As with all emergent tech, AI has been an absolute rollercoaster. We’ve gone from funky deep-dream psychedelia and crunchy robot voices that sort of sound like Spongebob to a legal and ethical minefield. While it’s been used for some cool stuff, like DLSS upscaling, it’s also, uh, been used by the UK government for welfare benefit claims, or to make NSFW mods without the original voice actor’s consent. Boot, meet mine.
Still, tech companies have been hungry to find the next use case that’ll finally catapult us into the future of hi-tech assistants. After all, who doesn’t want a little brain in your pocket to chat with? One such company is Humane, who have revealed a very weird magnetic camera-pin-AI assistant thing you can buy for the low low price of… $699. Jeez.
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Game designer Peter Molyneux is known for classic series Black & White (a personal fav), Dungeon Keeper, and Fable, but in the 2000s and 2010s, he also became known for making ambitious promises he couldn’t keep, becoming the quintessential ‘game dev who talks to much.’ This narrative climaxed when Molyneux launched a mobile game about clicking on a cube and promised that whoever got to the center would receive a life-changing prize, which turned out not to be life-changing at all.
The spotlight eventually moved on from Molyneux—in 2016, No Man’s Sky director Sean Murray became the new favorite games industry overpromiser—and although his mobile games studio continued on, it seemed like Molyneux’s legacy as a PC game designer had just about crystallized. Read more
Remember Gundam Evolution, the free-to-play multiplayer shooter from Bandai Namco that launched with fanfare in September last year? Well stop remembering it. It’s going away forever on November 29, barely a year after it released, because it can apparently no longer “provide a service that satisfies [its] players”. Throw another body on the pile; they’re dropping like flies out here.
“We want to express our gratitude to everyone who has played the game and supported us to this point,” said executive producer Kazuya Maruyama in a news update on Steam, “At the same time, we would like to sincerely apologize to our fans and players.” Maruyama doesn’t go into why Gundam Evolution is getting switched off, but a quick glance at its SteamDB page suggests that it’s struggled to …
Read moreA picture of an upcoming LGA1851 desktop CPU has made its way onto the internet. Though a picture of a CPU that’s a year or more from release isn’t particularly amazing, what is interesting is that it appears to be a Meteor Lake sample. While Meteor Lake-S was seemingly canceled, the existence of CPUs such as these tells us Intel got a long way down the Meteor Lake-S development path.
The pictured CPU comes from @wxnod (via Videocardz). The CPU is definitely an LGA1851 sample as the notches near the edge of the chip align with schematics we’ve seen previously. What’s interesting is the date of manufacture.
HKEPC shared the same picture but with the manufacturing date part of the Intel FPO code unblurred. In this case, it’s D234. The 234 denotes the year and month of manufact…
Read moreAfter a couple of years of declining PC shipments, due to the pandemic boom ending and global increases in inflation, the industry has started to see a small increase in shipments compared to this time last year. While the gains are very small, just 1.5% more, the recovery is expected to continue throughout 2024, as new product launches from every major PC vendor will be promoting the year of the AI PC.
The good news was reported by the International Data Corporation (IDC), who regularly monitors shipments for its worldwide PC device tracking service. In the first three months of 2023, an estimated 58.9 million systems were shipped across the globe, whereas for the first quarter of this year, the figure is judged to be 59.8 million—an increase of 1.53%.
That probably d…
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