New York Citys Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is looking into a rare designation for the interior spaces of the recently sold 945 Madison Avenue (aka the Breuer Building) on the Upper East Side. According to The Art Newspaper, a hearing on the issues is expected to take place within the next few months.Herzog & de Meuron had previously announced its intentions to "perfectly balance innovation and preservation" through their renovation. The interior layout and other aspects it would protect are equally important parts of the experience of the building as fans of Marcel Breuers and those who have visited in the past can attest to.

Firewalk Studios Concord is one of Sonys biggest failures of all time, estimated to have only sold 25,000 units after launch. It was pulled from sale after roughly two weeks before servers eventually shut down and the developer shuttered. Beyond the rumored budget and sunk costs, its impact is allegedly still felt, especially with Sonys other projects.In the latest Game Mess podcast, GiantBombs Jeff Grubb revealed that the cancelled live-service titles from Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio were reportedly due to Concord. This happened because of Concord. Like, this should be clear. Thats what Ive been told.Sony has been shell-shocked from Concord, and now theyre going around to every studio and reassessing every project. If its a live-service project, theres a lot of friction against it, preventing it from getting a chance to come out. He also reports that these were the main projects from both studios. Alongside Concord, they join the likes of cancelled multiplayer titles for The Last of Us and Marvels Spider-Man, the rumored Twisted Metal reboot and Sony Londons fantasy RPG.Sony noted that the cancellations wont result in studio closures, but its unknown if there will be layoffs. Plans are underway to discuss the future, so stay tuned for further updates.

A view of the Palisades fire on January 9. The strong Santa Ana winds that fueled much of the L.A. wildfires destruction are expected to relax for a few days. Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe fires around Los Angeles continue to rage on, after scorching some40,000 acres of drought-parched land. The Palisades and Eaton fires have together killed at least 27 people and displaced tens of thousands more, making them some of the deadliest fires in California history.In recent days, however, the regions powerful Santa Ana windswhich have been fanning the flameshave begun to slow down. This lull has offered firefighters a reprieve and a key opportunity to make progress against the blazes, but forecasts suggest the Santa Ana will return next week. What are these gusts, and how have they become so strong?This is not a typical Santa Ana, but this is the time of year when you expect it, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles, said in a livestream, per Voxs Umair Irfan.The Santa Ana winds are a seasonal occurrence in Southern California. They push inland air from the desert over Californias mountains, making it grow warmer and drier as it reaches the coast. As the winds funnel through canyons and valleys toward L.A., they gather speed.This year, ocean heat has likely made the winds even stronger. Warming oceans can cause the jet streama narrow, high-altitude current of fast-moving air that influences weather across the continentto move off course. This can create a patchwork of high- and low-pressure systems over California that supercharge the Santa Ana winds. Last week, gusts were as high as 100 miles per hour.These ocean heat waves are becoming stronger and larger because of heat trapped by increased human-generated greenhouse gases, so these persistent and unusual weather patterns will probably become more common, says Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, to Bloombergs Lauren Rosenthal and Brian K Sullivan.The Santa Ana winds are a natural part of the states weather and have exacerbated wildfires beforebut when these gusts are paired with abnormally dry conditions fueled by climate change, it can make them especially destructive.These winds come every year, Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced, told National Geographics Alejandra Borunda in 2020. The question is: Are they going to come when its wet or when its dry?For 2025, its the latter: Winter usually brings rainfall to Southern California, but that hasnt been the case this year. We havent had any substantial rain for hundreds of days, says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to NBC News Denise Chow.The regions current dry spell follows two wet winters, which led to exceptional vegetation growth, as Swain tells Elizabeth Kolbert at Yale Environment 360. Then, the rain stopped, in what Swain has called hydroclimate whiplash, or a sudden shift between wet and dry weather. After months without rain, all that vegetation has become fuel for fire. The winds then contributed to the fires fast-moving and erratic spread, helping them blaze through a heavily populated area, leading to a lot of destruction.While the region is currently getting a break from the Santa Ana, meteorologists expect the winds to pick back up early next week.Next week is a concern, wrote the National Weather Service Los Angeles in a post on X on Wednesday. While confident that we will NOT see a repeat of last week, dangerous fire weather conditions are expected.As of today, the Eaton fire has reached 65 percent containment and the Palisades fire is 31 percent contained, according to Cal Fire.The long-term effects of the wildfires remain to be seen. Once the health impacts from exposure to smoke, which contains pollutants and dangerous fine particles, are fully understood, the eventual death toll is likely to rise dramatically, writes Jeff Masters for Yale Climate Connections.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: California, Climate Change, Death, Global Warming, Natural Disasters, Weather, Wildfire

Devin 1.2 will help developers with accelerated workflows and less cognitive load in file searches, understanding codebases or fixing code.Read More

IntroductionLocalization is one of the most critical yet often underestimated aspects of game development. As global audiences grow, players expect to experience games in their native language, making effective localization a necessity, not a luxury. However, it's much more than just translating textit involves addressing technical challenges, cultural nuances, and workflow optimizations to ensure a smooth and seamless experience across multiple languages.In this article, Ill walk you through the complexities of localization in Unreal Engine, sharing insights based on my experience with Wizard of Legend 2. From gathering and managing text to overcoming issues like incorrect formatting, gender-specific language, and font handling, Ill highlight key areas that can cause delays and how to mitigate them.This is not an introductory article, so I expect you to be familiar with Unreals basic localization tools. If youre new to the subject, resources below are great to learn the basics. Once youre ready, lets dive into the real-world challenges and best practices to help you plan your localization process more effectively.Localization in depth -This series of videos will cover all the basics you need to work with Unreal's localization pipeline.How to make localization friendly UIMinimum you must know about unicode- Read this article to familiarize yourself with unicodeGathering textGathering text is straightforward. Open the Localization Dashboard, press the "Gather Text" button, and voil, it's done!However, there are two major problems that will take up a significant amount of your time:1. Irrelevant TextsUnreal gathers many irrelevant texts. In our case, about 80% of the text that appeared in the gathering results was irrelevant. These seemed intended for engine localization, not game content, but they appeared regardless of the filter preferences set.To address this, you need to filter the locations where your gather text command looks for text. At the later stages of development, this can be a daunting task, and its challenging to ensure that your filters cover all of your game content.2. Incorrect Text TypesAnother common issue is encountering many texts with the wrong type. In Unreal, every localizable text should be of type FText, but developers sometimes use FString instead. Worse, they might use FText initially but later change its value using FStringwhich is easy to do, as converting between FText and FString is very easy.Its a good idea to familiarize your entire team with localization principles in Unreal from the start and assign someone to supervise the localization process. You should periodically run the "Gather Text" command and ensure that your filters cover the majority of your texts. As your project grows in size, it becomes much harder to find the texts that need localization.Later, I will explain how to automate your pipeline so that AI can translate your texts into other languages, allowing your QA team to spot unlocalized text while testing the game in a different language.FText vs FString HellIf you've watched the tutorials mentioned earlier, you know that converting FString to FText (or vice versa) is a bad idea. But its so easy to do that I want to remind you again!We had some cases where FText was cast to FString, passed to a function, and then cast back to FText inside the function. The text appeared to be a regular FText unless you attempted to access its original string or sent it over the network to a client with a different language.Casting from FString to FText is also automatically done by the Blueprint system if you change the type of your text from FString to FText or vice versa. So, keep an eye on these conversions and fix them as soon as you spot one.There are a few cases where casting FString to FText makes sense (e.g., printing debug text on the screen), but in general, its a red flag.Human languages are a mess!We decided to introduce gender customization very late in development. From a gameplay perspective, it seemed simple: create a female model, add a UI to let the player choose the wizards gender. Done, right? Unfortunately, no!Some languages, like Persian and Kurdish, are gender-neutral, but others, like French and Spanish, are not. The introduction of gender customization forced us to retranslate every sentence involving our character, since its gender was determined at runtime, and the text also had to be dynamically crafted based on the gender.[1]Unreal already supports the {var}|gender(masculine, feminine, neuter) construct. If you pass ETextGender to the var parameter in the FormatText function, it works perfectly. However, we didnt use this feature.Our development language was English, which is largely gender-neutral. But to support gender using Unreals construct, we would have had to define a {var} for gender in all our texts. This would have allowed us to pass ETextGender to the FormatText function, which other languages could use if needed. This approach is easy to forget, and implementing it late in development requires significant effort.Instead, I wrote a custom construct that could be absent in the original text, and implemented a processor that could parse the construct and select the correct string based on the characters gender. This allowed our English text to remain clean. The construct is very similar to the Unreal construct [masculine|feminine]Additionally, this construct is flexible. Although we didnt need it, you could introduce a header like [header: masculine|feminine|neuter] to support different genders for the speaker and target.Another issue youll need to address is pluralization and singular forms. I encourage you to use Unreals {number} {number}|plural(one=,few=,many=,other=) construct.Certain languages may present other challenges. For example, in Turkish, the percent symbol comes before the number (e.g., %5 instead of 5%). Additionally, text highlighting might not work in languages like Chinese, where words arent separated by spaces. These issues are difficult to spot, so allocate time to handle them.FontsHandling fonts for different languages can be a real headache.You might be tempted to create a single font that supports all the languages in your game. This isnt a good idea because, for example, the font used for Chinese might overlap with the English font, and merging them could create inconsistencies. Even if you manage to separate the fonts cleanly, theres a limit to the number of glyphs a font can support.Another approach is to use Unreals asset localization, creating localized versions of your font asset. Unfortunately, this approach has its own drawbacks. When you change the games language, in-game texts change immediately, but Unreal only loads the localized font assets when the game is restarted. This results in players seeing question marks until they restart the game or switch back to the original language.A better solution is to use Unreals font handler feature, which allows you to choose a specific font based on the current locale. While this works, it's not ideal. For example, in the settings menu, you might want to display each language's name both in the current language and in its native script (e.g., "Farsi ()"). If the font is only selected based on the locale, you either have to support Persian letters in all your fonts or you'll see question marks.Whats the best approach?The approach I found best is to use Unicode ranges and assign each font to a specific range.Our default font covered all European languages, but Chinese and Japanese were more challenging. Since the Unicode range for Kanji characters is mixed, and simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese all use the same range, it was impossible to have separate fonts for each language. We tried various fonts, some of which promised to support both Chinese and Japanese, but when we tested them, we found missing characters. Some fonts were acceptable, but Chinese users found them unreadable. Eventually, the translators came to the rescue and provided me with the link below, which offers standard Chinese fonts: https://github.com/wordshub/free-font.Translation pipelineWorking with a translation team is a challenging management and software development task.As a programmer, you need to create a pipeline that facilitates communication between your team and the translation team. Since each teams structure is different, I wont go into specifics, but Ill offer some general advice.First and foremost, understand the software your translation team is using. Ensure that encoding is consistent throughout the pipeline. If not, you may encounter issues like numbers showing up instead of carriage returns or previously translated texts becoming corrupted. A good rule of thumb is to handle the conversion yourself. For example, if theyre using Excel, give them Excel files instead of CSVs (especially since Microsoft Excel doesnt ask for encoding when importing CSVs!). Depending on your workflow, you might need to write some converters or even create your own format (e.g., for versioning or tagging).The ideal workflow is to provide the translation team with a single file and retrieve the same file after translation. However, since translation deadlines are usually before the release date, some content might not be ready. In such cases, you can use string tables: write the texts in there and once the content is ready, you can reference the string table for the localized text. However, as translation progresses, your team might realize they missed some texts, and you might need to provide additional files. How you manage multiple files will depend on your pipeline, but be prepared for this.Building a robust pipeline is time-consuming, and youll likely need to refine it several times, but it can significantly speed up the process.You can start by using the commands available in Unreals Localization Dashboard. These can be easily called in a Python script without needing to open the engine. Ive included a simple example at the end of the document.With these building blocks, you can do all sorts of interesting things. For example, you could export your texts every night, convert them, and upload them automatically to your translation team. After the localization deadline, you can adjust your merge pipeline to check for word count. If new text has been added, you can prevent the merge from proceeding.Another useful application is to gather all your texts and use AI translation services to translate them, then have your internal QA team test the game and identify unlocalized texts before you send them to the translation team.Finally, note that text compilation isn't triggered when you build the game, so you'll need to trigger it manuallyor better yet, configure your build pipeline to call CompileText automatically.Platform considerationsIf you are planning to publish your game on platforms like PlayStation and Xbox, be aware that hardware, software, and concepts are referred to differently across platforms. Platform owners expect you to follow their standards in all the languages you support; otherwise, your game may be rejected. For example, you cannot simply use the word "Controller" across all platforms. The term "Controller" is called differently on each platform, so your game should refer to it according to the platform-specific terminology.You could create a construct that takes the current platform as a parameter and selects the appropriate term based on the platform, or alternatively, you can use different text for each platform.Its a good idea to create a table of these terms, alongside their expected translations in different languages for each platform, and provide it to your localization team early in the process. Reviewing all the texts afterward can be time-consuming and error-prone.ConclusionLocalization can be challenging and time-consuming, and you need to be prepared for it. It is an essential part of modern game development. Players expect to engage with games in their native language, and failing to provide this at launch can lead to negative reviews and missed opportunities. I hope this article has provided valuable insights into the challenges and solutions, and that it helps you approach localization with a clearer understanding.Good luck with your localization efforts, and I wish you great success!

Automakers sue to block Bidens flawed automatic emergency braking ruleAutomakers sue to block Bidens flawed automatic emergency braking rule / The auto industrys main lobbying group is seeking to have the rule repealed. By Andrew J. Hawkins, transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Jan 17, 2025, 8:06 PM UTCShare this story Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty ImagesA new rule requiring all vehicles to have automatic emergency braking is flawed and should be repealed, a new lawsuit filed by the auto industrys main lobbying group says. The suit was filed in US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuitby the Alliance of Automotive Innovation, which represents most of the major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, Hyundai, Volkswagen, and Toyota. The group is asking the court to overturn the new rule, which was finalized last year, requiring all vehicles to have automatic emergency braking (AEB) by 2029. Under the rule, all vehicles will be required to be able to stop and avoid contact with other vehicles at speeds of up to 62mph. In addition, AEB systems must apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision with a lead vehicle is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected. Vehicles must also be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the new rule will help prevent hundreds of deathsand tens of thousands of injuries every year.But after the rule was finalized, the alliance petitioned NHTSA to reconsider it, arguing that current technology was insufficient to meet the high standards outlined by the regulation. The group also claimed that its suggestions were rejected during the rulemaking process, and urged NHTSA to reconsider several key provisions in order to make it more achievable by the target date.But NHTSA denied the groups petition, stating that the requirements were practicable and that the overall aim is to force the industry to adopt new technology in order to meet the goals of saving lives and preventing injuries. NHTSA acknowledged that the final rule is technology-forcingNHTSA acknowledged that the final rule is technology-forcing, the agency said in its response, but emphasized that the standard is practicable and no single current vehicle must meet every requirement for an FMVSS to be considered practicable under the Safety Act.The auto alliance says that it has spent more than a billion dollars developing AEB over the years, but doesnt want this lawsuit to be interpreted as an opposition to its own technology. This litigation by Alliance for Automotive Innovationshould notbe interpreted as opposition to AEB, a lack of confidence in the technology, or an objection to AEBs widest possible deployment across the U.S. vehicle fleet, the group says in a press release. Rather, this litigation is about ensuring a rule that maximizes driver and pedestrian safety and is technologically feasible.But safety advocates arent buying it. The AEB Rule is the most impactful regulation for roadway safety issued in years, said Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, in a statement. Considering that automaking is Americas largest manufacturing sector, employs 10 million Americans, generates five percent of the U.S. GDP and drives $1 trillion into the economy annually, it is remarkable that it would be unable to meet the requirements in the AEB Rule by September 2029.Most PopularMost Popular

Enabling artificial intelligence to navigate and retrieve contextually rich, multi-faceted information from the internet is important in enhancing AI functionalities. Traditional search engines are limited to superficial results, failing to capture the nuances required to investigate profoundly integrated content across a network of related web pages. This constraint limits LLMs in performing tasks that require reasoning across hierarchical information, which negatively impacts domains such as education, organizational decision-making, and the resolution of complex inquiries. Current benchmarks do not adequately assess the intricacies of multi-step interactions, resulting in a considerable deficit in evaluating and improving LLMs capabilities in web traversal.Though Mind2Web and WebArena focus on action-oriented interactions that contain HTML directives, they suffer important limitations like noise, a rather poor understanding of wider contexts, and less enabling of multi-step reasoning. RAG systems are useful for retrieving real-time data but are largely limited to horizontal searches that often miss key content buried within the deeper layers of websites. The limitations of current methodologies make them inadequate for addressing complex, data-driven issues that require concurrent reasoning and planning across numerous web pages.Researchers from the Alibaba Group introduced WebWalker, a multi-agent framework designed to emulate human-like web navigation. This dual-agent system consists of the Explorer Agent, tasked with methodical page navigation, and the Critic Agent, which aggregates and assesses information to facilitate query resolution. By combining horizontal and vertical exploration, this explore-critic system overcomes the limitations of traditional RAG systems. The dedicated benchmark, WebWalkerQA, with single-source and multi-source queries, evaluates whether the AI can handle layered, multi-step tasks. This coupling of vertical exploration with reasoning allows WebWalker to improve the depth and quality of retrieved information by leaps and bounds.The benchmark supporting WebWalker, WebWalkerQA, comprises 680 question-answer pairs derived from 1,373 web pages in domains related to education, organizations, conferences, and games. Most queries mimic realistic tasks and require inferring information spread over several subpages. Evaluation of accuracy is in terms of correct answers, along with the number of actions, or steps taken by the system to resolve it, for single-source and multi-source reasoning. Evaluated with different model architectures, including GPT-4o and Qwen-2.5 series, WebWalker showed robustness when dealing with complex and dynamic queries. It used HTML metadata to navigate correctly and had a thought-action-observation framework to engage proficiently with structured web hierarchies.The results show that WebWalker has an important advantage over managing complex web navigation tasks compared with ReAct and Reflexion and significantly surpasses them in accuracy in single-source and multi-source scenarios. The system also demonstrated outstanding performance in layered reasoning tasks while keeping action counts optimized; hence, the balance between accuracy and resource usage is reached effectively. Such results confirm the scalability and adaptability of the system and make it a benchmark for AI-enhanced web navigation frameworks.WebWalker solves the problems of navigation and reasoning over highly integrated web content with a dual-agent framework based on an explore-critic paradigm. The benchmark for the tool, WebWalkerQA, systematically tests these functionalities and thus provides a challenging benchmark for tasks in web navigation. It is the most important development towards AI systems to access and manage dynamic, stratified information efficiently, marking an important milestone in the area of AI-enhanced information retrieval. Moreover, by redesigning web traversal metrics and enhancing retrieval-augmented generation systems, WebWalker thus lays a more robust foundation on which increasingly intricate real-world applications can be targeted, hence thereby reinforcing its significance in the realm of artificial intelligence.Check out the Paper, Project Page, 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 our65k+ ML SubReddit. Recommend Open-Source Platform: Parlant is a framework that transforms how AI agents make decisions in customer-facing scenarios. (Promoted)The post This AI Paper from Alibaba Unveils WebWalker: A Multi-Agent Framework for Benchmarking Multistep Reasoning in Web Traversal appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Entertainment has hit critical mass over the last decade, with more shows and movies being produced and released than ever before. Its impossible to keep up with everything hitting the digital space, whether it be Premium Video on Demand (PVOD) or a traditional streaming network. With that in mind, we figured it was well past time for us to whip up a little something to help you keep up (and catch up) with all there is to watch in the big, wide world of digital viewing. And thus, the Streaming Rewind was born! Well update this list at the end of each week so you can check out what you may have missed, and whats coming up on the weekend. Well keep it a mix of popular releases and noteworthy lesser-known titles to help you find whats worth taking the risk on as well as dive into a few things that we loved and why we loved em, or just break down a show or movie that left us with some opinions. Sometimes, well even have guest entries from other members of the IGN staff. If youre not interested in all that and just want to see a bulleted list of whats out there, pop on down to the New and Noteworthy and ICYMI sections.Thats a Wrap on Star Wars: Skeleton CrewNow, Skeleton Crew was not for me I found myself extremely frustrated by the first two episodes but I seem to be the lone crone on that one. Though the finale was relatively straight-forward and doesnt connect much to the universe at large, our Staff Writer Jesse Schedeen still gave a great look at what the ending means for everyones new favorite space misfits and Star Wars as a whole. PlayOur National Nightmare Has Ended: Severance Is BackYou know that Rose Dawson meme that says its been 84 years? Thats what I think of when Severance is concerned. Theres a considerable conversation to be had when your show becomes remembered for how absurdly long the gap between seasons is rather than how utterly remarkable its first outing was, but thats a conversation for another day. For now, lets all just rejoice in the fact that Severance has finally returned and that we have a wonderfully distracting mystery. Silo Delivers an Explosive Season 2 FinaleTake there being two Apple TV+ shows on this list as your general reminder that the streamer outpaces every single competitor when it comes to quality/quantity ratio. In an earlier version of Streaming Rewind, I broke down all of the shows you should check out first during the window that the service was free (to remind us that Severance was coming back, of course). We also have a list of the best shows overall on the platform. But, for now, Im just going to tell you to drop what youre doing and catch up on Silo. Its Season 2 finale hit this week and its a big one, featuring major reveals alongside one hell of a cliffhanger, and thats not always an easy balance to strike! Silo Season 2 GalleryNew and Noteworthy This Week: Kraven the Hunter, January 14 Digital and demand Castlevania Nocturne Season 2, January 16 NetflixHarley Quinn Season 5, January 16 MaxUnstoppable, January 16 Prime VideoSilo Season 2 Finale, January 17 Apple TV+Severance Season 2, January 17 Apple TV+ICYMI: If you had too much going on last week, here are all of the things that premiered or debuted on streaming and digital that you may have missed.Abbott Elementary (mid-season return) HuluShifting Gears HuluChicago Med, Fire and P.D. NBCFlow Digital and demand

Edward Lemuel is a kind, timid man. Or so it seems. For the first act of the 2024 black comedy, A Different Man, Edward tries his best to avoid attention. He sheepishly slides past the couch blocking his apartment door as new neighbor, the aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves in. He moves through the city with his body bent forward and his arms crossed in front of him, as if shielding himself from some unseen attack. Even when he tries out for various acting gigs, he falls back and gets embarrassed, a quality that only earns him parts in tone-deaf corporate training videos about how to treat people with physical differences.Its easy to see why Edward would conduct himself in this manner. After all, he has neurofibromatosis, a condition that covers his face with deforming tumors. When a miracle treatment removes the tumors and reveals a conventionally handsome face in place of the one he had before, Edward initially behaves the same way, skulking down the street to a nearby dive bar and eyeing with suspicion everyone he passes, including his own reflection.Edward continues that nervousness when a noisy group of revelers burst into the bar to celebrate their favorite teams win. Theyre loud and crass and obnoxious, but instead of bullying Edward like he expected, they bring their shouting alongside him. And when Edward starts shouting along with them, the jerks welcome him into their throng, to the point that a flirtatious woman in the group makes out with him and even performs sex acts on him in the bars hideous bathroom.Edward discovers hes at home among the jerks. And because Edward is played by Sebastian Stan, we know immediately that is going to be a layered and complex jerk at that. In fact, few modern actors excel at portraying unlikable people quite like Sebastian Stan.Buckys Best When BadFor most people, the name Sebastian Stan immediately calls to mind Bucky Barnes, his hardluck superhero in the MCU. Bucky entered the Marvel franchise as Steve Rogers big and strong best pal, a guy who seems to die heroically during World War II only to return in modern day as the unstoppable assassin called the Winter Soldier. As seen in Captain America: Civil War, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the upcoming Thunderbolts*, Buckys story has been one of tragedy and redemption.Yet as popular as his character is, Stan has always seemed ill at ease in the role. He relies on a mop of shaggy long hair, its untamed tresses covering his eyes, to relate Buckys internal toil as the Winter Soldier. Bereft of that hairdo in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Stan charms when hes bantering with Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson. But as soon as the two get separated, and he must convey Buckys regret and tentative hopes for acceptance, Stan loses his way. He appears inert on screen, trying and failing to make a creased brow and glower compelling.Popular as the part may be, Bucky hardly shows off Stan at his best. To best understand that, we can revisit Stans work from even before the MCU. The actors first break came playing rich kid Carter Baizen, an agent of chaos in the teen soap Gossip Girl; at the same time that he earned critical acclaim for his part as a jealous prince Jack Benjamin in the weird and wonderful Bible adaptation, Kings. Stan flounders when trying to portray a nice guy in the first half of Renny Harlins sublimely stupid The Covenant, but clicks into place when his character reveals his malevolent intentions in the films final act.These non-Bucky parts set the stage for Stans best work, in movies such as I, Tonya and the horror dark comedy Fresh, and the miniseries Pam and Tommy. In I, Tonya, Stan seems to pull a reverse of Chris Evans transformation in Captain America, apparently shrinking to a reedy wisp of a man to portray Jeff Gillooly, the terrible boyfriend to Margot Robbies Tonya Harding. The effect comes less from any CGI wizardry and more from the attitude Stan infuses in the character. He feels like a person who weighs just over 100 pounds, and whose sense of inferiority makes him at once too aggressive and too resigned. Hes a bitter, hateful man with an insufficient mustache.The horror film Fresh leans too far into ironic visuals and needle-drops to fully work, but Stan stands out as a man who literally preys on single women. In Fresh, Stan marshals his good looks and soft eyes to make his character Steve the type of guy who would attract women like protagonist Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). He makes those same features into something menacing and nefarious when he reveals his true intentions and starts dissecting her for literal meat.Its easy to see why fans would clamor for Bucky over Gillooly or Steve, but hes infinitely more engaged and interesting in the latter parts, even if the movies dont always match his skill.An Different, Unlikable GuyYes, Sebastian Stan portrayed real-life monster Donald Trump in 2024s The Apprentice, but his best villain performance of the year came in the A24 film A Different Man, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. A Different Man follows Edwards life before and after he gets a miracle cure for his neurofibromatosis, which has left his face disfigured since birth. Edward sees himself as a completely different man, and even starts calling himself Guy Moratz and claiming that Edward died. But as Edward as Guy integrates better into society, his anger and bitterness intensifies.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!That short description makes A Different Man sound like a movie about learning that beauty is only skin deep; that its what is inside that counts. But Schimberg has something more complex, and more cynical, in mind.Guys good looks allow him to become a high-powered real estate agent, successful with cash and women. Still, he keeps returning to the theater, and in particular to Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a struggling playwright who once lived next door to Edward. Guy discovers that Ingrid has written a play about Edward and he desperately wants the part, to the point where he begins wearing a mask of the face he had removed.Schimberg heightens the irony not only by having Guy get angry at Ingrid for the condescending way she romanticizes Edwards life, literally describing his romance to her stand-in as a Beauty and the Beast story, but also by inserting a third person in the form of Oswald. Played by Adam Pearson, an actor who actually has neurofibromatosis, Oswald charms everyone, embodying the success that Guy thought impossible when he was Edward.To its credit, A Different Man makes all three members of this triad awful in their own ways, without making them inhuman monsters. Oswalds extremely extroverted behavior allows him to disregard the feelings of others and ignore the way that Ingrid fetishizes him, allowing her to center herself in a story thats not hers. That dyspeptic twist, meanwhile, gives Stan plenty of space to play a sour, soiled man. In one delightful sequence, Oswald joins Ingrid and the actors for an after dinner drink and impresses everyone with his upbeat personality. Schimberg cuts from shots of Ingrid and other women laughing historically at Oswald, fully unencumbered by his appearance, to shots of Guy, Stan letting a sneer quiver under his characters smile.As the film builds toward its traditional climax (before moving into extended, and frankly, unnecessary fourth and fifth acts), Guy becomes more erratic on stage. Stan shows no fear of incurring the viewers disgust as he stomps across the stage as Guy, bellowing as pieces of facial prosthetics plop from his face. Its hard not to hate Guy in that moment but, as with all of the characters in A Different Man, its hard not to relate to him either.A Despicable ManA Different Man works not just because it has unlikable characters, but because they feel real and well-drawn. And thats Stans real skill in being unpleasant onscreen. It takes courage for an actor as handsome and popular as Stan to play people that the audience is going to hate. No one would blame him if he kept bringing in money and fans by playing Bucky or similar roles. Say as Dwayne Johnsons partner in rescuing Santa Claus? So its even more impressive that Stan can imbue his onscreen jerks with humanity, making them real and relatable, even as they disgust us.As A Different Man shows, Stan excels at playing despicable men precisely because he plays them so real.A Different Man is now streaming on Max.

A startup called Scenexus has unveiled plans to build digital twins of cities around the world.A spin-off from Dutch research organisation TNO, Scenexus launched this week with a new platform for urban planning.The software blends multiple datasets to clone entire cities and regions.Planners and engineers then use the replicas to precisely analyse the impacts of their ideas.The of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!According to Scenexus, the platform can accelerate their assessments from days to just minutes. They can then forecast the social, environmental, and economic impacts of developments.A host of factors can be reviewed, from traffic and safety to financial growth and resident sentiment. The concepts can then be fine-tuned to address pressing challenges, such as the housing crisis and congestion.The platform has already attractedclients in Amsterdam, San Diego, and Singapore. More cities are slated to sign up soon.Scenexus has also revealed a new backer for the project. The Hague-based business has raised 1.6mn from the LUMO Rise Fund, a 100mn pot of capital for impact-driven technologies. Scenexus is the first investment from the fund, which is managed by Dutch VC firm LUMO Labs.Andy Lrling, a founding partner at LUMO Labs and a TNW Advisory Board member, has great expectations for the startup.The range of application domains is nearly unlimited, Lrling told TNW.He highlighted 10 particularly promising targets: smart mobility, air quality, noise, climate, spatial development, equity, well-being, liveability, resilience, and energy.To support these applications, Scenexus will supply its digital twin platform as a software-as-a-service solution.Building digital twinsUnder the systems hood, thousands of calculations are processed in parallel by algorithms running on graphical processing units (GPUs). Scenexus said the results arrive up to 1,000 times faster than the leading planning software on the market. Thanks to this speed, clients can rapidly develop new urban planning concepts.Scenexus will now focus on bringing more cities to its platform. The startup has also joined digital cities projects with Microsoft and a European consortium.Lrling is bullish about the companys plans.With Scenexus, cities directly save time, money, and effort, and uncover unforeseen challenges before they arise, he said.At the same time, it enables lasting improvement of the citys liveability and safety, and the well-being of residents and visitors. Story by Thomas Macaulay Managing editor Thomas is the managing editor of TNW. He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers. Away from work, he e (show all) Thomas is the managing editor of TNW. He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers. Away from work, he enjoys playing chess (badly) and the guitar (even worse). Get the TNW newsletterGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.Also tagged with