Posted by Zack Zwiezen from Kotaku
Fallout is currently one of the biggest things in the world thanks to Amazon’s hit TV show. However, before all that, there was a time when Fallout as a franchise seemed dead. Then Bethesda stepped in, bought the IP in 2007, and announced plans to make Fallout 3, reviving the post-apocalyptic RPG series. And that’s…

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Posted by Moises Taveras from Kotaku
Spoilers for the Fallout show follow.

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the closer-look department: Linus Torvalds, discussing the AI hype, in a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Head of the Open Source Program Office: Torvalds snarked, "It's hilarious to watch. Maybe I'll be replaced by an AI model!" As for Hohndel, he thinks most AI today is "autocorrect on steroids." Torvalds summed up his attitude as, "Let's wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements."

That's not to say the two men don't think AI will be helpful in the future. Indeed, Torvalds noted one good side effect already: "NVIDIA has gotten better at talking to Linux kernel developers and working with Linux memory management," because of its need for Linux to run AI's large language models (LLMs) efficiently.

Torvalds is also "looking forward to the tools actually to find bugs. We have a lot of tools, and we use them religiously, but making the tools smarter is not a bad thing. Using smarter tools is just the next inevitable step. We have tools that do kernel rewriting, with very complicated scripts, and pattern recognition. AI can be a huge help here because some of these tools are very hard to use because you have to specify things at a low enough level." Just be careful, Torvalds warns of "AI BS." Hohndel quickly quipped, "He meant beautiful science. You know, "Beautiful science in, beautiful science out."

Posted by Alyssa Mercante from Kotaku
Hades, Supergiant Games’ award-winning 2020 roguelite, was renowned for its excellent combat, beautiful art style, entrancing music, and very, very hot characters. You’d expect a game about Greek gods (who were purposefully attractive so that the normies of Ancient Greece had something to aspire towards) to include a…

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Posted by Timothy Monbleau from Kotaku
Final Fantasy 16’s (presumably) final DLC, The Rising Tide, is a fascinating case study on how fan speculation can wildly shape an audience’s expectations. On one hand, Square Enix and the folks at Creative Business Unit 3 never promised this DLC pack would impact the main storyline of the game. However, prerelease…

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Microsoft Research Asia earlier this week unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. ArsTechnica: In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds -- or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want. "It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors," reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." It's the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.

The VASA framework (short for "Visual Affective Skills Animator") uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.

Posted by Zack Zwiezen from Kotaku
The future of physical media took another blow as Target confirmed previously reported plans that it would stop offering physical DVDs in store and transition to only carrying a select number of films in brick-and-mortar locations during specific, limited times. However, the retail giant said games would be—for…

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Posted by from MMO Champion
Dragonflight Season 4 Content Update Notes

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Dragonflight Season 4 arrives to World of Warcraft on April 23!

DRAGONFLIGHT SEASON 4



Powerful rewards await in Season 4 to deliver the best of what the Dragonflight expansion offers. Jump into the new Mythic+ dungeon rotation, rally your forces for new challenges in raids, prepare for the new PvP season, and ready yourselves for The War Within. [LEARN MORE]

Awakened Raids

Every two weeks during Dragonflight Season 4, one of the three Dragonflight raids will become Awakened: Vault of the Incarnates; Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible; or Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope. Enemies within Awakened raids are stronger and drop upgraded loot with a higher item level.

Schedule

Week 1 & 2: Vault of the Incarnates

Week 3 & 4: Aberrus, the Shadow Crucible

Week 5 & 6: Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope

Week 7+: All raids are Awakened

A buff that increases reputation gain with Dragonflight reputations will be enabled whenever a specific raid is Awakened:

Schedule

Vault of the Incarnates: Sign of Awakened Storms – Dragonscale Expedition, Maruuk Centaur, and Iskaara Tuskaar

Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible: Sign of Awakened Embers – Loamm Niffen, Soridormi, and Sabellian/Wrathion

Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope: Sign of Awakened Dreams – Dream Wardens and Valdrakken Accord

All raids Awakened: All the above reputations are increased

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Posted by from MMO Champion
The War Within Alpha - Delves Feature Overview

Blizzard has posted an overview of Delves, the new dynamic experiences that can be played solo or with up to four friends in The War Within.

Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: An anonymous reader shares a report: TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, India's top three IT outsourcing firms, have collectively seen their workforce shrink for the first time in at least 20 years. The trio reported a combined reduction of more than 63,750 employees in the financial year ending March 31, 2024.

Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the shape-of-things-to-come department: Adult content companies Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos will have to do risk assessment reports and take measures to address systemic risks linked to their services to comply with new EU online content rules, the European Commission said on Friday. From a report: The three companies were designated as very large online platforms last December under the Digital Services Act (DSA) which requires them to do more to remove illegal and harmful content on their platforms. Pornhub and Stripchat will have to comply with these DSA obligations, among the strictest, on April 21 and XVideos on April 23, the EU executive said. "These specific obligations include submitting risk assessment reports to the Commission, putting in place mitigation measures to address systemic risks linked to the provision of their services," it said in a statement.

Posted by Levi Winslow from Kotaku
Capcom’s high-fantasy RPG Dragon’s Dogma 2 will get a new update on all platforms this month that makes some much-needed changes, including one that makes Pawns more reliable, less dumb, and less talkative. We love Pawns that do their job silently, but one of the most notable changes in this upcoming patch makes the…

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Posted by from MMO Champion
This Week in WoW - April 19, 2024

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Catch up on all the latest World of Warcraft news from the last week—take a tour through The War Within in the WoWCast developer chat, pre-purchase the World of Warcraft®: The War Within™ 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition, get a closer look at the new Warbands System, and more!

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WoWCast Developer Chat: Go Into the War Within

Join Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Associate Art Director Tina Wang as they sit down with Community Manager and host Bethany Stout to take you into The War Within™.

The alpha test is right around the corner and we look forward to moving into the next phase of development of The War Within with you. Learn more about what’s ahead from The War Within™ website.

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Pre-Purchase the World of Warcraft®: The War Within™ 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition



World of Warcraft®: The War Within™ arrives this year¹, and the wings of a grand new adventure will spread widely across the next three expansions.² Be a part of the epic story that commemorates the first 20 years of World of Warcraft and sets new foundations for Azeroth's future!³

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the mum-is-the-word department: An anonymous reader shares a report: Today Meta unleashed its ChatGPT competitor, Meta AI, across its apps and as a standalone. The company boasts that it is running on its latest, greatest AI model, Llama 3, which was trained on "data of the highest quality"! A dataset seven times larger than Llama2! And includes 4 times more code! What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from "publicly available sources." Which sources? Meta told The Verge that it didn't include Meta user data, but didn't give much more in the way of specifics. It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: "we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3." There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it's liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

Posted by Zack Zwiezen from Kotaku
This next sentence might make you feel very old and I’m sorry: Earlier this week, Cartoon Network’s first original show, Space Ghost Coast To Coast, turned 30 years old. And while many have spent the week celebrating the strange series, its best bits, and funniest episodes, I want to take a moment to remember a…

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Posted by Jesse Vitelli from Kotaku
Fallout 76, the online multiplayer game set in the long-running post-apocalyptic series, has seen a surge of players due to Amazon Prime’s hit TV adaptation. And if you’re thinking about giving it a shot, you may be wondering if you can easily hop into games with your friends on other platforms. So before you pick up…

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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the don't-touch-with-a-10-foot-pole department: An anonymous reader shares a report: iPerf is a fairly popular cross-platform tool that is used by many to measure network performance and diagnose any potential issues in this area. The open-source utility is maintained by an organization called Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and officially supports Linux, Unix, and Windows. However, Microsoft has now published a detailed blog post explaining why you should not use the latest version, iPerf3, on Windows installations.

Microsoft has highlighted three key reasons to discourage the use of iPerf3 on Windows. The first is that ESnet does not support this version on Windows, and recommends iPerf2 instead. On its website, ESnet has emphasized that CentOS 7 Linux, FreeBSD 11, and macOS 10.12 are the only supported platforms. Another very important reason not to use iPerf3 on Windows is that it does not make native OS calls. Instead, it leverages Cygwin as an emulation layer, which obviously comes with a performance penalty. This alone means that iPerf3 on Windows isn't really an ideal candidate for benchmarking your network. While Microsoft has praised the maintainers who are trying to get iPerf3 to run on Windows via emulation, another flaw with this approach is that some advanced networking options simply aren't available on Windows or may behave in unexpected ways.

Posted by AzT from TFW2005


Transformers #10 and Void Rivals #11 are scheduled for arrival in July: **Shockwave’s plan revealed!** Can the Autobots recover from their latest loss in time to save everyone? **War in the wasteland.** Zertonian forces have caught up to Darak and Solila, but thankfully, they have a little Cybertronian help! Springer to the rescue! Discuss the cover artwork revealed so far with fellow readers on the 2005 boards! Transformers #10 Creator credits: (W) Daniel Warren Johnson, (A) Jorge Corona, Mike Spicer, (CA) Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer, (A/CA) Jorge Corona, Mike Spicer, (CA) Karen S. Darboe, (CA) Ricardo Lopez Ortiz, (CA) Tonci Zonjic   Void » Continue Reading.

The post Skybound’s Transformers Comics Solicitations: July 2024 appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.

Posted by Black Convoy from TFW2005


The official Transformers Twitter/X and Facebook accounts have treated us with new Transformers One New Character posters. We have new posters featuring Orion Pax (Optimus Prime), D-16 (Megatron), Elita-1 and B-127 (Bumbleebee) with the name of their respective voice actor. See the images after the jump and then sound off on the 2005 Boards!

The post Transformers One New Character Posters appeared first on Transformer World 2005 - TFW2005.COM.

Posted by Eric Schulkin from Kotaku
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