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.'

April 11, 20253 min readCrows Are Good at Geometry. Don’t Look So SurprisedCrows can tell the shapes of stars from those of moons and symmetrical quadrilaterals from unsymmetrical ones, new results showBy Gayoung Lee edited by Allison ParshallCarrion Crow (Corvus corone). AGAMI Photo Agency/Alamy Stock PhotoCrows sometimes have a bad rap: they’re said to be loud and disruptive, and myths surrounding the birds tend to link them to death or misfortune. But crows deserve more love and charity, says Andreas Nieder, a neurophysiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They not only can be incredibly cute, cuddly and social but also are extremely smart—especially when it comes to geometry, as Nieder has found.In a paper published on Friday in Science Advances, Nieder and his colleagues report that crows display an impressive aptitude at distinguishing shapes by using geometric irregularities as a cognitive cue. These crows could even discern quite subtle differences. For the experiment, the crows perched in front of a digital screen that, almost like a video game, displayed progressively more complex combinations of shapes. First, the crows were taught to peck at a certain shape for a reward. Then they were presented with that same shape among five others—for example, one star shape placed among five moon shapes—and were rewarded if they correctly picked the "outlier."“Initially [the outlier] was very obvious,” Nieder says. But once the crows appeared to have familiarized themselves with how the “game” worked, Nieder and his team introduced more similar quadrilateral shapes to see if the crows would still be able to identify outliers. “And they could tell us, for instance, if they saw a figure that was just not a square, slightly skewed, among all the other squares,” Nieder says. “They really could do this spontaneously [and] discriminate the outlier shapes based on the geometric differences without us needing them to train them additionally.” Even when the researchers stopped rewarding them with treats, the crows continued to peck the outliers.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Ripley Cleghorn; Source: “Crows Recognize Geometric Regularity,” by Philipp Schmidbauer et al., in Science Advances. Published online April 11, 2025 (reference)Telling shapes apart based strictly on geometric properties, such as side lengths or inner angles, is a lot trickier than it sounds, says Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Italy. Vallortigara, who was not involved in the new study, explains that almost all animals do recognize differences in length or area of surfaces to some extent. But it requires even more cognitive sophistication to identify that, for instance, squares and triangles have different numbers of sides or different inner-angle sizes on flat, two-dimensional surfaces.“The general view among scientists was that proper geometrical, Euclidean knowledge as applied to objects ... was probably limited to humans,” Vallortigara says. Nieder’s work now “is challenging this view—because the crows show a sort of intuitive, strictly perceptual recognition of geometric properties.”But why are crows good at geometry? The reason is likely evolutionary, scientists say. “I suspect that the origin and the drive for the development of these abilities mainly has to do with spatial orientation,” Vallortigara says. “It could be that, depending on foraging habits or other things, [crows] had more need to develop that [than] other species.”On the other hand, geometric intelligence is also a key part of recognizing faces, for example, because we use the position of features such as the eyes and mouth to distinguish between individuals. If that’s the case, crows might be using their geometric intelligence for mate selection or individual recognition, Vallortigara says.Of course, such benefits could easily apply to other animals, and both Nieder and Vallortigara concur that it wouldn’t be surprising if other birds—or any other animal, for that matter—were also capable of similar feats. “All these capabilities, at the end of the day, from a biological point of view, have evolved because they provide a survival advantage or a reproductive advantage,” Nieder says.These abilities might also have evolved in many different ways. For example, our cerebral cortex, “the site in the brain that is integrating all sorts of information and making us smart and conscious,” didn’t develop in birds, who instead have much simpler arrangements of independent neurons, Nieder explains. But in spite of these genetic differences, “these animals are terribly intelligent—so, obviously, evolution found two different ways of giving rise to behaviorally flexible animals.”Nieder hopes that future research will reveal what parts of the crow’s brain are responsible for this geometric intelligence. “It is very important that we can work with animals and also can explore these animals. We learn a lot about their brains but also about our brains because we have such fundamental skills that we share with them.”

How good are Switch 2's mouse controls? Eurogamer's verdict from the big reveal event "You have to create a new claw-like way to hold your hand." Image credit: Eurogamer Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on April 11, 2025 The Nintendo Switch 2: you've got questions, and now that Tom P and Ian have returned from the Parisian reveal event, we've got answers. Our full conversation was recorded for the Inside Eurogamer podcast, which you can listen to now if you're a Supporter. That show is especially for Supporters and it's where we elaborate on the work we do, and where we answer your questions. If you don't know, supporting Eurogamer costs £3/€3/$3 a month or £30/€30/$30 a year, and it removes adverts from the site as well as gives you exclusive content like this. However, since Switch 2 is currently such a hot topic, I thought I'd share a few excerpts here. Without doubt, one of the most questionable new features of Switch 2 is the mouse-like use of the new Joy-Con. Both Ian and Tom got a chance to try this, however neither particularly liked it. "I found it really difficult to get on board with," Tom told me, who used the mouse controls in the underwhelming Drag x Drive wheelchair basketball game. "And partly maybe that's just me getting to use a control scheme I've never used before. But also for a fast-paced competitive game... You really have to get involved with the controls. You have to twist and turn, almost similar to being in a wheelchair and trying to do this movement yourself. I came out of it and my arms were aching. I remember saying to you Ian, 'I'm exhausted after playing that.' I only played it for five minutes. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Separately, here's Ian's chat with Jim about Switch 2 following the Parisian reveal event.Watch on YouTube "Yeah," Ian added. "Most games that Tom played, I filmed first and I'd be like, ooh I can't wait to have my go. But that one I was like, no, I think I'll skip that one." One of the things that concerns me about the Joy-Con being used as a mouse is that it's a thin, rectangular device when turned on its side, which is very different to the long-settled-on design of a computer mouse: wide and flat and round so as to hold the wait of your hand without tipping over. Does it feel as awkward to hold as it looks? "I used it for two things," Ian said, "for Metroid Prime 4 Beyond and for the demo [the Welcome Tour], and I found them fairly uncomfortable to hold. You have to create a new claw-like way to hold your hand to be able to touch the face buttons and things. There were often times where I'd have to look down to work out where my thumb was to find the face buttons I needed to press. "I would struggle to think of any game that I would want to play using the mouse function, unless Nintendo launched a Mario Paint" "If you've used a mouse before, which pretty much everyone has, you are used to holding a mouse in a certain way which is your hand out flat. Now, your hand is in this little kind of pincer way. Yeah, it was uncomfortable for me to hold. Maybe after I've trained my hands it'll be fine." In use, though, the mouse functionality worked well. Ian said it was accurate and responsive and he didn't encounter any tracking issues, though I should add that neither of them tried rubbing it on their legs. We hope to do that at a follow-up event in London this week, by the way. Ian also said the mouse functionality offered faster aiming in Metroid Prime 4 as opposed to using a controller. "But as Tom said, who wants to play their console in front of a desk?" Ian said. "You're going to want to relax on your sofa, sit back, and play Metroid that way. I would struggle to think of any game that I would want to play using the mouse function, unless Nintendo launched a Mario Paint." Mario Kart World: an undeniable high point of the Switch 2 reveal event.Watch on YouTube If Drag x Drive and its mouse controls were a low-point of the presentation, though, an undeniable high-point was Mario Kart World. Both Ian and Tom were bowled over by it, specifically by the new knockout tournament mode, which is a sort of racing take on Battle Royale. It apparently revitalises the fairly staid design of Nintendo's long-running racing series, and in tandem with the open-world features of the game, makes Mario Kart World feel like the boldest entry in the series in years. To hear them talk about it makes me very excited indeed. They were also both impressed by Donkey Kong Bananza, which closed the Nintendo Direct show to a relatively lukewarm response, perhaps because people expected a Mario game there instead. Regardless, in play, DK Bananza convinces - the gorilla-powered level destruction in particular. "This is something that definitely feels new and definitely feels like you need new hardware to play it," Tom said. "The destruction stuff is really impressive. I'm surprisingly enthusiastic for it to be a pretty important title for Switch 2." This is but a snippet of a longer conversation, which takes in the Paris reveal event itself, Switch 2 pricing issues, what it's like to hold and use the new hardware, and what the screen is like. Nintendo's Switch 2 will be released 5th June in the UK and pre-orders are scarce but open. Check out our Nintendo Switch 2 'everything we know' article for everything you, um, need to know.

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here The Diablo 4 2025 roadmap has been released and fans aren’t particularly happy. With the game’s update schedule revealing a new seasons and a concerning amount of IP Collabs, even former-Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has complained about the game’s plans. Nevertheless, Blizzard is adamant that the update schedule for Diablo 4 will be satisfying for fans. With players hoping for more than just a few typical seasons, Blizzard has claimed that there’s a lot more to come. Diablo 4’s roadmap isn’t complete Speaking to fans on Twitter, Blizzard director of social and content marketing Adan Fketcher explained that the roadmap fans have been given is incomplete. While the roadmap does include some of the additions coming to the ARPG, there’s also more that the studio has yet to reveal. “It isn’t the full roadmap,” Fletcher told fans on social media. “More details [will come] as we get further in the year become less and less as those are still in development.” Fletcher explained that “there are some good surprises” coming to the game that Blizzard didn’t confirm in the recent roadmap. While Blizzard isn’t revealing any of these surprises anytime soon, Fletcher claims that cans will be “pleasantly happy about [what’s] coming up”. With annual expansions no longer happening, the next major expansion for Diablo 4 is coming out sometime in 2026. Likely bringing a brand-new area and a new class, hopefully a Holy Class, there’s a long wait until the next major chapter in the game’s story. Nevertheless, it does seem like Blizzard has something else in the works for the game. Perhaps a brand-new gameplay feature will be added, or a huge extension of the game’s endgame content. Whatever the case, it would be nice to have something outside of seasonal content to look forward to. For more Diablo 4 news, read about the teased Switch 2 port of the game. Additionally, read our thoughts on what Blizzard really needs to change to make that port actually fun to play. Diablo 4 Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X Genre(s): Action, Action RPG, RPG Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share

The cosmopolitan fashion and design capital of Milan is one whose style is best exemplified by the style-setting interiors the city is known for, in our opinion. The luxury accommodations there in particular reflect the old-world elegance of their surroundings through regal, velveteen decor, views of the Piazza della Repubblica and and beyond, plus fine-dining establishments that epitomize Italian hospitality.As Milan Design Week (the fair that beckons thousands in our industry each March) comes to a close, we’re sharing a few of the Milan hotels our editors call home when they’re in town for Salone—including one with a scene-y lounge where design editors flock in between appointments and a serene beauty in the heart of the city (converted from a former monastery) where you can peacefully recover from jet lag. Below, read up on all our favorite spots for sneaking in a workout, taking tea on the terrace, and proximity to the Duomo for traversing the town.Portrait Milano - Lungarno Collection“The Portrait is my favorite place to stay in Milan. What was once an old seminary is now one of the most beautiful hotels in the city. Many of the rooms look out onto the courtyard, and they’re all so comfortable and quiet the way that they’re laid out. I’ve never heard street noise staying there.The courtyard’s so beautiful, the Beefbar is right there to eat at, and the rooms are perfectly designed with everything you need. Each one features elegant touches of red and feels opulent and old world, but still modern. A lot of them even have little private terraces. Room service is really fast and they have such a good in-room bar for tea. I love that there’s a proper kettle and lots of sachets, and I always appreciate that the service is excellent there.” —Amy Astley, global editorial director and U.S. editor-in-chiefFrom $1,600 per night.BOOK NOWMax Brown Missori“Last year during Milan Design Week I stayed at Max Brown Missori Milano, a hotel that had just opened near one of my favorite buildings, the Brutalist Torre Velasca, by BBPR. Designed by the Amsterdam-based Saar Zafrir, the hotel’s 64 ’70s-inspired rooms are filled with vintage furniture that feel uniquely suited to the city. (Most even have their very own record player, charming!) Rooms range in size from itty bitty (at a quite reasonable price point) to roomy, and, located just a few blocks from the Duomo, it's the perfect home base for canvasing the city.” —Hannah Martin, senior design editorFrom $380 per night.BOOK NOWPark Hyatt Milan“I was lucky enough to stay at the Park Hyatt once upon a recent Salone del Mobile as the guest of a global luxury brand—which tells you all you need to know. This hotel has long been a favorite of jet-setting fashionistas on account of its central location, comfortable yet understated accommodations, and see-and-be-seen La Cupola restaurant, which is tucked beneath a central 30-foot tall glass dome. That’s where I happily ate breakfast each day, making multiple trips to the generous buffet before embarking for the day, making my way across the nearby Piazza del Duomo or through Galleria Vittorrio Emanuele II to my myriad appointments and events.Whenever possible, I would retreat back to my comfortable yet tailored room, which, along with the rest of the accommodations, was recently refurbished by Italian architect Flaviano Capriotti. In Milan, for me, the Park Hyatt is the place to be.” —Samuel Cochran, global features directorFrom $1,300 per night.BOOK NOWHotel Principe Di Savoia“I love staying at the Principe for three reasons: the quintessentially Italian service, the clubhouse-like feel of the lobby breakfast (you're bound to run into your design colleagues), and the absolutely divine sun-drenched gym complete with a wrap-around terrace. It's one of the best hotel gyms in the world. I love an old-school European hotel and the Principe always delivers.” —Madeline O’Malley, market director“The lobby lounge at the Principe is the best, and it’s a great scene. You can have breakfast, you can eat, you can have tea, you can have drinks, or whatever you like. You see everybody during Design Week at the Principe.” —AstleyFrom $760 per night.BOOK NOW