Research suggests that a new online therapy approved by the NHS could significantly increase the number of children and adults recovering from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. In England, it is estimated that 1 in 5 children and young people between the ages of 8 and 25 may have a mental disorder, while 1 in 4 adults experience a diagnosable mental health problem each year according to NHS England.
Due to long waiting lists for psychiatric care, a surge in demand, and challenges with face-to-face appointments, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommended the use of online therapies across the NHS in their Early Value Assessment. Developed by Oxford University, four internet treatments will be implemented in various NHS trusts, mental health facilities, schools, and universities starting in September.
The University of Oxford has licensed Koa Health to deliver these online therapies, which are tailored for adults, adolescents, children with social anxiety disorder, and adults with PTSD. The treatments involve a series of online modules delivered through phone or video calls with therapists, available 24/7 to replicate in-person treatment.
Studies have shown positive results with these online therapies, with patients recovering as effectively as those receiving face-to-face treatment. Clinical trials have demonstrated significant benefits in treating social anxiety disorder and PTSD, showing promising recovery rates and improvements in quality of life.
The expansion of online therapy has been welcomed by mental health organizations, emphasizing the importance of patient choice in selecting the most suitable treatment. The NHS acknowledges the need to improve access to mental health care and recognizes the potential of digital tools to provide essential support to those in need.
In its latest quarterly earnings report, Microsoft exceeded analysts’ expectations by reporting a 15% increase in revenue year over year on Tuesday. However, growth in Azure, the company’s flagship cloud-computing service, fell short, leading to a 7% drop in Microsoft shares during after-hours trading.
Expectations for solid growth in the fourth-quarter earnings report were high, especially driven by cloud services with predicted revenue growth of 29%, which was expected to be between 30% and 31%. This led to a decline in stock prices for major technology companies due to recent market challenges.
During the Microsoft Earnings Report, CEO Satya Nadella aimed to instill confidence in the company’s performance.
Nadella stated in the earnings call, “This year’s strong performance demonstrates our innovation and the ongoing trust our customers have in Microsoft. As a platform company, we prioritize meeting our customers’ mission-critical needs at scale while leading in the AI era.”
Microsoft’s significant investments in artificial intelligence in recent years reflect a strategic move to dominate the tech industry with AI-enabled services. Backing ChatGPT developer OpenAI solidifies Microsoft’s position as a key player in commercializing generative AI.
Despite the growing questions surrounding the revenue potential of big tech companies’ pivot to AI, other factors like speculation about a Federal Reserve rate cut have helped calm investors as enthusiasm for big tech fades after a period of rising stock prices driven by AI optimism.
Microsoft faced challenges this month amid a global technology outage caused by a flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affecting Windows systems. An unrelated outage on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service on Tuesday also caused network connectivity issues in multiple countries.
a
About 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world adventure Star Wars Outlaws, protagonist Kay Vess enters Milogana, a densely populated, dilapidated city on the desolate moon of Tshara. It’s surrounded by a mix of sandstone shacks and metallic sci-fi buildings, packed with flickering computer panels, neon signs, and holographic advertisements. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, and an R2 droid passes by, muttering to itself. Nearby, a cantina features a suspicious patron peeking out from a smoky doorway, and a darkened gambling hall stands nearby.
As you explore, a robotic voice reads Imperial propaganda over a loudspeaker, and stormtroopers patrol the city checking IDs. To this lifelong Star Wars fan, at least, these scenes perfectly capture the aesthetic and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, this is a promising beginning.
“We did our homework,” says voiceover director Navid Cavalli. “We looked to the original films as well as George Lucas’s own inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, World War II films like The Dam Busters, and spaghetti westerns. Great care was taken to maintain tonal consistency in the original trilogy. We needed this to feel like it had high stakes, light-hearted humor, emotional tension, character development and a hero’s journey.”
Outlaws, due to launch on August 30th, has been in development at Massive Entertainment for about five years. In 2018, the studio held an event to announce The Division 2, and at some point that night, then-CEO David Polfeldt stepped outside to talk quietly with a senior Disney official. Over cocktails, the two discussed a possible collaboration. “The first presentation was in February 2020, after we released The Division 2,” says creative director Julian Gerighty. “We had a small team of people – concept artists and game designers – and we went to San Francisco with a very short pitch deck based on three concepts: Star Wars, an open world, and a baddie story.”
Set in the years between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, The Outlaws follows ambitious city thief Kay as he rallies a crew to pull off the biggest heist of his life in order to pay off the huge bounty on his head. [the appeal of Star Wars] “He wasn’t a Jedi farm boy or a cranky old space wizard,” says Gerrity, “he was a cool guy surfing the galaxy with his best friend and the most iconic spaceship. I really focused on these archetypal characters and what they could do in terms of gameplay.”
In Outlaws, players are free to explore and roam at least five major worlds, from Tatooine to stormy Akiva to glitzy Kantonica, home to the casino city of Kanto Bight featured in The Last Jedi. Throughout Cay’s journey, she encounters crime organizations from across the Star Wars canon, including the brutal Pikes, the Hutts, the shady Crimson Dawn, and the samurai-esque Asiga. Completing missions for organizations earns credits and reputation points, unlocking more lucrative jobs and new areas of the map. Joining one gang means alienating another, but there’s an opportunity to set crime bosses at odds or even betray one another.
So perhaps the emphasis on space villains tempted the team to make a Han Solo game? Gerrity shakes his head. “We always wanted a character that wasn’t Han Solo,” he says. “Han is the coolest guy in the galaxy. Cay is a city thief who gets caught up in a bad deal and gets catapulted from place to place like a pinball, and suddenly he’s negotiating with Jabba the Hutt… We did a lot of casting, but Hanberly Gonzalez’s character was the final piece of the puzzle. Her voice, her acting, her approach to the character on the page was such a huge influence.”
The focus on gangster intrigue is what inspired the game to be situated within the Star Wars timeline, an idea that came from Lucasfilm. “We were looking for the right moment to define the gameplay and to be able to go to cool, interesting places and meet interesting characters,” says Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm. “So we found a place that had a lot of opportunity to tell an underworld story. Organized crime is rampant as the Empire turns its attention to the Rebel Alliance. Jabba the Hutt is at the height of his power.”
At a press event in Los Angeles earlier this month, I played the story’s main quest, set on Tshara, where Kay must steal top-secret information from a computer in the sprawling mansion of Pyke crime lord Gorak. It’s a large, multi-floor environment riddled with guards. You can either charge straight in with blaster fire, or hack doors as you work your way through a network of ventilation ducts, backrooms, and sneaky passageways. I also visited Kimiji, an ice planet ruled by the Ashigas, a blind swordsman-like alien race. My mission is to meet with a safecracker, but I’m being pursued by an assassin. It’s an atmospheric place to explore, with temple-like towers towering above frozen cobblestone streets, snow flurries in the sky, and a small group of shady thugs huddling around a pale orange noodle shop.
A restaurant with delicious noodles…Star Wars Outlaws. Photo: Ubisoft
Although this is a Massive Entertainment game, it feels unmistakably Ubisoft. The stealth, the combat, the balance between story and side quests all contain elements borrowed from Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs. You watch enemy patrols, take down targets one by one using a variety of special abilities, and then escape. There are further borrowings from other action-adventures, such as Kay’s ability to slow down time to target multiple enemies before firing multiple volleys with a blaster, a clear homage to Max Payne and Red Dead Redemption.
It’s fun to think about exactly how to use all the toys available to you in such a large, densely designed location. But the big question is: what’s new and what’s different? Apart from the Star Wars license, there are three elements that distinguish Outlaws from other Ubisoft adventures. First, there’s Nix, Kay’s constant companion. This is a cute little creature that follows you everywhere and gives you access to parts of the environment that you can’t. You can also command him to attack or distract guards, or pick up items or dropped ammo. This is especially useful during gunfights. “Nix was inspired by our pet,” says Navid Khavari. “My wife and I don’t know how we would have survived COVID without cats, so I think it feels very natural. He acts like a dog.
Outlaws also does away with Ubisoft’s typical skill trees and points in favor of a more natural alternative: Expert Missions have you quest for powerful specialists, granting you new abilities and upgrading your weapons and speeder bikes.
A masterpiece… “Star Wars Outlaws.” Photo: Ubisoft
And then, of course, there’s space travel; you can hop off-planet at any time, and the transition happens in one seamless sequence. You’re then free to fly around your current system, fighting TIE fighters or scavenging space debris before making a hyperspace jump to a new planet. Flying is simple, and dogfights rely heavily on the lock-on feature to automatically track down your enemies. It’s a lot more arcadey than the great X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games of yore. Still, it’s a unique thrill to get an enemy ship in your sights and blast it to smithereens accompanied by the legendary Ben Burtt-esque sound effects.
I’ve only seen a few hours of the game so far, but there’s still so much to discover. I’m hoping that the missions and side quests will delve deeper into Star Wars lore and move further away from the typical Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry fare. I’m curious to see how populated and detailed the planets are away from the major hubs. I’d love to encounter Jawa transports, secret Imperial bases, and terrifying monsters that will spend a thousand years trying to devour me. This element of stumble-through discovery in the Star Wars universe is something the team has clearly thought about.
“We knew we needed to allow the player freedom, which is very much part of how Star Wars works,” says Cavalli. “We created a tonal blueprint that drew from both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and blended that with all of the characters and vendors in the story so that they all felt like they were part of the same journey. It took us a while to realize this, but Star Wars is particularly well-suited for an open-world game, which is why fans, myself included, have been clamoring for it for so long.”
The Competition and Markets Authority has initiated a preliminary inquiry into Google’s collaboration with AI startup Anthropic, marking the latest in a series of probes into agreements between major tech companies and smaller AI enterprises.
Google has injected $2 billion (approximately £1.56 billion) into the firm by 2023, following a recent cloud-computing deal with Clode LLM and chatbot startup Anthropic.
The CMA is currently assessing whether the partnership may have led to “merger-related situations” that warrant a formal investigation. Public feedback is welcomed over the next fortnight.
This move comes amidst broader worries about competition in the generative AI sector, with Amazon also collaborating with Anthropic to secure a $4 billion stake in the company and serve as one of its cloud computing suppliers. The Amazon-Anthropic deal is also under scrutiny by the CMA for potential merger implications.
Additionally, the CMA has launched investigations into OpenAI and Microsoft, following Microsoft’s acquisition of a significant share in the commercial division of ChatGPT creator, as well as into Microsoft’s partnership with AI startup Inflection, where the tech giant obtained access to its AI models and recruited the startup’s founders and management.
An inquiry into Microsoft’s dealings with French AI startup Mistral was terminated in May.
Regulators are apprehensive about the dominance of big tech players, especially in competitive fields like AI, hence direct takeovers are improbable. However, the CMA is vigilant about agreements that could impede competition through other means.
An Anthropic spokesperson refuted any claims of a merger, stating that they remain an autonomous entity with no compromise to their corporate governance independence or partnership freedom.
A Google representative affirmed the company’s commitment to fostering an open and innovative AI ecosystem globally.
It’s fair to say the luster of the AI boom is fading. Skyrocketing valuations are starting to look shaky compared to the massive spending required to keep them going. Over the weekend, tech site The Information reported that OpenAI is An astonishing $5 billion in additional spending is expected More than this year alone:
If our predictions are correct, OpenAI’s recent valuation would be $80bnwill need to raise more capital over the next 12 months or so. Our analysis is based on informed estimates of what OpenAI will spend to operate the ChatGPT chatbot and train future large-scale language models, as well as a “guesstimate” of how much OpenAI will spend on staffing, based on OpenAI’s previous projections and our knowledge of its adoption. Our conclusion shows exactly why so many investors are concerned about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence.
The most pessimistic view is that AI — and especially chatbots, an expensive and competitive sector of an industry that has captured the public’s imagination — isn’t as good as we’ve been told.
This argument suggests that as adoption grows and iteration slows, most people have had a chance to use cutting-edge AI properly and are beginning to realize that it’s great but probably useless. The first time you use ChatGPT, it’s a miracle, but by the 100th time, the flaws are obvious and the magic fades into the background. You decide ChatGPT is bullshit.
In this paper, I argue against the view that ChatGPT and others are lying or hallucinating when they make false claims, and support the position that what they are doing is bullshit. … Since these programs themselves could not care less about the truth, and are designed to generate text that looks true without actually caring about the truth, it seems appropriate to call their output bullshit.
Get them trained
It is estimated that only a handful of jobs will be completely eliminated by AI. Photo: Bim/Getty Images/iStockphoto
I don’t think it’s that bad. But that’s not because the system is perfect. I think the move to AI is a hurdle we’ve got to overcome much earlier. You have to try a chatbot in any meaningful way to even begin to realize it’s bullshit and give up. And judging by the tech industry’s response, that’s starting to become a bigger hurdle. Last Thursday, I reported on how Google is partnering with a network of small businesses and several academy trusts to bring AI into the workplace to enhance, rather than replace, worker capabilities. Debbie Weinstein, managing director of Google UK and Ireland, said:
It’s hard for us to talk about this right now because we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. What we do know is that the first step is to sit down and talk. [with the partners] And then really understanding the use case. If you have school administrators and students in the classroom, what are the specific tasks that you actually want to perform for these people?
For teachers, this could be a quick email with ideas on how to use Gemini in their lesson plans, formal classroom training, or one-on-one coaching. Various pilot programs will be run with 1,200 participants, with each group having around 100 participants.
One way of looking at this is that it’s just another feel-good investment in the upskilling schemes of big companies. Google in particular has been helping to upskill Brits for years with its digital training scheme, formerly branded as the company’s “Digital Garage”. To put it more cynically, teaching people how to use new technology by teaching them how to use your own tools is good business. Brits of a certain age will vividly remember “IT” or “ICT” classes as thinly veiled instructions on how to use Microsoft Office. People older and younger than me learned some basic computer programming. I learned how to use Microsoft Access.
In this case, it’s something deeper: Google needs to go beyond simply teaching people how to use AI and also run experiments to figure out what exactly to teach them. “This isn’t about a fundamental rethinking of how we understand technology, it’s about the little everyday things that make work a little more productive and a little more enjoyable,” Weinstein says. “Today, we have tools that make work a little easier. Those three minutes you save every time you write an email.
“Our goal is to make sure that everyone can benefit from technology, whether it’s Google technology or other companies’ technology. And I think the general idea of working together with tools that help make your life more efficient is something that everyone can benefit from.”
Ever since ChatGPT came out, the underlying assumption has been that the technology speaks for itself, and the fact that it literally does is a big help to that. But chat interfaces are confusing. Even if you’re dealing with a real human being, it’s still a skill to get the best out of them when you need help, and an even better skill when the only way to communicate with them is through text chat.
AI chatbots are not people. They are so unlike humans that it’s all the more difficult to even think about how they might fit into common work patterns. The pessimistic view of this technology isn’t “what if there wasn’t one there” – there is, of course, a pessimistic view, despite all the hallucinations and nonsense. Rather, it’s a much simpler view: what if most people never bothered to learn how to use them?
Google DeepMind has trained its new AI system to solve problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad. Photo: Pittinan Piyavatin/Alamy
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Google it reads:
Although computers are being built to perform calculations faster than humans, the highest levels of formal mathematics remain the sole domain of humans. But a groundbreaking discovery by researchers at Google DeepMind has brought AI systems closer than ever to beating the best human mathematicians at the field.
Two new systems, called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, worked together to tackle problems in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a worldwide math competition for middle school students. 1959Each year, the Olympiad consists of six incredibly difficult problems covering subjects such as algebra, geometry and number theory, and winning a gold medal makes you one of the best young mathematicians in the world.
A word of warning: the Google DeepMind system solved “only” four of the six problems, and one of them they solved using a “neurosymbolic” system, which is less AI-like than you might expect. All problems were manually translated into a programming language called Lean, which allows the system to read it as a formal description of the problem without having to parse human-readable text first. (Google DeepMind also tried to use LLM to do this part, but it didn’t work very well.)
But this is still a pretty big step. The International Mathematical Olympiad difficultand AI won the medal. What happens when you win the gold medal? Is there a big difference between being able to solve problems that only the best high school mathematicians could tackle and being able to solve problems that only the best undergraduates, graduate students, and doctors could solve? What changes when a branch of science is automated?
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IIt's been five years since Tendershoot's wacky '90s internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw, and this spiritual sequel was announced two years ago. In that time, as tech moguls buy up social media giants, Reddit gets monetized (and effectively censored) against the will of its user base, and AI becomes more and more prevalent, millennials' yearning for the lawless, algorithm-free days of the early internet is only getting stronger. At least, that's how creative director Jay Tholen feels.
“I knew things were bad then, but I didn't think it would get this bad,” Thoren says of the current state of the World Wide Web.
Both Hypnospace Outlaw and Dreamsettler are set in an alternate world where people browse the internet while they sleep. In the first game, you're put in the shoes of a forum moderator, helping to keep internet users safe by fighting piracy, harassment and illegal activity. In Dreamsettler, set between 2003 and 2005, players have more powers, this time playing as a private investigator looking to make a name for themselves.
It starts with players setting up their own page and choosing which part of the web they want to base themselves in, like Camp Rowdy, which Tholen describes as “kind of like Good Time Valley, but with a bit more of a country subculture.” Low-risk deals help build your reputation. Eventually, Sleepnet, the company behind Dreamsettler, will ask you to unearth something for them, and other powerful companies will start seeking your services, too.
Imagine you've been asked to investigate a murder that may be linked to a conspiracy theorist's personal web page. You'd start by skimming the news article to find the date of the accident, then look at people's pages around that date to see if they have any clues that might lead you to the crime.
After two years of development, there's still no release date in sight for Dreamsettler. “No game I've ever made has been in this situation,” Tholen says, only half-joking. “Publishers have given up on setting deadlines. They don't like to make too specific plans because it makes it very tedious, and they don't allow for iterative design.”
Besides bumping up the game's resolution from 480×270 pixels to 960×540 pixels (if you remember Windows 95, you know that was once a huge amount of screen real estate for a Web page), one of the hardest things for Tholen was pleasing everyone: He hopes Dreamsettler will appeal to both those who lived in the early days of the Internet (many of whom played Hypnospace Outlaw) and those too young to remember what a dial-up modem sounded like.
“I always have this rule implicit in my head,” he explains. “What you need to know to enjoy Dreamsettler needs to be found within the game. There's no 'you don't know what you don't know' reference. The game needs to have that information accessible somewhere so that every player can enjoy it.”
a A few years ago, I encountered an unexpected problem: New York City had very few reliable phone repair shops, and even fewer that would repair a 2010 BlackBerry. No one seemed to understand my situation. Get your broken cell phone working again. It held text messages from my high school days. It was a significant part of my life.
For a brief moment, my BlackBerry actually turned on. I scrolled through my long-lost inbox, hoping to find some forgotten treasure: a written account of teenage heartbreak, memories of excitement, or moments shared with friends. However, my search yielded little. Most were emails about schoolwork.
I could never manage to get the device working again. This felt like a crisis, even if it was a personal and self-centered one. It felt tragic that all these materials — records of my feelings, communication, and my friends’ conversations during my teenage years — were stuck in a broken device.
Over time, the sadness faded, but my digital footprint continued to expand. Each day, I come across more content that I’ll want to revisit in the future: Numerous text messages. An average of 75 exchanges per day — Photos, videos, emails, social media likes, metadata from countless Google searches, group chat memes, “be there in 5 minutes” texts, my last message from my grandmother, and the complete story of a now-ended long-distance relationship.
I learned from my BlackBerry mishap. Instead of relying on a device destined to become outdated, I now invest in a cloud service that stores everything in a vast, overwhelming digital repository. For just $2.99 a month, I have over 200GB of digital storage, including 16,000 photos, eight years’ worth of Gmail, and 44GB of iMessages exchanged since I set my iPhone to “Don’t Delete” in 2017.
In the physical world, I lack the impulse to regularly discard old, irrelevant items without much consideration. However, I am sentimental and tend to engage in what experts label as “digital hoarding” — accumulating excessive digital content that leads to stress and anxiety.
Even with a more moderate approach, one’s digital footprint remains vast, dispersed, disorganized, and controlled by technology companies at their discretion. Experts reveal that each individual generates about 8MB to 2MB of data traveling online daily, a significant surge from 2MB ten years ago. The average American possesses about 500GB of storage, which includes social media usage, and this figure continues to grow amid escalating data demands. 328.77 million terabytes of new data are generated daily.
For many, including myself, the link between mobile phones and the cloud remains unclear and under-researched. Dr. Liz Silens, a psychology professor at Northumbria University and one of the few researchers to delve into this subject, discovered through Personal Digital Data Storage that most individuals don’t know where to begin with their data. “Is it genuinely mine? Is it stored in the cloud? Even if I delete content from my device, does it persist? Do I require additional backups if I can’t trust them? This exacerbates the data issue,” she remarked.
The topic of data makes me anxious as well because I’m not well-versed in technology and lack organizational skills. Data storage, like money, isn’t something I enjoy contemplating. If it’s accessible and usable, that suffices. Periodically, I attempt to transfer my data from the cloud in a casual, DIY manner, such as copying and pasting all my Facebook messages with my best friend at 16 into a Word document. I quickly become overwhelmed by technical terminology and multi-step processes recommended in various Reddit threads populated by individuals, like me, who fear losing themselves and remnants of their past. Digital Legacy of a Loved One.
One holiday season, my sister gifted me a subscription to iMazing, a service that backs up your iPhone and converts your iMessages into easily readable PDFs. However, after numerous failed attempts and frustration due to inadequate storage space on my 2017 MacBook, I abandoned the endeavor. For months, I manually removed photos from texts to address the memory shortage on my phone. Subsequently, rather than risking unintentional deletion from the cloud, I opted to purchase a new phone.
Archivist Margot Note highlighted a growing trend of private clients seeking to preserve caches of digital treasures, particularly text messages documenting “everyday history and significant moments.” Analogous to physical letters, they reveal the evolution of relationships over time, she mentioned.
The desire to safeguard such content stems from curiosity: What conversations did my best friend and I have in 2018, fresh out of college, full of vigor, and continents apart? How did my former partner indicate our relationship exceeded friendship? When did our bond begin to unravel?
The predominant emotion driving this preservation effort is anxiety. Losing these emails would mean forfeiting evidence of myself and my connections. It would signify losing one of the few constants after a loved one’s passing: their voice, its evolution over time, and their unique tone addressing me. Reflecting on her diary in Ongoingness, writer Sarah Manguso articulated the wish to shield “against awakening at the end of one’s life and realizing you’ve missed it.”
“Just the thought of data triggers anxiety because of its enigmatic nature. It can be overwhelming,” Silens remarked. “Anxiety serves as a significant barrier to addressing the reorganization and management of one’s digital information.”
Engagement with social media introduces its own set of risks. In her book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media, cultural and media scholar Kate Eichhorn contends that the internet’s ability to swiftly transport us back in time undermines our capacity to develop adult identities, evolve, and mature. “There’s a risk in the fact that anything can resurface in your life,” she noted. “We haven’t fully grasped the psychological repercussions of that yet.”
Whenever I delve into my 44GB repository of texts, I emerge feeling overwhelmed by information, nostalgic for the past, and acutely aware of the relentless march of time. Memory’s fallibility becomes apparent, as the records don’t always align with my idealized view of history. These texts aren’t my memories but fragments of experiences frozen in time. What’s the harm in forgetting? What do we truly gain from revisiting the past?
Both Eichhorn and Silens question the necessity of retaining such copious digital content. Eichhorn highlights the incessant accumulation of data. “Is this an archive? Or is it simply another form of clandestine, socially acceptable storage?” Silens proposes that tidying up the cloud could evolve into a routine, akin to filing taxes: “Review your day’s photos and only delete those you know won’t be needed in the future.”
I appreciate the notion of being more discerning. We can begin to be deliberate about our digital archives. We can organize and discard unnecessary items. Apps like “Second Brain App” serve as external memory for various content, from text to tasks. Note, the archivist, reassured me that my struggle to organize my digital repository isn’t foolish. There currently isn’t an optimal solution. While institutions possess robust preservation mechanisms, “it requires significant effort and resources,” she noted. “This hasn’t trickled down to personal digital archives yet. It’s likely to happen eventually, but the necessary solutions remain largely unknown to the public.”
Hence, I’ll likely procrastinate until my cloud storage reaches capacity before making a decision. At that point, I’ll likely purchase additional storage. My cloud storage operates quietly in the background, easy to delay, always present but forgotten. Similar to the old BlackBerry tucked away in a desk drawer, never to be used again but comforting in its mere existence.
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Navigating the challenges of modern dating can be overwhelming for single individuals. The uncertainties of how much you have in common with a stranger, whether you share similar values, and if you can open up to them loom large. Game developer Tanat Boozayaangool delves into these questions in Building Relationships, posing an additional intriguing query: What if you were a home?
The title of this dating adventure game is meant to be taken literally. In Building Relationships, players assume the role of the newest bachelorette residing on an island where love could blossom. The primary objective is to build relationships with other island dwellers, including a charismatic tent, a lackluster houseboat, and a flirtatious windmill named Millie. According to Boozayaangool, Millie tends to be a bit forward, catching some off guard.
Inspired by the eccentric pigeon dating sim “Hatoful Boyfriend” from 2011, “Building Relationships” promises a dating parody infused with personal narratives and surrealism. The game unfolds through various dates that lead to intertwined storylines on the island, where players ultimately decide whom to share a picnic with.
In addition to engaging with the island’s inhabitants through their unique personalities, players can freely explore the environment. Along the way, they encounter talking treasure chests that enhance mobility and fishing spots where they unearth humorous “carp” (referred to as cars in jest). Boozayaangool aimed to infuse the gameplay with a sense of playful exploration in a compact open-world setting, drawing inspiration from the emotive indie gem “A Short Hike”.
The gritty, low-poly art style of the island adventure pays tribute to the origins of Building Relationships as a college game jam creation. The scenery is adorned with cylindrical trees and jagged rocks cloaked in low-res textures, delivering a nostalgic visual style that complements the contemplative ambiance.
Despite the game’s uplifting visual appeal and its inclusion in June’s Wholesome Games Direct, a celebration of non-violent indie gaming, Boozayaangool refrains from labeling it solely as a feel-good experience. Reflecting on the personal themes embedded in the narrative, they acknowledge the underlying emotional challenges of building relationships: “For a seemingly lighthearted game, there’s unexpected depth waiting to be uncovered.”
Without divulging too much, Boozayaangool encourages players to brace themselves for the emotional complexities inherent in the dating journey depicted in the game: “Despite its whimsical facade, there’s a surprising amount of substance to explore.”
Hollywood video game performers have voted to go on strike, bringing parts of the entertainment industry back into strike action after new contract negotiations with major game studios collapsed over protections for artificial intelligence.
The walkout, the second by video game voice and motion-capture performers affiliated with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Entertainers (Sag-Aftra), is set to begin on Friday at 12:01 a.m. This move comes after almost two years of negotiations over a new interactive media contract with gaming giants like Activision, Warner Bros., and divisions of The Walt Disney Co.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators state that while video game contracts cover wages and job security, studios are not willing to agree to regulate generative AI. Without safeguards, game companies could train AI to mimic actors’ voices or create digital replicas of their likenesses without their consent or fair compensation, as per the union.
In a prepared statement, union president Fran Drescher mentioned that members will not accept contracts that permit companies to misuse AI.
Company representatives did not immediately respond to email requests for comment.
According to game market forecasters, the global video game industry generates over $100 billion in revenue annually. New Zoo Sag-Aftola emphasized that the individuals who design and bring these games to life are what drives their success.
“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown that our employers are not interested in fair and reasonable AI protections, but rather in exploitative behavior,” stated Sarah Elmaleh, chair of the Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee.
Last month, a union negotiator informed The Associated Press that game studios had declined to provide the same level of protection from AI risks for all members, especially motion picture performers.
Last year, union members overwhelmingly voted to authorize leadership to strike. Fears about how studios might utilize AI in a strike were intensified by AI. Last year, labor unions staged a four-month strike in the film and television industry.
The final interactive contract, expiring in November 2022, did not include protections for AI but established a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists following an 11-month strike that commenced in October 2016. This strike marked SAG-AFTRA’s first significant labor dispute since the merger of Hollywood’s two major actors unions in 2012.
According to the union, the video game contract covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voice-over) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers.”
Amidst tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA entered into a separate deal in February aimed at indie and low-budget video game projects. The Tiered Budget Independent Interactive Media deal consists of some of the AI protections that have been rejected by larger companies in the video game industry.
TMy wife has only ever enjoyed two video games: Mario Kart, which she has happily followed closely behind her throughout her life as a family, and Crash Bandicoot, of which she was the best player in the world at one point.
She perfected every molecule of a ’90s Clash game, and I’d swear I saw her hit 105% in one of them, but this was the ’90s, so I classify that memory, along with Gary McAllister’s missed penalty kick at Wembley Stadium and the band’s menswear, as a “psychological hallucination.”
I’m not a perfectionist like her, for me platform games are the best video game genre I absolutely hate, like Manic Miner, Plumber, Hedgehog, Mega Man, Aladdin, Earthworm Jim, etc. There are too many frustrations and failures to be worth the reward.
In the late ’90s, I decided I was too old to cry over these games, so I skipped Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, and Banjo-Kazooie altogether. did I played Super Mario Sunshine in co-op with my daughter, who was 5 at the time. She beat the level and I beat the boss. It was an incredibly fun gaming experience for both of us. Ten years later, I was proud and impressed to watch her coach her younger brother through a killer level of Rayman Legends, where aliens chased her while hopping across platforms too tiny for her father’s naked eye. Clearly, a talent for platforming runs in the family. I just don’t have it.
Rayman Legends is terribly difficult. Photo: Ubisoft
But in 2020’s Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time (the best double entendre of a game title), my wife found her equal: She’s been trying to beat the game for three generations, and is currently just 48% complete after 68 hours of play.
So I thought I’d step in and show her how it’s done.
The game has a retro mode option that takes you back to the original era of gaming, with limited lives and returning you to the start of the level when you die. I chose modern instead. Why in the name of the devil in hell would I want to go back to a time when things were still fun. more difficult?Yes, this is authentically old-fashioned, but so are the mumps, the Global Hypercolor T-shirt and Margaret Thatcher, and I have no desire to resurrect them.
Age doesn’t matter. When I played games in my teens and twenties, they calmed me. When I played games in my thirties and forties, they pissed me off. But now that I’m in my fifties, I’m a total crank. My family won’t ride with me in my Honda Civic because I get so angry at traffic jams, other drivers, dirty roads, useless politicians, shrinkflation, and King Lear-like architecture. But I swear platform games are designed to turn even the happiest of people into obelisks of frustration.
The phasing levels were the most mind-blowing for me. You press a button and blocks appear and disappear. You have to jump into the ether and then press a button to make the next block appear below. Sometimes the block collapses and you have to jump again while remembering to phase in the next block. It feels like walking around with an orange peel in the front pocket of your jeans.
I yell, I scream, I curse, I curse some more, and I do combo curses where the curse words are stacked two or three times. My wife tells me to stop because the neighbors are peeking in from their yard, so I make up a whole new swear word slang, spewing curse words like hunzels, gabbabusts, and primal screams. I immediately hate myself for what I’ve become.
The early boss level, Stage Dive, nearly killed me. You have to jump over and under death-bringers, spin the bad guy around the boss three times, dash forward, climb fading blocks, and keep going until you can hit him. Repeat. Classic frustrating gameplay. But if you persevere, you magically enter an almost zen state of failing and trying again and again, but the early parts are almost soothing in their repetition. It’s like whittling wood. And when you finally beat him? The feeling of reward feels like the last day of school before the holidays.
“It’s like walking around with an orange peel in your front jeans pocket” – Crash Bandicoot 4 Photo: Activision/Toys for Bob
Maybe that’s the lesson of platform games. teeth Difficult. Fail teeth It’s frustrating, but if you invest the time and keep failing, you will succeed, and the reward will be comforting for future challenges.
Soon I found myself faced with one of the most perfectly crafted levels I’d ever seen in a game. Hook, Line and Sinker features every imaginable platform move in a variety of pirate ships. It’s a reminder that imagination combined with execution is art. Unfortunately, it’s only a fleeting joy in a forest of failure. The game gets harder and harder. I get angrier and angrier.
My wife told me to stop. She thought I was going to have a heart attack. I told her we just had to get through the level. She sat me down and very patiently taught me a jump technique I’d never used on blocks I’d never seen before that unlocked the entire level. She coached me like she did with her kids. I was Luke and she was Yoda.
I completed the level, my wife breathed a sigh of relief and let me climb into my wheelchair and scream into the clouds.
Kamala Harris’ campaign has accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of spreading “manipulated lies” after he shared a fake video of the vice president on his X account.
Musk reposted a video on Friday evening that had been doctored to show Harris saying, “I was selected because I’m the ultimate diversity hire,” along with other controversial statements. The video has garnered 128 million views on Musk’s account. He captioned it with “This is awesome” and a laughing emoji. Musk owns X, which he rebranded from Twitter last year.
Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar criticized Musk for violating platform guidelines on sharing manipulated media. Users are not allowed to share media that may mislead or harm others, although satire is permitted as long as it doesn’t create confusion about its authenticity.
Harris’ campaign responded by stating, “The American people want the real freedom, opportunity, and security that Vice President Harris is providing, not the false, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
The original video was posted by the @MrReaganUSA account, associated with conservative YouTuber Chris Coles, who claimed it was a parody.
However, Musk, a supporter of Donald Trump, did not clarify that the video was satire.
California Governor Gavin Newsom stated that the manipulated video of Harris should be illegal and indicated plans to sign a bill banning such deceptive media, likely referring to a proposed ban on election deepfakes in California.
Musk defended his actions, stating that parody is legal in the USA, and shared the original @MrReaganUSA video.
After Donald Trump’s statement this past weekend that he would stop targeting the cryptocurrency industry if re-elected, Bitcoin surged to its highest price in over six weeks.
On Monday, the price of the cryptocurrency increased by more than 3%, reaching a peak of around $69,745, marking its highest value since June 12 when it surpassed $69,800.
Trump made supportive remarks at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, declaring his intention to make the United States a global leader in cryptocurrency and adopt a more pro-Bitcoin stance compared to his opponent, Sen. Kamala Harris.
The former president assured the Bitcoin community that if he takes office, the current anti-cryptocurrency initiatives by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would come to an end. He emphasized the importance of embracing cryptocurrency technology to prevent other countries like China from dominating.
Trump also vowed to remove the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on his first day as president, specifically targeting Gary Gensler, who has been critical of cryptocurrencies despite past endorsements.
At the Bitcoin Conference, Trump proposed the creation of a Presidential Cryptocurrency Advisory Council and the establishment of a national Bitcoin reserve using confiscated cryptocurrency held by the U.S. government.
Echoing his support for Bitcoin, Trump advised against selling the cryptocurrency, promising to retain all Bitcoin owned or acquired by the U.S. government if elected.
According to the Financial Times, Harris’ advisors have been reaching out to major crypto companies to mend relations between the Democratic Party and the cryptocurrency industry, including Coinbase, Circle, and Ripple Labs.
I Recently, I bought an iPhone 15 to replace my 5-year-old iPhone 11. The phone has the new A17 Pro chip, a terabyte of data storage, and is accordingly eye-poppingly expensive. Of course, I have carefully considered my reasons for sparing money on such a scale. For example, I have always had a policy of only writing about devices I bought with my own money (no freebies from tech companies). The fancy A17 processor is necessary to run the new “AI” features that Apple promises to launch soon. The phone also has a significantly better camera than my old phone, which is important (to me). My Substack Blog It comes out three times a week and I post new photos in each issue. Finally, a friend whose old iPhone is nearing the end of its lifespan might be happy to have an iPhone 11 in good condition.
But these are more rationalizations than evidence. In fact, my old iPhone was fine for what it did. Sure, it would eventually need a new battery, but otherwise it lasted for years. And if you look objectively at the evolution of the iPhone line, it’s just been a steady series of incremental improvements since the iPhone 4 in 2010. What was so special about that model? Mainly this. Front cameraThe iPhone 11 opened up a world of selfies, video chat, social media, and all the other accoutrements of a networked world. But what followed was only incremental change and rising prices.
This doesn’t just apply to the iPhone, but to smartphones in general; manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, and Google have all followed the same path. The advent of smartphones, which began with the release of the first iPhone in 2007, marked a major break in the evolution of mobile phone technology (just ask Nokia or BlackBerry if you doubt that). A decade of significant growth followed, but the technology (and market) matured and incremental changes became the norm.
Mathematicians have a name for this process: they call it a sigmoid function, and they depict it as an S-shaped curve. If you apply this to consumer electronics, the curve looks like a slightly flattened “S,” with slow progress on the bottom, then a steep upward curve, and finally a flat line on the top. And smartphones are on that part of the curve right now.
If we look at the history of the technology industry over the past 50 years or so, we see a pattern: first there’s a technological breakthrough: silicon chips, the Internet, the Web, mobile phones, cloud computing, smartphones. Each breakthrough is followed by a period of intense development (often accompanied by an investment bubble) that pushes the technology towards the middle of the “S”. Then, eventually, things settle down as the market becomes saturated and it becomes increasingly difficult to fundamentally improve the technology.
You can probably see where this is going. So-called “AI” Early breakthroughs have already occurred: first, the emergence of “big data” generated by the web, social media and surveillance capitalism, then the rediscovery of powerful algorithms (neural networks), followed in 2017 by the invention of the “Transformer” deep learning architecture, followed by the development of large-scale language models (LLMs) and other generative AI, of which ChatGPT is a prime example.
Now that we’ve passed the period of frenzy of development and huge amounts of corporate investment (with unclear returns on that investment) that has pushed the technology up into the middle of the sigmoid curve, an interesting question arises: how far up the sigmoid curve has the industry climbed, and when will smartphone technology reach the plateau where it is currently stagnating?
In recent weeks, we are starting to see signs that this moment is approaching. The technology is becoming commoditized. AI companies are starting to release smaller and (allegedly) cheaper LLMs. Of course, they won’t admit this, but it’s because the energy costs of the technology are increasing. Swelling Irrational promotion of the industry It’s not much talked about among economists. Millions of people have tried ChatGPT and its ilk, but most of them never showed up. Lasting Interest Nearly every large company on the planet has run an AI “pilot” project or two, but very few have made any real deployments. Today’s Sensation Is it starting to get boring? In fact, it’s a bit like the latest shiny smartphone.
The Department of Justice has requested an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a law that mandates China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets by January 19 or risk a ban.
TikTok, along with its parent company ByteDance and a group of TikTok creators, have filed lawsuits to oppose the legislation that could potentially ban the app used by 170 million Americans.
According to a senior Justice Department official, the government will provide classified documents to the court which will outline additional security concerns regarding ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok, along with statements from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Justice Department’s national security division.
The department is expected to argue that Chinese-owned TikTok poses a significant national security risk to the United States due to its access to vast amounts of personal data on American citizens, enabling China to manipulate information used by Americans through the app covertly.
President Joe Biden signed the law on April 24, giving TikTok and ByteDance until January 19 to separate or face a ban. The White House’s stance is to end Chinese ownership for national security reasons without banning TikTok.
The department clarified that the law is aimed at addressing national security concerns rather than speech issues and intends to address China’s potential misuse of TikTok to access sensitive personal information of Americans. It denies all arguments put forth by TikTok, including claims that the law violates the free speech rights under the First Amendment of Americans using the video app.
The government plans to accuse TikTok of insufficiently safeguarding the data of its U.S. users.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is set to hear oral arguments on September 16, placing TikTok’s fate in the midst of the final week of the 2024 presidential election.
Despite previously signing an executive order threatening to ban the app, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated in an interview in June that he would not support a ban. Additionally, US Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running for president, recently joined TikTok.
The law would prevent app stores like Apple and Google from offering TikTok and prohibit internet hosting services from supporting it unless it is divested by ByteDance.
The bill received strong support from the US Congress amid concerns expressed by lawmakers that China might exploit the app to gain access to Americans’ data for spying purposes.
pictureEarlier this month, the popular lifestyle magazine introduced its new “Fashion and Lifestyle Editor” to its massive social media following. “Ream”At first glance, Reem appeared to be a woman in her twenties who understood both fashion and lifestyle, and was proudly announced as an “AI-enhanced team member” — that is, a fake persona generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be recommending products to SheerLuxe's followers — in other words, doing the job that SheerLuxe would normally pay a human to do. The reaction was entirely predictable. Indignation“The editorial team hastily issued an apology, saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what to do.'”
This is just the latest in a long line of withdrawals of “inspiring AI projects” that have drawn outrage from those they were meant to inspire. The Prince Charles Cinema in London's Soho cancel In June, it canceled a screening of a film written by AI after patrons loudly protested. Lego was under pressure The company demanded that it remove a series of AI-generated images it had published on its website. Doctor Who had begun experimenting with generative AI, It stopped immediately After a wave of complaints, companies have bought into the AI hype, thinking that adopting AI will help them promote themselves as innovative, completely failing to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment among many customers.
Behind the backlash are a number of concerns about AI. The most fundamental is its impact on human labor. The main impact of using AI in many situations is that it will deprive humans of the opportunity to do the same work. And AI systems will: Exploitation of works Artificial intelligence is training the people it is meant to replace in creative output without paying them. The technology has a tendency to sexualize women, is used to create deep fakes, and is causing tech companies to miss their climate targets, without understanding many of its risks well enough to mitigate them. Naturally, this has not met with universal praise. Hayao Miyazaki, director of world-famous animation studio Studio Ghibli, said: “I’m completely disgusted…” [AI] It is an affront to life itself.”
Members of the activist group Safe Streets Level place cones around a self-driving taxi in San Francisco, California, in July 2023. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Some members of the anti-AI movement Reclaiming the name “Luddite”I come from a tech community where Luddite is considered an insult, but this new movement is proud of the moniker. As Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, points out, the first Luddites didn't rebel immediately. They called for dialogue and compromise. The new Luddites also want dialogue and compromise. Most recognize that AI is here to stay, and they want a more rational and fair approach to its adoption, not reversal. And it's easy to imagine that they might be more successful than their predecessors. 19th century counterpartThe legendary Ned Ludd had no social media. Downtrodden workers used to be easily ignored. The internet is the greatest organizing tool in history.
Anger toward AI companies is forging unlikely allies. When the Recording Industry Association of America recently sued two AI music-generation companies for “unimaginable copyright infringement,” musicians and fans took to the internet to show their support. “Wow, these AI companies make me want to root for the record companies,” one person wrote. One composer said:To address the new threat of AI, old arguments are being pushed aside: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes.
Some will believe that AI is all about opportunity, all about good, and that it is the next great technological revolution that will free humanity from the dark ages we live in. A speaker at the Tony Blair Institute's Britain's Future Summit a few weeks ago said: Overview Why empowering AI is “the only option for a forward-thinking UK government.” There is some truth to this. Of course, AI has a promise. That promise is largely a creed for now, with AI leaders promising technologies that are at best years away and at worst unrealistic. But there is reason to think that the more optimistic predictions about AI have some real potential. AI may truly change the world, as AI visionaries would have you believe.
But the backlash points out that we can’t ignore real harms today in order to make technological bets on the future. Nintendo They won’t use generative AI. A user on Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for software engineers, wrote: A group revolted After the platform struck a deal to allow OpenAI to remove content to train its models, users began deleting posts or editing them to make them nonsensical. Attacks on driverless taxis They shouted in the streets of San Francisco that they were putting people out of work.
Outside the OpenAI offices in San Francisco, there are frequent groups of protesters holding banners reading “Pause AI.” If AI is left unregulated, this sentiment will only grow. Countries may be tempted to treat AI development as an arms race and forge ahead regardless of the costs. But According to opinion polls, the public We think this is a bad idea, and AI developers and those regulating the emerging AI industry need to listen to the growing backlash against AI.
Ed Newton-Rex is the founder of Fairy Training, a nonprofit that certifies generative AI companies that respect the rights of creators, and co-founder of JukeDeck, an AI company that can compose and arrange music.
The Israeli government has blocked a costly U.S. lawsuit that could reveal secrets about a hacking tool called Pegasus. Documents suggest the Israeli authorities seized Pegasus spyware documentation from NSO Group to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information.
Pegasus is used to infect smartphones with hidden software that can extract data and spy on users. NSO Group’s customers include both authoritarian regimes and democracies, raising concerns about human rights abuses.
NSO has been fighting a lawsuit alleging WhatsApp vulnerabilities were exploited, compromising users in multiple countries. Israel’s close ties with NSO and the impact of the seizures on the legal battle have raised questions about the country’s involvement.
Media organizations are trying to uncover the details of the seizures and Israel’s interference in the case, shedding light on the complex relationship between NSO, Israel, and the legal system.
The documents obtained reveal the extent of Israel’s efforts to protect NSO from disclosing sensitive information demanded by the U.S. court, impacting the ongoing legal proceedings.
Israel’s covert actions have complicated WhatsApp’s attempts to obtain crucial information from NSO, highlighting the challenges faced in the legal battle.
The leaked files and emails provide insight into the behind-the-scenes activities and the attempts to prevent the exposure of sensitive information related to the Pegasus spyware.
“Strange Procedure”
Israel’s intervention in the lawsuit has raised concerns about the transparency of the legal process and the protection of national interests.
Do you have information about this story? Email stephanie.kirchgaessner@theguardian.com or send a message (from a non-work phone) using Signal or WhatsApp to +1 646 886 8761.
The legal battle between WhatsApp and NSO has revealed underlying complexities and challenges posed by the lawsuit, reflecting the broader implications of the case.
NSO’s actions and Israel’s involvement have significantly influenced the course of the lawsuit, raising questions about transparency and accountability in the legal process.
Additional reporting by Phineas Rueckert and Karine Pfenniger of Forbidden Stories.
State-sponsored hackers from North Korea have initiated an operation to acquire sensitive information regarding nuclear materials, military drones, submarines, and shipbuilding from the United States and Britain. Intelligence agencies have raised alarm about a “global cyber espionage campaign” targeting critical sectors.
A joint notice from the US, UK, and South Korea highlighted that North Korea is utilizing state-sponsored actors to advance its military and nuclear objectives, with Japan and India also on their radar.
These hackers, part of a group known as Andariel, are focusing on military secrets and intellectual property in industries such as nuclear, defense, aerospace, and engineering. They are also attempting to obtain sensitive data from the medical and energy sectors.
Paul Chichester, operations director at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), expressed concern over the extensive cyber espionage campaign orchestrated by North Korean forces in pursuit of their military and nuclear programs.
NCSC revealed that Andariel has successfully breached organizations worldwide and stolen sensitive technical and intellectual property data.
The NCSC believes Andariel is connected to North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) and poses a constant threat to critical infrastructure organizations globally.
According to intelligence agencies, Andariel funds its espionage operations through ransomware attacks on the US healthcare sector, using publicly available internet scanning tools to identify vulnerable systems.
Chichester emphasized the necessity for safeguarding sensitive information and intellectual property stored on systems to prevent theft or misuse, urging network defenders to follow the advisory guidelines to prevent malicious activities.
The advisory details how Andariel has transitioned from destructive hacks to conducting professional cyber espionage and ransomware attacks, sometimes targeting the same victims on the same day.
The US State Department has announced a reward for information on Lim Jeong-hyok, an alleged Andariel ally involved in ransomware attacks to fund operations against government agencies and defense companies.
North Korea’s cyber army has been linked to various cyber attacks, including the notorious WannaCry ransomworm in 2017. The attack aimed to obtain valuable information for North Korea and generate revenue for the state through illegal means.
OpenAI is currently testing a new search engine that utilizes generative artificial intelligence to generate search results, potentially posing a challenge to Google’s dominance in the online search market. The company announced that SearchGPT will initially launch with limited users and publishers before expanding further. OpenAI plans to integrate search capabilities into ChatGPT and offer it as a standalone product in the future.
SearchGPT is described as a preliminary prototype that combines AI models (such as ChatGPT) with internet search abilities to provide search results in a conversational format with real-time information and relevant source links. This feature positions OpenAI as a direct competitor to major search engines like Google and Bing, owned by Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor.
Integrating generative AI into search engines has become a trend among technology companies, despite concerns about accuracy and copyright issues. OpenAI aims to make searching on the web quicker and easier by enhancing its models with real-time information from the internet.
There is a potential risk of backlash from publishers over how OpenAI uses their content in SearchGPT. Some news outlets have already filed lawsuits against the company for alleged copyright infringement, claiming that their published work was used without permission.
OpenAI denies these claims, stating that their use of copyrighted data falls under the “fair use” doctrine. Other companies have faced similar backlash from users and publishers for AI-generated search features.
OpenAI is collaborating with publishers to give them control over how their content appears in search results and promoting trusted sources of information. The company’s press release includes statements from industry leaders, endorsing AI-powered search as the future of the internet.
This development comes at a time when Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit alleging illegal monopolization of the internet search industry. The lawsuit claims that Google signed deals with major companies to make it the default browser on their devices, further solidifying its dominance.
The Olympic finish line has evolved from just showcasing winning athletes with their medals to now involving every Olympian in the event by sharing videos of themselves unboxing sponsored gear.
These unboxing videos, a social media trend, are now being posted on TikTok by athletes gearing up for their events in Paris this summer.
Millions of viewers are eagerly tuning in to catch a glimpse of the gear set to be worn in the upcoming games.
Alika Schmidt, a 400m specialist from Germany, models an Adidas skirt and quarter-zip sweatshirt, while Australian hurdler Tayleigh Willis dons a yellow and green Asics uniform, showcasing their sponsored gear in TikTok videos.
The buzz around the Paris 2024 uniforms is palpable, with some calling it “the biggest Olympics in fashion history.” The LVMH-sponsored tournament has already sparked interest, with Mongolia’s intricately embroidered kit designed by Ulaanbaatar-based brand Michel & Amazonka gaining traction as a fan favorite.
Videos documenting athletes’ journeys from around the world to the Olympic Village are also gaining momentum on social media platforms. US tennis player Coco Gauff shares a peek into her in-flight meal before her nap, giving followers a taste of the behind-the-scenes action.
Exploring the Olympic Village, Danish handball team members showcase their decorated rooms with personal touches like photos and flags. The glimpse into the athletes’ living spaces, including Paris 2024’s unique cardboard beds, adds a layer of authenticity to the Olympic experience.
The human side of the Olympics is on full display, as athletes like Australian water polo player Tilly Kearns share touching cultural encounters and interactions from the Olympic Village, evoking emotional responses from viewers.
US rugby player Ilona Maher, known for her TikTok presence during the Tokyo Olympics, continues to entertain and engage her audience with content leading up to Paris 2024, showcasing the fun and creative side of the Games.
The Olympics have become a significant platform for athletes and brands alike to connect with diverse audiences through social media, opening up new opportunities for partnerships and content monetization.
As the world unites to celebrate the sporting spirit at the Olympics, the event remains a beacon of unity and a powerful platform for athletes to share their stories and engage with fans worldwide.
Google states that nearly 66% of jobs in the UK could be “augmented” by AI, with only a small percentage of jobs at risk of complete elimination. The company emphasizes the importance of supporting workers to utilize AI technology to improve efficiency rather than fearing job loss.
Debbie Weinstein, managing director of Google UK, highlights the low adoption rate of AI tools in workplaces and emphasizes the need for people to feel confident and capable in using these technologies to unlock their full potential.
Research commissioned by Google from think tank Public First reveals that 61% of UK jobs will be significantly impacted by AI, with only 31% remaining unaffected by the technology. Certain industries like social care, transportation, and accommodation and food services, which involve complex physical labor, are less likely to be automated.
Public First estimates that only a few jobs will become obsolete due to AI, with the majority of jobs expected to be enhanced instead. Google has partnered with various organizations to introduce AI technologies in a way that enhances worker capabilities without replacing them.
The government is also supporting the adoption of AI across the economy to drive growth and provide new opportunities for workers. Minister for AI, Feriel Clarke MP, emphasizes the importance of AI skills training to help workers thrive in the changing job market.
Public First predicts that full adoption of AI over the next six years could bring significant economic benefits to the UK, with an annual growth rate of 2.6% driven by technology alone. Google claims that using generative AI could save the average UK worker 100 hours a year, marking the biggest improvement in productivity since the introduction of Google Search.
Despite some controversies surrounding AI tools like Gemini AI, Google continues to invest in AI products and features to enhance user experiences. The company aims to revamp Google search with AI Briefs, although this has faced criticism for potentially reducing traffic to publisher sites.
debtFor Gemma, her life is a puzzle. Ever since she was left on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, she's never felt like she belonged, and she's desperate to know what the world is like outside the small town where no one ever leaves. What's more, when she moves, the whole world moves with her, like sliding tiles, a series of conveyor belts. It's the puzzle that gets her from point A to point B.
Each scene in Arranger: Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding block puzzle, where you need to think a couple steps ahead to move Gemma and the surrounding objects in the right direction. Some things don't move with Gemma, like purple static-covered rocks and robotic birds, but everything else does. So you'll need to carry a sword towards an intruding monster, a key towards a door, or a banana towards a shy orangutan. As long as Gemma's path isn't blocked, when she hits the end of a row or column, she'll reappear at the opposite end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
The game is hard to describe, but strangely enough, it's incredibly intuitive to play. I'm not sure exactly how I solved some of the rooms (I had been struggling for ages with a particularly tricky one with lasers and mannequins, and then suddenly it wasn't). My brain just figured out the rules. It made sense how Gemma moved along a tiled conveyor belt. The arrangers added surprising twists to these rules, introducing rafts to cross water, joysticks to control robots, grappling hooks, and more. I'd probably play it for 30 minutes to an hour before moving on to the next idea. It pushed the sliding block puzzle idea to its limits.
The cutesy fantasy-inspired art style and writing didn't do much to complement the puzzles for me; it's not without personality, but it felt mostly perfunctory. Arranger hints at a coming-of-age story for misfits, but doesn't really deliver on it. Instead, it's full of surreal vignettes, like shearing strange creatures for a painter who uses them as muses, or a teenager trying to sneak out of her parents' house to meet up with her long-distance boyfriend. The cartoon-inspired frames indicate the action and emotion that happens between puzzle scenes, but Arranger feels more cerebral than emotional.
Sure, it was brain-wracking at times; I briefly couldn't understand the logic of the puzzle's conveyor belt, not figuring out how to get three blocks to land on three separate switches at the same time, and just moving things around in circles. But mostly I felt trapped, racing through levels, placing them almost by instinct, and feeling like I was playing Tetris. I've reached the end of Jenna's adventure, so I'm definitely done with block puzzles for a while. But it's rare to play a game that explores one great idea so thoroughly.
According to insurers, a global technology outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update is estimated to cost Fortune 500 companies in the United States $5.4 billion. Cybersecurity companies have pledged to take measures to prevent such incidents in the future.
The projected economic losses do not factor in tech giant Microsoft, which experienced widespread system outages during the event.
Banking, healthcare, and major airlines are anticipated to bear the brunt of the impact, as reported by insurance company Parametric. Total insured losses for Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, are estimated to range between $540 million and $1.08 billion.
The CrowdStrike outage led to the disruption of thousands of flights, hospitals, and payment systems, marking it as the largest IT outage in history. Companies across industries are still struggling to recover from the damages. This incident exposed the fragility of modern technology systems, where a single faulty update can halt operations globally.
CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company worth billions, has seen a 22% drop in its shares since the outage. It has apologized for causing the tech crisis and has released a report detailing the issues with the update.
The root cause of the outage was an update pushed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, a cloud-based service aimed at protecting businesses from cyber threats. The update contained a bug that resulted in 8.5 million Windows machines crashing simultaneously.
CrowdStrike has committed to conducting more thorough testing of its software before updates and implementing staged updates to prevent similar widespread outages in the future. It also plans to provide a more detailed report on the outage’s causes in the upcoming weeks.
As one of the largest cybersecurity companies globally, valued at around $83 billion prior to the outage, CrowdStrike serves many Fortune 1000 companies worldwide. The impact of the failed update was substantial due to its broad reach, underscoring how heavily reliant companies are on similar products for their operations.
Several companies continue to face challenges in recovering from the outage, with Delta Air Lines still experiencing disruptions after canceling or rescheduling numerous flights. This situation has left frustrated passengers stranded. Panicked Parents Delta Air Lines has launched an investigation into reaching the affected children, and the U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating its handling of the matter.
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When Chinese developer Game Science announced its first console game, Black Myth: Wukong, last year, it immediately created a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, the action-packed film sees the titular mythical monkey Sun Wukong battling demons from Buddhist folklore and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in beautifully rendered forests. Smartphone games are extraordinarily popular in China but console game developers remain scarce, so anticipation for Wukong was at an all-time high in Game Science’s home country. Within 24 hours, the trailer had garnered two million views on YouTube and more than 10 million on Chinese video-sharing site Bilibili, surprising and delighting its creators. One excited fan said: Breaking into the developer’s office
eager for more information about the game.
After playing Wukong for an hour and a half in a London hotel suite, with a few Game Science folks nervously watching, I was convinced that, by some miracle, this masterful Dark Souls-infused take on Chinese mythology lived up to the promise of its splashy trailer, blending fluid combat with reflex-testing difficulty and the expensive cinematic sheen of God of War. Sprinting through Wukong’s jungles, ducking and dodging between hordes of terrifying flora and fauna, you’ll face everything from gi-clad toads to nightmarish giant-headed infants. Unlike many of its brutally difficult FromSoftware-esque brethren, Wukong’s difficulty feels judged by experts. My ape-man avatar met a gruesome end more times than I’d like to admit, but I persisted. Eventually I defeated enough foes to unlock new abilities. Soon I was perched on a staff mid-attack, gaining the upper hand against the savage monsters of myth. I can flit through the forest like a stealthy cicada, summon flames with my sword, and eventually take down a werewolf the size of a truck roaring atop a crumbling temple.
“We feel a lot of pressure,” recalls one of Game Science’s co-founders, Ted (who Game Science declined to reveal his full name), through an interpreter. “This is our first time working on PC and console games, and we’re a new studio, so we’re really grateful for the players’ and the market’s openness towards us. Their enthusiasm encourages us. But the Chinese mindset tends to be risk-oriented, so when faced with such great encouragement, the best we can do is to do our best to meet players’ expectations… and communicate with them in a very sincere way.”
Unfortunately, when I talk about this, I rarely get any honest communication. Report from IGN
The email was about alleged sexist comments made by multiple developers and people in leadership positions at Game Science. I offered Ted the opportunity to speak about the alleged misogynistic posts and whether or not he thought they were representative of Game Science’s values. However, I received a hasty “no comment” from the UK PR representative, followed after a long wait by a longer statement, also “no comment”, relayed through Ted’s translator. I was then told that Game Science’s US PR agency would follow up with a prepared statement later, which read, “Game Science is focused on demos at this time and will only answer questions about gameplay.”
The same thing happened to an IGN reporter. Demo in LA
It’s disappointing that Game Science chose to invite journalists to talk and play the game last month, but refuses to answer questions. Perhaps there’s nothing reassuring to say. A generous interpretation of the situation would be that the inexperienced studio is afraid to say the wrong thing. But by staying silent, Game Science is also failing to distance itself (and the game) from a number of crude, derogatory and misogynistic comments directed at its employees and management.
Journey to the West is, of course, no stranger to the world of video games; from Ninja Theory’s 2010 Xbox 360 adaptation Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, written by Alex Garland and starring Andy Serkis, to the late Akira Toriyama’s world-conquering Dragon Ball, its mythology and ape world are ripe for gaming. Black Myth: Wukong’s stunning visuals, cinematic beauty and exhilarating sense of speed make it the best playable adaptation of the fable to date, but the uninhibited excitement I would otherwise feel is trampled by the elephant in the room.
IIt’s not often that I get excited about the announcement of a new podcast, but in the past few weeks, that’s happened not once but twice. The first was the podcast debut of Gracie Nuttall, sister of the late cancer activist Laura Nuttall. Dead Siblings Association
She’s teamed up with the founder of Sibling Support Charity to take an intimate look at what it’s like to lose a brother or sister. Room to grieve
The show was created by two mothers who met after losing their children to cancer to help others cope with grief, and what it lacks in production value it more than makes up for with its altruism, courage, and honesty in its treatment of themes like getting through difficult anniversaries and how the experience of loss changes over time.
This week we also have a less inspiring historical analysis of toilets, which, alongside a quirky topical satire from the makers of Have I Got News for You and an immersive attempt to bring birdwatching to hipsters, is one of those films that’s more likely to leave you snorting with laughter than dampening your handkerchief.
Alexi Duggins Deputy TV Editor
This week’s picks
Sissy Spacek co-stars with Owen Wilson and Schuyler Fisk in the film Tom Slick: Mystery Hunter. Photo: Rebecca Cabbage/InVision/AP
Starring Owen Wilson, Sissy Spacek, and Schuyler Fisk, the story is about “the most interesting man you’ve never heard of.” Wilson relishes playing Slick, a legendary scientist, intrepid explorer, and sometime spy who recounts his many adventures. His granddaughter Liv (Fisk) and her mother Claire (Spacek) hunt for the Yeti and find hidden tapes detailing Slick’s exploits facing off against notorious bank robber Machine Gun Kelly. Hannah Verdier
A sponge on a stick, thunderbolts in the bum and a devil in the toilet bowl: delving deep into history’s U-curves can reveal fascinating facts. Dr. David Musgrove teams up with a team of historians to explore Roman, Medieval, Tudor, and Victorian toilet habits in a four-part series that reveals a lot about the past. HV
Is Donald Trump’s running mate interesting? And that Is there ever a photo more destined for history than Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich? Created by the team behind Have I Got News for You to fill the gap between the TV series, this show is predictably stimulating and full of jokes. Alexi Duggins
In this immersive birdwatching series, hipster amateur ornithologist Matt Spracklen goes on weekly walks with bird experts. The first episode of Season 2 is a relaxed and fun listen as he visits Sherwood Forest with Springwatch wildlife experts. The bottom line? A common way to identify a bird is by its “sem” (the overall impression you get of the bird’s shape, movement, etc.). advertisement
Elizabeth Day knows a thing or two about writing a bestselling novel, but in this insightful how-to series she takes a backseat and hands the reins over to literary powerhouses novelist Sarah Collins, agent Nell Andrew, and publisher Charmaine Lovegrove. First, how to know if your idea is worth pursuing. Holly Richardson
There is a podcast
Poseidon is one of the gods featured in “Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!” Photo: Cristiano Fronteddu/Alamy
this week, Charlie Lindler 5 best podcasts Ancient HistoryFrom comedic takes on the stories they don’t teach you in school from the star of Horrible Histories, to timeless, myth-busting adventures.
BThis month in design news, tinkering and hobby crafts get the respect they deserve. Read our articles to see where these wonderful activities are being treated as art. We also cover the history of Casio watches and the emerging future of the Apple Watch. Sign up for the Design Review newsletter to receive more articles like this on architecture, sustainability, and crafts every month.
Origami created by origami artist Darryl Bedford (London) Photo: Darryl Bedford
Oscar Wilde once said, “If you want to have fun in life, you have to take something seriously.” So he must have been impressed by the diverse works and collections on display in the new Art Angel exhibition, “Come As You Really Are,” which just opened in Croydon, UK. In January, British-Gujarati artist and filmmaker Hetan Patel put out a call for all passionate people — collectors, crafters, weekend painters — to send in photos and stories about their hobbies. From 1,500 responses, Patel has put together a stunning exhibition featuring everything from handmade banjos and origami to Warhammer figurines and My Little Pony collections. The artist is a huge Spider-Man fan, and the exhibition includes his own Spider-Man-inspired works. “Come As You Really Are” is currently on display at Grantsville in Croydon, but will be touring the UK for the next 18 months.
Patel said: “Sharing something so personal carries with it a vulnerability that often comes in private spaces with the responsibilities of everyday life. But there is great power in collective sharing, and that is at the heart of this project. We hope you will join us in celebrating the unstoppable nature of self-expression that hobby can represent.”
For more information on “Come As You Really Are” and tour locations, Art Angel Website
TinyPod models available in various sizes Photo: TinyPod
If the memory of the iPod still brings back nostalgia, the TinyPod might be just what you need. The new gadget is a strap-less Apple Watch in a case with the familiar old iPod click wheel, which you can use as a limited-function smartphone. You can make calls, send texts, and listen to music, but you can’t easily access social media or play videos. The Tinypod’s selling point is that it’s a “phone away from the phone,” and if you want to limit your screen time without reverting to a dumb phone, this could be the middle ground.
Sure, the TinyPod requires you to have an old Apple Watch gathering dust in a drawer, requires you to turn off wrist detection, and doesn’t count steps, but finding new uses for excess tech always seems like a good idea.
Approximately one in five Londoners is of South Asian descent, and the community has an impact across London’s streets and neighborhoods, and this rich history is celebrated in Blue Crow Media’s latest city guide map.
The publisher has earned a reputation for producing beautiful maps that combine hidden history with outstanding graphics. Previous titles include Brutalist London and Black History London. This latest map was created by urban planner and author Krish Nathaniel and Bushra Mohammed, director of Msoma Architects. It features 50 London locations, including Neasden Abbey, Drummond Street, the Statue of Noor Inayat Khan, and the Koh-i-Noor Diamond.
“In the UK, there’s often a comfortable assumption that our multi-ethnic history started in the 1950s. For South Asians, the story is much longer than many people know. We wanted to make that history visible and visitable,” says Nathaniel. “We want to show the intertwined stories that span every country and faith across the South Asian subcontinent and its diaspora. Anyone from the South Asian community can find themselves in this map, whether they’re 16 or 60.”
The South Asia History London Map is available at: Blue Crow Media and various independent bookstores.
A refurbished coastal pot by architect and leatherworker Martha Summers. Photo: Martha Summers
If you’re wondering whether to repair or replace your belongings, check out Architecture of Repair on Instagram before your next move. The feed explores the possibilities of repair and showcases the work of the Beyond Repair collective. Everyday objects like IKEA lamps, broken bottles, and moth-eaten rugs are restored to beautiful, usable condition by collective members like Phineas Harper, CEO of education charity Open City, architect Sanjukta Jitendar, and Smith Modak, CEO of the UK Green Building Council.
Some of these incredible pieces are also currently on display at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale in the Netherlands, so be sure to check them out if you want to take a closer look.
“Around 62% of the 222 million tonnes of waste the UK produces each year comes from construction and building,” Harper said. “The UN estimates that e-waste alone is growing five times faster than recycling rates. The transition to a fair and green economy must be focused on restoring a culture of repair, care, maintenance, and restoration.”
Let’s take another look at the IKEA lamp.
“Beyond Repair” is on display at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale until October 13th. Instagram: @architectureofrepair
It’s hard to believe Casio watches are still 50 years old, but this year the Japanese electronics manufacturer is celebrating the milestone. Everyone’s favorite brand of affordable keyboards and calculators is showcasing some of their vintage classic watches, with a focus on classics from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
If you grew up proudly wearing a G-Shock or adored an old-fashioned calculator watch, prepare to feel a tsunami of nostalgia.
Casio’s first digital watch was the Casiotron, introduced in 1974. It was the world’s first watch with an automatic calendar function. When Casio released a limited special edition of this watch earlier this year, it sold out in the UK within five minutes, with more due to be released later this year.
For more information on the Vintage Series, please visit Casio’s Website.
a A man in a strange, animalistic mask sits slumped in an armchair in a dingy motel room and watches you click a hand-held tally counter. He offers you $14,000 if you keep clicking until the number resets to 10,000, so you do. Occasionally he makes polite but suggestive requests: go faster, go slower, stop and try again, but he remains motionless, except for the occasional flexion of his hand.
Clicking the left mouse button, you wander around the room, admiring the paintings on the walls, the out-of-sync TV, the thermostat, etc. But as you approach the final scene, the man slowly begins to reveal bits and pieces of his life, and the atmosphere of an already dark world grows darker by the minute. This is what the game is all about.
Clickolding has been getting a lot of attention since its release on July 17th, receiving widespread coverage in the gaming press and nearly 500 reviews on PC game store Steam, most of which have been very positive. But what is it about this strange piece of interactive art that’s only 40 minutes long that has captured the hearts of critics and players alike?
That’s partly because Clickolding is a pretty obvious allegory about voyeurism and the sex trade. The man in the chair indirectly enjoys someone else’s use of his precious counter, which he describes as a lover he can no longer satisfy (“We’ve been together a long time, but I just can’t click like you do.”). The relationship between the two people in the room is deliberately left ambiguous, but we know this is no hostage situation; players are free to leave the room when they want, and opening the hotel room door ends the game. And yet, the threat hangs over the room, like a bad smell.
The player character must perform certain physical acts that clearly arouse the seated man, though not overtly explicit (“You’re clicking steadily. That’s good.”). But there’s also emotional labor, as the man reveals aspects of his tattered private life. Power dynamics shift subtly: at various times you’re a servant, a caretaker, a partner, a stranger, all with barely any dialogue.
One of Strange Scaffold’s other creations, an alien airport now run by dogs. Photo: Strange scaffolding
The game also captures a universal aspect of the experience of being confined to a hotel room for an extended period of time. While you’re there, it becomes a strange temporary home. It feels intimate (you undress there, you sleep there) yet alien and oddly fascinating. Who picked that floral wallpaper, that kitschy bedside lamp, that particular painting and why? How does the thermostat work? What’s outside the window? Visually, the room feels natural and detailed; it feels like a room from the latest Resident Evil or Call of Duty.
The clicker was born as an exploration of design principles: At this year’s San Francisco Game Developers Conference, members of studio Aggro Crab bought a clicker at a nearby thrift store, sat down with industry peers in a hotel lobby, and built a game to play with it. One of those peers was Xalavier Nelson Jr, creative director at the experimental indie studio. Strange Scaffoldingis responsible for such unique titles as Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and An Airport for Aliens Now Run By Dogs. An evening of oral history at WiredNelson was intrigued by the clicker’s hyper-repetitive appeal and began thinking about how he could use it in a new gaming project.
Clickolding continues the tradition of parody games like Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker, which were designed to critique first-generation social media games like FarmVille, in which players perform endlessly repetitive tasks to accumulate resources and level up their characters. But by adopting mainstream game design elements—realistic visuals and a first-person camera—Clickolding extends the parody to all games driven by fast clicking, such as shooters and real-time strategy simulations. Here, the man in the chair becomes a metaphor for compelling game mechanics, enticing the player to get faster, better, and more accurate.
As you approach 10,000 clicks it starts to get boring, but you feel compelled, even obligated, to carry on while the man in the chair gives you a glimpse into his fractured life. It’s strange and mundane, uncomfortable and oddly comforting all at the same time. Perhaps the reason this game has attracted so much attention is that the monotony of clicking buttons in a boring motel allows your own thoughts, feelings and experiences to creep into your and the masked man’s room. Rarely have games given you so much room to be scared.
What to Play
Arranger: A role-solving puzzle adventure. Photo: Furniture and mattresses
in Arranger: Role Playing Puzzle Adventureis a cutesy RPG-like game in which you play a young social misfit setting out on his first journey outside the town he grew up in. Except the entire world is a grid of sliding tiles, and as you move, rows of tiles move with you. This turns combat into a sliding-block puzzle where you have to carry your sword to monsters to defeat them, and turns the regular towns, forests, and graveyards into giant game boards. It took me a while to get to grips with it, but the unique mix of story and puzzles is far more interesting than a match-3 puzzle. You may recognize the artist from his groundbreaking 2010 indie game Braid.
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5 Estimated play time: 6 hr
I I am a person who believes in laughter. I work in the live arts. My primary medium is performance. In my art making I respect the heritage of border crossers, rebellious sexuality, witches and scoundrels. I am known as a sex clown and I am proud to make people laugh.
The best laughter comes from the absurd. It explodes and it spreads. It rumbles and it mutters. It invades rigid, rational, top-down thinking. It mysteriously appears even when you think you shouldn’t. My grandmother Betty used to tell my brother and me, “You’re laughing now, and soon you’ll be crying!” We need tears and hope. I wouldn’t laugh so much if it weren’t for something so serious.
1. Solid Gold Dancer Workout
I grew up watching my mom teach aerobics classes; it’s in my blood. As part of my artistic endeavors, I teach “Grumble Boogie,” a mentally stimulating dance class with a very nerdy ethos. I’ve even taught a 24-hour boogie.
I love this Solid Gold Dancer workout and I encourage you to give it a try, adapt it to your body, and move it. Just look at those outfits and those faces! (I’m obsessed with Darcel.) Dance and laugh, laugh and dance. Today is a healthy day. Thank you, body.
2. Linda Gibson, Judith Lucey, Denise Scott
In this flashback to the 2000 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, three legendary women in comedy show us how they prepare before taking to the stage: Judith Lucey, Denise Scott and the late Linda Gibson (my beloved auntie).
When I was about 15, my mom asked me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I said, “I want to act.” She said, “Whatever you do, have fun doing it.”“ Linda performs here despite having ovarian cancer. She’s funny, strong, defiant, and authentic. A golden gibbo.
3. Flutterby catches fire
A classic. I had this device as a kid too. It’s so pure to see your parent scream “Oh noooo” at the end. We must return to the cleansing fire one day. Fairies are real.
4. Take full control
Lockdown has taken hold of us. During the pandemic, I was living in the legendary Queer House in a stationary caravan in my backyard. In one of the windows where we could gather, a group I was part of called Working Bitches,I made the track with my gay uncle Paul Mac and Johnny Seymour (aka Stereogamus), and it’s so much fun to see the scenes in the music video of my friends, mentors and fellow artists dancing in my backyard.
5. Sacred David
This is the perfect video to refresh your mind. I’ve been lucky enough to see David Hoyle live on stage a few times in London. I love their stream of consciousness. Their charm. Their simmering, intense and welcoming intelligence. You can binge watch their other videos too. Please do! It’s just divine.
I’ve been very careful with my use of social media because I know it can feel like gambling. I feel how it changes my brain. But there are some things like Recess Therapy that give me real hope. Kids get it. Kids are having a great impact on my brain.
7. Dog in the water
You know who else gets it? Dogs. Dogs in wigs, dancing dogs, tricky dogs, laughing dogs – picking just one dog video was hard. I don’t anthropomorphize dogs, in fact, they bring me back to who I am and I’m grateful for that. Dog memes are constantly being passed around among my closest friends. Dogs are gods.
8. Young people dancing to Vogue
Just like the aerobics class, you can imitate their movements, invent your own movements, and enjoy the dramatic developments. Ecstatic dance helps us. The gaze in this girl’s eyes gives me energy.
9. Sammy Obeid
Some of the best laughter I’ve experienced has been produced by people who have overcome some of the most difficult times in their lives. Joy in the face of oppression is a powerful antidote to the pain of domination. Laughter can be a weapon. It can build solidarity and dismantle power.
Meta has announced that its new artificial intelligence model is the first open-source system that can compete with major players like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company revealed in a blog post that its latest model, named “Llama 3.1 405B,” is able to perform well in various tasks compared to its competitors. This advancement could potentially make one of the most powerful AI models accessible without any intermediaries controlling access or usage.
Meta stated, “Developers have the freedom to customize the models according to their requirements, train them on new data sets, and fine-tune them further. This empowers developers worldwide to harness the capabilities of generative AI without sharing any data with Meta, and run their applications in any environment.”
Users of Llama on Meta’s app in the US will benefit from an additional layer of security, as the system is open-source and cannot be mandated for use by other companies.
Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of open source for the future of AI, highlighting its potential to enhance productivity, creativity, and quality of life while ensuring technology is deployed safely and evenly across society.
While Meta’s model matches the size of competing systems, its true effectiveness will be determined through fair testing against other models like GPT-4o.
Currently, Llama 3.1 405B is only accessible to users in 22 countries, excluding the EU. However, it is expected that the open-source system will expand to other regions soon.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that surfaced last week that he plans to donate $45 million a month to a super PAC working to elect President Donald Trump.
Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show on Tuesday and said the allegations were “simply not true.” “I’m not giving $45 million a month to Donald Trump,” he said.
“What I’ve done is I’ve created a pack, or a super pack, or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “It’s called the America Pack.”
Super PACs (short for political action committees) are independent political organizations that allow donors to give unlimited amounts, but there are contribution limits on individuals and organizations other than super PACs.
After his interview with Peterson, Musk Reply “Yeah right,” he commented on a clip of X’s interview, as well as another tweet addressing the reports. To tell“Yeah, that’s ridiculous. I donate some money to America PAC, but at a much lower level. The PAC’s core values are supporting meritocracy and individual liberty. Republicans are largely, but not entirely, on the side of meritocracy and liberty.”
The denial came days after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who has enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination in August.
Also on Tuesday, The New York Times report The super PAC employed former staffers from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign. “The super PAC has created an air of mystery around Trump, with other outside groups knowing almost nothing about its plans,” the Times reported.
But aides to DeSantis’ initial campaign manager, Genera Peck, and Phil Cox, former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the campaign was seeking to become one of the major groups supporting Trump, which could help increase its legitimacy within the Republican establishment.
“It’s about promoting the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say I’m, like, a MAGA,” he added, referring to Trump’s catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more of a MAG, someone who makes America greater.”
Musk did not disclose how much he plans to donate to the PAC.
AmericaPac already has the backing of Musk’s friends and allies in the tech industry, the Times reported. reportJoe Lonsdale, who co-founded the software company Palantir with Peter Thiel, Major Political Donors President Trump’s new running mate is Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.
The Winklevoss twins, crypto entrepreneurs who have accused Joe Biden of waging a war on cryptocurrencies through regulation, have also contributed to the effort, The Wall Street Journal reports. reportIn June, they praised Trump as a “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto and pro-business.”
aAt the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, right after Snake crushes Liquid Ocelot, there’s a never-ending series of cut scenes. Well, that’s not strictly true. do end – 71 minutes later – I just haven’t seen that much of it. I understand that the game’s director, Hideo Kojima, is an avid film fan and took a lot of inspiration from movies, but I don’t care. Those are minutes of your life that you can never get back.
I also don’t like the 20-minute cinematic scenes that pepper Xenoblade Chronicles and Final Fantasy, or the hundreds of non-interactive scenes that detail every plot point in an Assassin’s Creed adventure. Taking away the player’s freedom and forcing their attention for extended periods of time is unnecessarily aggressive, and I think it’s time to abolish the practice altogether.
The origins of cutscenes in video games were both technical and situational. Games in the ’90s couldn’t render scenes in real time, and a lot of the narrative talent in games came from film, using tools they knew. This interestingly mirrors the evolution of film. In the 1920s and early 1930s, narrative film was heavily influenced by theater. This makes sense, because the early film industry drew most of its talent from theater — actors, directors, screenwriters, technical staff — and these people brought technology with them.
From stage to screen…Greta Garbo starred in the 1930 film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play “Anna Christie.”
Photo: Mgm/Sportsphoto/Allstar
The camera tended to stay still with long takes between cuts, observing the action like an audience member. Filming took place on purpose-built sets, not on location. Acting was somewhat staged and theatrical, as performers were accustomed to exaggerating their movements and emotions to be seen by an audience 18 rows back. Early film audiences were also familiar with the conventions of the stage, which helped them ease into the cinematic experience.
But as film evolved into a medium in its own right, new and intimate ways of telling stories emerged. With the invention of the dolly and crane, the camera transformed from a spectator to a moving observer in the world. Actors discovered that small gestures and facial expressions could communicate. From German Expressionism to the French New Wave to the American Auteur films of the 1970s, new storytelling techniques emerged, along with many of the lighting, direction, design, and special effects conventions that are unique to cinema. The medium came into its own.
This process is happening in games too. We see it in increasingly sophisticated fields like environmental storytelling, UX/UI, and narrative design. But despite being a medium where interactivity and immersion are everything, we’re stuck with cutscenes. Look at some of the biggest, most moving narrative games of the last five years — The Last of Us, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man — and most of the emotional moments happen in non-interactive, cinematic sequences that take control away from us. Like children, we’re not entrusted with participation; we’re expected to just sit back and watch the show.
No time to talk… Half-Life.
Photo: Valve
The argument is that sometimes, we need to craft the emotional development of a scene at exactly the right time to deliver the emotional element of that scene. In that case, we’re making the wrong kind of scene. If a mature interactive medium can only tell an emotional story through non-interactive sequences, something is wrong. This is frustrating, because Valve made great strides on this issue 25 years ago. The narrative sci-fi shooter Half-Life contained no cutscenes or cinematic sequences at all. Characters (scientists and guards at the Black Mesa facility) gave in-game exposition as the player explored, while at the same time the increasingly unstable environment told a tale of destruction and suspense. Valve did it again a decade later with the Portal games, combining amusingly chatty robot antagonists with a world where signs, symbols, and voice announcements conveyed all the rules and background details the player needed to know to be intellectually and emotionally immersed.
Game designer Fumito Ueda largely avoided cutscenes in his classic adventure games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, instead immersing us in vague, mysterious worlds where the player creates their own mythology with so little information. Indie studio thatgamecompany’s 2012 masterpiece Journey featured silent characters in a desert wasteland but still moved thousands of players to tears. Campo Santo’s game Firewatch forged a rich mystery out of the Wyoming wilderness and disembodied voices heard over walkie-talkies.
In an age where in-game realism is near-photographic, relying on cutscenes for dramatic, cathartic effect feels even more incongruous and alienating. We get to explore and exist in incredibly vivid worlds, surrounded by characters capable of expressing a wide range of emotions thanks to a combination of performance capture, cutting-edge AI and physics. And that’s all it takes. These are dynamic, immersive worlds. As a player, you only need control of weapons, vehicles and a highly sophisticated progression system to take part in the story.
A voice from the wilderness…Firewatch.
Photo: Campo Santo
Or the story can simply exist in the background, as something we experience or experience second-hand. It’s an interactive version of direct cinema. From Software’s works are great examples of this. There are cutscenes, but they’re short and usually used to introduce a new enemy or show the player a moment of reaction from the world. Otherwise the story is evoked simply by moving through these bleak, gothic landscapes. Author and historian Holly Nielsen says: Expressed with X
Recently, “I’ve spent about 300 hours on Elden Ring. I can’t really tell you anything about the world, characters, or story other than a vague sense of atmosphere.”
A few years ago I interviewed Bethesda Game Studios head Todd Howard and asked him what the most important part of telling a story in a video game was. “You have to find the tone,” he said, after a long silence. “We look a lot at old John Ford films and the way he captures space. Ford’s shots make you feel a certain way. There’s a thing called tone. As a designer, you have to know how you want the player to feel. Find something outside of the game that has that tone and just stare at it.” Yes, this is another example from a film, but Howard isn’t talking about The Searchers or the Rio Grande story, he’s talking about the feel of the space that Ford created.
Tone. Atmosphere. Feel. These are different words for the same concept, arguably the basis of post-cinematic theory of mainstream game narrative. In an immersive environment, the story isn’t something the player sees but something the player enters, a space of discovery rather than performance, a playground rather than a theater. Stories should be open to broad and bold interpretation, and may even be entirely optional or subliminal. If they do happen to take control away from the player, it should be in radical moments employed sparingly, like turning the camera away or darkening the stage.
Cinematic cut scenes are tyrannical fakes. It’s time to eliminate them.
“Where did CrowdStrike go wrong?” is, if anything, a slightly overly generalized question.
You can also think about it the other way around: if you push an update to every computer on your network at the same time, by the time you find a problem, it’s too late to contain the impact. Alternatively, with a phased rollout, the update is pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you start updating 50 systems at once and then they all immediately lose connection, you hope you notice the problem before you update the next 50 million systems.
If you don’t do a staged rollout, you need to test the update before pushing it to users. The extent of pre-release testing is usually up for debate; there are countless configurations of hardware, software, and user requirements, and your testing regime must narrow down what’s important, and hope that nothing is overlooked. Thankfully, if 100% of computers with the update installed experience crashes and become inoperable until you manually apply a tedious fix, it’s easy to conclude that you didn’t test enough.
If you’re not doing a staged rollout and testing the update before it ships, you need to make sure that: Not broken.
Broken
Many flights at Orlando, Florida’s airport were canceled or delayed amid the CrowdStrike crisis. Photo: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images
In CrowdStrike’s defense, I can understand why this happened. The company offers a service called “endpoint protection,” which if you’ve been in the Windows ecosystem for a few years, might be easiest to think of as antivirus. It’s built for the enterprise market, not the consumer market, and not just protects against common malware, but also tries to prevent individual computers used by companies from gaining a foothold on the corporate network.
This applies not only to PCs used by large corporations that need to provide every employee with a keyboard and mouse, but also to any other business with large amounts of cheap, flexible machines. If you left your house on Friday, you know what that means: advertising displays, point-of-sale terminals, and self-service kiosks were all affected.
The comparison is relevant because CrowdStrike is in a space where speed is crucial. The worst-case scenario, at least until last week, is a ransom worm like WannaCry or NotPetya, malware that not only does significant damage to infected machines but also spreads automatically in and out of corporate networks. So its first line of defense operates quickly: Rather than waiting for a weekly or monthly release schedule for software updates, the company pushes out files daily to address the latest threats to the systems it protects.
Though limited, even a phased rollout could cause real damage. WannaCry destroyed many NHS computers during the few hours it spread unchecked, before being accidentally halted by British security researcher Marcus Hutchins while trying to figure out how it worked. In this scenario, a phased rollout could result in loss of life. Delays in testing could be even more costly.
That means updates shouldn’t cause this kind of problem: rather than new code that runs on each machine, updates are more like dictionary updates that tell already-installed CrowdStrike software what new threats to look out for and how to recognize them.
At the loosest level, you can think of it as something like this article: You’re probably reading it through some application, like a web browser, an email client, or the Guardian app. (If you’ve arranged for someone to print this and deliver it to you with your morning coffee, congratulations!) We haven’t done a staged rollout or full testing of the article, because nothing would happen there.
Unfortunately, the update pushed out on Friday actually did something. High-level technical details remain unclear, and until CrowdStrike reveals the full details, we’ll just take their word for it. The update, which was meant to teach the system how to detect a specific type of cyberattack that had already been seen in the wild, actually “introduced a logic error, causing the operating system to crash.”
I’ve been covering this sort of thing for over a decade now, and my guess is that this “logic error” boils down to one of two things: Either an almost incomprehensible failure condition occurs in one of the most complex systems mankind has ever built, causing a catastrophic event through an almost unthinkable combination of bad luck, or someone does something incredibly stupid.
Sometimes there are no classes
Consumer self-service kiosks operated by Britain’s South Western Railway were also affected. Photo: Anadolu/Getty Images
There have been a lot of comments over the past few days.
This is an inevitable evil that results from the concentration of power in the technology sector in just a few companies.
This is an inevitable consequence of the EU prohibiting Microsoft from restricting antivirus companies’ ability to tamper with basic levels of Windows.
This is the inevitable harm of cybersecurity regulation that focuses more on checking boxes than on actual security.
This wasn’t a security issue because no one was hacked – it was just a bug.
None of it worked. CrowdStrike, despite the disruption it caused, doesn’t wield much power. It’s one of the big players in the space, but it’s installed on only about 1% of PCs. Microsoft says: They claim that the failure happened only because of regulations.Meanwhile, in the alternative where third-party security companies can’t operate on Windows, with Microsoft setting itself up as the only line of defense, it looks like we’ll be in a world where the first big failure actually affects 100% of PCs.
Cybersecurity regulations have actually benefited companies that have adopted CrowdStrike, making complicated certification processes into a simple checkbox check, and maybe that’s a good thing: “Buy a product to be safe” is the only reasonable request for the vast majority of companies, and CrowdStrike has delivered, except for that one unfortunate time.
But unfortunate or not, it was definitely a security issue. The golden triangle of information security has three goals: confidentiality (are the secrets kept secret?), integrity (is the data correct?), and availability (can the system be used?). CrowdStrike could not maintain availability, which meant they could not protect their customers’ information security.
In the end, the only lesson I can take comfort in is that this is going to happen more. We’ve managed so well with so many of our society’s failures that the ones that hit us from now on will be more unexpected, more severe, and less prepared for. Just as a driver can become so confident in their cruise control that they lose control right before an accident, we’ve managed to make catastrophic IT failures so rare that recovering from them is a marathon effort.
Yay?
The Wider TechScape
Social media automatically distributes problematic content to young men with little oversight. Illustration: Nash Weerasekera/The Guardian
“A complete river of rubbish”: Josh Taylor of The Guardian Australia Facebook and Instagram Algorithms The blank account fueled sexism and misogyny.
Is the world’s largest search engine broken? Tom Faber asks Google It is losing momentum.
Is this the end? The Story of Craig Wright? Post The Court’s Full Decision Post on your Twitter feed that you feel like the last decade of your career is final.
Parents have even more reason to worry, as AI technology overwhelms capture efforts. Child Abuser.
and Roblox Back in the spotlight Child sexual abuse failureCritics say the company’s privacy stance makes things worse.
Cybersecurity company Wizz has turned down a $23bn (£18bn) takeover offer from Google’s parent Alphabet, making it the largest takeover bid ever for a tech company, and has opted for a stock market listing instead.
Alphabet had been in discussions with Wizz, a company established by graduates of Israel’s cyber-intelligence program, in an effort to catch up with competitors Microsoft and Amazon in the competitive cloud-services market.
Wiz provides a service that scans data on cloud storage platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for potential security threats.
The New York-based startup, which is financially backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital, was last valued at $12 billion.
In an internal email to employees, the company expressed gratitude for the offer but decided to remain committed to its mission of building Wiz. CEO Assaf Rapaport outlined the company’s objectives of reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and going public.
Despite the tempting offer, the company’s trust in its skilled team reaffirmed their decision. The positive response from the market further reinforced their aim to create a platform that is loved by both security and development teams.
As of Tuesday morning, neither Wizz nor Google have released an official statement regarding the end of the acquisition negotiations.
There are concerns that the deal may face regulatory challenges as authorities seek to tighten their control over acquisitions involving major tech companies.
Last month, the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission agreed to investigate leading players in the AI market, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Established in 2020, Wizz was valued at $12 billion in a funding round in May, attracting investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive.
Wiz claims to have 40% of the Fortune 100 as clients and boasts an annual recurring revenue of $350 million.
‘T“There’s a giant rock that fell from the sky on an island in Scotland. They call it Dragonstone,” Tears of Metal director Raphael Toulouse explains, “and the British send their general out to [a look]”
“But then the general finds the rock and goes a little rogue, a little bit like Apocalypse Now. He breaks ties with the English, takes control of the island, and the English start mining this giant rock to make weapons and armor, but it also affects their minds. So the Scots organize to take the island back. And that’s where you come in.”
In Tears of Metal, you play as the leader of a Scottish battalion, and your job is to get closer and closer to Dragonstone while cutting down breakaway English troops. But as you get closer to the supernatural meteorite, the beautiful green backdrop of the Scottish Highlands gradually transforms into a hellish world. “It gets weirder and weirder, and by the end it looks almost post-apocalyptic,” Toulouse says.
You start with around 10 soldiers, but you can recruit more, and they’ll get stronger over time. Tears of Metal is a roguelike, so if you’re defeated you’ll be sent back to the start of the game, but you’ll keep any troops you’ve gathered for your next playthrough. However, just like in the alien-fighting XCOM series, if one of your soldiers dies in battle, he’s lost forever. The stakes are high, and you may have to rush to rescue your favorite characters before they’re wiped out for good.
Sensitivity warning: imitation blood.
The game is reminiscent of Dynasty Warriors, a series in which powerful warriors mow down hundreds of enemies in fantastical re-enactments of historical battles. Toulouse acknowledges that the series was a “huge influence,” but says the game relies less on button mashing. Up to four players can play together, each with their own army.
Toulouse is CEO of Paper Cult, an indie studio he co-founded in Montreal, Canada, nearly a decade ago. Which begs the question: why a French-Canadian indie studio is making a game set in Scotland? “That’s a good question,” Toulouse says, adding that the game originally had a completely different setting. Settling on medieval Scotland was a marketing decision; they wanted something instantly recognizable. But there’s also the fact that Toulouse is partial to the movies of Mel Gibson.
“I was a huge Braveheart fan,” he says. “I would always watch the movie with my friends after school. I would watch it over and over again. I loved the action scenes, and the Braveheart soundtrack is amazing.”
Toulouse has no personal connection to Scotland, but says Paper Cult has “a lot of connections with Scottish people” and works with writers who visit friends in Scotland every year. “We’re really trying to involve Scottish people in the project,” he adds, noting that the dialogue, in particular, will be of interest to Scots who still remember the terrible tragedy. Narration of William Wallace’s election campaign Age of Empires II users will be relieved to hear this.
Paper Cult has been working on Tears of Metal for around four years, but the release date is still a long way off, slated for next year. But since the game was revealed at Summer Game Fest in early June, Toulouse has been amazed by the audience’s response. He says it has been added to wishlists on Steam more than 100,000 times. “Within the first few days, we had over 100,000 people added to wishlists,” he says. [after the announcement]we surpassed [our previous game] “This is my lifetime wish list for Bloodroots,” Toulouse says with a hint of excitement. “I’m super excited.”
yes
You can track your calories, steps, and even the number of streams on your favorite songs. Now, you can also quantify your awesomeness with Aura Points, which determine your level of attractiveness. (It’s basically charisma, and if you didn’t know that, you just lost 100 Aura points.)
Asking someone out and getting a “yes” results in losing 100 aura points. Using Snapchat after the age of 19 is frowned upon and leads to a deduction of 1,000 aura points. Answering a question confidently in class, even if it’s wrong, puts you in the negative.
According to a TikTok explanation, this trend has caused a 378% spike in posts with the hashtag #aurapoints between May and June. It’s all about exuding a positive, carefree, and confident attitude to earn points and gain entry into the cool-kids club.
The concept of Aura Points is a modern twist on the elusive “it” factor, popularized by stars like Clara Bow and Evelyn Nesbitt, now reimagined for the younger generation. Gain your Aura Points to join the cool club, or risk losing them and facing consequences.
Stories on TikTok illustrate how people earn and lose points. Acting breezy and confident in tough situations earns you points, while staying with a cheating partner results in a deduction that no aura person would accept. Some scenarios are absurd but entertaining.
While Aura Points are mostly light-hearted, some creators use them to symbolize personal growth moments. It can be a way to reflect on important life choices and behaviors that define one’s character positively.
Young TikTok users share anecdotes of their point-earning and losing experiences. The trend aligns with Gen Z’s interest in cosmic belief systems like astrology. It offers a playful yet insightful approach to evaluating personal growth and character development.
Aura Points may seem like a modern TikTok fad, but they draw parallels to ancient virtue ethics from Greek and Roman philosophy. It’s more than just a superficial trend; it encourages self-reflection and moral alignment with personal values.
The concept of Aura Points also relates to moral credit, where positive actions counterbalance potential negative ones. It serves as a gamified system to assess behavior and invite constructive criticism.
Just like Alain de Botton’s notion of “status anxiety,” Aura Points reflect the ongoing concern for how others perceive us and our quest for self-worth. It’s a way for individuals to navigate social evaluation and engage in status transactions.
Understanding the philosophy behind this TikTok trend? Congratulations, you’ve earned 1,000 Aura points!
An extensive number of the 8.5 million devices affected by the recent global IT outage have been restored online, as reported by the cybersecurity company involved in the incident.
CrowdStrike mentioned that they are currently experimenting with technology to expedite the rebooting process of systems, while experts caution that recovering fully from the IT outage last Friday might take several weeks.
During the incident, numerous flights were canceled, broadcasters went off-air, medical appointments were disrupted, and countless PCs failed to boot after a CrowdStrike software update unintentionally caused devices using the Microsoft Windows OS to malfunction.
CrowdStrike posted updates on social media outlining the progress in resolving the glitch. According to an expert, this incident caused “the biggest IT outage in history.”
The US company stated, “A substantial number of the roughly 8.5 million Windows devices affected are now operational and back online.”
CrowdStrike remains focused on restoring all systems as quickly as possible, and of the approximately 8.5 million affected Windows devices, a significant number are back online and operational.
Working with our customers, we tested new techniques to accelerate the affected areas…
CrowdStrike mentioned ongoing tests for new methods to speed up the repair process of impacted systems, aiming to make this technology accessible to businesses and organizations.
Australia’s Home Affairs Minister confirmed that CrowdStrike plans to implement an automated fix similar to Microsoft’s to address this issue in an upcoming update.
Experts cautioned that affected computers might require manual repairs and could face prolonged restoration times since the outage.
Over 1,500 flights were canceled in the US for a third consecutive day, with Delta Airlines in Atlanta particularly struggling, while 45 flights were canceled in the UK on Saturday.
Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, stated that critical applications within the airline’s IT systems were impacted by the issue. He mentioned that crew tracking-related tools were affected, causing difficulty in managing the high number of changes due to the outage.
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, canceled 400 flights over the weekend primarily due to an IT issue.
NHS England in the UK issued warnings about potential delays as they work on restoring the health service from the outage. They advised patients with appointments to attend unless instructed otherwise.
The British Medical Association mentioned that regular GP services might not resume immediately due to significant IT-related delays.
An NHS spokesperson stated, “The system is back online now, and with the dedicated efforts of NHS staff, we hope to minimize any further disruptions. However, please expect some delays as services are being restored, especially with GPs needing to reschedule appointments.”
Pharmacy services in the UK are anticipated to be slower than usual as the recovery process continues.
Nick Kaye, president of the National Pharmacists Association, urged customers to be patient as local pharmacies work through the backlog of prescriptions caused by the IT outage last week.
circleWhen you enter this unique boutique video game festival, you’ll be greeted by bullet hell shooters with a painterly twist. ZOE Go away! As you dodge and fire attacks at breakneck speed, the game immerses you in an intoxicating shower of pointillist color, dazzling your eyes and challenging your thumbs. Leave after reading Initially resembling dark fantasy Quake clones, these games present a peculiar challenge of checking text messages on your phone while battling through dungeons. They are subversive games that cleverly twist common design tropes.
Violating the norm, the Glasgow Independent Games Festival was previously known as the Southside Game Festival. The recent event was held at Civic House, nestled in the shadow of the M8, a concrete eyesore cutting through Glasgow. The showcased games, created by developers residing in or near Glasgow, boast quirkiness and lower budgets compared to mainstream titles. Co-founder Joe Bain aims to place these works within games’ broader cultural context, steering away from the profit-driven atmosphere of trade shows like Gamescom.
Breaking the rules with wit and fun…Glasgow Independent Games Festival Photo: Mhairi Teresa
During a panel on “Unconventional Games,” game maker Stephen Gill-Murphy from Glasgow (aka Katamites) offered a sharp critique of what he termed the media’s “cult of depth.” He argued that games often lead players deeper into virtual worlds only to reveal the lack of coherence at the end. Gill-Murphy transformed this idea into a chilling horror game with intentional flatness called Murderer’s Anthology, available for play at the event.
At the festival, participants engage in activities like making amends with deceased virtual pets through Tamagotchi Seance, where they interact with virtual animals through spoken dialogue. Another intriguing game on display is Apartment Story, a simulator showcasing the chaotic everyday life in a single room with elements of a gangster thriller and The Sims.
An unconventional convention…the Glasgow Independent Games Festival. Photo: Mhairi Teresa
Spontaneous interactions are vital at these events. Participants come together to engage in a language decoding game like Kevin (1997-2077), deciphering cryptic images and text without clear instructions. This collaborative puzzle-solving process transforms the game into a participatory artwork, offering a collective experience with no definitive answers.
While Scottish video games were once synonymous with Edinburgh’s Rockstar North, the co-founder Ryan Caulfield emphasizes the abundance of “weird and wonderful” options available today. Amidst the prevalence of profit-driven live-service looter-shooters, playing games that defy conventions with irreverence at this festival is truly exciting.
a
Climbers cling to dizzying rock faces, toes digging in, knuckles white, limbs trembling with extreme tension. In this perilous moment, they have a few options: move quickly to regain their balance, rest for a few seconds, or simply let go and hope the belay can support their weight as they succumb to the massif.
Cairn, the new “survival climbing game” from French studio The Game Bakers, is full of dangerous, panic-inducing moments like this. There’s no visible stamina bar, meaning players must derive all their information from the state of their controllable climber, Aava. When under extreme stress, Aava’s breathing becomes intense and rapid and shallow, and her body begins to tremble. “We want you to focus on her posture and the railing in front of her,” says creative director Emeric Thoa.
Beneath this naturalistic presentation lies a huge amount of mathematical calculation. Using only the left analog stick, you control all of Aava’s body and limbs, and lock in handholds and footholds with the press of a button. The system calculates the stress on Aava’s limbs and core in real time, which determines the most physically realistic next movement for Aava. “Limbs are chosen automatically by the system; it predicts which arms and legs will move smoothly and easily,” Thoa explains. “The challenge for the player is to keep Aava balanced.”
This kind of dynamic scrambling is a far cry from Assassin’s Creed’s automated parkour, which has you clinging to stone walls with the pull of a trigger, or the navigation puzzles of recent climbing hit Jusant, which have you clinging to mineral outcrops on a predetermined path up a mountain. Cairn makes even the most dizzying activities even more complex by combining a freeform control system with a meticulously designed mountain, whose intersecting routes even Thoa and his colleagues don’t fully understand.
“It’s 2024, and there are words like ‘procedural’ and ‘AI,’ but we designed this mountain and built it completely by hand, placing every rock and crevice and handhold,” Thoa says. “It’s really hard work, and very iterative. I’m really grateful to our level design team.”
What sights and emotions await the player and Arva on their journey? Tore remains tight-lipped, saying only that he and the studio consulted with renowned mountaineer Elizabeth Revol, who spoke of “the intense freedom you feel when you push yourself past your limits at the top of the Earth.” Another detail that stayed in the game’s creator’s mind was that upon reaching the highest, thinnest mountain air, Revol experienced an almost delirious euphoria, “crying, screaming, going into a kind of strange trance.”
Cairn arrives with multiple game modes: the story sees Aava take on a gruelling, multi-day climb of a single mountain, and there’s an Expedition mode with additional mountains and challenges. Those willing to forgo the safety of the rope can also climb “free solo.” “This is where the real fun begins,” declares Toa, with a devilish glower, who, unlike Joussant, “will definitely die” in Cairn.
So what’s the Dark Souls of climbing games? Probably. But as Thoa stresses, “this isn’t a rage game.” Rather, he says, Cairn aims to convey “what climbing and alpinism is really about.” “You try, you fall, you try again, you fall, and then when you manage to get up, it’s very satisfying.”
Child safety experts have claimed that Apple lacks effective monitoring and scanning protocols for child sexual abuse materials on its platforms, posing concerns about addressing the increasing amount of such content associated with artificial intelligence.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the UK has criticized Apple for underestimating the prevalence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its products. Data obtained by the NSPCC from the police shows that perpetrators in England and Wales use Apple’s iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime for storing and sharing more CSAM than in all other reported countries combined.
Based on information collected through a Freedom of Information request and shared exclusively with The Guardian, child protection organizations discovered that Apple was linked to 337 cases of child abuse imagery offenses recorded in England and Wales between April 2022 and March 2023. In 2023, Apple reported only 267 suspected instances of child abuse imagery globally to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), contrasting with much higher numbers reported by other leading tech companies, with Google submitting over 1.47 million and Meta reporting more than 30.6 million, as per NCMEC reports mentioned in the Annual Report.
All US-based technology companies are mandated to report any detected cases of CSAM on their platforms to the NCMEC. Apple’s iMessage service is encrypted, preventing Apple from viewing user messages, similar to Meta’s WhatsApp, which reported about 1.4 million suspected CSAM cases to the NCMEC in 2023.
Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at NSPCC, expressed concern over Apple’s discrepancy in handling child abuse images and urged the company to prioritize safety and comply with online safety legislation in the UK.
Apple declined to comment but referenced a statement from August where it decided against implementing a program to scan iCloud photos for CSAM, citing user privacy and security as top priorities.
In late 2022, Apple abandoned plans for an iCloud photo scanning tool called Neural Match, which would have compared uploaded images to a database of known child abuse images. This decision faced opposition from digital rights groups and child safety advocates.
Experts are worried about Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, introduced in June, especially as AI-generated child abuse content poses risks to children and law enforcement’s ability to protect them.
Child safety advocates are concerned about the increase in AI-generated CSAM reports and the potential harm caused by such images to survivors and victims of child abuse.
Sarah Gardner, CEO of Heat Initiative, criticized Apple’s insufficient efforts in detecting CSAM and urged the company to enhance its safety measures.
Child safety experts worry about the implications of Apple’s AI technology on the safety of children and the prevalence of CSAM online.
It’s clear that people are not prepared for the “digital worker” yet.
CEO Sarah Franklin learned this lesson. Lattice is a platform for HR and performance management that offers services like performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management, and many other HR tools to over 5,000 organizations globally.
So, what exactly is a Digital Employee? According to Franklin, avatars like engineer Devin, lawyer Harvey, service agent Einstein, and sales agent Piper have “entered the workplace and become colleagues.” However, these are not real employees but AI-powered bots like Cognitive.ai and Eligible performing tasks on behalf of humans.
Salesforce Einstein, for example, helps sales and marketing agents forecast revenue, complete tasks, and connect with prospects. These digital workers like Devin and Piper don’t require health insurance, paid vacation, or retirement plans.
Despite backlash, Franklin announced on July 9th that the company will support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like human workers.
However, this decision faced criticism on platforms like LinkedIn for treating AI agents as employees. Disagreements arose on how this approach disrespects actual human employees and reduces them to mere “resources” to be measured against machines.
The objections eventually led Franklin to reconsider the company’s plans. The controversy raised legitimate concerns about the inevitability of the “digital employee.”
AI is still in its early stages, evident from the failures of Google and Microsoft’s AI models. While the future may hold potential for digital employees to outperform humans someday, that time is not now.
Utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze GP records for hidden patterns has significantly improved cancer detection rates for doctors.
The “C the Signs” AI tool used by general practitioner practices has increased cancer detection rates from 58.7% to 66.0%. This tool examines patients’ medical records, compiling past medical history, test results, prescriptions, treatments, and personal characteristics like age, postcode, and family history to indicate potential cancer risks.
Additionally, the tool prompts doctors to inquire about new symptoms and recommends tests or referrals for patients if it detects patterns suggesting a heightened risk of certain cancer types.
Currently in use in about 1,400 practices in England, “C the Signs” was tested in 35 practices in the East of England in May 2021, covering 420,000 patients.
Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a study revealed that cancer detection rates rose from 58.7% to 66.0% by March 31, 2022, in clinics using the system, while remaining similar in those that did not utilize it.
Dr. Bea Bakshi, who developed “C the Signs” with colleague Miles Paling, emphasized the importance of early and quick cancer diagnosis through their system detecting over 50 types of cancer.
The tool was validated in a previous study analyzing 118,677 patients, where 7,295 were diagnosed with cancer and 7,056 were accurately identified by the algorithm.
Notably, the system’s ability to predict if a patient was unlikely to have cancer resulted in only 2.8% of these cases being confirmed with cancer diagnosis within six months.
Concerned by delays in cancer diagnosis, Bakshi developed the tool after witnessing a patient’s late pancreatic cancer diagnosis three weeks before their death, highlighting the importance of early detection.
“With two-thirds of deaths from untestable cancers, early diagnosis is crucial,” Bakshi emphasized.
In the UK, GPs follow National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines to decide when to refer patients for cancer diagnosis, guided by tools like “C the Signs.”
The NHS’s long-term cancer plan aims to diagnose 75% of cancers at stage 1 or 2 by 2028, utilizing innovative technologies like the Garelli blood test for early cancer detection.
Decision support systems like “C the Signs,” improving patient awareness of cancer symptoms, and enhancing access to diagnostic technologies are essential for effective cancer detection, according to healthcare professionals.
NHS England’s national clinical director for cancer, Professor Peter Johnson, highlighted the progress in increasing early cancer diagnoses and access to timely treatments, emphasizing the importance of leveraging technology for improved cancer care.
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