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Apple TV+ might have just beaten HBO at its own game

During its nearly six years on the market, Apple TV+ has been referred to by some as “the new HBO.” But this year might be when Apple has truly started to prove that claim. Here’s why. Emmy nominations show Apple TV+ ahead in quality, while HBO boasts higher quantity Whatever your opinion of Apple TV+, it’s hard to dispute that 2025 has been an especially good year for the streamer. Apple TV+ has achieved new levels of both mainstream awareness and critical success. It’s putting out consisten

Major Rule About Cooking Meat Turns Out to Be Wrong

Contrary to common belief, resting meat isn’t really about retaining juices, but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Instead, it’s best understood as a temperature-control method for managing carryover cooking. To use it effectively, though, you have to completely rethink how the technique works and how to apply it. Is dark matter real? How do consciousness and memory actually work? And is it really necessary to rest your meat after cooking? These are the big, unresolved questions that keep scien

Spotify Takes Down Fake AI Song Credited to Famous Country Singer Who's Been Dead for Years

Country music fans may know Blaze Foley from his outlaw country Austin shows in the '80s, but they wouldn't recognize the track, "Together," that mysteriously appeared under Foley's Spotify profile a few days ago. That's because it's an AI-generated song uploaded by Syntax Error, and the sign of a growing problem in music apps. AI can easily create songs and imitate certain styles, but in addition to copyright issues, that creates legal problems when AI pretends to be an existing artist. It's n

I Tried T-Mobile's New Satellite Service for Texting in Dead Zones. Here's How It's Different

If you've traveled to remote areas where cellular coverage doesn't reach, you know that anxious feeling when your communications slam to a halt. T-Mobile's new $10 a month Starlink-based satellite texting service, T-Satellite, which went live today, takes a different approach from other satellite services to provide mobile access even within the half a million square miles of wireless dead zones in the US. To test it out, I drove nearly three hours from Seattle until my phone bars abandoned me,

Ukrainians arrest alleged admin of major crime forum XSS

Yesterday, Ukrainian authorities arrested the suspected administrator of a notorious Russian-language crime forum, XSS.is. In an X post, the Paris Prosecutor's Office announced that Ukrainian authorities detained the suspect after an investigation conducted with French authorities' and Europol's help that began almost exactly four years ago. XSS has been "one of the main hubs of global cybercrime" since 2013, French authorities said, allowing "the sale of malware, access to compromised systems

AI video is invading YouTube Shorts and Google Photos starting today

Google is following through on recent promises to add more generative AI features to its photo and video products. Over on YouTube, Google is rolling out the first wave of generative AI video for YouTube Shorts, but even if you're not a YouTuber, you'll be exposed to more AI videos soon. Google Photos, which is integrated with virtually every Android phone on the market, is also getting AI video-generation capabilities. In both cases, the features are currently based on the older Veo 2 model, no

Trump unveils his plan to put AI in everything

is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform. Ensuring AI reflects “objective truth,” slashing onerous regulations, disseminating US AI tools around the world, and fast-tracking AI infrastructure: this is all part of President Donald Trump’s vision for AI policy. The White House unveiled its “AI Action Plan” Wednesday ahead o

Apple TV+ just confirmed a new season for its latest hit comedy

Apple TV+ is having its biggest year ever. While Severance is the undisputed highlight, comedies on the streamer have been on a hot streak too. And the latest hit comedy, Stick, just got an official season 2 renewal. Stick lands season 2 renewal at Apple TV+ You don’t have to be a sports fan, or care at all about golf, to root for Owen Wilson’s Pryce Cahill. Cahill is the title character in comedy Stick, which has often topped Apple TV+ viewership charts throughout its first season run. Stic

Topics: apple hit season stick tv

Hyperpb: 10x faster dynamic Protobuf parsing that's faster than generated code

Today we’re announcing public availability of hyperpb, a fully-dynamic Protobuf parser that is 10x faster than dynamicpb, the standard Go solution for dynamic Protobuf. In fact, it’s so efficient that it’s 3x faster than parsing with generated code! It also matches or beats vtprotobuf’s generated code at almost every benchmark, without skimping on correctness. Don’t believe us? We think our parsing benchmarks speak for themselves. Here, we show two benchmark variants for hyperpb: out-of-the-bo

Trump Releases His All-American Action Plan for AI

Donald Trump on Wednesday revealed “America’s AI Action Plan,” a collection of more than 90 policy recommendations designed to ensure that the country remains competitive when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence, some of which would loosen regulations around the development of data centers and encourage rapid adoption of the technology across different sectors. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” David Sacks, the White House AI czar, said during a call with reporters. “We want t

Trump’s AI Action Plan aims to block chip exports to China but lacks key details

The Trump administration wants its AI technology to be considered an industry leader both on home soil and abroad. But it also doesn’t want the U.S.’s AI prowess to empower or embolden a foreign adversary. That’s quite the balance to strike. If President Trump’s AI Action Plan, which was released on Wednesday, is any indicator, the administration seems to still be figuring out the right course of action to achieve those goals. “​​America currently is the global leader on data center construct

"McDonald’s for Teeth": Private Equity is Destroying Our Teeth, Dental Professionals Warn

Image by Getty / Futurism As most of us in the United States are well aware, the US healthcare system is a nightmarish labyrinth of profit-seeking middlemen, kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy, and insurance-inflated costs. Adding to the noxious mix is the lucrative field of private equity — a financial industry that earns its dough by buying private companies and selling their assets piecemeal, kind of like a junk dealer. Research has shown that when private equity gets involved in healthcare,

Proton launches privacy-respecting encrypted AI assistant Lumo

Proton has launched a new tool called Lumo, offering a privacy-first AI assistant that does not log user conversations and doesn't use their prompts for training. Proton is a Swiss company behind proven privacy and security tools and services, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Drive. In June 2024, it transitioned to a non-profit structure, putting user privacy over profits. The introduction of Lumo aligns with this mission, as Proton claims this AI tool is designed to provide help

FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable visual understanding alongside textual inputs. They are typically built by passing visual tokens from a pretrained vision encoder to a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM) through a projection layer. By leveraging the rich visual representations of the vision encoder and the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the LLM, VLMs can be useful for a wide range of applications, including accessibility assistants, UI navigation, robotics, and gaming. VLM

Boost HTML5 Game Performance with WebAssembly

Who this article is for: Game developers looking to improve the performance of their HTML5 games Technical leads and engineers interested in integrating WebAssembly into their projects Students or professionals learning about web technologies and game development HTML5 game development has transformed web gaming, but it’s the integration of WebAssembly that’s truly revolutionizing performance capabilities. When players experience stuttering frame rates or input lag in browser games, they don’

Cara – High Precision Robot Dog Using Rope

Finding the Exact 8:1 Gear Ratio The starting point of this project was figuring out how to achieve an exact 8:1 gear ratio with the capstan drives. In my capstan drive video, I designed all the drives to have an 8:1 gear ratio—but when measured, none of them actually did. The commenters on that video pretty accurately diagnosed my mistake. I had made the outer diameter of the big drum 8 times larger than the outer diameter of the small drum, but this doesn't account for the diameter of the rop

I Set Up a VPN on My Roku to Stream Geo-Restricted Shows and Movies. Here's How You Can Too

Watching movies and shows from your favorite streaming services is easy with a streaming device or smart TV. These devices can give you access to thousands of live and on-demand streaming options with the push of a button or even a voice command. If you set up a VPN on your smart TV or streaming device, you can unlock a world of streaming options far beyond what would normally be available in your location. With a VPN, streaming services can register your internet connection as originating in a

UK targets Apple’s and Google’s mobile platforms for regulation

In Brief The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Wednesday a proposal that would give Apple’s and Google’s mobile platforms “strategic market status” — a designation that allows the regulator to create rules that could change how their app stores operate and how their mobile software works. The move is designed to create a more open, competitive environment for the app economy and user choice. However, Apple and Google have pushed back at the proposals, with Apple sayin

Open source X rival Mastodon begins raising funds with new in-app donation feature

Open source X and Threads competitor Mastodon will begin experimenting with a new way to raise funds: in-app donations. The organization on Wednesday announced it’s launching a campaign that introduces banners inside its Android and iOS apps, prompting users to make a monetary donation. Initially, the feature will be shown only to those on the Mastodon servers the nonprofit itself operates, Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online. These banners will be easy to dismiss, Mastodon says, and will only

CarPlay and AirPods work better than ever together in iOS 26, here’s how

For the longest time, one of AirPods’ best features has been absent when in the car. But in iOS 26, Apple is making AirPods and CarPlay work better together than ever. Here’s how. AirPods automatic switching supports CarPlay in iOS 26 Automatic switching is one of those ‘magic moment’ features that can make the Apple ecosystem so appealing. Essentially, the AirPods feature detects which Apple product you’re using at any given moment, and switches your AirPods to connect to that active device.

Microsoft's big AI update for Windows 11 is here - what's new

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Windows 11 users will find a host of new features awaiting them with a major update now being rolled out by Microsoft. Launched on Tuesday specifically for Windows 11 24H2, the optional update known as KB5062660 carries with it a cavalcade of AI-powered skills along with general enhancements and bug fixes galore. In a Tuesday blog post, Microsoft touted all the new AI tools and tricks in the update. For better or worse, most of these are geared toward Copilot+ PCs, so if y

Optimizations That Aren't

Optimizations that aren't We all like it when our code is fast. Some of us like the result, but dislike the process of optimization; others enjoy the process. However, optimization for the sake of optimization is wrong, unless you’re doing it in your pet project. Optimized code is sometimes less readable and, consequently, harder to understand and modify; because of that, optimization often introduces subtle bugs. Since optimization is not a process with only positive effects, in production it

The ‘Booster Gold’ Show Finally Shows Some Progress

It’s easy to forget, but part of DC Studios’ initial slate reveal included a TV show for one Booster Gold. There’s been nothing about it since then, but now we know who’ll be spearheading the show-to-be. Per Deadline, Our Flag Means Death creator David Jenkins has signed on to write the series’ pilot. If it gets the green light, he’ll also run the show, which centers on Michael “Booster” Carter, a fame-seeking superhero from the 25th century who comes to the present day to build up his superher

Topics: action booster dc gets tv

Trump’s AI strategy trades guardrails for growth in race against China

The Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI Action Plan on Wednesday, a document that takes a sharp shift away from former President Biden’s cautious approach to addressing the risks of AI, and instead barrels ahead with plans to build out AI infrastructure, cut red tape for tech companies, shore up national security, and compete with China. The downstream effects of this shift will likely ripple throughout various industries and may even be felt by the average American consumer.

Google DeepMind’s new AI can help historians understand ancient Latin inscriptions

To do this, Aeneas takes in partial transcriptions of an inscription alongside a scanned image of it. Using these, it gives possible dates and places of origins for the engraving, along with potential fill-ins for any missing text. For example, a slab damaged at the start and continuing with ... us populusque Romanus would likely prompt Aeneas to guess that Senat comes before us to create the phrase Senatus populusque Romanus, “The Senate and the people of Rome.” This is similar to how Ithaca w

Herringbone Tiles

Herringbone Tiles Sean Barrett Silver Spaceship Software In this paper I'll describe a method for expanding on the technique of Wang Tiles for generating large 2D regions from smaller ones. I call the technique "Herringbone Wang Tiles" or just "Herringbone Tiles". It is also of particular relevance to the map system used in Infamous by Sucker Punch. For an unreleased indie CRPG I worked on in 2010, I used an extremely simple method of dungeon map generation. It involves assembling a large

Reverse Engineering the GHA Cache to Improve Performance

This article walks you through how to use Depot's API within your own code to set up projects and run your Docker builds as a service on Depot's infrastructure. We recently announced our new product, Depot-hosted GitHub Actions runners. Our runners bring an extra improvement in cache speed that's no longer limited to our accelerated Docker builds. We're excited to be bringing faster caching to all kinds of GitHub Actions workloads. As we were building our runners, we learned a lot about the un

What to Expect from Debian/Trixie

Debian v13 with codename trixie is scheduled to be published as new stable release on 9th of August 2025. I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for the upcoming stable release (my efforts for trixie started in August 2024). On the one hand, to make sure packages we care about are available and actually make it into the release. On the other hand, to ensure there are no severe issues that make it into the release and to get proper and working upgrades. So far eve

Trip to moon required Apollo 11 crew to sign US Customs declaration to enter US

by Barbara Blum If you have ever traveled overseas, then returned to the U.S., you likely filled out a “customs declaration” form on the airplane: “Are you bringing with you: plants, food, animals, soil, disease agents, cell cultures or snails? Declare all articles that you have acquired and are bringing into the United States.” Who would have guessed the regulations would have been enforced so rigorously in 1969 when three men returned to the U.S. from a rather long business trip – to

Physicists Blow Up Gold With Giant Lasers, Accidentally Disprove Renowned Physics Model

Scientists equipped with giant lasers have blown up gold at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, heating it to 14 times its boiling point. For a chilling second, they thought they broke physics, but they fortunately did no such thing. That said, they broke something else: a decades-long model in physical chemistry having to do with the fundamental properties of matter. In an experiment presented today in Nature, researchers, for the first time ever, demonstrated a way to directly measure the t