The Guardian

Meeting ‘my people’ – video gamers with very long memories – took me back to an era of machine play that lacked megabytes but had far more tangible presence I want to tell you about the game that has made me the happiest this month. It’s a game I didn’t complete. It’s a game I didn’t even start. I just held it. And smiled. I have played the game before, but not for many years. Forty of them to be…

Company details $111.2bn in revenue in first earnings report after announcement of Cook’s pending departure Apple blew past Wall Street expectations in its first earnings report since it announced CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down. Cook shared his thoughts about the leadership transition on Thursday, saying: “There’s no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future” than incomin…

Green checkmark will appear on artist profiles to signal they meet the platform’s standard for authenticity Spotify on Thursday unveiled a new verification system designed to help listeners distinguish human musicians from AI-generated content, as people flood streaming platforms with a growing volume of synthetic tracks made with artificial intelligence . The Swedish streaming giant said its “Ve…

Trial continues after heated back-and-forth during OpenAI’s cross-examination of the Tesla CEO Elon Musk ’s court case against Sam Altman continued on Thursday, after a day of contentious exchanges during OpenAI’s cross-examination of the Tesla CEO. Musk faced more combative questioning throughout the morning, in a glimpse of what may await other prominent witnesses set to take the stand. Witness…

The female-created YouTube sketch series Smatouha Minni – You Heard It From Me – uses satire to confront misogynistic attitudes In Beirut’s Gemmayzeh neighbourhood a rented flat has been transformed into a film set: bright studio lights in a cosy living room. At its centre is Maria Elayan – though she is barely recognisable. Filming for the third season of Smatouha Minni (You Heard It From Me), a…

People describe awkward and unnatural process as survey finds nearly half of job seekers have been interviewed by AI Nearly half (47%) of UK job seekers have had an AI interview, research from the hiring platform Greenhouse has found. In its survey of 2,950 active job seekers, including 1,132 UK-based workers, with additional respondents from the US, Germany, Australia and Ireland, it found that …

Hitman developer IO Interactive’s pluralistic take on the British secret agent – his first video-game outing in almost 15 years – promises a Bond for all eras. Here’s what you need to know If you want to tell the tale of a young James Bond, you first need to pick which James Bond he’s going to grow into. This was the task handed to Hitman developer IO Interactive, the studio taking digital custod…

Small top-tier Android is great to use, being fast, AI-loaded and with reasonable battery life, but falls short of rivals on camera Samsung’s compact flagship phone hasn’t changed much in a year, but the S26 is still one of the best smaller handsets available as rivals grow larger and larger. The S26 is the cheapest and smallest of this year’s top Samsungs, dwarfed by the top-of-the-line S26 Ultr…

PC; Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment An innocent-looking charity shop find draws you into a compulsive world of demons, ogres and retro delights For a while in the mid-1990s, meta horror movies were the genre everyone was talking about. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream, the Blair Witch Project – these films simultaneously examined and exploited genre conventions, seeking to scare au…

PocketOS was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jere…

Physical phone blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel…

Pragmata, Saros and Vampire Crawler bring together aesthetics, responsiveness and creative opportunities in joyous ways that can’t be defined, only experienced Game feel is one of the most elusive concepts in the glossary of interactive entertainment, at once perfectly clear and difficult to define. Obviously, it refers to what a game feels like to play, but where does that feeling come from? How…

To test the safety and security of AI, hackers have to trick large language models into breaking their own rules. It requires ingenuity and manipulation – and can come at a deep emotional cost A few months ago, Valen Tagliabue sat in his hotel room watching his chatbot, and felt euphoric. He had just manipulated it so skilfully, so subtly, that it began ignoring its own safety rules. It told him …

Created by three dads from Seattle, the resolutely un-mobile handset doesn’t have internet access, apps or even a screen. No wonder anxious parents are snapping it up Name: Tin Can. Age: Launched last April. Continue reading...

Artists and writers argue scrappy nature of self-published booklets is incompatible with artificial intelligence The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial…