Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company’s impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree addressed the issue of AI and how Games Workshop is handling it. He said GW staff are barred from using it to actually produce anything, but admitted a “few” senior managers are experimenting with it. Rountree said AI was “a very broad topic and to be honest I’m not an expert on it,” then went on to lay down the company line:

“We do have a few senior managers that are [experts on AI]: none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed an internal policy to guide us all, which is currently very cautious e.g. we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorized use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance, security and governance perspective, the AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.

We are allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed we will be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. In the period reported, we continued to invest in our Warhammer Studio — hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting. Talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love.”

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Next week, Volvo shows off its new EX60 SUV to the world. It’s the brand’s next electric vehicle, one built on an all-new, EV-only platform that makes use of the latest in vehicle design trends, like a cell-to-body battery pack, large weight-saving castings, and an advanced electronic architecture run by a handful of computers capable of more than 250 trillion operations per second. This new software-defined platform even has a name: HuginCore, after one of the two ravens that collected information for the Norse god Odin.

It’s not Volvo’s first reference to mythology. “We have Thor’s Hammer [Volvo’s distinctive headlight design] and now we have HuginCore… one of the two trusted Ravens of Oden. He sent Hugin and Muninn out to fly across the realms and observe and gather information and knowledge, which they then share with Odin that enabled him to make the right decisions as the ruler of Asgard,” said Alwin Bakkenes, head of global software engineering at Volvo Cars.

“And much like Hugin, the way we look at this technology platform, it collects information from all of the sensors, all of the actuators in the vehicle. It understands the world around the vehicle, and it enables us to actually anticipate around what lies ahead,” Bakkenes told me.

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The UK government has awarded guaranteed electricity prices to offshore wind projects totaling 8.4 GW in a bid to revive wind development, attract nearly $30 billion in private investment, and stabilize energy costs. The New York Times reports: On Wednesday, the British government said that it would provide guaranteed electricity prices for a group of wind farms off England, Scotland and Wales that would, once built, provide power for 12 million homes. The 8.4 gigawatts, a power capacity measure, that won support is the largest amount that has been achieved in an auction in Britain. The government said that these wind farms could lead to 22 billion pounds, or almost $30 billion, in private investment.

The government holds regular auctions, roughly on an annual basis. Results have been improving after a failed auction in 2023 that produced no bids from developers. The government almost doubled its original budget for the recent auction to about 1.8 billion pounds per year. To encourage renewable energy sources like offshore wind, Britain offers a price floor to provide certainty for investors. The average floor, or strike price, from the auction on Wednesday was about 91 pounds, or $122 per megawatt-hour, in 2024 prices, up about 11 percent from the last auction.

Over the past year the wholesale price for electricity in Britain was on average about 79 pounds, according to Drax Electric Insights, a market analysis website. The bulk of the planned wind farms that won price supports will be off eastern England. Support will also go to wind farms off Scotland and Wales. The British government wants at least 95 percent of the country’s electricity generation to come from clean sources by 2030. Political consensus for ambitious climate goals is eroding in Britain, but the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer believes that an enormous bet on clean energy, especially offshore wind, is necessary to protect consumers from volatile fossil fuel prices.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from DealBook: Fifteen years ago, Daniel Ek broke into America’s digital-content wars with his streaming music start-up, Spotify, which has turned into a publicly traded company with a $110 billion market value. Now he and his business partner, the Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, aim to crack a higher-stakes consumer market: American health care. The pair plan to bring Neko Health, the health tech start-up they founded in 2018, to New York this spring, DealBook is first to report.

Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne hope to capitalize on the growing number of prevention-minded Americans who are hungry to track their biometric data. Whether through wearables like Oura rings or more intensive screenings, consumers are turning to technology to improve their health and help spot the early onset of some big killers, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The United States will be the third market, after Sweden and Britain, for Neko Health, which offers full-body diagnostic scans and is valued at roughly $1.7 billion.

[…] Mr. Nilsonne and Mr. Ek said Neko Health’s big aim was to change the health care model, in which spending across much of the developed world skyrockets but longevity gains have stalled. They want to make their noninvasive scans as routine as an annual checkup. The company, which advertises its service as “a health check for your future self,” did not say what the U.S. scans would cost. But in Stockholm, an hourlong visit at one of its clinics costs 2,750 Swedish krona (about $300). Prenuvo’s and Ezra’s most comprehensive scans can cost $3,999.

[…] Neko Health’s technology differs from that of many of its U.S. rivals. It does not use M.R.I. or X-rays, instead relying on scores of sensors and cameras and a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf technologies to measure heart function and circulation, and to photograph and map every inch of a patient’s body looking for cancerous lesions. At the moment, the company’s biggest challenge is scaling.

[…] Mr. Nilsonne said Neko Health scans have detected the early onset of diseases or serious medical conditions for thousands of its patients. But the medical community is divided on the need for proactive screening technologies. The fear is that mass adoption could spur a wave of false positives and send healthy people to seek follow-up medical advice, overwhelming an already swamped health care system. Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne believe they have built a better solution. And now they’re ready to test it in the U.S. market.

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After nearly two decades of touchscreen dominance, QWERTY smartphones are staging a niche comeback, with Clicks and Unihertz unveiling new physical-keyboard phones at CES 2026. Gizmodo reports: At CES 2026, Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad. Clicks pitches the $500 phone, launching later this year, as a device primarily intended for messaging — sending texts, DMs, Slack messages, whatever. The company didn’t have a functional unit — only a mockup dummy to fondle at the show — but it looked cool enough, even if it’ll be a very niche product. It’s a cool idea, but how many people will carry a companion phone to their main phone just to shoot off a few DMs? $500 is a lot to ask for that satisfaction.

But Clicks isn’t the only one trying to bring back QWERTY phones. Unihertz, makers of the really tiny Jelly Android phones and also Tank phones with massive battery capacities, also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.

Look closely, and there are some weird similarities between the Clicks Communicator and the Titan 2 Elite. We don’t have dimension specs yet, but the screens seem to have the same rounded corners, and even the hole-punch camera is in the same upper-left corner. The only difference seems to be the keyboards; the Communicator uses individual keys, whereas the Titan 2 Elite’s keyboard is more BlackBerry-esque. After digging into the Clicks Communicator’s specs, a few other features stood out that Slashdotters might appreciate. There’s a dedicated 3.5mm headphone jack, a physical “kill switch” (essentially an alert slider), fingerprint scanner and even a customizable notification LED. The last time we saw a phone with a dedicated notification LED was around 2019!

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Digg is officially back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. “Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests,” reports TechCrunch. “There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or ‘digg’) the site’s content.” From the report: [T]he rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding. They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.

“We obviously don’t want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process,” said Rose in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the ‘know your customer’ verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone’s identity. Instead of simply offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try out new technologies, like using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, like require that people who join a product-focused community verify they actually own or use the product being discussed there.

As an example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings. Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members — for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location. “I don’t think there’s going to be any one silver bullet here,” said Rose. “It’s just going to be us saying … here’s a platter of things that you can add together to create trust.”

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‘Are You Dead Yet’ is an app recently released in China that asks a user daily if they’re still alive. After two missed button-press confirmations, it notifies the emergency contact they entered when they signed up via an email. I want to read that email.

[App developer] Guo and his colleagues initially charged users a one-time payment of 1 RMB (14 cents) to use the app; amid the heightened attention this week, they raised the price to 8 RMB ($1.15), still a minimal amount considering there’s no subscription required.

“On Tuesday, the developers announced on Chinese social media that Are You Dead Yet would officially change its name to Demumu in order to better serve the global market. That name, which was also used for the app’s overseas version previously, was inspired by another Chinese business success. Guo says Demumu is a combination of the word “death” and the naming pattern of Labubu”

Really, trying to hitch your wagon to the Labubu star? That’s a mistake if you ask me — Labubu is already on its way out. Besides, the original name was half the appeal. Are You Dead Yet? For quite some time now, just look at my eyes. “Super glassy.” Right? And that’s not just all the gin and tonics talking either.

Cerebras Systems landed a more than $10 billion deal to supply up to 750 megawatts of compute to OpenAI through 2028, according to a blog post by OpenAI. CNBC reports: The deal will help diversify Cerebras away from the United Arab Emirates’ G42, which accounted for 87% of revenue in the first half of 2024. “The way you have three very large customers is start with one very large customer, and you keep them happy, and then you win the second one,” Cerebras’ co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC in an interview.

Cerebras has built a large processor that can train and run generative artificial intelligence models. […] “Cerebras adds a dedicated low-latency inference solution to our platform,” Sachin Katti, who works on compute infrastructure at OpenAI, wrote in the blog. “That means faster responses, more natural interactions, and a stronger foundation to scale real-time AI to many more people.”

The deal comes months after OpenAI worked with Cerebras to ensure that its gpt-oss open-weight models would work smoothly on Cerebras silicon, alongside chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. OpenAI’s gpt-oss collaboration led to technical conversations with Cerebras, and the two companies signed a term sheet just before Thanksgiving, Feldman said in an interview with CNBC. The report notes that this deal helps strengthen Cerebras’ IPO prospects. The $10+ billion OpenAI deal materially improves revenue visibility, customer diversification, and strategic credibility, addressing key concerns from its withdrawn filing and setting the stage for a more compelling refile with updated financials and narrative.

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This is an entirely non-CGI video created by He Tongxue of HTX Studio featuring a piano keyboard attached to a tank filled with bioluminescent algae. As the piano is played it releases air bubbles, disturbing the algae and making them glow around the bubbles as they travel to the top. How whimsical! And you know how I feel about whimsy. “It’s all you have left in the world.” And it’s getting harder and harder to find, like decent candy cigarettes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gothamist: City regulators on Tuesday accused Uber and DoorDash of deliberately altering their app interfaces to discourage customers from tipping food delivery workers, a move that has cost the employees more than $550 million over the last two years. A report (PDF) published by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection argues that food delivery app giants retaliated against minimum wage rules for delivery drivers that took effect in December 2023 by implementing “design tricks” that obscure opportunities to offer a tip in their mobile apps.

DoorDash explicitly blames the new wage rules for removing the simpler tipping option. “In response to regulations in New York City, you will now only be able to add a tip for your Dasher after they have been assigned,” a message on the app’s checkout page states. Other food delivery apps like GrubHub allow customers the option to add a tip before checking out. The average tip for DoorDash and Uber Eats drivers in the city fell from $2.17 to 76 cents per delivery after the companies made the changes to their apps, the report found. Both companies also issue messages to customers in the city telling them the prices for their orders were “set by an algorithm using your personal data.” Further reading: Uber and DoorDash Try To Halt NYC Law That Encourages Tipping

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