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‘Peacemaker’ Returns, and Wastes No Time Retconning the New DC Universe

With Superman in the books, the time has finally come to see how DC Studios’ rebooted universe will continue with the second season of James Gunn’s John Cena-led TV series, Peacemaker. Even before the show’s release, Peacemaker existed in a unique transitional phase between the old and new DC Universes, leading fans to wonder which elements would carry over and which would be left behind. The answer to that, as gleaned from trailers and the occasional Gunn interview about its premiere being not

Apple TV+ subscription price increasing to $12.99 per month from today

Apple today announced that the monthly price of Apple TV+ is rising in the United States and some international markets. From today, the monthly subscription will cost $12.99, up from $9.99. Existing subscribers will see the price change 30 days after the next renewal date. The pricing for yearly TV+ subscriptions and the Apple One services bundle remains unchanged. In a statement, Apple said that Apple TV+ has expanded its deep library of originals since launch, and that Apple One is the “the

Here’s What Muppet Mayhem Disney Will Unleash on Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster

The closing of Muppet*Vision 3D in Hollywood Studios was not enough to break the rainbow connection between the Jim Henson Company’s iconic Muppets and Walt Disney World. There are now more details about their new place of residence, the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, in the same park within the multi-resort Disney destination. The reimagining of the former Aerosmith classic rock-themed coaster is currently underway, and Disney Experiences has shared just how the Muppets will come into play. In the r

You Can't Trust Your Car's Driving Assistance System Yet, AAA Report Finds

Active driving assistance systems seem like a convenient way to get from point A to point B. But you can't fully trust them yet, according to the American Automobile Association's latest study released Thursday. AAA's automotive engineers put five cars with Active Driving Assistance systems to the test. The systems, also known as Traffic Jam Assistance, were used to navigate heavy traffic. The study found a dangerous datapoint: "notable events" (like people cutting into your lane) where the ADA

'Peacemaker' Season 2: Steve Agee Teases 'Superman' Connection and 'Less Terrifying' Dance Number

Season 2 of Peacemaker, the first original TV series under the new DCU banner, is nearly here. It's been three-and-a-half years of waiting, and the new episode run kicks off on Thursday on HBO Max. I hope you're excited, because I sure am. The first season gave John Cena's helmet-wearing villain (previously seen in James Gunn's The Suicide Squad) the spotlight and, in turn, we watched Peacemaker -- also known as Chris Smith -- as he struggled with the bad decisions and abusive demons of his pas

Google’s mysterious new smart speaker could offer spatial surround sound

Google TL;DR The mysterious smart speaker that appeared during Made by Google is a real, unannounced device. The speaker is said to come with Gemini installed. Users will reportedly be able to pair it with a Google TV Streamer. If you watched yesterday’s Made by Google event and thought you saw an unfamiliar piece of hardware, you weren’t imagining things. A device that looks like a mix between an Apple HomePod Mini and an Amazon Echo Dot briefly appeared in the stream. As it turns out, this

Google is selling a version of Gemini for government agencies

Google has announced plans to sell a custom version of its Gemini AI models for government agencies. "Gemini for Government" includes access to existing tools like NotebookLM, and "Google-quality enterprise search, video and image generation capabilities." The AI platform is in direct competition with similar offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. A big focus of Google's pitch for Gemini for Government is the idea of automating administrative tasks with AI agents. The company touts pre-built

Use Google Home? Gemini will be your new assistant soon - what we know so far

Maria Diaz/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Gemini is replacing Google Assistant in Google Home. The new, more personalized assistant supports natural conversations and maintains context. Early access for Gemini at Home starts in October. Get more in-depth ZDNET AI coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Amid the launch news of Made by Google phones and other devices, Google is also upgrading its Assistant for smart home users. Gemini for Home will replace

Elon Musk’s X may finally settle $500M severance lawsuit

More than two years after leaving the company, some former Twitter employees may finally receive their severance pay. Elon Musk’s X is tentatively settling a class action lawsuit filed by workers who were let go soon after he purchased Twitter. This news comes in the form of a court filing where both parties asked the court to delay an upcoming hearing so that they could work out a deal. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk laid off over 6,000 Twitter employees, reducing the company’s headcount

Feds investigate Tesla over inaccurate autopilot and FSD crash reports

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just announced an investigation into Tesla regarding its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems, according to a report by Electrek. The road safety regulator says the probe involves inconsistencies with how the company reports crashes regarding the aforementioned systems. The NHTSA requires automakers to report crashes involving autonomous and driver assistance systems within five days of being notified of them. The agency claims

Show HN: Tool shows UK properties matching group commute/time preferences

Introducing Our New App! We’re excited to introduce an app that helps you find the perfect places to live based on your personal needs. Here’s what you can do right now: Find the Perfect Property for You and Your Housemates Our app lets you instantly find properties that match your and your housemates' budgets, desired travel times, and work locations. No more endless searching—just the homes that fit your lifestyle. Key Features

My other email client is a daemon

I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely loose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. Thankfully The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything and there’s a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon! If compiled with -DMAIL and OPTIONS=mail is set in your runtime configuration (the default on Linux), NetHack will periodically check a user specified mbox file ( MAIL ) for new mail, and upon receivin

Neolithic people took gruesome trophies from invading tribes

A local Neolithic community in northeastern France may have clashed with foreign invaders, cutting off limbs as war trophies and otherwise brutalizing their prisoners of war, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The findings challenge conventional interpretations of prehistoric violence as bring indiscriminate or committed for pragmatic reasons. Neolithic Europe was no stranger to collective violence of many forms, such as the odd execution and massacres of small

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is coming to PS5 on November 20

We learned in July that Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl would come to PlayStation later this year. On Thursday, developer GSC Gameworld gave us a specific release date: November 20. That's exactly a year after its PC and Xbox launch. The PS5 version will support adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, gyro aiming and more. Meanwhile, PS5 Pro users will see upgraded resolution, shadows and reflections (among other enhancements). The game will be available in a $60 standard edition, an $80 deluxe one a

Ozempic Maker Novo Nordisk Freezes Hiring Amid Ongoing Struggles

No one stays on top forever. It’s a lesson that Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk may be painfully learning about. The Danish pharmaceutical company has enacted a hiring freeze—the latest sign of a sinking financial outlook for the once-titan of the obesity treatment world. Reuters reported on the hiring freeze Wednesday. The company has faced numerous setbacks in recent months, including billions shaved off its stock market value and continued competition from cheaper, compounded versions of its bloc

Sixteen bottles of wine riddle

Imagine the typical everyday scenario in which you have been imprisoned in the wine cellar of an evil combinatorialist. She promises to let you go, but only if you can solve her riddle. “Is it the one where there are 1000 barrels of wine and one of them is poisoned?” “Uh, maybe? Do you already know the answer to that one?” “…” You’re lead past a conspicuous amount of barrels and into a new room where you’re given a bottle of wine and four measuring devices. The combinatorialist explains that t

The Open-Office Trap (2014)

In 1973, my high school, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural trends of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one of its wings didn’t have doors. The rooms opened up directly onto the hallway, and tidbits about the French Revolution, say, or Benjamin Franklin’s breakfast, would drift from one classroom to another. Distracting at best and frustrating at worst, wide-open classrooms went, for the m

Google Gemini Has Conquered Nest Devices. Will It Fix Voice Assistant Woes?

After months of teasers and brief betas, Google has made it official: Gemini AI is replacing Google Assistant on all Nest and Google Home-related devices this year, officially called Gemini for Home. This version of Gemini starts rolling out in October with the same familiar "Hey Google" phrase but a whole new approach to voice commands. It's not only the death knell for Google Assistant in basically everything (I'm going to have to delete Assistant from the rest of my guides), but also a chanc

One of the most annoying things about the X app has been fixed – for now

The most annoying thing about X is, well, X – but the company has at least fixed an app behavior many of us found frustrating. Just 18 years after users started complaining about it, X’s head of product said that a fix is now rolling out … That irritation? You’ve just started reading something at the top of your feed, and then the feed spontaneously reloads and it is lost forever. Entrepreneur and investor Jesse Pujji repeated the complaint a few days ago, and product lead Nikita Bier says it

Google Gemini Is Finally Conquering Nest Devices -- Will It Fix Voice Assistant Woes?

After months of teasers and brief betas, Google has made it official: Gemini AI is replacing Google Assistant on all Nest and Google Home-related devices this year, officially called Gemini for Home. This version of Gemini starts rolling out in October with the same familiar "Hey Google" phrase but a whole new approach to voice commands. It's not only the death knell for Google Assistant in basically everything (I'm going to have to delete Assistant from the rest of my guides), but also a chanc

Microsoft employee arrested at headquarters while protesting Israel contracts

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. A Microsoft employee has been arrested as part of protests at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington this week. On Tuesday, a group of current and former Microsoft employees, as well as community members, took over a plaza at Microsoft’s headquarters to protest against the compan

Netflix signs up another YouTube star with Mark Rober deal

Netflix signs up another YouTube star with Mark Rober deal 35 minutes ago Share Save Annabel Rackham Culture reporter Share Save Getty Images Many of Mark Rober's videos have more than 100 million views on YouTube Former Nasa engineer Mark Rober has become the latest YouTube star to get his own Netflix deal. The 45-year-old has more than 70 million subscribers on YouTube and is known for his videos about science and technology. Rober has created a new competition series for the streamer, whic

On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop

Supported by Kutkov’s technical expertise and Stepanets’s organizational prowess, Kovalskyy’s warehouse became the major repair hub (though other volunteers also make repairs elsewhere). Over time, Kovalskyy—who co-owned a regional internet service provider before the war—and his crew have learned to perform adjustments to Starlink terminals, especially to adapt them for battlefield conditions. For example, they modified them to receive charge at the right voltage directly from vehicles, years b

Why recycling isn’t enough to address the plastic problem

And looking into the future, emissions from plastics are only set to grow. Another estimate, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, projects that emissions from plastics could swell from about 2 billion metric tons to 4 billion metric tons by 2060. This chart is what really strikes me and makes the conclusion of the plastic treaty talks such a disappointment. Recycling is a great tool, and new methods could make it possible to recycle more plastics and make it easier

The Open-Office Trap

In 1973, my high school, Acton-Boxborough Regional, in Acton, Massachusetts, moved to a sprawling brick building at the foot of a hill. Inspired by architectural trends of the preceding decade, the classrooms in one of its wings didn’t have doors. The rooms opened up directly onto the hallway, and tidbits about the French Revolution, say, or Benjamin Franklin’s breakfast, would drift from one classroom to another. Distracting at best and frustrating at worst, wide-open classrooms went, for the m

Sixteen Bottles of Wine Riddle

Imagine the typical everyday scenario in which you have been imprisoned in the wine cellar of an evil combinatorialist. She promises to let you go, but only if you can solve her riddle. “Is it the one where there are 1000 barrels of wine and one of them is poisoned?” “Uh, maybe? Do you already know the answer to that one?” “…” You’re lead past a conspicuous amount of barrels and into a new room where you’re given a bottle of wine and four measuring devices. The combinatorialist explains that t

Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)

DiffMem: Git-Based Differential Memory for AI Agents DiffMem is a lightweight, git-based memory backend designed for AI agents and conversational systems. It uses Markdown files for human-readable storage, Git for tracking temporal evolution through differentials, and an in-memory BM25 index for fast, explainable retrieval. This project is a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploring how version control systems can serve as a foundation for efficient, scalable memory in AI applications. At its core, Dif

Humans intervened every 9 minutes in AAA test of driver assists

Advanced driver assistance systems—also known as ADAS—come in a few variations. Blind spot monitoring, collision warnings, and emergency braking act like a second pair of eyes and ears, monitoring the car's environment to warn the driver, or possibly intervene, if a crash looks imminent. Other systems are better thought of as convenience features—things like adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, which relieve some of the burden of driving. Among the newer of these is the traffic jam assist.

OpenAI says GPT-6 is coming and it'll be better than GPT-5 (obviously)

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman told reporters that GPT-6 is already in the works, and it’ll not take as long as GPT-5. The GPT-6 announcement doesn't surprise me because OpenAI is slowly becoming a product-first company rather than research-focused. There's no denying that OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman overhyped GPT-5 and underdelivered. While GPT-5 isn't exactly bad and actually offers significant improvements over GPT-4 or o3 for coding, the rollout wasn't smooth and some people were expecting more than

Parallel Reduce and Scan on the GPU

Parallel reduce and scan on the GPU Introduction GPUs are formidable parallel machines, capable of running thousands of threads simultaniously. They are excellent for embarassily parallel algorithms, but are quite different than the ones on the CPU due to the way GPUs work. You can’t just build and run an application. You need to interact with the GPU driver via one of several APIs available (CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL, etc), manage the device memory, organize the transfers between