A key aspect of staying safe online is minimizing your digital footprint, and while tools like Surfshark VPN can help, take it a step further by bringing the fight to data collectors with Incogni.Remove your personal information from the internet - Image credit: IncogniThere are companies that exist with the sole purpose of buying personal data online in massive hauls. The data can be used for legitimate purposes like training ad targeting, but it can also be used by bad actors seeking to commit identity theft or target specific groups.What's worse, if bad actors can gather enough aggregate data about an individual, they can more easily steal their accounts or identity online. While it may seem fruitless to try and fight these massive companies, there are simple strategies that go a long way. Continue Reading on AppleInsider

Sonos didn't change its iconic look when it introduced the new Sub 4, but its minor tweaks help ensure the powerful subwoofer remains at top form for years to come.Sonos Sub 4 review: A new top contenderThe new flagship subwoofer from Sonos debuted in November, 2024 alongside the Arc Ultra. They're easy companions for one another, though they don't have to be paired together.You can use the Arc Ultra on its own which we recently reviewed and the Sub 4 can be paired with various models in the Sonos lineup. We've been listening to it for a few weeks now to see how it stand up. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Octopath Travelerhas grown into one of Square Enixs bigger and more successful properties over the course of the last few years, and it continues to attract players in decent numbers. As announced by Square Enix, the series has hit another major sales milestone.Taking to Twitter, the publisher announced that theOctopath Travelerseries has collectively sold over 5 million units worldwide across all platforms. The company hasnt provided specific, individual sales figures for the titles, but at last count, the originalOctopath Travelerhad hit 3 million units sold as of 2022, while last year, Square Enix announcedOctopath Traveler 2had hit 1 million units sold.Given the critical and commercial success the HD-2D turn-based RPG series has consistently enjoyed, its safe to say well be seeing moreOctopath Travelergames down the line, but for now, Square Enixs pipeline has plenty of HD-2D content.Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remakelaunched in November, andDragon Quest 1 and 2 HD-2D Remakeis due out sometime next year.#500 #2https://t.co/jinSDSFmhJ pic.twitter.com/h6itndyZN2 II (OCTOPATH TRAVELER II) (@OCTOPATH_PR) December 21, 2024

2025 is looking like a packed year for Xbox, with several major first-party titles lined up to release over the course of the year, though journalist Tom Warren of The Verge is claiming Microsoft has yet more games coming out during the year that the company hasnt yet publicly confirmed.Thus far, Microsoft hasFable, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, South of Midnight, DOOM: The Dark Ages,and the full release ofTowerborneofficially scheduled for 2025. Taking to BlueSky, Warren has claimed that in addition to those titles, the company also has additional games coming in 2025 that we dont yet officially know about.Leaks have claimed that an Xbox Developer Direct presentation is planned for January, where the rumoured remake ofThe Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivionwill be unveiled ahead of a 2025 release. Meanwhile, previously leaks have also suggested thatGears of War: E-Daycould be targeting a 2025 launch.and more Tom Warren (@tomwarren.co.uk) 2024-12-19T23:30:26.901Z

Borderlands 3may not have launched with cross-play support, but it did eventually end up adding it in, whileTiny Tinas Wonderlandssupported the feature right out the gate. Unsurprisingly, its been confirmed that you can expect the same withBorderlands 4.Asked about the games co-op offerings in an interview with Famitsu, Gearbox Entertainment boss Randy Pitchford confirmed thatBorderlands 4will feature cross-platform multiplayer support at launch, which means PlayStation, Xbox, and PC players will be able to play with each other.Gearbox has also confirmed that the looter shooter will feature two-player splitscreen support. Meanwhile, if you had a problem with the excessive toilet humour inBorderlands 3, you can also expect the next one to tone things down in that department.Borderlands 4is due out sometime in 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A new trailer for the RPG shooter was premiered at The Game Awards earlier this month. Check it out through here.

MPL's latest report show that popular mobile titles can leave players dissatisfied with certain approaches to in-game ads and updates.Read More

Since the release of BERT in 2018, encoder-only transformer models have been widely used in natural language processing (NLP) applications due to their efficiency in retrieval and classification tasks. However, these models face notable limitations in contemporary applications. Their sequence length, capped at 512 tokens, hampers their ability to handle long-context tasks effectively. Furthermore, their architecture, vocabulary, and computational efficiency have not kept pace with advancements in hardware and training methodologies. These shortcomings become especially apparent in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, where encoder-based models provide context for large language models (LLMs). Despite their critical role, these models often rely on outdated designs, limiting their capacity to meet evolving demands.A team of researchers from LightOn, Answer.ai, Johns Hopkins University, NVIDIA, and Hugging Face have sought to address these challenges with the introduction of ModernBERT, an open family of encoder-only models. ModernBERT brings several architectural enhancements, extending the context length to 8,192 tokensa significant improvement over the original BERT. This increase enables it to perform well on long-context tasks. The integration of Flash Attention 2 and rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) enhances computational efficiency and positional understanding. Trained on 2 trillion tokens from diverse domains, including code, ModernBERT demonstrates improved performance across multiple tasks. It is available in two configurations: base (139M parameters) and large (395M parameters), offering options tailored to different needs while consistently outperforming models like RoBERTa and DeBERTa.Technical Details and BenefitsModernBERT incorporates several advancements in transformer design. Flash Attention enhances memory and computational efficiency, while alternating global-local attention mechanisms optimize long-context processing. RoPE embeddings improve positional understanding, ensuring effective performance across varied sequence lengths. The model also employs GeGLU activation functions and a deep, narrow architecture for a balanced trade-off between efficiency and capability. Stability during training is further ensured through pre-normalization blocks and the use of the StableAdamW optimizer with a trapezoidal learning rate schedule. These refinements make ModernBERT not only faster but also more resource-efficient, particularly for inference tasks on common GPUs.Results and InsightsModernBERT demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks. On the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, it surpasses existing base models, including DeBERTaV3. In retrieval tasks like Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and ColBERT multi-vector retrieval, it achieves higher nDCG@10 scores compared to its peers. The models capabilities in long-context tasks are evident in the MLDR benchmark, where it outperforms older models and specialized long-context models such as GTE-en-MLM and NomicBERT. ModernBERT also excels in code-related tasks, including CodeSearchNet and StackOverflow-QA, benefiting from its code-aware tokenizer and diverse training data. Additionally, it processes significantly larger batch sizes than its predecessors, making it suitable for large-scale applications while maintaining memory efficiency.ConclusionModernBERT represents a thoughtful evolution of encoder-only transformer models, integrating modern architectural improvements with robust training methodologies. Its extended context length and enhanced efficiency address the limitations of earlier models, making it a versatile tool for a variety of NLP applications, including semantic search, classification, and code retrieval. By modernizing the foundational BERT architecture, ModernBERT meets the demands of contemporary NLP tasks. Released under the Apache 2.0 license and hosted on Hugging Face, it provides an accessible and efficient solution for researchers and practitioners seeking to advance the state of the art in NLP.Check out the Paper, Blog, and Model on Hugging Face. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Trending: LG AI Research Releases EXAONE 3.5: Three Open-Source Bilingual Frontier AI-level Models Delivering Unmatched Instruction Following and Long Context Understanding for Global Leadership in Generative AI Excellence.The post LightOn and Answer.ai Releases ModernBERT: A New Model Series that is a Pareto Improvement over BERT with bothSpeedandAccuracy appeared first on MarkTechPost.

This review contains spoilers for What We Do in the Shadows season 6, episode 11, The Finale.Trying to find the perfect ending for a TV show is a fools errand. So leave it to Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guilln) no stranger to foolishness or errands to be the one stressing out over the conclusion of the fake documentary at the center of What We Do in the Shadows. Hes the sole mortal among the shows primary characters, and therefore the only one for whom endings of any kind are significant or even exist. But this supernatural comedy is too clever and layered to allow Guillermos freak out to drive the entirety of The Finale, its unceasingly hilarious sign-off. There are emotional highs and sentimental sing-alongs, yes, but theres also Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) giving a goodbyes are hard pep talk that involves an anecdote about waving farewell to a train for over three hours, only to discover he was actually bidding adieu to a flatbed truck full of porta potties. And in its pileup of callbacks (Jackie Daytona! Laszlos witch-skin hat!), self-aware musings, and genuine heartache, The Finale is all locomotive, no portable toilet.That nondescript episode title is no afterthought or spoiler-disguising camouflage: Take its definitive article seriously, because in many ways this is the ultimate in series finales, the final bow that does the most and gets the most satisfying results. It goes so far as to drop Guilln and Novak into a pitch-perfect parody of one of TVs most notorious codas Newharts It was all a dream crossover with The Bob Newhart Show a fun detour for shippers and sitcom buffs alike. (Check the extra hypnosis features tab on the shows Hulu page for two more meticulous riffs on memorable endings.) But this is also where The Finale can get a little too cutesy, turning a house meeting about giving Guillermo the ending he desires into a pseudo writers room brainstorming session. (When The Guide suggests turning Guillermo into a vampire, Nandor shoots it down with a weary we did that already last year.) Far funnier and in-character for What We Do in the Shadows is Guillermos confession about why hes so bothered that the documentary is coming to an end. He delivers it directly to the soon-to-be-departing documentarians while Cravensworths monster (Andy Assaf) Laszlos (Matt Berry) scrappy stab at reanimating dead flesh la Dr. Victor Frankenstein humps a stuffed bear in the background. As Guillens heartfelt monologue about home mingles with his co-stars proud, perverse cooing about the monsters behavior, the out-of-focus-silhouette of Assaf gets freaky with the taxidermy and the go-for-broke spirit of The Finale is captured in a nutshell.The same goes for the documentary-within-the-documentary that fires up after Nandor and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) reveal this isnt the first time theyve let a film crew into their inner sanctum. You can quibble with the fact that such vain creatures surely wouldve let their previous onscreen experience slip earlier; you may object to Jerry the Vampire (Mike OBrien) failing to mention working with direct cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles when he threw a fit about the second documentary at the start of season 6. Whatever. I cackled through the entirety of this black-and-white interlude, a cavalcade of callbacks that temporarily puts Berry back into the persona of Arizonas most charismatic regular human bartender and gives him a Yes yes, very good. Thank YOU! for old times sake. The sequence is impeccably paced, ramping up to a panic over Nandor (not for the last time) blowing his and his roommates cover in news coverage of a nearby water-main break. The point is that all of this has happened before and will happen again in conversations amongst the characters, The Finale puts in the work to build the illusion that (after)life will carry on after the final credits roll. The committed lunacy of this abandoned doc is a welcome reminder that I wouldve happily watched these immortal idiots make the same mistakes for years to come.What We Do in the Shadows Series Finale GalleryReally, all of season 6 felt that way. Its one of the better sitcom swan songs in recent memory, due in no small part to how it prioritizes laughs. Ive already praised the delightful spin-out of Sleep Hypnosis, but What We Do in the Shadows managed to top itself the very next week with the fake-office hijinks of The Railroad. Putting the shows variety of colorful vampire factions into a send-up of The Warriors mustve been one of the biggest no-brainer pitches its writers ever threw out; that episode, Come Out and Play, scores additional points for closing the loop on Jerry and bringing back Doug Jones for one more commanding portrayal of Baron Afanas. And while the Cannon Capital Strategies subplot never really gathers a full head of steam, Gullermos time among the private equity vultures does lay the ground work for both Nandors mannequin-festooned, Apocalypse Now-inspired dark-comedy night of the soul in Nandors Arm and the reconciliation that gives The Finale its curtain-closing rush of warm fuzzies.Of all the wild guesses and concrete answers for why Guillermo might be feeling down about the end of the documentary, this is the most poignant: He already got the ending he thought he wanted, and being a vampire wasnt all hed hoped and dreamed it would be. The stint at Cannon renewed his sense of purpose, but as The Promotion effectively proved last week, that was just one more situation where hed be strung along by the promise of a life-altering change but without the fallback of someone like Nandor whod grown to respect him. The scenes between Guilln and Novak are the ballast that keeps The Finale from completely floating off into Wackyland they begin the episode wearing low-rent, humiliating superhero outfits but they end it as equals, looking at one another eye-to-eye. It is very What We Do in the Shadows that this precious moment occurs in a coffin, mere seconds before it descends into the imitation Batcave Nandor has dug beneath the vampire residence.I wouldve happily watched these immortal idiots make the same mistakes for years to come.In one of a few head-fake finishes, Guillermo gives the documentarians a pretend time to move on ending. But the real deal shows how far hes come. The guy sitting in that coffin is no longer the meek servant we glimpse in the excerpt from the series premiere shown during the credits of The Finale. Hes now a full, active participant in the chaos that defines the episode: Its format-breaking rabbit holes, its expressions of the monsters natural urges, its VFX-aided capper. And thats really the best ending that anyone in his situation couldve hoped for.

Let's make this simple. You want to know if there are any post-credits or mid-credits scenes in the new Sonic movie. We'll tell you right here: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 has both, so be sure to stick around!Full spoilers follow from this point on!Sonic fans have been waiting eagerly for the third installment to the blockbuster franchise since it was announced, and now the massive movie is here with a ton of new additions to the cast, as well as some wild and deep Sonic lore. Following the blue blur as he faces down Shadow (Keanu Reeves) and two Doctor Robotniks (Jim Carrey), Sonic 3 (review) is a delightful family film thats also filled with action, heart, and an honestly surprising amount of Sonic Adventure 2 references.So now that you've (hopefully) watched the movie and gotten your Sonic popcorn bucket, of course we're here to explain that absolutely wild ending, the importance behind that tragic character, what those post-credits scenes mean, and where the film leaves us heading into the recently announced Sonic 4. PlaySonic 3 Ending Explained After that unexpected Eggman team-up that the first act sets up, we end the film with the reveal that Gerald Robotnik, the grandfather of both Dr. Robotnik and Maria (Alyla Browne), doesn't just want to rule the world like his grandson: He wants to destroy it. That takes us to the famous Eggman game weapon the Eclipse Cannon, where Reeves Shadow uses his speed to super-charge the cannon with his Chaos Energy in order to destroy humanity for the death of his best friend, Maria. Sonic (Ben Schwartz) manages to get through to Shadow by connecting with him over the importance of making the right choice and remembering Maria the right way. This leads to one of the biggest moments in the movie as both Sonic and Shadow use the Chaos Emeralds to take on their Super forms, teaming up to fly through the sky. And in a very cool nod to Sonic Adventures 2, the main theme from that game, "Live and Learn" by Crush 40, begins to play as they soar up above. While in his Super form, Shadow helps save the Earth along with Dr. Robotnik the younger, with both sacrificing themselves. While in his Super form, Shadow helps save the Earth by staying on the Eclipse Cannon along with Dr. Robotnik the younger, with both sacrificing themselves for the good of humanity, though they do happen to carve through the moon while doing so, which feels like it will probably have ramifications. After the deaths of both Robotniks and seemingly Shadow as well, Sonic, Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), and Knuckles (Idris Elba) have a fun family race to settle their challenge from the opening of the film and celebrate saving the world. Who Is Maria in Sonic 3? Well, isn't that the big question. If you're a casual Sonic fan then you might not know about the incredibly bleak tale of Maria and Shadow that we get a truncated reimagining of here. In the video games, Maria is the terminally ill granddaughter of Gerald Robotnik. He brings her to the Space Colony ARK space station in the hopes of saving or prolonging her life, and it's there that she meets Shadow. But while the pair have a sweet childlike friendship in the film, their story in the games veers much darker as Shadow feels a great guilt for not being able to help Maria find a cure for her illness. Unlike the film where Shadow is discovered as a young alien by the US government, in the games' canon he was actually created by Gerald Robotnik to cure Maria thanks to the use of secret alien DNA. The fact that he was never able to help Maria weighs heavily on Shadow and leads to his protective nature around her. PlayShadow's origin has long been legendary among video game fans, because just like in the film Maria dies. But in the games she's intentionally killed by GUN as she frees Shadow from ARK and his pursuers. The murder of a child by a government soldier sounds far more like something out of The Last of Us than Sonic the Hedgehog, and it's still one of the franchise's most controversial and iconic moments because of it. A very important impact of all this is the way it changes Shadow, who vows to destroy all humanity alongside Gerald Robotnik. And that story has now been echoed in the third Sonic the Hedgehog film. Does Sonic 3 Have a Post-Credits Scene?Sonic fans rejoice: The answer here, as noted at the top of this page, is a resounding yes. The sequel actually has both mid-credits and post-credits scenes, and of course we're going to break them down for you here. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 GalleryAs Sonic realizes that he's outrun his family during their celebratory race, he stops in a New York state park only to quickly sense that he's not alone. Hidden among the trees is an army of Metal Sonics ready to take down the blue blur while he's alone. This is a big moment for Sonic fans as Metal Sonic is easily one of his most iconic foes appearing in 11 Sonic games so far and it got a huge crowd reaction at this writer's screening. But that was far from the biggest surprise that we got in the mid-credits scene because as Sonic was facing down the multiple metal menaces, he was saved by a hooded figure with a huge hammer who revealed herself to be none other than Amy Rose, Sonic's longtime ally and biggest fan. And that's not all. If you wait until the credits are over, youll see that Shadow is still alive as his feet appear and he retrieves his golden bracelet from the dusty ground, promising he lives to fight another day, likely alongside Team Sonic in the next film. How Sonic 3 Sets Up Sonic 4While the main film wraps things up pretty neatly, the post-credits scenes set up some serious conflict for the next movie, which will hit screens in 2027. We'll likely follow Amy Rose and Sonic as they try to work out where the Metal Sonic bots came from. In the games they're evolved versions of Robotnik's Badnik bots. But seeing as both Gerald and Ivo Robotnik seemingly died at the end of this movie, maybe well wind up getting another version of Robotnik in the future.When it comes to Shadow, it seems most probable that we'll get to see him return, probably to help Team Sonic find their fearless leader after he and Amy Rose meet on their mission. We could also see some version of a future Robotnik and future timeline where the Metal Sonics hailed from. But that's all hypothetical until the next Sonic movie appears in theaters two years from now. What did you think of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie? Lets discuss in the comments!

Download it now.Following its release in October, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed has received a new update.It adds a new colour blind mode with three options and also "responds to fan demand" for increased gameplay difficulty and other quality-of-life improvements. Here's the full rundown, courtesy of the PR:Read the full article on nintendolife.com