Image: Nintendo LifeJust when you thought the messaging around Nintendo's 'Switch 2 Edition' games couldn't get any more confusing, another discovery comes along to stir things up even further. Looking at the game's store pages, it seems some upcoming titles won't support the Nintendo Switch Online Cloud Save feature — or maybe they will, it's all a bit confusing (thanks for the heads up, Eurogamer). As was pointed out in a recent Resetera thread by user RandomlyRandom67, the Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch 2 Edition page on Nintendo's website houses the following disclaimer: "Please note: this software does not support the Nintendo Switch Online paid membership's Save Data Cloud backup feature".Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube808kWatch on YouTube You'll find the same message at the bottom of Nintendo's Donkey Kong Bananza listing, and the original poster claimed it could also be found on the Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Party Jamboree Nintendo Switch 2 Edition pages, but it seems to have been removed now. Hmm. Image: Nintendo Life Image: Nintendo Life Where things get really confusing, however, is how these disclaimers appear to only be present on the European and North American game listings. Eurogamer noted that no such message appears on the Japanese site for any of the games, muddying the waters even further. Again, hmmmmm. We've reached out to Nintendo for a comment on these cloud save shenanigans and will update this article when we hear back. Removing the NSO cloud save option from new Switch 2 games is a baffling move, but taking it from the likes of TOTK — which, let's not forget, supported it in its Switch 1 form — makes even less sense. We know that you'll be able to move your original BOTW and TOTK save files over to the Switch 2 editions, but, if the disclaimer is correct, you won't be able to make a new cloud save in the latter once it's there. Surely there's been a mistake here. We'll be keeping an eye out for more clarification in the run-up to Switch 2's launch, but until then, cherish you're cloud saves, folks. Who knows how long they'll last? "That DLC is available as a separate purchase" You'll need to use 'Zelda Notes', though What do you think is going on here? Let us know in the comments. [source resetera.com, via eurogamer.net] Related Games See Also Share:0 0 Jim came to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, despite his insistence that The Minish Cap is the best Zelda game and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (yes, really), he has continued to write news and features on the site ever since. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Switch 2's Backwards Compatibility List Provides Updates On Two Titles Here's what you can expect Here's Why Switch 2 Joy-Con And Pro Controllers Don't Have Analogue Triggers Nintendo thought instant input was the "better option"

Hello Everyone! I made a tutorial on how you can make your own explosion fireball flipbook texture using Blender! I show you how to simulate, render, make motion vectors and use it in a game engine. check it out ↓Make A Fireball Flipbook Texture in Blender! (Game VFX Asset) if you have any questions, let me know in Youtube’s comments! 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Tech Can this $70,000 robot transform AI research? Hugging Face to sell open-source robots thanks to Pollen Robotics acquisition Published April 18, 2025 6:00am EDT close Can this $70,000 robot transform AI research? Reachy 2 is touted as a "lab partner for the AI era." The folks at Hugging Face, the open-source artificial intelligence gurus, just jumped into the world of robotics by acquiring Pollen Robotics. And right out of the gate, they are offering the Reachy 2, a super-interesting humanoid robot designed as a "lab partner for the AI era." Ready to dive in and see what all the buzz is about?STAY PROTECTED & INFORMED! GET SECURITY ALERTS & EXPERT TECH TIPS – SIGN UP FOR KURT’S ‘THE CYBERGUY REPORT’ NOW Reachy 2 Humanoid robot (Hugging Face)What makes this humanoid robot so special?So, what makes Reachy 2 stand out? Well, first off, it's a state-of-the-art humanoid robot already making waves in labs like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. It's designed to be friendly and approachable, inviting natural interaction. This robot is open-source and VR-compatible, perfect for research, education and experimenting with embodied AI.The innovative Orbita joint system gives Reachy 2's neck and wrists smooth, multi-directional movement, making it remarkably expressive. Reachy 2 also features human-inspired arms.Its mobile base, equipped with omni wheels and lidar, allows for seamless navigation, and the VR teleoperation feature lets you literally see through the robot's eyes! Finally, its open-source nature fosters collaboration and customization, with Pollen Robotics providing a ton of resources on their Hugging Face organization. Reachy 2 Humanoid robot (Hugging Face)Technical specificationsThis humanoid robot combines advanced vision, audio and actuator systems for cutting-edge AI interaction and teleoperation. Here's a quick look at what Reachy 2 brings to the table. Standing between 4.46 and 5.45 feet tall and weighing in at 110 pounds, it features bio-inspired arms with 7 degrees of freedom, capable of handling payloads up to 6.6 pounds. It's also equipped with a parallel torque-controlled gripper and multiple cameras for depth perception, plus a high-quality audio system. Navigating its environment is a breeze thanks to its omnidirectional mobile base.When it comes to perception, Reachy 2 has a vision module in its head with dual RGB cameras and a Time-of-Flight module for depth measurement. There's also an RGB-D camera in its torso for accurate depth sensing. Immersive stereo perception is achieved through microphones in Reachy's antennas.For interaction, Reachy 2 has custom-built speakers with a high-quality amplifier and a Rode AI-Micro audio interface. Its expressive head is powered by an Orbita system, and it has motorized antennas for enhanced human-robot interaction.Reachy 2's manipulation capabilities stem from its Orbita 3D and 2D parallel mechanisms, along with a Dynamixel-based parallel gripper that features torque control.Controlling Reachy 2 is a Solidrun Bedrock v3000 unit, with AI processing handled on external hardware. Finally, the mobile base includes omnidirectional wheels, Hall sensors and IMU, an RP Lidar S2 and a LiFePO₄ Battery.WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? Reachy 2 Humanoid robot (Hugging Face)Cost of the humanoid robotGetting your hands on Reachy 2 will cost you $70,000, a price that reflects its cutting-edge robotics and AI components and open-source capabilities, making it a serious investment for researchers and educators looking to push the boundaries of human-robot interaction.GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE Reachy 2 Humanoid robot (Hugging Face)Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics team upSo, what does Hugging Face scooping up Pollen Robotics really mean? Well, it could signal a big push toward making robotics more accessible. Think of it this way: Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and chief scientist at Hugging Face says, "We believe robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI, and it should be open, affordable, and private."Matthieu Lapeyre, Pollen Robotics co-founder, echoes this sentiment: "Hugging Face is a natural home for us to grow, as we share a common goal: putting AI and robotics in the hands of everyone."Hugging Face's acquisition of Pollen Robotics represents its fifth acquisition after Gradio and Xethub. This move solidifies Hugging Face's commitment to open-source AI and its vision for a future where AI and robotics are accessible to all. Reachy 2 Humanoid robot (Hugging Face)Kurt's key takeawaysBottom line? Hugging Face is making moves. Who knows, maybe one day we'll all have our own Reachy to help with the chores (or just keep us company). Either way, the collaboration between Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics is definitely worth keeping an eye on.If you could use a robot like Reachy 2 for any purpose, what would it be and why? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPAsk Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to cover.Follow Kurt on his social channels:Answers to the most-asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

worawit chutrakunwanit/Getty ImagesThe world of artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been preoccupied with advancing generative AI beyond simple tests that AI models easily pass. The famed Turing Test has been "beaten" in some sense, and controversy rages over whether the newest models are being built to game the benchmark tests that measure performance.The problem, say scholars at Google's DeepMind unit, is not the tests themselves but the limited way AI models are developed. The data used to train AI is too restricted and static, and will never propel AI to new and better abilities. In a paper posted by DeepMind last week, part of a forthcoming book by MIT Press, researchers propose that AI must be allowed to have "experiences" of a sort, interacting with the world to formulate goals based on signals from the environment."Incredible new capabilities will arise once the full potential of experiential learning is harnessed," write DeepMind scholars David Silver and Richard Sutton in the paper, Welcome to the Era of Experience.The two scholars are legends in the field. Silver most famously led the research that resulted in AlphaZero, DeepMind's AI model that beat humans in games of Chess and Go. Sutton is one of two Turing Award-winning developers of an AI approach called reinforcement learning that Silver and his team used to create AlphaZero. The approach the two scholars advocate builds upon reinforcement learning and the lessons of AlphaZero. It's called "streams" and is meant to remedy the shortcomings of today's large language models (LLMs), which are developed solely to answer individual human questions. Google DeepMindSilver and Sutton suggest that shortly after AlphaZero and its predecessor, AlphaGo, burst on the scene, generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, took the stage and "discarded" reinforcement learning. That move had benefits and drawbacks. Gen AI was an important advance because AlphaZero's use of reinforcement learning was restricted to limited applications. The technology couldn't go beyond "full information" games, such as Chess, where all the rules are known. Gen AI models, on the other hand, can handle spontaneous input from humans never before encountered, without explicit rules about how things are supposed to turn out. However, discarding reinforcement learning meant, "something was lost in this transition: an agent's ability to self-discover its own knowledge," they write.Instead, they observe that LLMs "[rely] on human prejudgment", or what the human wants at the prompt stage. That approach is too limited. They suggest that human judgment "imposes "an impenetrable ceiling on the agent's performance: the agent cannot discover better strategies underappreciated by the human rater.Not only is human judgment an impediment, but the short, clipped nature of prompt interactions never allows the AI model to advance beyond question and answer. "In the era of human data, language-based AI has largely focused on short interaction episodes: e.g., a user asks a question and (perhaps after a few thinking steps or tool-use actions) the agent responds," the researchers write."The agent aims exclusively for outcomes within the current episode, such as directly answering a user's question." There's no memory, there's no continuity between snippets of interaction in prompting. "Typically, little or no information carries over from one episode to the next, precluding any adaptation over time," write Silver and Sutton. However, in their proposed Age of Experience, "Agents will inhabit streams of experience, rather than short snippets of interaction."Silver and Sutton draw an analogy between streams and humans learning over a lifetime of accumulated experience, and how they act based on long-range goals, not just the immediate task."Powerful agents should have their own stream of experience that progresses, like humans, over a long time-scale," they write.Silver and Sutton argue that "today's technology" is enough to start building streams. In fact, the initial steps along the way can be seen in developments such as web-browsing AI agents, including OpenAI's Deep Research. "Recently, a new wave of prototype agents have started to interact with computers in an even more general manner, by using the same interface that humans use to operate a computer," they write.The browser agent marks "a transition from exclusively human-privileged communication, to much more autonomous interactions where the agent is able to act independently in the world."As AI agents move beyond just web browsing, they need a way to interact and learn from the world, Silver and Sutton suggest. They propose that the AI agents in streams will learn via the same reinforcement learning principle as AlphaZero. The machine is given a model of the world in which it interacts, akin to a chessboard, and a set of rules. As the AI agent explores and takes actions, it receives feedback as "rewards". These rewards train the AI model on what is more or less valuable among possible actions in a given circumstance.The world is full of various "signals" providing those rewards, if the agent is allowed to look for them, Silver and Sutton suggest."Where do rewards come from, if not from human data? Once agents become connected to the world through rich action and observation spaces, there will be no shortage of grounded signals to provide a basis for reward. In fact, the world abounds with quantities such as cost, error rates, hunger, productivity, health metrics, climate metrics, profit, sales, exam results, success, visits, yields, stocks, likes, income, pleasure/pain, economic indicators, accuracy, power, distance, speed, efficiency, or energy consumption. In addition, there are innumerable additional signals arising from the occurrence of specific events, or from features derived from raw sequences of observations and actions."To start the AI agent from a foundation, AI developers might use a "world model" simulation. The world model lets an AI model make predictions, test those predictions in the real world, and then use the reward signals to make the model more realistic. "As the agent continues to interact with the world throughout its stream of experience, its dynamics model is continually updated to correct any errors in its predictions," they write.Silver and Sutton still expect humans to have a role in defining goals, for which the signals and rewards serve to steer the agent. For example, a user might specify a broad goal such as 'improve my fitness', and the reward function might return a function of the user's heart rate, sleep duration, and steps taken. Or the user might specify a goal of 'help me learn Spanish', and the reward function could return the user's Spanish exam results.The human feedback becomes "the top-level goal" that all else serves.The researchers write that AI agents with those long-range capabilities would be better as AI assistants. They could track a person's sleep and diet over months or years, providing health advice not limited to recent trends. Such agents could also be educational assistants tracking students over a long timeframe."A science agent could pursue ambitious goals, such as discovering a new material or reducing carbon dioxide," they offer. "Such an agent could analyse real-world observations over an extended period, developing and running simulations, and suggesting real-world experiments or interventions."The researchers suggest that the arrival of "thinking" or "reasoning" AI models, such as Gemini, DeepSeek's R1, and OpenAI's o1, may be surpassed by experience agents. The problem with reasoning agents is that they "imitate" human language when they produce verbose output about steps to an answer, and human thought can be limited by its embedded assumptions. "For example, if an agent had been trained to reason using human thoughts and expert answers from 5,000 years ago, it may have reasoned about a physical problem in terms of animism," they offer. "1,000 years ago, it may have reasoned in theistic terms; 300 years ago, it may have reasoned in terms of Newtonian mechanics; and 50 years ago, in terms of quantum mechanics."The researchers write that such agents "will unlock unprecedented capabilities," leading to "a future profoundly different from anything we have seen before." However, they suggest there are also many, many risks. These risks are not just focused on AI agents making human labor obsolete, although they note that job loss is a risk. Agents that "can autonomously interact with the world over extended periods of time to achieve long-term goals," they write, raise the prospect of humans having fewer opportunities to "intervene and mediate the agent's actions." On the positive side, they suggest, an agent that can adapt, as opposed to today's fixed AI models, "could recognise when its behaviour is triggering human concern, dissatisfaction, or distress, and adaptively modify its behaviour to avoid these negative consequences."Leaving aside the details, Silver and Sutton are confident the streams experience will generate so much more information about the world that it will dwarf all the Wikipedia and Reddit data used to train today's AI. Stream-based agents may even move past human intelligence, alluding to the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or super-intelligence."Experiential data will eclipse the scale and quality of human-generated data," the researchers write. "This paradigm shift, accompanied by algorithmic advancements in RL [reinforcement learning], will unlock in many domains new capabilities that surpass those possessed by any human."Silver also explored the subject in a DeepMind podcast this month.Artificial Intelligence

As new technologies emerge and business needs change, legacy applications face multiple challenges in performance, scalability and security.

WTF?! It's something many people have thought about: when a lottery jackpot reaches an enormous figure, would it be possible to buy every combination of numbers to guarantee a win? There are plenty of reasons why this is usually impossible or just doesn't work, but a team that included a legendary gambler showed it could be done by winning a $95 million Texas lottery jackpot. The story started in the spring of 2023, when London banker-turned-bookmaker Bernard Marantelli wanted to buy every ticket combination in an upcoming Texas lottery to guarantee the jackpot win, which was closing in on $95 million. With tickets priced at $1 each and 25.8 million combinations, the profit would be almost $60 million, writes the Wall Street Journal. This assumes no one else picked the winning combination; otherwise, the prize would have been split. Marantelli put together a team that included famed Tasmanian gambler Zeljko Ranogajec (aka John Wilson), who bankrolled the operation. His reputation for pulling off capers at gambling venues had earned him the nickname "The Joker." The plan was to use the machines that allow people to play the lottery by picking their numbers and receiving a printed ticket. In 2023, Texas allowed online lottery-ticket vendors to open shops to print tickets for their customers. Marantelli flew to Texas and established four makeshift ticket-printing hubs, including a warehouse and a defunct dentist's office. They acquired official lottery terminals from a struggling online lottery vendor, Lottery.com, and printed nonstop for three days. The team had converted each number combination into a QR code, which were scanned into the terminals by crew members using their phones. They were printing over 100 tickets every second to purchase 99.3% of every possible combination of the six numbers from 1 to 54. // Related Stories The printed tickets were organized into boxes so the winning numbers could be easily located. Surely enough, one of the tickets won the jackpot. It was the only winner. After taking a lump sum payout of $57.8 million, the team walked away with a profit of around $20 million. via The Wall Street Journal Lottery.com executive Greg Potts wrote in an internal email "This is a huge win for the company," highlighting that the firm would make a profit of nearly $264,000 on its sales commission. The win was claimed anonymously under the name "Rook TX," and soon became public knowledge when the Houston Chronicle broke the story. Texas officials, including Governor Greg Abbott, ordered investigations, and self-appointed Texas-gambling watchdog Dawn Nettles sued Lottery.com and the winners for defrauding regular players. The defendants have not yet responded to the allegations. "If the investigation turns up information that would lead to a potential prosecution, that should be undertaken," Abbott said last month. "And if the investigation leads to, let's say, inadequate measures that they have at the Commission, those measures need to be reformed." Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called the scheme "the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas", more than "all the bank robberies, all the train robberies in the Old West, everyone who's stolen anything" combined. Bulk buying lottery tickets is technically legal. A lawyer representing Rook TX told The Wall Street Journal that "all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed." Since the win, others have tried to repeat the formula. Retailers have received offers to lease out their lottery terminals for mass ticket printing. The Texas Lottery Commission has tried to make this practice more difficult, including no longer providing low-traffic lottery outlets with extra terminals. The commission has also pushed out a software update that limits the number of tickets a terminal can sell in a day. Masthead: Philip Oroni

If you own one of Nvidia’s best graphics cards, the latest driver update might be an interesting one for you. According to users who downloaded the patch, the drivers bring an up to 8% boost in synthetic benchmarks. But, seeing as most of us don’t spend all of our time benchmarking our GPUs, what are the actual benefits of the 572.02 graphics driver? The first reports of these driver improvements showed up on Reddit and were then picked up by publications like VideoCardz. Some users have found that they saw performance gains in synthetic benchmarks, ranging from 3% to 8%. Recommended Videos This isn’t something that happens often. Nvidia’s aim with this driver was to resolve a number of issues, including black screens, crashes, and overall stability problems. Performance gains weren’t mentioned as part of the update changelog. Users are seeing various other benefits. Some claim to be seeing a slight improvement in frames per second (fps), and others note that the idle power consumption was reduced following the driver update. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in those Reddit comments, because some users have also found that their GPUs aren’t doing quite as well as before. Related One user who owns an MSI Shadow OC RTX 5080 GPU says that their card’s overclocking capabilities got worse after the patch. From a stable overclock of +400/+1,250, their GPU can now only hold +300/+800. Meanwhile, another user says that the latest driver caused “a ton of stuttering, frame loss, [and] weird clock behavior.” It’s possible for all those stories to be true. Nvidia’s RTX cards might now fare better in benchmarks, but this doesn’t mean much in terms of gaming gains, and it’s hard to say what caused the crashes reported by a couple of users. We’ll be monitoring the situation and will keep you posted if there are any issues with the driver. Editors’ Recommendations

A U.S. congressional committee has urged two U.S. banks to pull out of working on Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology’s planned listing in Hong Kong, expressing “significant concerns” over their involvement in the process.

Comcast vs. Brendan Carr Trump’s FCC chair threatens Comcast, demands changes to NBC news coverage "Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public," Brendan Carr claims. Jon Brodkin – Apr 17, 2025 4:36 pm | 69 President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr accused Comcast of "news distortion" because its subsidiary NBC isn't parroting the Trump administration narrative on the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. "Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn't cut it," Carr wrote in a post on X yesterday. Carr's use of the phrase "news distortion" is significant because he has been invoking the FCC's rarely enforced news distortion policy to pressure licensed broadcasters that he perceives as being biased against President Trump. For a detailed look at Carr's fight against media, read our feature: "The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC's news distortion policy." Carr, who recently wore a pin depicting Trump's head on his lapel, provided no substantive argument that NBC is guilty of news distortion. Historically, the FCC has enforced the policy in only the most extreme cases where there is evidence of misconduct, such as a bribe, or instructions from management to distort the news. As a 1985 ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said, the FCC policy makes "a crucial distinction between deliberate distortion and mere inaccuracy or difference of opinion." In his post yesterday, Carr alleged that "Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that Abrego Garcia was merely a law abiding US citizen, just a regular 'Maryland man.'" Carr wrote that "Abrego Garcia came to America illegally from El Salvador, was validated as a member of the violent MS-13 gang—a transnational criminal organization—and was denied bond by an immigration court for failure to show he would not pose a danger to others." "Why does Comcast ignore these facts of obvious public interest?" Carr asked. SCOTUS ruled US must facilitate man’s release Abrego Garcia's lawyer said in a lawsuit that he has no affiliation with MS-13. During a 2019 immigration court proceeding, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "offered a Gang Field Interview Sheet ('GFIS') generated by PGPD [Prince George County Police Department]," the lawsuit said. "The GFIS explained that the only reason to believe Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was a gang member was that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique." The MS-13 Westerns clique is said to operate in New York, "a state that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia has never lived in," the lawsuit said. The Gang Field Interview Sheet was reportedly filled out by an officer who was later suspended and indicted for providing confidential information to a sex worker. The Supreme Court last week upheld a key portion of a District Court order on the deportation, saying that the lower court's "order properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador." Carr made his statement on X yesterday while sharing a post by White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who said it's "SHAMEFUL that CNN and MSNBC refuses to take Angel Mom Patty Morin as she recounts the terrible tragedy of how an illegal killed her sweet daughter, Rachel." Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of killing Rachel Morin earlier this week. The White House has attempted to link this murder to Abrego Garcia's deportation, but they are entirely separate cases. Carr’s fight against media Carr's post yesterday, combined with his recent actions to enforce the news distortion policy, suggest that he is likely to open a proceeding if a formal complaint is lodged against any NBC stations. Carr showed he is willing to investigate news distortion complaints into ordinary editorial decisions when he revived complaints against CBS and ABC that were thrown out under the previous administration. Carr has focused in particular on the CBS complaint, which concerns the editing of a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The conservative Center for American Rights alleged that CBS distorted the news by airing "two completely different answers" to the same question. CBS published unedited video and a transcript that shows it simply aired two different sentences from the same response in different segments, but Carr has kept the proceeding open and seems to be using it as a bargaining chip in the FCC review of CBS-owner Paramount's transfer of TV broadcast station licenses to Skydance. Carr's handling of the CBS complaint has been condemned by both liberal and conservative advocacy groups—and former Democratic and Republican FCC commissioners and chairs—who say the FCC's approach is a threat to the constitutional right to free speech. Carr has also sent letters to companies—including Comcast—alleging that their diversity policies are "invidious forms of discrimination in violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws." Carr last month threatened to block mergers pursued by companies that enforce diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. We contacted Comcast and NBC today and will update this article if they provide any response to Carr's news distortion allegation. Jon Brodkin Senior IT Reporter Jon Brodkin Senior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 69 Comments

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-­mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa’s pools, marble hammams, and showers.  When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse’s first location in Williamsburg in 2019, he used conventional pool heaters. But after diving deep into the world of bitcoin, he realized he could fit cryptocurrency mining seamlessly into his business. That’s because the process, where special computers (called miners) make trillions of guesses per second to try to land on the string of numbers that will earn a bitcoin, consumes tremendous amounts of electricity—which in turn produces plenty of heat that usually goes to waste.   “I thought, ‘That’s interesting—we need heat,’” Goodman says of Bathhouse. Mining facilities typically use fans or water to cool their computers. And pools of water, of course, are a prominent feature of the spa.  It takes six miners, each roughly the size of an Xbox One console, to maintain a hot tub at 104 °F. At Bathhouse’s  Williamsburg location, miners hum away quietly inside two large tanks, tucked in a storage closet among liquor bottles and teas. To keep them cool and quiet, the units are immersed directly in non-conductive oil, which absorbs the heat they give off and is pumped through tubes beneath Bathhouse’s hot tubs and hammams.  Mining boilers, which cool the computers by pumping in cold water that comes back out at 170 °F, are now also being used at the site. A thermal battery stores excess heat for future use.  Goodman says his spas aren’t saving energy by using bitcoin miners for heat, but they’re also not using any more than they would with conventional water heating. “I’m just inserting miners into that chain,” he says.  Goodman isn’t the only one to see the potential in heating with crypto. In Finland, Marathon Digital Holdings turned fleets of bitcoin miners into a district heating system to warm the homes of 80,000 residents. HeatCore, an integrated energy service provider, has used bitcoin mining to heat a commercial office building in China and to keep pools at a constant temperature for fish farming. This year it will begin a pilot project to heat seawater for desalination. On a smaller scale, bitcoin fans who also want some extra warmth can buy miners that double as space heaters.  Crypto enthusiasts like Goodman think much more of this is coming—especially under the Trump administration, which has announced plans to create a bitcoin reserve. This prospect alarms environmentalists.  The energy required for a single bitcoin transaction varies, but as of mid-March it was equivalent to the energy consumed by an average US household over 47.2 days, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, run by the economist Alex de Vries.  Among the various cryptocurrencies, bitcoin mining gobbles up the most energy by far. De Vries points out that others, like ethereum, have eliminated mining and implemented less energy-­intensive algorithms. But bitcoin users resist any change to their currency, so de Vries is doubtful a shift away from mining will happen anytime soon.  One key barrier to using bitcoin for heating, de Vries says, is that the heat can only be transported short distances before it dissipates. “I see this as something that is extremely niche,” he says. “It’s just not competitive, and you can’t make it work at a large scale.”  The more renewable sources that are added to electric grids to replace fossil fuels, the cleaner crypto mining will become. But even if bitcoin is powered by renewable energy, “that doesn’t make it sustainable,” says Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. Mining burns through valuable resources that could otherwise be used to meet existing energy needs, Madani says.  For Goodman, relaxing into bitcoin-heated water is a completely justifiable use of energy. It soothes the muscles, calms the mind, and challenges current economic structures, all at the same time.  Carrie Klein is a freelance journalist based in New York City.