Table of ContentsTable of ContentsSans UndertaleMike Tyson Mike Tysons Punch-Out!!Shao Kahn Mortal Kombat 9Promised Consort Radahn Elden Ring: Shadow of the ErdtreeAbsolute Radiance Hollow KnightEmerald Weapon Final Fantasy 7Through the Fire and the Flames Guitar Hero 3Absolute Virtue Final Fantasy 11 (Honorable mention)From the first console generation to the last, there have always been boss fights. These battles upped the difficulty to test players on all the skills they learned up until that point and push them even further beyond. Boss fights come in all shapes and sizes depending on the genre, such as shooters and fighting games, but they always stand as the games highest challenge. A perfectly tuned boss fight can be the highlight of a given game, but if it leans a bit too far one way or the other in terms of difficulty, it can fall flat. An easy boss fight is dull, but one that is way, way too hard can completely ruin a game. Thankfully, most games hide their intentionally punishing bosses as secret or optional challenges, but there are a few that have caused many players to give up before seeing the credits roll. We dont know if any upcoming video games will feature bosses harder than these brutal battles from all of video game history.TobyFoxOne of the most unique aspects of Undertale is the fact that you dont actually have to kill a single enemy. You can play the game as a complete pacifist and are rewarded for it. However, anyone who opts to go the opposite direction and aim for the genocide ending will be faced with the most difficult boss in the game: Sans. The normally cheerful and joking skeleton will show up as your final opponent to stop your rampage and will probably be successful. Each of his attacks, which play out in various iterations of bullet-hell-style dodging sequences, require near-perfect execution and memorization to avoid. Even though you will have a ton of HP at this point, even a single too early can ruin your run since his attacks will inflict poison and slowly dwindle your health away. Unlike most bosses, this one really makes you feel like youre not supposed to win.Recommended VideosNintendoBoses in the NES era were notoriously difficult. Games were much shorter then, so they were extra difficult to make up for it. Mike Tysons Punch-Out!! is one of the first examples of a boss-rush game, where you go from one boss to the next in a gauntlet all the way to the end. There are tricks to each fight, Tyson included, but even if you know the tells it is still incredibly hard to execute. Tyson is fast, can knock you out in one or two shots, and only gives you a few frames to counter with that you need to hit perfectly. Dodge once in the wrong direction or jab one too many times and you will be down for the count. This isnt so much a boss fight as it is a test to see if youve memorized Tysons moves and can perfectly execute the counters.RelatedNetherRealmsFighting games are most fun playing against another player, which is what they were primarily designed for. There have always been arcade modes and other single-player offerings, but typically you had to grab a friend or head online to get a reach challenge. That isnt true for Mortal Kombat 9s version of Shao Kahn. The lord of Outworld does not fight fair. All of his attacks deal massive damage, he can juggle you off of almost any move, he has way more health than any other character, and can ignore hit-stun whenever he feels like it. Oh, and thats not even mentioning how obvious it is that he reads your inputs to counter you. Even professional fighting game players struggle to beat this boss without resorting to cheesing him.FromSoftwareWe were spoiled for choices when it came to FromSoftware bosses, but we challenged ourselves to pick only one. In the end, it came down to Isshin from Sekiro and Promised Consort Radahn from Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. In the end, we had to give it to the latter for pushing so many players to the limit. Even Miyazaki himself claimed that this boss was probably the most difficult boss they could make within the limitations of the game. Radahn is huge, fast, and seems to never let up on his attacks. And thats just the first phase. If you somehow manage to find a way to get enough hits in without getting wiped, he gets an entirely new set of holy AoE attacks that make it nearly impossible to heal, dodge, attack, or even see what is going on.Team CherryHollow Knight shares a lot of elements from the souls-like genre in addition to being a Metroidvania, but the bosses might just give FromSoftware a run for its money. Absolute Radiance is the final boss of the last DLC for the game that expects no less than perfection from the player. Theres only so much you can do to prepare in terms of equipping charms and upgrading your nail so it really does just come down to skill. Between their 6 phases, you will need to deal with rapid-fire beam attacks, summon swords, spikes coming out of the ground, and more. You only get a small window to get your attacks in so you cant miss your shot or risk another onslaught of attacks. Even the most dedicated Hollow Knight fans have given up in the face of this challenge.Square EnixNearly every Final Fantasy game hides away one or more super bosses that are meant to be end-game level challenges. In the original Final Fantasy 7, these were the various Weapons you could attempt on the final disc. Of all the Weapons, Emerald is typically considered the hardest. You need to head underwater to encounter this boss, which means you need to defeat it within a time limit. By default, this is 20 minutes but you can extend it to 30 if youre willing to waste a Materia slot to equip the Underwater Materia. Odds are you wont need to worry about that timer since it can deal over 50% of the entire partys HP with a single attack, counters with a stomp that also hits the entire team, and also has a move that deals damage to everyone based on how much Materia you have equipped.HarmonixIt is a little strange to call a song a boss, but theres no other way to describe playing Through the Fire and the Flames on Guitar Hero 3. The difficulty of this song is based on the song, as every song is, but we almost think it would be easier to learn the song on a real guitar than keep up with the notes blazing down the track. Words cant accurately describe how insane it is to watch this song be played by someone skilled enough to somehow keep up. The notes are so clustered to gether that it would be impressive if anyone could hit them all at half the speed the game asks.Square EnixWere giving one honorable mention to the Absolute Virtue boss from Final Fantasy 11. We didnt want to include bosses from live-service or MMOs on this list, but we had to highlight just how insane this boss is. Initially, FF11 players thought this boss was actually unbeatable after spending literal hours fighting it with no progress (excluding illegitimate methods). Some teams had gone upwards of 30 hours fighting it but couldnt take it down. It was so extreme that it remained undefeated for years until Square Enix released a patch that cut its HP almost in half and nerfed many of its stats. To compensate, a 2-hour time limit was also put on the boss. Only with all of that, plus the level cap being raised from 75 to 99, did players finally manage to overcome this legendary boss battle.Editors Recommendations

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Reality, what a concept To help AIs understand the world, researchers put them in a robot There's a difference between knowing a word and knowing a concept. Jacek Krywko Feb 1, 2025 7:05 am | 1 Credit: Thomas Vogel Credit: Thomas Vogel Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreLarge language models like ChatGPT display conversational skills, but the problem is they dont really understand the words they use. They are primarily systems that interact with data obtained from the real world but not the real world itself. Humans, on the other hand, associate language with experiences. We know what the word hot means because weve been burned at some point in our lives.Is it possible to get an AI to achieve a human-like understanding of language? A team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology built a brain-inspired AI model comprising multiple neural networks. The AI was very limitedit could learn a total of just five nouns and eight verbs. But their AI seems to have learned more than just those words; it learned the concepts behind them.Babysitting robotic armsThe inspiration for our model came from developmental psychology. We tried to emulate how infants learn and develop language, says Prasanna Vijayaraghavan, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the lead author of the study.While the idea of teaching AIs the same way we teach little babies is not newwe applied it to standard neural nets that associated words with visuals. Researchers also tried teaching an AI using a video feed from a GoPro strapped to a human baby. The problem is babies do way more than just associate items with words when they learn. They touch everythinggrasp things, manipulate them, throw stuff around, and this way, they learn to think and plan their actions in language. An abstract AI model couldnt do any of that, so Vijayaraghavans team gave one an embodied experiencetheir AI was trained in an actual robot that could interact with the world.Vijayaraghavans robot was a fairly simple system with an arm and a gripper that could pick objects up and move them around. Vision was provided by a simple RGB camera feeding videos in a somewhat crude 6464 pixels resolution.The robot and the camera were placed in a workspace, put in front of a white table with blocks painted green, yellow, red, purple, and blue. The robots task was to manipulate those blocks in response to simple prompts like move red left, move blue right, or put red on blue. All that didnt seem particularly challenging. What was challenging, though, was building an AI that could process all those words and movements in a manner similar to humans. I dont want to say we tried to make the system biologically plausible, Vijayaraghavan told Ars. Lets say we tried to draw inspiration from the human brain.Chasing free energyThe starting point for Vijayaraghavans team was the free energy principle, a hypothesis that the brain constantly makes predictions about the world based on internal models, then updates these predictions based on sensory input. The idea is that we first think of an action plan to achieve a desired goal, and then this plan is updated in real time based on what we experience during execution. This goal-directed planning scheme, if the hypothesis is correct, governs everything we do, from picking up a cup of coffee to landing a dream job.All that is closely intertwined with language. Neuroscientists at the University of Parma found that motor areas in the brain got activated when the participants in their study listened to action-related sentences. To emulate that in a robot, Vijayaraghavan used four neural networks working in a closely interconnected system. The first was responsible for processing visual data coming from the camera. It was tightly integrated with a second neural net that handled proprioception: all the processes that ensured the robot was aware of its position and the movement of its body. This second neural net also built internal models of actions necessary to manipulate blocks on the table. Those two neural nets were additionally hooked up to visual memory and attention modules that enabled them to reliably focus on the chosen object and separate it from the image's background.The third neural net was relatively simple and processed language using vectorized representations of those move red right sentences. Finally, the fourth neural net worked as an associative layer and predicted the output of the previous three at every time step. When we do an action, we dont always have to verbalize it, but we have this verbalization in our minds at some point, Vijayaraghavan says. The AI he and his team built was meant to do just that: seamlessly connect language, proprioception, action planning, and vision.When the robotic brain was up and running, they started teaching it some of the possible combinations of commands and sequences of movements. But they didnt teach it all of them.The birth of compositionalityIn 2016, Brenden Lake, a professor of psychology and data science, published a paper in which his team named a set of competencies machines need to master to truly learn and think like humans. One of them was compositionality: the ability to compose or decompose a whole into parts that can be reused. This reuse lets them generalize acquired knowledge to new tasks and situations. The compositionality phase is when children learn to combine words to explain things. They [initially] learn the names of objects, the names of actions, but those are just single words. When they learn this compositionality concept, their ability to communicate kind of explodes, Vijayaraghavan explains.The AI his team built was made for this exact purpose: to see if it would develop compositionality. And it did.Once the robot learned how certain commands and actions were connected, it also learned to generalize that knowledge to execute commands it never heard before. recognizing the names of actions it had not performed and then performing them on combinations of blocks it had never seen. Vijayaraghavans AI figured out the concept of moving something to the right or the left or putting an item on top of something. It could also combine words to name previously unseen actions, like putting a blue block on a red one.While teaching robots to extract concepts from language has been done before, those efforts were focused on making them understand how words were used to describe visuals. Vijayaragha built on that to include proprioception and action planning, basically adding a layer that integrated sense and movement to the way his robot made sense of the world.But some issues are yet to overcome. The AI had very limited workspace. The were only a few objects and all had a single, cubical shape. The vocabulary included only names of colors and actions, so no modifiers, adjectives, or adverbs. Finally, the robot had to learn around 80 percent of all possible combinations of nouns and verbs before it could generalize well to the remaining 20 percent. Its performance was worse when those ratios dropped to 60/40 and 40/60.But its possible that just a bit more computing power could fix this. What we had for this study was a single RTX 3090 GPU, so with the latest generation GPU, we could solve a lot of those issues, Vijayaraghavan argued. Thats because the team hopes that adding more words and more actions wont result in a dramatic need for computing power. We want to scale the system up. We have a humanoid robot with cameras in its head and two hands that can do way more than a single robotic arm. So thats the next step: using it in the real world with real world robots, Vijayaraghavan said.Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adp0751Jacek KrywkoAssociate WriterJacek KrywkoAssociate Writer Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry. 1 Comments

My best friend and I met in New York, and then we moved to Denver.Once we moved, our friendship changed, and he suddenly ghosted me.I tried to understand what I did wrong, but I'll never truly know.I recently endured my first friendship breakup one that caught me off guard and ended without explanation.Seven years ago, I was living in New York when a mutual friend introduced me to a guy with similar interests and personality traits. We even identified with the same sports teams. We made each other cackle by reciting foreign accents or comedy bits while also melting into couches while spinning Pink Floyd vinyl.As we spent more time together, we grew side-by-side, investing in each other's personal growth.During the pandemic, I moved to Denver, and after two years of staying in touch, he followed me because he wanted easier access to nature. But not insignificantly, he moved knowing I'd be there for him.That move would ultimately cause the end of the friendship, leaving me hurt and confused.We no longer fit together in DenverThe early reconnection was joyful chaos. We'd golf on gorgeous mountain courses, hit the bars to watch soccer, and, most importantly, continue laughing.As he settled in, I tried expanding his social circle by introducing him to my friends. Unfortunately, this wasn't as seamless as I hoped.I then spent more time traveling than staying put in Denver last summer. When I returned in the fall, I reached out to hang out, but uncharacteristically, he didn't respond.After a few more texts, I still hadn't heard from him. By the fifth unanswered text, I was no longer in denial. One of my favorite people was ghosting me.I tried calling him. After no response, I texted to express if I had done something wrong, I wanted to apologize.My desire to right the ship ended up in capsizingMy friend took two weeks to respond a gestation period to draft three paragraphs.In his mini-essay, he shared that he didn't want to be friends anymore and asked me not to contact him. The friendship was over.I'd like to believe my lack of response was due to acceptance, but it was likely because I was speechless.A few months prior, he and I were flexing the bounds of our connection, from quoting the crudest moments of "South Park" crudest moments to having an articulate, heart-to-heart chat. Now, he wouldn't even acknowledge my presence.I tried to figure out what exactly went wrongAs this was my first overt friendship breakup, I tried to figure out where I went wrong.My initial reaction was to recreate scenarios between us and analyze everything. Was it something I said? Could I have done something differently? Could I have hung out with him more?Those questions were all dead ends. After enduring weeks of rumination, I uncovered a harsh reality.When a friendship ends, you're not entitled to know anythingAt work, a sudden termination is often followed by answers explaining exactly what you did wrong in the role. A divorce needs reasons to influence legal and financial implications. But with this friendship breakup, there was no need for explanations.My nebulous misdeeds were no longer the point. I just had to accept that whether he was my friend for a reason or a season, he wouldn't be for a lifetime.Fortunately, I found the silver lining.Losing one best friend made me wake up and double down on appreciating my current close friends. That doesn't just require being present for the good times; it's about being there through it all. It also means communicating any discontent so that I won't be blindsided again.

"Magic Mike XXL" (February 1)Channing Tatum in "Magic Mike XXL." Claudette Barius/Warner Bros. One could argue that the second movie in this stripper trilogy is the best of all three.Most of the original cast returns, as Mike (Channing Tatum) takes the gang on a road trip to Myrtle Beach for one final performance for the ladies."Miss Congeniality" (February 1)Sandra Bullock in "Miss Congeniality." Castle Rock Entertainment In this classic comedy, Sandra Bullock plays an FBI agent who is transformed into a beauty pageant contestant to prevent a group from bombing the event.Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen, and William Shatner all add to the fun in supporting roles."Parasite" (February 1)Kang-ho Song in "Parasite." Neon You can't go wrong with Bong Joon-ho's four-time Oscar-winning masterpiece, which examines issues like class and privilege while telling the story of a poor family who infiltrates a wealthy one."Space Jam" (February 1)Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan in "Space Jam." Warner Bros. Family Entertainment During the late 1990s, when Michael Jordan stepped away from professional basketball to pursue baseball following the death of his father, he also starred in this classic animated movie where the Looney Tunes gang recruit him to play in a basketball game against invading aliens."Two Weeks Notice" (February 1)Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant in "Two Weeks Notice." Warner Bros Opposites attract in this rom-com starring Sandra Bullock as a lawyer who goes to work for a narcissistic billionaire played by Hugh Grant. You guessed it, eventually they fall for each other."The Wedding Planner" (February 1)Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez in "The Wedding Planner." Archive Photos / Getty Images Here's more rom-com fun: Jennifer Lopez plays a wedding planner who begins to have feelings for the latest groom she's working with, played by Matthew McConaughey."The Founder" (February 2)Michael Keaton in "The Founder." The Weinstein Company In this biopic, Michael Keaton plays businessman Ray Kroc, who turned a hamburger stand he stumbled across in the 1950s run by two brothers into the birthplace of fast food with the McDonald's chain. In the process, Kroc ruthlessly forced out the brothers of the soon-to-be lucrative company."Kinda Pregnant" (February 5)Amy Schumer in "Kinda Pregnant." Netflix In this Netflix original comedy, Amy Schumer plays Lainy, who after learning that her best friend is pregnant, pretends she is too by wearing a fake belly. Complications ensue when she finds the man of her dreams while keeping up the lie."Spencer" (February 8)Kristen Stewart in "Spencer." Neon Kristen Stewart transforms into Princess Diana in this impressionistic biopic of the late royal, which follows her as her life begins to unravel as she considers divorcing Prince Charles and leaving the royal family."Train to Busan" (February 11)Gong Yoo in "Train to Busan." Next Entertainment World If you're in need of a good horror, you can't go wrong with this zombie movie, which follows a group of people trying to survive a train trip from Seoul to Busan during a zombie outbreak. Expect lots of gore and some laughs."Despicable Me 4" (February 28)Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) in "Despicable Me 4." Universal Pictures The latest movie in the franchise follows Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) and his family and, of course, the Minions as they embark on a new spy adventure."Sonic the Hedgehog 2" (February 28)Knuckled and Sonic face off in "Sonic the Hedgehog 2." Paramount Pictures Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) returns this time with his buddy Tails to take on Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey) and the formidable Knuckles (Idris Elba).

A friend of mine once told me that You are where your attention is. That line always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all make is also the most common one. Its the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.One of the primary features of this age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because were endlessly pushed around by a parade of distractions. Your phone is ringing, your Apple Watch is blinking, you got a ping on Slack from a coworker, youre getting an email notification as youre sitting down for dinner its always something.This level of distraction is not an accident. Our devices have engineered the incessant need for stimulus and a whole industry has emerged thats devoted to capturing our attention and then selling it to the highest bidder.Chris Hayes is the host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the author of a new book called The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the Worlds Most Endangered Resource. The discourse on attention is, shall we say, crowded, but Hayes makes an interesting and novel argument about how the rearranging of social and economic life around the pursuit of attention represents a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism.I invited Hayes on The Gray Area to talk about what that actually means and why he thinks we havent fully appreciated the significance of this transformation. As always, theres much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Sean IllingHow do you define a word like attention? What are some of the more useful or practical ways to think about what it means in human life?Chris HayesTheres a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say its not really even a coherent concept. And some of those critiques I take seriously. In some ways Im using it in an everyday sense because I think it is naming something real. So one way to think about attention is the flash beam of thought. Thats a common trope. Theres a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about attention quotes because its so good, which is: withdrawal from certain things to focus on others. If you think about what a stagehand with the spotlight does in a Broadway play Im focusing on you right now. If I take a second, theres a million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus on those. Im not. Im focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So thats how we think about attention: the ability to willfully focus, basically. But then there are other dimensions of that. So theres conscious attention, voluntary attention, then theres involuntary attention. Right now, if someone busted into my studio and opened that door, I couldnt not look. It would literally be impossible. Before I had any conscious will over it, no matter how disciplined I am, pre-consciously a system would fire that would wrench my attention towards that door going open. So thats involuntary attention. And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention, which I think has its own particular weight and depth. Its not just that we can pay attention to things and people in the world, its also crucially important that people can pay attention to us. We can be on the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so psychologically and socially and emotionally rich.Sean IllingIs it too much to say that you think attention is the most important thing we have?Chris HayesI think its the most important thing. And I go back to William James. One of his philosophical preoccupations is free will whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him attention is indistinguishable from will because that ability to focus is the essence of will. And for me, if you are not a religious person and you dont think that the meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power, what we get is one life. And what we do during that one life is we go around through the world in this one body and brain and from moment to moment were paying attention to this or that, and what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. Its elemental in that sense. I dont think theres any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty.Sean IllingThe book is obviously about the rise of the modern attention economy and you make the case that this transition is comparable to the emergence of wage labor in the Industrial Revolution. How so?Chris HayesSo labor is the product of a specific set of legal market social institutions that produce this thing called a wage and a laborer. Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it, exists prior to that. Labor has turned into a commodity and there are a bunch of weird things about that. Im not a Marxist personally, but I think his observations here are quite prophetic.First of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a guy who runs a shoe shop, whos a cobbler which existed prior to industrial capitalism making the whole shoe. First youre cutting the sole, then youre putting the upper on, then youre putting it together. In the end, youve got this thing, its a shoe, and now you own it and then I sell it to you. You pay me money, now you own it. We go from that to working in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where someone just stamps soles all day. Its completely alienating and also its a much different experience of life. The other thing thats weird about it is that labor in the aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. Its incredibly valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially valueless. But if youre an individual shoemaker, this is all youve got. I have this one body and I go and stamp soles 12 hours a day and I get nothing for it. But thats it. From my perspective, thats all Ive got. All of these attributes are there for attention. Attention existed before its marketization. It now has a value out in the world. Its now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate, its wildly valuable. Google, Meta, all their money comes from this. I argue in the book that Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. Individually, theyre paying tiny slivers of cents for your attention at any moment. But to you, its all youve got. What youre paying attention to at any given moment is all youve got.Sean IllingAnd what do you think is the biggest difference between an economy built around a resource like attention and previous economies built around different kinds of material resources?Chris HayesThe argument I make in the book is that what we commonly think of as The Attention Age is truly the information age. Theres a switch from physical market production to non-material market production information economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters like you and I, all doing these things that dont amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And in that world, we think of information as the defining feature, but information is limitless. Theres tons of information. The thing thats scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone has to fight over that. And the more information there is the lower the barriers are to get it in front of someones face the more competitive it becomes. And I think that were in a position now, as more and more of the world moves from industrial modes of production to post-industrial modes of production, that the one thing thats left thats scarce, thats finite, thats the most valuable, is our attention.Sean IllingI am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us, but I dont really have a compelling response to the arguments that no ones forced to stare at their phones all day. Were choosing this. We want this. And thats not exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so exploitable that even though were not being forced in the literal sense, Im also not sure were really free in any meaningful or recognizable way. At some point, the question about free will becomes hopelessly blurred and maybe even incoherent.Chris HayesI dont think I can resolve the free will question, but I think youre right. It implicates our freedom in a profound and deep way. I was joking with my wife the other day that I feel like Ive written a recovery memoir and Im still drinking. Im still fighting all this stuff. Im not great about it. So I dont want anyone to think that Im on some elevated plane here. Im in the muck with everyone. But when you get that screen time notification that this was your average screen time for the week, that is a profound moment of, Who am I and what is my will?Sean IllingIf we also lack the capacity to pay attention together, what does that mean for democracy? Chris HayesTheres a few things Id say. One is that I want to try very hard to resist the temptation to dehistoricize everything. As I say in the book, they didnt need Facebook in Salem to start having viral rumors that so-and-so was a witch. People are very good at spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is the core of the human condition, and thats our lot. And democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just want to say that. But yes, I think there is a profound question about what this is doing to our democracy. And this is particularly true because attention is not a moral faculty. It is distinct from what we think is important. Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion whines about this. Hes talking about Versailles, actually, about the end of the war and the reparations. He says Americans have an incredible interest in this, but theyre not interested in it. Hes like, The same way the child has an enormous interest in his fathers business that he will inherit but is not interested in it. So this problem is old, but I think its so sheer right now. Overcoming the compulsions, the sirens call, the lowest-common-denominator, tabloid, casino effect of everything in a very competitive attention environment where were driven toward the lowest common denominator. It malforms the publics ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what just sustains our attention from moment to moment. Because what sustains our attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we all know that. Everyone understands that. And yet its very hard to counteract whats being done to us through the technologies.Sean IllingHow do we really know whats new here and whats not? As you say, people freaked out about comic books and that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect. But people also worried about cigarettes and that was clearly wise in retrospect. So how do we know the attention economy is cigarettes and not comic books?Chris HayesOne way to answer this is to look at the empirical research, like Jonathan Haidt does in The Anxious Generation. Like, what is this doing to us? In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence: This is terrible for our health. Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 16th century who were like, Boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do. You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs? I dont think thats going to work out well.I think in some ways the empirical question, while important, is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like, is this good? Do we like this? Is this forming my soul well? I dont need data to tell me that. Thats a human question. Thats why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy. You could come back and tell me that the empirical data shows that this isnt causing more anxiety, it isnt causing more depression, and fine, that might be true. But the bigger question is that our experience of modernity is an experience of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation that we then have to wrestle with as people. And whatever the data says in the end, we all have to live in this world and in this environment, which I think a lot of us understandably are not enjoying.Sean IllingAs you point out, the labor movement in the 19th century basically arrived at two big regulatory responses: a ban on child labor and limitations on total hours worked. Any ideas on the equivalent regulations today?Chris HayesI think thats an interesting place to start. First of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention is just an area that we need to explore. Theres a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media. [But] as a general principle, the idea that companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14-year-olds is just obviously true. And this goes hand in hand, but before we even get to regulation, we just need non-commercial spaces for connection, just the way that we have non-commercial public spaces. I can meet you in Prospect Park. We can walk on the street. We dont just exist in a mall. All of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying to buy and sell your attention.The regulatory question is a deep one. First of all, theres constitutional issues because of speech. But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating attention, like, An app just cant take more than an hour of your attention today I dont know. Maybe we pass the law and do that. That seems crazy at some level, but is it? I just think we need to be thinking about regulating attention. Part of that is breaking up the big tech firms, which are too big. But more specifically, this does feel like a place for governments to do something.Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didnt know where to start. The grief wasnt helping either. I was just like, theres no way I can do this, the 31-year-old from Los Angeles says.Around the same time, hed begun using OpenAIs ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot, tinkering with the technology to create grocery lists and budgeting tools. What if it could help him with the obituary? King fed ChatGPT some details about his grandmother she was a retired nurse who loved bowling and had a lot of grandkids and asked it to write an obituary. I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life, King says. It didnt matter that it was from ChatGPT.The result provided the scaffolding for one of lifes most personal pieces of writing. King tweaked the language, added more details, and revised the obituary with the help of his mother. Ultimately, King felt ChatGPT helped him commemorate his grandmother with language that adequately expressed his emotions. I knew it was a beautiful obituary and it described her life, King, who works in video production for a luxury handbag company, says. It didnt matter that it was from ChatGPT.Generative AI has drastically changed the manner in which people communicate and perceive communication. Early on, its uses proved relatively benign: Predictive text in iMessages and Gmail offered suggestions on word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase basis. But after the technological advances heralded by ChatGPTs public release in late 2022, the applications of the technology exploded. Users found AI helpful when writing emails and recommendation letters, and even to spruce up responses on dating apps, as the number of chatbots available for experimentation also proliferated. But there was also backlash: If a piece of writing appears insincere or stilted, receivers are quick to claim the author used AI. Now, the AI chatbot content creep has gotten increasingly personal, with some leveraging it to craft wedding vows, condolences, breakup texts, thank-you notes, and, yes, obituaries. As people apply AI to considerably more heartfelt and genuine forms of communication, they run the risk of offending or appearing grossly insincere if they are found out. Still, users say, AI isnt meant to manufacture sentimentality, but to provide a template onto which they can map their emotions. A gut checkAs anyone whos been asked to give a speech or console a friend can attest, crafting the perfect message is notoriously difficult, especially if youre a first-timer. Because these communications are so personal and meant to evoke a specific response, the pressures on to nail the tone. Theres a thin line between an effective note of support and one that makes the recipient feel worse.AI tools, then, are particularly attractive in helping nervous scribes avoid a social blunder, offering a gut check to those who know how they feel but cant quite express it. Its a great way to sanity check yourself about your own intuition, says David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University. If you wanted to write an apology letter for some transgression, you can write that apology letter and then give it to ChatGPT or Claude and be like, Im going for a warm and compassionate tone here. Am I right with this, or did I write this well? And it could actually say, It reads a little cold to me. If I were you, Id probably change a few words here, and it will just make things better.Generative AI platforms, of course, have not lived nor experienced emotions, but instead learn about them through scraping massive amounts of literature, psychological research, and other personal writing, Markowitz says. This process is analogous to learning about a culture without experiencing it, he says, through the observation of behavioral patterns rather than direct experience. So while the tech doesnt understand feelings, per se, it can compare what youve written to what its learned about how people typically express their sentiments. Katie Hoffman, a 34-year-old marketer living in Philadelphia, sought ChatGPTs counsel on more than one occasion when broaching particularly sensitive conversations. In one instance, she used it to draft a text to a friend to tell her she wouldnt be attending her wedding. Another time, Hoffman and her sister prompted the chatbot to provide a diplomatic response to a friend who backed out of Hoffmans bachelorette party at the last minute but wanted her money back. How do we say this without sounding like a jerk, but without making her feel bad? Hoffman says. It would be able to give us the message that we crafted from there.Rather than overthink, over-explain, and send a disjointed message with too many details, Hoffman found ChatGPTs scripts more objective and precise than anything she couldve written on her own. She always workshopped and personalized the texts before sending them, she says, and her friends were none the wiser. I know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out, Torres says. I dont want it to sound silly. I dont want it to sound like Im not grateful.Ironically, the worse a chatbot performs and the more editing required, the more ownership the author takes over the message, says Mor Naaman, an information science professor at Cornell University. If youre not tweaking its output all that much, the less you feel like you really penned the message. There might be implications for that as well: Youre feeling like a phony, youre feeling like you cheated, Naaman says. But that hasnt stopped many people from trying out chatbots for sentimental communications. Grappling with a bout of writers block, 26-year-old Gianna Torres used ChatGPT to outsource writing graduation party thank-you notes. I know what to say, but I have a hard time actually thinking about it and writing it out, the Philadelphia-based occupational therapist says. I dont want it to sound silly. I dont want it to sound like Im not grateful. She prompted it to generate a heartfelt message expressing her thanks for commemorating the milestone. On the first try, ChatGPT spit out a beautiful, albeit long, letter, so she asked for a shorter version which she wrote verbatim into each card.People are like, ChatGPT has no emotions, Torres says, which is true, but the way it wrote the message, I feel it.Torress friends and family initially had no inkling she had help writing the notes that is, until her cousin saw a TikTok Torres posted about the workaround. Her cousin was surprised. Torres told her cousin the fact that she had help didnt negate how she felt; she just needed a little nudge. An unwelcome reception While you may believe in your ability to spot AI-crafted language, the average person is pretty bad at parsing whether a message was written by a chatbot. If you feed ChatGPT enough personal information, it can generate a convincing text, even more so if that text includes, or has been edited to include, statements using the words I, me, myself, or my. These words are one of the biggest markers of sincerity in language, according to Markowitz. They help to indicate some sort of psychological closeness that people feel towards the thing theyre talking about, he says. But if the recipient suspects the author outsourced their sincerity to AI, they dont take it well. As soon as you suspect that some content is written by AI, Naaman says, you find [the writer] less trustworthy. You think the communication is less successful. You can see this clearly in the backlash last summer to Google over its Olympics ad for its AI platform, Gemini: Audiences were appalled that a father would turn to AI to help his daughter pen a fan letter to an Olympic athlete. As the technology continues to proliferate, audiences are increasingly skeptical of content that may seem off or too manufactured. If you arent wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt?The negative reaction to outsourcing writing that people find inherently emotional may stem from an overall skepticism toward the technology, as well as what its use means for sincerity, says Malte Jung, an information science associate professor at Cornell University who studied the effects of AI in communication. People still hold a more negative perception of technology and AI and they might attribute that negative perception to the person using it, he says. (Over half of Americans consider AI a concern rather than an exciting innovation, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center Survey.) Jung says that people might think of AI-generated communications as less genuine, authentic, or sincere. If you arent wrestling with the words to perfectly articulate your emotions, are they even real? Will you even remember how it all felt? When King, who used ChatGPT to write his grandmothers obituary, relayed how hed used AI in a reply on X, the response was overwhelmingly negative. I couldnt believe it, he says. The blowback prompted him to come clean to his mother, who assured him the obituary was beautiful. It really did make me second-think myself a little bit, King says. Something that I never even thought was a bad thing, so many people tried to turn into a crazy, evil thing.When deliberating the ethics of AI communications, intentions do matter to a certain extent. Who hasnt wracked their brain for the perfect mix of language and emotion? The desire to be warm and authentic and genuine could be enough to produce an effective message. The key question is the effort people put in, the sincerity of what they want to write, Jung says. That might be independent from how it is perceived. You used ChatGPT, then no matter if youre sincere in what you put in, people might still see you negatively.Generative AI is becoming so ubiquitous, however, that some may not care at all. Chris Harihar, a 39-year-old who works in public relations in New York City, had a specific childhood anecdote he wanted to include in his speech at his sisters wedding but couldnt quite weave it in. So he asked ChatGPT for some help. He uploaded his speech in its current form, told it the story he was aiming to incorporate, and asked it to connect the story to lifelong partnership. It was able to give me these threads that I hadnt thought of before where it made total sense, Harihar says.Harihar was an early adopter of AI and uses platforms like Claude and ChatGPT frequently in his personal and professional life, so his family wasnt surprised when he told them he used AI to perfect the speech. Harihar even uses AI tools to answer his 4-year-old daughters perplexing, ultra-specific questions that are characteristic of kids. Recently, Harihars daughter wondered why people have different skin tones and he prompted ChatGPT to offer a kid-friendly explanation. The bot provided a diplomatic and age-appropriate breakdown of melanin. Harihar was impressed he probably wouldnt have thought to break it down that way, he says. Rather than feel like he lost out on a parenting moment by outsourcing help, Harihar sees the technology as another resource.From a parenting perspective, sometimes youre just trying to survive the day, he says. Having one of these tools available to you to help make explanations that you otherwise might struggle with for whatever reason are helpful.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

By Margherita Bassi Published February 1, 2025 | Comments (0) | Little Red Dots. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College) About a year after launching into orbit around the Sun, the James Webb Space Telescope began imaging an abundance of little red dots, which scientists called, um, little red dots. I knownot only is the name highly unimaginative, it also conveys a false impression of insignificance. In reality, these little red dots almost broke modern cosmology. Astronomers have assembled one of the largest surveys of little red dots (LRDs) ever made, and theorize that a large portion of these mysterious space objects are galaxies with supermassive black holes. Their results, presented during the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland and accepted for future publication in The Astrophysical Journal, could resolve the universe-breaking problem. Were confounded by this new population of objects that Webb has found. We dont see analogs of them at lower redshifts, which is why we havent seen them prior to Webb, Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, who led the study, said in a Space Telescope Science Institute statement. Redshift happens when the universes expansion stretches light waves, increasing their wavelengths. This makes them appear more red because they shift closer to the red part of the light spectrum. Thats partially why little red dots areyou guessed itred. Essentially, lower redshifts correspond to closer distances in space. Theres a substantial amount of work being done to try to determine the nature of these little red dots and whether their light is dominated by accreting [growing by accumulating matter] black holes, Kocevski added. Kocevski and his teams research was published in a September preprint article on arXiv.Nearly all the LRDs in their survey existed during the universes first 1.5 billion years. How do we know about objects that existed billions of years ago? Its because light takes time to travel. When we observe celestial bodies, were seeing them not as they are today, but as they were when their light first began its journey to Earth. For example, it takes eight minutes and twenty seconds for the Suns light to travel to our planet.That means we see the Sun as it was eight minutes and twenty seconds ago. The same goes for objects much farther away from us. In fact, the farther away they are, the higher their redshift, and the further back in time we can see. Dont worry, there wont be a quiz at the end.The teams research indicated that a large portion of the LRDs in question existed between 600 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. They also found evidence that many of them had orbiting gas traveling at about 2 million miles per hour (around 3.2 million kilometers per hour). Based on this evidence, the researchers suggest that LRDs could be active galactic nuclei (AGN): extremely luminous and growing supermassive black holes. The most exciting thing for me is the redshift distributions. These really red, high-redshift sources basically stop existing at a certain point after the big bang, said Steven Finkelstein from the University of Texas at Austin, who also participated in the research. If they are growing black holes, and we think at least 70 percent of them are, this hints at an era of obscured black hole growth in the early universe. It would also fix the cosmology that the JWST broke when it first identified the LRDs. The possibility of stars emitting that kind of light within this context contradicted widely-accepted cosmological theories, leading some scholars to suggest that cosmology was broken. Light emitted by AGNs, however, fits with those theories.This is how you solve the universe-breaking problem, said Anthony Taylor from the University of Texas at Austin, a co-author of the forthcoming study. While the universe-breaking problem might be solved, however, many questions about LRDs remain.Theres always two or more potential ways to explain the confounding properties of little red dots, said Kocevski. Its a continuous exchange between models and observations, finding a balance between what aligns well between the two and what conflicts. Ultimately, the take-aways from the study are two: dont judge an astronomical phenomenon by its name, and even universe-breaking problems can eventually be fixed.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published January 27, 2025 By Margherita Bassi Published January 23, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published January 21, 2025 By Margherita Bassi Published January 19, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published January 18, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published January 14, 2025

Aimasia Residence / A31 ArchitectureSave this picture! Mike KelleyHousesGreeceArchitects: A31 ArchitectureAreaArea of this architecture projectArea:850 mYearCompletion year of this architecture project Year: 2024 PhotographsPhotographs:Mike Kelley Lead Architect: Praxitelis Kondylis More SpecsLess SpecsSave this picture!Text description provided by the architects. The new project named AIMASIA Residence is located in a 14.000 m2 piece of land and in very close proximity to one of Mykonos most prominent beaches, Elia beach. Aimasia is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning the dry-stone wall fence built by farmers throughout centuries in order to cultivate grain, grapes, wheat and vegetables in the steep and arid land of the Cycladic islands including the island of Mykonos. These dry-stoned walls have always been a welcoming embrace to people, plants and animals throughout the ages.Save this picture!The landscape is the inspiration for both the farmer of the past and the today's architect. As a result, a 62 meters wall made by local Mykonian granite stone and gently following the site's contour lines is the "spine" of the new architectural composition on which the new building is smoothly nestled. The building opens to the south towards a spectacular vista to the sea and to the beach of Elia and to the East towards an imposing rocky granite hill full of old dry-stone walls that are listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage landmarks. The residence offers intimate and expansive areas for leisure, maintaining visual harmony with the surroundings. Aimasia Residence elegantly integrates outdoor elements indoors, respecting natural terrain while optimizing scenic views through thoughtful design. All off the residence's roofs are planted with native plants as the aim was to maintain the natural landscape with minimal disruption and allow the new project to blend smoothly into the existing environment.Save this picture!The AIMASIA project in Elia was designed with respect to its environment trying to use different qualities of sustainability. According to our firm's values the issue of sustainable construction should be tackled from a life-cycle point of view. More sustainable construction could not only involve less impactive materials but also structural optimization that may enhance its performance. To implement a successful sustainability strategy the following actions were taken.o The southern orientation of the building provides it with passive thermal and visual comfort.o Elongating the life of the building by selecting a more robust and durable structure. Cast in-situ concrete was used as the main structural material with low-carbon cement to reduce the building's carbon footprint and make concrete surfaces brighter helping create a spectacular, sustainable landmark. Moreover, the thermal mass of concrete is used to avoid or reduce temperature swings in the building. Concrete walls and floors are effective storage heaters, absorbing free heat from the sun during the daytime and releasing heat at night. Concrete stores heat in the winter and cools buildings in the summer, creating optimal comfort conditions for the occupants.o The entire building complex has a green roof providing shade and insulation that results in energy savings. The green roof can become a way to reclaim habitat lost because of the building's construction while improving its aesthetic value.o All the exterior walls are coated with thermal insulation and white color plaster to optimize the building's energy performance while reducing the heat gain from the sun during summertime.o Cross ventilation is anticipated as a boosting technique for passive cooling.o Highly efficient window panels with thermally insulated aluminum frames are used.o Low flow water fixtures,o High efficiency light fixtures,o Low maintenance plants that have minimum irrigation requirements are applied.Save this picture!Project gallerySee allShow lessAbout this officeA31 ArchitectureOfficePublished on February 01, 2025Cite: "Aimasia Residence / A31 Architecture" 01 Feb 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1026227/aimasia-residence-a31-architecture&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save!ArchDaily?You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream