The driverless vehicles still can't take L.A.'s notorious highways.

RADIO shock jock fan Alan Jones unleashed on both sides of politics on Q&A last night — and came out in defence of Brexit.

Sir Keir Starmer's beleaguered former chief of staff will no longer take up the position of “envoy to the nations and regions.”

A rural housing project branded as ‘truly transformative’ has been completed

Chris embraces our cyberpunk subscription overlords. Josh kills the innkeeper (accidentally). Meanwhile Robert plunges down the .Hack hole.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 610: “No One Should Learn Japanese from Super Robot Wars” appeared first on RPGamer.

Kelley graduates from Canada. Josh discovers Tactics Advance is an isekai. Meanwhile Chris calculates the skill check for suplexing a train.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 619: “That One Time I Got Reincarnated as a Canadian Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” appeared first on RPGamer.

Kelley enters the phlegm dimension. Chris thinks he's an Elden Lord. Josh summons another cat. You, unfortunately, went to E3 programming camp and are now a slave for EA. Sorry.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 632: “I’m Done Dating Weapons” appeared first on RPGamer.

It's one final week of JCServant "Phil-ing" in! Chris plays Podcast: Painkiller Enhanced Edition, and probably needs a nap. Anna Marie picnics with some ham sandwiches, while her Pokémon are gettin' busy.

The post RPGCast – Episode 657 : “Well-Seasoned Blobber” appeared first on RPGamer.

Chris is hunting bears, because of course that's what you do. Kelley hangs out with Chadley and the massively annoying individual. Robert is all about that exquisite fraisier cake.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 716: “Canadian Telephone Game” appeared first on RPGamer.

Ryan slip 'n slides his health away. Robert lives on the side of danger and poor choices in video games. Meanwhile, Chris makes his own bathtub Geralt.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 725: “Not Every Idea in the Factory Is a Good One” appeared first on RPGamer.

Chris proclaims that WoW isn't a battery drainer, it's the Warlord of Draenor. Kelley has a soda-fresh Steamdeck. Josh discovers the fifth horseman of the apocalypse: politics. Robert wraps himself in a towel and puts himself in the oven.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 735: “Dodge Dragonero” appeared first on RPGamer.

ublisher Bethesda Softworks and developer MachineGames have released a gameplay deep dive video for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that is nearly 15 minutes in length.

"From locations and puzzles to gear and combat, MachineGames Audio Director, Pete Ward, takes us on a whirlwind journey through the world of The Great Circle," reads the description to the video. "Get ready for launch with this look at Indy’s grand adventure."

View the gameplay deep dive below:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will launch for the Xbox Series X|S, PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, and Xbox Game Pass on December 9.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463033/indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle-gets-gameplay-deep-dive/

Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, was found dead in a hotel courtyard in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday evening, according to CNN and La Nacion, both of which cited local police.

The singer died after an apparent fall from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room. Argentinian authorities told Good Morning America that Payne had been staying at the hotel CasaSur in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo.

He was 31.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Remedy's Alan Wake 2 has now "recouped most of its development and marketing expenses", CEO Tero Virtala has announced in a business review for January-September 2024. Speaking as somebody who would quite like there to be more Alan Wake games - or at least, moderately weird and pretty decent blockbuster singleplayer horror games - I am both pleased by this news and a little troubled that Remedy's eldritch forest fable (which came out in October 2023) has yet to break even.

Read more

Ogres, Orcs, and Khorne are all on the way in the upcoming expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3, and Creative Assembly have just released their latest dev vlog with a few more details on what to expect. There’s still no word on the exact title, although given the established naming convention (Shadows Of Change, Thrones Of Decay), I’m tentatively calling it “Sniffers Of Glue” in honour of the No Think, Only Krump faction selection.

You’ll find the vlog in its full glory below. What’s interesting about this one is that vlog mainstay director Rich Alridge has brought along some new faces: battle designer Josh King and audio director Chris Goldsmith. And, yes, so no-one can accuse me of burying the lede: that audio design involved the enthusiastic, deeply disgusting slurping of porridge and yoghurt, and the jangling of real bones. The source of the bones is not revealed.

Read more

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: new questions surrounding the deaths of four Green Berets in the Western African nation of Niger and the role of the president as consoler in chief.

John Yang has the story.

JOHN YANG: Sending young Americans into harm’s way can be the most serious decision a president makes. Consoling the families of the fallen has become the latest controversy to engulf President Trump.

To bolster his claim that he does more than his predecessors, Mr. Trump today invoked the dead son of his chief of staff, retired Marine general John Kelly.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: To the best of my knowledge, I think I have called every family of somebody that’s died. Now, as far as other representatives, I don’t know. I mean, you could ask General Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?

JOHN YANG: Kelly’s 29-year-old son, Robert, a Marine lieutenant, was killed in 2010 when he stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan, an episode Kelly rarely talks about publicly. Kelly and his wife did attend a 2011 Memorial Day breakfast President Obama hosted for Gold Star families.

President Trump ignited the furor when he was asked about his public silence on four Green Berets killed two weeks ago in Niger.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it.

JOHN YANG: Reporters pressed him to back up the claim.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals.

JOHN YANG: The response from former Obama officials was swift and forceful.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted this photo and insisted: “Stop the damn lying. I went to Dover Air Force base with 44 and saw him comfort families,” a reference to one of Mr. Obama’s late-night trips to pay his respects to troops killed in Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush often visited wounded warriors at Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals, a practice Mr. Trump has continued. In February, the president and his daughter Ivanka went to Dover for the return of the remains of a Navy SEAL killed in Yemen, the first casualty of his administration.

So far this year, the Pentagon says 16 Americans have been killed in action. Another 17 sailors died in accidents. In the first year of the Obama presidency, 344 were killed in action.

During last year’s campaign, Mr. Trump publicly feuded with the Khans, the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, after they criticized him at the Democratic Convention.

Today, the Khans said: “President Trump’s selfish and divisive actions have undermined the dignity of the high office of the presidency.”

The current controversy comes as questions are being raised about how and why the four soldiers died in Niger.

Senator Jack Reed is the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

SEN. JACK REED, D-R.I.: I think the administration has to be much more clear about our role in Niger and our role in other areas in Africa and other parts of the globe.

JOHN YANG: The Pentagon is investigating the deaths. Reportedly among the questions, did commanders adequately assess the risk, and was there ready access to medical support?

Today, President Trump called the families of the four dead Green Berets.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m John Yang.

The post Trump ignites furor with claim past presidents didn’t console military families by phone appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell held a news conference today after the second day of the annual owners meeting. Watch his remarks in the player above.

NFL players will be encouraged to stand for the national anthem at the start of the football games, the league’s chief told reporters today.

After two days of meeting with owners of each NFL team, representatives for the players’ union and players themselves, the NFL has reiterated its decision to keep its existing policy of not requiring players to stand during the anthem. Goodell said yesterday that the league wouldnot instate a rule that would penalize players who refuse to stand for the anthem.

“We believe everyone should stand for the national anthem,” he told reporters at a news conference today. “That’s an important part of our policy. It’s also an important part of our game that we all take great pride in. And it’s also important for us to honor our flag and our country and I think our fans expect us to do that.”

Goodell’s remarks came after President Donald Trump continued his criticism of the NFL this morning. On Twitter, Trump said: “The NFL has decided that it will not force players to stand for the playing of our National Anthem. Total disrespect for our great country!”

After former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem last year to protest police killings of unarmed black men, dozens of other players joined him to draw greater attention to social and racial injustice. Last month, Trump said the NFL ought to fire players who didn’t stand for the anthem.

The players “are not doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag,” Goodell said today. “But they also understand how it’s being interpreted.”

Goodell also said the league wanted to stay out of the political arena over the issue.

“We’re not looking to get into politics,” he told reporters. “What we’re looking to do is to continue to get people focused on football.”

The post WATCH: NFL commissioner says players ‘should stand for the national anthem’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has torpedoed the UK's economic recovery with her tax-and-spend Budget but Ed Miliband is the one who worries me.

Martin Lewis has warned Tesco customers of a piece of small print that could see £18m worth of Clubcard points wasted.

Sam Howell tells New Scientist why NASA is so keen to visit Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, and how the mission could help us figure out the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos

The success of the all-civilian spacewalk on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission shows that private space flight is starting to catch up with government space agencies

Medically evacuating an astronaut from space is difficult and expensive, and a new model predicts that one in three long-duration moon missions may require it

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

SpaceX is preparing for the sixth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. Next week's launch – if successful – will be the fastest turnaround yet

A newly identified smartphone vulnerability can reveal the floor plans of where you are and what you are doing - and it is possible that companies or intelligence agencies are already making use of it

In a basement beneath City St George's, University of London, senior NATO leaders watch on as four research teams demonstrate the latest in AI-controlled, autonomous drone technolo0gy

Google, Microsoft and others have taken big steps towards error-free devices, hinting that quantum computers that solve real problems aren’t far away

Machines are fighting machines on the Ukrainian battlefield, as a technological arms race has given birth to a new way to wage war

Smartphones have indeed created an "anxious generation", but it isn't young people, it is their parents, argues neuroscientist Dean Burnett

Motion sensors in smartphones can be turned into makeshift microphones to eavesdrop on conversations, outsmarting security features designed to stop such attacks

A simulator for the process of scientific discovery shows that AI models still fall short of human scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses and carrying out experiments on their own

Next-generation phone networks could dramatically outperform current ones thanks to a new technique for transmitting multiple streams of data over a wide range of frequencies

An off-the-shelf millimetre wave sensor can pick out the tiny vibrations made by a smartphone's speaker, enabling an AI model to transcribe the conversation, even at a distance in a noisy room

Just under 5 per cent of the Wikipedia pages in English that have been published since ChatGPT's release seem to include AI-written content

The software used to control a robot is normally highly adapted to its specific physical set up. But now researchers have created a single general-purpose robotic control policy that can operate robotic arms, wheeled robots, quadrupeds, and even drones.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to applying machine learning to robotics is the paucity of data. While computer vision and natural language processing can piggyback off the vast quantities of image and text data found on the Internet, collecting robot data is costly and time-consuming.

To get around this, there have been growing efforts to pool data collected by different groups on different kinds of robots, including the Open X-Embodiment and DROID datasets. The hope is that training on diverse robotics data will lead to “positive transfer,” which refers to when skills learned from training on one task help to boost performance on another.

The problem is that robots often have very different embodiments—a term used to describe their physical layout and suite of sensors and actuators—so the data they collect can vary significantly. For instance, a robotic arm might be static, have a complex arrangement of joints and fingers, and collect video from a camera on its wrist. In contrast, a quadruped robot is regularly on the move and relies on force feedback from its legs to maneuver. The kinds of tasks and actions these machines are trained to carry out are also diverse: The arm may pick and place objects, while the quadruped needs keen navigation.

That makes training a single AI model for robots on these large collections of data challenging, says Homer Walke, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. So far, most attempts have either focused on data from a narrower selection of similar robots or researchers have manually tweaked data to make observations from different robots more similar. But in research to be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich in November, they unveiled a new model called CrossFormer that can train on data from a diverse set of robots and control them just as well as specialized control policies.

“We want to be able to train on all of this data to get the most capable robot,” says Walke. “The main advance in this paper is working out what kind of architecture works the best for accommodating all these varying inputs and outputs.”

How to control diverse robots with the same AI model

The team used the same model architecture that powers large language model, known as a transformer. In many ways, the challenge the researchers were trying to solve is not dissimilar to that facing a chatbot, says Walke. In language modeling, the AI has to to pick out similar patterns in sentences with different lengths and word orders. Robot data can also be arranged in a sequence much like a written sentence, but depending on the particular embodiment, observations and actions vary in length and order too.

“Words might appear in different locations in a sentence, but they still mean the same thing,” says Walke. “In our task, an observation image might appear in different locations in the sequence, but it’s still fundamentally an image and we still want to treat it like an image.”

UC Berkeley/Carnegie Mellon University

Most machine learning approaches work through a sequence one element at a time, but transformers can process the entire stream of data at once. This allows them to analyze the relationship between different elements and makes them better at handling sequences that are not standardized, much like the diverse data found in large robotics datasets.

Walke and his colleagues aren’t the first to train transformers on large-scale robotics data. But previous approaches have either trained solely on data from robotic arms with broadly similar embodiments or manually converted input data to a common format to make it easier to process. In contrast, CrossFormer can process images from cameras positioned above a robot, at head height or on a robotic arms wrist, as well as joint position data from both quadrupeds and robotic arms, without any tweaks.

The result is a single control policy that can operate single robotic arms, pairs of robotic arms, quadrupeds, and wheeled robots on tasks as varied as picking and placing objects, cutting sushi, and obstacle avoidance. Crucially, it matched the performance of specialized models tailored for each robot and outperformed previous approaches trained on diverse robotic data. The team even tested whether the model could control an embodiment not included in the dataset—a small quadcopter. While they simplified things by making the drone fly at a fixed altitude, CrossFormer still outperformed the previous best method.

“That was definitely pretty cool,” says Ria Doshi, an undergraduate student at Berkeley. “I think that as we scale up our policy to be able to train on even larger sets of diverse data, it’ll become easier to see this kind of zero shot transfer onto robots that have been completely unseen in the training.”

The limitations of one AI model for all robots

The team admits there’s still work to do, however. The model is too big for any of the robots’ embedded chips and instead has to be run from a server. Even then, processing times are only just fast enough to support real-time operation, and Walke admits that could break down if they scale up the model. “When you pack so much data into a model it has to be very big and that means running it for real-time control becomes difficult.”

One potential workaround would be to use an approach called distillation, says Oier Mees, a postdoctoral research at Berkley and part of the CrossFormer team. This essentially involves training a smaller model to mimic the larger model, and if successful can result in similar performance for a much smaller computational budget.

But of more importance than the computing resource problem is that the team failed to see any positive transfer in their experiments, as CrossFormer simply matched previous performance rather than exceeding it. Walke thinks progress in computer vision and natural language processing suggests that training on more data could be the key.

Others say it might not be that simple. Jeannette Bohg, a professor of robotics at Stanford University, says the ability to train on such a diverse dataset is a significant contribution. But she wonders whether part of the reason why the researchers didn’t see positive transfer is their insistence on not aligning the input data. Previous research that trained on robots with similar observation and action data has shown evidence of such cross-overs. “By getting rid of this alignment, they may have also gotten rid of this significant positive transfer that we’ve seen in other work,” Bohg says.

It’s also not clear if the approach will boost performance on tasks specific to particular embodiments or robotic applications, says Ram Ramamoorthy, a robotics professor at Edinburgh University. The work is a promising step towards helping robots capture concepts common to most robots, like “avoid this obstacle,” he says. But it may be less useful for tackling control problems specific to a particular robot, such as how to knead dough or navigate a forest, which are often the hardest to solve.

Simone Giertz came to fame in the 2010s by becoming the self-proclaimed “queen of shitty robots.” On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.

But Giertz has parlayed her Internet renown into Yetch, a design company that makes commercial consumer products. (The company name comes from how Giertz’s Swedish name is properly pronounced.) Her first release, a daily habit-tracking calendar, was picked up by prestigious outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York City. She has continued to make commercial products since, as well as one-off strange inventions for her online audience.

Where did the motivation for your useless robots come from?

Simone Giertz: I just thought that robots that failed were really funny. It was also a way for me to get out of creating from a place of performance anxiety and perfection. Because if you set out to do something that fails, that gives you a lot of creative freedom.

You built up a big online following. A lot of people would be happy with that level of success. But you moved into inventing commercial products. Why?

Giertz: I like torturing myself, I guess! I’d been creating things for YouTube and for social media for a long time. I wanted to try something new and also find longevity in my career. I’m not super motivated to constantly try to get people to give me attention. That doesn’t feel like a very good value to strive for. So I was like, “Okay, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?” And developing products is something that I’ve always been really, really interested in. And yeah, it is tough, but I’m so happy to be doing it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, as much as there’s a lot of face-palm moments.

Giertz’s every day goal calendar was picked up by the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Yetch

What role does failure play in your invention process?

Giertz: I think it’s inevitable. Before, obviously, I wanted something that failed in the most unexpected or fun way possible. And now when I’m developing products, it’s still a part of it. You make so many different versions of something and each one fails because of something. But then, hopefully, what happens is that you get smaller and smaller failures. Product development feels like you’re going in circles, but you’re actually going in a spiral because the circles are taking you somewhere.

What advice do you have for aspiring inventors?

Giertz: Make things that you want. A lot of people make things that they think that other people want, but the main target audience, at least for myself, is me. I trust that if I find something interesting, there are probably other people who do too. And then just find good people to work with and collaborate with. There is no such thing as the lonely genius, I think. I’ve worked with a lot of different people and some people made me really nervous and anxious. And some people, it just went easy and we had a great time. You’re just like, “Oh, what if we do this? What if we do this?” Find those people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Queen of Useless Robots.”

PlayStation 5 Pro is out, and with plenty of availability, scalpers are shifting the £700 console at a loss and turning their attention to a key accessory instead

Cement is ubiquitous, but the process of making it emits carbon into the atmosphere. The industry says there's no easy way to avoid that, which is why it's turning to carbon capture and storage technology as a way to decarbonize.

President-elect Donald Trump vowed on his first day in office to sign an executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and kick-start the largest deportation effort in the nation's history.

Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson reveals four signs of compromised Social Security numbers and offers five steps to protect yourself.

Getting virus alerts on your iPhone? Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson helps you learn how to handle fake scam alerts and boost security.

Apple has introduced a native call recording feature as part of Apple Intelligence with its release of iOS 18.1. It's easier than ever to document conversations.

A company announced the launch of two new advanced drones designed to improve military operations with the use of cutting-edge technology.

LIVERPOOL midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum will be pivotal for Jurgen Klopp at Manchester City..

Former Chelsea and Arsenal defender Ashley Cole has signed a new one-year contract to remain with the LA Galaxy for a third season in Major League Soccer..