Samsung has officially confirmed that the Galaxy S25 series will be using the Snapdragon 8 Elite from Qualcomm in all regions, and with satellite connectivity too.
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Announced alongside the Galaxy S25 and new Gemini features, the Circle to Search redesign is beginning to roll out today.
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Extremely OK Games has cancelled its upcoming game Earthblade. The followup to the team's beloved indie sensation Celeste was announced in 2022 and expected to release last year. Maddy Thorson announced the news on the studio's website today.
"Noel and I…began to reflect on how the game has felt for us to work on day-to-day, and realized that it has been a struggle for a long time," she wrote. "Sure, working on one project for so long is bound to become a slog, but this feels like a deeper problem. Celeste's success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting."
The studio, led by Thorson and Noel Berry, parted ways with EXOK co-founder Pedro Medeiros in November. However, Thorson was clear in her message that the rift between team members was not the reason for cancelling Earthblade. In fact, all of the public conversation between the former colleagues thus far has remained amicable. Thorson offered firm support for Medeiros and his new game project Neverway in her post: "If you were excited about Earthblade and angry about its cancelling, Pedro and the Neverway team aren't the enemy and anyone who treats them as such isn't welcome in any EXOK community."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/extremely-ok-games-has-cancelled-its-follow-up-to-celeste-000352550.html?src=rss©
© Extremely OK Games
Tumbler has finally launched Tumblr TV as a new tab at the top of its app, the company said today in a brief set of update notes spotted by TechCrunch. Tumblr TV first debuted as a GIF-finding feature in 2015, but now it includes video content as well.
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Screenshot: Tumblr TV
According to Tumblr, “New users will have this tab enabled by default in the third position, while existing users will have it available in the Dashboard Tabs configuration, if not already enabled.”
When you tap the Tumblr TV tab, you’ll see a grid of videos and GIFs. Once you tap one, you can like, comment, repost, or share it, and when you’re ready to see something else, you can swipe up to move on.
In my very brief testing, it’s still very GIF-heavy despite the inclusion of video and a swipe interface similar to other short-form video apps.
It could be tempting to compare Tumblr TV to TikTok, especially in light of its recent shutdown, but right now, it’s more like scrolling a group text full of GIFs.
The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was then stolen by a totally unrelated real AI spam farm where it has gone megaviral and was ‘loved’ by the Meta CEO.
Called “chałkoń” or “challah horse,” the image was part of a series of AI-generated images created by a Polish news outlet called Donald.pl, which pilloried the AI spam that has taken over Facebook. “This woman baked a challah horse but no one congratulated her,” a page run by Donald called Polska w duźych dawkach (Poland in Large Doses) wrote on January 7.
The image was designed as a commentary on AI spam on Facebook, the outlet wrote. But like other AI spam, some people believed it was real, and the image was seen by more than a million people and liked 11,000 times. The English-language, subscriber-funded Noted From Poland originally wrote about this drama if you’d like to learn more.
“As you all probably know, Facebook has been inundated with generic AI content targeted at older people and naive people,” Donald’s Poland in Large Doses wrote in a follow up post. “The text ‘someone made an X but no one congratulated him’ has basically become a meme … a few days ago, for fun, we decided to post Challah Horse in the same format, but Challah Horse turned out to be a beast whose power we didn't appreciate.”
O tym, jak zchałkowaliśmy polski internet, chociaż nie planowaliśmy
— donald.pl (@donald_PL_) January 20, 2025
Chałkonia pewnie widział już każdy, chociaż może nie każdy pogratulował. Zaczęta przez nas akcja z początku miała być żartem, satyrą z zalewu Facebooka marnej jakości grafikami generowanymi przez AI, a… pic.twitter.com/v7aFdtK69N
“In the comments there were non-ironic congratulations for the creator of Challah Horse, mainly from older people, mixed with jokes and (thankfully) warnings that it was made with AI. We post all sorts of things, from memes to jokes about Polish politics. But in the end it turned out that Challah Horse went viral … If such an obvious Challah Horse works, then imagine what reach can be obtained with posts aimed for specific target groups, e.g. old people. Such ‘like farms’ can then be used in hundreds of ways and influence specific groups.”
Challah Horse quickly became a meme on the Polish internet, with companies like Ikea, OLX Polska (a classifieds website), Zabka (a convenience store), mBank (a bank), and others making their own AI-generated versions of the Challah Horse, and various Polish news outlets covering it. There was also an AI-generated video about Challah Horse warning about the dangers of AI-generated media. A real Polish baker baked a real Challah Crocodile, even.
Donald did a follow up post highlighting some of these memes, and said “the campaign was initially supposed to be a joke, a satire on the flood of AI spam on Facebook. But it eventually spread like hot cakes and won the hearts of marketers …. We would like the original meaning of this whole undertaking not to be lost. Challah Horse is not just a meme, but a warning. Because while everyone is making fun of Challah Horse, ‘like farms’ are preying on the naivety of older and more susceptible people.”
As I mentioned in my first piece on this, the origin of bread sculpture AI comes from a real image from the 2010s that went viral on the Russian internet of a man who built a house out of bread. That image has been ripped off thousands of times and has eventually morphed into what is now known as Challah Horse.
With all of this context, it is perhaps even wilder that an actual Facebook AI spam page stole the Challah Horse image, reposted it and has gotten more than three million reactions, 210,000 comments, and 107,000 shares. It is wilder still that the CEO of the entire platform is one of the people who “loved” the image.
With its new Galaxy S25 series, Samsung is finally adding Qi2 support. Sort of. You’ll need a case to take full advantage of it, and Spigen’s new cases are ready and compatible with Qi2 on the Galaxy S25 series, and taking things a step to solve a big problem.
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Earthblade, the next game from the developers of Celeste, has been canceled. The fantasy-inspired game got its first trailer in late 2022, and the game would have let you explore a “free-roaming, dynamically-loading map,” Extremely OK Games’ Maddy Thorson said at the time. But the team decided to cancel the game in December after a team conflict and because of the pressure of trying to follow up on Celeste, Thorson says in a post detailing what happened.
The “disagreement” was between Thorson and Noel Berry (Thorson refers to the two of them as “us”) and Pedro Medeiros over “the IP rights of Celeste,” Thorson says. “We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways,” and Medeiros is currently working on a game called Neverway. “Losing Pedro wasn’t the only factor in cancelling the game, but it did prompt us to take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” Thorson says.
The huge success of Celeste also “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” Thorson says. “Pedro isn’t to blame for this — in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”
Thorson and Berry want to refocus on “smaller-scale projects” and are “prototyping again” to try and “rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste’s or TowerFall’s inception.”
Ten video games have received nominations for the 36th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. This program celebrates media works that feature "fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community and the issues that affect their lives." There are nominees for television, film, music, theater, journalism and comics as well as video games.
One of the 2024 nominees for outstanding video game is the re-release of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door for the Nintendo Switch. The original Japanese version of the GameCube title included a minor character named Vivian who was transgender. The game contained dialogue about her challenges being misgendered and her journey to understanding her own identity. However, the 2002 international translations of the game, including the English version released in the US, erased that side to the character, removing language around Vivian's gender and pronouns. Last year's Switch re-release restored the character's original lines and story arc for English-speaking players to finally experience.
The video game nominees also include Dragon Age: The Veilguard. BioWare has a long history of portraying queer characters and romance options in their games, and it's great to see them continuing that practice with the latest title. Horror film outfit Blumhouse's first foray into games, the fascinating indie project Fear the Spotlight, also received a nod. Here is the complete list of game nominees:
Caravan SandWitch (Studio Plane Toast / Dear Villagers)
Dragon Age: The Veilguard (BioWare / Electronic Arts)
Dread Delusion (Lovely Hellplace / DreadXP)
Dustborn (Red Thread Games / Spotlight by Quantic Dream)
Fear the Spotlight (Cozy Game Pals / Blumhouse Games)
Life is Strange: Double Exposure (Deck Nine / Square Enix)
Minds Beneath Us (BearBone Studio)
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Intelligent Systems / Nintendo)
Sorry We’re Closed (à la mode games / Akupara Games)
Until Then (Polychroma Games / Maximum Entertainment)
©
© Nintendo
First unveiled at CES earlier this month, Google TV has announced that it will begin rolling out an experimental feature, “News Briefs,” which is powered by Gemini.
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NASA's acting administrator is moving swiftly to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—programs from the space agency.
In an email sent to agency employees on Wednesday afternoon, acting administrator Janet Petro wrote, "We are taking steps to close all agency DEIA offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions."
During his run for a second term as president, Trump campaigned on ending programs in the federal government that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. He signed executive orders to that effect shortly after his inauguration on Monday.
© HUM Images/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Just a day after dismissing rumors about an imminent launch, The Information reported this evening that OpenAI is moving closer to its goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing a system capable of performing like a seasoned software engineer. […]
The post OpenAI targets AGI with system that thinks like a pro engineer, a day after dismissing rumors of an imminent launch first appeared on Tech Startups.
Nvidia has posted a new video showcasing a history of Founders Edition graphics card designs that explores the design of its new RTX 5090 and confirms a previously leaked prototype that used an unconventionally large four-slot design.
As noted by VideoCardz, the prototype “Titan ADA” card first revealed by leaker Kopite7kimi included a triple-fan cooling system, and earlier this month, Gamers Nexus tested and tore down a working version of the prototype.
In the video published today, Nvidia’s EVP of system products, Andrew Bell, explains that Nvidia cards were trending larger and larger, and they wanted to change that. “We didn’t like the idea of it taking up four slots; it was big, it was unwieldy, it worked in a limited number of chassis,” Bell said.
Bell says that the prototype triple-fan cooling system influenced Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture. However, the latest RTX 5090 Founders Edition card that we are currently testing achieves its goals through a modular four-part design with a separate I/O board that allows air to flow through for a more efficient and compact cooler. According to Nvidia, these changes are why the new 5090 fits in two slots on the motherboard compared to the previous three-slot 4090.
