Normally, CES brings a raft of display announcements, but it seems a bit quieter this year. That's not to say there's nothing notable: In addition to a new spate of 27-inch 4K/240Hz displays and 1440p/500Hz options forthcoming, there are some novelties as well.But in addition to monitors, there were some specification announcement updates that you'll run into as we head into 2025. They include:VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600:OLED has traditionally gotten a pass on brightness in VESA's HDR display certification because it's really hard to make OLED really bright, and it's got great contrast regardless. But highlights matter, so I'm glad to see the brightness levels creep up. I'm not sure whether we'll see it first on laptop screens or desktop monitors.New VESA ClearMR tiers:ClearMR is VESA's standard for a way to certify and convey motion clarity (really more of the lack of motion artifacts) by evaluating the contrast of a screen element in motion (the ratio of clear edges to blurry edges. As refresh rates rise, so does the metric and as refresh rates have been rising...VESA added three new levels: ClearMR 15000, 18000 and 21000.DisplayPort 2.1b:Monitors have barely ramped up on support for DP 2.1a, but the DisplayPort Association is way ahead of them. The DP 2.1b standard it announced at CES is really about a new DP80LL active cable specification necessary for long cables to carrying 2.1a bandwidth signals (80Gbps) without disruption or degradation. For monitors, you'll want DP 2.1 in order to handle 4K at high refresh rates or real HDR (or 8K, if you're going there) without having to rely on display stream compression.HDMI 2.2: HDMI 2.1 brought variable refresh rate support, key for connecting a monitor to a TV or console; HDMI 2.2 raises the bandwidth to 96Gbps (you'll need a new Ultra96 HDMI cable!) including an upgrade to the bandwidth of HDMI Fixed Rate Link technology. That means potentially higher refresh rates when connecting to consoles, although probably not until the next gen arrives. LG LG UltraGear 45GX990A Dual-mode, 5K2K, bendable OLED LG launched a new GX9 line of UltraGear gaming monitors at CES 2025, with debut models 45GX990A, 45GX950A and 39GX90SA -- as the names indicate, two 45-inch and one 39-inch displays. GX9 designates the company's "premium OLED gaming monitors," which I guess means all the latest features. The most interesting of the three (to me, at least), is the 45GX990A, because it's the most kitchen-sinkiest of the three -- relative high resolution (5,120 x 2,160), support for multiple picture sizes and refresh rate configurations (dual mode) and a curved-to-flat bendable screen (like the Corsair Xeneon).The 39-inch model incorporates WebOS, to make it "smart" -- operate standalone to run apps and stream. Samsung/CNET Samsung Odyssey OLED G6 G60SF High-refresh OLED Samsung announced a handful of monitors at CES 2025, and this looks like the most notable -- or at least newsworthy -- gaming monitor. Mostly because gamers get excited by high numbers (except if it's latency). In this case, the company has updated its G6 line with a 500MHz refresh rate version of its 1440p, 27-inch OLED.The company also revealed that the 3D display it teased at last year's showis now a real product, and it's for gamers. Like competitors, the 27-inch Odyssey 3D (G90XF) uses a lenticular layer plus eye tracking to create a 3D view.There's also a new Odyssey G8 (G81SF), which the company claims is the first 27-inch 4K OLED. Both support DisplayHDR True Black 400. Asus/CNET Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQDPG Another speedy OLED Asus' ROG gaming line has similar offerings to Samsung, including a 27-inch, 4K/240Hz QD-OLED (ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM) and a 27-inch, 1440p/500Hz QD-OLED (ROG Strix OLED XG27AQDPG); it makes sense that the new models are similar because Samsung makes the panels. Josh Goldman/CNET Dell 32 Plus S3225QC QD-OLED monitor The speakers make it Dell made some minor refreshes to its Alienware monitors, instead leaving the most interesting changes to its mainstream S series. Its new QD-OLED is pretty typical for its type -- 32 inches, 4K/120Hz, USB hub. But this model adds custom-tunable 3D Spatial Audio with AI-driven head-tracking and beamforming technology. I got to try the monitor before CES, and while it won't replace spatial headphones for 360-degree sound, it's pretty good at widening stereo to about 180 degrees; possibly better, because the audio I listened to wasn't really surround. And even if you don't care about the spatial aspect, it has dual 5-watt speakers that offer more power than you typically get from ones built into displays. HP/CNET HP Omen 32X Smart Gaming Monitor Now with Google inside This is a pretty run-of-the-mill mainstream gaming monitor -- 32 inches, 4K/144Hz -- but the little difference here is that HP has incorporated Google TV to compete with LG, Samsung and others in order to offer standalone cloud gaming and streaming app support, along with Android. Other companies who've offered this capability generally have their own TV operating systems on which to build these features. MSI MSI MPG 322URX DisplayPort 2.1a arrives There may be other displays which debuted DisplayPort 2.1a support, but if few of the manufacturers are highlighting it except MSI -- and as long as the company is shouting it, we might as well highlight that model. Like others mentioned here, this is a 4K/240Hz QD-OLED, and the high resolution/refresh rate, high bit-depth combo can use the extra bandwidth of the new standard.MSI announced the deluge of monitors we're used to seeing at CES, but a few strike me as notable. Like the me-too 27-inch 500Hz QD-OLED (MPG 272QR QD-OLED X50), as well as a 24-inch, 1080p/600Hz model (MPG 242R X60N) which uses a Rapid TN panel.It's not all about gaming, though: one highlight is a 24-inch USB-C portable monitor. I don't really think of 24 inches as portable, but I'm also not six-feet-plus tall. Corsair Corsair Xeneon 14.5-inch touchscreen System control at your fingertips This isn't a traditional monitor, but it's an interesting concept: a small, standalone touchscreen (2,560x720 resolution at 60Hz) that you can use for apps, system metrics and more. Yeah, you can do all that from your main screen, but if you're kitting out a gaming system, this looks way cooler -- you can even mount it inside. There isn't much detail about it available yet, though.

Looking for the most recentregular 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.Connections: Sports Editionisn't too tough today, especially if you're a hockey fan, as I am. Read on for hints and answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition puzzle.For now, the game is in beta, which means the Times is testing it out to see if it's popular before adding it to the site's Games app. You can play it daily for now for free and then we'll have to see if it sticks around.Read more: NYT Has a Connections Game for Sports Fans. I Tried ItHints for today's Connections: Sports Edition groupsHere are four hints for the groupings in today's Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.Yellow group hint: Group of athletesGreen group hint: Detroit and Chicago, too.Blue group hint: The pink one is famous.Purple group hint: Fore!Answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition groupsYellow group: TeamGreen group: Original six NHL teamsBlue group: PanthersPurple group: Golf ____Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English WordsWhat are today's Connections: Sports Edition answers? The completed NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Jan. 9, 2025. NYT/Screenshot by CNETThe yellow words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is team. The four answers are crew, group, side and squad.The green words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is original six NHL teams. The four answers are Boston, Montreal, New York and Toronto.The blue words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is panthers. The four answers are Carolina, Florida, Northern Iowa and Pittsburgh.The purple words in today's ConnectionsThe theme is golf ____. The four answers are cart, clap, club and course.

How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. Were talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. Thats exactly what a bot would say, isnt it? I guess youre just going to have to trust me on this.Im taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days. The internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI slop. (Its not clear who coined the phrase but slop is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI.) A recent analysis estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, many news sites have covertly been experimenting with AI-generated content bylined, in some cases, by AI-generated authors.Slop is everywhere but Facebook is positively sloshing with weird AI-generated images, including strange depictions of Jesus made out of shrimps. Rather than trying to rid its platform of AI-generated content much of which has been created by scammers trying to drive engagement for nefarious purposes Facebook has embraced it. A study conducted last year by researchers out of Stanford and Georgetown found Facebooks recommendation algorithms are boosting these AI-generated posts.Meta has also been creating its own slop. In 2023, the company started introducing AI-powered profiles such as Liv: a proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller. These didnt get a lot of attention until Meta executive Connor Hayes told theFinancial Timesafter they went viral.The likes of Liv may be gone from Meta for now, but our online future seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier. What Cory Doctorow memorably termed the gradual enshittification of the internet (the degradation of services in pursuit of relentless profit-seeking) is accelerating. Lets hope Shrimp Jesus performs a miracle soon; we need it.

New (and old) challengers join the fight.The world's biggest fighting game tournament EVO is scheduled to announce this year's US game line up next week on 14th January, but it seems it might have already been revealed.In other words, if you would rather find out in the official broadcast, navigate away from this page right now. Otherwise, here's the lineup which seems to have been accidentally revealed in the scheduled live-stream's thumbnail image on YouTube.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Including "Express Micro SD Card".There have been all sorts of 'Switch 2' developments this week and now product listings for Nintendo's new hardware are supposedly showing up on GameStop's internal database.Some photos currently doing the rounds, which were originally shared by 'Opposite-Chemistry96' on the Switch subreddit, apparently reveals GameStop listings for multiple SKUs. For starters, there are a handful of "Express Micro SD Card" listings - covering 256GB to 1TB.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Zelda, Paper Mario and more.We're still in that part of the year where end-of-year events are taking place and next up is the 14th annual New York Game Awards.Although no Nintendo games are in the running for the 'Game of the Year' award, some first-party Switch titles have been nominated in certain other categories. This includes Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is up for 'best kids game' and Super Mario Party Jamboree has also been nominated in the same category.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Flipkart has hired Kabeer Biswas, co-founder of Indian delivery startup Dunzo, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce group expands its quick commerce business in the worlds most populous nation.Biswas will lead Flipkarts quick commerce business, called Flipkart Minutes, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. The move follows Flipkart engaging with Biswas over a potential acquisition of embattled startup last year, TechCrunch first reported.The talks fell due to complication in the ownership structure of Dunzo, which counts Reliance Retail as one of its largest backers. Reliance has all but written off Dunzo in the quarters since.The quick-commerce model delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes hasnt worked in most parts of the world, but its increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.Zomato-owned BlinkIt, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Nexus-backed Zepto currently lead the quick commerce market in India, but that hasnt deterred other big players from joining the race. Flipkart launched Minutes last year. Amazon began pilot of its quick commerce offering in the country last month. This is developing story. More to follow

Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that theres little real-world data left to train AI models on.Weve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge . in AI training, Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. That happened basically last year.Musk, who owns AI company xAI, echoed themes former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever touched on at NeurIPS, the machine learning conference, during an address in December. Sutskever, who said the AI industry had reached what he called peak data, predicted a lack of training data will force a shift away from the way models are developed today.Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data data generated by AI models themselves is the path forward. The only way to supplement [real-world data] is with synthetic data, where the AI creates [training data], he said. With synthetic data [AI] will sort of grade itself and go through this process of self-learning.Other companies, including tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models. Gartnerestimates 60% of the data used for AI and analytics projects in 2024 were synthetically generated.Microsofts Phi-4, which was open-sourced early Wednesday, was trained on synthetic data alongside real-world data. So were Googles Gemma models. Anthropic used some synthetic data to develop one of its most performant systems,Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And Meta fine-tuned its most recentLlamaseries of modelsusing AI-generated data. Training on synthetic data has other advantages, like cost savings. AI startup Writer claims its Palmyra X 004 model, which was developed using almost entirely synthetic sources, cost just $700,000 to develop comparedto estimates of $4.6 million for a comparably-sized OpenAI model.But there as disadvantages as well. Some research suggests that synthetic data can lead to model collapse, where a model becomesless creative and more biased in its outputs, eventually seriously compromising its functionality. Because modelscreatesynthetic data, if the data used to train these models has biases and limitations, their outputs will be similarly tainted.

Painted with oil in 1845, the room depicted in Balkonzimmer belonged to Adolph Menzels family apartment, on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin. Credit: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jrg P AndersTypical of many of Berlins 19th-century apartment buildings is the Berliner Zimmer: a corner room that forms the meeting point between the front of the building facing the street and the perpendicular side wing. With only a single window overlooking the central courtyard, the Berliner Zimmer tends to be gloomy a dim space for passing through. If you are lucky, it may receive a brief ray of sunshine at some point during the day.On a spring day in 1845, German painter Adolph Menzel made a painting of his Berliner Zimmer at just such an auspiciously sunny moment. He had recently moved into a new apartment that overlooked the Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlins first railway station which had begun its operations seven years earlier. Another painting from the same year shows the view out of this apartment window at night, along the flank of a neighbouring building and down into the railway stations shadowy yard. Most of the picture is dark cloud-strewn sky, the railway yard and its heavy machinery are cast in gloom, while a small disc of moon glances white on the tiled roofs of the railway buildings centre left.Menzels painting of his rooms interior is just the opposite. Pale spring light breathes through thin muslin curtains which frame the open window and billow gently into the room. A bright shaft of reflection lies on the polished parquet floor in the foreground, and shimmers on the back of a mahogany chair, turned askew towards the open window. A matching chair is back-to-back, also angled, like a mirror image reflected on an invisible diagonal plane. On the wall behind the chairs is an actual mirror, tall with a carved mahogany frame, reflecting a picture we cannot make out, shown at another oblique angle. The motion in this painting is all diagonal, and all the action occurs on the right. On the left is just a spread of parquet floor, a corner of red carpet and a bare expanse of wall. Hovering on this wall is an ambiguous patch of white: a painted void, as if unfinished.When Adolph Menzel painted his room, he was not yet the foremost painter of 19th-century Germany he was to become. While he then owed his fame to depictions of the court of King Wilhelm I, he also made countless pieces that focus on peripheral details and everyday incidents in Berlin. The city was being built up rapidly around him, and these early realist works are vivid visual documents which manifest a prephotographic compulsion to bear witness. Besides the intimate oil paintings of his own accommodation, his pencil drawings and gouaches sketch daily journeys through the outskirts of the city. He would walk around with sketchbooks, pencils and watercolours stuffed into his pockets to see what the streets, rural lanes, backyards and alleyways could offer up by way of subject matter. In these areas that ambiguously straddle both urban and rural, the city seemed to lie in wait, gathering on the horizon.Menzels work thrives on contingencyMenzels work, which has been deemed a kind of embodied realism, thrives on contingency. The painting of his room, known as Balkonzimmer (balcony room), is full of such contingencies. It is less a painting of the room and more of the light that floods in and the breeze that seems to animate it; of the space within the walls, rather than the walls themselves. The painting seems to open outwards, like a curious mind filling with thought. The ambiguous mark on the wall is a flourish of self-reflexivity. That this patch of paint is the works central focus suggests that paint is being employed literally tautologically to replicate its own material state.Menzel had moved into this apartment with his mother and sisters only a few weeks earlier and described it in a letter to a friend: in front of the Anhaltische Tor in Schneberger Strae, number 18, two flights up, where I will have more space and a dedicated room to paint. It is this dedicated room to paint that is the subject of Balkonzimmer, shown not straight on but towards the corner. Each corner, as Gaston Bachelard has it, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination. In a state of solitude, Menzel paints the paint on the wall. Finally alone in a room of his own, the artist can indulge in interiority. This painting, made in the century before Berlins rapid rise and equally rapid fall, depicts a calm before the storm. It remains filled with the breath of potential.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writers2025-01-09Reuben J BrownShare

TCL's CES mobile lineup includes the TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G, an Android handset with a brilliant display and competitive price point.