Black folks are loud. We laugh loud, we love loud, we protest loud. But when we really want to show our approval, we get quiet first. When we laugh at something funny, like really laugh, it sounds like a thin wheeze before sound bursts forth like a storm. And within seconds of starting South of Midnight, as I walked around the protagonist Hazel’s home and seeing a piece of art that was an obvious and deliberate homage to the painter Annie Lee’s Blue Monday, I wordlessly put my Steam Deck down and took a quiet lap around my living room before I started shouting.South of Midnight is the latest title from Compulsion Games, a Canadian studio best known for making We Happy Few. It follows Hazel, a young woman who must rescue her mother after a hurricane sweeps their home away. Along her journey, she comes into her powers as a Weaver, or guardians who can see the strands that connect all life in what’s known as the Grand Tapestry and can repair it when those strands get knotted by pain and trauma.The game is an action platformer. Hazel progresses by using her Weaver abilities to heal the blighted landscape and defeat enemies called haints – a Southern term used to describe ghosts or monsters. She’s aided on her quest by Crouton, her childhood stuffed toy come to life by powerful magic. He can take over enemies’ bodies, cause them to fight on Hazel’s side, and can squeeze into places she’s too big to reach.This is Crouton. I love him. Image: Compulsion GamesI love when a piece of media talks to me as a Black person. A TV show, cartoon, or even a video game will have tiny visual references or phrases that are like a secret code. I see or hear them and know a Black person left this for me to find. What made me holler about South of Midnight was that its writers went for the deep cuts. They put in the kind of stuff you only know about if at least three of your four grandparents were American Black. Back in the day, everyone on both sides of my family had Annie Lee artwork in the house. If it wasn’t Blue Monday, it was Sixty Pounds — which my mother had hanging above the window in our kitchen.What made me holler about South of Midnight was that its writers went for the deep cuts.That kind of acknowledgement is everywhere in the game. It’s in the way Hazel and her mother, Lacey, speak to each other, the words they use, and their intonation. Hazel mutters something disrespectful, and her mother immediately calls her out: “I thought you was grown.” It’s in the way Catfish, the magical and overly large catfish who guides Hazel on her quest, reminds me of my two very country uncles. Earlier this year when I spoke to Ahmed Best, the voice and motion capture director for the game, he talked about how he wanted to ensure every aspect came across as authentic — right down to the way folks stood. I saw that come through in the way Hazel fans herself just so to keep the Mississippi heat at bay. Instead of standing straight up, she tilts her head to the side as she waves her hand the exact same way Memphis-born aunties do. Hazel’s adventures takes her through all kinds of areas endemic to the American Deep South. Image: Compulsion GamesThe details were so small, but they accumulated in my heart like the waters behind a levee. Every time I discovered something new — like noticing one of the game’s chapter titles referenced Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God — the emotion would burst forth as a flood of tears. And it’s not just the narrative that pays homage to Black and Southern tradition and culture; the gameplay does, too. Instead of the much (and unfairly) maligned yellow paint used to denote a climbable surface, South of Midnight uses a very specific shade of blue — the color Black people in the South would use to paint their porches to keep evil spirits away. There was a moment when I saw blue butterflies hovering over a cliff surrounded by water that kills Hazel if she touches it. Knowing the game uses blue to show you where you can safely go, I took a leap of faith over the edge and found a secret power-up. The game spoke to me using the language of my ancestors, and I heard it. Once again, I hollered.This wall is marked with a color called ‘haint blue,’ which lets the player know it’s a surface that can be interacted with. Image: Compulsion GamesAs much as South of Midnight made me yell, its combat did make me groan a little bit. Every combat encounter follows the same extremely basic formula. Enemies show up in an arena, you kill them, heal the wound causing the enemies to appear, repeat ad nauseam with particular emphasis on the nausea part. It’s so formulaic that combat feels vestigial, like it was put there as an afterthought to give players something else to do. Hazel’s abilities don’t feel particularly fun or interesting to use, and, honestly, the game doesn’t even need combat at all. The storytelling is so strong that South of Midnight would be just as compelling as a purely narrative experience with some light platforming action. Honestly, the game doesn’t even need combat at allIn a lot of cases, in order for Black media to get widespread attention or critical acclaim, it must be centered on luridly depicting trauma. The opposite isn’t all that great either, wherein a piece of Black media overcorrects and completely refuses to acknowledge traumatic realities that inform our existence. South of Midnight deftly straddles those two schools of thought in a pointed way that I’ve never seen before.South of Midnight sees me. It gets me. Its creators wanted to craft a love letter to a culture not often depicted in video games, and they did exactly that. At a time when my government is trying to do everything in its power to erase my people, their history, and their contributions to the US, I cannot overstate the power that lies in being seen — especially coming from a place like video games, which is often violently hostile if it bothers to acknowledge folks like me at all.This game came out right on time, right in the moment when a narrative like this was needed the most. South of Midnight is a loving and worshipful praise song of the culture and people it depicts that made it hard for me to stay quiet for long.South of Midnight is out now on Xbox, Xbox Game Pass, and Windows PC.See More:

HIGGS — the innovative method for compressing large language models was developed in collaboration with teams at Yandex Research, MIT, KAUST and ISTA. HIGGS makes it possible to compress LLMs without additional data or resource-intensive parameter optimization. Unlike other compression methods, HIGGS does not require specialized hardware and powerful GPUs. Models can be quantized directly on a smartphone or laptop in just a few minutes with no significant quality loss. The method has already been used to quantize popular LLaMA 3.1 and 3.2-family models, as well as DeepSeek and Qwen-family models.  The Yandex Research team, together with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA) and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), developed a method to rapidly compress large language models without a significant loss of quality.  Previously, deploying large language models on mobile devices or laptops involved a quantization process — taking anywhere from hours to weeks and it had to be run on industrial servers — to maintain good quality. Now, quantization can be completed in a matter of minutes right on a smartphone or laptop without industry-grade hardware or powerful GPUs.  HIGGS lowers the barrier to entry for testing and deploying new models on consumer-grade devices, like home PCs and smartphones by removing the need for industrial computing power. The innovative compression method furthers the company’s commitment to making large language models accessible to everyone, from major players, SMBs, and non-profit organizations to individual contributors, developers, and researchers. Last year, Yandex researchers collaborated with major science and technology universities to introduce two novel LLM compression methods: Additive Quantization of Large Language Models (AQLM) and PV-Tuning. Combined, these methods can reduce model size by up to 8 times while maintaining 95% response quality. Breaking Down LLM Adoption Barriers Large language models require substantial computational resources, which makes them inaccessible and cost-prohibitive for most. This is also the case for open-source models, like the popular DeepSeek R1, which can’t be easily deployed on even the most advanced servers designed for model training and other machine learning tasks.   As a result, access to these powerful models has traditionally been limited to a select few organizations with the necessary infrastructure and computing power, despite their public availability.  However, HIGGS can pave the way for broader accessibility. Developers can now reduce model size without sacrificing quality and run them on more affordable devices. For example, this method can be used to compress LLMs like DeepSeek R1 with 671B parameters and Llama 4 Maverick with 400B parameters, which previously could only be quantized (compressed) with a significant loss in quality. This quantization technique unlocks new ways to use LLMs across various fields, especially in resource-constrained environments. Now, startups and independent developers can leverage compressed models to build innovative products and services, while cutting costs on expensive equipment.  Yandex is already using HIGGS to prototype and accelerate product development, and idea testing, as compressed models enable faster testing than their full-scale counterparts. About the Method  HIGGS (Hadamard Incoherence with Gaussian MSE-optimal GridS) compresses large language models without requiring additional data or gradient descent methods, making quantization more accessible and efficient for a wide range of applications and devices. This is particularly valuable when there’s a lack of suitable data for calibrating the model. The method offers a balance between model quality, size, and quantization complexity, making it possible to use the models on a wide range of devices like smartphones and consumer laptops. HIGGS was tested on the LLaMA 3.1 and 3.2-family models, as well as on Qwen-family models. Experiments show that HIGGS outperforms other data-free quantization methods, including NF4 (4-bit NormalFloat) and HQQ (Half-Quadratic Quantization), in terms of quality-to-size ratio. Developers and researchers can already access the method on Hugging Face or explore the research paper, which is available on arXiv. At the end of this month, the team will present their paper at NAACL, one of the world’s top conferences on AI.  Continuous Commitment to Advancing Science and Optimization This is one of several papers Yandex Research presented on large language model quantization. For example, the team presented AQLM and PV-Tuning, two methods of LLM compression that can reduce a company’s computational budget by up to 8 times without significant loss in AI response quality. The team also built a service that lets users run an 8B model on a regular PC or smartphone via a browser-based interface, even without high computing power. Beyond LLM quantization, Yandex has open-sourced several tools that optimize resources used in LLM training. For example, the YaFSDP library accelerates LLM training by as much as 25% and reduces GPU resources for training by up to 20%.  Earlier this year, Yandex developers open-sourced Perforator, a tool for continuous real-time monitoring and analysis of servers and apps. Perforator highlights code inefficiencies and provides actionable insights, which helps companies reduce infrastructure costs by up to 20%. This could translate to potential savings in millions or even billions of dollars per year, depending on company size.  Check out Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 85k+ ML SubReddit. Note: Thanks to the Yandex team for the thought leadership/ Resources for this article. Yandex team has financially supported us for this content/article. Asif RazzaqWebsite |  + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Nvidia Released Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1: A State-of-the-Art AI Model Balancing Massive Scale, Reasoning Power, and Efficient Deployment for Enterprise InnovationAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Together AI Released DeepCoder-14B-Preview: A Fully Open-Source Code Reasoning Model That Rivals o3-Mini With Just 14B ParametersAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Boson AI Introduces Higgs Audio Understanding and Higgs Audio Generation: An Advanced AI Solution with Real-Time Audio Reasoning and Expressive Speech Synthesis for Enterprise ApplicationsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Interview with Hamza Tahir: Co-founder and CTO of ZenML

Here's a rare standalone GPU offer you don't want to miss out on if you're currently building yourself a high-end gaming PC. Woot!, which is owned by Amazon, is offering the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Vapor-X Gaming Graphics Card for $999.99. Amazon Prime members get free shipping, the rest of us pay just $6. This is currently the best price you'll find for the best RX 7900 XTX on the market. The Nitro+ boasts an outrageously overbuilt cooling system, impeccable build quality, and as a result, high overclocking headroom. This GPU comes with a 90-day Woot! warranty.Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU for $999.9990-Day Woot! WarrantySapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Vapor-X Gaming Graphics CardThe Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX is the priciest 7900 XTX GPU by MSRP. It normally retails at $1100, which is about $100 higher than most other models. But that $100 price premium is SO worth it for the build quality and cooling that you get with this behemoth. Outside of the PCB, the Nitro+ is almost entirely made out of metal. It is held together by a die-cast aluminum and magnesium alloy frame. A copper plate sits on the GPU core to transfer heat. Above that a vapor chamber acts like a giant heatpipe to transfer the heat to a massive finned aluminum heatsink that is then exhausted by three high-quality axial ball bearing fans. This is the best kind of cooling you can get short of a dedicated liquid cooling solution. The benefit of the extra cooling is that the Nitro+ runs virtually silent. It will run cooler and quieter than its main Nvidia competition, the RTX 4080/4080 Super/5070 Ti.The Nitro+ is overclocked by 180MHz out of the box. Performance-wise, without factoring in DLSS or ray tracing, the Nitro+ offers superior performance over the 4080 and rivals that of the 4080 Super while generating less heat and less noise. In order to match the acoustic and thermal performance, you would have to invest in a higher end RTX 4080 like the Asus ROG STRIX model, which is impossible to find anymore. This is an outstanding card for high-fps 4K gaming and is powerful enough to comfortably handle any game currently realized and on the horizon. What makes this deal even better is that the RTX 7900XTX GPU is nearly impossible to find at retail price anywhere else. I'm surprised Woot! even has it available and I expect inventory to be low. That means, currently, the best 7900XTX GPU out there also happens to be the least expensive.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

SummaryZenless Zone Zero, HoYoverse’s urban fantasy ARPG, will be available for free on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Cloud Gaming in June.Game Pass Ultimate members can play the game seamlessly across devices without downloads via Xbox Cloud Gaming.Dive into the vibrant world of New Eridu, explore the brand-new area Waifei Peninsula, and experience exhilarating combat. HoYoverse’s urban fantasy ARPG, Zenless Zone Zero, is set to officially launch on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Cloud Gaming this June alongside its Version 2.0 update. Players will be able to enjoy the immersive urban life experience and thrilling action combat in this dynamic and vibrant game on Xbox. As an exclusive benefit, Game Pass Ultimate members will unlock special in-game rewards—including Polychromes, Dennies, and more—simply by logging in after each major version update. It’s time to wishlist Zenless Zone Zero on Xbox now! Curious to learn more? Read on! Stunning Performance on Xbox In the world of Zenless Zone Zero, a calamity called the “Hollows” has destroyed modern society. New Eridu, the last remaining metropolis, has risen against the odds amidst this destructive catastrophe to become the last bastion of modern civilization. Players step into the shoes of a Proxy, a professional specializing in navigating the dangerous Hollows, guiding those who, for various reasons, need to venture inside. With the extraordinary performance of Xbox Series X|S, Proxies can look forward to an exceptional audiovisual feast, featuring DirectX RayTracing and HDR support, as well as native 4K resolution running at a smooth 60FPS performance. In addition, Game Pass Ultimate members will be able to seamlessly play Zenless Zone Zero across multiple devices, including mobile phones, via Xbox Cloud Gaming without downloads. Exhilarating Combat Experience Zenless Zone Zero distinguishes itself with an exciting combat system that blends accessibility with depth. It is designed to make thrilling combat more accessible and satisfying for all players while offering deep mechanics for skilled action veterans who desire to hone their combat skills. The game is optimized to support the Xbox controller, incorporating customized vibration feedback for different actions such as Basic and Special attacks. Players can fully unleash their skills in challenging battles while embracing the enhanced immersion and sense of impact during battle. Play Zenless Zone Zero Anytime, Anywhere Cross-progression and flexible server selection are fully supported on Xbox, allowing players to link their existing Zenless Zone Zero account from other platforms such as PlayStation, PC, Android, and iOS to Xbox. Furthermore, players can switch back and forth between multiple active games without lengthy loading times with the exclusive “Quick Resume” feature on Xbox Series X|S. Currently, the game supports 13 text and 4 voice-over languages. All of these ensure that Xbox players can dive into Zenless Zone Zero with unparalleled convenience, flexibility, and instant accessibility — wherever and whenever they choose. An Enchanting Journey Awaits in June 2025 Zenless Zone Zero fuses contemporary urban aesthetics with retro elements, crafting evocative narratives and authentic emotions that delve into the significance of ordinary people and their daily lives. Accompanied by distinctive characters, many players have found a profound sense of connection through this adventure in New Eridu. We are so thrilled and grateful that Zenless Zone Zero will finally arrive on Xbox alongside the highly anticipated Version 2.0 this June. The new chapter of the game will unfold in a unique area called Waifei Peninsula, in which urban life and Hollow exploration closely intertwine, bringing a more cohesive and immersive narrative experience. Soon, you will be able to join this spectacular journey as a Proxy and we just can’t wait to see you in New Eridu! Until then, stay tuned for more information on the game and on the exclusive rewards we are preparing for you. And of course, don’t forget to add Zenless Zone Zero to your Wishlist now!

Our long national nightmare is over. No, not that one. This one. According to posts on social media, Apple has completed installation of the more durable rainbow arches found within the circular campus. Readers may recall that the six color arches were removed for mysterious reasons a while back. The explanation, it turns out, was simply that Apple was working on a more permanent version of the structure that was originally intended to be decoration around a temporary stage. As of this week, the work appears to be completed in plenty of time for the six color arches to be present for WWDC 2025 in June. More timely, perhaps, is having the rainbow monument back in time for videos being produced ahead of time for Apple’s developer conference. Best Apple accessories Follow Zac Hall: X | Threads | Instagram | Mastodon Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Little love has been lost between billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI.Musk co-founded the company in 2015 alongside current CEO Sam Altman, only to rage quit roughly three years later, citing disagreements with the group's direction.Since then, in a flurry of personal attacks and disparaging comments, the mercurial Musk has taken it out on the firm, accusing it of failing to uphold its open-source roots. Over the last couple of years, Musk has filed a series of lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing it of being a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of investor Microsoft and failing to live up to its promise of developing a "safe" AI that "benefits all of humanity."This week, OpenAI countersued Musk, accusing him of a pattern of harassment, including "press attacks, malicious campaigns... a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims, and a sham bid for OpenAI's assets."OpenAI accused Musk of trying to become an "AGI dictator," including a scheme to buy OpenAI's nonprofit arm, a move the company claims was meant to scare off investors.Strikingly, OpenAI has the receipts. The wealth of incriminating documents included in the countersuit form what Electrek is calling Musk's "web of lies" surrounding his attempts to assume control over OpenAI is coming to light — and raises the question of how much damage Musk's credibility can stand as his fibs and dubious timelines start to sound more like PT Barnum than Steve Jobs.Last year, OpenAI had already revealed that Musk had attempted to merge OpenAI with his EV maker Tesla, a plan that didn't sit well with the former's leadership.Perhaps most hypocritically, while Musk has repeatedly accused OpenAI of failing to live up to its promises of being open, he was the one suggesting OpenAI should move to a for-profit structure.According to a 2017 email revealed by OpenAI, Musk attempted to assume control over OpenAI by proposing to give himself preferred shares and a supermajority.In 2018, OpenAI eventually wound up accepting major investment from tech giant Microsoft to kick off its for-profit arm. Musk left soon after.Since then, Musk has launched his own competing AI company in July 2023, called xAI, in an apparent bid to rival OpenAI. He has also attempted to shift priorities at his carmaker toward AI development, ultimately threatening investors in January 2024 that he would develop AI products and robots elsewhere unless he was given a "25 percent voting control."Unfortunately for him, his ill-conceived and ill-executed $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022 left a giant hole in his pocket. Compounding these issues, a Delaware judge voided Musk's gargantuan $55 billion Tesla compensation package, calling it an "unfathomable sum" and arguing it was unfair to shareholders. In August, shareholders overwhelmingly approved the package — a widely expected development, given their longstanding loyalty to the CEO — only for the same Delaware judge to reject it once again.Last month, Musk announced that he had sold X-formerly-Twitter to his AI startup xAI, which is valued at $80 billion, in a baffling, 11th-hour attempt to rescue his ailing social media company that raised plenty of eyebrows.In other words, Musk was financially on the back foot, which could explain his flailing against OpenAI.Meanwhile, his smear campaign against OpenAI continues, culminating in a gigantic $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI in February. The move was widely seen as a way to slow down OpenAI's transition to a for-profit entity.In its latest countersuit, OpenAI accused Musk of making up the almost $100 billion purchase price, pointing out the lack of "evidence of financing."In short, Musk's actions suggest he's been trying to strongarm himself into a position of power and influence in the AI industry at all costs — actions that have hurt OpenAI, the company claims.The protracted legal battle raises a number of questions. Did Musk feel left out by OpenAI's meteoric rise to the world's leading AI firm? Did he launch xAI because he failed to take over the ChatGPT maker?Given the ample evidence, there are plenty of good reasons to believe that Musk's attempts to paint himself as the victim and OpenAI as the villain are riddled with holes and ulterior motives.How all of this will play out remains to be seen, especially with Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI now scheduled for a jury trial next spring — but one thing's for sure: a factual assertion by Musk at this point is worth the tweet it's written on.More on OpenAI and Musk: Elon Musk's AI Company Tried to Recruit an OpenAI Engineer and His Reply Was BrutalShare This Article

Apr 11, 2025Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Vulnerability Fortinet has revealed that threat actors have found a way to maintain read-only access to vulnerable FortiGate devices even after the initial access vector used to breach the devices was patched. The attackers are believed to have leveraged known and now-patched security flaws, including, but not limited to, CVE-2022-42475, CVE-2023-27997, and CVE-2024-21762. "A threat actor used a known vulnerability to implement read-only access to vulnerable FortiGate devices," the network security company said in an advisory released Thursday. "This was achieved via creating a symbolic link connecting the user file system and the root file system in a folder used to serve language files for the SSL-VPN." Fortinet said the modifications took place in the user file system and managed to evade detection, causing the symbolic link (aka symlink) to be left behind even after the security holes responsible for the initial access were plugged. This, in turn, enabled the threat actors to maintain read-only access to files on the device's file system, including configurations. However, customers who have never enabled SSL-VPN are not impacted by the issue. It's not clear who is behind the activity, but Fortinet said its investigation indicated that it was not aimed at any specific region or industry. It also said it directly notified customers who were affected by the issue. As further mitigations to prevent such problems from happening again, a series of software updates to FortiOS have been rolled out - FortiOS 7.4, 7.2, 7.0, 6.4 - The symlink was flagged as malicious so that it gets automatically removed by the antivirus engine FortiOS 7.6.2, 7.4.7, 7.2.11 & 7.0.17, 6.4.16 - The symlink was removed and SSL-VPN UI has been modified to prevent the serving of such malicious symbolic links Customers are advised to update their instances to FortiOS versions 7.6.2, 7.4.7, 7.2.11 & 7.0.17 or 6.4.16, review device configurations, and treat all configurations as potentially compromised and perform appropriate recovery steps. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an advisory of its own, urging users to reset exposed credentials and consider disabling SSL-VPN functionality until the patches can be applied. The Computer Emergency Response Team of France (CERT-FR), in a similar bulletin, said it's aware of compromises dating all the way back to early 2023. In a statement shared with The Hacker News, watchTowr CEO Benjamin Harris said the incident is a concern for two important reasons. "First, in the wild exploitation is becoming significantly faster than organizations can patch," Harris said. "More importantly, attackers are demonstrably and deeply aware of this fact." "Second, and more terrifying, we have seen, numerous times, attackers deploy capabilities and backdoors after rapid exploitation designed to survive the patching, upgrade and factory reset processes organizations have come to rely on to mitigate these situations to maintain persistence and access to compromised organizations." Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE    

In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. “I wondered,” she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, “if Sam Altman’s machine could do it for me.” So she tried ChatGPT. But as it expanded on Vara’s prompts in sentences ranging from the stilted to the unsettling to the sublime, the thing she’d enlisted as a tool stopped seeming so mechanical.  “Once upon a time, she taught me to exist,” the AI model wrote of the young woman Vara had idolized. Vara, a journalist and novelist, called the resulting essay “Ghosts,” and in her opinion, the best lines didn’t come from her: “I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them … as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same.” The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. But it also offers a particularly human problem in narrative: How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them? And how do the words we choose and stories we tell about technology affect the role we allow it to take on (or even take over) in our creative lives? Both Vara’s book and The Uncanny Muse, a collection of essays on the history of art and automation by the music critic David Hajdu, explore how humans have historically and personally wrestled with the ways in which machines relate to our own bodies, brains, and creativity. At the same time, The Mind Electric, a new book by a neurologist, Pria Anand, reminds us that our own inner workings may not be so easy to replicate. Searches is a strange artifact. Part memoir, part critical analysis, and part AI-assisted creative experimentation, Vara’s essays trace her time as a tech reporter and then novelist in the San Francisco Bay Area alongside the history of the industry she watched grow up. Tech was always close enough to touch: One college friend was an early Google employee, and when Vara started reporting on Facebook (now Meta), she and Mark Zuckerberg became “friends” on his platform. In 2007, she published a scoop that the company was planning to introduce ad targeting based on users’ personal information—the first shot fired in the long, gnarly data war to come. In her essay “Stealing Great Ideas,” she talks about turning down a job reporting on Apple to go to graduate school for fiction. There, she wrote a novel about a tech founder, which was later published as The Immortal King Rao. Vara points out that in some ways at the time, her art was “inextricable from the resources [she] used to create it”—products like Google Docs, a MacBook, an iPhone. But these pre-AI resources were tools, plain and simple. What came next was different. Interspersed with Vara’s essays are chapters of back-and-forths between the author and ChatGPT about the book itself, where the bot serves as editor at Vara’s prompting. ChatGPT obligingly summarizes and critiques her writing in a corporate-­shaded tone that’s now familiar to any knowledge worker. “If there’s a place for disagreement,” it offers about the first few chapters on tech companies, “it might be in the balance of these narratives. Some might argue that the ­benefits—such as job creation, innovation in various sectors like AI and logistics, and contributions to the global economy—can outweigh the negatives.”  Searches: Selfhood in the Digital AgeVauhini VaraPANTHEON, 2025 Vara notices that ChatGPT writes “we” and “our” in these responses, pulling it into the human story, not the tech one: “Earlier you mentioned ‘our access to information’ and ‘our collective experiences and understandings.’” When she asks what the rhetorical purpose of that choice is, ChatGPT responds with a numbered list of benefits including “inclusivity and solidarity” and “neutrality and objectivity.” It adds that “using the first-person plural helps to frame the discussion in terms of shared human experiences and collective challenges.” Does the bot believe it’s human? Or at least, do the humans who made it want other humans to believe it does? “Can corporations use these [rhetorical] tools in their products too, to subtly make people identify with, and not in opposition to, them?” Vara asks. ChatGPT replies, “Absolutely.” Vara has concerns about the words she’s used as well. In “Thank You for Your Important Work,” she worries about the impact of “Ghosts,” which went viral after it was first published. Had her writing helped corporations hide the reality of AI behind a velvet curtain? She’d meant to offer a nuanced “provocation,” exploring how uncanny generative AI can be. But instead, she’d produced something beautiful enough to resonate as an ad for its creative potential. Even Vara herself felt fooled. She particularly loved one passage the bot wrote, about Vara and her sister as kids holding hands on a long drive. But she couldn’t imagine either of them being so sentimental. What Vara had elicited from the machine, she realized, was “wish fulfillment,” not a haunting.  The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them?  The machine wasn’t the only thing crouching behind that too-good-to-be-true curtain. The GPT models and others are trained through human labor, in sometimes exploitative conditions. And much of the training data was the creative work of human writers before her. “I’d conjured artificial language about grief through the extraction of real human beings’ language about grief,” she writes. The creative ghosts in the model were made of code, yes, but also, ultimately, made of people. Maybe Vara’s essay helped cover up that truth too. In the book’s final essay, Vara offers a mirror image of those AI call-and-­response exchanges as an antidote. After sending out an anonymous survey to women of various ages, she presents the replies to each question, one after the other. “Describe something that doesn’t exist,” she prompts, and the women respond: “God.” “God.” “God.” “Perfection.” “My job. (Lost it.)” Real people contradict each other, joke, yell, mourn, and reminisce. Instead of a single authoritative voice—an editor, or a company’s limited style guide—Vara gives us the full gasping crowd of human creativity. “What’s it like to be alive?” Vara asks the group. “It depends,” one woman answers.     David Hajdu, now music editor at The Nation and previously a music critic for The New Republic, goes back much further than the early years of Facebook to tell the history of how humans have made and used machines to express ourselves. Player pianos, microphones, synthesizers, and electrical instruments were all assistive technologies that faced skepticism before acceptance and, sometimes, elevation in music and popular culture. They even influenced the kind of art people were able to and wanted to make. Electrical amplification, for instance, allowed singers to use a wider vocal range and still reach an audience. The synthesizer introduced a new lexicon of sound to rock music. “What’s so bad about being mechanical, anyway?” Hajdu asks in The Uncanny Muse. And “what’s so great about being human?”  The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AIDavid HajduW.W. NORTON & COMPANY, 2025 But Hajdu is also interested in how intertwined the history of man and machine can be, and how often we’ve used one as a metaphor for the other. Descartes saw the body as empty machinery for consciousness, he reminds us. Hobbes wrote that “life is but a motion of limbs.” Freud described the mind as a steam engine. Andy Warhol told an interviewer that “everybody should be a machine.” And when computers entered the scene, humans used them as metaphors for themselves too. “Where the machine model had once helped us understand the human body … a new category of machines led us to imagine the brain (how we think, what we know, even how we feel or how we think about what we feel) in terms of the computer,” Hajdu writes.  But what is lost with these one-to-one mappings? What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1s and 0s? Maybe what happens is we get a world full of chatbots and agents, computer-­generated artworks and AI DJs, that companies claim are singular creative voices rather than remixes of a million human inputs. And perhaps we also get projects like the painfully named Painting Fool—an AI that paints, developed by Simon Colton, a scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He told Hajdu that he wanted to “demonstrate the potential of a computer program to be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right.” What Colton means is not just a machine that makes art but one that expresses its own worldview: “Art that communicates what it’s like to be a machine.”   What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1s and 0s? Hajdu seems to be curious and optimistic about this line of inquiry. “Machines of many kinds have been communicating things for ages, playing invaluable roles in our communication through art,” he says. “Growing in intelligence, machines may still have more to communicate, if we let them.” But the question that The Uncanny Muse raises at the end is: Why should we art-­making humans be so quick to hand over the paint to the paintbrush? Why do we care how the paintbrush sees the world? Are we truly finished telling our own stories ourselves? Pria Anand might say no. In The Mind Electric, she writes: “Narrative is universally, spectacularly human; it is as unconscious as breathing, as essential as sleep, as comforting as familiarity. It has the capacity to bind us, but also to other, to lay bare, but also obscure.” The electricity in The Mind Electric belongs entirely to the human brain—no metaphor necessary. Instead, the book explores a number of neurological afflictions and the stories patients and doctors tell to better understand them. “The truth of our bodies and minds is as strange as fiction,” Anand writes—and the language she uses throughout the book is as evocative as that in any novel.  The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our BrainsPria AnandWASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, 2025 In personal and deeply researched vignettes in the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Anand shows that any comparison between brains and machines will inevitably fall flat. She tells of patients who see clear images when they’re functionally blind, invent entire backstories when they’ve lost a memory, break along seams that few can find, and—yes—see and hear ghosts. In fact, Anand cites one study of 375 college students in which researchers found that nearly three-quarters “had heard a voice that no one else could hear.” These were not diagnosed schizophrenics or sufferers of brain tumors—just people listening to their own uncanny muses. Many heard their name, others heard God, and some could make out the voice of a loved one who’d passed on. Anand suggests that writers throughout history have harnessed organic exchanges with these internal apparitions to make art. “I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her own experiences with ghostly sounds. “I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation.” The mind in The Mind Electric is vast, mysterious, and populated. The narratives people construct to traverse it are just as full of wonder.  Humans are not going to stop using technology to help us create anytime soon—and there’s no reason we should. Machines make for wonderful tools, as they always have. But when we turn the tools themselves into artists and storytellers, brains and bodies, magicians and ghosts, we bypass truth for wish fulfillment. Maybe what’s worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to contribute our own voices to the lively and loud chorus of human experience. And we keep others from the human pleasure of hearing them too.  Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Christian Dimbleby joins Nordic practice after 20 years at passivhaus specialist ArchitypeWhite Arkitekter has hired an associate at passivhaus specialist Architype as its new UK head of sustainability. Christian Dimbleby has joined the Swedish practice after two decades at Architype designing low-carbon schemes including Hackbridge Primary School and the Enterprise Centre at the University of East Anglia. Since 2022 he has also worked with the UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard looking at best practice data and helping to set 2050 operational energy targets. Christian Dimbleby has joined White Arkitekter after two decades at Architype He is a frequent speaker on sustainable design at universities and campaign groups including Architects Declare. Dimbleby will drive sustainable practices across White Arkitekter’s UK portfolio, which includes the under-construction Velindre Cancer Centre in Wales which is aiming to be the UK’s most sustainable hospital. The firm’s London studio director Michael Woodford said Dimbleby’s “wealth of experience and expertise in delivering low energy and net-zero buildings is invaluable as we work towards achieving our sustainability goals and addressing the climate emergency head on.” Dimbelby added: “I’ve long admired White’s Arkitekter’s work with timber, especially with the Sara Kulturhus in Skellefteå, Sweden.  “But more than it just being about the material choice, this project demonstrates the practice’s wider sustainable vision in delivering low carbon and beautiful buildings.  “My work has always sought to make a better future for all, so I’m very excited to help support White’s vision to deliver all carbon neutral buildings by 2030.” White Arkitekter is the biggest practice in Scandinavia with 600 staff employed across 16 offices in Sweden, Norway, Germany and the UK. Recent projects by its 30-strong London team include the Gascoigne East and West schemes in Barking for the council’s housing development arm Be First, which was completed by contractor Willmott Dixon in 2023. The firm is also working with O’DonnellBrown Architects and Ekkist on the Crichton Project, a cultural centre in Dumfries, Scotland.

If the bond selloff continues, it could bring widespread economic pain in the form of higher borrowing costs on loans and credit, plus a slowdown in growth. Experts say for now it's 'wait and see.'