It looks like even memory modules will soon come integrated with an LCD, as that is something that V-Color showed off at its booth. DDR5 Memory Modules With Integrated LCDs Are Coming Soon, V-Color First To Showcase New Design These days, you can find LCDs or some sort of display on almost every PC component. We have seen CPU coolers, graphics cards, motherboards, power supplies, cases, and even standalone fans with such designs, and it looks like the next component is going to be memory modules. At its Computex booth, V-Color was showcasing a lot of memory products since it's their primary business, and they are excellent at it. The company stated that they are securing high-quality SK Hynix ICs for their newest DDR5 UDIMM & CUDIMM modules, which will further push the performance to new levels. Furthermore, the company is also rolling out its high-capacity DDR5 memory modules, such as the RDIMM series. V-Color has already announced that it was the first to offer overclocked DDR5 RDIMMs with capacities of up to 256 GB. We saw this flagship module at the booth, which is rated at 6000 MT/s at a CL38 timing with 1.35V. There were also 128 GB and 96 GB kits. But the most interesting product at V-Color's booth is definitely their concept Manta Sky Xfinity module design, which integrates an LCD on the heatspreader while retaining the high-end heatsink and the large RGB diffuser on the top. This integrated LCD can be seen on the right-most DIMM and can display various useful stats such as the memory capacity, its voltage, frequency, the CPU, and what sort of BIOS mode the CPU is running in. In this case, the memory was running the 200S Boost, which optimizes memory on Arrow Lake CPUs to enhance performance. 2 of 9 Just like the filler RGB modules that V-Color has launched, the integrated LCD module will only have one piece in the kit, and that makes a lot of sense since you can't see the remaining LCDs when running a stack of modules. The design is still very much in prototype stages, but we will hear more about this new design in the coming months. Deal of the Day

Mattel has partnered with Uken Games, an independent Canadian game studio, to develop “Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked,” a free-to-play match game that “brings together all of Mattel’s iconic brands in a brand-new digital experience.” The new game marks the first IP crossover mobile game from Mattel, and was developed as part of Mattel’s 80th anniversary celebration campaign. Related Stories “Toybox Unlocked” features Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, UNO, Thomas & Friends and Masters of the Universe and more Mattel franchises in a leveled puzzle adventure that challenges players to match characters, toys and items from across Mattel’s titles before time runs out.  “For the first time ever, Mattel is uniting its beloved brands in a single mobile game with ‘Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked,’ offering fans an exciting, new way to engage with the characters and stories they love,” Mattel’s head of business development and digital gaming Erika Winterholler said. “Our team has really enjoyed working with Uken Games to imagine and create this unique, interconnected world on mobile and can’t wait to have it join our growing portfolio of digital entertainment titles.”  Popular on Variety “Uken is delighted to partner with Mattel on this iconic mobile match game that seamlessly brings together your favorite Mattel brands with this unique & challenging gameplay style,” added Uken Games co-CEO. “I cannot wait to see players filling up their digital toy boxes with their favorite Barbie, Hot Wheels, and UNO toys among the many others the game will feature.”   “Mattel Match: Toybox Unlocked” is currently soft launching in the Philippines and Canada, with additional regions rolling out ahead of its official wide launch later this year.

This is such exciting work about environmental forecasting, so we’re happy to have the two of you join us today.   Megan and Wessel, welcome.  MEGAN STANLEY: Thank you. Thanks. Great to be here.  WESSEL BRUINSMA: Thanks.  TINGLE: Let’s jump right in. Wessel, share a bit about the problem your research addresses and why this work is so important.  BRUINSMA: I think we’re all very much aware of the revolution that’s happening in the space of large language models, which have just become so strong. What’s perhaps lesser well-known is that machine learning models have also started to revolutionize this field of weather prediction. Whereas traditional weather prediction models, based on physical laws, used to be the state of the art, these traditional models are now challenged and often even outperformed by AI models.   This advancement is super impressive and really a big deal. Mostly because AI weather forecasting models are computationally much more efficient and can even be more accurate. What’s unfortunate though, about this big step forward, is that these developments are mostly limited to the setting of weather forecasting.   Weather forecasting is very important, obviously, but there are many other important environmental forecasting problems out there, such as air pollution forecasting or ocean wave forecasting. We have developed a model, named Aurora, which really kicks the AI revolution in weather forecasting into the next gear by extending these advancements to other environmental forecasting fields, too. With Aurora, we’re now able to produce state-of-the-art air pollution forecasts using an AI approach. And that wasn’t possible before!  TINGLE: Megan, how does this approach differ from or build on work that’s already been done in the atmospheric sciences?  STANLEY: Current approaches have really focused training very specifically on weather forecasting models. And in contrast, with Aurora, what we’ve attempted to do is train a so-called foundation model for the Earth system. In the first step, we train Aurora on a vast body of Earth system data. This is our pretraining step.   And when I say a vast body of data, I really do mean a lot. And the purpose of this pretraining is to let Aurora, kind of, learn some general-purpose representation of the dynamics that govern the Earth system. But then once we’ve pretrained Aurora, and this really is the crux of this, the reason why we’re doing this project, is after the model has been pretrained, it can leverage this learned general-purpose representation and efficiently adapt to new tasks, new domains, new variables. And this is called fine-tuning.  The idea is that the model really uses the learned representation to perform this adaptation very efficiently, which basically means Aurora is a powerful, flexible model that can relatively cheaply be adapted to any environmental forecasting task.    TINGLE: Wessel, can you tell us about your methodology? How did you all conduct this research?  BRUINSMA: While approaches so far have trained models on primarily one particular data These datasets are a combination of estimates of the historical state of the world, forecasts by other models, climate simulations, and more. We’ve been able to show that training on not just more data but more diverse data helps the model achieve even better performance. Showing this is difficult because there is just so much data.   In addition to scaling to more and more diverse data, we also increased the size of the model as much as we could. Here we found that bigger models, despite being slower to run, make more efficient use of computational resources. It’s cheaper to train a good big model than a good small model. The mantra of this project was to really keep it simple and to scale to simultaneously very large and, more importantly, diverse data and large model size.  TINGLE: So, Megan, what were your major findings? And we know they’re major because they’re in Nature. [LAUGHS]  STANLEY: Yeah, [LAUGHS] I guess they really are. So the main outcome of this project is we were actually able to train a single foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in four different domains. Air pollution forecasting. For example, predicting particulate matter near the surface or ozone in the atmosphere. Ocean wave forecasting, which is critical for planning shipping routes.   Tropical cyclone track forecasting, so that means being able to predict where a hurricane or a typhoon is expected to go, which is obviously incredibly important, and very high-resolution weather forecasting.   And I’ve, kind of, named these forecasting domains as if they’re just items in a list, but in every single one, Aurora really pushed the limits of what is possible with AI models. And we’re really proud of that.   But perhaps, kind of, you know, to my mind, the key takeaway here is that the foundation model approach actually works. So what we have shown is it’s possible to actually train some kind of general model, a foundation model, and then adapt it to a wide variety of environmental tasks. Now we definitely do not claim that Aurora is some kind of ultimate environmental forecasting model. We are sure that the model and the pretraining procedure can actually be improved. But, nevertheless, we’ve shown that this approach works for environmental forecasting. It really holds massive promise, and that’s incredibly cool.  TINGLE: Wessel, what do you think will be the real-world impact of this work?  BRUINSMA: Well, for applications that we mentioned, which are air pollution forecasting, ocean wave forecasting, tropical cyclone track forecasting, and very high-resolution weather forecasting, Aurora could today be deployed in real-time systems to produce near real-time forecasts. And, you know, in fact, it already is. You can view real-time weather forecasts by the high-resolution version of the model on the website of ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).  But what’s remarkable is that every of these applications took a small team of engineers about four to eight weeks to fully execute. You should compare this to a typical development timeline for more traditional models, which can be on the order of multiple years. Using the pretraining fine-tuning approach that we used for Aurora, we might see significantly accelerated development cycles for environmental forecasting problems. And that’s exciting.  TINGLE: Megan, if our listeners only walk away from this conversation with one key talking point, what would you like that to be? What should we remember about this paper?  STANLEY: The biggest takeaway is that the pretraining fine-tuning paradigm, it really works for environmental forecasting, right? So you can train a foundational model, it learns some kind of general-purpose representation of the Earth system dynamics, and this representation boosts performance in a wide variety of forecasting tasks. But we really want to emphasize that Aurora only scratches the surface of what’s actually possible.  So there are many more applications to explore than the four we’ve mentioned. And undoubtedly, the model and pretraining procedure can actually be improved. So we’re really excited to see what the next few years will bring.  TINGLE: Wessel, tell us more about those opportunities and unanswered questions. What’s next on the research agenda in environmental prediction?  BRUINSMA: Well, Aurora has two main limitations. The first is that the model produces only deterministic predictions, by which I mean a single predicted value. For variables like temperature, this is mostly fine. But other variables like precipitation, they are inherently some kind of stochastic. For these variables, we really want to assign probabilities to different levels of precipitation rather than predicting only a single value.  An extension of Aurora to allow this sort of prediction would be a great next step.   The second limitation is that Aurora depends on a procedure called assimilation. Assimilation attempts to create a starting point for the model from real-world observations, such as from weather stations and satellites. The model then takes the starting point and uses it to make predictions. Unfortunately, assimilation is super expensive, so it would be great if we could somehow circumvent the need for it.  Finally, what we find really important is to make our advancements available to the community. [MUSIC]  TINGLE: Great. Megan and Wessel, thanks for joining us today on the Microsoft Research Podcast.  BRUINSMA: Thanks for having us.  STANLEY: Yeah, thank you. It’s been great.  TINGLE: You can check out the Aurora model on Azure AI Foundry. You can read the entire paper, “A Foundation Model for the Earth System,” at aka.ms/abstracts. And you’ll certainly find it on the Nature website, too.   Thank you so much for tuning in to Abstracts today. Until next time.   [MUSIC FADES] 

Maryse Bastié Middle School Reconstruction / Tectoniques ArchitectsSave this picture!© Maxime Verret•Dole, France Architects: Tectoniques Architects Area Area of this architecture project Area:  8248 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2025 Photographs Photographs:Maxime Verret More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Built in 1974 by Jouven and Phelouzat (who also designed the neighboring hospital), the existing college is located on the south-western outskirts of the city center, in a suburban fabric that combines facilities, business parks, multi-family housing, and single-family dwellings. It is made up of several buildings arranged in an orthogonal system with no relationship to their surroundings. This functionalist architecture, poorly maintained, is now in a state of disrepair. The fragmentation of the buildings and successive additions have rendered the whole complex illegible and dysfunctional. The existing college is symptomatic of an ordinary heritage dating back to the 1970s, which has largely fallen into disrepute. Its transformation is now a necessity to meet contemporary environmental challenges. This implies taking a fresh look at it, as a heritage to be taken care of, an available resource rather than a clean slate. In addition to bringing the building up to standard and renovating its heating system, the project aims to clarify the formal and programmatic layout of the entire site in order to relieve congestion at the 550-student school, while increasing its capacity to 600. The project strategy must also take into account the need for a construction site on an occupied site, and therefore for phasing.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Tectonique's approach is to make the right diagnosis without preconceptions. It's a question of working with, repairing, and revealing the qualities of what's already there, in this case, the rationality of the constructive system that enables the structure's adaptability. The new image is thus a result, not an assumption. The intervention seeks to relieve the complexity inherited from the existing situation, in order to offer optimal operation over the long term. This is achieved through the simplicity and straightforwardness of the architectural and constructive features. First, the multiple additions are eliminated. The extension then extends the existing building using the same system, to the east to add a teaching block and half-board facilities, and to the west to reconnect the SEGPA section, which was previously isolated. The volume is also raised by one floor to create additional classrooms. This reconfiguration establishes a hierarchy between the previously very equivalent buildings, creating a more homogeneous and coherent whole.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The courtyard has been relocated to the south, on the side facing the town, which is served by a new forecourt with a canopy that doubles as a bicycle storage area. The entrance hall has been repositioned along the axis, at the barycentre of the plan, redefining a clear sequence from the public space. It opens onto a vast atrium with a monumental stepped staircase leading directly to the Culture and Knowledge Centre in its northern extension (in phase 3). This space redefines the centrality of this fragmented complex. It acts as a ball-and-socket joint between the various wings, providing better orientation within the building thanks to its openness to the landscape and its height. The exposed structure reveals the juxtaposition of different construction periods. The existing building is constructed using a "Stribick" prefabrication process, based on concrete floor caissons previously concealed beneath a false ceiling. These caissons are sandblasted. Revealing this structure characterizes the ambience, improves inertia, and makes the building's construction intelligible. The existing framework is envisaged as a generating system for the extension. The new parts reinterpret the coffered floors, using a timber solution of identical proportions. This relationship between the two construction methods blurs the distinction between old and new.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The project is based on an ambitious environmental approach that favors the use of local resources, whether through the massive use of Jura wood (640 m3) or the valorization of local know-how. Previously rightly described as a "thermal sieve", the building envelope has been considerably improved thanks to external thermal insulation using wood wool. Timber construction, which is largely prefabricated and minimizes nuisance, is also an appropriate response to the problem of a phased construction site on an occupied site. The facades are clad with green standing seam aluminum cassettes, evocative of Jura metal gables and the forest character of the region. The south-facing facade is enhanced by large sunshades suspended from a slender metal structure. These overhangs protect the facades and shelter the exterior longitudinal walkway. The composition of horizontal bands alternates aluminum and wood cladding, interspersed with wide windows. This new envelope unifies the existing and the new.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less Project locationAddress:Dole, FranceLocation to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.About this office MaterialsMaterials and TagsPublished on May 21, 2025Cite: "Maryse Bastié Middle School Reconstruction / Tectoniques Architects" 21 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1030329/maryse-bastie-middle-school-reconstruction-tectoniques-architects&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

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:

Deloitte UK is reducing some bonuses. Peter Dazeley via Getty Images 2025-05-21T16:42:47Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Staff in one of Deloitte's four UK divisions will get lower bonuses after missing profit targets. The firm will also promote fewer staff this year, according to an internal email seen by BI. The promotions move was demotivating and has "dampened" the office mood, a Deloitte employee said. Deloitte told employees in one of its UK consulting divisions to expect lower annual bonuses following weaker-than-expected financial performance.Richard Houston, a senior partner and chief executive of Deloitte UK, wrote in a companywide email on Tuesday that employees in the technology and transformation (T&T) consulting division would receive an average of 80% of their annual bonus.Partners in the division will also face a drop in annual rewards, Houston said in the memo seen by Business Insider.The news was first reported by The Financial Times.The T&T business had "faced a particularly challenging year and fell materially short of its performance goals," Houston wrote. Richard Houston is chief executive of Deloitte UK. Liam McBurney/PA/Getty Images Bonuses have always been linked to individual and firm performance. However, for the 2025 financial year, they will also take into account performance variations in each of Deloitte's four business lines.The shift means that workers in Deloitte's other three business lines — which cover deals, tax and legal, and audit and assurance services — will retain their full bonus.Those three divisions have either exceeded targets or, in the case of the audit and assurance branch, had still increased profits in the 2025 financial year, Houston wrote.Deloitte will also promote fewer employees than in previous years, Houston said.The firm would promote 5,500 employees, or about 25% of the UK workforce, at the start of the next financial year, he said. The previous year 28% were promoted, Houston said.A Deloitte consultant in the T&T division said the news about promotions was demotivating and had "dampened" the mood. The person added that their division had taken "a beating."It's "not the best feeling since T&T functions have historically pulled the firm forward in times of crisis," the employee added.Deloitte UK's total profits for its 2025 financial year, which ends on May 31, would be "slightly ahead of last year" but "below our original plan," Houston wrote."At the start of FY25, we expected greater economic stability and a gradual return of growth opportunities. But an early election, geopolitical complexity, and unexpected economic headwinds — like changes in trade policies — have continued to cause market uncertainty," he said.Deloitte's global revenue climbed 3.1% to $67.2 billion in the 2024 financial year, which marked a sharp slowdown in growth compared to the 14.9% increase in 2023.The firm's UK arm has reorganized its business divisions and laid off workers as it grappled with an industrywide slowdown in demand for consulting services that has hit revenue growth.Cost-cuttingIn October 2024, Deloitte UK cut its spending on staff travel and expenses by more than 50%.Houston addressed the cost-cutting measures in Tuesday's email, acknowledging "it has not been easy" for teams to be unable to meet in person for much of the year.He said the efforts to manage costs had "made a significant difference" and had directly contributed to bonuses for the 2025 financial year.A Deloitte UK spokesperson told BI: "Amid ongoing market uncertainty, we are pleased to be able to recognize our people for their hard work with salary increases, bonuses, and promotions this year. This is alongside other benefits such as fully funded private medical insurance, recently enhanced family policies, and our commitment to offering flexibility and choice in our ways of working."Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pthompson@businessinsider.com or Signal at Polly_Thompson.89. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

In a nutshell: The latest leak suggests that the upcoming RTX 5080 Super could receive a significant upgrade in the memory department. If the information holds true, we're looking at a consumer graphics card featuring 24 GB of cutting-edge GDDR7 memory, 10,752 CUDA cores, and a power draw exceeding 400 watts. The RTX 5080 Super is likely to use denser 24 Gb (3 GB) GDDR7 modules, allowing Nvidia to maintain the same 256-bit memory bus as the standard RTX 5080 while fitting in 24 GB of VRAM. That's a 50 percent increase in capacity, which should be ideal for higher-resolution textures, demanding 3D workloads, and future-proofing against increasingly memory-intensive games. For additional context, the 24 GB configuration mirrors what we've already seen in the RTX 5090 Mobile GPU, which also uses these denser memory modules. And with memory clocked at 32 Gbps, the 5080 Super could reach a massive 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth – slightly faster than the vanilla 5080. Interestingly, the core specs might remain unchanged. Like the standard RTX 5080, the Super variant is rumored to use the GB203 die with the same 10,752 CUDA cores. That's unusual for a "Super" refresh, which traditionally boosts both memory and processing power. However, Nvidia may be reserving more substantial upgrades for future models or aiming to maintain clearer segmentation across its product lines. Some rumors suggest the RTX 5080 Super could deliver a performance uplift of seven percent to 15 percent over the base 5080, thanks primarily to faster memory and potentially higher clock speeds. According to sources from board partners, these Super models have been in testing for months, though pricing concerns may have delayed an official launch. // Related Stories No pricing or release date has been confirmed yet, but based on historical trends, the RTX 5080 Super could retail between $1,000 and $1,500 – assuming Nvidia doesn't surprise consumers with another MSRP hike. Then again, in today's GPU market, MSRP often feels more like a wish than a promise.

Published May 21, 2025 10:00am EDT close 'There's no sense of privacy involved': 'CyberGuy' warns AI users' privacy could be at risk Tech expert Kurt Knutsson discusses tips on how to protect your data amid AI privacy concerns and Ford filing a patent to bring the stick shift to electric vehicles.  Removing your personal information from people-search sites can feel pretty overwhelming. There are hundreds of these sites in the U.S. alone. In fact, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says there are over 500 companies that collect and sell personal information. At first, it might seem impossible to get your details removed from all of them. But here's the good news: You don't need to tackle every single site. Your information isn't on all 500-plus sites. With a bit of time and persistence, you can remove your info from the major ones, and every removal really counts. Let me show you exactly how to do it yourself.JOIN THE FREE "CYBERGUY REPORT": GET MY EXPERT TECH TIPS, CRITICAL SECURITY ALERTS AND EXCLUSIVE DEALS, PLUS INSTANT ACCESS TO MY FREE "ULTIMATE SCAM SURVIVAL GUIDE" WHEN YOU SIGN UP! A woman scrolling on her laptop (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)First, find which people-search sites have your infoThe process will be easier if you have a list of people-search sites that have your personal information. Not only can you check them off as you go, but you'll also need a list for the last step. The easiest place to start is with a free scan that some data removal services provide. These scans automatically check a ton of people-search sites for your personal information and send you a report. You can also search for your full name on Google. This will probably bring up a mix of results, including your social media profiles. THINK YOU CAN DELETE YOUR DATA YOURSELF? HERE'S WHY YOU'RE PROBABLY WRONGThe bigger your online presence, the more search results you'll likely have to sift through to find the people-search sites. I recommend searching for your name together with other personal details, like your email, phone number or home address. For some reason, this is more likely to bring up people-search sites, different ones depending on the combination of personal details you try. You may not be able to find all the people-search sites that have your info like this, though. You should also check any state-specific people-search sites, like StateofFlorida.com, and search all of the most popular people-search sites like:WhitepagesSpokeoBeenVerifiedInteliusMyLifePeopleFindersRadarisTruthFinderFastPeopleSearchInstant CheckmateKeep in mind that many smaller or niche sites exist, especially those that are state or region-specific. These sites can be harder to find but may still have your information. Using scanning tools or data removal services can help uncover these less obvious listings.Follow the opt-out process for each siteEvery people-search site has its own opt-out process, but most of them will require you to do something like this:Find your listing: You'll usually need to search for your name, phone number, address or email on the site.Submit a removal request: Most sites have an online form where you can request removal. Look for links that say "Opt-Out," "Do Not Sell My Info" or "Privacy Rights," which are usually found in the website footer.Verify your request: Most sites will send you a confirmation email with a link you'll need to click. Some ask for a phone call verification. A few people-search sites request documents, like a photo ID (I recommend avoiding sending sensitive documents unless absolutely necessary). If a site insists on ID verification, try contacting their support to ask about alternative methods or consider skipping that site if you're uncomfortable.TOP 20 APPS TRACKING YOU EVERY DAYPro tip: Use a separate email address for opt-out requestsMany sites require email verification. Using your regular email can expose it to spam or further data collection. Creating a dedicated or alias email address just for these requests helps protect your primary inbox and keeps things organized. Also, using various email aliases makes it so you don't have to worry about all your info getting taken in a data breach. An email alias address is a great way for you to stop receiving constant spam mail by simply deleting the email alias address. See my review of the best secure and private email services here. A woman working on her laptop (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Phone verification and a secondary number If a site requires phone verification, consider using a secondary number to avoid exposing your personal phone number. Services like Google Voice can provide you with a secondary number that you can use for online activities, keeping your primary number private. The process should take between five and 20 minutes for each site on your list, depending on how difficult they make it for you. But once you submit the request, removal is usually pretty quick. Your information should be off the site within 24 hours to a week, though it can sometimes take up to 30 days.Don't forget about Google search resultsPeople-search sites aren't the only places your info can pop up. Sometimes your personal info appears directly in Google search results, pulled from public records or other sites. If you find sensitive info in Google results, you can request removal through Google's own removal tools, especially if the info includes things like your Social Security number, bank account info or images you don't want to be public. This is a separate process, but it is worth doing alongside removing info from people-search sites. Google Search image (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Keep in mind, this isn't a one-and-done dealEven after you remove your info, there's a good chance it'll show up again. People-search sites constantly scrape public records and other databases to refresh their listings. Some sites offer "suppression lists" you can add your name to, but it's not a perfect system. Small changes, like a slightly different address, a new phone number or a missing middle name, can slip past their filters and pop up as a "new" profile.The best way to stay on top of it is to set a reminder to recheck the main people-search sites every few months and repeat the opt-out process when needed. Maintaining a detailed tracker or spreadsheet with the sites you've contacted, dates and confirmation info can make this easier and help you avoid missing any sites. A woman working on her laptop and scrolling on her phone (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)​​A quick note on your rights (updated for 2025)There is still no federal data privacy law in the U.S. that grants everyone the automatic right to opt out of people-search sites. However, the landscape is changing quickly at the state level. As of 2025, at least thirteen states have passed comprehensive privacy laws that give residents stronger opt-out rights, including:California (California Consumer Privacy Act/California Privacy Rights Act - CCPA/CPRA)Virginia (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act - VCDPA)Colorado (Colorado Privacy Act - CPA)Connecticut (Connecticut Data Privacy Act - CTDPA)Utah (Utah Consumer Privacy Act - UCPA)Delaware (Delaware Personal Data Privacy Act - DPDPA)Iowa (Iowa Consumer Data Protection Act - ICDPA)Nebraska (Nebraska Data Privacy Act - NDPA)New Hampshire (New Hampshire Data Privacy Act - NHDPA)New Jersey (New Jersey Data Privacy Act - NJDPA)Tennessee (Tennessee Information Protection Act - TIPA)Minnesota (Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act - MCDPA)Maryland (Maryland Online Data Privacy Act - MODPA)If you live in one of these states, you now have a much stronger legal footing to demand that people-search sites remove your information. Many of these laws require companies to honor requests to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal data, and some even require businesses to respect browser-based global opt-out signals. But even if you don't live in one of these states, you should still submit removal requests. Most people-search sites do not filter opt-out requests by state; they generally process any request they receive to avoid potential legal issues, regardless of your location.If this sounds like too much work, there's helpRemoving your data manually takes real time and commitment, especially since you have to keep doing it to stay off these sites. That's why many people turn to personal data removal services. Instead of going site by site yourself, a service can automatically send removal requests on your behalf, track the responses and re-request removals if your data reappears later.While no service promises to remove all your data from the internet, having a removal service is great if you want to constantly monitor and automate the process of removing your information from hundreds of sites continuously over a longer period of time. Check out my top picks for data removal services here.Kurt's key takeawaysManual removal is free and gives you full control, but it takes time and requires ongoing effort. Automated services cost money but save you time, handle rechecks and can catch new listings faster. Choose what best fits your budget and privacy needs. If you follow these steps and stay consistent, you can take back control of your personal information online. It might take some work, but every removal counts toward protecting your privacy.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPDo you think it should be your job to constantly remove your info from people-search sites or should companies and lawmakers be doing more to protect your privacy? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to cover.Follow Kurt on his social channels:Answers to the most-asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here Contents hide While Saber Interactive has already released the keys to the modding kingdom for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, the studio is still hard at work to create more content for the popular co-op game. Alongside new Operations and a brand-new Horde Mode, the studio is working on new weapons, classes and more. With a fanbase as rabid as Warhammer’s, dataminers were bound to go looking, and it seems like Saber is adding some very exciting things to Space Marine 2 in the near future. Space Marine 2 dataminers find a brand-new class Dataminers in the Space Marine subreddit have discovered a slew of exciting new goodies coming to the game in the foreseeable future. Found in the game’s latest PTS update files, there’s a tonne of new content in the works. First and foremost, dataminers found references to a Techmarine class with a “Shoulder Gun Bolter” perk. This class is expected to be a support class with deployable turrets and other perks that play very differently. The Techmarine is also expected to come with a brand-new melee weapon: the Power Axe. Look at all that swag. New Horde Mode details Saber Interactive has been teasing its Horde Mode as a much different experience than what fans may be used to, but dataminers have finally figured out what the studio means by that. In the game’s files, numerous Horde Mode details were discovered and the new gameplay type sounds very extensive. In the game mode, players will not only fight waves of enemies, but there will also be numerous objectives that need to be completed including killing multiple minibosses, collecting batteries and more. As players fight the Horde, they will have to use consumables such as ammo crates, revive tokens and more to stay alive. However, players will also be able to “summon NPCs” to assist them in the fight. The list of summonable NPCs found in the game are as follows: Dreadnought Vanguard Assault Sniper Tactical Heavy Bulwark New Operations Additionally, fans discovered files for three new Operations in the PTS build that have yet to be announced. PvE Missions 10, 11 and 12—known as Ship, Relay and Dread—are in development for future updates. In Ship, players will be tasked with simply reaching the engineering dock of a spaceship. In Relay, players will have to “Reach Astropath Relay, Eliminate The Corrupted Astropaths, Defeat Boss”, which sounds considerably more complicated. Finally, Dread only has one objective but appears very unfinished, but players will be tasked with defending a tower. A new Majoris enters the battle Finally, Saber is still working on adding more enemies to the game. While modders are working to add entire Necron and Tau factions, Saber is working to bring one more Majoris enemy with “several variations, including a boss variant” in a future update. This enemy is expected to be a Chaos Majoris enemy. Alongside continued support for Space Marine 2, Saber is also working on early development of the game’s sequel. Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 3 is a “bigger and better” sequel with a focus on large-scale battles. However, it will be years until we see the game release. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X Genre(s): Action Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share