It’s only been a little over a month since Microsoft first announced a new feature for Copilot+ AI PCs, called Recall. The idea behind the AI tool was that it would make searching through your PC’s use history easier but the public felt otherwise, pointing out that it had serious privacy and security concerns. Microsoft has updated the system to address some of these issues, adding the most important one of all—the option to disable it entirely.

The updates to Recall are covered in a Microsoft blog (via Ars Technica) and while the changes are only three in number, they’re pretty significant ones. The first, and most important one of all, is that Recall is now completely optional.

During the first run of your new Copilot+ AI PC, during the Windows setup procedure, you’ll be asked if you want Recall to be enabled. No prizes for guessing what most people will choose here.

Next, for added security, you’ll need to use Windows Hello to enable Recall and also to vie…

If you haven’t played co-op survival game Icarus, this is the weekend to give it a shot. To celebrate two years since launch, developer RocketWerkz is inviting everyone to visit their beautiful but extremely deadly alien planet: Icarus is free to play for the weekend.

As a bonus, if you decide you want to stick around past December 4, you can buy the game for 33% off. Not a bad deal.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Icarus lately, well, it’s been keeping up with its community. I think it’s genuinely one of the most responsive games out there in terms of reaction to community requests. Since it launched its added a number of new modes, including a complete open world (it was initially a session-based survival game), mounts, an expansive fishing system, new maps, and more. It’s also grown from an original roster of 35 missions to over 100, plus added lots of other, smaller quests.

Most impressively, Icarus began with about 150 craftable items and that number has s…

Let’s face it, humans have a natural tendency to fear the unknown. The Terminator, The Matrix, and movies like them have implanted the seed that AI is bad. Killer cyborgs and malevolent AI have become a part of the public consciousness. The rise of the AI industry has even led to extinction level concerns… from the AI industry.

But don’t go stocking up on ammo and baked beans just yet. Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center believes current AI models are little more than glorified tape recorders.

Kaku was interviewed by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria (via Business Insider). When asked for his thoughts on AI, Kaku said: “It takes snippets of what’s on the web created by a human, splices them together, and passes it off as if it created these things, and people are saying: ‘Oh my God, it’s a human, it’s humanlike.'” He goes on to say “AI cannot distinguish true from false”.

I find it hard to argue with his lo…

An Overwatch player messing around outside the boundaries of the map has discovered that the statue of Jesus Christ on Rio de Janeiro map Paraíso miraculously reflects all projectiles aimed at it with unerring accuracy. This is as opposed to Overwatch’s vaunted cyborg-ninja Genji, whose ability to deflect projectiles lasts at most a mere two seconds and must be used by players with perfect timing. The discovery was posted by user OmicronGaming to Reddit.

The Jesus statue on Paraiso (OoB) deflects any projectiles that are shot at it with an invisible barrier from r/Overwatch

The explanation for this is of course that it is a miracle, an act of divine providence by God to protect the world-famous statue Christ the Redeemer, or Cristo Redentor in the local Portuguese language.

Indeed, as evinced in the video, Christ’s divine protection extends not just to the statue itself but to the mountain it sits upon, Corcovado. In the…

I had some big gaming plans for the holiday break this year: I was finally going to start a second playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2, build a new city in Farthest Frontier, and grab some friends to dive into Lethal Company.

I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I just played poker-inspired deckbuilder Balatro. Every single day I sat on the couch with my Steam Deck and played it for at least a couple hours. And it wasn’t even the full game, just the demo, which I still managed to sink 30 hours into. That meant I was pretty bummed when that awesome demo got pulled off Steam by its developer, LocalThunk, on January 1.

Today I’m firing my Steam Deck up again because that deckbuilder demo is suddenly back, and it’s got a ton of new cards for you to try out—including nearly 40 brand new jokers. Even better, along with the return of the demo, LocalThunk’s poker roguelike also has a launch date: Balatro will release on February 20. Here’s the new trailer:

To quickly s…

Overwatch developers have cited Quake as an inspiration for the hero shooter’s design for years. It has jump pads and a hero who can rocket jump. But in its upcoming season, it’ll finally have an entire map that looks like it was ripped straight out of the classic arena shooter.

Earlier this year, Blizzard held a Twitch stream where viewers helped design a map for the game’s goofy arcade modes. That map, called Talantis, will be fully playable in a limited-time arcade mode starting on April 25.

Talantis is an underwater map consisting of suspended platforms and jump pads that can fling you between them. It’s Quake’s The Longest Yard map, but with giant fish circling around it. No matter where you go on it, you’re always a few steps away from falling into the abyss. Lucio and Wrecking Ball players keen on booping enemies off the edge will surely thrive here.

Season 4 will have a space opera-themed battle pass, including a customizable Galactic Emperor mythic skin fo…

One of our favourite pieces from the past 12 months. Originally published 22 July, 2022.

It takes a whole lot of GPU power to run today’s most powerful AI models. Even the most extreme gaming PC build wouldn’t be able to handle the kind of oomph needed to get the best AI Dungeon models up and running. In order for Latitude to power what’s essentially this less numbers-heavy, more free and creative online D&D campaign, you’d need something truly beastly.

According to Nick Walton, the CEO of Latitude and the software engineer who helped design the initial code for the D&D-inspired story generator, “If you wanted to run the largest AI for AI dungeon, you would need not just a high-powered GPU, but a cluster of eight or 16 massive high-powered GPUs.” Even those would need to be more powerful than the best graphics cards on the consumer market.

Language models such as AI Dungeon’s Dragon experience, based on the 178 billion par…

All the help you need to solve today’s Wordle is on this very page, whether you’re after a quick brush-up of your general skills or an easy win. There are tips, a clue written for the September 12 (815) puzzle, and of course, today’s Wordle answer ready and waiting to go.

Today’s puzzle turned out to be a real rollercoaster of emotions for me, veering from utter despair to four green letters, then from four green letters to please be the answer please oh thank goodness. Never has being almost completely right been so very wrong. Let’s hope tomorrow’s Wordle isn’t quite so stressful.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, September 12

If you were cooking or baking and needed to beat lots of air into some eggs, you’d probably use today’s answer to do so. This word can also mean to quickly take someone or something away to another place too. There’s only a single vowel to find today. 

ViewViewViewView

Is ther…

Remember the guy with the balls so big he sued Amazon and JRR Tolkien’s grandson, claiming they infringed on his Lord of the Rings fanfic with the Rings of Power TV series? In a shocking turn of events that no one (except literally everyone) saw coming, he lost badly and now owes the Tolkien estate $134,000 in legal fees.

The whole thing began back in 2017 when Demetrious Polychron registered his book, “The Fellowship of the King,” with the US Copyright office. He then sent a letter to Simon Tolkien, director of the Tolkien Estate and grandson of Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien, describing the book and requesting a review of the manuscript.

After receiving no response, he hired a lawyer in 2019 and contacted the Tolkien Estate again with another proposal to collaborate on the project. The estate quickly said “no,” at which point he personally delivered a copy of his manuscript to Simon Tolkien’s home for consideration. 

When that also went ignore…

Twitch has taken back a rule change it made just two days ago. After seeing what some streamers did with the freedom to stream “artistic depictions of nudity,” the site said it “went too far.”

The change was one of several adjustments to Twitch’s policies on sexual content and nudity made on Wednesday, and lifted a ban on “drawn, animated, or sculpted” depictions of breasts and genitals. The adjustment was intended to permit Twitch’s community of visual artists to share their depictions of the human figure.

Some of the spicy streams that followed violated even the relaxed rules, says Twitch. (Depictions of “fictionalized sexual acts” were still prohibited, for example.) But some of the imagery that was allowed under the new guidelines was “met with community concern,” the company said in a blog post today. 

Dexerto, for instance, declared that Twitch’s art category had been “overrun by explicit furry and anime content,” although that’s not what Twitch specific…