Tag: tech

Marvel Rivals brings all your favorite superheroes and villains together, but you can take things a step further with Team-Up Abilities. Here’s how it works.

Marvel Rivals is the latest hero shooter title, bringing the greatest heroes and villains together. But does it bring us together with cross-platform support?

Equal parts laptop and tablet, the Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 is a powerhouse PC that will only run you $600 this week. But act fast! This deal could be gone soon.

Warner Bros. Discovery announced the Max streaming release date for Joker: Folie à Deux, the controversial sequel from Todd Phillips.

Fortnite OG released this morning as a permanent fixture to the game’s lineup, and it broke 1 million players in 20 minutes.

Meta’s aggressive push to make its AI assistant a ubiquitous presence in its apps continues to pay off. Meta AI is on the verge of passing its next major milestone, with “nearly” 600 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg shared in an update. Meta AI, which debuted last fall, passed 500 million users back in October.

The update came alongside the release of Meta’s latest Llama 3.3 70B model. According to Meta, the latest text model has “similar performance to the Llama 3.1 405B model,” but comes “at a fraction of the cost.” Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta posted a chart on X that showed Llama 3.3 scored higher on several benchmarks compared with Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

Zuckerberg also briefly teased the next major release. “The next stop is Llama 4,” Zuckerberg said in a video shared on Instagram, after noting that the 3.3 release was the “last big AI update of the year.” Zuckerberg has so far has been fairly tight-lipped about what’s in store for Llama 4, though he’s offered some hints. The CEO said earlier this year that the model was being trained on a cluster of more than 100,000 H100s with an expected release of one of the “smaller” Llama 4 models “sometime early next year.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-ai-has-nearly-600-million-monthly-users-184512693.html?src=rss

There’s a new TMNT game in town, and it’s unlike anything the franchise has attempted before. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, as the name suggests, is a turn-based strategy RPG. This means that players will control characters on a grid-based map, with each turn representing movement or an action of some sort.

There’s one thing that sets this game apart from its SRPG cousins. Battles take “minutes” to complete, which is a far cry from the time-consuming affairs found in games like Unicorn Overlord. From the trailer, the fights look even zippier than the Mario + Rabbids series. Also, players control each turtle independently on a solo campaign before teaming up to take on a boss. 

The graphics look cartoony and on-brand, bringing to mind a tabletop session with D&D miniatures. It looks like all of the turtle’s favorite hang out spots are represented here, from the sewers to the NYC subway system. This could be a neat way to bring new players into the genre.

Paramount Game Studios

This is a unique entry in the TMNT franchise, but it’s also a new type of game for developer Scaffold Games. This is the company that brought us the absolutely disturbing Clickholding and the third-person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere. The company also made I Am Your Beast and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. None of these titles are turn-based tactical RPGs.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown will be released for PCs sometime next year. You can preorder the game right now via Steam. Publisher Paramount Game Studios hasn’t said anything about a potential console release, so perhaps hold off on organizing that pizza party. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-tactical-takedown-is-the-first-turn-based-game-in-the-franchises-long-history-175730833.html?src=rss

Three judges shot down ByteDance’s petition to overturn a law that could ban TikTok in the US. On Friday, The New York Times reported that the judges upheld the new law, which requires the company to sell the app to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or face a ban.

ByteDance argued that the law unfairly targets TikTok and that a ban would violate users’ First Amendment rights. The company has said a sale is impossible because the Chinese government would block it. In 2020, the country updated export control rules to give it more say over a potential transaction.

In a statement to Engadget, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was disappointed in the decision. “Restricting the free flow of information, even from foreign adversaries, is fundamentally undemocratic,” an EFF spokesperson wrote. “Until now, the U.S. has championed the free flow of information and called out other nations when they have shut down internet access or banned online communications tools like social media apps.”

ByteDance’s options from here include appealing to the US Supreme Court (although there’s no guarantee they would take the case) or hoping President-elect Donald Trump follows through on a vague promise to “deliver” on a plan to save the app. ByteDance suggested on Friday that the decision amounted to censorship, saying it expects the Supreme Court to protect “Americans’ right to free speech.”

The NYT reports that legal experts don’t see much of a legal path for Trump to rescue the app after taking office on January 20, 2025. During his first term, he issued executive orders restricting American dealings with the app, citing national security concerns and suggesting the app could be a Trojan Horse for data harvesting by the Chinese government. Microsoft was ready and willing to buy it if given the chance. The ban faced a series of legal challenges, and President Biden revoked the order in 2021.

Trump reversed his position in early 2024, reportedly after meeting with a Republican megadonor with a significant financial stake in the app. The president-elect’s shift intensified after Biden signed the law that could lead to its ban in early 2025. By the time election season was in full swing, Trump had recast himself as TikTok’s savior and used it as a wedge issue to attract younger users to his campaign.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/tiktok-inches-closer-to-a-us-ban-after-judges-shoot-down-appeal-172748902.html?src=rss