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20 countries — including Canada, Germany, UAE and Singapore — endorsed stronger checks on advanced models. The European Commission also signed.
The UN, whose leader backs the push, is maneuvering for a bigger role in global AI governance, but without Washington or Beijing, its influence will be limited. The two nations are expected to meet this week.
Amazon plans to expand Prime Air to nearly 500 cities and towns this year, but some residents in one US city already covered by the drone delivery service say that it’s “been a disaster.” The drones are a privacy and safety concern, according to people living in Richardson, Texas, and sound like flying lawn mowers.
[The New York Times]
Microsoft is due to announce another round of Xbox layoffs today, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The cuts will reportedly be part of a larger restructuring, with The Information reporting that Microsoft plans to “consolidate several of its game studios.” Today’s layoffs will reportedly affect hundreds of employees, and are part of the 3,200 Xbox layoffs that Microsoft is planning by the end of June 2027.
If you have one of Birdfy’s smart birdwatching devices, you can tune into its video feed on the biggest screen in the house now on the Roku version of the Birdfy companion app.
A system for “contextually aware” ads described in the patent application could pause gameplay “at the operating system level” to show an ad when certain in-game events or triggers happen. For instance, players might get an ad break after a boss fight or when their avatar “is determined to be in a safe location, such as the user’s team base.”
A new “Premium early access” feature for users in India forces users without a subscription to wait three extra days for access to new albums:
With UMG’s ‘Hear It First’, participating artists and their labels can collaborate with Spotify to choose to make select new releases available to Premium subscribers up to three days early. Every Spotify listener gets access after that - or free listeners can subscribe at any time to get early access.
Update: Added quote from Spotify support page.
Microsoft’s DLSS competitor isn’t just for Qualcomm laptops and Xbox Ally X anymore — the MSI Claw EX handheld and anything else Intel Core Ultra Series 3 should now qualify. Microsoft claims it’s enough to play at ultra instead of high, among other examples, and I see the hard-to-find Claw EX is now back in stock at B&H, MSI, and ExcaliberPC.
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[DirectX Developer Blog]
According to Reuters, the settlement with California and 11 other states “includes the creation of independent editorial boards for CNN and CBS” as well as “a $30 million penalty per film for any shortfall against Paramount’s pledge to release 30 movies annually.”
Update: Paramount and the state AGs have officially announced a settlement.
MediaTek is announcing its new Dimensity CX C10 Max processor. It’s an Arm-based chip built on TSMC’s 3nm process, with an 8-core CPU, 11-core GPU, and an NPU capable of up to 55 TOPS. This will be MediaTek’s Googlebook chip, as it’s designed for thin-and-light laptops like the five initial Googlebooks that were just announced.
It says mods aren’t allowed to “expand or modify” official storylines, plots, missions, or characters. The updated policy also bans crossover mods that combine content from one Rockstar game into another, like maps or characters from previous GTA games, and limits multiplayer mods to Rockstar’s official Creator Platform.
[Rockstar Games]
The TimeXplayer V2 shrinks a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel down to the size of a matchbook, including a 2.4GHz USB receiver hidden inside. But it’s also got Bluetooth so you can connect it to your phone and use it as an alternative to the Boox Tappy as a handheld remote for doomscrolling or reading.
They said Monday that they plan to challenge the White House’s move to revoke their journalists’ press credentials:
Googlebooks are here. And they’re actually interesting (for Android phone users) — but there are still so many questions.
The subsea “Petal” cable will connect the US and France across 4,300 miles when it comes online in 2029. Meta says it will be the first transoceanic subsea cable to deliver 1 petabit of data per second using a multi-core fiber technology. “That’s roughly the network capacity required for 75% of the world’s population to stream music at the same time,” according to Meta.
Features like Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy were found to violate GDPR privacy rules in Europe from 2018 to 2020.
“As a result of Google’s failures, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data,” DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement. “The retention of users’ location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control.”
A new “Copy code” button is rolling out to Gmail inboxes on Android and iOS that previews authentication codes below the subject line, letting you copy them with a single tap without opening the email. It isn’t available on web, but it should make mobile logins less tedious.
Backrooms was a legit box office blockbuster. And now A24 is gearing up to make a movie based on the SCP universe (even if, for legal reasons, it might not use the SCP name). What internet horror franchise do you think should get big-screen treatment next?
This episode of the BBC’s Towards Tomorrow explores whether humans and robots can coexist. It features an introduction from Isaac Asimov, in which he wonders whether the line between the two will become meaningless and “humanity itself will die out as humanity, and sort of melt into this machine culture.”
It’s unclear what military advantage there would be to storing “large quantities of sniper ammunition” and “large numbers of drones” in the DC arch. The area already has a significant military presence. But this is the same tactic Trump used to argue for his ballroom, which suddenly became a national security issue when it faced legal challenges.
Reality Check is a simple game where you get 10 seconds per image, 60 seconds total, to identify which images are AI and which are real—it’s not easy. I went on pure gut instinct and only got 18 of 26 right.
(Also: The irony of a spot-the-AI game built with AI doesn’t escape me.)
[Slop Sense]
It’s been a poorly kept secret that the company was working towards building its own wet lab. It was hiring biologists and even bought startup Coefficient Bio in April. Now it’s confirmed to TechCrunch that a lab is up and operating in the Bay Area.
Norwood was on Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss its AI slop movie, Misaligned. There’s a painful lag between questions and answers, and it routinely fails to answer the actual question. But the most surreal moment comes when Norwood glitches mid-answer and starts speaking Cantonese.
“Best-case scenario, the men handling this technology are completely incompetent. Worst-case scenario, we are all being led into a disaster.” Eventually, the woman was escorted from the building, but not before disrupting the company’s celebration of flooding the world with awful AI-generated fliers.
