In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.

"I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."

In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya").

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On Tuesday, the team behind the plan to bring mammoth-like animals back to the tundra announced the creation of what it is calling wooly mice, which have long fur reminiscent of the woolly mammoth. The long fur was created through the simultaneous editing of as many as seven genes, all with a known connection to hair growth, color, and/or texture.

But don't think that this is a sort of mouse-mammoth hybrid. Most of the genetic changes were first identified in mice, not mammoths. So, the focus is on the fact that the team could do simultaneous editing of multiple genes—something that they'll need to be able to do to get a considerable number of mammoth-like changes into the elephant genome.

Of mice and mammoths

The team at Colossal Biosciences has started a number of de-extinction projects, including the dodo and thylacine, but its flagship project is the mammoth. In all of these cases, the plan is to take stem cells from a closely related species that has not gone extinct, and edit a series of changes based on the corresponding genomes of the deceased species. In the case of the mammoth, that means the elephant.

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US Health Secretary and long-standing anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing criticism for his equivocal response to the raging measles outbreak in West Texas, which as of Tuesday has grown to 159 cases, with 22 hospitalizations and one child death.

While public health officials would like to see a resounding endorsement of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine as the best way to protect children and vulnerable community members from further spread of the extremely infectious virus, Kennedy instead penned an Op-Ed for Fox News sprinkled with anti-vaccine talking points. Before noting that vaccines "protect individual children" and "contribute to community immunity," he stressed parental choice. The decision to vaccinate is "a personal one," he wrote, and merely advised parents to "consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine."

Further, Kennedy seemed more eager to embrace nutrition and supplements as a way to combat the potentially deadly infection. He declared that the "best defense" against infectious diseases, like the measles, is "good nutrition"—not lifesaving, highly effective vaccines.

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Most readers come away from George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984 with the same singular desire: to inhabit the world of the book by playing a late '90s first-person puzzle-adventure PC game that includes a "zero-g training sphere" for some reason. In 1998, publisher MediaX set out to satisfy that widespread literary desire with Big Brother, an officially licensed "sequel" game set in the 1984 universe.

After appearing as a demo at E3 1998 and receiving some scattered press coverage, the Big Brother project fell apart before the game could see a full release. Now, though, you can experience a small taste of this ill-fated literary sequel thanks to a newly unearthed demo that was recovered and posted to the Internet Archive over the weekend.

War is Peace

The Lost Media Wiki has a bit more info on the history of Big Brother, which was announced in May 1998 as the first game ever from multimedia CD-ROM maker MediaX. In that announcement, the company said the game would move focus away from 1984's Winston Smith and to new character Eric Blair, who's on a search for his missing fiancée Emma (sure, why not) in "a completely changed world dominated by the Thought Police."

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Three critical vulnerabilities in multiple virtual-machine products from VMware can give hackers unusually broad access to some of the most sensitive environments inside multiple customers’ networks, the company and outside researchers warned Tuesday.

The class of attack made possible by exploiting the vulnerabilities is known under several names, including hyperjacking, hypervisor attack, or virtual machine escape. Virtual machines often run inside hosting environments to prevent one customer from being able to access or control the resources of other customers. By breaking out of one customer’s isolated VM environment, a threat actor could take control of the hypervisor that apportions each VM. From there, the attacker could access the VMs of multiple customers, who often use these carefully controlled environments to host their internal networks.

All bets off

“If you can escape to the hypervisor you can access every system,” security researcher Kevin Beaumont said on Mastodon. “If you can escape to the hypervisor, all bets are off as a boundary is broken.” He added: “With this vuln you’d be able to use it to traverse VMware managed hosting providers, private clouds orgs have built on prem etc.”

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There's little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It's possible to perceive both images by shifting one's perspective, but it's the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.

But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.

In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the "rabbit-duck illusion," in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one's perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.

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Apple reportedly filed an appeal in hopes of overturning a secret UK order requiring it to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data.

"The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter," the Financial Times reported today. The case "is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court," the article said.

A Washington Post report last month said UK security officials "demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud," including "blanket capability to view fully encrypted material."

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Google's AI ambitions know no bounds. A new report claims Google's next phones will herald the arrival of a feature called Pixel Sense that will ingest data from virtually every Google app on your phone, fueling a new personalized experience. This app could be the premiere feature of the Pixel 10 series expected out late this year.

According to a report from Android Authority, Pixel Sense is the new name for Pixie, an AI that was supposed to integrate with Google Assistant before Gemini became the center of Google's universe. In late 2023, it looked as though Pixie would be launched on the Pixel 9 series, but that never happened. Now, it's reportedly coming back as Pixel Sense, and we have more details on how it might work.

Pixel Sense will apparently be able to leverage data you create in apps like Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Keep Notes, Recorder, Wallet, and almost every other Google app. It can also process media files like screenshots in the same way the Pixel Screenshots app currently does. The goal of collecting all this data is to help you complete tasks faster by suggesting content, products, and names by understanding the context of how you use the phone. Pixel Sense will essentially try to predict what you need without being prompted.

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Three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are due to return home on a Crew Dragon spacecraft in a couple of weeks. For two of the crew members, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, it has been a long, strange trip.

To recap:

• Wilmore and Williams launch on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024
• During Starliner's flight to the International Space Station, the vehicle has thruster issues and helium leaks
• In August, NASA announces Starliner will return to Earth uncrewed due to unresolved technical issues
• Crew 9 mission launches with just two astronauts, NASA's Nick Hague and Russia's Aleksandr Gorbunov, in late September
• Wilmore and Williams join Crew 9, extending their flight from eight days to more than eight months
• After SpaceX experiences a development issue with a Crew Dragon, Crew 9's return is delayed a month more, to March
• In February 2025, Elon Musk and Donald Trump politicize Wilmore and Williams' long-duration stay
• When a European astronaut calls Musk out for his "lie" about this, Musk replies, "You are fully retarded."
• Musk recommends space station be deorbited as soon as 2027, three years ahead of schedule.

On Tuesday Wilmore, Williams, and Hague participated from orbit in a news conference with reporters. What is notable about the news conference is that it marks the first time any NASA official—a handful of previously scheduled media availabilities have been canceled—has been on the record with media since the politicization of Crew 9's return and Musk's call to deorbit the space station early.

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President Trump's 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect today, and the White House increased a tariff on China from 10 to 20 percent in an executive order. Canada, Mexico, and China announced retaliatory moves, and stock markets sank globally.

Industry groups and companies have warned the Trump tariffs will raise prices for cars, groceries, consumer technology, and other products.

Canada was hit with a 10 percent tariff on energy exports to the US, while other Canadian exports are subject to the 25 percent tariff. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose 25 percent tariffs on over $100 billion worth of US goods.

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It's time for Google's newest Pixel Drop update, which will deliver a batch of enhancements to the company's smartphones. Pixel Drops, which arrive quarterly, refine and expand the features on Pixel phones. This probably won't come as a surprise, but AI plays a big role in the changes rolling out to Pixels this time around. There are also some new connectivity and photography options.

A long-overdue update is coming to Google's Pixel Studio app, which is preinstalled on the Pixel 9 series. The app lets you generate AI images, but person generation was not available at launch because of well-documented problems with the Imagen 3 model's penchant for diversity. Google re-enabled person generation on the web about six months ago, but Pixel Studio is just now gaining this ability.

Google's AI will also begin butting in if it suspects a caller or message is attempting to scam you. Google says this feature (previously available as a limited beta) is not foolproof, as scammers often change up their tactics. However, it may help catch some of the less sophisticated scams that regularly ensnare your less technologically literate family and friends. This feature will be available in Google Messages with the Pixel 6 and later, but the phone call scam detection will require a Pixel 9 because it uses on-device AI features that only exist on Google's latest phones. That makes it a little less creepy.

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It's not the update that most Apple watchers were hoping for, but today, Apple announced upgrades to two of its iPads, including the standard iPad and the quirky middle child, the iPad Air.

The iPad Air moves up from an M2 in last year's Air refresh to an M3 chip, which is capable of Apple Intelligence and more graphics rendering. The Magic Keyboard gets a new layout with a larger trackpad and a physical function key row.

That's a notable upgrade for anybody doing real, portable-minded work with an iPad, but there's even better news: The new Magic Keyboard with those physical keys is backward-compatible with previous iPad Airs: 4th and 5th generation, 11-inch M2 and M3, and 13-inch M2 and M3 models (better news, that is, if you're good with the $270 price).

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Federal health policies and decisions are quickly becoming less transparent under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—despite him telling Health Department employees just last month that he would work with them to "launch a new era of radical transparency."

Since then, Kennedy has axed a public meeting on vaccines—leaving lingering questions about the future of those transparent proceedings. He has also revoked a broad transparency policy for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that required public notice for certain new rules and a comment period to allow for the public to be involved with the rulemaking process. Revoking the policy could have sweeping effects. For instance, HHS could now change Medicaid requirements with no notice or change federal research grants without input from the research community—something the Trump administration has already tried to do before it was put on hold by a federal judge.

Rolling back public participation

On Monday, Kennedy published the new policy in the Federal Register, which specifically revoked a transparency rule adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1971. The rule—called the Richardson Waiver, after then-Health Secretary Elliot Richardson—required HHS to have public notice-and-comment periods for proposed rules and policies regarding certain matters, namely public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts. These five categories would otherwise have been exempt from public notice-and-comment requirements under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The APA also says that public notice-and-comment periods can be waived for "good cause."

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Early on Monday morning, a bank of Tesla Superchargers went up in flames in Littleton, Massachusetts. While the cause of the fire is unknown, Tesla's Superchargers are not known for bursting into flames, and a $5,000 reward is being offered by the authorities, who believe the fire was "intentionally set." Assuming that arson is to blame, this may well be one more attack against a brand that's becoming more and more toxic.

Elon Musk's involvement with US President Donald Trump has changed the nature of the spotlight on the Tesla CEO. Instead of cute cameos in Marvel movies and being name-checked by Star Trek, Musk now makes headlines for boosting far-right politics in Europe and suggesting cuts to Social Security. This has made him some new friends, but it has lost many more in the process. And the consequences for Tesla's core business—selling electric cars—have been disastrous.

2024 was already a not-good year for the automaker. A decade ago, it was basically the only game in town if you wanted an electric car that could go more than 200 miles between charges, and celebrities and tastemakers flocked to the brand in droves. Now, customers are spoiled for choice, and Tesla's model range—effectively just two cars—has to compete against all the established OEMs that are increasingly working out how to build great EVs, plus all those Chinese startups that appear to have cracked that market in terms of what customers want and how to make it cheap.

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In the past decade, Americans have become increasingly aware that climate change is harming the health of people in the US, according to a new survey.

The survey, which was conducted in December and released Friday, also shows increased trust in physicians, climate scientists, federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, local public health departments and the World Health Organization for providing information about the health harms of global warming.

These sources of information are under threat: President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed cutting most of the EPA’s budget and initiated mass firings at the CDC, taken down climate and health information from government websites, frozen or revoked funding for some climate research and interventions, stalled environmental justice initiatives, and proposed rescinding a 16-year-old federal finding that mandates government action on greenhouse gases. Trump also withdrew the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord.

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"4090 performance at $549."

That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had previously existed for around one-third the price.

Let's dispel that notion up front. No, the GeForce RTX 5070 is not as fast as an RTX 4090, not without some very creative comparing of non-comparable numbers. Per usual for the 50-series, Nvidia is leaning on its AI-generated interpolated frames for the bulk of its claimed performance improvements. In terms of actual rendering speed, the 5070 isn’t even as fast as a 4080 or a 4070 Ti. It’s barely faster than last year’s 4070 Super, and it has disproportionately higher power usage.

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Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, experts have debated how widely AI language models would impact the world. A few years later, the picture is getting clear. According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications. It's having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of the United States.

"Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications," wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3 million job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases.

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Striking a four-year deal with President Donald Trump, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plans to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the US, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

According to "people familiar with the matter," Trump will officially announce the deal later today. While still unconfirmed, TSMC's supposed investment comes after OpenAI and Apple announced similarly vague plans to each invest $500 billion into the US in apparent efforts to get on Trump's good side. It's hard to tell if these plans are actually new or if companies had already planned to invest heavily without outside pressure, WSJ noted.

It's undeniable that expanding TSMC's US presence has long been a goal for the US. TSMC announced its first fab in 2020, initially committing $12 billion over 10 years. Since then, TSMC's investments over time have expanded, reaching $40 billion by 2022. Last year, its investments notched up again when TSMC was awarded $6.6 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS Act to "support the company’s planned investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Phoenix, Arizona," the Commerce Department press release said. At that time, Joe Biden had promised those fabs would "manufacture the most advanced chips in the world," putting the US "on track to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors by 2030."

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Anthony and Joe Russo have their hands full these days with the Marvel films Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret War, slated for 2026 and 2027 releases, respectively. But we'll get a chance to see another, smaller film from the directors this month on Netflix: The Electric State, adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag.

Stålenhag's stunningly surreal neofuturistic art—featured in his narrative art books, 2014's Tales from the Loop and 2016's Things From the Flood—inspired the 2020 eight-episode series Tales From the Loop, in which residents of a rural town find themselves grappling with strange occurrences thanks to the presence of an underground particle accelerator. That adaptation captured the mood and tone of the art that inspired it and received Emmy nominations for cinematography and special visual effects.

The Electric State was Stålenhag's third such book, published in 2018 and set in a similar dystopian, ravaged landscape. Paragraphs of text, accompanied by larger artworks, tell the story of a teen girl named Michelle who must travel across the country with her robot companion to find her long-lost brother, while being pursued by a federal agent. The Russo brothers acquired the rights early on and initially intended to make the film with Universal, but when the studio decided it would not be giving the film a theatrical release, Netflix bought the distribution rights.

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Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game.

Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination of puzzle game, light capitalism horror, and the most memorable introductory-level computer science, chemistry, or logistics class into which you unwittingly enrolled. Each game is its own thing, but they have a certain similar brain feel between them. It is summed up perhaps best by the Zachtronics team itself in a book: Zach-Like.

Barth and his crew have made other kinds of games, including a forward-looking visual novel about AI, Eliza, and multiplayer card battler Nerts!. And Barth himself told PC Gamer that he hates "saying Zach-like." But fans of refining inputs, ordering operations, and working their way past constraints will thrill to learn that Zach is, in fact, back.

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