Technology News

Unlock 25% off with top Groupon coupon codes, and explore deals on getaways, spa packages, memberships, and event tickets this March.

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” our hosts talk about three big stories from February.

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” our hosts talk about three big stories from February.

Budget Windows laptops still suck. Framework’s upcoming repairable and upgradeable machine could change the game.

On this special episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we dig into the many DOGE staffers keeping two jobs at once, plus what happened when US federal workers received an email from Elon Musk over the weekend.

Stephen and Katie Miller—he's “the prime minister,” sources say; she’s DOGE’s comms guru—liaise between the White House and Elon Musk, and are centrally involved as he tears the government apart.

With egg prices soaring, the US is considering vaccinating laying chickens, which have been hit particularly hard by the avian influenza outbreak.

It took a couple of years, but it happened: Microsoft released its Copilot AI assistant as an application for macOS. The app is available for download for free from the Mac App Store right now.

It was previously available briefly as a Mac app, sort of; for a short time, Microsoft's iPad Copilot app could run on the Mac, but access on the Mac was quickly disabled. Mac users have been able to use a web-based interface for a while.

Copilot initially launched on the web and in web browsers (Edge, obviously) before making its way onto iOS and Android last year. It has since been slotted into all sorts of first-party Microsoft software, too.

Read full article

Comments

On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like Mercury produce entire responses simultaneously, refining them from an initially masked state into coherent text.

Traditional large language models build text from left to right, one token at a time. They use a technique called "autoregression." Each word must wait for all previous words before appearing. Inspired by techniques from image-generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, text diffusion language models like LLaDA (developed by researchers from Renmin University and Ant Group) and Mercury use a masking-based approach. These models begin with fully obscured content and gradually "denoise" the output, revealing all parts of the response at once.

While image diffusion models add continuous noise to pixel values, text diffusion models can't apply continuous noise to discrete tokens (chunks of text data). Instead, they replace tokens with special mask tokens as the text equivalent of noise. In LLaDA, the masking probability controls the noise level, with high masking representing high noise and low masking representing low noise. The diffusion process moves from high noise to low noise. Though LLaDA describes this using masking terminology and Mercury uses noise terminology, both apply a similar concept to text generation rooted in diffusion.

Read full article

Comments

Google's Pixel phones include numerous thoughtful features you don't get on other phones, like Now Playing. This feature can identify background music from the lock screen, but unlike some similar song identifiers, it works even without an Internet connection. Sadly, it has been broken for months. There is some hope, though. Google has indicated that a fix is ready for deployment, and Pixel users can expect to see it in a future OS update.

First introduced in 2017, Now Playing uses a cache of thousands of audio fingerprints to identify songs you might encounter in your daily grind. Since it works offline, it's highly efficient and preserves your privacy. Now Playing isn't a life-changing addition to the mobile experience, but it's damn cool.

That makes it all the stranger that Google appears to have broken Now Playing with the release of Android 15 (or possibly a Play Services update around the same time) and has left it that way for months. Before that update, Now Playing would regularly list songs on the lock screen and offer enhanced search for songs it couldn't ID offline. It was obvious to Pixel fans when Now Playing stopped listening last year, and despite a large volume of online complaints, Google has seemingly dragged its feet.

Read full article

Comments

Elon Musk claims he mistakenly fired Ebola prevention workers, then quickly fixed the error. But Ebola programs are still in tatters, along with other livesaving efforts like AIDS treatments for children.

Internally called Orion, GPT-4.5 is OpenAI’s largest model to date, and it’s first available through the company’s $200 monthly ChatGPT subscription.

Internally called Orion, GPT-4.5 is OpenAI’s largest model to date, and it’s first available through the company’s $200 monthly ChatGPT subscription.

Longlegs, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Deadpool & Wolverine are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Disney+ this month.

Sony's first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR's biggest hits. The PlayStation 5's PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it's dropping the price of the headset significantly.

Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That's welcome, but it's also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.

The headset launched in early 2023 but has suffered from weak software support ever since—a far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn't help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.

Read full article

Comments

The integrated heat spreaders put on CPUs at the factory are not the most thermally efficient material you could have on there, but what are you going to do—rip it off at the risk of killing your $500 chip with your clumsy hands?

Yes, that is precisely what enthusiastic overclockers have been doing for years, delidding, or decapping (though the latter term is used less often in overclocking circles), chips through various DIY techniques, allowing them to replace AMD and Intel's common denominator shells with liquid metal or other advanced thermal interface materials.

As you might imagine, it can be nerve-wracking, and things can go wrong in just one second or one degree Celsius. In one overclocking forum thread, a seasoned expert noted that Intel's Core Ultra 200S spreader (IHS) needs to be heated above 165° C for the indium (transfer material) to loosen. But then the glue holding the IHS is also loose at this temperature, and there is only 1.5–2 millimeters of space between IHS and surface-mounted components, so it's easy for that metal IHS to slide off and take out a vital component with it. It's quite the Saturday afternoon hobby.

Read full article

Comments

Doctors around the US have anecdotally reported an uptick of children critically ill with the flu developing severe, life-threatening neurological complications, which can be marked by seizures, delirium, hallucinations, decreased consciousness, lethargy, personality changes, and abnormalities in brain imaging.

It's long been known that the seasonal flu can cause such devastating complications in some children, many with no underlying medical conditions. But doctors have begun to suspect that this year's flu season—the most severe in over 15 years—has taken a yet darker turn for children. On February 14, for instance, health officials in Massachusetts released an advisory for clinicians to be on alert for neurological complications in pediatric flu patients after detecting a "possible increase."

With the anecdata coming in, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed all the data it has on neurological complications from flu this year and seasons dating back to 2010. Unfortunately, existing surveillance systems for flu do not capture neurological complications in pediatric cases overall—but they do capture such detailed clinical data when a child dies of flu.

Read full article

Comments

For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old test chambers will feel a bit too familiar if you revisit them today.

Over the years, community mods like Portal Stories: Mel and Portal: Revolution have tried to fix this problem with extensive work on completely new levels and puzzles. Now, though, a much simpler mod is looking to recapture that "first time" feeling simply by adding random gameplay modifiers to Portal's familiar puzzle rooms.

The Portal Randomized demo recently posted on ModDB activates one of eight gameplay modifiers when you enter one of the game's first two test chambers. The results, while still a little rough around the edges, show how much extra longevity can be wrung from simple tweaks to existing gameplay.

Read full article

Comments

Microsoft is pushing the Trump administration to change last-minute export controls implemented by Joe Biden on his way out of office that were largely designed to limit access to advanced AI chips so that less surplus could find its way into the hands of China or other foreign adversaries.

Considered critical for US national security, the AI Diffusion rule divides the world into three tiers. At the top are countries that can access US-made AI chips without restrictions, including key chip ally Taiwan and 17 other countries. Access is completely restricted for about 20 countries in the bottom tier, including China, Russia, and North Korea. But stuck in the middle tier are 150 countries that must endure artificial limits on computing supply chains that are kept at least a generation behind US technology accessible by the top tier.

In a Thursday blog, Microsoft President Brad Smith warned that the rule will hurt US businesses by placing heavy restrictions on some of America's "friends"—including countries like Switzerland, Poland, Greece, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. He cautioned that the rule makes "uncertain" their "ability to buy more American AI chips in the future," and this will inevitably force US allies to seek supply chains outside the US. And "it’s obvious where they will be forced to turn" if Trump doesn't intervene, Smith suggested.

Read full article

Comments

People who subscribe to Max at the ad-supported tier will no longer be able to access CNN or Bleacher Report (B/R) Sports content through the service starting on March 30, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced this week.

At that time, only people subscribed to one of Max’s more expensive, ad-free subscription tiers will be able to access Max's live news and sports hubs.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games at WBD, said the decision to change access to CNN Max and B/R Sports, which includes MLB, NBA, NHL and other live sporting events, followed over a year of assessing how people watch news and sports on Max.

Read full article

Comments