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Apple has 90 days to allow app sideloading in Brazil

Apple has been told it has to allow alternative app stores on iOS in Brazil within 90 days, as reported by Brazilian publication Valor International and 9to5Mac. Apple has already been forced to allow third-party app stores on iOS in the EU due to the Digital Markets Act.

The judge who issued today’s ruling said that “Apple has already complied with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model,” Valor reports.

Brazil’s investigation into Apple began with a complaint filed by Mercado Livre in 2022. In November, Brazil gave Apple 20 days to let developers offer alternative in-app payment options and allow sideloading, but in early December, the injunction was overturned.

The company plans to appeal the ruling, according to a machine translation of Valor’s article. Apple says in a statement to Valor that it “believes in vibrant and competitive markets where innovation can flourish” and that “we face competition in all segments and jurisdictions where we operate, and our focus is always the trust of our users.” Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge.

Turing raises $111M in funding to accelerate AGI advancement, hits $2.2B valuation

Turing, an AI infrastructure startup accelerating the advancement and deployment of AI systems, has secured $111 million in Series E funding, bringing its valuation to $2.2 billion. The round was led by Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, with […]

The post Turing raises $111M in funding to accelerate AGI advancement, hits $2.2B valuation first appeared on Tech Startups.

Intuitive Machines’ second attempt to land on the Moon also went sideways

Inside a small control room, during the middle of the day on Thursday local time in Texas, about a dozen white-knuckled engineers at a space startup named Intuitive Machines started to get worried. Their spacecraft, a lander named Athena, was beginning its final descent down to the lunar surface.

A little more than a year had passed since the company's first attempt to land on the Moon with a similarly built vehicle, Odysseus. Due to problems with that spacecraft's laser rangefinder, it skidded into the Moon's surface and toppled over.

So engineers at Intuitive Machines had checked, and re-checked the laser-based altimeters on Athena. When the lander got down within about 30 km of the lunar surface, they tested the rangefinders again. Worryingly, there was some noise in the readings as the laser bounced off the Moon. However, the engineers had reason to believe that, maybe, the readings would improve as the spacecraft got nearer to the surface.

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A big Playdate sale discounts 13 of our favorite games

It's the second anniversary of the Playdate's Catalog game store and to celebrate, you can get a bunch of great Playdate games and apps at a healthy discount — in many cases for 50 percent off or more.

The sale starts today, March 6, and ends on March 10 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Over 150 Playdate games are on sale, but if you're looking for a good place to start, 13 titles from our list of the best Playdate games are currently discounted:

That's on top of other great options you can buy, like the fast-paced puzzle game XTRIS for $3, historical RPG Quest for X for $1 or roguelite mining game SpaceRat Miner for $6. Panic, the creators of the Playdate, introduced Catalog as a supplement to the Playdate's first "Season" of games when it was still uncertain if another one was going to happen. The tiny handheld supports sideloading games from third-party stores like Itch, but Catalog offers a more curated selection if you don't want to spend time finding something good. 

Now that Panic's confirmed that a second season of Playdate games is on the way in 2025, this Catalog sale is a perfect opportunity to stock up on anything you might have missed before the new season launches.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-big-playdate-sale-discounts-13-of-our-favorite-games-000040558.html?src=rss

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© Panic

A graphic showing the Catalog Sale and some images from games.

Instagram is experimenting with a Discord-like ‘community chat’ feature

It seems that Instagram is working on a “community chat” feature that allows people to organize groups of up to 250 people in the app. The so-far unreleased feature was spotted by developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who has a solid track record of uncovering new features within Meta’s apps.

According to screenshots shared by Paluzzi, it seems that community chats will function similarly to Discord. Individual users can form the chats around specific topics and control who can join, though there’s apparently a limit of 250 people per community.

Unlike Instagram’s broadcast channels, which allow creators to blast out messages to their followers, anyone who is in the community chat can participate in the conversation. There are also built-in moderation features. “Admins can remove messages and members to keep the channel safe,” the screenshot says. “We also review Community Chat against our Community Standards.”

It’s not clear when, or if, the feature may launch. An Instagram spokesperson described it as an internal prototype that’s not being tested outside the company. But Meta has previously released similar features in its other apps. WhatsApp began experimenting with a “Communities” feature in 2022, and brought “Community Chats” to Facebook and Messenger later that same year. Mark Zuckerberg said at the time it was meant to help people find “a new way to connect with people who share your interests.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-is-experimenting-with-a-discord-like-community-chat-feature-234832236.html?src=rss

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ANKARA, TURKIYE - DECEMBER 1: In this photo illustration, logo of 'Instagram' is displayed on a wide screen in Ankara, Turkiye on December 1, 2023. (Photo by Didem Mente/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

Here at Ars, we've written frequently about the video game industry's ongoing problem with blatant game cloning, and the shifting legal and ethical landscape around the issue. But we've rarely seen a case of alleged game theft as blatant as the one surrounding recent iOS App Store hit My Baby or Not!, which appears to cross the line from mere cloning into outright code theft of recent indie web game Diapers, Please!.

The small, five-person development team at VoltekPlay created Diapers, Please! as part of a recent one-week Game Jam. The game was posted as a free-to-play HTML5 release on itch.io on February 23, featuring simple gameplay that involves choosing a baby that matches the visual traits of two pictured parents (with a little bit of Papers, Please-style authoritarian styling to boot).

Three days later, on February 26, My Baby or Not! appeared on the App Store, with screenshots and gameplay that looked not just similar but downright identical to the Diapers, Please! web release. The two games even shared the same description:

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SpaceX Starship spirals out of control in second straight test flight failure

SpaceX’s Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test flight Thursday, marking the second launch in a row that the vehicle has run into a fatal problem on its way to orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly halted flights into major Florida airports and appears to have diverted some others out of […]

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CMU research shows compression alone may unlock AI puzzle-solving abilities

A pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently discovered hints that the process of compressing information can solve complex reasoning tasks without pre-training on a large number of examples. Their system tackles some types of abstract pattern-matching tasks using only the puzzles themselves, challenging conventional wisdom about how machine learning systems acquire problem-solving abilities.

"Can lossless information compression by itself produce intelligent behavior?" ask Isaac Liao, a first-year PhD student, and his advisor Professor Albert Gu from CMU's Machine Learning Department. Their work suggests the answer might be yes. To demonstrate, they created CompressARC and published the results in a comprehensive post on Liao's website.

The pair tested their approach on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC-AGI), an unbeaten visual benchmark created in 2019 by machine learning researcher François Chollet to test AI systems' abstract reasoning skills. ARC presents systems with grid-based image puzzles where each provides several examples demonstrating an underlying rule, and the system must infer that rule to apply it to a new example.

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