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Runway is going to let people generate video games with AI

So far, Runway is known for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming industry. This week, I was granted access to a new interactive gaming experience that Runway plans to make available to everyone as soon as next week, according to CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The consumer-facing product is currently quite barebones, with a chat interface that supports only text and image generation, but Valenzuela says that generated video games are com

The 1975 at Glastonbury 2024: Livestream Their Headline Festival Set From Anywhere for Free

After a nine-year absence from Worthy Farm, The 1975 are back at Glastonbury, with the band this time playing a prestigious headline set on the festival's Pyramid main stage. Below, we'll outline which live TV streaming service will be streaming this headline act at Glastonbury, wherever you are in the world. We'll also explain how to use a VPN if you're outside of the UK. Led by provocative frontman Matty Healy, The 1975 last played the event as an early act on the festival's Other Stage back

'Peak flower power era': The story of first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970

'It was the peak of the flower power era': The story of the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970 4 days ago Share Save Myles Burke Share Save Alamy Almost 55 years ago, Michael Eavis hosted the first of his legendary music festivals. In 1970, the BBC visited his Somerset dairy farm to find out what made it unique. "I think this is the quickest way of clearing my overdraft," said Michael Eavis on 18 September 1970 when he was asked on the BBC why he had booked glam rocker Marc Bolan to per

Tovala Meal Kit and Oven Review (2025): We’re Nearing Robot Chef

Tovala is the only meal kit I know of that comes with its own oven—and I speak as someone who has tested a lot of meal kits and also ovens. Still, the idea isn't merely wacky. The biggest pitfall of preprepared meal delivery is almost always the microwave, as I noted in my review of HelloFresh's often delicious but sometimes soggy Factor meals. These almost always benefited from an improvised turn in the air fryer. And so the brainstorm on Tovala is both sophisticated and simple. Make mostly pr

Facing Rising Seas, Thousands in Tuvalu Seek an Escape Through Australia

As rising sea levels gradually swallow the world’s low-lying island nations, many citizens will have no choice but to leave their homes behind. In Tuvalu, one of the world’s most climate-threatened archipelagos, the migration has already begun. Nearly a third of Tuvalu’s roughly 11,000 residents are seeking Australian visas to escape the encroaching waters. In 2023, Australia announced that it would launch these visas as part of a bilateral treaty it signed with Tuvalu—the world’s first to crea

Muvera: Making multi-vector retrieval as fast as single-vector search

Neural embedding models have become a cornerstone of modern information retrieval (IR). Given a query from a user (e.g., “How tall is Mt Everest?”), the goal of IR is to find information relevant to the query from a very large collection of data (e.g., the billions of documents, images, or videos on the Web). Embedding models transform each datapoint into a single-vector “embedding”, such that semantically similar datapoints are transformed into mathematically similar vectors. The embeddings are

Tovala Meal Kit and Oven Review (2025): We're Nearing Robot Chef

Tovala is the only meal kit I know of that comes with its own oven—and I speak as someone who has tested a lot of meal kits and also ovens. Still, the idea isn't merely wacky. The biggest pitfall of pre-prepared meal delivery is almost always the microwave, as I noted in my review of HelloFresh's often delicious but sometimes soggy Factor meals. These almost always benefited from an improvised turn in the air fryer. And so the brainstorm on Tovala is both sophisticated and simple. Make mostly p

Team Fortress 2 is getting another major update with a little help from the community

In a nutshell: Valve has announced a pending update for Team Fortress 2, the popular team-based multiplayer first-person shooter originally released in 2007 for Windows and Xbox. The long-awaited update focuses on the game's Mann vs. Machine PvE mode and will include new community-created content. It's set to roll out before Halloween. Valve is inviting the community to submit Mann vs. Machine maps and missions by August 27 for potential inclusion in the update. The company clarified that, desp

Team Fortress 2 is getting a major update after 8 years, with a little help from the community

In a nutshell: Valve has announced a pending update for Team Fortress 2, the popular team-based multiplayer first-person shooter originally released in 2007 for Windows and Xbox. The long-awaited update focuses on the game's Mann vs. Machine PvE mode and will include new community-created content. It's set to roll out before Halloween. Valve is inviting the community to submit Mann vs. Machine maps and missions by August 27 for potential inclusion in the update. The company clarified that, desp

The Final ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Trailer Ups the Stakes Even Further

We’re a month away from the arrival of the next Marvel movie in Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Marvel is reminding us in style with a brand new trailer—one that really wants you to feel the stakes that are riding on this movie, in more ways than one. Prior looks at First Steps leaned into the Silver Age retro-kitsch of its world, and then the arrival of Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer to herald the threat of the dread, Galactus. But now this final big trailer for the film really wants to remind

Incogni vs. DeleteMe: Which service removes your personal data best?

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Data removal services began to appear around 15 years ago, after data brokers realized that data could become a new, valuable currency -- and one ripe for exploitation, given the lack of laws and little to no consumer data privacy protection written into legislation. Incogni and DeleteMe, founded in 2021 as part of VPN provider Surfshark and in 2010 by Abine Privacy, respectively, are two of the most widely-known data removal services in the US. Both companies offer data remov

Netflix is pulling the plug on 21 indie games, including Hades and Katana ZERO

Have you been working your way through Hades on mobile via Netflix? You’d better hurry up, before it’s too late. As first spotted by Engadget and confirmed by Netflix, 21 high-profile indie games are being removed from the service starting next month. See the full list below. Netflix seems to be rethinking its game strategy once again. After a streak of splashy acquisitions, the company shut down Blue, its internal AAA studio last year, releasing zero games in total. Now, its focus appears to

PyTorch Reshaping with None

PyTorch Reshaping with None Currently I am learning attention mechanism from Dive into Deep Learning book. In the book I see following implementation in masked softmax: def sequence_mask (X, valid_len, value = - 1e6 ): """ X is 2D array (number_of_points, maxlen), valid_len is 1D array (number_of_points)""" max_len = X . size( 1 ) mask = torch . arange(max_len, dtype = torch . float32, device = X . device)[ None , :] < valid_len[:, None ] X[ ~ mask] = value return X In sequential data process

Netflix is removing over 20 games, including Hades and Monument Valley

It's the latest sign of trouble for gaming on the streamer. Netflix's games arm is struggling. The streamer is removing over 20 games from its library, including popular titles like Hades and all three Monument Valley games. It follows the closure of Netflix's AAA gaming studio in October. The games will leave Netflix in July, so there's not much time left to play them. Here are all the titles dropping off of the streamer: Battleship Braid, Anniversary Edition Carmen Sandiego CoComelon: Pl

What tech titans Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates talked about in their first meeting

Microsoft/Mark Russinovich Boy, do I wish I had been at this dinner. For decades, Microsoft and Linux fought like cats and dogs. However, while the conflict has cooled down, and Microsoft loves Linux these days, the two leaders, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Linux creator Linus Torvalds, had never met… until now. Also: Your jump from Windows 10 to Linux gets easier with KDE Plasma 6.4 Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, decided it would be neat if he could somehow get the pair and Dave

Curated realities: An AI film festival and the future of human expression

Last week, I attended a film festival dedicated to shorts made using generative AI. Dubbed AIFF 2025, it was an event precariously balancing between two different worlds. The festival was hosted by Runway, a company that produces models and tools for generating images and videos. In panels and press briefings, a curated list of industry professionals made the case for Hollywood to embrace AI tools. In private meetings with industry professionals, I gained a strong sense that there is already a

I Solved a 7-Day Calculation Problem in a Weekend

How I Solved a 7-Day Calculation Problem in a weekend Jithin Sankar Follow 3 min read · 3 days ago 3 days ago -- Listen Share In a previous project, my team was building a SaaS application. The scenario was this: we had a slider for setting a price, from $0.00 to $10.00. When you moved the slider, the app would show you the projected sales for that price. The slider input was combined with two other attributes, Region and SKU name. The problem was performance. Each time the slider moved, it wo

The Steam Deck OLED is back in stock

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. If you’ve been itching to get a handheld, but the Switch 2 isn’t quite up your alley, now you can get your hands on a Steam Deck OLED. As spotted by @Wario64, Valve has started selling the device on its online store again after it was out of stock in the US and Canada for over a week. Earlier this month, Valve cited “recent supply chain constraints

The Newest Alamo Drafthouse Is a World-First Godzilla Cinematic Experience

Alamo Drafthouse is working on a multi-year alliance with Toho that will bring with it new merch and special Godzilla programming—and it’s kicking off today with the opening of a new Drafthouse theater in California that will become the world’s first fully Godzilla-themed cinema. io9 can exclusively reveal the first details about Drafthouse and Toho’s new partnership, which formally kicks off with today’s opening of the Alamo Drafthouse Valley Fair, at Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, Cali

Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time at tech titans' dinner

What just happened? Given that there was a time when Microsoft called Linux a "cancer," it's little surprise that the Redmond firm's co-founder and long-time boss Bill Gates had never met Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. But that changed recently when the two attended a dinner, and it appears to have gone well. Microsoft chief technical officer Mark Russinovich posted evidence of the historic dinner in a LinkedIn post. Dave Cutler, the legendary programmer and lead architect of the

Homotopy Equivalences

Previously: Fibrations and Cofibrations. In topology, we say that two shapes are the same if there is a homeomorphism– an invertible continuous map– between them. Continuity means that nothing is broken and nothing is glued together. This is how we can turn a coffe cup into a torus. A homeomorphism, however, won’t let us shrink a torus to a circle. So if we are only interested in how many holes the shapes have, we have to relax our notion of equivalence. Let’s go back to the definition of home

2025 Alonzo Church Award: Paul Blain Levy for Call-by-Push-Value (CBPV)

The 2025 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation is presented to Paul Blain Levy for his fundamental study of effectful λ-calculi through the Call-by-Push-Value calculus. The awardee book and paper are: Paul Blain Levy. Call-By-Push-Value: A Functional/Imperative Synthesis. Semantics Structures in Computation 2, Springer 2004, ISBN 1-4020-1730-8 Paul Blain Levy. Call-by-Push-Value: Decomposing call-by-value and call-by-name. High.-Order Symb. Comput. 19(4): 3

P-Hacking in Startups

Speed kills rigor. In startups, the pressure to ship fast pushes teams to report anything that looks like an improvement. That’s how p-hacking happens. This piece breaks down three common cases—and how to avoid them. Example 01: Multiple comparisons without correction Imagine you're a product manager trying to optimize your website’s dashboard. Your goal is to increase user signups. Your team designs four different layouts: A, B, C, and D. You run an A/B/n test. Users are randomly assigned to

Topics: 05 95 positive test value

Sound As Pure Form: Music Language Inspired by Supercollider, APL, and Forth

WHAT This program is called: "A tool for exploring sound as pure form." or "sound as pure form" or "sapf" It is an interpreter for a language for creating and transforming sound. The language is mostly functional, stack based and uses postfix notation similar to FORTH. It represents audio and control events using lazy, possibly infinite sequences. It intends to do for lazy sequences what APL does for arrays: provide very high level functions with pervasive automatic mapping, scanning, and reduct

Open source can't coordinate?

Open Source Can’t Coordinate I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday’s problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can’t just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS. And NixOS isn’t a problem — it’s a solution. Linux on desktop is a rickety tower of competing libraries, protocols and standards, which is always in an Escheresque sort of perpetual motion, taking off but simul

College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe

The Pitch Deck. The deck is often the introduction of a venture capitalist to a company, sent after a warm intro. For the athlete, the pitch deck consists of video and some metrics, posted on Twitter (the LinkedIn of college baseball). In both cases, the best story is (naturally) being told: they aren’t dishonest, but they also aren’t going to emphasize flaws or risks. In my experience, pitch decks are important, but not as important as the underlying business; similarly, terrific video of a bul

College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long Maybe

The Pitch Deck. The deck is often the introduction of a venture capitalist to a company, sent after a warm intro. For the athlete, the pitch deck consists of video and some metrics, posted on Twitter (the LinkedIn of college baseball). In both cases, the best story is (naturally) being told: they aren’t dishonest, but they also aren’t going to emphasize flaws or risks. In my experience, pitch decks are important, but not as important as the underlying business; similarly, terrific video of a bul

Open source can't coordinate

Open Source Can’t Coordinate I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday’s problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can’t just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS. And NixOS isn’t a problem — it’s a solution. Linux on desktop is a rickety tower of competing libraries, protocols and standards, which is always in an Escheresque sort of perpetual motion, taking off but simul

Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs

Here’s a problem with local-first software. You want to work on a document together with a friend who lives far away from you. That sounds like local-first’s bread and butter: store the document as a CRDT, then use some sort of sync server to merge updates and relay them between you and your friend. But there’s a catch: the contents of that document are secret. So secret, in fact, that you don’t even want the app developer to know what they are. One way to solve this is end-to-end encryption.

Fintech Ramp's valuation hits $16 billion in deal led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund

Ramp, which offers a financial operations platforms to corporate clients, has raised its valuation to $16 billion in a new fundraising led by long-time investor Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's venture firm. The $200 million round is the fifth that Founders' has led for Ramp and raised its valuation by $3 billion. It last raised money at a $13 billion valuation in March. Founded in 2019, Ramp offers services that cover corporate cards, procurement, bookkeeping, travel booking, and vendor managemen