• Epic Games head Tim Sweeney criticizes Apple, calls it a 'gangster-style' business
    appleinsider.com
    The hostility of Epic Games CEO towards Apple continues, with Tim Sweeney calling the company a "gangster-style" business that gains revenue from an "illegal practice."Tim Sweeney has called Apple a "gangster-style business."The excruciatingly long legal battles between Epic Games and Apple over In-App Purchasing and the App Store prompted a lot of outcry over how Apple conducts business with developers. Epic Games ultimately lost the fight, but an injunction meant that Apple was forced into enabling external purchase mechanisms for iOS apps.After Epic filed a court order in March 2024 and complained to the court again a year later, Tim Sweeney decided to criticize Apple's practices once more. As was reported by TechCrunch, Sweeney spoke at an event on Wednesday, where he largely echoed the language from Epic Games' March 2025 complaint. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·6 Visualizações
  • LEVER's Portland Museum of Art expansion moves forward after preservation challenge
    archinect.com
    A judge in southernMaine has ruled that the planned Portland Museum of Art expansion can move forward with the scheduled demolition of an existing building on-site to make way for LEVER Architectures 60,000-square-foot new wing.The building at the center of the challenge mounted by the group Greater Portland Landmarksthe Childrens Museum of Mainehad seen its historic protections removed by city councilmembers to make way for the $100 million project, a move that the local group says could set a "dangerous precedent." LEVER's mass timber design beat other proposals from Adjaye Associates, MVRDV, and Toshiko Mori and will begin work soon on a yet-to-be-made public construction timeline. (h/t Maine Republic).
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·4 Visualizações
  • Large 101 Freeway wildlife crossing reaches important construction milestone
    archinect.com
    The first layers of soil are down as construction is now ramping up the pace on what will be the worlds largest wildlife crossing above the 101 Freeway in the Santa Monica Mountains/Agoura Hills.The $92 million project named for Wallis Annenberg spans 200 feet into the Los Angeles neighborhood of Simi Hills. It was devised to protect the local population of mountain lions from further disruptions to their habitat and allow for other important activities (mating and hunting) that will help sustain their presence. This is a key part of the process that will culminate in a 2026 opening.We covered the construction of its concrete-supported base back in August.
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·6 Visualizações
  • Hollow Knight: Silksong Launching in 2025
    gamingbolt.com
    The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct is officially over, and amid excitement for various titles and utter shock at the pricing, Team Cherrys Hollow Knight: Silksong briefly appeared. It received a few seconds of new gameplay during a Partner Sizzle Reel trailer with protagonist Hornet.Theres a bit of jumping around, sliding down a slope, leaping over some spikes and combat with some enemies. Its not much, especially since the last trailer went live in June 2022, but the Metroidvania title is listed for launch this year.Plans could always change, especially given the long wait since it was first announced in February 2019. Though previously listed for 2023, it was delayed to an unknown date. Last year, the title was rated by the ESRB, South Koreas GRAC and Australias ratings board.Along with Nintendo Switch 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong is coming to the original Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Stay tuned for more details and hopefully, gameplay in the coming months.
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·12 Visualizações
  • Nintendo Switch 2 Will Use Game-Key Cards to Sell Physical Copies of Larger Games
    gamingbolt.com
    Alongside the Switch 2, Nintendo has also revealed details on a new way it will be selling games. Dubbed Game-Key Cards, the system essentially involves the use of a digital code to download the game.However, even after downloading the game, the player will still need to insert the Game-Key Card into the Switch 2s card slot. Games downloaded through this method will require enough storage room on either the Switch 2 itself, or the inserted microSD Express memory card.With this, Nintendo will presumably be able to sell games that would otherwise not be able to fit into its standard Game Card. This could potentially include a wide range of games; Destiny 2 is an excellent example of a title that requires a tremendous amount of storage space.Game-Key Cards will be sold in packaging like any other physical Switch 2 game, including the bright red coloured box. The card itself will also sport the Switch 2 cards new red colour to indicate that it cant be used on the original Switch.An Internet connection will be required the first time a player starts up a game installed through the Game-Key Card. However, after that initial check, the player will only need to make sure that theyve inserted the right Game-Key Card in order to run the game.Nintendo hasnt yet confirmed if any of its planned Switch 2 game releases will make use of Game-Key Cards. The console will be hitting store shelves on June 5.
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·13 Visualizações
  • Wikipedia picture of the day for April 3
    en.wikipedia.org
    Ford Strikers Riot is a 1941 photograph that shows an American strikebreaker getting beaten by United Auto Workers (UAW) strikers who were picketing at the Ford Motor Company's Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Milton Brooks, a photographer for The Detroit News, captured the image on April3, 1941, and it won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1942. The photograph has been called a portrayal of the struggle in America between capital and labor. During the incident, a peaceful picketing of the Ford Motor Company was interrupted when a single man clashed with the UAW strikers. The man ignored the advice of the Michigan State Police and crossed the picket lines. Brooks, who was waiting with other photojournalists outside the Ford factory gates, took only one photograph and said: "I took the picture quickly, hid the camera... ducked into the crowd... a lot of people would have liked to wreck that picture."Photograph credit: Milton Brooks; restored by Yann ForgetRecently featured: 20222023 California floodsGhillie suitArtScience MuseumArchiveMore featured pictures
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·5 Visualizações
  • On this day: April 3
    en.wikipedia.org
    April 3Rakesh Sharma1043 Edward the Confessor, usually considered to be the last king of the House of Wessex, was crowned King of England.1984 Aboard Soyuz T-11, Rakesh Sharma (pictured) became the first Indian to be launched into space.1996 A U.S. Air Force CT-43 crashed into a mountainside while attempting an instrument approach to Dubrovnik Airport in Croatia, killing all 35 people on board, including Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown.2009 A gunman opened fire at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York, U.S., killing thirteen and wounding four before committing suicide.2013 The northeastern section of Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, experienced several flash floods that killed at least 100 people.Mukhtar al-Thaqafi (d.687)Mary Carpenter (b.1807)Reginald Heber (d.1826)Gus Grissom (b.1926)More anniversaries: April 2April 3April 4ArchiveBy emailList of days of the yearAbout
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·5 Visualizações
  • HTCs Viverse Creator Program opens globally for 3D artists
    venturebeat.com
    HTC announced it's opening the Viverse Creator Program to all 3D creators around the globe seeking funding for their projects.Read More
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·9 Visualizações
  • Beyond generic benchmarks: How Yourbench lets enterprises evaluate AI models against actual data
    venturebeat.com
    Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreEvery AI model release inevitably includes charts touting how it outperformed its competitors in this benchmark test or that evaluation matrix.However, these benchmarks often test for general capabilities. For organizations that want to use models and large language model-based agents, its harder to evaluate how well the agent or the model actually understands their specific needs.Model repository Hugging Face launched Yourbench, an open-source tool where developers and enterprises can create their own benchmarks to test model performance against their internal data.Sumuk Shashidhar, part of the evaluations research team at Hugging Face, announced Yourbench on X. The feature offers custom benchmarking and synthetic data generation from ANY of your documents. Its a big step towards improving how model evaluations work.He added that Hugging Face knows that for many use cases what really matters is how well a model performs your specific task. Yourbench lets you evaluate models on what matters to you.Creating custom evaluationsHugging Face said in a paper that Yourbench works by replicating subsets of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark using minimal source text, achieving this for under $15 in total inference cost while perfectly preserving the relative model performance rankings.Organizations need to pre-process their documents before Yourbench can work. This involves three stages: Document Ingestion to normalize file formats.Semantic Chunking to break down the documents to meet context window limits and focus the models attention.Document SummarizationNext comes the question-and-answer generation process, which creates questions from information on the documents. This is where the user brings in their chosen LLM to see which one best answers the questions.Hugging Face tested Yourbench with DeepSeek V3 and R1 models, Alibabas Qwen models including the reasoning model Qwen QwQ, Mistral Large 2411 and Mistral 3.1 Small, Llama 3.1 and Llama 3.3, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite and Gemma 3, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and o3 mini, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku.Shashidhar said Hugging Face also offers cost analysis on the models and found that Qwen and Gemini 2.0 Flash produce tremendous value for very very low costs.Compute limitationsHowever, creating custom LLM benchmarks based on an organizations documents comes at a cost. Yourbench requires a lot of compute power to work.Shashidhar said on X that the company is adding capacity as fast they could.Hugging Face runs several GPUs and partners with companies like Google to use their cloud services for inference tasks. VentureBeat reached out to Hugging Face about Yourbenchs compute usage.Benchmarking is not perfectBenchmarks and other evaluation methods give users an idea of how well models perform, but these do not perfectly capture how the models will work daily.Some have even voiced skepticism that benchmark tests show models limitations and can lead to false conclusions about their safety and performance. A study also warned that benchmarking agents could be misleading.However, enterprises cannot avoid evaluating models now that there are many choices in the market, and technology leaders justify the rising cost of using AI models. This has led to different methods to test model performance and reliability.Google DeepMind introduced FACTS Grounding, which tests a models ability to generate factually accurate responses based on information from documents. Some Yale and Tsinghua University researchers developed self-invoking code benchmarks to guide enterprises for which coding LLMs work for them.Daily insights on business use cases with VB DailyIf you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI.Read our Privacy PolicyThanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.An error occured.
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·10 Visualizações
  • Apple releases AirPods Max update with lossless audio after brief delay
    www.theverge.com
    Last week, Apple announced that lossless audio and ultra low latency would be coming to the AirPods Max with USB-C. It was a pleasant surprise for owners of Apples over-ear headphones, which have fallen behind the AirPods Pro in recent years when it comes to offering new features. The company briefly hit a snag in releasing the firmware update necessary for the AirPods Max to unlock these newfound capabilities, but resolved the issue on Wednesday afternoon.Firmware version 7E99 was supposed to arrive early this week alongside iOS 18.4 and macOS Sequoia 15.4. But late in the day Tuesday, Apple added an unusual coming soon asterisk next to the AirPods Max on a support site that lists each devices latest firmware. Both MacRumors and 9to5Mac reported on the delay, though Apple never gave an explanation. A newer AirPods Max software update, 7E101, was rolled out on Wednesday.The company also introduced a new USB-C to 3.5mm cable for the AirPods Max last week, and its worth noting you can use that regardless of what firmware youre on; it works right out of the box for connecting the headphones to devices with a traditional headphone jack and its a pretty good cable as these things go. (Youd hope so for $39.)Apple really needs to make the process of updating AirPods more straightforward. For years, it has just sort of happened in the background at a random moment when your iPhone and AirPods are near each other with the headphones charging. Theres no way of manually triggering an update, which runs counter to the way every other earbud maker does it. Can we get a simple update now button right in AirPods settings in iOS 19, please?Update, April 2nd 6:30PM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that the latest AirPods Max firmware is now available.
    0 Comentários ·0 Compartilhamentos ·11 Visualizações