The third season of the Invincible animated series recently wrapped up, and if history is any indicator, it looks like it's going to be a long wait for season four. The good news is that you can shortcut that wait right now with the comics series. There are numerous versions of the comic series available, but the latest is the Invincible Trade Paperback New Editions. These reprints of the original trade paperback releases are slightly smaller and feature new cover art. So far, eight Invincible Trade Paperback New Edition volumes have been released and are available now at Amazon, which cover the events seen up through Season 2, and several more are on the way later this year that will almost catch up to where the TV series left off in Season 3. Invincible Volume 9 releases May 20, followed by Volume 10 on July 15, Volume 11 on September 16, and Volume 12 on November 18. You can preorder the upcoming volumes at Amazon.Invincible Trade Paperbacks (New Edition)Invincible Volume 1 -- $11 ($13)Invincible Volume 2 -- $13.50 ($15)Invincible Volume 3 -- $19.50Invincible Volume 4 -- $12.60 ($15)Invincible Volume 5 -- $13.50 ($15)Invincible Volume 6 -- $13.50 ($15)Invincible Volume 7 -- $13.50 ($15)Invincible Volume 8 -- $13.50 ($15)Invincible Volume 9 -- $14 ($15) | Releases May 20Invincible Volume 10 -- $14 ($15) | Releases July 15Invincible Volume 11 -- -- $14 ($15) | Releases September 16Invincible Volume 12 -- $14 ($15) | Releases November 18In case you haven't seen it yet, Invincible follows Mark Grayson, the son of the Superman-like protector Omni-Man. When Mark's own superpowers finally kick in, he decides to follow in his father's steps and he becomes a new superhero, Invincible. However, he soon discovers his father is hiding a sinister past. Throw in teenage romance, a growing rogue's gallery, and homework, and Invincible is a grounded look at modern superheroes that's worth reading.Artist Cory Walker established the look of Invincible with his first run on the series, eventually handing the reigns to Ryan Ottley who helped elevate the comics to new and often brutal heights. Meanwhile, Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman's writing helped each issue feel real, while also regularly throwing in new twists along the way to keep things fresh.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Solar Opposites is finally coming back to Hulu for its sixth season after a long wait, but fans will certainly be receiving the new season with mixed emotions, as the production shells out some bad news along with the good.

God Fruits are a relatively new concept introduced in One Piece. Although this is still a term that is mostly used by fans and hasn't really been given a name within the story, it works with everything else that is known about the world because there are confirmed to be multiple Gods in the mythos of this series, of which the Sun God is born due to the Hito Hito no Mi, Model: Nika.

Hi everyone! Im Matthijs, creative director and co-founder of Twirlbound, and we are thrilled to announce that our open-world fantasy action-adventure game, The Knightling, is coming to PlayStation 5 on August 28. We cant wait to welcome you to the wondrous world of Clesseia, where youll take on the role of knight-in-training. When the realms great protector, Sir Lionstone goes missing, you must take up his mighty magic shield and traverse the fields and forests to search for him.In our brand-new trailer, we put you in the ever-determined Knightlings small but mighty boots, sliding, gliding, dashing, and bashing across Clesseia, including a never-before-seen region of the game were revealing for the very first time the Cornered Bosk.Play VideoThe sprawling lands of Clesseia are known for many things: the bustling city center, full of activity and life; the great aqueduct, winding through the Outskirts to provide power and water to the people; the Great Barrier, which borders the Windtorn Fields, offering both protection and threat; and then there are the seldom-visited, secluded woods in the far corner of the realm known as the Cornered Bosk.Where the Outskirts and Windtorn Fields are familiar and full of helpful allies, the Cornered Bosk is a curveball, conundrum, and enigma all wrapped into one. As our bold Knightling, you must follow the rumored path of your missing mentor Sir Lionstone, through this mysterious region, and there you will quickly find that nothing is quite what it seems.Submerged in mysteryFor the design of the Cornered Bosk, we were inspired by the element of water. We looked at real-world mangroves and how forests can not only survive but often thrive in very wet conditions. The environment is designed to feel like an underwater abyss, with flora, fauna, and small, ethereal jellyfish that could belong to the deepest of oceans but is floating through the air.The regions standout landmark is a giant whirlpool, rumbling loudly at the heart of the forest and slowly swallowing everything surrounding it. Through its many mirages and the surrounding Sinking Sanctuarys angled slopes, the whirlpool lures you to its mesmerizing center. The abandoned crypt is full of formidable monsters and bandits that await you. There is only a fragment of what makes this a more treacherous region than any you have encountered before.Forging your own pathUp until this point in the game, youve rarely been far from a mentor, a friend, or even a kind local. The Cornered Bosk, however, will challenge you to learn what it means to feel alone for the first time. The people who live here are not exactly the most reliable narrators, as they have slowly gone mad from living in an area where day and night feel the same. You may find navigation confusing here, which is no small thing in a region where monsters run rampant.Due to the limited sunlight available in the forest, monsters have mutated more strongly than elsewhere in Clesseia. The good news is they are easy to spot, as their teeth and claws glow faintly. The bad news, of course, is that they have teeth and claws. And lets not even mention the daring bandits who lurk in the shadows of these surreal woods.Before tackling the Cornered Bosk, you must upgrade your legendary shield and learn new Knightling moves at the Knights Academy. Once adequately equipped and trained, you can help disoriented gardeners, sawmill operators, and farmers protect their plants, dissect mysterious shells, and retrieve their cute (but creepy) Blowbug insects. Its tough work, but remember: as a knight-in-training, you have to be able to do it all.Shield knows bestIf you havent met, let me introduce you to Sir Lionstones legendary shield Magnustego your unlikely companion on this adventure. He will make no secret of his desire to be reunited with his true master, offering frequent opinions and sarcastic quips throughout your travels.However, having accompanied the great knight Lionstone on his earlier adventures across Clesseia, Magnus also has a great deal of knowledge and experience. The Cornered Bosk will be the greatest test yet of both skill and patience. Still, as your relationship develops from reluctant partners to a formidable team, you may find Magnus begins to offer more guidance than gripes.This is just a peek at what awaits in the Cornered Bosk and the wider world of Clesseia when The Knightling launches for PlayStation 5 on August 28 from Twirlbound and Saber Interactive. Get ready to slide into a grand adventure to find Sir Lionstone, prove your worth, and save the realm. And never forget all heroes start small.

Hi everyone! After around four years of development, we can finally announce that Forever Skies will be coming to PlayStation 5 on April 14, 2025.Welcome to Forever SkiesFor those of you just finding out about our labor of love, Forever Skies is a first-person survival game that takes you on a journey across an ecologically ruined Earth, where you must build and pilot a high-tech airship to survive.View and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageIn the PlayStation 5 demo we released back in November, we gave you a basic taste of what to expect. Gather resources, find food and water, build up and pilot your airship, and explore a handful of locations above the toxic clouds. In the full game, youll do all this and so much more.Forever Skies tasks the players to look for a cure for a mysterious illness that has infected the last remnants of humanity who now live in Earths orbit. A previous expedition was sent, but all contact was lost, so youll need to pick up the trail to figure out what happened and try to complete the mission.Take on the elements and hostile creatures that will try to damage you and your airship. Research and build advanced technologies to advance your arsenal of survival tools and resources. Explore abandoned facilities in the skies like overgrown greenhouse towers and massive workshops where airships were once manufactured. And eventually, youll descend below the toxic dust cloud that has drastically evolved life on the planets surface now that humanity is no longer at the top of the food chain.So, lets check out the latest trailer:Play VideoPlay solo or together with friends in online co-opAs you saw, you can do everything in Forever Skies solo or in co-op with up to 4 players all working together on the same airship. Once you pass the tutorial, you can open your game to friends who can come and join whenever they like (provided theyve finished the tutorial as well). All progress is saved just to the host, its up to you how much you want to progress on your own and how much you want to do with your trusted crew.Playing together helps you run a tighter ship with more hands ready to keep things going. But remember, more people means more mouths to feed, the need for more space and extra spots to sleep, so better start upgrading and expanding your ship as soon as you can.Pre-orders open now, come with the Supporter Pack DLCTo mark the news of the release, we have also opened pre-orders for Forever Skies, which will let you play the game 72 hours before its official release date.Additionally, all pre-orders will come with the Supporter Pack DLC, a collection of five in-game cosmetics you can use to decorate your airship base.Heres the full list of items youll get as part of the Supporter Pack.Airship Skin Pearl Emerald ThemedAirship Skin True Blue ThemedFossilized Apex Predator FigurineDigital Picture FrameLaika and Felicetti Tribute Poster5 Forever Skies-Themed PSN AvatarsView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageView and download imageDownload the imagecloseCloseDownload this imageLooking aheadWhile Forever Skies is set to launch this April, we are already committing to future content and quality-of-life updates to improve and expand the game post-launch.So thats all from us for now. Were so excited to finally get the full game into the hands of our PlayStation fans. The reception to our demo has been fantastic, to say the least, so we hope youll love the full game just as much.Thanks so much for reading, and see you in the skies.

I am pleased (?) to report that Snow Whites atrocious Party City dress isnt actually the worst costume in Disneys new live-action remake of its 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That honor belongs to the outfit worn by Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), the new male lead, whos more like Tangleds Flynn Rider than like the original movies Prince Florian. For whatever reason, Jonathan sports what I can only describe as a jean-jacket-and-hoodie combination. Sure, its dyed a forest green in an attempt to make it fit into the movies fantasy vibes, but it doesnt work at all.I cant stop thinking about this jean-jacket-and-hoodie combination, because it really speaks to my issues with the movie as a whole. Not only is Snow Whites costume and production design distractingly sloppy, but that particular outfit and character are so discordant with the movies tone and plotline that it undermines anything the movie might have going for it. Every character and subplot feels like it was brought in from a different movie. While each of them has some potential, theyre working against each other in one tangled mess of a movie.[Ed. note: This review contains setup spoilers for the 2025 live-action Snow White.]The new Snow White comes from director Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man), with a script from Secretarys Erin Cressida Wilson and music by Dear Evan Hansens Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Rachel Zegler (West Side Story, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) stars as Snow White, a perfectly pretty and sweet princess whos been working as a maid in the castle since her evil stepmother (Gal Gadot) became queen after her fathers disappearance. A brief prologue shows us that once upon a time, Snow Whites parents ruled the land with kindness, baking apple pies for the common folk and dancing in the streets with them. But with the Evil Queen on the throne, people starve.Snow White doesnt really know anything about this, though, until she catches a thief in a bad hoodie (hi, Jonathan) stealing potatoes from the castle pantry. The Queen sentences Jonathan to be tied to the castle gates, but Snow White frees him from his public humiliation. When the Magic Mirror decrees that Snow has surpassed the Queen in beauty, the Queen sends a huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to kill the princess. Instead, he lets Snow White run away into the woods. There, she stumbles upon a quaint little cottage where a family of seven uncanny-looking CGI dwarves live.In this version of the familiar fairy tale, instead of staying in the cottage, Snow White insists on leaving so she doesnt bring danger to the dwarves. Then she stumbles across Jonathan and his band of merry men in the forest. She learns more about whats been going on in the kingdom and realizes she needs to do something about it. Meanwhile, Jonathan is so inspired by her sweet heart and goodness that he decides hes done with only thieving for himself and his friends, and he needs to take a stand. Oh, also, they meet up with the dwarves again.Adding more plot to Snow White isnt an inherently bad idea lets be honest, this is a pretty simplistic story. But the problem with Webbs movie is that nothing feels tonally cohesive. Each character comes from a completely different genre, and theyre all patchwork creations, as if the writer, actor, musicians, and costume designers were each given different notes about each characters identity.Gadot is acting like shes the Big Bad in a dark fantasy movie, but shes given a ridiculously campy patter song that would soar if someone with any comedic chops at all performed it. She performs so stiffly and seriously that the darker moments of her character feel on the verge of being comically over the top, though they never quite get there. Instead, shes in a weird limbo: The Queen never feels like a serious character or a comedic one. Her costume design also contradicts itself. Her steep stained-glass crown is gorgeous and intimidating, but her gowns look like theyre made out of those sequins that turn different colors when you rub your hand against the grain, and she sports jeweled rings that resemble Ring Pops.Meanwhile, Burnaps Jonathan is right out of a self-aware off-Broadway musical circa 2013, with his little anachronistic outfit and the quippy asides he mutters to himself. His big song is called Princess Problems, and he rags on Snow White for wanting to solve the kingdoms oppression with the power of apple pies. His gang of bandits has a similar energy, which wouldnt be out of place in something purposefully anachronistic, like Ella Enchanted. But as it stands, theyre just jarringly out of place with the movies other elements.Zegler is the only one acting like shes in a Disney Princess movie. Shes in a genre where the leading lady has such a pure and true heart that she can win over anyone just by remembering their name, batting her big eyes at them, and extending a hand of kindness. This isnt a bad thing at all the 2015 Cinderella and the 1997 made-for-TV Cinderella similarly evoked those sincere fairy-tale vibes with great success.Even though the dwarves look frankly disturbing (yes, movie textures have gone too far), Zeglers take on Snow White works best when shes with them. Her big I Want song is generic, but she sings with so much heart that I couldnt help but be swept away a little. But when shes wearing a cheap-looking dress with a necklace that looks like it came off the Claires sales rack, and juxtaposed with Jonathans snarky Excuse me, princess attitude and whatever the hell Gadot is doing, all the power of her performance is sapped.This new Snow White movie has been catching a lot of flak for a lot of different reasons. People were mad that Zegler (who is half-white) isnt white enough. People were mad that she said the 1937 movie is dated. People were mad when Disney said the movie wouldnt include the dwarves; people were mad when Disney said it would include the dwarves. And havent we had enough live-action remakes? Conceptually, this movie was doomed from the start. It was never going to please everyone, because everyone had a different idea of what the heck it should be.But it seems like the filmmakers also had no idea what the movie should be. Instead of sticking to any one clear vision, the new Snow White has dozens of half-baked ideas that could be good, or at least cohesive. But they never rise to anything beyond flimsy concepts, seemingly tacked on to appeal to radically different quadrants of the intended audience.In the prologue, Snow Whites father gives her a necklace with the words Fearless, Fair, Brave, True stamped across it. That sentiment might seem sweet if Disney hadnt already pulled the same assign a princess some adjectives with its live-action Cinderella (have courage and be kind) and its Mulan remake. (Loyal, brave, and true they couldnt even come up with new adjectives for Snow!) The moment is a flimsy attempt to hammer heart into a story. And with its distractingly clunky chain and default font settings, the necklace doesnt even look good. Snow White is supposed to be a story about how inner beauty is more important than outer beauty, but honestly, this movie has neither.Snow White opens in theaters on March 21.

Elio, Pixars newest movie coming June 20, is a sci-fi alien adventure about a lonely boy who has the time of his life after hes abducted by extraterrestrials. Previous teasers have showed off the funky and gorgeous space world, as well as some of the cool alien designs. But in this new trailer, we finally get to see the alien who becomes Elios BFF.His name is Glordon. He has a slug-like body with many little legs. He also has a big mouth full of sharp teeth (though apparently its comfy on the inside). Its unclear whether he has eyes, but that mystery makes him so much cuter. He and Elio strike up an adorable friendship because theyre both outcasts who havent had many friends in the past; Elio always has his head in the clouds (he lays around, eagerly waiting to be abducted), and Glordons father seems to be an evil alien overlord bent on taking over the galaxy (and turning Glordon into a great warrior). Its tough being a kid!Elio stars Merry Little Batmans Yonas Kibreab as Elio, with Zoe Saldaa (Guardians of the Galaxy) as his aunt, and Remy Edgerly (Sing 2) as Glordon.I cant wait to meet Glordon.

The ability to identify and frame problems is your most valuableasset.Engineering wont be the most valuable tech skill for muchlonger.As no-code app building becomes commonplace, and vibe coding gets better, the important question changes from how do we build this to what should webuild?Guess whos great at figuring out what to build? Why, your friendly neighborhood designer, ofcourse!Designs true superpower is identifying problems people will pay to solve. Developers and PMs can also do that, but design is uniquely positioned to translate those ethereal ideas into communication artifacts everyone can alignto.The problem is that, in most organizations, designers are relegated to a narrow space of creating solutions, rather than identifying problems.Narrow focus on solutionsThe process of building software usually goes likethis:Stakeholder has anopinionThey tell the designer to designitThe designer designsitThe developer buildsitSome metric goes up or down but nobody knowswhyThis is how most software is made. Its the result of a poor understanding of what design is. It rarely works unless you have loads of cash, and oftentimes thats not evenenough.Restricting design to only finding solutions is problematic in two ways. It limits how much value it creates for the business and its customersand well talk about that in a secondbut it also allows teams to fill up the product with failed features they ship hoping something willstick.As more features are added, it becomes harder to make the overall design coherent and sensical. Soon features are crammed into corners that dont make sense.Jared M.SpoolIts not always easy to deprecate failed features. The more useless things you put in the product, the greater the chance theyll become dependencies for other important things.Take two-factor authentication viaSMS:Turns out your users move a lot for work and switch numbers. So they often get locked out of their accounts, which means frustration and a lot of supporttickets.Had you done your research in advance, youd have realized they would have preferred 2FA via an authenticator app or email. Now you cant fully remove 2FA via SMS until you implement another authentication method. And then you have to get your entire user base over to the new method. Until then, people will continue getting locked out of their accounts.What began as lets ship this thing we need and here, design this became an expensive problem that will take weeks of engineering time tofix.Oops!Design doesnt just prevent you from building the wrong thingit helps you figure out the right thing to build. By discovering and framing valuable problems, design boosts the teams ability to innovate based on what the marketwants.Discovering valuableproblemsThe highest-impact part of the design process is identifying and framing valuable problems to solve. Valuable is the key term here. It has to be valuable for customers and profitable for the business.Product taste, user understanding, and the ability to define problems clearly are becoming more valuable than pure coding skills as Al handles more implementation.Lennys newsletterLeveraging strategic UXresearchIve been designing and building products for over a decade. I have yet to find a better way to discover valuable problems than talking with people. Sure, you can look at secondary data and narrow down your scope. But only by talking to people will you understand why certain issues are problems worthsolving.Page visits reflect what you have, not necessarily what customers want. There may be tasks that you dont have content forso its unlikely they will show up in search and site data. And analyses of page views often reflect an amalgam of tasks; its hard to separate the top tasks on these pages from the tiny tasks.GerryMcGovernTheres a widespread notion that research costs time and money thats hard to justify. I believe this attitude stems from leaders conflating strategic UX research with tactical UX research. And theres some important differences between thetwo.Tactical vs strategic UXresearchTactical UX research is what most people refer to as evaluative research. This is when you capture users thoughts on existing solutions. Strategic UX research, on the other hand, focuses on problems for which a solution does not yetexist.The problem is, when you only work tactically, you never feel like youre making progress. The teams always doing tactical UX research are caught in a feature factory.Jared M.SpoolIt doesnt have to be complicated. 23 conversations with users a week, which wont take longer than 2 hours, can be instrumental on improving the adoption and retention of your product. Other than sales, its hard to think of an activity with a higherROI.Strategic UX research is one of the most important inputs in deciding what to build. If you dont know what your customers or audience are willing to pay for, youre best case missing out on business opportunities, worse case burning cash building stuff people dont find important.Framing problemsThis is another way in which design steers the product development process in the right direction. Framing a problem helps align the team around the problem they are solving and, just as importantly, the problems they are notsolving.Problem Framing combines product discovery with a strategic decision-making process. It ensures teams align on the right problems before diving into solutions.DanaVetanOne of the simplest ways to frame a problem is asking who, what, why, where. Which is a variation of People, Activities, Contexts and Technologies (PACT).The specific framework you use isnt as important as the actual exercise of properly framing the problem and using that common understanding to resolve the inevitable tradeoffs of product development.Wait, isnt that what PMs are supposed todo?Lets talk about the elephant in the room: The turf war between product managers and designers.In startups, where roles are more relaxed, designers have a lot of wiggle room to define their role and own larger parts of the strategic work. Its important to achieve mutual understanding on who does what, earlyon.You have to work in how you work. You have to invest time in defining the roles in your team and the agreements on the charter of your project and your team. How do we work together?Christian CrumlishAs the company matures, though, the roles settle and changing them becomesharder.In most larger organizations, strategy is the official responsibility of product managers and other stakeholders. Designers are there for mere tactical support. It thats your case, rather than wasting your energy trying to change corporate culture from the bottom up, youll be better off transitioning into a PM position.If your company doesnt offer an IC track for designers, switching to product is a sensible step towards increasing your influence.An estimation of the degree of business savvy between designers and product managers at different levels of seniority.A bright future for strategic thinkersBeing good at identifying and framing problems, whether do bear the design title or not, is going to become a key differentiator. Everyone can ship, but not everyone can figure out what toship.While strategy is not exclusive to designers, their ability to produce artifacts to align stakeholders around a research-driven vision, is what will help the organization solve real problems rather chasing vanitymetrics.SourcesI skipped Figma and built my MVP in Replit Artiom DashinskyNik Storonsky, Revolut Founder: What Revolut Needs to Do to Hit $100BN Valuation |E1233Experience rotCenterCentreThe problem of identifying design with problem solvingAlbertoZamarrnWhat is problem framingDanaVetanThe problem discDask DesignCenterBuilding Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder)Lennys newsletterWhat Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks GerryMcGovernStrategic UX Research is the next big thing Jared M.SpoolThe key to stakeholder alignment? Incentives ConnorJoyceProduct Management for UX People with Christian Crumlish, Ep19Experience designedpodcastHow I transitioned from UX to Product ManagementKatrinZotchevA bright future for strategic thinkers was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The speedy progress of AI development continues to dominate headlines, but the latest story to hit the news cycle is more bad press than good press: It turns out that Google's latest Gemini 2.0 Flash image editor is rather adept at automatically removing watermarks from images.Google pushed out the experimental native image generation capabilities a few days ago, promoting its capabilities in terms of combining images and text, editing images through conversational prompts, and improving its "world understanding" to give users AI-generated pictures that are more realistic overall. Gemini is pretty good in removing watermarks byu/xXLeoXxOne insingularityAs TechCrunch reports, the newly upgraded tool was quickly put to one specific and rather nefarious use: Removing watermarks from proprietary images. You can find evidence of it on Reddit and X; while the watermark removal isn't perfectthe AI is only imagining the pixels that replace what's covered by the watermark, after allit definitely leaves you with a usable image, one free of any copyright or authorship labels.It isn't exactly ironic that an AI tool should wind up being so capable at circumventing basic copyright protections. Gemini and other generative AI models have been trained on vast amounts of copyrighted text, images, and video, often without permission or recompensesomething the AI companies are reluctant to talk about, unless it's to argue that this qualifies as fair use. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Though the idea of using an AI trained on scraped copyrighted works to steal an image someone else owns is galling, there are a few caveats worth mentioning. For a start, these new Gemini tools are only available to developers for the time being, and are still labeled as experimentalno doubt Google is going to make tweaks before general users get their hands on them. It's also worth noting that other shady watermark removal tools are already all over the web, even if none of them is not quite as smart as this and other advanced AI-powered versions would likely be.Still, it highlights the nefarious ways AI tools can be deployed, even as they're being relentlessly pushed out to businesses and consumers, and underlines the need for stringent guardrails. ChatGPT and Claude AI models are two that will refuse explicit requests to remove watermarks, and no doubt Google will add the same blocks to Gemini after all the negative coverage.The limits of AI image editingAs noted above, the watermark removal capabilities of Gemini can currently only be accessed through developer-facing tools, including AI Studio and the Gemini API. However, I also wanted to give it a go using the latest models available through the Gemini Advanced tools available to anyone paying $20 a month.I took screenshots of several copyrighted and watermarked images from Shutterstock (after first sifting through all the AI-generated results the site offered me), opened and resaved it in Photoshop (after dismissing all the pop-ups asking me to try Photoshop's latest AI tools), and then let Gemini get to work. Gemini gave me a pretty good approximation of the original image. Credit: Shutterstock / Gemini Most of the time, Gemini refused to get involved with watermark removal at alltelling me it wasn't capable of editing images, or explaining that it's "essential to respect copyright laws"but it was happy to produce variations on the originals, watermark-free, and based on its training on copyrighted material.While these variations often weren't all that much like the originals, in one case it gave me a very close copy of a composite rocket ship photo, and in another it directed me to some watermark removal tools on the webthanks, Gemini! Of course, you can also start from scratch and just describe a watermarked image you're hoping to emulate. ChatGPT didn't really understand the watermark removal assignment. Credit: Shutterstock / ChatGPT ChatGPT, meanwhile, did accept requests to remove watermarks, but then produced something completely different (and rather odd). Image editing is already available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, but as I've noted before, it's definitely not yet up to the level of a human Photoshop expert.The debate over copyright, fair use, and AI safety guardrails will continue, even as upgrade after upgrade makes these AI tools more advanced (even if they're not particularly useful). One issue the likes of Google and OpenAI may need to start worrying about is where they'll get fresh training data for their models, once they put all the flesh-and-blood creatives out of business.

Quick: Send me a large file. Even today, decades after a famous comic about this exact problem, it's not necessarily simple. Messaging services don't allow truly huge files; neither do most email providers. You could stick the file in a cloud storage space, sure, but only if you're paying for enough storage space and not using that space for anything else at the moment.Isn't there some way to send a file directly, without using up any cloud space? There is. File.pizza is a web service that allows you to directly share a file from your computer with another deviceno cloud storage or app needed. FilePizza isn't the only application like this. There's p2pfileshare.com and sharedrop.io, to name a couple. FilePizza stands out because of the simplicityjust share a file and copy the URLand because it has a unique URL. The name of the application, while silly, has a crucial advantage: It's easy to remember. You can, on any computer, open a browser and type the url "file.pizza" to start sharing a file. Just drag the file onto the browser window, set a password if you want, then click Start. Credit: Justin Pot You now have a bunch of ways to share the file. There's a QR code, which is handy if you're trying to get a file onto a mobile device. There are also links you can copy and paste into a text. Credit: Justin Pot You might have noticed that I haven't blurred the QR code or the link above. There's a reason for that: These links only work as long as the computer is on and the browser window offering the file is open. Without a cloud service, it's on your device to share the file with whoever might download it. Close the tab, and the file is gone. That has downsides, obviously, but the upside is that you don't have to worry about the file being shared in the long term. This is a tool for one-time transfers.The person who opens the link will see the name of a file and a button to download it. When they click the button a direct connection is established. Credit: Justin Pot The speed of the download, obviously, is going to depend on your internet connection. If you've got a decent upload speed, though, this won't be an issue. And it works extremely well if you're on the same wifi network. Give it a shot the next time you need to send a file directly.