Hisense has revealed its new laser TV ahead of CES 2025, and it's going big on both projection size and sound quality.

Following two lawsuits in 2021 and 2023, IBM and Global Foundries have reached a settlement, but it's not known exactly what.

Is Nvidias RTX 5070 Ti mobile set to use a low-end Lovelace chip? No, in a word but new rumor still suggests next-gen GPUs are imminent.

Today on the befores & afters podcast, were chatting to VFX supervisor Alex Noble, who is the founder of Wild Union Post. Now, while it works on big studio films, Wild Union has crafted a lot of visual effects for independent films, including those submitted for the Sundance Film Festival.In this chat, we talk about all things indie related, and how to get the best kind of VFX work done for your indie film. Alex has some fantastic tips and tricks for making the most of your VFX budgetthings that apply all the way from small films to much larger ones, too.This episode of the befores & afters podcast is sponsored by SideFX. Looking for great customer case studies, presentations and demos? Head to the SideFX YouTube channel. There youll find tons of Houdini, Solaris and Karma content. This includes recordings of recent Houdini HIVE sessions from around the world.Listen in above, and below, check out some imagery from Wild Union.The post How to get VFX into your Sundance film appeared first on befores & afters.

This week on Dezeen, we rounded up twelve architecture projects expected to complete in 2025, including a sports campus topped with greenery in China.Featured among the list of projects is the highly anticipated World Expo in Osaka, which is being masterplanned by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and will be held within a 60,000-square-metre wooden ring.We concluded our review of the year's best projectsAlso this week, we concluded our review of the top stories of 2024, which was rounded off with a look at the top 10 chairs and the top 10 Dezeen videos of the year.We also listed the top 10 holiday homes of the year, which included a home in India wrapped in a gabion wall filled with rocks and an angular black holiday home in the Netherlands informed by stealth aircraft.Tom Dixon was recognised in the new year's honours listIn other news, designer Tom Dixon was awarded a CBE in King Charles III's New Year Honours list.Also recognised in the King's biannual honours programme were architect Peter Clegg and graphic designer Neville Brody, who were each awarded OBEs.Pooran Desai wrote an opinion piece addressing climate tipping pointsAlso published this week was an opinion piece by Pooran Desai, in which the social entrepreneur calls on designers to help lead a fundamental shift in the way we see the world.In the midst of immense climate pressures, Desai highlights a lack of time to save the world revealing only two options: "reimagine, or perish".A desert house in California was the most-read project on Dezeen this weekPopular projects featured on Dezeen this week included a wood-and-stucco house and studio in California, a forest spa featuring tubular concrete wells, and a trapezoidal home added to a Norman Foster extension in London.Our latest lookbooks include bedrooms illuminated by creative lighting solutions and interiors with gold and silver accents.This week on DezeenThis week on Dezeen is our regular roundup of the week's top news stories. Subscribe to our newsletters to be sure you don't miss anything.The post This week we revealed the architecture projects to look out for in 2025 appeared first on Dezeen.

Elden Ring Nightreignis going to diverge from the established FromSoftware formula in several key ways, from its co-op focus and its roguelike structure to its parallel world setting and more. A little lower down that list, another familiar feature from the studios past Soulslike titles that wont be returning (and is admittedly more granular in nature) is the message system.Leaving short messages scrolled on the ground for other players to read (and rate) has been a staple of FromSoftwares Soulslike action RPGs for as long as theyve been around, but speaking in an interview with IGN Japan, game director Junya Ishizaki revealed thatElden Ring Nightreignwont have that feature. With each run of the game lasting about 40 minutes at most, Ishizaki says players simply wont have enough time to read and write messages.You can still see the ghosts of other players, but the ability to leave messages has been removed. The reason we removed the message function is that in this game, where each session is about 40 minutes long, there is no time to write your own message, and no time to read messages written by others, Ishizaki explained.As a co-op-focused title,Nightreignis obviously expected to adopt a different structure and pacing from the game it has spun off from, so the tweaking and chopping of familiar elements here and there doesnt necessarily come as a surprise. Whether the game is going to be able to deliver a compelling experience in spite of all the changes is going to be the big question on everyones mind.Elden Ring Nightreignis due out in 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. A closed network test will take place in February, with registrations set to go live next week.

Power distribution systems are often conceptualized as optimization models. While optimizing agents to perform tasks works well for systems with limited checkpoints, things begin to go out of hand when heuristics tackle multiple tasks and agents. Scaling dramatically increases the complexity of assignment problems, often NP-hard and nonlinear. Optimization methods become the white elephants in the room, providing suboptimality at high resource consumption. Another major issue with these methods is that their problem setup is dynamic, requiring an iterative, state-based assignment strategy. When one thinks of state in AI, reinforcement learning is the first thing that comes to mind. In the case of assignment applications, given its temporal state-dependent nature, researchers realized the attractive and massive potential of sequential decision-making reinforcement learning. This paper discusses the latest research in state-based assignment, which optimizes its solution through RL.Researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, introduced a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for sequential satellite assignment problems. Multi-Agent RL provides solutions for large-scale, realistic scenarios that, with other methods, would have been extravagantly complex. The authors presented a meticulously designed and theoretically justified novel algorithm for solving satellite assignments that ensures specific rewards, guarantees global objectives, and avoids conflicting constraints. The approach integrates existing greedy algorithms in MARL only to improve its solution for long-term planning. The authors also provide the readers with novel insights into its working and global convergence properties through simple experimentation and comparisons.The methodology that distinguishes it is that agents first learn an expected assignment value; this value serves as the input for an optimally distributed task assignment mechanism. This allows agents to execute joint assignments that satisfy assignment constraints while learning a near-optimal joint policy at the system level. The paper follows a generalized approach to satellite internet constellations, where satellites act as agents. This Satellite Assignment Problem is solved via an RL-enabled Distributed Assignment algorithm(REDA). In this, the authors bootstrap the policy from a non-parameterized greedy policy with which they act at the beginning of training with probability . Additionally, to induce further exploration, the authors add randomly distributed noise to Q . Another aspect of REDA that reduces its complexity is its learning target specification, which ensures targets satisfy the constraints.For evaluation, the authors perform experiments on a simple SAP environment, which they later scale to a complex satellite constellation task allocation environment with hundreds of satellites and tasks. The authors steer the experiments to answer some interesting questions, such as whether REDA encourages unselfish behavior and if REDA can be applied to large problems. The authors reported that REDA immediately drove the group to an optimal joint policy, unlike other methods that encouraged selfishness. For the highly complex scaled SAP, REDA yielded low variance and consistently outperformed all other methods. Overall, the authors reported an increase of 20% to 50% over other state-of-the-art methods.Conclusion: This paper discussed REDA, a novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning approach for solving complex state-dependent assignment problems. The paper addresses satellite assignment problems and teaches agents to act unselfishly while learning efficient solutions, even in large problem settings.Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. 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. Adeeba Alam Ansari+ postsAdeeba Alam Ansari is currently pursuing her Dual Degree at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, earning a B.Tech in Industrial Engineering and an M.Tech in Financial Engineering. With a keen interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, she is an avid reader and an inquisitive individual. Adeeba firmly believes in the power of technology to empower society and promote welfare through innovative solutions driven by empathy and a deep understanding of real-world challenges. Follow us on X (Twitter) to get regular AI Research and Dev Updates here...

It's a stressful time to have student loans. Between payment pauses and the courts disputing the legality of the Biden administration's SAVE repayment plan, there are many questions about what will happen next. Elaine Rubin, a higher education policy expertAs a student loan expert with more than 15 years of experience in the industry, I understand the confusion. I've witnessed my fair share of program changes, but I've never been through a period more complicated and tumultuous than the policy tug-of-war we've seen over the past two years.With so many factors up in the air, how should you approach your student loan repayment strategy?You can't control the fate of debt relief programs or income-driven repayment plans, but there are steps you can take to regain control of your student loans. Here are five things you can do right now and one thing you shouldn't do. Check your student loan balanceDo you know how much you owe in total on your student loans? You might have an idea (or think you do), but it's important to check.Many borrowers I've worked with are surprised to find they owe more than they initially borrowed when it's time to start repayment. This is because most loans, except subsidized ones, begin accruing interest from the moment they are disbursed. Outstanding interest, which has not been capitalized or added to your loan, is listed separately from the principal balance. To fully understand your loan balance, it's important to carefully review your statements.If you know who your student loan servicer is, you can log into your online account to check your balance. If you're not sure, you can find out by logging into your Federal Student Aid account and visiting the My Aid page.Read more:5 Ways to Pay Off Your Student Loans Even Faster Prepare now to restart paymentsIf you are enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan, your loans have been in an administrative forbearance since this summer due to the plan's legal challenges. You haven't been able to make payments, and your interest rate has been set to zero. This payment hold is temporary, and I expect it to end soon.If you haven't done so already, reevaluate your monthly budget to accommodate your student loan payments.Compare the income-driven repayment plansIf you're worried about SAVE disappearing or looking to adjust your budget to include your monthly loan payments, it's a good idea to explore all available repayment plans. You can use the US Department of Education's Loan Simulator to estimate your payments and check eligibility for specific plans. This tool will let you explore available income-driven payment options.Update: The department recentlyrestored the Pay as You Earn and Income-Contingent Repayment options, two IDR plans that were previously phased out. You can now apply for them online (if you're eligible). Consider the PSLF buyback programThe Public Service Loan Forgiveness program offers debt cancellation for teachers, nurses and other public service employees who work in a qualifying job for 10 years and make 120 payments on their loans. If you're enrolled in SAVE and were close to reaching your 120 total payments, the recent payment pause may have delayed your forgiveness. In this case, you might benefit from the PSLF buyback program.The PSLF buyback program lets you "buy back" months where your loans sat on hold during a forbearance period but only if doing so brings you to 120 total payments.For example, let's say you had already made 115 qualifying payments before your loan entered the SAVE Plan forbearance. You could apply for the PSLF buyback program to buy back five of the months where your loans were in forbearance to reach the 120-payment requirement. You'll apply for the program online, and once approved, you'll have 90 days to pay off what you owe for the number of months you buy back. So, if your monthly payment was $100, you'd need to pay $500 to receive forgiveness.You'll need to also make sure you meet all other PSLF eligibility criteria, such as working for a qualifying employer and having the correct loan type. If you think you're eligible and want to confirm your payment count, you can find qualifying payment amounts in yourStudentAid.gov account. Expert tip: If you qualify for forgiveness through the buyback program, you will not pay any federal taxes on the forgiven amounts through 2025. However, certain states may tax student loan forgiveness. If you're in school, start paying off interestIf you're still in college, your student loans likely haven't entered repayment yet. While it's difficult to predict what repayment options will be available in the future, there are proactive steps you can take now.One recommendation is to pay off any interest that accrues while you're still in school. Even small contributions can help reduce the overall cost of your loans in the long run.If your federal student loan hasn't yet entered repayment, you won't be eligible to enroll in a repayment plan yet. Repayment starts six months after graduation or if your enrollment drops below half-time, unless you enroll in another program, like graduate school, before the grace period ends. Don't plan on forgiveness as an optionMany borrowers have turned to income-driven repayment plans to reduce their monthly payments and potentially qualify for student loan forgiveness. However, forgiveness is not guaranteed, especially as legal challenges continue to threaten the SAVE repayment plan. Programs like PSLF and forgiveness under the Income-Based Repayment Plan carry less risk, since they would require congressional action to be altered or eliminated.That said, it's always wise to plan for full repayment of your student loans, regardless of any current potential forgiveness opportunities. More student loan advice

Looking for the most recent Strands answer?Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Connections puzzles.When I saw the topic of today'sStrandspuzzle, which is "literary couples," I figured it would be the names of married writers, like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. (Hey, New York Times Games editors, free future topic idea!) Spoiler: It's not. Don't think of "literary couples" as people, but as paired words in their book titles. If you need hints and answers, read on.Also, I go into depth about therules for Strands in this story.If you're looking for today's Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visitCNET's NYT puzzle hints page.Read more:NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So FarHint for today's Strands puzzleToday's Strands theme is:Literary couplesIf that doesn't help you, here's a clue: Like War and Peace, or Sense and Sensibility.Clue words to unlock in-game hintsYour goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle's theme. If you're stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:SITE, SITED, SLIT, BOOM, SHIM, SHINE, TILE, TIED, TIRED, DICEAnswers for today's Strands puzzleThese are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you've got all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:SOUND, FURY, CRIME, PUNISHMENT, PRIDE, PREJUDICEToday's Strands spangramToday's Strands spangram isBOOKTITLES. To find it, start with the B that's five letters down on the far left column, and wind up and around. The completed NYT Strands puzzle for Jan. 4, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNET

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.Oh purple category, how you love to throw players curve balls. You'll need to be very familiar with a certain painting in order to get that category. It's a very famous painting, but still, this could be a streak-breaking day for some. Read on for today's Connections hints and answers.The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. And players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.Read more:Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every TimeHints for today's Connections groupsHere are four hints for the groupings in today's Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest, yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.Yellow group hint: Smash up.Green group hint: Connect together.Blue group hint: Done!Purple group hint: Famed surrealist painting.Answers for today's Connections groupsYellow group: Crush into a compact shape.Green group: Fasteners.Blue group: Mark as completed.Purple group: Depicted in Dali's The Persistence of Memory.Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English WordsWhat are today's Connections answers? The completed NYT Connections puzzle for Jan. 4, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNETThe yellow words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is crush into a compact shape. The four answers are ball, crumple, scrunch and wad.The green words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is fasteners. The four answers are buckle, clip, hook and snap.The blue words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is mark as completed. The four answers are check, cross, strike and tick.The purple words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is depicted in Dali's The Persistence of Memory. The four answers are ant, branch, clock and melting.