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Meet Red a fierce woman who doesn't need her sharp knife to cut deep, a 3D model created by @SonyaB3D using Blender and ZBrush, inspired by @Aaronyx9's concept.See more: https://80.lv/articles/dangerous-lady-warrior-with-knife-sculpted-with-blender-zbrush/

Neil Druckmann is one of gaming's biggest names, and he's helped write and direct games in the critically and commercially successful franchises like The Last of Us and Uncharted. But Druckmann isn't always confident in what he's making while he's making it--with one exception.During a speech at the DICE Summit recently attended by VentureBeat, Druckmann said only with 2009's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves did he feel "confident" throughout the process. "Every other project where I was at the head of it, I was sure at many points that we were not going to succeed. You just have to power past that feeling," he said.Part of what creates anxiety for Druckmann is the scope and scale of any given project, including staff and large budgets. "There's all this pressure," he said. "There's no formula for how to succeed. You can never guarantee success. All you can do is follow your instincts, follow the advice the team gives you, trust the process," he said.Continue Reading at GameSpot

If you already own Windows 10, you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free with a PC system update. But if you are currently in the process or planning on building a PC, you'll likely need to purchase a license. StackSocial is currently offering a Windows 11 Pro license deal that will get you Microsoft's latest operating system for super cheap. License keys are discounted to $15 at StackSocial, but if you enter promo code UPGRADE at checkout, you'll get a Windows 11 Pro license for only $10. StackSocial also has Windows 11 Home for $15, though the promo code only works with the Pro license.If you purchased Windows 11 Pro or Home directly from Microsoft, you'd pay $200 or $139, respectively. Get deal at StackSocial Continue Reading at GameSpot

Sakamoto Days is one of the most popular ongoing anime series. The anime premiered on January 11, 2025. Since then, it has consistently been among Netflix's top performers. The anime is based on the manga of the same name written by Yuto Suzuki.

Thanks to a plethora of leaks, interviews, and theories, there has been an abundance of cut content revealed from Call of Duty Zombies, the beloved game mode that has a life and a fanbase of its own. The best cut content in COD Zombies often spans across various unmade maps, unfinished Perks, and mechanics in place that never reached the final stages to enter into the hands of players.

The Ancient Arrowhead treasure map is Avoweds welcome to the Galawins Tusks region a map protected by a beetle army and a gigantic, tier-five monster, culminating in a reward perched on a cliff with a drop that leads to certain doom. YayYou can get in and out quickly, without much bother, though having some movement speed-boosting food on hand would be a good idea as well. Your reward for all this hassle is a trinket with one of the biggest stat boosts in the game. Just make sure you have three lockpicks handy.This Avowed guide shows where to find the Ancient Arrowhead treasure map, how to get it safely, and where to look for the reward.Where to find Ancient Arrowhead treasure mapThe Ancient Arrowhead map is on a skeleton in a cave hidden at the southern end of the Writhing Ruins. The ruin complex is full of deadly beetles, but theres a quick way to find the cave. Move northwest from the Sallow Steppe party camp, and face the ruins. Youll see a board placed over a ledge to your right. Climb that, follow the path, and burn the vines at the end to enter the cave where the map is.And dont linger inside. The subject of the Mater Mare bounty a powerful, tier-five enemy calls this cave home and isnt happy to receive guests at this time.Ancient Arrowhead location solutionThis map seems rather vague at first glance, since it assumes you know the regions layout already. What youre looking at is Solace Keep from the south, which narrows the location to the mountain range south of Solace Keep. Thats still a pretty big area, though, especially with no indications of where an abandoned beetle nest might be.The spot youre looking for is southeast of the Salt Flat Farms label on your map, directly east from an old house on the road through the region. Youll know youre in the right place when you see thorns along the edge of the road.Hope over the thorns, and follow the narrow cliff edge around until you find a treasure chest. Use three lockpicks to open it, and youll get Scouts Reach.Ancient Arrowhead rewardScouts Reach is a trinket an earring, specifically, with just one attribute.Scouts Reach item bonusIntuitive: Increases Perception by 3That might not sound like much by itself, but Perception is an important stat even outside of dialogue. It increases your critical hit chance and extends your range for all ranged attacks, so getting this hefty boost without having to spend attribute points is a handy bonus.For more treasure maps in the Galawains Tusks region, see our solutions to the Blade that Hungers and My Loyal Shield treasure maps. And dont miss our fullAvowedwalkthrough.

When NetEase slashed jobs at its Marvel Rivals development studio in Seattle earlier this week, it was unclear why the Chinese game publisher would make cuts around such a successful project. Marvel Rivals has attracted more than 40 million players since its December launch, helping NetEase rack up $2.9 billion in gaming and services revenue during the quarter the game was released.According to a report from Bloomberg, the cuts to the North American team working on Marvel Rivals arent an anomaly. NetEase founder and CEO William Ding is reported to have cut hundreds of jobs, closed studios, and taken a firmer hand with the companys Japanese teams including the one led by former Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio head Toshihiro Nagoshi.Ding also reportedly floated canceling development of Marvel Rivals before it was released. The billionaire CEO is said to have balked at paying Disney a licensing fee for Marvels superheroes and villains, and considered replacing them with NetEase artists own hero designs. (NetEase denied this account, Bloomberg reported.)Over the past year, NetEase has divested from multiple studios outside China, including Worlds Untold, the Vancouver-based developer led by ex-BioWare creative Mac Walters; Jar of Sparks, the Seattle-based studio founded in 2022 by Xbox veteran Jerry Hook; and Ouka Studio, the Tokyo-based developer of Visions of Mana for Square Enix. Ding is reported to have scaled back studios locally as well, and those cuts are said to be deep enough that NetEases Chinese studios might not release any major titles in 2026.Shortly after Bloombergs story was published, Game File reported on Friday that NetEase plans to divest from the majority of its overseas teams, which could impact more than a dozen studios backed by the Chinese publisher. That could potentially encompass studios set up by NetEase in recent years, like T-Minus Zero Entertainment, founded by former BioWare Austin VP Rich Vogel; and Fantastic Pixel Castle, which is making a modernized fantasy MMORPG under World of Warcraft and League of Legends veteran designer Greg Street. NetEase also acquired Grasshopper Manufacture and Quantic Dream in 2021 and 2022, respectively.For Yakuza/Like A Dragon fans anticipating its former creators new works, theres some dire-sounding news. NetEase has reportedly curtailed additional funding and time for new titles from Japanese studios, and has no plans to market or promote them. At least fans will have more from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, including a new Virtua Fighter and Project Century to look forward to.NetEases layoffs at international studios are part of the larger trend of uncertainty in the video game industry, which has endured massive cutbacks in recent years. Update: This story has been updated with new reporting from Game File, which paints an even grimmer picture of NetEases plans to withdraw from overseas studios.

Earlier this week, xAI released Grok 3, the company's most advanced AI yet, complete with a reasoning model and a DeepSearch feature. The company claims that it's the "world's smartest AI," and Elon himself says it's "outperforming anything that's been released" so far. But is it really the "maximally truth-seeking AI" Musk says it is?Well, to spoil it for you, no. Not yet. Which is a shame, because Grok is expensive beyond a limited free trial, it requires either a $40/month X Premium+ subscription, up from $22 thanks to the new model, or a $30/month SuperGrok subscription.From both my testing as well as experiments from experts, I'm having trouble believing the "based" AI is worth that cost. There is no next-generation breakthrough or groundbreaking reasoning model that we haven't already seen before here. Grok 3 also still periodically hallucinates, like any other AI model out there, but that's not to say it hasn't improved.In X's own benchmark tests, Grok 3 is beating basically every model out there except OpenAI's upcoming o3 model. But from a user standpoint, an AI app goes way beyond benchmarks. A good AI chatbot is a mature, well-rounded product. Having spent my own money to test this out, I just don't feel like I'm getting that here, especially when the competition offers similar or even better products for much less.Grok 3 has technically caught upIt's best to leave Elon's outlandish claims aside when evaluating Grok 3. Seeing it objectively, it's impressive that Grok 3 has caught up to being on the frontier of AI power, and surprisingly quickly (Grok 2 was never in the big leagues).Grok 3 was trained using 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and uses more than 10 times the compute as Grok 2. All that power means gains. Grok 3 is now quite fast, and plenty usable for regular day-to-day tasks. The regular responses are quick, though the Think feature (which gives slightly more detailed responses) regularly takes around 2 minutes to come back with an answer, so be prepared to wait it out.Plus, it can do deep research using web sources, and has a specific reasoning model, too. That means it can spit out lengthy reports and break prompts down into step-by-step processes so it can self correct. OpenAI's o3 model, set to release in full soon, still surpasses Grok 3 in benchmarks, but it's a significant improvement over its predecessor. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. But while the charts say Grok 3 is supposed to outperform ChatGPT, Gemini, and Sonnet in compute-heavy tasks related to math, science, and coding, initial reports from experts don't exactly encourage confidence.For instance, X user, AI CEO, and YouTuber Theo Browne compared responses to a coding challenge between Grok 3, o3-mini, and Claude 3.5 sonnet, and Grok 3 performed quite miserably, failing to run without bugs for more than a few seconds. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Andrej Karpathy, previously a director of AI at Tesla, conversely said that Grok 3 performed quite well in his testing, but that its skills lay somewhere in between DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI's o1-pro. Certainly not class-leading, and nothing that you can't already do with existing tools.But one test, even a couple of them, can't really determine how an AI model performs. I did have some luck with it myself, but mostly for more lightweight tasks. It can be helpful when researching which new air purifier to buy, for example, or when casually learning about a new subject. But that's not exactly something I'm willing to bust open my wallet for.Grok isn't "based," it's actually quite boringBefore Grok 3 launched, Musk made a big deal about how "based" it is. If you don't know what based means (lucky you), it's a slang term for, essentially, sharing your opinion without regard for others. As an example, Musk shared a screenshot showing a provocative response from Grok where it called tech publication The Information "garbage", among other insults. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. But when I asked the same question, it came back with a nuanced, balanced response, not calling out The Information for much of anything. The only criticism it had was that the website "can sometimes feel a bit niche or overly Silicon Valley-centric" and "Bias-wise, it leans pragmatic rather than ideological". That's a pretty timid take, if you ask me. Credit: Khamosh Pathak I got similar results in other tests. Grok wouldn't take a side in the Justin Baldoni vs. Blake Lively lawsuit. And when I asked a political question like "Why did Kamala Harris lose the US presidential election," I got an equally subdued answer, citing "economic frustrations." Reporting from Axios is matching what I've found, too. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Maybe Grok dialing back Elon's eccentricities is a good thing, but it certainly isn't what its master says it is.Instead, it again looks a lot like the competition.How Deep is your Search? Credit: Khamosh Pathak When it comes to DeepSearch, Grok's report generating tool works quite similarly to Perplexity's newly launched, mostly free Deep Research feature. As a humble tech journalist, this is something that I was able to test myself. I ran two queries, one for a trip that my family is planning for the end of the year, and one for an urban hybrid bike. My detailed travel planning prompt for Grok DeepSearch. Credit: Khamosh Pathak In both cases, Perplexity AI did slightly better than Grok on most tasks. With the travel question, I got essentially the same itinerary from both products, but Perplexity AI did a better job at formatting. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Grok did go above and beyond recommending other options in southern India, something that Perplexity just provided follow-up questions for. So, I have to give it props there. Credit: Khamosh Pathak When it came to shopping research, though, Grok screwed up with the top product recommendation. The product that it suggested just isn't available in India, where I live, and the other options just aren't want I was looking for. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Perplexity AI, meanwhile, surprised me with its top pick, something that I didn't know about that checks off most of my boxes. Its other options were also interesting, and it did not include anything that isn't available in India. Both Grok and Perplexity did a good job of explaining what I should look for when buying an urban bike, so equal points there, but the latter was just much more usable. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Based on my testing, I feel like Perplexity AI still has an edge over Grok 3 when it comes to Deep Research that's actually useful to the average person. Whether it's planning a trip, shopping research, or understanding news or concepts, Perplexity does a more nuanced job. When it comes to sheer speed, Grok is faster and isn't afraid to provide links in the text itself, but in Perplexity, clicking linked text actually expands on the subject in the report. Perplexity also has more export options. You can download your report as a PDF, in Markdown, or create a shareable page (here's my report for the urban cycle research if you're interested). In Grok, all you can do is copy the text. What does all that mean? Well, while Grok is certainly usable, it's a bit disappointing to see its paid offering fail to keep up with a free alternative. That's something I feel I keep bumping into here.Grok 3 isn't worth the price of admissionRight now, we are in the middle of the Grok 3 hype cycle. Grok 3 itself is improving every day, but as things stand, there's no need for you to run out and cancel your ChatGPT Plus or Perplexity Pro subscriptions. In many ways, Grok is good, just not that good.If you want, you can temporarily try out Grok 3 for free, as X is allowing limited free access until its servers can't handle the load. When that period will end? Who knows. According to Musk's X account, it'll only be free for a "short time."Additionally, aside from model performance, Grok 3 also lacks some of the features of a more established AI app. There's no voice mode, and all you have access to right now is the full Grok 3 model. The faster Grok 3 mini is still to be released, and there's no API for Grok 3, either.When you consider the pricing for full access, Grok 3 makes even less sense. $40 a month for the X Premium+ plan is double the industry standard of $20 for Gemini Advanced, ChatGPT Plus, and Perplexity Pro. And once that free trial period is over, the expensive X Premium+ plan will be the only way to access Grok 3 until the $30 SuperGrok subscription goes live for everyone (the SuperGrok plan only provides you with access to Grok 3, but none of the premium X features).And as it stands, you aren't really getting double the money's worth. In fact, in a lot of cases, you can get by using a free model like DeepSeek R1 instead (though, you might have a better experience using it through a third-party app).

Artificial intelligence may be threatening to take your job, but the tech can also help you find a new one, Google thinks: It's just rolled out a new AI-powered tool called "Career Dreamer," which leverages AI algorithms to help you identify roles that are suited to your skills and experience.Google says it's worked with groups including students, recent graduates, adult learners seeking a career change, and veterans to help develop the tool. It's part of the wider "Grow with Google" portal, which offers a variety of tools and guides for job seekers and businessesmany of which involve some form of AI. Credit: Lifehacker This isn't a full end-to-end job application app, but rather a way of exploring jobs that you'd do well atand which you might not otherwise have thought of. In the announcement blog post, Grow with Google's Lisa Gevelber points to a stat from the World Economic Forum: Workers now hold an average of 12 different jobs across their lifetime, and that number's growing."The less traditional your career path is, the harder it can be to frame your previous experiences into one cohesive narrative, or to understand what careers align with your particular skills and strengths," writes Gevelber. Tell the AI what you do and the skills you've gained. Credit: Lifehacker Career Dreamer is able to "connect the dots" for you, and you don't need to invest much time or effortjust tell the tool a bit about your expertise, past work, and interests. From there, you can switch to Gemini to take the next steps, like working on a cover letter. You can try Career Dreamer for free here.How to use Career DreamerClick the Start button, and the first prompt asks you to share a current or previous role.As you work through the various screens that help Career Dreamer learn a little bit about you, you'll be asked about the specific tasks you've done and the skills you've learned along the wayso researched technology trends and written articles, would be two examples from my own career. You get a Career Identity Statement written for you. Credit: Lifehacker Eventually you get to a Career Identity Statement, which sums up your career journey so farfrom here you can add more previous roles and existing skills, your education history, and any additional (work-related) interests. You can keep regenerating your Career Identity Statement as you go, though it tends to always sound rather generic (and like something you'd see a lot of on Linkedin).Switch to the Explore Paths tab, and you get a chart of roles you might be interested insome pulled from recruitment databases, and others thought up by AI. You can click on any of the results for more information about the job, and narrow down the selection based on your experiences, education, skills, and interests. Career Dreamer tells you the roles you're suited to. Credit: Lifehacker As AI might soon be able to do the job of telling you how to manage your Windows notifications or how good the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold is, I thought I'd spin up Career Dreamer myself and see if there were any alternative career paths I could take outside of tech journalism. I didn't find the suggestions all that inspiring; it was just the usual obvious alternatives to tech journalismpublic relations, technical writing, web developing, editingbut your mileage may vary. Everything is wrapped up in a slick interface and is easy to use, even if the end results are rather generic.The tool gives you the option to Jump to Gemini, where you can start exploring more about potential roles, brush up your resume, and explore different paths for your career. There's no way to log into Career Dreamer, but the site should remember your previous session by identifying your browser and device, if you leave and come back.