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Labor Day is coming and we’ve tracked down all the best early Labor Day Chromebook deals so you can save big already.

For extra protection for your Google Pixel 9 Pro, it might be wise to purchase a screen protector as well. Here are best on the market.

With Yellowstone’s return only a few short months away, the Paramount Network has unveiled the first images from season 5, part 2.

Nintendo has stopped offering repairs for the New Nintendo 3DS. While it’s unsurprising for a company to end support for hardware that’s a decade old, the reason in this case is that Nintendo has simply run out of parts. The news circulated in a translated social media post from the company’s Japanese support team.

Time is also running out for official repairs of the Nintendo 2DS and New Nintendo 3DS LL (known as the XL model in the US). Nintendo said it will stop offering repairs on those handhelds when they likewise deplete their stock of replacement parts.

Nintendo stopped manufacturing the entire 3DS line in 2020. The handhelds had a long and impactful run as the game company’s leading handheld. The New 3DS and New 3DS XL shipped 9.94 million units globally at the close of 2016, while the entire 3DS family’s sales reached 75.94 million by 2020.

For the time being, US customers can still take advantage of Nintendo’s repair service for late-model 3DS XLs. New 3DS owners can still attempt the DIY approach if their handhelds break. Third-party repair platform iFixit currently has a stock of replacement parts and guides for the handheld in its online catalog. But as with any piece of hardware that’s getting along in years, it might be wise to exercise a little extra care when you use it. Just like the 3DS eShop, nothing lasts forever.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-cant-repair-your-new-3ds-because-it-ran-out-of-parts-192615658.html?src=rss

OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to share AI models — before and after release — with the US AI Safety Institute. The agency, established through an executive order by President Biden in 2023, will offer safety feedback to the companies to improve their models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hinted at the agreement earlier this month.

“Safety is essential to fueling breakthrough technological innovation. With these agreements in place, we look forward to beginning our technical collaborations with Anthropic and OpenAI to advance the science of AI safety,” Elizabeth Kelly, director of the US AI Safety Institute, wrote in a statement. “These agreements are just the start, but they are an important milestone as we work to help responsibly steward the future of AI.”

The US AI Safety Institute is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It creates and publishes guidelines, benchmark tests and best practices for testing and evaluating potentially dangerous AI systems. “Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm, from AI-enabled cyber-attacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bioweapons that could endanger the lives of millions,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in late 2023 after the agency was established.

The first-of-its-kind agreement is through a (formal but non-binding) Memorandum of Understanding. The agency will receive access to each company’s “major new models” ahead of and following their public release. The agency describes the agreements as collaborative, risk-mitigating research that will evaluate capabilities and safety. The US AI Safety Institute will also collaborate with the UK AI Safety Institute.

The US AI Safety Institute didn’t mention other companies tackling AI. Engadget emailed Google, which began rolling out updated chatbot and image generator models this week, for a comment on its omission. We’ll update this story if we hear back.

It comes as federal and state regulators try to establish AI guardrails while the rapidly advancing technology is still nascent. On Wednesday, the California state assembly approved an AI safety bill (SB 10147) that mandates safety testing for AI models that cost more than $100 million to develop or require a set amount of computing power. The bill requires AI companies to have kill switches that can shut down the models if they become “unwieldy or uncontrollable.”

Unlike the non-binding agreement with the federal government, the California bill would have some teeth for enforcement. It gives the state’s attorney general license to sue if AI developers don’t comply, especially during threat-level events. However, it still requires one more process vote — and the signature of Governor Gavin Newsom, who will have until September 30 to decide whether to give it the green light.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-and-anthropic-agree-to-share-their-models-with-the-us-ai-safety-institute-191440093.html?src=rss

Owning a Playdate comes with the perk of already having access to 24 games at no additional cost from the bundled-in Season One — and some pretty good ones to boot. But there are a ton of great games outside the Season One offerings too, for when you’ve finished the whole batch or, for newer players, while you’re waiting for new games between the weekly drops. Here, I’ll highlight some of the best games I’ve played so far from the Playdate Catalog. It’ll mainly be split two ways: games that use the crank and games that don’t. There are also a couple of titles that aren’t quite games, but are worth checking out all the same.

Games that use the crank

Games that don’t use the crank

Comics, visual novels and more

Check out our entire Best Games series including the best Nintendo Switch games, the best PS5 games, the best Xbox games, the best PC games and the best free games you can play today.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/best-playdate-games-190049201.html?src=rss

X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.

On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.

Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn’t explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.

In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a “false positive” and that it had been corrected. The company didn’t explain further.

Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.

Update August 29, 2024, 2:35 PM ET: This story was updated to add additional details from an X spokesperson and to indicate that the link is no longer labeled as “unsafe.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-is-labeling-an-unflattering-npr-story-about-donald-trump-as-unsafe-163732236.html?src=rss

If you’re the kind of pro or college football fan who wishes they could time travel so they can watch every game as they happen, Apple Sports may be able to help. The iPhone sports app can’t break the laws of quantum physics but it can help you keep track of all the games during football season.

Apple Sports’ newest update adds more comprehensive alerts and features for National Football League (NFL) and National Collegiate Athletic Association Football (NCAAF) games. The app will not only provide up-to-the-minute scores and stats on games but it will also deliver play-by-play updates for scoring drives with its new “dynamic drive tracker” that can show the ball’s location on the field. The Apple Sports app will also provide real-time betting odds during every game.

The app will eventually add a drop-down screen that will show the main scorecards from game to game, a feed of updates for your teams and a search function that makes it easier to find and switch between games even if you don’t follow them. It’ll also cannibalize the “Live Activities” alert feature from Apple TV. Both those features will drop when the iOS 18 beta launches in the fall.

The Apple Sports app launched in February for free and is available now on the App Store. As of Thursday, the app can track games for 15 different leagues’ seasons including the NFL, NCAAF, Major League Soccer (MLS), Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). Apple says more leagues will be added to the app in future updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-sports-is-ready-for-some-football-with-new-game-tracking-updates-181536944.html?src=rss

The Oldest House could be coming to a big screen near you. TV and film adaptations of Control and Alan Wake may be on the way after Remedy Entertainment struck a deal with Annapurna Pictures. Annapurna is stumping up half of the development budget for Control 2 and in return it snapped up the rights to adapt the two franchises. 

Remedy fully owns the intellectual property of both after it bought the rights to Control from 505 Games earlier this year. The two franchises exist in an MCU-style shared universe, and they’re both highly cinematic. Expanding them into audiovisual mediums makes a lot of sense.

Remedy will take the lion’s share of Control 2 game revenue after both sides have recouped their investments. Annapurna will keep most of the proceeds of any TV and film projects. No specifics have been revealed about how it may adapt Control and Alan Wake.

The studio is behind movies such as Zero Dark Thirty, Her and Nimona, which turned out to be a surprise hit on Netflix. It’s starting to turn games published by its excellent Annapurna Interactive division into films as well. An animated Stray movie is on the way.

“Annapurna’s expertise across film, TV and video games makes them an ideal partner for us,” Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said. “This agreement will ensure we can develop Control 2 into the best game possible, allow us to move into self-publishing for selected titles and expand our franchises to other mediums.”

The agreement should alleviate some financial pressure on Remedy. Control 2 had an initial budget of 50 million euros ($55.4 million), but that number could end up rising. Moving into TV and film will give Remedy a fresh revenue stream too.

Remedy’s operating profit nosedived over the last couple of years. It had 19 million euros ($21.1 million) in net cash at the end of June, down from 31.7 million euros a year earlier. Its games have been critically acclaimed. However, Alan Wake 2, which Remedy said in February was its fastest-selling game to date, had only “recouped most of its development and marketing expenses” as of earlier this month.

Control 2 is not yet in full production, so it will still be at least a few years away. Remedy has two other games in the works: a multiplayer Control project and a remake of the first two Max Payne titles. A co-op shooter Remedy was developing with Tencent was scrapped earlier this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-alan-wake-and-control-universe-may-expand-to-film-and-tv-175949089.html?src=rss

Researchers at Cornell University tapped into fungal mycelia to power a pair of proof-of-concept robots. Mycelia, the underground fungal network that can sprout mushrooms as its above-ground fruit, can sense light and chemical reactions and communicate through electrical signals. This makes it a novel component in hybrid robotics that could someday detect crop conditions otherwise invisible to humans.

The Cornell researchers created two robots: a soft, spider-like one and a four-wheeled buggy. The researchers used mycelia’s light-sensing abilities to control the machines using ultraviolet light. The project required experts in mycology (the study of fungi), neurobiology, mechanical engineering, electronics and signal processing.

“If you think about a synthetic system — let’s say, any passive sensor — we just use it for one purpose,” lead author Anand Mishra said. “But living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals. That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”

The fungal robot uses an electrical interface that (after blocking out interference from vibrations and electromagnetic signals) records and processes the mycelia’s electrophysical activity in real time. A controller, mimicking a portion of animals’ central nervous systems, acted as “a kind of neural circuit.” The team designed the controller to read the fungi’s raw electrical signal, process it and translate it into digital controls. These were then sent to the machine’s actuators.

Cornell University / Science Robotics

The pair of shroom-bots successfully completed three experiments, including walking and rolling in response to the mycelia’s signals and changing their gaits in response to UV light. The researchers also successfully overrode the mycelia’s signals to control the robots manually, a crucial component if later versions were to be deployed in the wild.

As for where this technology goes, it could spawn more advanced versions that tap into mycelia’s ability to sense chemical reactions. “In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical,” according to Rob Shepherd, Cornell mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and the paper’s senior author. The researchers believe this could lead to future robots that sense soil chemistry in crops, deciding when to add more fertilizer, “perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms,” Shepherd said.

You can read the team’s research paper at Science Robotics and find out more about the project from the Cornell Chronicle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/these-robots-move-through-the-magic-of-mushrooms-171612639.html?src=rss