Jennifer Salke is stepping down as the head of Amazon MGM Studios, according to reporting by Deadline. Shes been at the post for over seven years, which is a ripe old age for a studio head. Before Amazon, Salke was president of NBC Entertainment.She will not be replaced. Instead, the head of studio role will be eliminated as part of a new structure for the division. Prime Video honcho Mike Hopkins said in a memo that the company "decided to flatten our leadership structure a bit." The studio will split into two distinct arms, with one focusing on TV and the other handling films."We will be taking a couple of weeks to have thoughtful conversations with Jens directs and others to finalize the ideal long-term structure for the Amazon MGM Studios organization as a whole, and well have more to share on that work soon," Hopkins said.Salke isnt leaving the studio entirely. Shes transitioning to a first-look film and TV deal with the company. However, industry rumors suggest that its more like a firing than a voluntary career change. She was largely absent from the deals that brought in Amy Pascal and David Heyman as the producers of the next James Bond film.Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson sold creative control of 007 to Amazon for around $1 billion earlier this year. Insiders have suggested that Broccoli and Salke didnt get along, which Jeff Bezos allegedly caught wind of. It has been reported that one condition of Pascal and Heyman signing on was that the pair would not report to Salke.We dont know what any of this means for James Bond, other than new movies are most definitely coming. Its also been suggested that the platform could be prepping an affiliated TV show.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/jennifer-salke-steps-down-as-head-of-amazon-mgm-studios-161856700.html?src=rss

The Amazon Spring Sale has brought a number of discounts to Shark vacuums, both cordless and robotic varieties. On the robot vacuum side of things, you can get the well-regarded Shark AI Ultra robovac for $300, or more than $100 off its regular price. This is a version of one of our top picks for the best robot vacuums. It has strong suction power, an easy-to-use mobile app and an extra-large, self-emptying base that can hold up to 60 days worth of debris. Its great for pet hair and all-around cleaning tasks. The only major downside is that this isnt a hybrid unit, so it doesnt mop. For that, consider the Shark Matrix Plus. This 2-in-1 robovac vacuums and mops, and its currently on sale for $400. Thats a massive discount of 47 percent, as the typical price is an eyebrow-raising $750. This one also includes a self-emptying base that can accommodate 60 days of dirt and debris. It boasts a true HEPA filter and excels at mopping away deep stains. This is thanks to powerful scrubbers that operate at 100 times per minute. We couldnt truly recommend this model at its original price, as thats a whole lot of cheddar, but its a steal right now for $400. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/shark-robot-vacuums-are-up-to-47-percent-off-during-the-amazon-spring-sale-151615466.html?src=rss

Star Wars has collaborated with Audio-Technica for four custom earbuds, and TechRadar has your exclusive first-look hands-on experience with all four.

A new leak and patent indicate that Apple is working on a future Apple Watch with a touchscreen glass frame.

A proposed class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk and his family office Excession can proceed in federal court, a judge ruled Friday.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Friday said he is opening an investigation into the diversity practices of Walt Disney and its ABC unit, saying they may violate U.S. equal employment opportunity regulations.FCC Chair Brendan Carr wrote Disney CEO Bob Iger in a letter dated Thursday that the companys diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts may not have complied with FCC regulations and that changes by the company may not go far enough. I want to ensure that Disney ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name, Carr wrote in the letter, which was seen by Reuters.He has sent letters to Comcast and Verizon announcing similar probes into diversity practices.We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commissions letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions, a Disney spokesperson said.Disney recently revised its executive compensation policies to remove diversity and inclusion as a performance metric, adding a new standard called talent strategy, aimed at upholding the companys values.Carr said FCCs Enforcement Bureau will be engaging with Disney to obtain an accounting of Disney and ABCs DEI programs, policies, and practices.Carr, who was designated chair by President Donald Trump on January 20, has been aggressively investigating media companies.In December, ABC News agreed to give $15 million to Trumps future presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air involving the civil case brought against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll.Days after Carr took over as chair, the FCC reinstated complaints about a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President KamalaHarris, as well as complaints about how ABC News moderated the preelection TV debate between then-President Joe Biden and Trump. It also reinstated complaints against Comcasts NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live shortly before the election.Trump has sued CBS for $20 billion, claiming that 60 Minutes deceptively edited the interview in order to interfere in the November presidential election, which he won.CBS, which is owned by Paramount Global, this week called on the FCC to dismiss the complaint without delay, but Carr quickly rejected the idea, saying the investigation would continue.By David Shepardson and Dawn Chmielewski, Reuters

Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle start-up Nikola who wassentenced to prison last year for fraud, was pardoned by President Donald Trump, the White House confirmed Friday.The pardon of Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology, could wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution that prosecutors were seeking for defrauded investors.Milton, 42, and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission.At Miltons trial, prosecutors say a company video of a prototype truck appearing to be driven down a desert highway was actually a video of a nonfunctioning Nikola that had been rolled down a hill.Milton had not been incarcerated pending an appeal.Milton said late Thursday on social media that he had been pardoned by Trump.I am incredibly grateful to President Trump for his courage in standing up for what is right and for granting me this sacred pardon of innocence, Milton said.The White House confirmed the pardon Friday, though there was no notice of a pardon on the White House website.When asked by a reporter in a news conference Friday why he pardoned Milton, Trump said it was highly recommended by many people. Trump suggested that Milton was prosecuted because he supported the president.They say the the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president, Trump said.Trump went on to say that Milton did nothing wrong and that the Southern District of New Yorks prosecutors were a vicious group of people.During his securities fraud case, Milton was defended by two lawyers with connections to Trump: Marc Mukasey, who has represented the Trump Organization; and Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, who Trump appointed as U.S. Attorney General.Trump wasted little time in using his pardon power since beginning his second term. Hours after taking office, he wiped clean the records of roughly 1,500 people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The next day, Trump announced that he hadpardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an underground website for selling drugs.Ulbricht had beensentenced to life in prisonin 2015 after a high-profile prosecution that highlighted the role of the internet in illegal markets.Nikola, which was a hot start-up and rising star on Wall Street before becomingenmeshed in scandal, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February.Milton, convicted of fraud, was portrayed by prosecutors as a con man six years after he had founded the company in a basement in Utah.Prosecutors said Milton falsely claimed to have built its own revolutionary truck that was actually a General Motors product with Nikolas logo stamped onto it.Called as a government witness,Nikolas CEO testifiedthat Milton was prone to exaggeration when pitching his venture to investors.Milton resigned in 2020 amid reports of fraud that sent Nikolas stock prices into a tailspin. Investors suffered heavy losses as reports questioned Miltons claims that the company had already produced zero-emission 18-wheel trucks.The company paid $125 million in 2021 tosettlea civil case against it by the SEC. Nikola didnt admit any wrongdoing.The U.S. District Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment on Miltons pardon.At the time of his conviction U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said, Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again on social media, on television, on podcasts, and in print. But todays sentence should be a warning to start-up founders and corporate executives everywhere fake it till you make it is not an excuse for fraud, and if you mislead your investors, you will pay a stiff price.Matt Ott, AP business writer

For anyone who grew up watching Tony Stark casually summon the Iron Man Mk5 armor from a suitcase, the Hancept Zero Mk2 pen will trigger that same wide-eyed, kid-on-Christmas-morning reaction. This pen doesnt just writeit transforms, unfolds, and assembles like a mechanical origami masterpiece. You dont so much use the Zero Mk2 as you deploy it. Because while the worlds seen fountain pens, ballpoint pens, gel pens, and even those fancy bolt-action pens nothing really matches up to this sheer over-engineered beauty that goes from a flat, 2mm-thick metal card to a fully functional, beautifully balanced hexagonal pen.The lineage of EDC pens has always leaned into practicality. Compact, reliable, and unassumingthey do their job and stay out of the way. But the Zero Mk2 clearly didnt get that memo. Hancepts second-generation pen is unapologetically crafted for those who appreciate the sheer joy of precision mechanics. Made up of 54 meticulously machined components, the Mk2 is built from 6000 series aluminum alloy and 316L watch-grade stainless steel, giving it the same material pedigree youd expect from a luxury timepiece. Its assembled entirely by hand, like a mechanical watch, only this time, the ticking seconds are replaced by flowing ink.Designer: HanceptClick Here to Buy Now: $199 $270 ($71 off) Hurry! Only limited units leftThe pen gives off a strong mecha vibe with its all-metal design. Whether opened flat, or rolled into its pen avatar, the thing looks like it means business, and I guarantee you, youll feel a sense of sheer childlike joy every time you deploy it. An entirely machined design means precision tolerances that allow parts to roll, slide, and lock with satisfying accuracy. And a magnet allows the pen to click shut in a way thats sure to become a fidget action of sorts. Remember when owning a space pen made you the coolest person in a room? Well, this ones sure to garner a few jaw-drops and hushed wows and maybe a few where did you get that fromsHancept, a small but obsessive outfit from New York City, didnt approach the Mk2 like a pen company. They approached it like watchmakers designing a kinetic sculpture. At first glance, its just a 3.375 by 2.125-inch metal card, barely thicker than two stacked credit cards at only 2mm. Nothing about its closed form suggests its capable of anything beyond looking cool and maybe shimming open a door in a spy movie. But in just a few secondsthree, to be preciseit rolls into a 3.85-inch hexagonal pen with a 0.47-inch diameter, locking together into a rigid, comfortable writing tool that youd swear was always meant to be a pen, not a trick.The magic isnt just in the unfoldingits in the sheer precision of it all. The Zero Mk2 is cut from 6000 series aluminum alloy and 316L watch-grade stainless steel, milled to tolerances as tight as 0.00039 inches. Thats the kind of obsessive precision usually reserved for aerospace components and mechanical watches. Every segment, every slider, every tiny mechanism clicks together with mechanical poetry. It took Hancept two years, 34 design revisions, and 27 prototypes to nail this thing down, and it shows. Beyond just technically impressive, its emotionally satisfying.Yet, for all its mechanical wizardry, the pen still gets the basics right. Unlike many EDC pens that prioritize compactness without much thought to the overall writing experiencethe Mk2 is properly balanced with a 55/45 weight distribution. The hexagonal shape isnt merely a function of its folding metal panel design; it actually provides a natural grip that feels familiar, steady, and surprisingly ergonomic, given how cold and robotic the pen initially seems.Of course, what good is technical brilliance without daily usability? Hancept wisely avoided proprietary refills, instead opting for the readily available 0.7mm Staedtler D1 cartridge, which means youre never scrambling for ink. And if you really want to put the pen on a pedestalliterallythe Deluxe Package includes a desk stand crafted from titanium PVD-coated steel with embedded N52 neodymium magnets. It holds the Zero Mk2 either flat or assembled, turning it into a conversation-starting sculpture for your workspace.Theres an elegance to how it integrates into daily life too. When folded flat, it slips unnoticed into most card slots, including minimalist phone wallets. For anyone whos streamlined their carry to just a MagSafe wallet or slim card holder, the Zero Mk2 quietly earns its spot without any bulk. No clip, no obvious protrusionsjust a sleek, flat panel waiting for its mission. And although I dont own a sample unit to test this theory out, the all-metal pen just might double as an RFID-blocking card when placed in your wallet too. Hope someone tries it out!That said, this isnt a mass-market pen for scribbling grocery lists. Starting at $199 (or $249 with the full Deluxe setup), it occupies a different echelonone where craftsmanship, mechanical creativity, and aesthetic satisfaction matter as much as ink on paper. Its for people who geek out over the details, who see beauty in machined tolerances and tiny mechanical linkages, and who want their EDC gear to have just a little cinematic magic baked in.Click Here to Buy Now: $199 $270 ($71 off) Hurry! Only limited units leftThe post This Mechanical-Origami EDC Pen Transforms Like Iron Mans Suit first appeared on Yanko Design.

SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union, announced agreements to allow both students and game jam participants to work with union performers.Read More

3D self-supervised learning (SSL) has faced persistent challenges in developing semantically meaningful point representations suitable for diverse applications with minimal supervision. Despite substantial progress in image-based SSL, existing point cloud SSL methods have largely been limited due to the issue known as the geometric shortcut, where models excessively rely on low-level geometric features like surface normals or point heights. This reliance compromises the generalizability and semantic depth of the representations, hindering their practical deployment.Researchers from the University of Hong Kong and Meta Reality Labs Research introduce Sonata, an advanced approach designed to address these fundamental challenges. Sonata employs a self-supervised learning framework that effectively mitigates the geometric shortcut by strategically obscuring low-level spatial cues and reinforcing dependency on richer input features. Drawing inspiration from recent advancements in image-based SSL, Sonata integrates a point self-distillation mechanism that gradually refines representation quality and ensures robustness against geometric simplifications.At a technical level, Sonata utilizes two core strategies: firstly, it operates on coarser scales to obscure spatial information that might otherwise dominate the learned representations. Secondly, Sonata adopts a point self-distillation approach, progressively increasing task difficulty through adaptive masking strategies to foster deeper semantic understanding. Crucially, Sonata removes decoder structures traditionally used in hierarchical models to avoid reintroducing local geometric shortcuts, allowing the encoder alone to build robust, multi-scale feature representations. Additionally, Sonata applies masked point jitter, introducing random perturbations to the spatial coordinates of masked points, thus further discouraging reliance on trivial geometric features.The empirical results reported validate Sonatas efficacy and efficiency. Sonata achieves significant performance gains on benchmarks like ScanNet, where it records a linear probing accuracy of 72.5%, substantially surpassing previous state-of-the-art SSL approaches. Importantly, Sonata demonstrates robustness even with limited data, performing effectively using as little as 1% of the ScanNet dataset, which highlights its suitability for low-resource scenarios. Its parameter efficiency is also notable, delivering strong performance improvements with fewer parameters compared to conventional methods. Furthermore, integrating Sonata with image-derived representations such as DINOv2 results in enhanced accuracy, emphasizing its capacity to capture distinctive semantic details specific to 3D data.Sonatas capabilities are further illustrated through insightful zero-shot visualizations including PCA-colored point clouds and dense feature correspondence, demonstrating coherent semantic clustering and robust spatial reasoning under challenging augmentation conditions. The versatility of Sonata is also evidenced across various semantic segmentation tasks, spanning indoor datasets like ScanNet and ScanNet200, as well as outdoor datasets including Waymo, consistently achieving state-of-the-art outcomes.In conclusion, Sonata represents a significant advancement in addressing inherent limitations in 3D self-supervised learning. Its methodological innovations effectively resolve issues associated with the geometric shortcut, providing semantically richer and more reliable representations. Sonatas integration of self-distillation, careful manipulation of spatial information, and scalability to large datasets establish a solid foundation for future explorations in versatile and robust 3D representation learning. The framework sets a methodological benchmark, facilitating further research towards comprehensive multimodal SSL integration and practical 3D applications.Check outthe Paper and GitHub Page.All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,feel free to follow us onTwitterand dont forget to join our85k+ ML SubReddit. NikhilNikhil is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is pursuing an integrated dual degree in Materials at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Nikhil is an AI/ML enthusiast who is always researching applications in fields like biomaterials and biomedical science. With a strong background in Material Science, he is exploring new advancements and creating opportunities to contribute.Nikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces the Kolmogorov-Test: A Compression-as-Intelligence Benchmark for Evaluating Code-Generating Language ModelsNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/Beginners Guide to Deploying a Machine Learning API with FastAPINikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces PLAN-AND-ACT: A Modular Framework for Long-Horizon Planning in Web-Based Language AgentsNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/This AI Paper Introduces GRPO-based Open-RS: A Low-Cost Reinforcement Learning Framework to Enhance Reasoning in Small Language Models