My family recently visited Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, home of Potcake Place K9 Rescue.A potcake is a mixed-breed street dog in the Caribbean, and the rescue lets volunteers walk them.My family loved doing this and plan to volunteer again the next time we visit Providenciales.Several years ago, my family visited Turks and Caicos as part of a cruise itinerary. While researching things to do there, I read about a dog rescue where volunteers could walk puppies. Sadly, our cruise port was on Grand Turk and Potcake Place K9 Rescue on Providenciales two different (and very far apart) islands in Turks and Caicos, which is made up of 40 main islands and cays.Recently, though, as my family headed to an all-inclusive resort in Turks and Caicos, I was delighted to learn we'd be on the same island as Potcake Place. So, we made plans to take a taxi from our resort into town and visit the shelter.Potcakes are mixed-breed stray pups who live on many Caribbean islands Our potcake was named Heidi. Terri Peters A potcake is a term for a dog native to the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. The name came about because locals once fed the stray animals the remains in their cooking pots. Although there's no exact formula for a potcake's DNA, the breed is essentially a mixed-breed street dog.They're social and food-oriented and can be seen roaming the streets throughout these countries as strays. Contrary to popular belief, they are not wild dogs, simply domestic breeds without homes.Potcake Place runs on donations with a mission to reduce the number of homeless potcakes on the island, in part by adopting rescues out to approved, screened homes.And, if you happen to be visiting Providenciales, you can volunteer to walk one of its dogs.We were given helpful instructions for walking our pup I was so excited to walk a dog around the island. Terri Peters Beyond the $30 cab ride we took into town, the experience was completely free. To walk a puppy, we got to Potcake Place a little before 10 a.m. and waited in line with many other visitors who were there to volunteer. After filling out a form and waiting our turn, a volunteer brought Heidi out to meet us. A sweet black-and-white pup who was just a few months old, Heidi was handed off to us with a leash and a tote full of poop bags, treats, water, and a collapsible bowl. We were able to walk our pup around town in the morning. Terri Peters We were told we could walk her all over the town and given some simple rules: Heidi had to be back to the rescue by 12:30 p.m., and we should stick to dog-friendly parts of town.A volunteer also suggested some good, dog-walker-friendly spots, including a local coffee shop and the Ritz Carlton in town.This was an incredible way to soak up the sun and sightsee We loved exploring the island on foot. Terri Peters After a rundown of the rules, we were off with Heidi in tow. Not only was she a super-sweet pup, but also this activity was an amazing way to explore downtown Providenciales. We got coffee at a local shop, shopped for souvenirs, walked on the beach, and rested on the beautiful lawns of the Providenciales Ritz Carlton, all with Heidi leashed up next to us. She seemed as thrilled to be out and about with us as we were to have her, even if she did get tired of walking a few times and needed to be carried (a possibility the volunteers at Potcake Place warned us about).Spending a morning exploring Providenciales with my husband, two teenagers, and a puppy was everything I hoped it would be. What's more, Potcake Place staff can help families adopt the dog they walk and get them home to the US.I'd have brought Heidi back to Florida with us in a heartbeat, but my particular airline wouldn't allow it. If I visit the island again, I'll be sure to go back and fly with a dog-friendly airline.

PwC hosts "prompting parties" to help employees experiment with generative AI tools.The firm's chief learning officer said employees needed a safe, low-stakes format to experiment with it.PwC announced last year it was investing $1 billion over three years to expand its AI capabilities.Generative AI is reshaping the workplace, but many employees are still unsure how to use it.PwC, a Big Four professional services firm, is addressing that gap with "prompting parties."In 2023, PwC announced it was investing $1 billion over three years to expand its AI capabilities. Later that year the company launched My AI, an upskilling initiative for employees to get trained on how to use AI responsibly.But Leah Houde, the chief learning officer at PwC, told Business Insider that after the initial AI trainings, there was still a skill gap when it came to employees actually putting the technology to use, even though employees wanted to know more about how to use it.In 2024, AI was among the top five terms searched in PwC's internal learning and development platform, compared to being in the top 15 in 2023 and not even in the top 100 in 2022, PwC represenatives told BI."The cognitive load that it takes to just try something new in the course of doing what you're normally doing is hard," Houde said, adding that many employees just didn't know where to start with AI prompts, which are the written instructions given to an AI tool in order to elicit a useful response.People needed a safe, low-stakes place to play with the tools. That's where the AI prompting parties came in.The group sessions, which can be run independently amongst teams or by a company AI leader, are aimed at making employees comfortable using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatPwC the company's internal version of ChatGPT.The sessions focus on real use cases, so employees can collaboratively experiment with using AI to help them solve a problem or accomplish a task that's specific to their team.Houde said the sessions are like a"playground where I'm not working on a client deliverable or writing an email to my boss or something that might give me anxiety that I don't want to mess up with AI."She said experimenting in a group setting also allows employees to learn from each others' prompts, giving them new ideas about what AI can do. It's also made them more likely to try out AI on their own time too, Houde said.Since launching in March, PwC said it has hosted nearly 500 prompting parties and over 880 more have been requested, so they are scaling up to meet the demand.Houde said becoming familiar with AI was especially important for employees at PwC as a professional services firm, since the company's clients often turn to its employees to get their own questions about AI answered.Workforce experts previously told BI's Tim Paradisthat getting employees up to speed with AI is necessary, and that it will require the help and investment of employers. A survey published by Slack in November found the rate of AI adoption among desk workers had plateaued, despite companies continuing to invest heavily in AI for their business.But Houde said it's not just AI or other technical skills that employees at PwC want more training on. Terms like"inclusion" and "inclusive mindset" are among the top searched on the company's training platform every year."The thing that it says to me is that the human interaction is always going to matter," she said.Going forward, Houde said she's most excited about how AI can be used to create personalized learning and development plans for people based on their current skills and where they want to go in their careers.Instead of generically recommending the same trainings to everyone, AI can flag trainings that are most relevant to each individual."AI is now enabling us to understand the skills our people have and make connections between the skills that they have and the skills that they're going to need to progress," Houde said.Have a news tip or a story to share? Do you work in consulting or have you worked with a consulting career coach? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the companys business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors. One key area of interest is how the worlds largest software provider packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter. This so-called bundling was the subject of a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to vastly expand its business with the U.S. government while boxing competitors out of lucrative federal contracts. At the time, many federal employees used a software license that included the Windows operating system and products like Word, Outlook and Excel. In the wake of several devastating cyberattacks, Microsoft offered to upgrade those license bundles for free for a limited time, giving the government access to its more advanced cybersecurity products. The company also provided consultants to install the upgrades.Vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy accepted, including all of the military services in the Defense Department and then began paying for those enhanced services when the free trial ended. Former sales leaders involved in the effort likened it to a drug dealer hooking a user with free samples, as they knew federal customers would be effectively locked into the upgrades once they were installed. Microsofts offer not only displaced some existing cybersecurity vendors but also took market share from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, as the government began using products that ran on Azure, Microsofts own cloud platform. Some experts told ProPublica that the companys tactics might have violated laws regulating contracting and competition, and the news organization reported that even some of Microsofts own attorneys had antitrust worries about the deals.Microsoft has said its offer was structured to avoid antitrust concerns. The companys sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors, Steve Faehl, the security leader for Microsofts federal business, told ProPublica. Some of those incursions were the result of Microsofts own security lapses. As ProPublica reported in June, Russian state-sponsored hackers in the so-called SolarWinds attack exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other victims. Years before the attack was discovered, a Microsoft engineer warned product leaders about the flaw, but they refused to address it for fear of alienating the federal government and losing ground to competitors, ProPublica reported.While the engineers proposed fix would have kept customers safe, it also would have created a speed bump for users logging on to their devices. Adding such friction was unacceptable to the managers of the product group, which at the time was in a fierce rivalry with competitors in the market for so-called identity tools, the news organization reported. These tools, which ensure that users have permission to log on to cloud-based programs, are important to Microsofts business strategy because they often lead to demand for the companys other cloud services. According to a person familiar with the FTCs probe, one such identity product, Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, is another focus of the agencys investigation.Microsoft has defended its decision against addressing the SolarWinds-related flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the companys assessment included multiple reviews at the time and that its response to security issues is based on potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations. It has pledged to put security above all else. The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the companys problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told the news organization.The commission is not alone in that view. These guys are sort of a version of too big to fail, said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and a longtime critic of Microsoft. I think its time to amp up the antitrust side of the house, dealing with antitrust abuses. The FTCs investigation of Microsoft, which was first reported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg, is far from the companys first brush with federal regulators over antitrust issues. More than two decades ago, the Department of Justice sued the company in a landmark antitrust case that nearly resulted in its breakup. Federal prosecutors alleged that Microsoft maintained an illegal monopoly in the operating system market through anticompetitive behaviors that prevented rivals from getting a foothold. Ultimately, the Justice Department settled with Microsoft, and a federal judge approved a consent decree that imposed restrictions on how the company could develop and license software. John Lopatka, a former consultant to the FTC who now teaches antitrust law at Penn State, told ProPublica that the Microsoft actions detailed in the news organizations recent reporting followed a very familiar pattern of behavior.It does echo the Microsoft case from decades ago, said Lopatka, who co-authored a book on that case. In the new investigation, the FTC has sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the agencys version of a subpoena, compelling the company to turn over information, people familiar with the probe said. Microsoft confirmed that it received the document. Company spokesperson David Cuddy did not comment on the specifics of the investigation but said the FTCs demand is broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical. He declined to provide on-the-record examples. The FTC declined to comment. The agencys investigation follows a public comment period in 2023 during which it sought information on the business practices of cloud computing providers. When that concluded, the FTC said it had ongoing interest in whether certain business practices are inhibiting competition.The recent demand to Microsoft represents one of FTC Commissioner Lina Khans final moves as chair, and the probe appears to be picking up steam as the Biden administration winds down. The commissions new leadership, however, will decide the future of the investigation. President-elect Donald Trump said this month that he will elevate Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, a Republican attorney, to lead the agency. Following the announcement, Ferguson said in a post on X, At the FTC, we will end Big Techs vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the worlds technological leader and the best place for innovators to bring new ideas to life.Trump also said he would nominate Republican lawyer Mark Meador as a commissioner, describing him as an antitrust enforcer who previously worked at the FTC and the Justice Department. Meador is also a former aide to Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who introduced legislation to break up Google. Doris Burke contributed research.

SummaryThis podcast episode focuses on debugging and troubleshooting VFX in Unreal Engine, a critical but often overlooked aspect of working with visual effects. The episode features Ashif Ali, a resident expert, who shares his knowledge on common VFX issues, debugging techniques, and best practices for future projects. He covers a wide range of topics, including performance problems, visual artifacts, lighting issues, and shader compilation errors. Ashif also discusses essential debugging tools and provides practical solutions for fixing these issues, empowering VFX artists to create polished and efficient effects.

The existence of SMILE Fruit was first introduced during the Punk Hazard arc. Caesar Clown was the primary scientist behind its creation, using new and existing technology to ensure mass production.

As the most elusive area in Genshin Impact, Mare Jivari has been the talk of the town since Mondstadt was released. Snippets of its lore have been spread by either the Anemo Archon or the people of Natlan, yet despite this, not much is still known.

Xbox Game Pass has come a long way since its 2017 launch. When it debuted, Xbox Game Pass was home to just over 100 games, with some of the biggest being Halo 5: Guardians, Payday 2, Saints Row 4, and NBA 2K16. Seven years later, Xbox Game Pass is now home to almost 500 titles, many of which can be played on consoles, PC, or on a variety of devices thanks to Xbox Cloud streaming.

Dreams on a Pillow is a video game experience about the 1948 Nakba, an event where roughly 700,000 people were displaced from their land and homes due to Zionist occupation.The game, described as a pseudo-3D stealth adventure game about a land full of people being made into a people without land, is from Palestinian developer Rasheed Abu-Eideh. But before I tell you more about that, let me tell you about his previous game.In 2016, Abu-Eideh released Liyla and the Shadows of War, a game about a 2014 assault on Gaza by Israel, known as Operation Protective Edge. Liyla follows a Palestinian girl and her family as they navigate attacks in their neighborhood. Its short but emotional, and it blends elements of platformers and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling. In 2021, the game was a part of an Indie Bundle Pack that raised nearly $900,000 for Palestinian aid through UNRWA USA. @polygon Dreams on a Pillow by Rasheed Abu-Eideh is a video game experience about the 1948 Nakba- plus how you can support it at the end of the video. original sound Polygon Currently, Liyla and the Shadows of War is free on mobile and Windows. But back in 2016, it was initially rejected as a game in the Apple App Store. Abu-Eideh was told to remove all description of it as a Game and re-categorize it as News or Reference due to its political nature. The hypocrisy of the decision was noted by many at the time: As reported by Eurogamer, Apple denied Liyla as a game, but allowed a game called Israeli Heroes in the game section. After Abu-Eideh spoke about Apples decision on social media, Apple finally allowed Liyla to be categorized as a game.Dreams on a Pillow is currently being crowdfunded by Abu-Eideh on LaunchGood till Jan. 13, and funds raised from the LaunchGood campaign will go towards asset creation, outsourcing, and salaries for the current team of 9 individuals. The game is aiming to launch in Q4 2026.

We live in a landscape where words like reboot and retcon are common knowledge. Hollywood executives use the word multiverse in complete seriousness. No one can talk about Batman in the movies anymore you have to specify. Nolan Batman? Snyder Batman? Reeves Batman? Bryan Singers Magneto, or the First Class one? Raimi Spider-Man or the Amazing run or the MCU version? Superhero movies dont have to explain comics anymore. They can just be like comics places for creative folks to drop in, do their take on a long-established character, and see what the audience thinks about it.The gift this era has given me, as a comics fan and a critic, is a new thought experiment: What would I think of this superhero movie if it had been a comic book? Did the movie find something insightful to say about a decades-old character? Did it play well in the space, relative to all the other stories that have gone before it?I think Matt Reeves The Batman might actually have been even better as a 12-issue alt-universe miniseries, giving its characters more time to breathe in a new variation on Gotham. On the other hand, the original Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has so much to say about Spider-Mans themes of responsibility and identity, and its also so inventive with the form of the animated film that converting it into a comic would definitely rob it of some of its magic.But this year, I found my experiment running aground when considering Todd Phillips Joker duology. Setting aside my own problems with Phillips writing and directing, did these two movies which reimagine the Joker as the alternately pathetic and dangerous failed comedian turned successful murderer Arthur Fleck have something to say about the iconic supervillain? And how did that statement measure up against the comics themselves? With Joker: Folie Deux now streaming on Max, it seemed like a good time to reconsider the question.And heres my conclusion: Todd Phillips Joker movies dont have anything to say about Joker comics, because they are simply not about the character of the Joker in any recognizable way. Who is the Joker?The mutability of a character is a sign of its strength, but characters are not endlessly mutable. How much mutation is acceptable before a character becomes unrecognizable is a topic upon which gallons of metaphorical blood have been spilled in forums digital and in person.But I think we can agree that that line exists.You could slowly make changes to Batman give him guns, make him OK with killing criminals, take away his money and friends, give him a differently themed costume and eventually he would simply become the Punisher. We can argue about exactly where the line between the two of them would be, but that line exists.And where the Joker is concerned, I believe, that line is about his interiority.Phillips makes a lot of changes to the Joker. His films give him a name, Arthur Fleck, and an inciting incident: getting roughed up by some corporate bros and blowing them all away. They give him mommy issues and a yearning for a romantic partner, and remove his rivalry with Batman and his context within a world of theatrical supervillains and powerful superheroes.Folie Deux has Arthur meditate aloud on the question of Who is Arthur Fleck? via a sad and profoundly delivered knock-knock joke recited during the closing argument of a trial in which he has elected to defend himself, no less.You can make a lot of changes to the Joker, because good characters are mutable. You can remove him entirely from a setting where superheroes and villains are commonplace, or remove Batman, and therefore his rivalry with him, entirely. You can make him a silly trickster or a horrifying psychopath or a Lego man. You can give him obsessions like getting Batman to acknowledge me or obstacles to overcome like accidentally committing tax evasion.But if you give the Joker a parsable human interiority, I would argue youve stopped interacting with the idea of the Joker in any meaningful way. I think this is the fundamental nucleus of his character, as whittled down, sharpened, and compressed to a fine point by 80 years of Joker stories and hundreds of striving creative minds.Batmans dark mirrorWe like to say that the best supervillains are mirror reflections of their heroes, which is fun to apply to Batman and the Joker, because I dont think theres anyone out there who, when asked What is the opposite of a bat? would answer A clown. Dig a little deeper and you can pull some oppositions from the way theyre typically characterized: Theyre equally theatrically invested in fear, but they aim it in opposite directions.Batman is taciturn where the Joker is chatty, and dark where hes colorful. Batman represents order, while the Joker is chaos. But careful! Batman is mutable. Hes not always frightening, grim, and lawful, and neither is the Joker always flamboyant, deadly, and philosophically chaotic.Whats immutable about Batman is that he does what he does for extraordinarily specific reasons. His motivations are entirely known, and constantly restated to the audience. His core character trauma is infamous for how often its been recreated in adaptation. Its been memed into immortality. With Spider-Man as a close second, Batman is the origin-story superhero. And so by force of the narrative Joker is the anti-origin-story villain.We dont know why he does what he does. Its not even clear whether he knows. His interiority is a black box, open to embody our worst fears about mans inhumanity to man. Titans of the genre have tried to give the Joker a motivating origin story, and none of them have succeeded in crafting one that sticks. And while we should never dismiss something as impossible just because nobodys done it yet, I also think it behooves us to learn from history.Even recent history would suffice: Its hard to find a compelling emotional throughline if you cant peek into your main characters thoughts, but Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenicos 2022 series The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing gets around that issue by featuring a main character who isnt sure whether hes really the Joker, or just a guy the Joker brainwashed into being a Joker decoy. Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentinos 2019 series Joker: Killer Smile, meanwhile, is actually a series about the Jokers new psychiatrist.James Tynion IV and Guillem Marchs 2021 Joker series tells a great story about the Clown Prince of Crime based on the extremely cogent observation that ex-police commissioner James Gordon might be the only person in Gotham City more personally wronged by the Joker than Batman. Their book features Gordon as the point-of-view character on a Catch Me If You Can-style manhunt for the Joker, wrestling with whether he should just put a bullet in the murderer for the good of humanity instead of apprehending him.Said the Joker to the thiefThis is why I struggled to apply the Is this a good Joker story? framework to Todd Phillips Joker and Joker: Folie Deux. The Joker resists origin stories and clear motivation because theyre fundamentally opposed to the narrative purpose he fulfills as the summation of all that Batman opposes. At his most immutable, Batman is the guy who says A senseless thing happened to me, and thats why I have to stop more senseless things from happening. And what has made the Joker his perfect foil is that at his most immutable, the Joker is a machine for making senseless things happen.If you remove Batman, the character the Joker was molded around, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. And if you change the Joker so that hes the main character of the story, you might still have a Joker story on your hands. But if you do all that and you examine who the Joker is and why he does what he does you are simply not making a story about the Joker anymore.And thats fine! There are a lot of characters who are not the Joker, and I think we can agree that some of them are even quite compelling. But youre not telling me anything salient or new about the Joker, a character honed over 80 years into a highly efficient narrative machine for making senseless things happen. Youve made him make sense. Youve made up a new guy for your story, and slapped Jokers name on him.That is, I think, what I most want to explain to any creative who, like Phillips, sees the superhero genre as a means to an end. I dont just want to point out the faux pas of dismissing the work of the creators who came before you, of picking up someone elses toys while not playing in the space. Not because I dont think thats important, but because I just think that if youre a person who sees superhero cinema as a means to an end, you probably dont care about being rude to comics creators.What I want to get into the skulls of this particular kind of superhero filmmaker is that comics have already done the work. What youre dismissing is decades of evidence of what succeeds, doesnt succeed, or only succeeds if you do it like this. Phillips saw the Jokers lack of an origin story as freedom to make his own take, not a sign that his origin storys very absence, despite 80 years of opportunity to create one, was significant.Declining to learn from decades of stories made by hardworking creatives developing the same character is rude, sure, sure. But its also shooting yourself in the dang foot.

Some users of the YouTube Android app are seeing a button that means less scrolling and more watching.