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Google’s AI model just nailed the forecast for the strongest Atlantic storm this year

In early June, shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Google unveiled a new model designed specifically to forecast the tracks and intensity of tropical cyclones. Part of the Google DeepMind suite of AI-based weather research models, the "Weather Lab" model for cyclones was a bit of an unknown for meteorologists at its launch. In a blog post at the time, Google said its new model, trained on a vast dataset that reconstructed past weather and a specialized database contain

Instagram’s new feature helps college students connect with others on campus

Instagram is introducing a new feature aimed at helping college students connect with people on campus, the company announced on Tuesday. The launch comes a week after TikTok rolled out a nearly identical feature. The new option allows students in the U.S. to add their college or university to their profile banner and browse a list of students at their school. Students will see an ‘Add School’ option on their profile, which they can click to complete a verification process through the student

Waiting for Spotify Hi-Fi? Spotify built Messages instead, because of course they did

TL;DR Spotify is rolling out a new Messages feature that allows users to chat and share content within the app. The feature is available for free and premium users aged 16 and older in select markets. Users can have one-on-one conversations, share Spotify content, and react with text and emojis. Spotify announced its “HiFi” lossless tier in February 2021. While there have been recent signs of progress, the feature still hasn’t launched. If you’ve been holding your breath for Spotify’s lossles

Silent Hill f goes back in time and back to basics

Silent Hill f starts off with a grounded (but still heavy) setup, establishing a miserable family dynamic for protagonist Hinako. With an alcoholic, abusive father, a submissive mother and an absent sister, who’s shown in flashbacks with that classic horror trope, face unseen. Something horrible is about to unfold in the sleepy, remote village of Ebisugaoka, sometime in the early 1960s. The latest entry in the Silent Hill series still has jumpscares, like you’d expect from the horror series, bu

YouTube TV warns subscribers they may lose Fox channels

YouTube TV could soon lose access to Fox channels, it announced on its official blog, mere days before the 2025 NFL season begins. It warned users that it's actively negotiating with Fox now that the renewal date for their partnership is approaching, but Fox is allegedly asking for an amount "far higher than what partners with comparable content offerings receive." YouTube TV says it's aiming to reach an agreement that "reflects the value of their content and is fair for both sides" without the

Spotify introduces an in-app messaging feature

My first thought when I heard Spotify had launched a messaging service was, "Why?" But, after looking into it a bit more, I'm intrigued at the idea of sharing recommendations within the app. So, what is Spotify's new Messages feature? Basically, like Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms, Spotify is creating a way for you to share content and thoughts from within its app. You can send playlists, songs and podcasts without having to use a link on another platform. You can see the M

The physics of parabolic microphones: Frequency dependence of gain (2023)

Introduction Parabolic microphones are known for their extreme sensitivity, and the origin of their acuity isn’t difficult to guess. It is the most obvious thing about them, which can also make them a liability for field use, namely, their considerable size. Just as a large amount of weak light is captured by a telescope’s parabolic mirror and made amenable to viewing with the much smaller human eye, so too are faint sounds harvested with a reflecting dish that far exceeds the dimensions of our

US Intel

Listen to this post: Log in to listen Now that everyone is using ChatGPT, the lazy columnist’s trick of quoting Wikipedia to open an Article is less cliché than it is charming (at least that’s my excuse). Anyhow, here is Wikipedia’s definition of “steelmanning”: A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of a straw man argument. Steelmanning is the practice of applying the rhetorical principle of charity through addressing the strongest form of the other person’s argument, even if

Sonos headphones and speakers are up to 25 percent off for back to school

No matter how old you get, the back-to-school season will always bring a desire to shop. So, sales at this time of year are always more than welcome — especially when they're on some of our favorite devices. Such is the case with the 10 percent discount currently available on the Sonos Era 100. Our choice for midrange smart speaker is down to $179 from $199 as part of a larger sale on the Sonos website. The same price is available on Amazon, as are some more deals on Sonos products. Sonos debu

Linear Scan with Lifetime Holes

In my last post, I explained a bit about how to retrofit SSA onto the original linear scan algorithm. I went over all of the details for how to go from low-level IR to register assignments—liveness analysis, scheduling, building intervals, and the actual linear scan algorithm. Basically, we made it to 1997 linear scan, with small adaptations for allocating directly on SSA. This time, we’re going to retrofit lifetime holes. Lifetime holes Lifetime holes come into play because a linearized seq

Open the pod bay doors, Claude

It’s a well-worn trope in science fiction. We see it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the premise of the Terminator series, in which Skynet triggers a nuclear holocaust to stop scientists from shutting it down. Those sci-fi roots go deep. AI doomerism, the idea that this technology—specifically its hypothetical upgrades, artificial general intelligence and super-intelligence—will crash civilizations, even kill us all, is now riding another wave. The weird thing is th

The Morning After: The most intriguing AI features inside the Pixel 10

After all the new Pixel 10 phones — expect to hear our review verdicts soon — we had time to take a closer look at the AI-centric software features Google often excels at. These include advances in Voice Translate, which can create a synthetic version of your voice speaking German. Or French. Or Japanese. Engadget There’s also Pro Res Zoom (Pixel 10 Pro devices only), which cranks zoom up to 100x, with AI guide rails to avoid twisted human faces and garbled text. In short, fewer AI hallucinati

Matter Is Finally Ready to Deliver the Smart Home It Promised

Last month's Ikea's announcement of more than 20 new Matter-over-Thread devices felt like a much-needed breakthrough moment for the high-profile smart home standard. If Ikea—a brand with a broad, not necessarily tech-savvy customer base—is all-in on Matter, have we finally arrived at the smart home utopia that was first promised back in late 2019? It was then, amid growing frustrations from users around smart home compatibility, that tech giants including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung form

Spotify is adding DMs

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Spotify is introducing a direct messaging feature that allows users to share music, podcast, and audiobook recommendations with each other without leaving the app. Messages is rolling out in “select markets” this week, according to Spotify’s press release, and will be available on mobile devices for Free and Premium users aged 16 years and older. The messaging feature can be accessed by tapping the share ic

How to stop AI agents going rogue

How to stop AI agents going rogue 1 hour ago Share Save Sean McManus Technology Reporter Share Save Getty Images Anthropic tested a range of leading AI models for potential risky behaviour Disturbing results emerged earlier this year, when AI developer Anthropic tested leading AI models to see if they engaged in risky behaviour when using sensitive information. Anthropic's own AI, Claude, was among those tested. When given access to an email account it discovered that a company executive was

The Physics of Parabolic Microphones: Frequency Dependence of Gain

Introduction Parabolic microphones are known for their extreme sensitivity, and the origin of their acuity isn’t difficult to guess. It is the most obvious thing about them, which can also make them a liability for field use, namely, their considerable size. Just as a large amount of weak light is captured by a telescope’s parabolic mirror and made amenable to viewing with the much smaller human eye, so too are faint sounds harvested with a reflecting dish that far exceeds the dimensions of our

20% Off LG Promo Codes & Coupons

LG makes some of the best TVs you can buy. Its OLED TVs in particular are perennial favorites at WIRED, with C-series models like the C4 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) providing among the best performance for your dollars on the market. LG is about way more than TVs of course. The Korean brand offers multiple products across the A/V landscape, from soundbars to Bluetooth speakers, along with a host of other products like home appliances, laptops, and more. Save over 40% with LG promo codes and online

11 secret Fire TV remote shortcuts I use to unlock hidden features and menus

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Capture Checking in Scala

Hands on Capture Checking Introduction I gave a live coding session on capture checking at Scala Days 2025. Let’s be honest: it was essentially a failure, mostly because I have very little live coding experience and woefully underestimated how long it’d take to go through the material. I was stopped maybe 10% in, much to my annoyance and that of Martin Odersky, who’d kindly agreed to be there and help with the questions I was likely to get. This article is a form of apology for my failure: at

Imgur protest covers the front page in anti-MediaLab memes

Despite all the division and controversy rife in the modern era, sometimes the Internet does manage to collectively agree on something. Right now, they agree that they hate Imgur parent company MediaLab. After being acquired by MediaLab in 2021, the once famously open-to-anything image-sharing service began placing restrictions on content in 2023. More recently, the site has experienced service issues, including problems with notifications. Many members of the Imgur community have claimed that

Scientist Says Mysterious Object Approaching Earth May Be Alien Artifact

Mundane wayward space snowball, or extraterrestrial visitor? Astronomers believe that our solar system's latest and only third ever confirmed interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, is almost certainly a comet. But lingering questions about the object means it's not yet an open and shut case. Amid that uncertainty, famed Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is pushing the possibility that the interstellar interloper is an "extraterrestrial artifact" — perhaps even an "alien mothership" — here to menace or obse

Scientists Just Transplanted a Pig Lung Into a Human for the First Time

Image by Getty / Futurism Developments For the first time in history, scientists in China have transplanted a lung from a genetically modified pig into a human patient. As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature, the team of researchers transplanted the lung into the body of a 39-year-old male who had previously been declared brain-dead, in May of last year at the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University. The news comes after scientists in the United States succes

The iPhone 17 event is likely in September: What to expect from Apple's upcoming launch

We're still waiting for Apple to make the official announcement for the iPhone event that usually takes place in September. At that event, they'll showcase the new iPhone 17 lineup which will come equipped with the latest iOS 26 features preinstalled, as well as any additional features Apple reveals at the launch event. But since we (presumably) still have to wait a few weeks until the iPhone event, we can only speculate what the new devices will look like. As with most unreleased iPhones, rumor

Fenster: Most minimal cross-platform GUI library

Fenster Fenster /ˈfɛnstɐ/ -- a German word for "window". This library provides the most minimal and highly opinionated way to display a cross-platform 2D canvas. If you remember Borland BGI or drawing things in QBASIC or INT 10h - you know what I mean. As a nice bonus you also get cross-platform keyboard/mouse input and audio playback in only a few lines of code. What it does for you Single application window of given size with a title. Application lifecycle and system events are all handle

Saudi AI Firm Launches Halal Chatbot

Companies with AI chatbots love to highlight their capability as translators, but they still default to English, both in function and in the information they are trained on. With that in mind, Humain, an AI company in Saudi Arabia, has now launched an Arabic-native chatbot. The bot, called Humain Chat, runs on the Allam large language model, according to Bloomberg, which the company claims was trained on “one of the largest Arabic datasets ever assembled” and is the “world’s most advanced Arabi

Perplexity Will Share Revenue From AI Searches With Publishers

Artificial intelligence systems need content to produce results, and they've been criticized for not paying the people who wrote and edited that content. Now, Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, is introducing Comet Plus. This new subscription tier will distribute revenue to publishing partners whenever readers use AI to glean or deliver journalistic content, the company said in a blog post on Monday. In the AI age, high-quality information is key, and Perplexity contends that publishe