According to the Hollywood Reporter, Downey and his wife and business partner, Susan, paid $5.6 million in 2009 for a modern home in Venice, California, to serve as a base for their production company, Team Downey. The 7,500-square-foot structure was built in 2007 and features a nearly all-glass façade, a rooftop deck with an infinity pool, and a home theater. According to listing details, the top floor is designed for personal living, while the ground floor has a 1,600-square-foot art gallery or office space. A 2010 Rolling Stone feature described the space as “a concrete modernist aboveground bunker whose main floor resembles a mellow war room.”The Downeys still seem to do business out of the three-story dwelling. The Oppenheimer star is no stranger to the beach town; according to the archived Venice Beach website, the Sherlock Holmes star had an apartment on the boardwalk back in the ’90s.Malibu estateThe actor and his wife bought a Malibu compound in 2009 for $13.4 million. The four-bedroom country-style cottage spans 3,500 square feet and rests on a seven-acre plot with pastures, animal enclosures, a tennis court, and a barn converted into a two-bedroom guesthouse.In 2013, the Downeys commissioned architect Nicolò Bini to build a 6,500-square-foot concrete clubhouse on the property. Bini, the son of industrial designer Dante Bini, uses his father’s technique to construct Binishells: domed bungalows made by inflating neoprene-coated air bladders topped with steel-reinforced concrete. The thin-shelled building, which sits in one corner of the property alongside a kidney-shaped pool, serves as a place for the Downeys to entertain and house guests. “We wanted to try something that hadn’t been done before,” Susan told The New York Times. “Plus, we love a character.” The unique abode was inflated into shape in 2015, but sat empty for about two years until the couple tapped AD100 designer Joe Nahem, along with architect Ben Goodman, to decorate the dwelling with furniture and decor befitting of a Binishell. A saltwater aquarium, a breakfast nook tucked behind a retro screen comprised of giant fiberglass beads, cork flooring, and organically shaped round windows are among some of the fun furnishings.According to an interview with Purist, Downey had the property rigged with wind turbines and solar-generated water systems to offset energy consumption. The eco-friendly home still serves as the family’s primary residence.Spare Malibu padIn 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported that Downey paid $3.8 million for a 1970s beach house in Malibu. The 3,400-square-foot single-story pad features three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a great room with sliding glass doors leading out to a spacious deck with an ocean view. A detached garage with a studio, an outdoor kitchen, a putting green, a swimming pool, a cabana, and a fire pit round out the stone-paved backyard.Downey still owns the home, though it seems he bought it for family rather than for his use.Hamptons windmill houseDowney’s Hamptons living room. Photo: Francois Dischinger

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Well, it's happening, starting from 12am EST on April 24 / 9pm PST on April 23, the great US digital stampede begins — with retailers like Walmart already chucking up listings to see how fast they can melt servers. Games and accessories are tagging along too, because of course they are. If you're itching to throw your money at Nintendo, you'll find the links below. No judgment. We've all been there. Read more

Make some space for third-party offerings.Switch 2 is on the way and being a next-generation system its games are naturally going to take up a little more space.We've had a rundown on various first-party titles and how much they're expected to use up of the 256GB internal storage and now some third-party estimated file sizes have surfaced. This information has been shared by Necro Felipe of Universo Nintendo (via GoNintendo):Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there’s currently a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can no longer see these accounts, and their reach is limited.The report indicates that 59 Bluesky accounts were blocked on the grounds of protecting “national security and public order.” Bluesky also made another 13 accounts and at least one post invisible from Turkey. Given that many Turkish users migrated from X to Bluesky in the hopes of fleeing government censorship, Bluesky’s bowing to the Turkish government’s demands has raised questions among the community as to whether the social network is as open and decentralized as it claims to be. (Or whether it’s “just like Twitter” after all.) However, Bluesky’s technical underpinnings currently make bypassing these blocks easier than it would be on a network like X — even if it’s not quite as open as the alternative social network Mastodon, another decentralized X rival. A Mastodon user could move their account around to different servers to avoid censorship targeted at the original Mastodon instance (server) where they first made posts that attracted the censors. Users on the official Bluesky app can configure their moderation settings but have no way to opt out of the moderation service Bluesky provides. This includes its use of geographic labelers, like the newly added Turkish moderation labeler that handles the censorship of accounts mandated by the Turkish government. (Laurens Hof has a great breakdown of how this all works in more technical detail here on The Fediverse Report.) Simply put, if you’re on the official Bluesky app and Bluesky (the company) agrees to censor something in your region, there’s no way to opt out of this to see the hidden posts or accounts. Working around censorship in the Atmosphere Other third-party Bluesky apps, which make up the larger open social web known as the Atmosphere, don’t have to follow these same rules. At least, not for now. Because Bluesky is built on top of the AT Protocol, third-party clients can create their own interfaces and views into Bluesky’s content without applying the same moderation choices. Meanwhile, the censored accounts in question aren’t banned from Bluesky infrastructure, like relays and personal data servers (which others outside the company can run, too). Instead, the accounts are moderated by the geographic labelers at the client level. Currently, Bluesky doesn’t require any third-party apps to use its geographic moderation labelers, which would force the apps to geolocate their users and then apply the appropriate regional restrictions. That means any app that doesn’t implement the existing geographic labelers isn’t censoring these blocked Turkish accounts. In other words, apps like Skeets, Ouranos, Deer.social, Skywalker, and others can currently be used to bypass Turkish censors. This “solution” comes with several caveats, unfortunately. The app developers’ choice not to use geographic labelers isn’t necessarily intentional. Adding the geographic labelers would be extra work on their part, and most have simply not bothered to implement them yet. In addition, these third-party apps have much smaller user bases than the official Bluesky app, which allows them to fly under the radar of government censors. That also makes decisions like this less of a concern for the app developers — at least for the time being. If these third-party apps grew popular enough, a government like Turkey’s could also approach them and demand action. And if they failed to comply, they could risk their app being blocked in the country (e.g., several Bluesky app developers told us they won’t worry about adding geographic labelers until Apple approaches them about a potential removal from the App Store). Because avoiding labelers is seemingly not a permanent solution, one developer, Aviva Ruben, is building an alternative Bluesky client called Deer.social that works differently. Here, users can choose to entirely disable Bluesky’s official moderation service and labelers in favor of using other third-party labelers instead. Plus, the app allows users to configure their location manually in its settings — an option that would let users avoid geolocation-based blocks and censorship. Alternative Bluesky client Deer.social.Image Credits:Deer.social “I like the current policy, but I do fear it will get more restrictive or change in the future — a great reason to continue pushing on alternative AppViews,” Ruben said, referencing the need for alternative ways to access and view Bluesky’s data. Though today’s government censorship concerns are focused on Turkey, Bluesky’s community has to prep for a future where any government, including the U.S., could request that the company hide posts beyond only those that are blatantly illegal, like CSAM. Ruben says Deer.social would add a “no location” option to the app at this point, so users could choose to avoid all geographic labelers. Despite these possible loopholes, censorship has arrived at Bluesky. And considering the official app reaches the largest number of people, this is a notable evolution.

Toward the end of March, OpenAI announced its intention to release its first “open” language model since GPT‑2 sometime this year. Now details about that model are beginning to trickle out from the company’s sessions with the AI developer community. Sources tell TechCrunch that Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research, is leading development of the open model, which is in the very early stages. OpenAI is targeting an early summer release and aims to make the model — a reasoning model along the lines of OpenAI’s o-series models — benchmark-topping among other open reasoning models. OpenAI is exploring a highly permissive license for the model with few usage or commercial restrictions, per TechCrunch’s sources. Open models like Llama and Google’s Gemma have been criticized by some in the community for imposing onerous requirements — criticisms OpenAI is seemingly seeking to avoid. OpenAI is facing increasing pressure from rivals such as Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that have adopted an open approach to launching models. In contrast to OpenAI’s strategy, these “open” competitors make their models available to the AI community for experimentation and, in some cases, commercialization. It has proven to be a wildly successful strategy for some outfits. Meta, which has invested heavily in its Llama family of open AI models, said in early March that Llama has racked up over 1 billion downloads. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has quickly amassed a large worldwide user base and attracted the attention of domestic investors. Sources tell TechCrunch that OpenAI intends for its open model, which will be “text in, text out,” to run on high-end consumer hardware and possibly allow developers to switch its “reasoning” on and off, similar to reasoning models recently released by Anthropic and others. (Reasoning can improve accuracy, but at the cost of increased latency.) If the launch is well-received, OpenAI may follow it up with additional models — potentially including smaller models. In previous public comments, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he thinks OpenAI has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. “[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy,” Altman said during a Reddit Q&A in January. “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority … We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.” Altman has also said that OpenAI’s upcoming open model will be thoroughly red-teamed and evaluated for safety. Sources tell TechCrunch that the company intends to release a model card for the model — a thorough technical report showing the results of OpenAI’s internal and external benchmarking and safety testing. “[B]efore release, we will evaluate this model according [to] our preparedness framework, like we would for any other model,” Altman said in a post on X last month. “[A]nd we will do extra work given that we know this model will be modified post-release.” OpenAI has raised the ire of some AI ethicists for reportedly rushing safety testing of recent models and failing to release model cards for others. Altman also stands accused of misleading OpenAI executives about model safety reviews prior to his brief ouster in November 2023. We’ve reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this piece if we hear back.

As Paul Hunt, the son of famous painter, William Morris Hunt, and the nephew of famed architect Richard Morris Hunt, built his house in Brookline, Massachusetts, he also began constructing this neighboring property which was to be sold upon completion (that is one good way to pick your neighbors!) On an oversized lot on Powell Street, Paul Hunt worked with his architect, Milton W. Stratton of Bar Harbor, to furnish plans for a similar style home to his own next door. The Mission Revival style mansion is set behind a tall, stucco and metal fence, and is constructed of wood and covered with stucco siding and capped by a lovely green tile roof. Main architectural details include the Mission-style dormer and the chimneys with round arched tops that are capped with small hipped roofs, creating a whimsical addition to the house. When finished, the property was sold to Louis Coues Page (1869-1956), a wealthy publisher with offices in Boston. Louis C. Page would hire local architect Edward B. Stratton, in 1916, to design a detached automobile garage in a style mimicking the main house. What an incredible property. 

Looking for some help with today's NYT Mini crossword? In that case, extra clues and the answers are right here for you.

TL;DR: 4chan has long been one of the internet's most infamous communities, playing a central role in the rise of various memes and controversial incidents. Following a cyberattack that abruptly took the site offline, comments from an anonymous former moderator suggest its chances of returning are slim. Access to 4chan was disrupted on April 14, and troves of internal data appeared online shortly after. Members of Soyjak, a rival forum, claimed responsibility, declaring victory in a feud that has spanned several years. The attackers claimed they had infiltrated 4chan's systems for over a year before executing the attack. At least one admin account was compromised, a previously deleted board was revived and defaced, and visiting 4chan now results in a 503 error message. Information from the leaks indicates that the site's source code was extremely outdated and vulnerable to numerous exploits. The hack also exposed administrators' email addresses and revealed that they could see the IP addresses of everyone who posted on the ostensibly anonymous forum. Additionally, the attackers obtained the personal information of paid subscribers. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a 4chan moderator told TechCrunch that the damage likely extends beyond what has been publicly revealed. Given that the attackers appeared to gain complete control over the forum – and access has not been restored more than a week later – its return seems unlikely. // Related Stories 4chan was founded in 2003 by Christopher "moot" Poole, then a high school student, as an alternative space for discussing anime culture. Poole based the site's design and code on Japan's 2chan, one of the world's largest online communities. A reference to the viral "Chicken Jockey" meme from the Minecraft movie is likely 4chan's final post. Poole's English-language version quickly gained notoriety for its irreverent and often offensive content. In 2015, he sold 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2channel (not to be confused with 2chan). The site's cultural influence and infamy only grew throughout the 2010s. Widely known trends like Pepe the Frog, wojaks, rage comics, and trolling were popularized on 4chan, but the forum also gained a reputation as one of the internet's darkest. 4chan played a central role in the rise of movements like QAnnon, the incel community, GamerGate, and the alt-right. The site was also linked to multiple mass shootings, the 2014 celebrity photo leak scandal, and other serious incidents. 4chan's influence on 21st-century culture is undeniable, but if it really is gone, many won't miss it.

Striking footage showing a dust storm sweeping across a part of Mexico has been shared by CIRA (Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere). The dramatic clip, which plays at faster-than-normal speed, shows the enormous cloud of dust moving across the land like a huge wave of water. After watching it, Colorado-based scientist Dakota Smith described the recent weather event as “an all-timer.” The CIMSS Satellite Blog — an educational and informational site operated by the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies — reported on the event last week, explaining how strong winds in the wake of a cold front had lofted areas of dust across parts of southern New Mexico, southwestern Texas and northern Mexico. Recommended Videos “The peak wind gust at El Paso, Texas was 50 kts (58 mph), and blowing dust reduced the visibility to 1/4 mile at Carlsbad, New Mexico,” the report said, adding that “the leading edge of the blowing dust was moving at speeds up to 35 kts across northern Mexico.” The footage was captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-18 (GOES-18), which launched to orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2022. NOAA debuted the satellite’s first hi-res imagery soon after its deployment. GOES-18 is part of a network of satellites that enable meteorologists to accurately monitor and forecast local weather events that impact public safety, among them thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, fog, flash floods, and — you got it — dust storms. It also detects and monitors environmental hazards, such as wildfires and volcanic eruptions. The GOES-19 satellite was built by Lockheed Martin and cover a vast area that includes the U.S. West Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and the Pacific Ocean. The advanced technology carried by the GOES-18 satellite enables information on severe weather events to be sent to NOAA’s Satellite Operations Facility in Maryland every 30 seconds, where it can be quickly analyzed. Media outlets like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather also use GOES satellite imagery in their forecasts. Editors’ Recommendations Check out the first hi-res images from NOAA’s new satellite