Let’s say you are lucky enough to have access to a system with an Nvidia Graphical Processing Unit (Gpu). Did you know there is an absurdly easy method to use your GPU’s capabilities using a Python library intended and predominantly used for machine learning (ML) applications?  Don’t worry if you’re not up to speed on the ins and outs of ML, since we won’t be using it in this article. Instead, I’ll show you how to use the PyTorch library to access and use the capabilities of your GPU. We’ll compare the run times of Python programs using the popular numerical library NumPy, running on the CPU, with equivalent code using PyTorch on the GPU.  Before continuing, let’s quickly recap what a GPU and Pytorch are. What is a GPU? A GPU is a specialised electronic chip initially designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. Its utility as a rapid image manipulation device was based on its ability to perform many calculations simultaneously, and it’s still used for that purpose. However, GPUs have recently become invaluable in machine learning, large language model training and development. Their inherent ability to perform highly parallelizable computations makes them ideal workhorses in these fields, as they employ complex mathematical models and simulations. What is PyTorch? PyTorch is an open-source machine learning library developed by Facebook’s AI Research Lab (FAIR). It’s widely used for natural language processing and computer vision applications. Two of the main reasons that Pytorch can be used for GPU operations are, One of PyTorch’s core data structures is the Tensor. Tensors are similar to arrays and matrices in other programming languages, but are optimised for running on a GPU. Pytorch has CUDA support. PyTorch seamlessly integrates with CUDA, a parallel computing platform and programming model developed by NVIDIA for general computing on its GPUS. This allows PyTorch to access the GPU hardware directly, accelerating numerical computations. CUDA will enable developers to use PyTorch to write software that fully utilises GPU acceleration. In summary, PyTorch’s support for GPU operations through CUDA and its efficient tensor manipulation capabilities make it an excellent tool for developing GPU-accelerated Python functions with high computational demands.  As we’ll show later on, you don’t have to use PyTorch to develop machine learning models or train large language models. In the rest of this article, we’ll set up our development environment, install PyTorch and run through a few examples where we’ll compare some computationally heavy PyTorch implementations with the equivalent numpy implementation and see what, if any, performance differences we find. Pre-requisites An Nvidia GPU You need an Nvidia GPU on your system. To check your GPU, issue the following command at your system prompt. I’m using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). $ nvidia-smi >> (base) PS C:\Users\thoma> nvidia-smi Fri Mar 22 11:41:34 2024 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NVIDIA-SMI 551.61 Driver Version: 551.61 CUDA Version: 12.4 | |-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ | GPU Name TCC/WDDM | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | | Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. | | | | MIG M. | |=========================================+========================+======================| | 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti WDDM | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A | | 32% 24C P8 9W / 285W | 843MiB / 12282MiB | 1% Default | | | | N/A | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Processes: | | GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory | | ID ID Usage | |=========================================================================================| | 0 N/A N/A 1268 C+G ...tility\HPSystemEventUtilityHost.exe N/A | | 0 N/A N/A 2204 C+G ...ekyb3d8bbwe\PhoneExperienceHost.exe N/A | | 0 N/A N/A 3904 C+G ...cal\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDrive.exe N/A | | 0 N/A N/A 7068 C+G ...CBS_cw5n etc .. If that command isn’t recognised and you’re sure you have a GPU, it probably means you’re missing an NVIDIA driver. Just follow the rest of the instructions in this article, and it should be installed as part of that process. Nvidia GPU drivers While PyTorch installation packages can include CUDA libraries, your system must still install the appropriate NVIDIA GPU drivers. These drivers are necessary for your operating system to communicate with the graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware. The CUDA toolkit includes drivers, but if you’re using PyTorch’s bundled CUDA, you only need to ensure that your GPU drivers are current. Click this link to go to the NVIDIA website and install the latest drivers compatible with your system and GPU specifications. Setting up our development environment As a best practice, we should set up a separate development environment for each project. I use conda, but use whatever method suits you. If you want to go down the conda route and don’t already have it, you must install Miniconda (recommended) or Anaconda first.  Please note that, at the time of writing, PyTorch currently only officially supports Python versions 3.8 to 3.11. #create our test environment (base) $ conda create -n pytorch_test python=3.11 -y Now activate your new environment. (base) $ conda activate pytorch_test We now need to get the appropriate conda install command for PyTorch. This will depend on your operating system, chosen programming language, preferred package manager, and CUDA version.  Luckily, Pytorch provides a useful web interface that makes this easy to set up. So, to get started, head over to the Pytorch website at… https://pytorch.org Click on the Get Started link near the top of the screen. From there, scroll down a little until you see this, Image from Pytorch website Click on each box in the appropriate position for your system and specs. As you do, you’ll see that the command in the Run this Command output field changes dynamically. When you’re done making your choices, copy the final command text shown and type it into your command window prompt.  For me, this was:- (pytorch_test) $ conda install pytorch torchvision torchaudio pytorch-cuda=12.1 -c pytorch -c nvidia -y We’ll install Jupyter, Pandas, and Matplotlib to enable us to run our Python code in a notebook with our example code. (pytroch_test) $ conda install pandas matplotlib jupyter -y Now type in jupyter notebook into your command prompt. You should see a jupyter notebook open in your browser. If that doesn’t happen automatically, you’ll likely see a screenful of information after the jupyter notebook command. Near the bottom, there will be a URL that you should copy and paste into your browser to initiate the Jupyter Notebook. Your URL will be different to mine, but it should look something like this:- http://127.0.0.1:8888/tree?token=3b9f7bd07b6966b41b68e2350721b2d0b6f388d248cc69da Testing our setup The first thing we’ll do is test our setup. Please enter the following into a Jupyter cell and run it. import torch x = torch.rand(5, 3) print(x) You should see a similar output to the following. tensor([[0.3715, 0.5503, 0.5783], [0.8638, 0.5206, 0.8439], [0.4664, 0.0557, 0.6280], [0.5704, 0.0322, 0.6053], [0.3416, 0.4090, 0.6366]]) Additionally, to check if your GPU driver and CUDA are enabled and accessible by PyTorch, run the following commands: import torch torch.cuda.is_available() This should output True if all is OK.  If everything is okay, we can proceed to our examples. If not, go back and check your installation processes. NB In the timings below, I ran each of the Numpy and PyTorch processes several times in succession and took the best time for each. This does favour the PyTorch runs somewhat as there is a small overhead on the very first invocation of each PyTorch run but, overall, I think it’s a fairer comparison. Example 1 — A simple array math operation. In this example, we set up two large, identical one-dimensional arrays and perform a simple addition to each array element. import numpy as np import torch as pt from timeit import default_timer as timer #func1 will run on the CPU def func1(a): a+= 1 #func2 will run on the GPU def func2(a): a+= 2 if __name__=="__main__": n1 = 300000000 a1 = np.ones(n1, dtype = np.float64) # had to make this array much smaller than # the others due to slow loop processing on the GPU n2 = 300000000 a2 = pt.ones(n2,dtype=pt.float64) start = timer() func1(a1) print("Timing with CPU:numpy", timer()-start) start = timer() func2(a2) #wait for all calcs on the GPU to complete pt.cuda.synchronize() print("Timing with GPU:pytorch", timer()-start) print() print("a1 = ",a1) print("a2 = ",a2) Timing with CPU:numpy 0.1334826999955112 Timing with GPU:pytorch 0.10177790001034737 a1 = [2. 2. 2. ... 2. 2. 2.] a2 = tensor([3., 3., 3., ..., 3., 3., 3.], dtype=torch.float64) We see a slight improvement when using PyTorch over Numpy, but we missed one crucial point. We haven’t used the GPU because our PyTorch tensor data is still in CPU memory.  To move the data to the GPU memory, we need to add the device='cuda' directive when creating the tensor. Let’s do that and see if it makes a difference. # Same code as above except # to get the array data onto the GPU memory # we changed a2 = pt.ones(n2,dtype=pt.float64) # to a2 = pt.ones(n2,dtype=pt.float64,device='cuda') After re-running with the changes we get, Timing with CPU:numpy 0.12852740001108032 Timing with GPU:pytorch 0.011292399998637848 a1 = [2. 2. 2. ... 2. 2. 2.] a2 = tensor([3., 3., 3., ..., 3., 3., 3.], device='cuda:0', dtype=torch.float64) That’s more like it, a greater than 10x speed up.  Example 2—A slightly more complex array operation. For this example, we’ll multiply multi-dimensional matrices using the built-in matmul operations available in the PyTorch and Numpy libraries. Each array will be 10000 x 10000 and contain random floating-point numbers between 1 and 100. # NUMPY first import numpy as np from timeit import default_timer as timer # Set the seed for reproducibility np.random.seed(0) # Generate two 10000x10000 arrays of random floating point numbers between 1 and 100 A = np.random.uniform(low=1.0, high=100.0, size=(10000, 10000)).astype(np.float32) B = np.random.uniform(low=1.0, high=100.0, size=(10000, 10000)).astype(np.float32) # Perform matrix multiplication start = timer() C = np.matmul(A, B) # Due to the large size of the matrices, it's not practical to print them entirely. # Instead, we print a small portion to verify. print("A small portion of the result matrix:\n", C[:5, :5]) print("Without GPU:", timer()-start) A small portion of the result matrix: [[25461280. 25168352. 25212526. 25303304. 25277884.] [25114760. 25197558. 25340074. 25341850. 25373122.] [25381820. 25326522. 25438612. 25596932. 25538602.] [25317282. 25223540. 25272242. 25551428. 25467986.] [25327290. 25527838. 25499606. 25657218. 25527856.]] Without GPU: 1.4450852000009036 Now for the PyTorch version. import torch from timeit import default_timer as timer # Set the seed for reproducibility torch.manual_seed(0) # Use the GPU device = 'cuda' # Generate two 10000x10000 tensors of random floating point # numbers between 1 and 100 and move them to the GPU # A = torch.FloatTensor(10000, 10000).uniform_(1, 100).to(device) B = torch.FloatTensor(10000, 10000).uniform_(1, 100).to(device) # Perform matrix multiplication start = timer() C = torch.matmul(A, B) # Wait for all current GPU operations to complete (synchronize) torch.cuda.synchronize() # Due to the large size of the matrices, it's not practical to print them entirely. # Instead, we print a small portion to verify. print("A small portion of the result matrix:\n", C[:5, :5]) print("With GPU:", timer() - start) A small portion of the result matrix: [[25145748. 25495480. 25376196. 25446946. 25646938.] [25357524. 25678558. 25675806. 25459324. 25619908.] [25533988. 25632858. 25657696. 25616978. 25901294.] [25159630. 25230138. 25450480. 25221246. 25589418.] [24800246. 25145700. 25103040. 25012414. 25465890.]] With GPU: 0.07081239999388345 The PyTorch run was 20 times better this time than the NumPy run. Great stuff. Example 3 — Combining CPU and GPU code. Sometimes, not all of your processing can be done on a GPU. An everyday use case for this is graphing data. Sure, you can manipulate your data using the GPU, but often the next step is to see what your final dataset looks like using a plot. You can’t plot data if it resides in the GPU memory, so you must move it back to CPU memory before calling your plotting functions. Is it worth the overhead of moving large chunks of data from the GPU to the CPU? Let’s find out. In this example, we will solve this polar equation for values of θ between 0 and 2π in (x, y) coordinate terms and then plot out the resulting graph. Don’t get too hung up on the math. It’s just an equation that, when converted to use the x, y coordinate system and solved, looks nice when plotted. For even a few million values of x and y, Numpy can solve this in milliseconds, so to make it a bit more interesting, we’ll use 100 million (x, y) coordinates. Here is the numpy code first. %%time import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from time import time as timer start = timer() # create an array of 100M thetas between 0 and 2pi theta = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 100000000) # our original polar formula r = 1 + 3/4 * np.sin(3*theta) # calculate the equivalent x and y's coordinates # for each theta x = r * np.cos(theta) y = r * np.sin(theta) # see how long the calc part took print("Finished with calcs ", timer()-start) # Now plot out the data start = timer() plt.plot(x,y) # see how long the plotting part took print("Finished with plot ", timer()-start) Here is the output. Would you have guessed beforehand that it would look like this? I sure wouldn’t have! Now, let’s see what the equivalent PyTorch implementation looks like and how much of a speed-up we get. %%time import torch as pt import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from time import time as timer # Make sure PyTorch is using the GPU device = 'cuda' # Start the timer start = timer() # Creating the theta tensor on the GPU theta = pt.linspace(0, 2 * pt.pi, 100000000, device=device) # Calculating r, x, and y using PyTorch operations on the GPU r = 1 + 3/4 * pt.sin(3 * theta) x = r * pt.cos(theta) y = r * pt.sin(theta) # Moving the result back to CPU for plotting x_cpu = x.cpu().numpy() y_cpu = y.cpu().numpy() pt.cuda.synchronize() print("Finished with calcs", timer() - start) # Plotting start = timer() plt.plot(x_cpu, y_cpu) plt.show() print("Finished with plot", timer() - start) And our output again. The calculation part was about 10 times more than the numpy calculation. The data plotting took around the same time using both the PyTorch and NumPy versions, which was expected since the data was still in CPU memory then, and the GPU played no further part in the processing. But, overall, we shaved about 40% off the total run-time, which is excellent. Summary This article has demonstrated how to leverage an NVIDIA GPU using PyTorch—a machine learning library typically used for AI applications—to accelerate non-ML numerical Python code. It compares standard NumPy (CPU-based) implementations with GPU-accelerated PyTorch equivalents to show the performance benefits of running tensor-based operations on a GPU. You don’t need to be doing machine learning to benefit from PyTorch. If you can access an NVIDIA GPU, PyTorch provides a simple and effective way to significantly speed up computationally intensive numerical operations—even in general-purpose Python code. The post Use PyTorch to Easily Access Your GPU appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Julian Rose’s Building Cultures, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains 16 in-depth interviews with leading architects who have designed museums around the world. In 2022, András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, published by Hatje Cantz, offered a complementary glimpse into the sensibilities of a new generation of voices. (The titles share four interviewees: David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller, and Kulapat Yantrasat) Rose and Szántó sat down with AN’s executive editor Jack Murphy to discuss the museum’s inexhaustible spatial variety and its capacity to shape civic and cultural space today. Julian Rose’s Building Cultures, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains 16 interviews with architects. (Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press) AN: Julian, what are the major themes, concerns, and anxieties that you heard when interviewing architects about designing museums? Julian Rose (JR): The conversations in Building Culture grew out of my time at Artforum, so they began nearly 10 years ago in a pretty different world. In that context, one important theme was looking at the museum to understand how architecture relates to arts. Architects, either by choice or because the culture at large compels them to, are always defining what they do in relation to other cultural practices, especially the visual arts. This relationship goes back to the modernist avant-garde, and you could trace it even further. I was drawn towards architects who had deep connections to art, maybe they had even gone to art school or had a record of collaboration; not coincidentally, a lot of them have become known as museum specialists. The answers I heard were refreshing; people were not necessarily learning the lessons I expected. As an example: With Peter Zumthor, I thought we were going to have a focused conversation about the very architectural aesthetics and materials used by certain artists like Richard Serra or Donald Judd. No—he wanted to talk about the bigger picture, the emotional and philosophical connections. He’s obsessed with Walter de Maria’s landscape works like Lightning Field. Even if they don’t seem to have an obvious connection to architecture, he loves the scale and ambition. This kind of surprise happened in several conversations. The other key topic is the typological problem of the museum. As I write in my introduction, the museum refuses spatial optimization—there’s no “best” way to design one. In part, that’s because contemporary art is evolving. Look at the popularity of large-scale installations today, which require big open spaces, versus the more old-fashioned idea of a museum being the place you go to have a one-on-one moment with a masterpiece, which needs intimate galleries. Until recently, “public art” was a kind of forlorn category. It was something you might happen on in a park or a subway station, and it was separate from what most people thought of as real art, which of course was what you saw in the museum. And you went to the museum to have what was essentially a private experience of that art. Now you go to the museum to have an experience that’s both aesthetic and social—to look at art and to enjoy a public space—and I think that’s a huge part of why museums are so popular today. One of the fundamental takeaways from the book is that contemporary art is becoming more and more public, and the evolution of the art museum has been a crucial part of that shift. Artists are creating work that’s meant to be experienced by many people at once, and they need new spaces to do that. At the same time, all the architects wanted to talk about circulation, because there is a tension on some level between how we traditionally think of experiencing art and the crowds that certain museums are starting to receive. András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects also features interviews with leading architects who design museums (Hatje Cantz) AN: András, how does this compare to how you approached your book? András Szántó (AS): One reason why the two books are quite complementary is that their genesis is so different. Julian, your book approaches its subjects with an interest in their relationship to art and their creative work. For me, the direction of travel was different. My talks came out of a previous book, which I did during the pandemic, for which I interviewed museum directors about how their institutions are changing. Rather than reviewing past projects, I was interested in the architects’ overall perspective on the museum as a form. Generally, there is the idea that architecture saved the visual arts from the fate of other forms of high art. And there has been a post-pandemic realization that you can do highly elitist and exclusive architecture in the language of modern design, just as you can using neoclassical architecture. We see a reckoning for how to realign museums to serve a wider segment of the population, not just the creation of these beautiful confections to attract the wealthy, highly educated cultural tourists of the world, but maybe the ability to send the message to someone who lives two miles away, “This is for you.” Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London, U.K., 1991 (Matt Wargo) Sainsbury Wing renovation by Selldorf Architects (Edmund Sumner/©The National Gallery London) AN: How did you go about selecting the architects you wanted to interview? AS: You consign yourself to a lifetime of apologies to people who you didn’t interview. I wanted to be global, so I didn’t stack my book with New York–based architects. I wanted to attempt a gender balance, which was difficult. Again, I think our books work well together, Julian, because you spoke with a lot of people on my dream list. JR: I agree that our books are a good pair; it was fun for me to read your book when mine was in progress. I was first educated as an architect, but I’m also coming at this as a historian, so the idea was trying to figure out how we got here: How did museums become so important? I think that the success of both the museum and contemporary art in general is a bit of a surprise to everyone. In this century, we’ve seen so many traditional “highbrow” forms of culture get pushed to the periphery, but museums are thriving. I thought about Building Culture as an oral history project. I almost did the opposite of András: I have a couple younger voices, but I wanted to speak with established figures because that generation has shaped the present and has ideas about the future, too. Frank Gehry was one of the first people I interviewed; he’s 96 and he still has important museums under construction. It was interesting to ask Renzo Piano what he thinks is next. People like Frank and Renzo have had plenty of media exposure, but I did feel like there was a certain depth missing from journalistic coverage. I wanted to do a relatively small number of longer conversations and cover the widest historical range I could. I was thrilled to have Denise Scott Brown in there, because the Sainsbury Wing [of the National Gallery, London] alone is a paradigm-shifting project. She’s part of a whole generation that had a huge impact through postmodern museum designs, although most of [her peers] are no longer with us. That felt important to capture. Gehry Partners, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 1997 (Courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP/© Frank O. Gehry) AS: We’re discussing the success of contemporary visual art, which for most people feels inscrutable and hard to access. You had an interesting thought experiment: What would the same art have done without the scaffolding of the museum around it? The art museum could have become a dusty, irrelevant thing—and often still is—but through the efforts of a new generation of museum experts, working together with architects, communicators, and other specialists, this form has been lifted up and made super contemporary through, frankly, a lot of the functions that were seen as somewhat secondary. This is where the rubber meets the road for architects: So many of the metrics, even the audience metrics, are related to the non-gallery functions of the museum. People flock to the museum as a place, and this is where architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design have been superb. Museums have become civic hubs, which was maybe a secondary concern initially. That’s why people like Piano and Gehry are interesting, because they came up having to work in both worlds. They created this highly successful institutional typology, which still has those art at its core, but it’s the civic infrastructure that is the most successful. JR: Museums have always had a civic function, but almost as a secondary part of the program. With an institution like the Centre Pompidou in Paris the civic aspect starts to dominate. Meanwhile, all of these other institutions that used to provide shared social space have largely disappeared, which has an isolating and alienating effect on culture. It’s funny: Civic engagement started out as almost an afterthought, but it has become a crucial function of the museum in the 21st century. AS: Another point to make about generations: Do not confuse age with being namby-pamby or conservative. Today’s older architects are people of the 1960s, absolutely. Many, like Elizabeth Diller and David Chipperfield, were more radical then than some of our younger architects are today. They did not necessarily expect to be multimillionaires. They were devoted to the public sphere. These “older” figures who now get giant commissions are, on a DNA level, super radical people. JR: Richard Gluckman is another important example. Like Chipperfield, he has a direct connection to modernism through his education. We can talk all day about modernism as a failed project, but the fact is that back when people like Richard and David were in school, architecture was still seen as a fundamental part of the progressive state. Gluckman went to school at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, and as a student he worked for his professors exclusively on projects like housing and university campuses. But by the time he got around to opening his own office, it was 1977. New York had almost gone bankrupt—no one was building that stuff anymore. Gluckman got involved in designing spaces for art, and this was his way of basically sneaking back into the public sphere. I think their generation was connected to a very different—and very powerful—understanding of what architecture meant for society, and you still see that in their work today. AS: We can think about the art museum as a scaffolding building around a core enterprise of artistic experience. But this means something different for collecting versus non-collecting institutions. Often, you find institutions places that are dedicating more and more of their space to social functions around the art, contemplative aspects of art, and so on. The best architects are absolutely capable of doing both things: One is creating transparency, porosity, ease of access, and landscape integration in a way that flows, and the other is delivering wonderful amenities like shops and cafes. We can question some old dichotomies: How hard do you have to separate gallery space and social space? How porous could those boundaries be? What everybody profoundly believes is that a successful museum experience must have a magic combination of three things: objects, humans, and architecture. And when those three things come together—incredible real objects with a social experience in the company of other people in a magisterial architectural space—that creates an enduring magic that you cannnot sacrifice. Shohei Shigematsu/OMA, rendering of the New Museum of Contemporary Art expansion, New York, New York, anticipated completion 2025 (Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de) JR: It was interesting for me to think about how conservative the museum can be. My conversation with Shohei Shigematsu at OMA put that into relief for me. He was one of the lead architects for the Whitney Museum extension proposal. At the time, OMA’s whole thing was reinventing typologies for the 21st century—think CCTV twisting the skyscraper, or Seattle transforming the public library. They took that aggressive critical method to the museum too—in the 1990s for MoMA and the Tate Modern, and then to the Whitney in 2001, and didn’t win a single competition. The establishment was not interested! AS: I agree that architects are often more radical than their clients. Hopefully nobody misunderstands this, but there is often a profound disconnect between the veneration of rule-breaking, iconoclastic innovation in the gallery versus the conservatism of the museum organization. Organizationally speaking, most museums have not read an airport book on modern management. I see architects trying to push against that. An easy example: Why do these buildings still look like fortresses? Libraries have been redesigned to work for people while still accommodating books. All too often, art museums still feel like citadels with lots of walls. Why? Because walls are great for hanging art on the inside of the building. Is that really the singular goal? AN: How does the scale of the institution shape what it can do? AS: We have certainly seen the emergence of a lot of small institutes and institutions, because of the enormous expansion of private museums. I do think small scale is good. When you ask most people about their favorite museums, they will frequently mention places that are quite intimate, like the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, by Renzo Piano, soon with a lovely modest expansion by Zumthor. Nobody likes a super tanker, which is easy to respect but hard to love. When it comes to big, we need to differentiate between the gigantic temple on the hill versus what I think could be the future: the SESC Pompéia model, an interdisciplinary, social-cultural hub that may be quite big in the aggregate, and where the visual arts play a role inside a larger matrix. Particularly in our big, sprawling cities, such multipurpose, campus-like configurations could be an ideal setting for a museum. JR: I agree that the future might be more like the biennale model: When done well, the whole city is activated. In that sense maybe the size of the institution itself is less important. But I worry that smaller institutions will be hurt as public funding dries up and all museums become increasingly reliant on philanthropy. The regional, kunsthalle-like spots will suffer because those aren’t glamorous places to give money, but those are often the locations the programming makes the biggest impact in the community. AN: What else should we discuss? AS: Globalization is worth mentioning. There is a parallel to be drawn, perhaps, to the evolution of art. At the end of the 20th century, an astonishing amount of liberation became available to artists as the master narrative of modernism splintered to a more pluralistic discourse where all kinds of positions were accepted as art. Today I think something similar has happened in museum architecture: With the proliferation of museums globally, the language of museum architecture has opened up into a new openness to difference and variation, often informed by regional, vernacular forms and needs. Museums can be built using local materials or respond to local typologies, versus the older ideas of the white cube or the enfilade gallery sequence. Anything can be a museum—not just because of reuse, which is important, but because architects can build some crazy stuff inside almost any kind of building: a power station, a prison, a hospital, an army barracks. And people will say, “That’s a museum.” JR: There’s a running joke in museum design that the Louvre is an adaptive reuse project. And it’s true: The world’s first public art museum started out as a palace. This speaks to the museum’s typological flexibility. Its program is very architectural in the sense that it’s about how people and artworks interact in space, but it’s not like an airport or a hospital with a hyper-specialized program that is understandably difficult to fit into an existing structure. I’m optimistic that museums will stay on the cutting edge of adaptive reuse even as it gets more and more important for the whole architectural profession. Another thing that came out of my book is how much museum architects pay attention to the spaces artists are working in. The New York loft is the classic example. Once upon a time, not every gallery looked like a renovated postindustrial space, but artists moved into defunct industrial spaces decades ago and eventually exhibition spaces followed. This exchange goes both ways—its dialectical. As museum buildings have gotten more varied, artists have had a lot of fun learning how to use these new spaces. The Guggenheim in New York is an example. For decades, [Frank Lloyd] Wright’s design has been criticized because it’s hard to show most traditional art forms on the spiral ramps. But the best things I’ve seen in that museum in the past ten years have been installations in the atrium. Artists can do something wild with that space. After seeing that, do you really want to look at a little painting on a curvy wall? Julian Rose is a designer, critic, and historian. He is currently completing a PhD at Princeton on the origin and evolution of museums of contemporary art. András Szántó advises museums, foundations, educational institutions, and corporations on cultural strategy and program development, worldwide. This post contains affiliate links. AN may have a commission if you make a purchase through these links.

Looks like Ubisoft is giving Rayman an "AAA" revival after last year's "exploration phase" Never mind the Globox. Image credit: Ubisoft News by Matt Wales News Reporter Published on May 21, 2025 Remember Ubisoft's announcement last October it was currently in the "exploration phase" of a new Rayman project? Well, it seems full development has now been given the go ahead, with a recent job listing indicating the publisher is currently staffing up on a "AAA" Rayman game. To rewind a bit, all this came about following reports last year that Ubisoft had assembled a small group of developers - including around a dozen members of its now-disbanded Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team - to work on a remake of Rayman. Somewhat unusually, Ubisoft didn't immediately reach for the 'does not comment on rumours or speculation' button, instead confirming that, yes actually, it was sort of true. "We are pleased to confirm Ubisoft Montpellier and Ubisoft Milan have recently started an exploration phase on the Rayman brand," it said at the time. "The project is still in its early stages, and we will share more details later." There was a sense, then, that nothing might come of the project if that "exploration phase" didn't bring encouraging results. But it now appears those initial experiments showed sufficient promise, because Ubisoft Milan is currently seeking a 3D gameplay animator to work on a "prestigious AAA title for the Rayman brand." There's also a second, slightly less specific job listing searching for a senior game designer to "work on the Rayman brand", but it seems likely both positions are related to the same project. More of this sort of thing please Ubisoft.Watch on YouTube So that's some encouraging news for Rayman fans, particularly given Ubisoft Montpellier and Milan's historically stellar output. Between them, the studios have released the acclaimed likes of Mario + Rabbids, the beautiful Valiant Hearts series, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, plus Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends - two absolutely gold-standard 2D platformers. The only troubling element of Rayman's revival is last year's controversial admission by Ubisoft that original Rayman creator Michel Ancel had been drafted in as a consultant. Ancel departed the publisher in 2020, allegedly following an investigation into employee complaints accusing him of toxic leadership, and his involvement with the new Rayman project was reported to have "raised some concerns among team members". It is, however, unclear if Ancel is still serving as a consultant now Ubisoft's initial "exploration phase" appears to be complete. Signs that Rayman may be making a "AAA" return come at a challenging time for Ubisoft. The publisher has faced a tumultuous few years amid tumbling share prices and a number of high-profile flops, resulting in a string of layoffs and studio closures. As part of its attempts to right the ship, Ubisoft announced it was launching a new subsidiary dedicated to its big three IPs - Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry - earlier this year. With those game under a new banner, Ubisoft itself will concentrate on a number of key areas, including "nurturing the development of iconic franchises" - which is presumably where Rayman comes in.

These 1920s Color Palettes are ‘Greater than Gatsby’ Preston Lee •  In this article:See more ▼Post may contain affiliate links which give us commissions at no cost to you.There’s something undeniably captivating about the color schemes of the Roaring Twenties. As a designer with a passion for historical aesthetics, I’ve always been drawn to the sophisticated elegance and bold statements that defined this transformative decade. The 1920s represented liberation from Victorian constraints, embraced modernism, and celebrated luxury in ways that continue to influence contemporary design a century later. If you’re looking to infuse your next project with the timeless glamour and innovative spirit of the Jazz Age, you’re in luck. I’ve compiled eight stunning 1920s-inspired color palettes that perfectly capture this iconic era while remaining remarkably relevant for today’s design landscape. 👋 Psst... Did you know you can get unlimited downloads of 59,000+ fonts and millions of other creative assets for just $16.95/mo? Learn more »The 8 Most Elegant 1920s Color Palettes 1. Gatsby Glamour #CBA135 #0C0C0C #F5F5F5 #8B0000 A luxurious blend of antique gold, deep black, ivory, and crimson red, capturing the opulence of The Great Gatsby era. I’m particularly fond of this palette for luxury branding or special event designs. These colors instantly communicate sophistication and extravagance – perfect when you want to make a statement that feels both historic and contemporary. The contrast between the warm gold and cool neutrals creates a balanced tension that draws the eye. 2. Jazz Age Jewel #7F00FF #FFD700 #2E8B57 #000000 Vibrant amethyst purple, gleaming gold, rich emerald green, and classic black, reflecting the boldness of jazz clubs and speakeasies.Get 300+ Fonts for FREEEnter your email to download our 100% free "Font Lover's Bundle". For commercial & personal use. No royalties. No fees. No attribution. 100% free to use anywhere. When I need to create something with dramatic flair, this palette never disappoints. These jewel tones embody the adventurous spirit of the era, when conventional rules were being broken and new forms of expression were emerging. I find it works wonderfully for nightlife-themed projects or any design that aims to capture a sense of excitement and rhythm. 3. Deco Dreams #4682B4 #D2B48C #A9A9A9 #FFFFFF Steel blue, tan, dark gray, and white combine to create a sleek, modern palette emblematic of Art Deco style. The architectural influence is unmistakable in this palette. These colors remind me of the iconic skyscrapers that transformed urban skylines during the 1920s. The cool rationality of steel blue paired with warm tan creates a beautiful balance that works exceptionally well for professional environments and modern interiors with historical references. 4. Flapper Chic #f04b41 #F5DEB3 #000000 #FFFFFF Playful hot pink, soft wheat, bold black, and crisp white reflect the fashion-forward spirit of flapper style. This lively combination captures the youthful energy and rebellion that characterized the flapper movement. Whenever I use this palette, I’m reminded of the revolutionary changes in women’s fashion during this era – shorter hemlines, bobbed hair, and a newfound sense of freedom. It’s perfect for projects that need a touch of feminine boldness with historical depth. 5. Speakeasy Shadows #2F4F4F #8B0000 #A0522D #000000 Dark slate gray, deep red, sienna brown, and black evoke the mysterious allure of hidden speakeasies. There’s something irresistibly secretive about these deep, rich tones. I love using this palette when designing for brands that want to convey exclusivity or a sense of insider knowledge. The colors feel substantive and slightly mysterious, perfect for creating depth in any design project that aims to tell a compelling story. 6. Art Deco Sunrise #FFA500 #FF4500 #FFD700 #000000 Bright orange, fiery red-orange, golden yellow, and white capture the vibrant energy of Art Deco motifs. When optimism is the primary message, this radiant palette delivers. Inspired by the sunburst patterns so prevalent in Art Deco design, these warm, vibrant hues communicate progress and forward momentum. I’ve used this combination for everything from travel brands to motivational campaigns with great success. 7. Peacock Parlor #1E90FF #32CD32 #8A2BE2 #000000 Electric blue, lime green, vivid violet, and black mirror the extravagant colors found in 1920s parlor rooms. This bold, somewhat unexpected combination speaks to the experimental side of 1920s design. During this decade, international influences like Japanese prints and African art were making their way into Western interiors, bringing with them more adventurous color stories. I find this palette particularly effective for digital projects that need to stand out in crowded visual environments. 8. Champagne & Charcoal #F7E7CE #36454F #D3D3D3 #FFFFFF Soft champagne, charcoal gray, light gray, and white create a sophisticated, understated palette. Sometimes subtlety speaks volumes. This refined palette channels the quiet luxury that underpinned much of 1920s design. Not everything was bold and dramatic – there was also a movement toward elegant restraint. This combination works beautifully for upscale branding, wedding design, or any project where sophistication is the primary goal. Why 1920s Color Palettes Remain Relevant Today The enduring appeal of 1920s color schemes isn’t simply about nostalgia. This was a period of profound transformation in design thinking, as traditional Victorian excess gave way to modernist principles that continue to shape our visual language today. The 1920s represented a unique moment when the handcrafted met the machine-made, when traditional luxury was being redefined through the lens of new technologies and materials. The color palettes from this era reflect this fascinating tension – simultaneously honoring tradition while pushing boldly forward. As a designer working in 2025, I find that incorporating these historical palettes provides a richness and contextual depth that purely contemporary color schemes sometimes lack. There’s a storytelling aspect to these colors that resonates deeply with audiences looking for authenticity and meaning in design. How to Incorporate 1920s Colors in Contemporary Design After years of experimenting with these historical palettes, I’ve developed some strategies for using them effectively in modern contexts: Create Unexpected Pairings Try combining 1920s color schemes with ultra-contemporary design elements. The juxtaposition can create a fascinating dialogue between past and present. I recently paired the Gatsby Glamour palette with minimal sans-serif typography and negative space for a luxury hotel project – the result felt both timeless and thoroughly modern. Use Strategic Proportions You don’t need to use all colors equally. Consider using the bolder hues as accents while letting neutrals dominate the overall design. For example, with the Jazz Age Jewel palette, I often use the black as a grounding base, with strategic pops of amethyst, gold, and emerald creating focal points. Consider Contemporary Contexts Think about how these historical colors might translate to digital environments. The high-contrast combinations popular in the 1920s actually work remarkably well for accessibility in UI design, providing sufficient distinction between elements while maintaining aesthetic cohesion. Explore Material Translations The 1920s was characterized by innovative materials like Bakelite, chrome, and lacquered surfaces. Consider how your chosen palette might express itself through different materials and textures. The Deco Dreams palette, for instance, takes on new life when imagined in contemporary materials like frosted glass, brushed metal, and polished concrete. The Historical Context Behind These Palettes Understanding why certain colors dominated the 1920s design landscape helps us use them more intentionally today: Post-War Optimism After the darkness of World War I, there was a collective desire for brightness and celebration. This explains the prevalence of gold tones and vibrant accents in palettes like Art Deco Sunrise and Jazz Age Jewel. Technological Advances New synthetic dyes and manufacturing processes made previously rare colors more accessible. Electric blues and vibrant purples that were once the exclusive domain of royalty became available to the middle class, influencing palettes like Peacock Parlor. Global Influences The 1920s saw increased international travel and cultural exchange, bringing new color sensibilities from Egypt (following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb), East Asia, and African art. These influences expanded the typical Western color vocabulary considerably. Changing Social Norms As women gained the right to vote and entered the workforce in greater numbers, there was a shift toward bolder self-expression in fashion and design. The vibrant accents in palettes like Flapper Chic reflect this new sense of freedom and assertiveness. Applying 1920s Palettes Across Design Disciplines These versatile color combinations can enhance projects across multiple design fields: Digital Design The high contrast and distinctive color relationships in 1920s palettes translate surprisingly well to screen-based media. I’ve used the Speakeasy Shadows palette for an immersive storytelling website with excellent results – the deep, rich tones created an engaging experience that kept users exploring. Environmental Design The architectural roots of Art Deco make these palettes natural choices for interior and environmental design. The Champagne & Charcoal palette has been my go-to for creating sophisticated retail environments that feel both contemporary and connected to design history. Fashion & Textile Design The cyclical nature of fashion means that 1920s color stories regularly find their way back into contemporary wardrobes. The Flapper Chic palette continues to inform collections that balance playfulness with sophistication, especially for eveningwear and special occasions. Product Design The bold geometry and distinctive color schemes of the 1920s can transform ordinary objects into conversation pieces. I recently collaborated on a kitchenware collection using the Gatsby Glamour palette – the combination of black, gold, ivory, and crimson elevated simple forms into luxury items. Conclusion: Embracing Timeless Elegance As we navigate the complex visual landscape of 2025, there’s something reassuring about connecting with the refined aesthetics of the past. The 1920s represented a pivotal moment in design history when tradition and innovation converged to create something truly distinctive. By incorporating these eight elegant color palettes into your work, you’re not simply borrowing from history – you’re participating in an ongoing conversation about how we express values like luxury, progress, and sophistication through color. Whether you’re designing a website, creating a brand identity, or reimagining an interior space, these timeless combinations offer a solid foundation that can be adapted to countless contemporary contexts. The enduring appeal of 1920s aesthetics proves that truly exceptional design transcends its era to become something timeless. So go ahead – let the elegance and boldness of the Jazz Age inspire your next creative endeavor. Your work will be all the richer for it. Preston Lee Preston Lee is a graphic and web designer who grew up drawing, painting, and building with Lego. Okay, let's face it: he still does all of those things. But now, he gets paid to design websites, design graphics, write, and do all kinds of creative things. His advice has been featured by Entrepreneur, Inc, Forbes, Adobe, and many more. How Fonts Influence Tone and Clarity in Animated VideosAudiences interact differently with messages based on which fonts designers choose to use within a text presentation. Fonts shape how...30 Stamp Fonts for a Crafty, Handmade FeelThere’s something incredibly satisfying about the texture and character of a stamped impression. As a graphic designer who’s spent countless...30 Monoline Fonts That Create Clean, Consistent Designs in 2025I’ve noticed monoline fonts taking center stage across branding, web design, and print materials in . There’s something undeniably elegant...

If you are in any online Star Wars circles right now, odds are, completely unprompted, you’ve probably seen people commenting about getting a third Battlefront game. It’s been the best part of a decade since Battlefront II released, and there’s no signs of life in the franchise it seems, as far as EA is concerned. But that’s not going to stop fans from trying to get the company’s attention any way they can. The sudden surge in interest for Battlefront 3 has come from a mix of things. Right now, it’s arguably a pretty good time to be a Star Wars fan, between the the climax of Andor, the post-May-4th-glow, and Revenge of the Sith‘s 20th anniversary (which itself heralds the impending 20th anniversary of the original Battlefront II later this year). Perhaps particularly pointed to Battlefront fans too is the fact that the galaxy far, far away’s already being lovingly platformed (and occasionally a little more controversially) by one of the biggest shooters around, Fortnite, for its ongoing Star Wars special season. It’s led some to go back to Battlefront II, EA and DICE’s 2017 shooter that launched to mixed acclaim but managed to carve its way to a respectable Star Wars shooting experience by the time post-launch support trailed off after the launch of Rise of Skywalker a couple years later. In the past few weeks, Steam DB reports that the player counts for the game on PC have surged from an average of just 1-2,000 people to highs of nearly 8,000 this past weekend, a height not seen since 2021. The mandatory change.org petitions calling for a sequel have risen up, and, of course, Star Wars online fandoms, from the Battlefront Reddit to TikTok and X comments, have been filled with memes, yearning, and a shared demand on everyone’s lips: Battlefront III when? The answer is, unfortunately, probably not for a very long while. Even with the current upsurge in interest in Battlefront II, EA’s management of the Star Wars video game brand has proven a bit murky in recent years, even with brilliant titles like Respawn’s Jedi games or the intriguing, upcoming tactics title Zero Company, beset by behind-the-scenes turmoil at the publisher and the cancellation of several potential Star Wars titles. Battlefront II itself, despite selling millions of copies, was never quite seen as the oversized success EA wanted, especially when at launch it was beset with controversy. It took years of continual support and updates to flesh out the game’s celebration of the sequel, original, and prequel trilogy eras before public opinion on the game turned around, but by then, it was too late for hopes of a third game to really get off the ground. Grimly, this is somewhat fitting for the franchise, both in terms of Star Wars—which loves itself a cycle of thematically repeated storytelling—and Battlefront itself, because the series has found itself in this exact instance already. EA and Dice rebooted Battlefront back in 2015, a decade after Battlefront II released and several years after that version of the series’ own third entry had been scrapped. The original hypothetical Battlefront III has infamously leaked over and over for years now, from story campaign cutscenes to gameplay from recovered builds of the title, as fans hoped and prayed that somehow, some day, Battlefront III would happen. While we have no evidence at all that a Battlefront sequel to the 2017 game is currently in the works, as was the case with the cancelled sequel to the 2005 game, in this time of Star Wars anniversary reflectiveness, there’s a bit of dark humor in finding Battlefront fans in the exact same place today as they were in the late aughts. Hoping in spite of unlikely outcomes, however, is a deeply Star Wars sentiment. If rebellions can be built on it, why not video games? Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine.Now, it’s more like 10. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play. Games consoles often feel like they mark off particular eras in my life: the Nintendo 64 was the defining console of my childhood, the PlayStation 2 of my adolescence, and the Xbox 360 of the first years of my career, the first console launch I ever covered as a (ridiculously young) journalist. The Nintendo Switch came along just a few months after my first child was born, and for me it has become the games machine of that era of harried early parenthood.When I reflect on my experiences with the Switch, I remember snatching moments in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule while the baby napped beside me; hiding on the veranda of a French villa to play the odd Splatoon match on our first family holiday; and trying to make a mint on my Animal Crossing turnip trades while walking my second baby around the house in his sling, trying to get him to sleep (he never did). When they got old enough, the first games I played with my children were on the Switch. We all played Pokémon Sword and Shield together, and most recently my youngest made his way through the surprisingly entertaining Princess Peach Showtime with only minimal assistance from me.Hello to the moo … The Nintendo Switch created a unique gaming space all of its own. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPAOver the last eight years, my living room TV became dominated by things like Bluey and Moana and most recently (god help me), Alvin and the Chipmunks, and I no longer have the hours of uninterrupted gaming time in the evenings. The Switch gave me some of that that time back, though, letting me dip into games whenever I had a moment – which gave me vital stress relief, a route back to myself during some of the most challenging years of my life. Eight years is a long time, enough for anyone’s life to change beyond recognition. In that time I’ve lost people, moved cities, gained new friends, too. And, of course, we all went through the pandemic. Animal Crossing: New Horizons became perhaps the defining game of that time, and I am not the only person for whom the Switch was a blessed oasis, a way to connect when we were starved of in-person interaction.Things have changed for me since 2017, as they probably have for you. Consoles feel like companions, especially perhaps the portable ones like the Switch and the Game Boy, which we literally carry with us wherever we go. My kids are older now, enjoying all the Switch games that I enjoyed when they were very small – and it does seem as if the Switch 2 will neatly mark another new stage, for me and for them.I recently gathered together all the Switch consoles, games, controllers and accessories in my house and my office for an audit, from the battered day-one unit that serves as the family console to the untouched OLED Zelda special edition my partner got me and the variably functioning spare JoyCons accumulated over time. It’s not quite time for them to join the other old consoles under my bed, each in a clear plastic box with all of its cables, ready to be dusted off when the time comes; the Switch 2 will take its place in my rucksack and in my office, but I won’t be upgrading the family console for some time yet. I don’t really wantA little sentimentality is forgivable at the end of an era. In a couple of weeks all the talk will be about the new console, how it’s selling, whether it’s worth the money, what the best Mario Kart World strategies are, and how it compares to its record-breaking predecessor. For now, I’m not thinking much about what the Nintendo Switch meant for the gaming industry; instead I’m thinking about what it meant to me.What to playBe who you wanna be … there are many lives to choose from in the latest RPG, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Illustration: Level5/Have you ever heard of Fantasy Life? It was a bit of a cult hit on the Nintendo 3DS in 2014, a cosy-feeling role-playing game that let you switch between 12 different professions, so you would be blacksmithing one minute, fighting monsters another and cooking things up the next. The sequel – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time – is out today after years of delays.You can now be an artist or a farmer as well as a magician, carpenter, fisherman, alchemist or whatever else you fancy, and also it adds time travel into the mix. It’s an intriguing amalgamation of the Animal Crossing/Harvest Moon style of Japanese life simulator, and the Dragon Quest/Ni no Kuni flavour of unthreatening role-playing game, and I’m looking forward to exploring it. An especial shout-out to the members of one of my group chats who have been eagerly awaiting this for more than a decade.Available on: Switch/2, PS4/5, Xbox, PC Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readBroom broom … the home delivery system in Crescent County. Illustration: Electric Saint A couple of interesting games hitting Kickstarter this week: Crescent County, a colourful witch-delivery game with broom-racing and plenty of small-town drama; and a ghost story set in Paisley just outside Glasgow, named after its Chinese takeaway Crystal Garden. If you have a few minutes, have a go at this satirical simulation text game You Are Generative AI, which casts you as an increasingly self-aware AI large language model answering random questions that people cannot be bothered to research or think through themselves. I got three different endings and one of them made me genuinely quite sad. Developers at Bungie, makers of Destiny and the forthcoming shooter Marathon, have been dealing with an alleged plagiarism scandal after unattributed designs from an artist called Antireal were found in promotional screenshots and art from Marathon. Bungie is blaming the mistake on a former employee. VG247 has a rundown. After half a decade, PlayStation 5 sales are neck and neck with PlayStation 4’s results at this point in its life cycle, at 78m – despite the fact that its price has actually increased, due to the wild times in which we live. Video Game Chronicle gets into the numbers. What to clickQuestion BlockWhat’s in a name? … playing a video game using Nintendo’s Wii U controller. Photograph: Jae C Hong/API’ve had several good suggestions for the name of reader Travis’s book-club style video game club: Select/Start (thanks Alex), Long Play (from Eva), and Doki Doki Videogame Club (niche reference there, Chris). Especial props to Kenny, however, who went hog wild and came up with several, including these three beauts: Go Forth and Multiplay, Concurrent Players and Let’s Console Each Other.Lucas also had a great suggestion for last week’s questioner: “Your bookclubber should look at itch.io for crazy little free games to play and discuss with their friends! The indie folks sharing their games there would probably love the attention/feedback of a games book club.” (You Are Generative AI, which I mentioned earlier, is on Itch, along with just hundreds of other shortform games worthy of discussion.)And we’ve just about got room for another (timely) question, this time from reader Ali:“I’ve always admired Nintendo for coming up with different names for each console, as opposed to Sony going for the sequential naming convention and Microsoft jumping from 360 to One to Series (?). My opinion has somewhat changed now that the successor to the Nintendo Switch is called Switch 2. Do you have any thoughts on console names?”It’s true that Nintendo usually goes for completely new names for each console, except arguably the series of Game Boys, the NES and Super NES, Wii and Wii U, and now Switch and Switch 2. And yes, this is the first time they’ve gone for a number. I’d say this is down to how badly the company did with the Wii U, whose confusing name surely contributed to how badly it flopped. But I think it reflects the more conservative and cautious mood of the games industry as a whole in 2025, as it comes to the end of decades’ worth of unsustainably rapid growth. Or maybe it’s because Nintendo’s president Shuntaro Furukawa used to be an accountant.If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com

Politics, you will notice, has gotten extremely weird.To some degree, of course, this is Donald Trump’s fault. No other president has seen the first part of their term defined by a fight over whether the federal government can send people living in the US to a prison in El Salvador with no due process. No other modern president has decided to ignore decades of settled economic and political wisdom and institute the biggest tariffs since the Hoover administration. No other president has waged war against the entire foundation of American science. Some weirdness is also the fault of Covid. The pandemic introduced a slew of policies that proved divisive, from mask mandates to vaccine mandates to funding for “gain of function” research to school closures. None of these were polarizing topics in 2019 because they either had never happened before or were too obscure for most people to care. And though we’re a few years past the worst days of the pandemic, the appointment of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary shows just how central many of these topics remain.It’s this context that has made Congress’s debate over a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill so fascinating. The bill’s contents are still evolving, but the broad outlines are simple: trillions in tax cuts, tilted to the wealthy; hundreds of billions in spending cuts, particularly to programs for the poor like Medicaid and food stamps; over a hundred billion dollars in increased spending for defense.I know of no better summary of its effects than the above chart from the Urban Institute, which shows that it would make poor Americans earning less than $10,000 dramatically worse off (reducing their income by 14.9 percent) while affluent households earning over $200,000 would thrive.So, all in all, a terrible bill. But whatever else that proposal is, it’s startlingly normal for Republican politics. It represents ideas that have defined the Republican party and its economic and budgetary priorities since 1980, and which the party has strongly held to even in the face of Trump’s total takeover. The Republican party stands for lower taxes, especially on the rich; lower spending on programs for the poor; and big spending on defense. That’s what Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and other figures who defined the party have all stood for, for nearly half a century now.The extreme weirdness of national politics has led to a temptation to see a new Republican party just over the horizon, defined by rejecting its tax-cutting and program-slashing tradition. This is stoked by strategic leaks that Trump might be open to a higher tax rate on the richest Americans; by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) condemning Medicaid cuts; by party figures like Vice President JD Vance suggesting a break from the party’s hawkish foreign policy.But the composition of the reconciliation bill suggests that when it comes to bread-and-butter economic issues, this is mostly a mirage. The essential Republican message may become blurred around the edges, the way that George W. Bush messed with it by expanding Medicare or his father did by accepting a small tax hike. But the deviations are swamped by the continuity. It’s not, in the ludicrous phrasing of Steve Bannon, a “workers’ party.”Congressional Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, have brought back normal politics, and for them that means one thing: redistributing income upward.The rise and persistence of Normal RepublicanismThis essential pattern of Republicans standing for across-the-board tax cuts and cuts to safety net programs has not always been the norm. Nothing in politics is truly permanent. As late as Richard Nixon, Republican presidents would propose ideas like a guaranteed minimum income and universal health coverage while actually raising taxes on the rich.The ground shifted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a small group of policy entrepreneurs in Washington centered around Congress member Jack Kemp (R-NY) began promoting across-the-board cuts to individual income tax rates as a solution to stagflation (the combination of slow growth and high inflation then characterizing the economy). In her history of this moment, Starving the Beast, sociologist Monica Prasad notes that major business lobbies at the time opposed this move. Their priority was corporate rate cuts and a balanced budget, and they saw individual cuts as a threat to both.Kemp and his allies, including soon-to-be-President Reagan, overcame corporate skepticism for one simple reason: The cuts were popular, and the public mood was becoming strongly anti-tax. At this point in time, the thresholds for tax rates were not indexed for inflation, which meant that more and more middle-class people were being pushed into higher and higher tax brackets every year without actually becoming richer as inflation worsened. These pressures had forced even Democrat Jimmy Carter to sign tax cuts in 1978, and they only built as inflation rose still further.Timeline of major Republican tax billsTax Reform Act of 1969 — signed by Richard Nixon, cracked down on foundations, extended a temporary across-the-board income tax hike to fund the war in Vietnam, and created the Alternative Minimum Tax, meant to target high-earners claiming many deductions and credits. On net, substantially raised taxes on the rich while cutting them for the poor.Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 — signed by Ronald Reagan, across-the-board cut in tax rates for individuals, with top rate falling from 70 percent to 50 percent. Tax thresholds now indexed for inflation. Businesses allowed to deduct expenses at an accelerated pace.Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 — also signed by Reagan, undid most of the 1981 cuts to corporate taxes, but crucially kept the cuts on individuals in place.Tax Reform Act of 1986 — bipartisan legislation signed by Reagan that eliminated many deductions and credits and simplified the individual income tax to only two brackets (15 percent and 28 percent).Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 — signed by George H.W. Bush, added a 31 percent bracket on the rich to raise revenue on top of the 1986 law. Bill Clinton would add 36 percent and 39.6 percent rates in 1993.Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 — signed by Bill Clinton but championed by Republicans in Congress, created a $500 child tax credit and cut the capital gains rate from 28 percent to 20 percent.Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 — signed by George W. Bush, slashed individual rates across the board, with the top rate falling from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and gradually eliminated the estate tax. Initially set to expire in 2010. Extended temporarily by Barack Obama in 2010 as part of an economic stimulus deal, and then in 2012 permanently, but only for couples earning under $450,000.Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 — signed by George W. Bush, cut taxes on dividend and interest income, and limited the Alternative Minimum Tax’s effects. Set to expire in 2010, like the 2001 cuts; largely expired under the 2012 Obama deal.Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 — signed by Donald Trump, cut individual rates with the top rate falling from 39.6 percent to 37 percent; doubled the standard deduction and consolidated personal and dependent exemptions into a larger child tax credit; dramatically cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. While some cuts, like the corporate rate cut, were permanent, most of the bill is set to expire at the end of 2025.At the same time, Reagan and his team in the early 1980s were convinced that the US needed a major military buildout to counteract what they claimed had been a Soviet buildout in the 1970s. That led to a big increase in defense spending, from 6.6 percent of GDP in 1981 to 7.6 percent in 1985; at today’s size of the US economy, an equivalent increase would be about $290 billion more per year.To pay for at least some of this, Reagan’s first reconciliation bill included sweeping cuts to safety net programs, notably including Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This, too, fit well with Reagan’s image. He had campaigned hard against establishing Medicare in the 1960s, and denunciations of “welfare queens” had been a prominent theme in his ultimately failed 1976 campaign for the presidency. This wasn’t the most popular part of the Reagan brand (he denounced “welfare queens” while trying to win the Republican primary, not the general), but it reflected both his genuine beliefs and the twin pressures of the tax cuts and defense buildout on the budget.This combination of policies was a profound break from the Nixon/Gerald Ford years, when tax cuts were not seriously considered, the priority with the Soviets was detente and arms control, and safety net programs were largely protected. And, sure enough, some Republicans continued to push back against the new regime. Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) successfully fought to limit food stamps cuts; Congressional Republicans worked with Democrats to expand Medicaid throughout the 1980s over Reagan’s objections; most infamously, George H.W. Bush signed a bill adding a new 31 percent tax bracket for rich Americans in 1990, violating his pledge not to raise taxes.But for the most part, the pattern established by Reagan has persisted ever since, and deviations — like Bush’s tax hike, which contributed to his loss in 1992 — are remembered more as cautionary tales than examples to emulate.Look at the Contract With America, the Republicans’ platform during their successful 1994 bid to retake the House for the first time in over 40 years. It included tax cuts (like introducing a child tax credit and lower capital gains rates) and cuts to welfare and other safety net programs. While Bill Clinton was able to tamp down these demands somewhat, all became law in one form or another.A few years later, George W. Bush began his first term with sweeping across-the-board tax cuts, and his second with a failed effort to slash Social Security spending in favor of individual accounts. In the Obama years, Congressional Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, coalesced around plans for yet more across-the-board tax cuts and sweeping cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other safety net programs. Under Trump, Ryan was able to pass the former, though his attempts at the latter through Obamacare repeal failed.Occasionally, a Republican politician will gesture at trying to break with this orthodoxy, and is invariably greeted with intrigued attention from the press. With George W. Bush in 2000, it was called “compassionate conservatism.” With Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2005, it was “Sam’s Club Republicanism.” With then-Sen. Marco Rubio and his allies in the press circa 2014, it was “reform conservatism.” These days the preferred term for Sen. Josh Hawley and Vice President JD Vance seems to be “national conservative,” which, like the Sam’s Club and Reformocons before, purports to reject the tax-cutting orthodoxy of past Republicans in favor of a more communitarian vision — very little of which, of course, appears to have made its way into the budget bill. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.A very Normal Republican budgetBut through each of these much-hyped fads, Normal Republicanism on the budget has survived more or less unchanged. The legacy of compassionate conservatism is a prescription drug benefit in Medicare administered by private insurers; the legacy of reform conservatism is mostly increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 in 2017. These are slight ripples in a pattern that has been remarkably persistent.The 2025 reconciliation package is a perfect illustration of these dynamics. Per a helpful tally by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the centerpiece of the legislation is the extension and expansion of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The cuts here will cost over $4.1 trillion over a decade. Remarkably, some of the cuts aren’t even made permanent, but temporarily extended again, to artificially make the cost look lower than it is; if they’re extended still further, the total cost of the TCJA extensions would be more like $4.8 trillion.Deficits would surge dramatically due to the reconciliation bill. Committee for a Responsible Federal BudgetThese are tax cuts overwhelmingly tilted at the top. $1.4 trillion goes to repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which exists to prevent high-earners from taking excessive deductions; $2.2 trillion goes to cutting rates, including the top rate, which disproportionately helps the rich. The pass-through deduction, which arbitrarily lets some business owners exclude 20 percent of their profit from taxation, is extended and also expanded to 23 percent for no apparent reason, for a mere $820 billion. The Tax Policy Center has estimated that extending the TCJA increases incomes for the top 1 percent by an average of 3.7 percent, which swamps the 0.6 percent increase that the poorest fifth of Americans would get.On top of this, the House Ways and Means committee has thrown a potpourri of assorted other tax cuts: through 2028, for instance, tips, overtime income, and car loan interests would be tax-free, and senior citizens would get bigger standard deductions. The spending spree isn’t limited to taxes, either. There’s $144 billion from the Armed Services Committee, focused on shipbuilding ($32 billion) and “air superiority and missile defense” ($30 billion), and $67 billion for border security, including about $50 billion for Trump’s long-promised wall.The gross cost of all these giveaways hits around $5 trillion, before even considering the possibility that giveaways like the tips and overtime tax cuts are made permanent. But the net cost of the package, and impact on the defiict is “only” about $3.3 trillion, per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. What makes up the difference? $698 billion comes from cuts to Medicaid; including other cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies, the bill will deprive about 10 million people of health insurance. $559 billion comes from undoing most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s credits for clean energy and electric vehicles. $350 billion comes from cuts to education, heavily focused on student loan programs and subsidies meant to make them more affordable for borrowers. $267 billion comes from food stamps, slashing the program by about 30 percent overall.There’s a lot to say about this set of priorities. The Medicaid and food stamp cuts target the most vulnerable Americans and, combined with the tax cuts for the wealthy, amount to extreme upward redistribution. The Inflation Reduction Act cuts will likely substantially increase energy prices for most Americans, while substantially increasing emissions. I know of no serious economist who thinks that many of the most expensive provisions in the bill, like deductibility of overtime income or the pass-through business deduction, are effective ways to boost economic growth.But, at a moment where so many assumptions about politics have been overturned, the plan is not surprising. This is not a radically different Republican party newly attuned to the interests of the working class. It’s not a party whose tax-cutting passions have been tempered now that their president is imposing new taxes left and right on foreign imports in the form of tariffs (and which will be borne disproportionately by lower-income Americans). It’s not a party reflecting the fact that Medicaid recipients narrowly voted for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.It’s just the normal Reagan-Gingrich-Bush-Ryan Republican party, same as it’s ever been.Why, then, are people so eager to hear that the Republican party has changed? Part of it might be the simple fact that voters have had trouble accepting that a political party could actually be like this. When Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC in the 2012 election, told a focus group that Mitt Romney wanted to slash Medicare while cutting taxes on the rich, “the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing,” per reporter Robert Draper. It does sound vaguely ridiculous: It defies common sense that cutting taxes on the wealthy and funding it with spending cuts on programs for poor and working people would ever be a compelling political message, perhaps outside the extreme inflationary environment of the 1970s that birthed Reagan’s presidency.But ridiculous or not, that’s the world we have. The Republican Party’s budgetary views simply have not changed. They want to blow up the deficit with massive tax cuts tilted toward the rich and pay for a fraction of the cost by slashing programs for the poor. It’s really that simple. It may not be exciting or brand new. But it’s normal Republican policymaking, and it’s back with a vengeance.See More:

Billionaire Elon Musk made a bafflingly childish appearance this week at Bloomberg's Qatar Economic Forum.While being asked some hard — but entirely fair — questions by UK broadcaster Mishal Husain, covering topics such as his highly questionable work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the massive hits Tesla has taken as a result, and the glaring conflict of interests facing his space venture SpaceX, Musk appeared to be completely unprepared.At multiple points during the interview, Musk lashed out at Husain, accusing her of being an "NPC," which is gamer lingo for a "non-playable character," and refusing to give her more than one-word answers.After Husain pointed out DOGE has fallen extremely short of Musk's goal of slashing $2 trillion from the government's budget, the mercurial CEO had a bizarre retort."I mean, I feel you’re somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist," he said. "So it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who’s trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer."That was a particularly eyebrow-raising line given that Musk has built a multibillion-dollar business around mindlessly talking to computers via xAI, his company that offers a chatbot called Grok.And in reality, he's getting the dynamic backwards. It's the AI chatbots, not the human journalists, that tend to grovel at the feet of users and cave at virtually any sign of confrontation.As such, the interview perfectly summarizes Musk's distorted worldview and disconnection from reality. Critics have long pointed out that the billionaire has surrounded himself with sycophants who rarely say no to him, meaning that he's increasingly started to crumble under pressure when faced with difficult questions.Now that his popularity has fallen off a cliff following a bewildering embrace of far-right viewpoints over the last few years, Musk finds himself on the back foot. And considering his petulant appearance this week, he's clearly still struggling to take accountability for his incredibly damaging actions.Instead, Musk tried to paint himself as the victim."Massive violence was threatened against me," he told her, referring to the international anti-Tesla movement his actions have given rise to. "Who are these people? Why would they do that? How wrong can they be? They’re on the wrong side of history."Unsurprisingly, the billionaire used the interview to further a widely discredited conspiracy theory about a "white genocide" occurring in South Africa. That's a topic his chatbot Grok squeezed into unrelated answers last week following a bizarre "unauthorized modification" being made to its underlying tech."Why do you like racist laws?" Musk probed Husain, squarely pointing at her through the camera after interrupting her, leading to nervous laughter at the event.Musk's relationship with journalists has been rocky, to say the least. Earlier this year, he called Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long a "disgusting and cruel person" after she found that he had armed an underqualified 25-year-old to infiltrate the US Treasury's payments system.Later that month, he called for CBS News journalists to get a "long prison sentence" for being the "biggest liars in the world."Musk has made it clear that he's in no mood for constructive conversation. The self-avowed free speech absolutist has a long track record of suspending journalists critical of him on his social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.During his descent into the far right, Musk has convinced himself that the so-called "woke" media has had it out for him, despite repeatedly furthering easily disproven conspiracy theories and spreading disinformation himself.More on Musk: Elon Musk Says Being Tesla CEO Might Kill HimShare This Article

PROS: Impressive charging capabilities Generous package including charger and MagSafe compatible case Seamless AI integration through “One-Tap Infinix AI” Versatile camera set up CONS: Limited software update support Not available in the US RATINGS: AESTHETICSERGONOMICSPERFORMANCESUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITYVALUE FOR MONEYEDITOR'S QUOTE:The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G impresses with its robust performance, premium design, and an array of thoughtful features, all wrapped in an affordable price tag of $370. Smartphone shoppers often face a frustrating dilemma: spend a fortune on a premium device with all the bells and whistles, or settle for a budget phone that cuts too many corners to hit its price point. This compromise typically means sacrificing camera quality, display performance, or processing power – the very features that enhance our daily digital experiences. The mid-range market attempts to bridge this gap, but rarely delivers a truly satisfying balance of high-end specifications and reasonable cost without significant compromises in build quality or user experience. The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G boldly challenges this status quo by bringing genuine flagship-level features to the budget-conscious consumer. What makes this offering particularly intriguing is how Infinix has prioritized features that genuinely impact user experience rather than simply checking specification boxes for marketing purposes. Let’s see if it manages to meet those goals or if it cut too many corners to achieve its mouth-watering price point. Designer: Infinix Aesthetics The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G stands out in terms of design, drawing inspiration from automotive engineering. The frame is crafted from Armor Alloy, a robust blend of Damascus steel and aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, paired with a durable glass back panel. This combination enhances both strength and premium appeal. The Note 50 Pro+ 5G is available in three color variants: Titanium Grey, Enchanted Purple, and the Racing Edition. We had the chance to review the Racing Edition, which draws influence from BMW’s Physital design philosophy, blending physical and digital aesthetics. The Racing Edition features a matte silver back panel with textured vertical lines, complemented by the iconic tri-color racing stripes, symbolizing dynamism and speed. The device is also defined by its glossy octagonal camera island, located at the upper left corner. The camera island houses a triple camera setup, paired with the Bio-Active Halo AI Lighting System and an LED flashlight. The lighting system reacts to your phone’s activity, changing colors in response to charging, notifications, incoming calls, and gaming, adding a touch of flair to everyday interactions. It is also a sensor for measuring heart rate and blood oxygen levels. While the concept is intriguing, the term “AI” seems a bit of a stretch, as the feature feels more gimmicky than groundbreaking. Ergonomics With dimensions of 163.36 x 74.35 x 7.99 mm and a weight of 209 grams, the device feels solid and premium in hand. However, this solid build comes with a slight downside. That is, the phone is a bit top-heavy, creating an unbalanced feel when holding it. Another notable ergonomic issue occurs when the phone is placed face up on a flat surface. Due to the pronounced camera island, the device has a tendency to wobble, making it less stable when resting on a desk or table. While the phone’s design is generally comfortable for regular use, gaming is where the camera island becomes an ergonomic hurdle. When holding the device horizontally for gaming, the raised camera module interferes with your grip, which can be distracting and uncomfortable during longer sessions. The fingerprint scanner, located near the bottom of the display, also presents a bit of a challenge. The placement makes the transition from unlocking the device to navigating through the interface somewhat awkward. Overall, the Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G is solidly built, but the top-heavy design, wobbling issue, and less-than-ideal fingerprint scanner placement can make for an occasionally frustrating user experience. While it’s not uncomfortable to hold, these small design decisions can impact long-term usability. Performance The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G boasts a 6.79-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080 x 2436, supporting a 144Hz refresh rate, HDR10+, and up to 1300 nits peak brightness (550 nits typical). The display is vibrant and fluid, offering rich colors and smooth animations whether you’re browsing, watching videos, or gaming. Even in direct sunlight, the screen stays bright and readable. Additionally, it remains responsive when used with wet fingers or in wet conditions, ensuring precision without any issues. The bezels are impressively thin and nearly symmetrical, enhancing the immersive viewing experience. Complementing the display is a dual speaker setup tuned by JBL, which promises a more premium audio experience on paper. However, in practice, the speakers felt inconsistent. Volume remains relatively quiet up to around 80%, then suddenly spikes when pushed beyond that. The overall sound lacks balance. Bass is weak, and the mids and highs don’t carry much depth. For casual use, it’s adequate, but audio enthusiasts may find it underwhelming. Under the hood, the Note 50 Pro+ 5G is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Ultimate chipset, coupled with 12GB of RAM (expandable virtually to 24GB) and 256GB of storage. Running Android 15 with Infinix’s XOS 15 skin, the phone delivers a smooth, responsive experience across the board. Performance holds up impressively well even during graphically intense games like Call of Duty: Mobile and Genshin Impact, with no noticeable lag or stutter. For the first time in an Infinix smartphone, the Note 50 Pro+ 5G introduces a comprehensive suite of AI features. What stands out, however, is how these tools are seamlessly integrated through “One-Tap Infinix AI”. By simply long-pressing the power button, regardless of the app you’re using, Folax, Infinix’s AI assistant, is instantly accessible. From summarizing or translating on-screen content to describing images or even editing photos, the AI offers a wide range of functions. The addition of Google’s Circle to Search further enhances the experience. This integration feels incredibly well-thought-out, as it consolidates multiple AI tools under a single gesture, eliminating the need to switch between apps. It’s a convenient, user-friendly feature that simplifies multitasking without compromising functionality. Another interesting addition is the ability to measure heart rate and blood oxygen levels by placing your finger on the Bio-Halo AI lighting sensor. While it may not replace dedicated health devices, it’s a novel feature to have built into a smartphone, particularly at this price point. Its usefulness will vary depending on user habits, but it adds an unexpected layer of utility. The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G boasts, which is relatively rare in this price range. The system consists of a 50 MP main sensor, a 50 MP 3x telephoto lens, and an 8 MP ultra-wide camera, offering great versatility for mobile photography. While this combination is a standout feature at this price point, the real question is how well it performs in everyday use. Let’s dive in and see how it stacks up. The main camera uses a 1/1.56-inch Sony IMX896 sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and optical image stabilization (OIS). In well-lit conditions, it produces sharp, detailed images with vibrant colors, though the contrast can sometimes be a bit strong. Night mode performance is solid, capturing clear and well-exposed shots with minimal noise, although light sources can occasionally appear overexposed. The telephoto camera delivers 6x optical zoom with lossless clarity and extends up to 100x zoom. Between 3x and 6x, photos are rich in detail, with a good dynamic range that performs well across different lighting conditions. Beyond 6x, image quality starts to degrade, which is expected at higher magnifications. The ultra-wide camera also performs admirably. While it’s not as sharp as the main or zoom cameras, it still captures vibrant and clear images. Selfies from the 32 MP front-facing camera are generally good, though they can sometimes appear a bit faded. For video, the Note 50 Pro+ 5G can record up to 4K at 60 FPS with the main and telephoto cameras, while the ultra-wide is limited to 2K at 30 FPS. The front-facing camera is capped at 4K at 30 FPS. Video footage from the main and telephoto cameras is smooth, though there are some minor hiccups. Unfortunately, you cannot switch between cameras while recording. Additionally, panning can cause stuttering in the viewfinder, and rapid movement results in judder in the video. Fortunately, you can turn on ultra-stabilization at 4K 60 FPS, and it works quite well. With its sizable 5,200 mAh silicon-carbon battery, the Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G ensures you can go about your day without worrying about battery life. It easily lasts a full day of regular use. But the impressive battery specs don’t end there. The device supports 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging, both of which are flagship-level capabilities. Additionally, the phone offers reverse charging, providing 10W through wired connections and 7.5W wirelessly, adding even more versatility to its power management. Sustainability The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G is designed with durability in mind. The phone’s side frame is made from Armor Alloy, a robust blend of Damascus steel and aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, ensuring the phone is built to last. Paired with a durable glass back panel, this combination enhances the phone’s overall sturdiness, making it a reliable option for everyday use. Additionally, the phone comes with an IP64 rating, offering protection against dust and water splashes. While this level of protection is not the highest available, it provides sufficient durability for typical day-to-day scenarios, giving users confidence that their device can handle the occasional exposure to water or rough environments. However, when it comes to software longevity, the phone’s sustainability potential falls short. Infinix promises two years of Android updates and three years of security updates only, which is relatively limited when compared to other devices in the same price range. Many competing smartphones offer three or more years of operating system updates and security patches for up to four or five years, which means that the Note 50 Pro+ 5G may require a replacement sooner than some users might expect in order to stay up-to-date with the latest features and security improvements. Value At a price of $370, the Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G delivers exceptional value for money. With a feature set that includes a 6.79-inch AMOLED display, powerful performance, and a versatile triple-camera setup, it competes well in the mid-range smartphone market. Infinix has certainly packed a lot of premium features into an affordable device. What truly sets the Note 50 Pro+ 5G apart is the inclusivity of its package. Along with the phone, Infinix includes a 100W charger brick, a USB-C to USB-C cable, earphones, a MagSafe-like phone case, and a glass screen protector, offering a generous bundle that enhances the overall value of the device. That said, it’s worth noting that the Note 50 Pro+ 5G isn’t available in the US. Verdict The Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G impresses with its robust performance, premium design, and an array of thoughtful features, all wrapped in an affordable price tag of $370. It stands out in the mid-range segment by offering a large, vibrant AMOLED display, a capable triple-camera setup, and strong performance driven by the MediaTek Dimensity 8350 chipset. Additionally, the generous package that includes a 100W charger, USB-C cable, earphones, a MagSafe-like case, and a glass screen protector further enhances its value proposition, making it a complete package for those who want more out of their device. While the device has a few ergonomic quirks, such as a top-heavy design and camera island wobbling, the overall user experience remains solid. The AI integration through “One-Tap Infinix AI” is a standout feature, providing quick and effortless access to a wide range of AI tools. Despite some limitations in software support, the Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G remains a well-rounded, feature-packed option for tech enthusiasts, gamers, and photographers who don’t want to break the bank. However, its absence in the US market is a downside for those hoping to purchase locally. The post Infinix Note 50 Pro+ 5G: Flagship features packed in a budget phone first appeared on Yanko Design.

Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments