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From the wahoo! department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a roaring start. Early on Wednesday, Nintendo announced that it had sold 3.5 million units of its new console in just four days, making it Nintendo's fastest-selling console ever. In fact, this is likely the biggest console launch of all time -- by quite some margin. For comparison, PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in its first seven weeks, PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million in a little over two weeks, and Nintendo Switch sold 2.74 million in its first month. [...]
Nintendo has predicted it will sell 15 million Switch 2s during its current financial year. It's well on the way to that figure already, although Nintendo still faces the challenges of maintaining stock availability and extending this expensive console's reach past the first wave of early adopters. If Switch 2 hits its first-year target, it will join Nintendo's other fasters sellers over the first year on sale: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and the original Switch. Over the weekend, the Switch 2 beat the record for the "most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," according to TweakTown.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the AI-at-nauseam department: Amazon has launched its AI-powered Video Generator tool in the U.S., allowing sellers to quickly create photorealistic, motion-enhanced video ads often with a single click. "We'll likely see Amazon retailers utilizing AI-generated video ads in the wild now that the tool is generally available in the U.S. and costs nothing to use -- unless the ads are so convincing that we don't notice anything at all," says The Verge. From the report: New capabilities include motion improvements to show items in action, which Amazon says is best for showcasing products like toys, tools, and worn accessories. For example, Video Generator can now create clips that show someone wearing a watch on their wrist and checking the time, instead of simply displaying the watch on a table. The tool generates six different videos to choose from, and allows brands to add their logos to the finished results.
The Video Generator can now also make ads with multiple connected scenes that include humans, pets, text overlays, and background music. The editing timeline shown in Amazon's announcement video suggests the ads max out at 21 seconds.. The resulting ads edge closer to the traditional commercials we're used to seeing while watching TV or online content, compared to raw clips generated by video AI tools like OpenAI's Sora or Adobe Firefly.
A new video summarization feature can create condensed video ads from existing footage, such as demos, tutorials, and social media content. Amazon says Video Generator will automatically identify and extract key clips to generate new videos formatted for ad campaigns. A one-click image-to-video feature is also available that creates shorter GIF-style clips to show products in action.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the that's-a-first department: Hong Kong authorities have invoked national security laws for the first time to ban the Taiwan-made video game Reversed Front: Bonfire, accusing it of promoting "secessionist agendas, such as 'Taiwan independence' and 'Hong Kong independence.'" Engadget reports: Reversed Front: Bonfire was developed by a group known as ESC Taiwan, who are outspoken critics of the China's Communist Party. The game disappeared from the Apple App Store in Hong Kong less than 24 hours after authorities issued the warning. Google already removed the game from the Play Store back in May, because players were using hate speech as part of their usernames. ESC Taiwan told The New York Times that that the game's removal shows that apps like theirs are subject to censorship in mainland China. The group also thanked authorities for the free publicity on Facebook, as the game experienced a surge in Google searches.
The game uses anime-style illustrations and allows players to fight against China's Communist Party by taking on the role of "propagandists, patrons, spies or guerrillas" from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia and Xinjiang, which is home to ethnic minorities like the Uyghur. That said, they can also choose to play as government soldiers. In its warning, Hong Kong Police said that anybody who shares or recommends the game on the internet may be committing several offenses, including "incitement to secession, "incitement to subversion" and "offenses in connection with seditious intention." Anybody who has downloaded the game will be considered in "possession of a publication that has a seditious intention," and anybody who provides financial assistance to it will be violating national security laws, as well. "Those who have downloaded the application should uninstall it immediately and must not attempt to defy the law," the authorities wrote.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the work-in-progress department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The robot built by [Yuntao Ma and his team at ETH Zurich] was called ANYmal and resembled a miniature giraffe that plays badminton by holding a racket in its teeth. It was a quadruped platform developed by ANYbotics, an ETH Zurich spinoff company that mainly builds robots for the oil and gas industries. "It was an industry-grade robot," Ma said. The robot had elastic actuators in its legs, weighed roughly 50 kilograms, and was half a meter wide and under a meter long. On top of the robot, Ma's team fitted an arm with several degrees of freedom produced by another ETH Zurich spinoff called Duatic. This is what would hold and swing a badminton racket. Shuttlecock tracking and sensing the environment were done with a stereoscopic camera. "We've been working to integrate the hardware for five years," Ma said.
Along with the hardware, his team was also working on the robot's brain. State-of-the-art robots usually use model-based control optimization, a time-consuming, sophisticated approach that relies on a mathematical model of the robot's dynamics and environment. "In recent years, though, the approach based on reinforcement learning algorithms became more popular," Ma told Ars. "Instead of building advanced models, we simulated the robot in a simulated world and let it learn to move on its own." In ANYmal's case, this simulated world was a badminton court where its digital alter ego was chasing after shuttlecocks with a racket. The training was divided into repeatable units, each of which required that the robot predict the shuttlecock's trajectory and hit it with a racket six times in a row. During this training, like a true sportsman, the robot also got to know its physical limits and to work around them.
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From the would-you-look-at-that department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said.
Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company.
Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated.
The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions. UPDATE: The headline has been revised to clarify that four leading AI-focused tech companies saw their operational emissions rise to 150% of their 2020 levels by 2023 -- a 50% increase, not a 150% one.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the closer-look department: An anonymous reader shares a report: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.
CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest's air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts. The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.
"The big airlines -- through a shady data broker that they own called ARC -- are selling the government bulk access to Americans' sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used," Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, other publicly released documents show. The company's board of directors include representatives from Delta, Southwest, United, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Lufthansa and Air France, and Canada's Air Canada. More than 240 airlines depend on ARC for ticket settlement services.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Legacy of Arathor: Get an Assist With New UI Options
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
In the Legacy of Arathor content update, we’re introducing two additional options in the User Interface (UI) to help you learn a new class or relearn an alternate character. These new options are also a great way to provide additional accessibility to players who may need a little extra help.
Assisted Highlight
When enabled, Assisted Highlight will highlight the recommended next ability based on resources and the situation your character is in. Configured as an additional option to assist with damage rotation no matter which specialization you’re using, this new option is designed to help new players, players who are trying out a new specialization, or those looking for additional guidance on the abilities they should use.
To access Assisted Highlight, you’ll need to open the Game Menu (Escape) and select Options. Within the menu, select Gameplay Enhancements. To turn on the Assisted Highlight option, simply click on the checkbox.
Please note that this feature focuses on DPS abilities and additional abilities such as buffs, healing, and damage mitigation abilities will not show up in the rotation.
Single-Button Assistant
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the smile-please department: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin full operations in the coming months with the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3,200-megapixel images that would require several hundred HD television screens to display at full resolution. The $810 million facility will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each location approximately 800 times over its planned decade of operations.
The telescope's unusual design allows it to photograph an area equivalent to 45 full moons in each shot and swing between different sky locations every 40 seconds. Its digital camera, roughly the size of a small car, will generate eight million alerts per night when it detects astronomical objects that move or change brightness, according to Tony Tyson, the University of California, Davis astronomer who conceived the project in the 1990s. Astrophysicist Federica Bianco, who received a preview of the telescope's first full-color image, described her reaction simply: "There are so many stars!" The team plans to unveil that inaugural image on June 23.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the it-was-inevitable department: Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company.
The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson.
The companies claim they attempted to resolve the matter privately, but Midjourney "continued to release new versions" with "even higher quality infringing images" according to the complaint. Disney's general counsel used the word "piracy," to describe Midjourney's practice, while NBCUniversal's general counsel characterized it as "blatant infringement."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the shifting-landscape department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.
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