Almost immediately in The Outer Worlds 2, the player receives news of a corporate shake-up: Auntie Cleo and Spacer’s Choice, two of the in-game retail brands, have merged to form Auntie’s Choice. Less a chain of stores and more a feudal power, Auntie’s Choice manages its employees – serfs, really – with the cruelty of […]
Halo coming to PlayStation is one of those events that, five years ago, would have been the tell that “something is not right here” in a show about time travel or alternate universes. Looking at the state of Xbox with its layoffs, game cancellations, price hikes, studio closures, and a soft release schedule light on […]
Character.AI is gradually shutting down chats for people under 18 and rolling out new ways to figure out if users are adults. The company announced Wednesday that under-18 users will be immediately limited to two hours of “open-ended chats” with its AI characters, and that limit will shrink to a complete ban from chats by […]
Bill Gates wants us all to be more upbeat about climate change. He argues that we’ve made great progress on the problem, aided in large part by technological advances. So it’s time to focus more on improving people’s lives, particularly by fighting hunger and disease, he writes in a memo published Tuesday. Of course, he […]
It’s been nearly two weeks since Microsoft, a multi-trillion dollar company, shipped a $600 handheld “Xbox” that can’t be relied on to sleep, wake, or hold a charge while asleep in my tests. Neither Microsoft nor Asus would admit there’s a problem with the white Xbox Ally or offer a timeline to fix it after […]
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-0 to let itself retroactively ban gadgets and radio components that it previously approved for entry into the United States, if the company that makes them is deemed a national security risk. Officially, it’s a way to close loopholes and protect US networks from backdoors in Chinese […]
Tech products that are packaged and ready for sale aren’t launching in the US as planned right now, thanks to the government shutdown. Earlier this month, Leica delayed its M EV1 camera due to holdups on approval from the partially shuttered Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The WiiM Sound audiophile speaker, currently shipping in international markets, […]
Now he’s best known for the crime-fueled duology of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but when Vince Gilligan was first starting out in television, it was in the realm of sci-fi. Over seven years he penned a number of classic episodes of The X-Files, ranging from a monster-themed spoof of Cops to a bizarre […]
OpenAI’s new deepfake machine, Sora, has proven that artificial intelligence is alarmingly good at faking reality. The AI-generated video platform, powered by OpenAI’s new Sora 2 model, has churned out detailed (and often offensive or harmful) videos of famous people like Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jackson, and Bryan Cranston, as well as copyrighted characters […]
Earlier this month, Lyra Health announced a “clinical-grade” AI chatbot to help users with “challenges” like burnout, sleep disruptions, and stress. There are eighteen mentions of “clinical” in its press release, including “clinically designed,” “clinically rigorous,” and “clinical training.” For most people, myself included, “clinical” suggests “medical.” The problem is, it doesn’t mean medical. In […]