Sonic Prime: The Complete Series on Blu-ray - Steelbook Edition $34 (was $50) | Releases June 24 Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Walmart Sonic fans can save big on preorders for the upcoming Blu-ray release of Sonic Prime: The Complete Series Steelbook Edition. Preorders initially opened last week with a $50 MSRP, but now Amazon and Walmart are offering over 30% off, dropping the price down to only $34. That's a pretty incredible deal, especially when you toss in the cool steelbook case that comes with the upcoming release. Sonic Prime: The Complete Series Steelbook Edition launches on June 24.Amazon and Walmart offer preorder price guarantees, so locking in your preorder while the discount is active ensures you won't pay more than $34 when your order ships. If the price drops even lower, however, both retailers offer automatic adjustments to get you the best possible price since you placed your order. You won't be charged for your preorder at either retailer until Sonic Prime's release in June.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Electro Giant is a beatdown win condition in Clash Royale that zaps nearby troops as it slowly walks up to the enemy tower. When it first launched, it was considered one of the best cards in the meta. While subsequent nerfs have brought down its popularity, it's still a solid troop in the right deck.

A federal judge has ruled that Google is a monopolist in online advertising. The New York Times reported on Thursday that Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the company broke the law to maintain its ad tech dominance. “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” the judge said. The case stemmed from a January 2023 lawsuit from the US Justice Department and eight states. They accused Google of illegally monopolizing the ad market and using that power to charge more and take a higher portion of sales. "Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable," the government said in its complaint. "One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising." The government says Google holds an 87 percent market share in ad-selling tech. The judge also dismissed a portion of the government's case. “We won half of this case, and we will appeal the other half," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, wrote in a statement. "The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.” The government claimed Google’s monopoly powers enabled it to force publishers to use its ad software, leaving online media organizations and other websites without much recourse. This reduced the revenue for news sites, especially those without paywalled subscriptions. The media industry is, by and large, in dire financial straits, with closures and layoffs multiplying in recent years. This also has a trickle-down effect, leading to snowballing clickbait headlines and other reader-hostile gimmicks as news orgs try to figure out how to recoup lost revenue and stay afloat. Judge Brinkema's decision follows another in August, when a federal judge ruled that Google monopolizes online search. Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said in 2024 that the company "is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." Judge Mehta is considering a DOJ request to break up the company based on that ruling. Now, Judge Brinkema will face a similar decision about the nearly $1.9 trillion company's dominance in advertising. The DOJ's lawsuit already asked the court to make Google sell portions of its ad tech business. Much of the company's future will rest on what those two judges decide in the coming months.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-is-a-monopoly-in-online-ad-tech-federal-judge-rules-151531919.html?src=rss

Just don't drop them on your foot: when I say heavyweight, I mean heavyweight

Light & Magic: Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+ — a must-watch for anyone who loves movie magic! Directed by Joe Johnston, this three-part documentary dives deep into the digital revolution at Industrial Light & Magic, the studio that transformed visual effects. Season 2 highlights how George Lucas pushed the limits of filmmaking by shooting The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones with high-resolution digital cameras — a bold move that reshaped cinema forever. The series also explores ILM’s groundbreaking work on Twister, The Perfect Storm, and the creation of Jar Jar Binks — the first fully CG lead character in a live-action film. Packed with behind-the-scenes stories, fun VFX trivia, and interviews with legends like John Knoll, Doug Chiang, Rob Coleman, and Ahmed Best, this series is a treasure trove for VFX fans. Experience the history, innovation, and creativity that changed Hollywood. Now streaming only on Disney+! The post Light & Magic Season 2: The Untold Story of ILM’s Digital Revolution appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Amid the video podcast boom, Netflix is making its own move into the space. According to Business Insider, the streaming giant’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said video podcasts may be the next format to land on the platform. During Netflix’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday, Sarandos noted that “the lines are getting blurry” between podcasts and talk shows, adding, “as the popularity of video podcasts grows, I suspect you’ll see some of them find their way to Netflix.” In 2025, audiences want to watch their podcasts. As a result, YouTube—not audio-first platforms like Spotify or Apple—has become the top destination for American podcast listeners. Data from Edison Podcast Metrics shows YouTube attracts 31% of weekly podcast listeners, compared to Spotify’s 27% and Apple’s 15%. Nearly half of podcast listeners now watch their favorite shows on Smart TVs, and in March, YouTube made up 9.7% of all TV viewing—edging out Netflix’s 8.1%. When asked about competition from YouTube, Sarandos told The Hollywood Reporter that Netflix remains the “best place for premium content, as defined by fans.” The platform already licenses content from kids’ favorite Ms. Rachel, as well as Tony Hinchcliffe, the conservative comedian behind the podcast Kill Tony. And Netflix is far from done. “We’re looking for the next generation of great creators, and we’re looking everywhere, not just in film schools and certainly not just in Hollywood,” Sarandos said during the call. When it comes to helping creators scale and monetize, Sarandos says Netflix stands apart. “You know, the question that’s out there is, is it premium? Well, some of it is, and we believe we have the best monetization model on the planet for premium storytelling,” he said. “I think we could help those creators reach an audience. Our model can also support more ambitious efforts for them, could help derisk them, unlike the kind of typical [user generated content] models.” With Netflix becoming YouTube, Instagram turning into TikTok, and X becoming… whatever X is now, no one wants to stay in their lane anymore.

Though not technically officially confirmed yet, it looks like a remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is nonetheless set to launch imminently, with all rumours pointing to a Virtuos-developed Unreal Engine 5 recreation of the 2006 classic being simultaneously revealed and released at some point in the final days of the month. Given the stature of both The Elder Scrolls as a franchise and of Oblivion as a game, there’s obviously palpable excitement surrounding the remake, even in the absence of an official announcement, and you can bet we count ourselves in that excited group as well. In particular, it’s the prospect of an enhanced and improved version of the open world action RPG masterpiece that has turned heads. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion has admittedly aged poorly in some regards, even though it overall remains a great game to this day, so the idea of a remake that sands out those rough edges and helps bring the entire game up the modern standards while not deviating from its biggest core strengths is an exciting one, to say the very least. Here, we’re going to talk about a few such improvements that we’re hoping to see in the purported remake. VISUALS AND TECH Let’s start things off with the obvious pick. Any remake of a 20 year old title is going to make visual and technical improvements, and what we have already seen and heard of the Oblivion remake suggests that that is very much the case here as well. The question, of course, is just how significant of an uplift the game will have received in this area, because arguably, this is where Oblivion is at its weakest. That’s not just true in terms of what the passage of time has done to the original title, but also in the sense that, really, Oblivion was a pretty janky and rough-around-the-edges experience even back when it first came out (as is so often the case with Bethesda Game Studios titles). By all accounts, it sounds like the allegedly upcoming remake has made some major visual changes, at the very least, which is pretty much exactly what most would have hoped for. From dated visuals (with excessive bloom effects, which we couldn’t not mention) to, in typical Bethesda Game Studios fashion, a laundry list of bugs and glitches (including some outright game-breaking ones), there is a lot that holds the original title back in the technical department, so hopefully that’s something that is addressed by the remake to the fullest extent possible. Of course, it would probably be silly to expect a cutting edge visual masterpiece even by 2025 standards, but we’d be surprised if the remake didn’t tout noticeable upgrades nonetheless. SEAMLESS MAP Speaking of technical upgrades that Oblivion needs to make, a seamless map would go down rather well with the Elder Scrolls fanbase (to put it mildly), though it does seem like a somewhat unrealistic dream, simply given the history of the developer. Back when it launched in 2006, Cyrodil not being a completely seamless open world wasn’t that big of a deal, because totally seamless maps were something of a rarity at the time. The fact that the map was broken up into multiple separate instances that had been stitched together with loading screens was, as such, not something that stood out to anyone in any meaningful way. That is conclusively no longer the case, of course, and hasn’t been for years at this point. Seamless open worlds are very much the norm- and yet, Bethesda Game Studios RPGs haven’t got that memo, it seems, because they continue to do things their way (frustratingly enough). This supposed Oblivion remake, however, isn’t being made by Bethesda Game Studios. Allegedly, Virtuos has remade the title in Unreal Engine 5 while bringing over a lot of the original assets, and while it remains to be seen how much of that is accurate, if it is accurate, that may well have been the perfect opportunity to finally make that change and turn Oblivion’s map into what it always should have been. BETTER DUNGEONS There’s more in Oblivion’s open world that a potential remake could try and improve with smart improvements, beyond attempting to stitch it together into a single, contiguous whole. Take, for instance, the original game’s dungeons, which were probably among its biggest weaknesses. From the dungeons being procedurally generated to even the Oblivion Gates randomly selected between a limited number of layout templates that quickly became repetitive, there were some pretty notable issues with the game in this department. Now, we are obviously not expecting the Oblivion remake to completely redo the dungeons from head to toe – we’re actually not even sure if it is going to be that significant of an overhaul – but at the very least, targeted improvements are in order. Just as an example, getting rid of procedural generation and instead delivering actual, designed dungeons would help make exploration significantly more compelling. It’d be a real shame to see that opportunity passed up. IMPROVED COMBAT Combat has never really been Bethesda Game Studios’ strong suit, to say the least, which stands doubly true for The Elder Scrolls games in particular. Typically, Oblivion’s combat was something of a jankfest- floaty movements and animations, shoddy hit detection, spotty AI, and more issues combined to make the whole affair feel disappointingly weightless and lackluster. Ideally, that should be one of the first things any hypothetical remake looks at when considering which areas of the original game are most in need of improvement. Thankfully, it does seem like rumured developer Virtuos is making some much needed changes. If reports are to be believed, the Oblivion remake will feature a new stamina system that will take cues from the Souls series, as well as overhauled blocking and archery mechanics, among other things. Our hope is that those are actual, major improvements, because put together, such changes could have a big impact on how the combat fares on a moment to moment basis. No, we don’t expect the combat to suddenly turn into one of the game’s highlights, but it would be disappointing to see it brought over as is, flaws and all. FINETUNED PROGRESSION The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is counted to this day as one of the finest RPGs ever made, and a game truly deserving of that moniker (as Oblivion obviously is) is obviously not going to have any major deficiencies where its progression and customization systems are concerned. There is still room for improvement, however, and we fully expect to see some tweaking here and there, should the remake actually prove to be real. Specifically, it’s likely that the remake will make it less easy for players to break the progression curve in the manner that the original allowed players to, especially if you had spent enough time paying the game. We don’t expect – or hell, even want – that side of the experience to completely go away – there’s something undeniably appealing about RPGs that let you do that, after all – but this remake is a great chance for Virtuos and Bethesda to root out the more prominent balancing issues that do hold the progression systems back, and we’d fully expect them to take that chance.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enabling them to develop and refine long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Models like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 have shown great performance in text-based reasoning tasks, however, they face limitations on tasks that require precise numerical calculations or symbolic manipulations, such as geometric reasoning, complex computations, or equation solving. Recent research has explored prompting and supervised fine-tuning methods to equip LLMs with tool-use capabilities, but they are constrained by their reliance on imitating curated data distributions. This often results in poor generalization beyond seen patterns and an inability to determine when and how to invoke external tools. Recent advancements in LLMs show progress toward human-like metacognition through CoT prompting. Research has evolved from train-time scaling to test-time scaling, allocating additional computational resources during inference to generate intermediate reasoning steps. Techniques like stepwise preference optimization, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and RL have improved multi-step mathematical reasoning, as evidenced by models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. In addition to CoT, Program-of-Thought reasoning integrates external computational tools such as Python interpreters to simplify complex reasoning steps. Further, Tool-integrated reasoning was initially introduced to help LLMs solve computationally intensive problems through programming strategies. Researchers from ByteDance Seed have proposed ReTool, a CI-powered RL framework designed to address math problem-solving tasks. It enhances long-form reasoning with tool-integrated learning through two key features. First, it enables dynamic interleaving of real-time code execution within natural language reasoning processes. Second, it implements an automated RL technique that allows policy rollouts with multi-turn real-time code execution, teaching the model when and how to invoke tools based on outcome feedback. ReTool employs a systematic training framework that begins with synthetic cold-start data generation to produce code-augmented long-form reasoning traces for fine-tuning base models. The ReTool consists of two primary stages, cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by RL with interleaved code execution rollout. The pipeline designed for collecting and curating high-quality data begins with collecting high-quality mathematical reasoning data from diverse sources, including open-source datasets like OpenThoughts. A dual-verification approach combining human expert curation and Deepseek-R1 evaluation filters invalid data. From this foundation, code-integrated reasoning data is automatically constructed. The VeRL framework is employed with PPO as the RL method for training. The maximum sequence length is set to 16384 tokens, with a 512 mini-batch size and a KL coefficient of 0.0, using Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct as the main backbone. ReTool enables the LLM to utilize the code interpreter flexibly during the RL stage, leading to substantial performance improvements. ReTool (Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct) achieves accuracies of 67.0% on AIME2024 and 49.3% on AIME2025 with only 400 training steps. This outperforms the text-based RL baseline (Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct), which attains 40.0% and 36.7% on the respective benchmarks despite using over 1000 training steps. Moreover, on AIME2024, ReTool (Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct) surpasses the competitive baseline s1-32B by 10.3%. Similarly, on AIME2025, it achieves an 11.4% gain over OpenAI’s o1-preview. When combined with a more advanced backbone, ReTool (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B) further improves performance with scores of 72.5% on AIME2024 and 54.3% on AIME2025. In conclusion, researchers introduced ReTool, a novel RL framework that empowers LLMs to self-enhance their mathematical reasoning capabilities through effective Code Interpreter utilization. Experiments on AIME2024 and AIME2025 show that ReTool achieves superior accuracy compared to conventional text-based RL approaches and converges with significantly fewer training steps. Through careful data curation and a specialized tool-using pipeline, ReTool enables models to develop complex computational intervention strategies, paving the way for more efficient and powerful tool-augmented reasoning in LLMs. The results demonstrate that tool-integrated RL represents a promising direction for advancing mathematical reasoning capabilities in LLMs for tasks requiring precise computation and symbolic manipulation. Check out the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad AnsariSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner.Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/Fourier Neural Operators Just Got a Turbo Boost: Researchers from UC Riverside Introduce TurboFNO, a Fully Fused FFT-GEMM-iFFT Kernel Achieving Up to 150% Speedup over PyTorchSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/Model Compression Without Compromise: Loop-Residual Neural Networks Show Comparable Results to Larger GPT-2 Variants Using Iterative RefinementSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/Underdamped Diffusion Samplers Outperform Traditional Methods: Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, NVIDIA, and Zuse Institute Berlin Introduce a New Framework for Efficient Sampling from Complex Distributions with Degenerate NoiseSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/NVIDIA AI Releases UltraLong-8B: A Series of Ultra-Long Context Language Models Designed to Process Extensive Sequences of Text (up to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens)

The following article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2, episode 2. If the first episode of The Last of Us season 2 was the scene setter, then episode 2 is the catalyst for everything that comes next. It features – SPOILERS! – the death of Joel Miller, and it takes place in pretty much the exact same way as it did in the game. The devil is in the details, though, and not everything about that scene is a 1:1 recreation. That’s where our TV show vs game comparison comes in. We’ve taken the major scenes of episode 2 that are taken from the game and compared them against the original source material, analysing what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. You can see both versions in the video above, or read on below for our written explanations. Joel’s DeathAs the instigating incident of the game and the big main event of the season’s second episode, Joel’s death was naturally going to be a meticulously recreated sequence. Both the broad strokes and many of the small details are all here; Abby blasts his leg with a shotgun and then proceeds to lay into him with a golf club. Kaityn Dever delivers the “You don’t get to rush this” line exactly as her game counterpart did. When Ellie arrives on the scene, the direction largely follows in the footsteps of the original cutscene, using the same floor-level camera angles and high-pitched sound break as Abby deals the final blow. Lurking between the many game-accurate details are several changes, though. First and foremost is that Joel is with Dina for this scene, not Tommy. Furthermore, Dina is drugged for the whole event, which means Ellie is the only Jackson resident to witness Joel’s murder. Abby’s behaviour is also slightly different; in the show she reveals to Joel who she is and why she’s about to kill him. In the game there’s no such scene, and we’re left to believe that Joel died without truly knowing why Abby hated him so much.Oh, and then there’s the matter of Abby’s hole in… well, not quite one. The game depicts the blow that finally kills Joel as a horrible bit of blunt force trauma to the skull, using the actual head of the golf club. In the show, the club is broken in Abby’s assault, and so all that’s left is the sharp broken end. Abby uses this as a shiv, stabbing it into Joel’s neck. Abby’s FlashbackEpisode two features a sequence in which a young Abby searches the Fireflies’ hospital for her dad. It’s a recreation of the end of Tracking Lessons, the chapter of the game where the perspective shifts from Ellie to Abby. While the setting of this scene remains the same – the hospital corridor bathed in red emergency lighting – the actual events are rather different. In the show, older Abby confronts her younger self, cementing that this is a dream sequence rather than a flashback. Abby tells herself not to look inside the operating room, as she’ll have to see her dead father. Younger Abby does go into the operating room, but the camera does not follow, and so we’re left with just the older Abby’s restrained tears to relay the horror found inside. In the game, since you are in control of Abby, you get to see the inside of the room and Abby’s reaction to finding her father.This reframing of the scene is likely due to its shifted position; in the game, this is the moment you learn that Abby’s father was killed in Joel’s attack on the Fireflies, and so the raw emotion of seeing Abby cry on the operating room flaw is necessary to humanise a character who has been portrayed as a villain for the prior 10 or so hours. The show reveals Abby’s motive from the very start and moves this sequence to much earlier in the story, and so it serves a different purpose. Ellie’s Awkward MorningThe most faithful scene recreation of episode two arrives when Jesse comes knocking at Ellie’s door to go out on patrol. What follows is an awkward exchange regarding Ellie and Dina’s kiss the previous night at the barn dance – Dina, of course, had only recently split up with Jesse. The dialogue here is a 95% match to the game’s script, and the camera work also does its best to recreate the conversation in exact detail. The main difference here is context. In the game, the barn dance isn’t shown until right near the end of the campaign, and so when playing this sequence you’re using the information provided by the characters to piece together an event you’ve not witnessed. In the show, you know exactly what Jesse and Ellie are talking about, as you watched it happen in the previous episode.Bigot SandwichesSimilar to Ellie’s conversation with Jesse, her encounter with Seth the morning after the dance is largely a 1:1 replication of the same scene in the game. Seth has once again prepared steak sandwiches as an apology, and much of the dialogue around this awkward exchange is taken straight from the game’s script. The main difference here is that Jesse is now part of the scene, and he thanks Seth for the sandwiches rather than Maria. Additionally, the building itself is visually very different to that in the game, looking more like a canteen than a timber-constructed bar. Eugene’s Weed FarmThe show sees Jesse and Ellie head out on a patrol that recreates the middle section of the game’s first chapter. Fans of the game will instantly notice a key difference, as Ellie’s discovery of Eugene’s weed farm actually takes place during the same patrol depicted in episode one where Ellie and Dina explore the supermarket. These events have been split up and changed, as it’s now Jesse, not Dina who accompanies Ellie. That means the show removes the sequence in which Ellie and Dina smoke weed and are implied to have sex.Despite this, there are still several key elements of the sequence that are kept intact. Ellie still discovers Eugene’s Firefly pendant, as well as his once-impressive marijuana operation (which is far less well hidden in the show.) Among the belongings scattered about, Ellie finds Eugene’s bong gas mask, which can also be found in the game. Jesse, however, is much less impressed with Eugene’s ingenuity than Dina was. Abby’s EscapeAbby’s fateful encounter with the infected horde plays out much like it does in the game’s first chapter. A chase sequence results in Abby becoming trapped behind a chainlink fence that begins to collapse under the weight of the clawing runners. If anything, this sequence is even nastier than it was in the game thanks to a shot of a hand being pushed through the fence, the wire cutting through the flesh. Aside from that, the broad direction of this scene is very close to the framing of the game, right up to the way Joel’s revolver appears from the side of the shot to blast the infected that pins Abby to the ground. For more from The Last of Us, check out our spoiler-free season two review and our spoiler-filled review of the second episode. We’ve also asked the show’s creators about how canon can change, and what that means for the show's biggest plot points.Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.

Now that WrestleMania 41 is over, you can watch it all again, in bits and pieces or start to finish.