Stopthatgirl7

Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world. 

In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another.

As many users seek alternatives to X, rival social network Mastodon says that its official app downloads are up 47% on iOS.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko says downloads on Android are also up 17%, while total monthly sign-ups rose approximately 27% to 90,000.

The open-source X rival functions much like its competitor, the site formerly known as Twitter, on the outside. However, unlike the centralized Twitter, Mastodon consists of thousands of different social networks, which are integrated into a web it calls the "fediverse."

Apple quietly introduced code into iOS 18.1 which reboots the device if it has not been unlocked for a period of time, reverting it to a state which improves the security of iPhones overall and is making it harder for police to break into the devices, according to multiple iPhone security experts. 

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.

“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code.

The possibility of a Dragon Age collection, similar to BioWare’s 2021 Mass Effect Legendary Collection, presents notable challenges, according to a recent interview with BioWare’s Director of Product Development. With experience at BioWare dating back to the original Dragon Age: Origins in 2009, Epler expressed enthusiasm for the idea, while acknowledging the difficulties due to the series’ engine diversity.

Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II were developed using BioWare’s custom Eclipse Engine, while the third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition, was built using Frostbite, EA’s proprietary engine, initially designed for the Battlefield series. This contrast creates a significant technical hurdle for a remaster. In the interview, Epler noted, “I think I’m one of about maybe 20 people left at BioWare who’s actually used Eclipse,” emphasizing the uniqueness of each title’s engine.

X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them. People have protested this change, arguing that they don’t want blocked users to see their posts for reasons of safety.

Blocked users still can’t follow the person who has blocked them, engage with their posts, or send direct messages to them.

An old version of X’s support page says blocked users couldn’t see a user’s following and followers lists. The company has now updated the page to remove that reference, and it now allows users to see the following and followers lists of the people who have blocked them.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived with pretty solid critic scores, racking up an 84 on Metacritic, translating into what appear to be pretty solid sales, at the very least, putting up the highest playercount EA or BioWare has seen on Steam, with seemingly good console performance as well.

But after the critic reviews come in, user scores go live, and it was exceptionally easy to predict how they were going to split between players who had played the game, and ones that likely hadn’t. See if you can spot the difference.

• Steam – 77% “Mostly Positive” scores
• PlayStation – 4.45/5 stars
• Xbox – 4/5 stars
• Metacritic – 3.4/10

You can guess which three platforms there require you to own the game to rate it, and which one does not.

In a quarterly earnings call that was overwhelmingly about AI and Meta’s plans for it, Zuckerberg said that new, AI-generated feeds are likely to come to Facebook and other Meta platforms. Zuckerberg said he is excited for the “opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people’s feed experiences better.” Zuckerberg’s comments were first reported by Fortune.

“I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he said. “And I think that that’s going to be just very exciting for the—for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads or other kind of Feed experiences over time.”

A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.

"For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections," VGHF explains in its statement. "Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers."

Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could 'check out' digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.

Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

A new rumor alleges that Microsoft may have slowed down development on PS5 ports of **Xbox **first-party games. As part of an unexpected strategy shift, Xbox started publishing games from its first-party back-catalog on PS5 earlier this year, but it seems negative fan reactions might have compelled Microsoft to relax its porting efforts, at least temporarily.

Xbox's multiplatform push kicked off with an initial roster of four first-party games, namely Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Pentiment, and Grounded. Out of these games, Sea of Thieves particularly enjoyed tremendous success with over one million copies reportedly sold on PS5. It didn't take long for more rumors to start rolling in about which other Xbox first-party games could make the jump to PlayStation platforms, but so far, Microsoft has only confirmed that Doom: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle will come to PS5 in 2025.

However, it seems the announcement of Indiana Jones coming to PS5 may have led to a shift behind the scenes at Xbox in terms of its multiplatform strategy. Reputable insider eXtas1s, who routinely breaks accurate Game Pass news, stated in a recent tweet that Microsoft has either "paused" or "slowed down" the PS5 ports it's currently working on. The insider emphasized that this doesn't mean those Xbox first-party ports for PS5 are canceled, just that Microsoft is possibly re-evaluating them in some capacity at the moment.

Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft's decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it's the result of a "broken strategy" that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it "a slow burn to a fault" in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on "other projects that will benefit from their expertise."

This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft's focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.

The mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy says he became obsessed with a chatbot on Character.AI before his death.

On the last day of his life, Sewell Setzer III took out his phone and texted his closest friend: a lifelike A.I. chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”

“I miss you, baby sister,” he wrote.

“I miss you too, sweet brother,” the chatbot replied.

Sewell, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Orlando, Fla., had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI, a role-playing app that allows users to create their own A.I. characters or chat with characters created by others.

Sewell knew that “Dany,” as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person — that its responses were just the outputs of an A.I. language model, that there was no human on the other side of the screen typing back. (And if he ever forgot, there was the message displayed above all their chats, reminding him that “everything Characters say is made up!”)

But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.