Welcome to your Friday edition of TMA. It’s a public holiday where I’m from, so it’s a shorter briefing than usual. Barring a barrage of new cars (tariffs? shh!) revealed at the New York International Auto Show, it’s been a relatively quiet week, but not without a bit of drama. Engadget “You know, they say money can’t buy happiness. And… yeah, OK… I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? …Right?? Fuck, I’m so alone.” That’s what a pretty realistic AI voice clone of Elon Musk was saying to pedestrians at crosswalks in Palo Alto. An AI Mark Zuckerberg joined him, with both billionaires’ voices mimicked to say, well, the things a lot of us are thinking, whether it’s the invasive AI push, billionaires wielding power over government or other bleak, beige real-world versions of Black Mirror premises. They were in operation at downtown intersections in Redwood City, Menlo Park and Palo Alto but were gone, sadly, by Saturday. No one’s staked a claim to the prank — but there are probably many people in Silicon Valley capable of pulling it off. More recently, an AI clone of Jeff Bezos was talking on Seattle crosswalks. — Mat Smith Get Engadget's newsletter delivered direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here! The biggest stories you might have missed Our (actual) favorite VPN is on sale, with 64 percent off The best VPNs (just to prove my point) Mario Kart World Direct: Rewatch nearly 17 minutes of Switch 2 gameplay 18 percent of the new music uploaded to Deezer is AI-generated 20,000 tracks each day. 5 total listens. Music streaming service Deezer said 20,000 completely AI-generated tracks are added to its music service daily, making up “over 18% of all uploaded content” the platform receives every day. At the start of the year, Deezer introduced a tool for detecting and tagging AI-generated content, which at the time accounted for only 10 percent of uploads. Continue reading. Panasonic S1R II camera review Its video is great, it finally does stills well and it’s cheaper than its rivals. The S1R II is Panasonic’s first camera that can both shoot up to 8K video and capture 44-megapixel (MP) photos in rapid bursts. And unlike its rivals, the new model is available at a more reasonable $3,300 — half the price of Sony’s A1 II. At the same time, it’s a massive upgrade over the original S1R. We have some issues with the rolling shutter, but it’s a minor problem on an otherwise excellent hybrid camera. Continue reading. The $666 edition of Doom includes a game box that, itself, plays Doom The true physical edition. Doom Physical editions of the iconic shooters Doom and Doom II are on their way, and the highlight is something called the Will It Run Edition. This comes with a game box that actually runs the original Doom itself. All you have to do is connect a controller as the box also has a port. It’s an expensive gimmick: The copies cost $666 and are being kept to a limited run of 666. Because hell. There’s also the usual special edition content inside, including a soundtrack (on cassette), trading cards and a handheld cacodemon handheld console that also plays Doom. Continue reading. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-111621557.html?src=rss

Here's when you can stream the first three episodes of Andor season 2 on Disney+.

Nathan Fielder’s comedy can feel like watching a slow-motion plane crash. On semi-scripted shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, the comedian makes real people squirm with his bizarre suggestions, which he offers with rigor mortis-level deadpan. Some of it is best viewed through the slightly parted fingers of a face-obscuring hand. The second season of The Rehearsal, returning to HBO on April 20, is no exception. Like its predecessor, the show again uses elaborate role-play to game out difficult social scenarios, only this time the stakes are way higher. Season 2 focuses on the dynamic between copilots—and how it can lead to, or possibly prevent, plane crashes. But while the topic may be eerily timely, this season is truly about the universal experience of standing up to a superior at work. In its first season, Fielder positioned The Rehearsal as a show where different people practice solving a new interpersonal problem each episode. Using a fleet of actors and expensive, movie-caliber sets, Fielder created a reality-simulation technique that allowed its subjects to rehearse, say, admitting to a friend they’d been lying for years about having a master’s degree. By Episode 2, however, the show pivoted to helping one woman—and Fielder himself—rehearse what it might be like to become parents. The remainder of the season was spent burrowing further down that (often uncomfortable) rabbit hole. The second season instead dispenses with any pretense of being an anthology and announces its aviation concentration straight away. As glimpsed in the trailer, the season’s opening moments encapsulate everything the show will spend this batch of six episodes unpacking. Inside a cockpit, the first officer voices his disapproval of the pilot’s tactics. The pilot ignores him, and their plane crashes in a fiery wreck—only for the cockpit to be revealed as a motion simulator. Cue Fielder emerging in front of a projected inferno, a Mona Lisa smile on his face. As they used to say on infomercials, there’s got to be a better way. At some point after the first season of The Rehearsal aired in 2022, well before the recent spate of plane crashes and near misses, Fielder apparently became interested in air disasters. While reading through endless pages of black box transcripts, he uncovered a distinct pattern. Whenever first officers seemed to sense an imminent problem, they often either fell short of a full-throated warning or buckled under the slightest pushback. What if, Fielder wondered, he could help first officers rehearse advocating for themselves more effectively? Disagreeing with one’s supervisor presents a classic conundrum. Say something and the boss might either overrule you or resent you for being right. Keep it to yourself, letting the chips fall where they may, and you might be the one getting thrown under the bus if there’s any fallout. This thorny communication issue carries exponentially more urgency and risk, though, when it happens at high altitudes, with dozens of lives at stake. [Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO] Though he understands he might not be the right person to take on this particular communication conflict, Fielder recognizes a source of killer material when he sees one. A lot of the comedian’s previous work mined humor out of the way people communicate. His breakout series Nathan for You, which ran on Comedy Central for four seasons in the 2010s, featured Fielder convincing small business owners to try out wild marketing strategies. Although the strategies themselves were the meat of the show—a yogurt shop unveiling a poo-flavored option, for instance, to drum up publicity—part of the cringy fun was watching Fielder talk people into going through with them. He’d present each ridiculous idea with a straight face and a feather-soft voice, then the owner would laugh nervously, unsure whether Fielder was serious. (Rule number one of these shows: Fielder is always serious.) Viewers could practically see the gears turning in the owner’s heads, questioning whether the reward of getting a plug for their business on a TV show will be worth the short-term pain of actually going through with a poo-flavored yogurt promotion. Invariably, they’d agree to whatever madness Fielder had in store, usually after an awkward silence. [Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO] In the second season of The Rehearsal, though, that equation has inverted. Instead of using his authority as an ambassador of television to talk people into doing something, he’s teaching people to talk someone in a position of authority out of doing something. Throughout the course of the season, as with most Fielder productions, some profound—and profoundly uncomfortable—truths come tumbling out. Also as per usual, the show is filled with surreal meta-moments, inventive tableaux, and the creator grappling with whether his own communication issues might stem from having the aura of a corporate IT guy with a dark secret. Whether the comedian ultimately finds a practical method for making difficult cockpit conversations easier will remain unspoiled here. Watching the show, though, should provide some new ideas about how to communicate with one’s boss—especially when they’re about to make a huge mistake.

Projectors have always held a subtle advantage over TVs: inherent portability. You could never just casually toss a 50-inch television into a bag for a weekend getaway. Yet, for a long time, projectors themselves weren’t exactly pinnacles of design – functional, often bulky, white or beige boxes. That’s changing fast. A new wave of smart projectors, spearheaded by brands like XGIMI, JMGO, and Nebula, are aggressively shedding that utilitarian skin, embracing aesthetics that make them mantle-worthy decor and genuinely travel-friendly companions. The era of the boring box is fading. Into this evolving landscape steps the Dangbei N2 Mini. At first glance, it fits right into the modern aesthetic of compact tech. It’s small, unassuming, and designed to blend in, aided by a clever built-in gimbal stand allowing easy tilting up to 95 degrees. This isn’t a powerhouse meant for a dedicated home theater; it’s positioned as a versatile companion for spontaneous movie nights, easy bedroom ceiling projections, or adding a big screen where a TV won’t fit. Its portability invites users to rethink content consumption. Designer: Dangbei Click Here to Buy Now The crucial feature that sets it apart is its native Netflix certification. Dangbei securing official Netflix support is a huge win for convenience, sitting alongside preloaded Prime Video, YouTube, YouTube Kids, and nearly 300 other streaming apps. No Chromecast, no Fire Stick, no Roku, no Apple TV. The N2 Mini has everything it needs within, giving you a smart device that’s all-encompassing on both the hardware and software level. Of course, a projector lives and dies by its image quality. The N2 Mini offers a native 1080p resolution for solid clarity, capable of projecting an image up to 120 inches. It has 200 ISO lumens of brightness, which might be its only Achilles heel. Although not designed to battle bright daylight, it performs admirably in dimly lit or dark rooms – its intended environment. Support for HDR10 and HLG also aims to deliver better contrast and color than basic SDR projectors within its brightness class. Automatic focus, keystone correction, and even obstacle avoidance come baked in, so your projector is literally as easy to use as a point-and-shoot. Point the projector roughly where you want the image, and it should electronically square things up, focus sharply, and adjust for objects in the way. This automation, combined with a quiet 26dB operating noise and a dust-resistant design, reinforces the N2 Mini’s plug-and-play appeal for casual users. Sound is handled by a pair of 6W speakers with Dolby Audio support. While integrated speakers rarely rival dedicated soundbars, having decent onboard audio is essential for grab-and-go portability. It means you can move it to another room and start watching without needing external speakers, though Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity is available if you want to upgrade the audio experience for a more cinematic feel during longer sessions. Connectivity options are standard but sufficient: an HDMI port for consoles or laptops, a USB-A port likely for media playback, faster dual-band Wi-Fi 6 for smooth streaming, and the aforementioned Bluetooth. These ensure it can handle various sources beyond its native apps, maintaining that ease-of-use focus that defines the experience while keeping pace with current wireless standards for reliable performance online. The Dangbei N2 Mini enters a crowded market, but its official Netflix support provides a compelling argument, especially considering its highly accessible promotional price of $179 (discounted from $229). It addresses a common pain point directly without demanding a premium. While not the brightest projector overall, it presents a remarkably well-rounded package focused squarely on convenience and popular streaming within a compact, smart, and aesthetically current form factor. It’s a pragmatic, affordable solution for everyday big-screen enjoyment. Click Here to Buy NowThe post This $179 Projector Is Netflix-Certified and Small Enough to Travel With first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Though the larger Star Wars franchise has seen better days, Disney Plus’ Visions animated series has been consistently excellent for the past two seasons, and the creative teams behind its next chapter make it sound like it’s going to be another knockout. The anthology series will see three storylines from previous episodes continue in this third volume — not only that, but Visions Volume 1 episode “The Ninth Jedi” is getting its own spinoff series, under a new Star Wars: Visions Presents label.Star Wars: Visions Volume Three is set to premiere on October 29th, 2025, Disney and Lucasfilm announced as part of Star Wars Celebration in Japan. Visions executive producer James Waugh said during a panel at the event that the show’s third season will have nine episodes, three of which will continue the storylines from popular Volume 1 episodes “The Duel,” “The Village Bride,” and “The Ninth Jedi,” reports The Hollywood Reporter. The Ninth Jedi will be the first Star Wars: Visions Presents series. Image: StarWars.comThe third volume will be followed up in 2026 with Star Wars: Visions Presents — The Ninth Jedi. “The Ninth Jedi” story showed lightsabers that derive their color from the wielder’s alignment with the Force — red is bad; blue is good. Kenji Kaniyama, who wrote and directed “The Ninth Jedi” will serve as supervising director for the spinoff. According to THR, that’s just the start; more Visions Presents spinoffs are planned, giving storytellers a chance to tell longer, deeper stories than the anthology approach has allowed, so far.Like the first season, Volume 3’s stories are produced by different Japanese creative teams. Studios Kamikaze Douga, Kinema Citrus Co., Production IG, and Trigger are all returning to Visions. But we can also expect to see fresh takes on the Star Wars universe from newcomers Anima, David Production, Polygon Pictures, Project Studio Q, and WIT Studio.Waugh and filmmakers working on Volume 3 episodes talked about what’s coming and showed off character designs and artwork. THR described, for instance, an AT-AT — the gigantic, four-legged walkers armed with lasers that first showed up in The Empire Strikes Back — with a Japanese building on top.Masaki Tachibana from the anime studio Kinema Citrus previewed an “especially kawaii” episode called “Yuko’s Treasure,” according to THR, while Hiroyasu Kobayashi of Project Studio Q discussed an X-Wing-focused episode called “The Song of Four Wings.” ”We’re a studio that specializes in the creation of mechanisms,“ Kobayashi said, ”so we really focussed on the essence of the old Joe Johnston designs and featured a lot of droids and mechs.“See More:

Latest   Machine Learning Beyond Search: 86.4% MMLU, 77.6 MTEB, and the New Architecture of Policy Understanding 0 like April 20, 2025 Share this post Last Updated on April 20, 2025 by Editorial Team Author(s): R. Thompson (PhD) Originally published on Towards AI. “Amidst the proliferation of generative technologies, the true constraint remains epistemic access — especially within public systems.” The corpus of legal, regulatory, and policy documents maintained by governments and NGOs has grown into a dense, heterogeneous ecosystem. These documents, often drafted in domain-specific language and archived across disparate formats such as PDFs, scanned text, and fragmented HTML, pose a formidable barrier to access and interpretation. For administrators, legal personnel, and constituents, the task of retrieving pertinent clauses or aligning practices with current mandates is fraught with inefficiencies, ambiguity, and latency. A 2019 report by McKinsey quantified the magnitude of this issue, noting that up to 30% of a public employee’s time is spent locating internal information. In domains governed by high regulatory volatility or compliance sensitivity, this inefficiency is not merely inconvenient — it is structurally incapacitating. The imperative for a cognitively intelligent interface between users and policy repositories is now self-evident. This article introduces a systematized retrieval and reasoning framework: the Smart Policy Search Engine. Architected using LangChain’s composability, BGE-M3’s multilingual embedding prowess, ChromaDB’s high-dimensional indexing, and GPT-4’s generative fidelity, the engine serves as a neuro-symbolic bridge between unstructured regulatory texts and human queries. Unlike conventional search systems that rely on keyword density… Read the full blog for free on Medium. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI Towards AI - Medium Share this post

Months after satellites picked up a massive nuclear fusion facility in China's Sichuan province, the country's nuclear industry has blown the lid off fission tech.During a private meeting earlier this month, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the successful operation of a thorium-powered nuclear reactor located in the Gobi Desert. The team had achieved "full-power operation" last June, according to South China Morning Post, and recently succeeded in reloading the reactor while it was powered up — a world first.It's a major milestone for nuclear power. Thorium offers a more accessible but less weaponizable alternative to uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association, which notes that "thorium-based power reactor fuels would be a poor source for fissile material usable in the illicit manufacture of an explosive device."The Gobi Desert reactor is a two megawatt research unit engineered to use molten salt as fuel carrier and coolant. A molten salt reactor (MSR) theoretically carries far less risk in the event of a meltdown compared to water-based systems, as salts can carry greater loads of thermal energy at much lower pressure.In fact, a "meltdown" is basically a non-factor for these systems — the fuel is already molten.A report sponsored by the US government on MSRs notes that a "possible advantage of the MSR is that the fuel is subject to freezing," so "upon breach of a vessel or pipe... the fuel will disperse, and thus increase its cooling geometry, until it reaches a freezing configuration and thus will be confined to that location and configuration." Basically, imagine lava rolling slowly down a mountain as the air cools it back into rock, compared to a spectacular steam explosion like the incident at Chernobyl.Curiously, MSRs are nothing new. They had their day in the US back in the late 1940s and early 50s, when American cold warriors dumped nearly $1 billion into developing a nuclear-powered stealth bomber. Congress halted research on thorium-fueled airplanes back in 1961, and uranium more or less became the gold standard, due in no small part to its military potential.Assumed obsolete, the US' MSR research has since been made public, forming the foundation of the Gobi Desert team's work."The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor," said the project's chief scientist Xu Hongjie. "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That’s when the tortoise seizes its chance."More on nuclear energy: California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety SystemShare This Article

We’re seeking motivated, creative individuals in Germany to join us as Part-Time Online Promoters. This fully remote role is perfect for students, freelancers, or anyone looking to earn extra income by sharing content and engaging with digital audiences.You’ll promote our products and services on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, while gaining valuable experience in social media and digital marketing.Key Responsibilities:Create and post engaging content (text, images, videos, stories) across social media platformsPromote our offerings through your own voice and channelsInteract with followers, answer questions, and support community engagementShare weekly insights and feedback with the teamRequirements:Based in Germany with legal working statusFamiliar with at least one major social platform (training provided)Available to work 5–10 hours/week, flexible scheduleReliable internet access + smartphone or computerCreative mindset and willingness to learnWhat We Offer:✅ Flexible remote work (work anytime, anywhere in Germany)✅ Weekly payouts based on tasks and performance✅ Training and support provided – no experience needed✅ Collaborative, international work cultureHow to Apply:Click "Apply Now" and send us a short introduction. Tell us why you’d make a great Online Promoter – we’ll handle the rest.Start your remote journey today and turn your time online into earnings!