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Q-learning is not yet scalable

Does RL scale? Over the past few years, we've seen that next-token prediction scales, denoising diffusion scales, contrastive learning scales, and so on, all the way to the point where we can train models with billions of parameters with a scalable objective that can eat up as much data as we can throw at it. Then, what about reinforcement learning (RL)? Does RL also scale like all the other objectives? Apparently, it does. In 2016, RL achieved superhuman-level performance in games like Go and C

The Art of Lisp and Writing

The Art of Lisp & Writing Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. –Charles Darwin Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer. Taught that programming—or the worse "developing software"—is like a routine engineering activity, many find difficulty seeing writing

Climate Disasters Hit the Brain Before Babies Are Even Born, Study Suggests

When Superstorm Sandy made a beeline for New York City in October 2012, it flooded huge swaths of downtown Manhattan, leaving 2 million people without electricity and heat and damaging tens of thousands of homes. The storm followed a sweltering summer in New York City, with a procession of heat waves nearing 100 degrees. For those who were pregnant at the time, enduring these extreme conditions wasn’t just uncomfortable—it may have left a lasting imprint on their children’s brains. That’s accor

Kitchen Feeling Like a Sauna? 8 Ways to Stay Cool While Cooking This Summer

We're barely into June, but July-like weather has descended on parts of the country, including the Northeast, where 90-plus temperatures are expected. But you've still got to eat -- and cook -- which means hot kitchens that can cause a domino effect, raising the temperature in the entire home. Read more: Best Foods for Staying Hydrated During Hot Weather Using appliances that don't produce as much heat and planning your meals so that cooking doesn't coincide with the hottest part of the day a

Laptop Buying Guide (2025): How to Choose the Right PC (Step-by-Step Guide)

For some people, however, it might be helpful to think through what software you need to run and which operating systems it runs best on will help you determine the hardware you need. And let's not forget: ChromeOS and Linux are still alternative options. So, here's how the four available operating systems break down. Windows: Windows is the stalwart default OS. Windows is the broadest and most widely used operating system, supporting the largest number of applications and hardware. It may be r

How Covid-19 Changed Hideo Kojima’s Vision for ‘Death Stranding 2’

When legendary game designer Hideo Kojima announced to the world that Death Stranding 2 would soon be released, he made it known that Covid-19 had completely changed his idea for this sequel. “We released Death Stranding before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world was moving toward isolation and division—as with Brexit. The idea behind it was ‘Let's connect. We’ll face disaster if we don’t connect.’ The theme, the story, and the gameplay of the first chapter all revolved around that idea,” Koj

These are the best iPad deals right now, just in case iPadOS 26 made you rethink things

A short while ago, I was browsing Apple deals on Amazon (as one does) – and something stuck out to me. High-end iPad Pros, particularly 12.9-inch models, are surprisingly cheap. I saw M1 models with 1TB and cellular for under $700. Given the recent iPadOS 26 overhaul that makes the iPad much more Mac-like, I figured these deals would be worth a share. While renewed iPad deals are the focus here because of their affordability, new iPad deals are also mentioned at the end. Renewed M1 iPad Pro de

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ third season falls short of its second

This is a spoiler-free preview of the first five episodes of season three. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ended its second season with arguably the single strongest run of any streaming-era Trek. The show was made with such confidence in all departments that if there were flaws, you weren’t interested in looking for them. Since then, it’s gone from being the best modern Trek, to being the only modern Trek. Unfortunately, at the moment it needs to be the standard bearer for the show, it’s become

Flies grow their gyroscopes: Study reveals how flight stabilizers take shape

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Electron microscopy image showing a haltere developed under normal conditions (left) and a deformed haltere in a genetically modified fruit fly model (right). Credit: Instituto de Neurociencias UMH CSIC A team from the Institute for Neurosciences (IN), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) a

Cray versus Raspberry Pi

Please visit the sponsor! Cray versus Raspberry Pi I fondly recall the era when the pinnacle of supercomputing was the Cray 1. Even the shape of this computer was massively different to anything that came before and it was so futuristic that it could have come straight from a scifi movie. While almost all other computers of the 1970s were just a collection of huge rectangular cabinets with blinky lights and perhaps a few tape drives, the Cray 1 looked more like a piece of space-age furnitu

Sperm are very different from all other cells

'There's a huge amount that we don't understand': Why sperm is still so mysterious 20 hours ago Share Save Katherine Latham Share Save How do sperm swim? How do they navigate? What is sperm made of? What does a World War Two codebreaker have to do with it all? The BBC untangles why we know so little about this mysterious cell. With every heartbeat, a man can produce around 1,000 sperm – and during intercourse, more than 50 million of the intrepid swimmers set out to fertilise an egg. Only a f

Infineon security microcontroller flaw enabled extraction of TPM secret keys

A few months ago, security researcher Thomas Roche presented his fundamental research on secure elements used in the YubiKey 5. The security element is the Infineon SLE78, which contains a proprietary implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). Using side-channel attacks and a great deal of smart research, the author discovered a vulnerability in Infineon Technologies' cryptographic library and, as a result, was able to extract the ECDSA secret key from the secure

Fixing the mechanics of my bullet chess

I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0). Well, I may have just fixed that. I changed how I move pieces this afternoon and have gained about 100 ELO already. When I play on a computer, I usually drag-and-drop pieces. But it turns out you can also move pieces by clicking first on your piece and then the target square. An analysis of my recent games indicates this shift saved me abou

Have a damaged painting? Restore it in just hours with an AI-generated "mask"

The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting. Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, Alex

AMD's AI Future Is Rack Scale 'Helios'

Only have a minute? Here are our key takeaways. 🚀 New MI355X GPU: 2x AI FLOPs, more HBM, 40% better tokens/$ than NVIDIA. 🧠 Software Wins: ROCm 7 with big performance boosts and day-0 support. 🖧 Rack-Scale Wins: New turnkey solutions using AMD CPU + GPU + Network. 📈 Roadmap Wins: Next-Gen in 2026 with 4x performance, HBM4 and scale. 🌱 Efficiency Wins: Roadmap to 20× rack-scale energy efficiency by 2030. Thanks for reading More Than Moore! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share

British Comedy Caper Deep Cover is the Perfect Film to Kick Off Cozy-Crime Summer

You can't move for hit British crime shows right now. Whether it's Dept. Q or Adolescence on Netflix; MobLand on Paramount Plus; or Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus (even if that one's technically more of a spy show), gritty and binge-worthy content is showing up on the best streaming services, all delivered in a vibrant array of British accents. Deep Cover feels like a real crowd-pleaser. Peter Mountain/Metronome Film But a shift is happening. We're about to enter cozy-crime summer, when the genr

Tanks, guns and face-painting

Of all the jarring things I’ve witnessed on the National Mall, nothing will beat the image of the first thing I saw after I cleared security at the Army festival: a child, sitting at the controls of an M119A3 Howitzer, being instructed by a soldier on how to aim it, as his red-hatted parents took a photo with the Washington Monument in the background. The primary stated reason for the Grand Military Parade is to celebrate the US Army’s 250th birthday. The second stated reason is to use the even

A shortage of high-voltage power cables could stall the clean energy transition

In a nutshell: As nations set ever more ambitious targets for renewable energy and electrification, the humble high-voltage cable has emerged as a linchpin – and a potential chokepoint – in the race to decarbonize the global economy. A Bloomberg interview with Claes Westerlind, CEO of NKT, a leading cable manufacturer based in Denmark, explains why. A global surge in demand for high-voltage electricity cables is threatening to stall the clean energy revolution, as the world's ability to build n

Scientists Reveal Easy Three-Step Plan to Terraform Mars

Terraforming, the act of radically transforming a planet's climate and environment to make it suitable for human habitation, currently belongs to the realm of science-fiction. But it's possible, at least in theory, and the idea of terraforming our nearest candidate planet for off-world colonization, Mars, has captivated us for generations. But how would we even begin to pull off such a monumental feat of engineering? You can basically boil it down to three simple steps, argue the authors of a r

You’ll Guffaw When You Hear How Much Self-Driving Waymos Cost Compared to Human-Driven Ubers

The whole point of self-driving taxis is, in theory, to save costs on human labor — but Waymo, Google's glitchy robotaxi service, doesn't appear to be any cheaper at all, at least for now. In a report shared with TechCrunch, the ride-hailing data aggregator Obi found that riding with Waymo is pretty much always more expensive than taking a ride with a human-driven Uber or Lyft. For its analysis, Obi analyzed roughly 90,000 records from Uber, Lyft, and Waymo rides between March 25 and April 25

Topics: lyft obi ride uber waymo

McDonald's in Trouble as Ozempic Takes Hold

Image by Getty / Futurism Rx/Medicines Broken ice cream machines aren't the only thing bedeviling stalwart fast food chain McDonald's. Financial services firm Redburn Atlantic put the company's stock in the bear category, coinciding with a slumpy week in which it lost about three percent of its value — because analysts are betting that GLP-1 agonist weight loss drugs like Ozempic are going to disrupt the fast food business model, CBS News reports. The eyebrow-raising conclusion comes as the a

Climate Change Is Ruining Cheese, Scientists and Farmers Warn

Climate change is making everything worse — including apparently threatening the dairy that makes our precious cheese. In interviews with Science News, veterinary researchers and dairy farmers alike warned that changes to the climate that affect cows are impacting not only affects the nutritional value of the cheeses produced from their milk, but also the color, texture, and even taste. Researchers from the Université Clermont Auvergne, which is located in the mountainous Central France region

Topics: cows dairy fed grass milk

Rethinking AI: DeepSeek’s playbook shakes up the high-spend, high-compute paradigm

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more When DeepSeek released its R1 model this January, it wasn’t just another AI announcement. It was a watershed moment that sent shockwaves through the tech industry, forcing industry leaders to reconsider their fundamental approaches to AI development. What makes DeepSeek’s accomplishment remarkable isn’t that the company developed novel ca

Indie App Spotlight: ‘Queue’ makes it easier to keep in touch with everyone in your life

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact. Keeping up with all of the people in your life can be hard. Queue is a simple app that helps you be better at that. It’s like a personal CRM, but for all of the people in your life. Highlights Life can be busy – and sometimes you can forget to keep up with someone, or multiple people. Queue aims to sol

Apple is reportedly redesigning the MacBook Pro next year, here’s what we’re expecting

Rumors strongly suggest that Apple will be overhauling the MacBook Pro in 2026, marking five years since the previous redesign that we know and love today. There are three key rumors to follow with this redesigned MacBook Pro, and we’ll be delving into them here. OLED display After debuting in the iPad Pro in 2024, Apple is expected to introduce OLED display technology to the MacBook Pro for the very first time with the redesign in 2026. This’ll provide higher brightness, better contrast ratio

Topics: apple m6 macbook oled pro

A native PS3 emulator for Android is available on the Play Store

We're another step closer to getting PlayStation 3 games to run smoothly on an Android smartphone. A little-known developer has released aPS3e, a PS3 emulator that can natively run on Android, onto the Google Play Store. Independent developers have been creating ways to emulate our favorite nostalgic hits on PS3, but offering a direct way to do it on an Android device is a major step in the emulation world. Before you dive in, it's worth noting that aPS3e suffers the same issues as other emulat

What to read this weekend: Vampires and more vampires

I was pretty late in getting to this one, as it's been on my list for a good while now, but I really can't think of a better time to have finally picked up this retelling of the original sapphic vampire story, Carmilla, than during Pride Month. And what a treat it is. Hungerstone is a gothic novel that follows Lenore, a woman who has been uprooted from London and moved to the British moorlands by her husband, Henry, to fulfill his career ambitions. Henry is… not the best, and Lenore could defini

Windows 11 users want these five features back

When Windows 11 was first released, many long-time users felt features they loved had been taken away overnight. Three and a half years later, the same complaints still rise to the top of the Feedback Hub with tens of thousands of votes. Below are the five most wanted Windows 11 features on the Microsoft Feedback Hub. The most wanted requests in Windows 11 "Bring back the ability to move the taskbar to the top and sides of the screen on Windows 11" Right now, the taskbar is glued to the bot