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:

• Echo: The Oracle's Scroll for $6, down from $8.

• Angel Pop for $4, down from $6.

• Mars After Midnight for $3, down from $6.

• Summit for $4, down from $6.

• Reel-istic Fishing for $5, down from $8.

• Under the Castle for $6, down from $10.

• Core Fault for $3, down from $6.

• You're Gonna Miss the Bus! for $3, down from $6.

• The Keyper for $1, down from $3.

• You Cannot Go Back! for $1, down from $3.

• Penrose for $1, down from $2.

• Four Corners for $3, down from $6.

• The Botanist for $6, down from $9.

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

©

© Panic

If you’re a heavy Mastodon user (or were a Twitter user back in the good old days), you’re probably familiar with Tapbots – the company behind the popular Ivory and Tweetbot apps. The developers now have some good news to share with Bluesky users, as they announced this week that they’ve been working on a new app for the platform.

more…

Read 'Dekar Druid and the Infinite Library' by Cadwell Turnbull, author of The Lesson; No Gods, No Monsters; and We Are the Crisis.

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

©

© Anadolu via Getty Images

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:

Read full article

Comments

Chip designer delivers upbeat results amid broad decline in tech shares

SpaceX’s Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test flight on 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 […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

After the EU forced Apple to implement major changes to how iOS and the App Store work for European users, other countries have also conducted their own antitrust investigations against the company. Now the Brazilian court has ruled that Apple has 90 days to allow sideloading on iOS for iPhone users in Brazil.

more…

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.

Read full article

Comments

© Eugene Mymrin via Getty Images

English-speaking Gundam fans won’t have to wait long before they can stream dubbed versions of the franchise’s newest (and most difficult to pronounce) series.

Today, Amazon Prime announced that it has secured the rights to stream dubbed and subbed versions of Gundam GQuuuuuuX, a new show produced by studio Khara, directed by Kazyua Tsurumaki, and co-written by Hideaki Anno and Yōji Enokido. Beginning April 8th, Amazon will begin streaming Gundam GQuuuuuuX in over over 240 countries as new episodes of the show simultaneously debut on Japanese television. GQuuuuuuX making its Western debut on Amazon tracks with the streamer’s recent moves to add highly-anticipated, Japanese animation like Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back and Khara’s Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time to its catalog.

Tsurumaki — who previously directed the original FLCL anime — said in a statement that it was an honor to work on GQuuuuuuX and that he was excited for Western fans to see what his creative team has cooked up.

“FLCL was enjoyed by many fans overseas, which brought me great joy,” Tsurumaki said. “Now, after all these years, I am truly delighted to be able to present this new title through digital streaming. I sincerely hope audiences around the world will watch and enjoy it.”

Following yesterday’s announcement, Google is rolling out early access to Search’s new AI Mode experiment for Google One AI Premium subscribers.

more…

Tired of the restrictions imposed on streaming platforms? Here's an unbeatable and affordable solution.

Daredevil: Born Again kicked off with a banger this week—and a series of events that has fans scrambling to the comics for answers.

It was a swing and a miss for the first private attempt at an asteroid mission, but the company is still chalking it up as a win. California startup AstroForge launched a spacecraft dubbed Odin on February 26, but the team lost communication with it shortly after its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

"The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue," the company said in its extensive debrief of the mission. Technical issues occurred at its primary ground station in Australia, but AstroForge said that other problems also could have occurred on Odin to further prevent establishing contact.

Although the launch was a bust, AstroForge maintained optimism about the project as a valuable learning experience for its eventual goal of creating and operating an asteroid mining vehicle. The company is targeting the asteroid 2022 OB5, with the aim of eventually landing on its surface and extracting potentially valuable resources. Odin was built in 10 months for $3.5 million, a sliver of the money and time federal space projects have taken to complete.

AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich had several quotes in the debrief, all peppered with expletives, and he summed up the company ethos as, "At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/the-first-private-asteroid-mission-probe-is-probably-lost-in-deep-space-224803775.html?src=rss

©

© Intuitive Machines

Oracle's federal electronic health record experienced a nation-wide outage on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed to CNBC.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to vote on an inquiry to explore alternatives to GPS, FCC chair Brendan Carr says in a blog post.

Carr says that while GPS has been “indispensable,” the technology “isn’t infallible” and that “disruptions to GPS have the potential to undermine the nation’s economic and national security.” Carr says that “we need to develop redundant technologies,” which is why the FCC will “vote on an inquiry to explore other Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) systems” that can serve as “complements or alternatives” to GPS.

In addition to GPS, Carr also says the commission will vote on two proposals regarding 911 technology. One is “a proposal to update our existing rules to ensure the resiliency, reliability, interoperability, and accessibility” of “Next Generation 911,” or NG911, which is internet-connected emergency tech that will eventually replace legacy 911 systems.

Another is a proposal to “strengthen our 911 location accuracy rules” to potentially improve the information first responders receive about a person’s location, including the ability to more accurately find callers on specific floors in buildings.

The issues are tentatively on the agenda for the FCC’s open meeting on March 27th.

Google co-founder Larry Page is building a new company called Dynatomics that’s focused on applying AI to product manufacturing, according to The Information. Page is reportedly working with a small group of engineers on AI that can create “highly optimized” designs for objects and then have a factory build them, per The Information. Chris Anderson, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Intuitive Machines has landed a second spacecraft on the moon, just one year after accomplishing the feat for the first time ever. Unfortunately, much like that first attempt, it seems the company’s spacecraft may have tipped on its side. The lunar lander, called Athena, touched down on the moon’s surface at around 12:30 p.m. ET […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google seems to be preparing support for Gemini on Android Auto, as well as the more conversational Gemini Live experience.

more…

We’re still over a year away from Apple’s first foldable iPhone launching. But per one analyst’s new report, prior rumors have apparently had a key detail of the foldable wrong. Thanks to the latest reveal, the new iPhone ‘Fold’ makes a lot more sense than before.

more…