GoKawiil
Tech News
Tyra Banks deleted her existing social media presence and launched a new Substack newsletter called 'The World of Too Much.' She revealed the project by publishing her first post live on stage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Physicist NÃckolas de Aguiar Alves of the Federal University of ABC revisited the 'Picard Maneuver' from Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode 'The Battle,' in which Captain Picard jumps to warp speed and stops abruptly to create a visual double image that confuses an enemy ship. Working through the relativistic math, he found the tactic holds up better than the show's writers likely realized, tying it to real physics involving objects moving faster than a medium's speed of light.
b.next, originally an academic effort focused on synthetic cell interoperability through its Nucleus platform, took on a 2023 contract to build an open, fully specified synthetic cell sensor. That project, intended to take months, evolved into years of work solving supply chain gaps for PURE system components, ultimately leading the team to build a manufacturing plant producing 'Cytosol,' a core substrate for synthetic cells, and recently shipping its 100th kit.
Star Trek celebrates six decades since its original series premiered in 1966, having since expanded into more than 25 series and films spanning multiple generations of fans. Media outlets are marking the occasion with retrospectives on the franchise's cultural influence, from its many captains to its shared lexicon of stardates, warp factors and Vulcan salutes.
A technical essay argues that describing large language models as mere next-token predictors is outdated once reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enters the picture. Unlike pre-training, which only reinforces sequences already present in training data, RLVR lets models generate novel token sequences and learn from evaluating their outcomes. The piece walks through pseudocode contrasting the two training loops to show how post-training changes what the model is actually optimizing for.
Costco Next, a platform that gave Costco members access to discounted products from vetted third-party suppliers, has stopped working for many customers over the past several days. Users report being unable to access the marketplace, and Costco has not issued a public explanation for the disruption or shutdown.
Director Adam Wingard, known for 'The Guest' and 'You're Next,' releases his new film 'Onslaught' starring Adria Arjona in theaters starting September 4. Early reviews suggest the film struggles to live up to the promise of Wingard's earlier genre work.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told BBC News that Project Helix, previously described as a codename for Microsoft's next console, will actually be a 'family' of devices rather than a single machine. She declined to confirm whether any of these devices would be discless, though Microsoft recently launched a program letting users digitize physical games.
Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma told the BBC that rising hardware costs, partly fuelled by AI spending, mean the company must prioritise affordability for its next-generation console, codenamed Project Helix. She also announced that owners of roughly 1,000 physical disc titles will soon be able to unlock digital entitlements for those games, with rights transferring to new owners if discs are resold.
Gohar Khan, a 2021 MIT graduate who is a first-generation, Pakistani-American student, turned his own difficult college application experience into a media and consulting business. His YouTube channel, Gohar's Guide, now reaches more than 10 million followers with advice on applications, essays and study habits, and he co-founded Next Admit, a paid consulting service for prospective college students.
ESPN executive Michael Szykowny and Pixar's Jay Ward described at Disney's D23 convention how the network builds its animated alternate broadcasts, which recast real athletes as characters like Toy Story figures or Simpsons cast members. The system combines NFL Next Gen Stats player-tracking data, Sony's Beyond Sports engine and Hawk-Eye optical tracking to animate characters in real time, while commentator Drew Carter now uses a VR headset instead of a full motion-capture suit to sync his live calls with his on-screen avatar.