Gartner says the market for large language model (LLM) providers is on the cusp of an extinction phase as it grapples with the capital-intensive costs of building products in a competitive market.…
BREAKING: The Sundance Film Festival is moving to Boulder, Colorado. The festival, formerly held in Park City, Utah, had been looking for a new venue for expansion.
Many cities threw their hats into the ring, but Boulder has emerged victorious. The official move will not take place until 2027, but it will surely be a different festival.
The festival reached a 10 year-deal with city officials, so it will be in Boulder at least until 2037.
Sundance organizers have cited financial pressures and concerns about the accessibility of Park City as key reasons for exploring a potential relocation.
There are concerns that Park City has become too exclusive. And Utah's laws were complex when it came to throwing a party with liquor. Then you had ski season, which already made the town very expensive, and conflicts with Sundance, rising rental prices, and making studios spend a lot of money in order to send people there.
There were a lot of issues piling up, and the Sundance festival only wanted to get bigger, something that the small town of Park City could not expand to provide.
In a statement, Robert Redford expressed gratitude to the state of Utah and also explained the move.
He said, “What we’ve created is remarkably special and defining.” He continued, “As change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival. This move will ensure that the Festival continues its work of risk-taking, supporting innovative storytellers, fostering independence, and entertaining and enlightening audiences. I am grateful to the Boulder community for its support, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for the festival there.”
Boulder will retain the wintery vibes people have come to love, and the city put forth a good plan for how they can house the thousands of people and press who descend on the city for the festival every year.
“One of the things that we also thought about is one of Robert Redford’s founding principles, which is this notion of making sure that the festival has a sense of space and a sense of place,” said Amanda Kelso, Sundance Institute’s acting CEO.
She continued, “One of the things that you’ll see when you walk around [Boulder] is we are surrounded by this breathtaking Flat Iron Mountain Range, and it’s truly an incredible vibe. So when you’re walking from theater to theater, you’ll really get this opportunity to sort of metabolize what you just watched while convening in nature.”
This is a huge development, and we'll keep you updated as more transpires.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
When we test products at Wirecutter, we consider their durability, repairability, and ease of maintenance alongside other criteria. With proper use and care, some of our picks can last for decades—and even a lifetime, to be passed down to others.
And you have plenty of reasons to invest in things that last. While some items we recommend might have a higher up-front cost, we trust that they’ll be worth their price per use. Investing in something long-lasting allows you to save money over time—plus, it may even be better for the environment, if you keep that item long enough. Typically, buy-it-for-life products are also repairable or backed by solid warranties.
Below, we’ve rounded up 25 of our favorite tried-and-tested buy-it-for-life (or just about) picks for every location, from your kitchen, bathroom, or closet to your garden or campsite.
Microsoft recently announced that it would bring the beta of a gaming-specific version of Copilot to the Xbox platform in April. The new Copilot for Gaming is meant as a constant companion for anyone playing on Xbox, which can offer tips or hints on demand.
That leads me to ask: why would I want to use this at all? What’s the actual target audience here?
As I said recently on the GeekWire Podcast, machine learning as a whole is at that familiar tech stage where most of the new projects are solutions in search of a problem. If you look at recent product lineups from places like CES, advocates of the technology are still hung up on can instead of should.
Copilot for Gaming, as it was presented to me, falls squarely into that zone. It’s an attempt to improve the hobby by removing many of its human elements, so you never have to stop playing a game in order to look anything up. Your Copilot can ostensibly offer advice on how to start a new game, look up hints online, or provide personalized coaching.
The examples of use from the press briefing included asking Copilot for tips on what character to play in Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch 2 and how to get started as a brand new Minecraft player.
A Microsoft representative told me that Copilot for Gaming “accesses public sources of information using the Bing search index and results, and provides tailored responses for the individual player based on its understanding of the player’s activity and the games they’re playing on the Xbox platform.”
In addition, Microsoft currently plans that Copilot’s advice will source “the most accurate game knowledge,” including working directly with game studios.
Off the top, unless the plan is that every Xbox game will provide direct integration with material that was written in-house at Microsoft, Copilot for Gaming is still Copilot and will still have problems with its overall accuracy. As per a recent study by the Columbia Journalism Review, Copilot is wrong more often than it’s right.
The Microsoft representative was sure to note that “it’s important to check AI results against other trusted sources of information.” If that’s the case, then why am I using Copilot for Gaming at all, especially when it’s taking much-needed web traffic away from actual humans who want to provide me with the same guidance?
To be fair, the feature that Microsoft’s team initially led with struck me as being the most potentially useful. You can use Copilot for Gaming to give you a reminder of where you were and what you were doing the last time you played a particular game.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was 1993’s Phantasy Star IV, which has something like this as a menu feature, where you can trigger short conversations between your characters to remind you what you’re supposed to be doing. I’ve wanted to see more of that ever since. Many games are long and/or complicated enough that if you have to step away from them for a few days, you’ll have forgotten enough about the storyline or mechanics that you might as well start over. Having some kind of built-in refresher would be great.
The rest of Copilot for Gaming, however, strikes me as another example of an AI project with a reach that exceeds its grasp. Microsoft is asking players to trust an AI to provide them with accurate information at a point in time when AI-driven search is still distinctly flawed.
Full disclosure: I write strategy guides for sites like IGN, so I’m obviously biased. Even so, this whole project seems to be riding on the idea that players will happily sacrifice accuracy for convenience, and in my experience, such is not the case. The first time Copilot for Gaming gives someone incorrect gaming advice, it will take an unrecoverable PR hit.
Microsoft as a whole is smarter about the video game business than it often gets credit for being. Xbox may be stuck in a seemingly permanent third place position in the console market, but it’s got a few uncomplicated wins on its record, many of which revolve around its accessibility efforts.
The company recently announced the debut of its Xbox Adaptive Joystick, a new wired controller that’s intended for players with limited mobility, and which builds on its Adaptive Controller project.
You could also point to how the Xbox Game Pass is a great deal for budget-conscious players, particularly in conjunction with the Play Anywhere initiative, or Xbox’s history of outreach to the independent game developer community.
That’s part of what makes Copilot for Gaming frustrating. We’ve been on this train for a while, and we’re still regularly seeing AI researchers and developers trying to bring products to market that won’t work as advertised. The best case scenario for Copilot for Gaming is that it’s sort of helpful sometimes, at the price of removing yet more of the human element from the hobby. It’s a dumb move from a company that’s smarter than people think.
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
Yeah, this is basically why I don’t waste time anymore railing against the many hypocrisies of conservatives — they’re not gotchas that you’re catching them in, they’re part of the domination.
Tags: A.R. Moxon · politics
23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy.
23andMe said in court documents viewed by 404 Media that since hackers obtained personal data about seven million of its customers in October 2023, including, in some cases “health-related information based upon the user’s genetics,” it has faced “over 50 class action and state court lawsuits,” and that “approximately 35,000 claimants have initiated, filed, or threatened to commence arbitration claims against the company.” It is seeking bankruptcy protection in part to simplify the fallout of these legal cases, and because it believes it may not have money to pay for the potential damages associated with these cases.
CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki announced she is leaving the company as part of this process. The company has the genetic data of more than 15 million customers.
According to its Chapter 11 filing, 23andMe owes money to a host of pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, artificial intelligence companies (including a company called Aganitha AI and Coreweave), as well as health insurance companies and marketing companies.
The filing is a devastating reminder that once you give your genetic information to a company like 23andMe, there is no way to have any clue what is going to happen to that data, how it is going to be analyzed, how it is going to be monetized, how it is going to be protected from hackers, and who it is going to be shared with for profit. Sharing your own DNA with 23andMe also necessarily implicates your close family members, who may or may not want their genetic information submitted to a company that is financially precarious and sitting on a trove of highly sensitive information.
On Friday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an “urgent” alert to 23andMe customers telling them to ask the company to delete their data and destroy their genetic samples under a California privacy law: “Given 23andMe’s reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.”
Other genetic sequencing companies have shared customer information with police and governments, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurers. GED Match, a non-profit that once claimed it would protect customers’ genetic data, was sold to a for-profit company called Verogen, which works with the FBI and was later sold to a Dutch multinational conglomerate. Police now regularly attempt to identify suspects using information pulled from commercial genetic databases like the one that 23andMe has created.
23andMe’s bankruptcy means that the company will be put up for sale, and there’s no way of knowing who is going to buy it, why they will be interested, and what will become of its millions of customers’ DNA sequences. 23andMe has claimed over the years that it strongly resists law enforcement requests for information and that it takes customer security seriously. But the company has in recent years changed its terms of service, partnered with big pharmaceutical companies, and, of course, was hacked.
In a letter to customers Sunday, 23andMe said “Your data remains protected. The Chapter 11 filing does not change how we store, manage, or protect customer data. Our users’ privacy and data are important considerations in any transaction, and we remain committed to our users’ privacy and to being transparent with our customers about how their data is managed.” It added that any buyer will have to “comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data,” which means essentially nothing because there are few laws that protect against the monetization of customer genetic data, as evidenced by the fact that other genetic databases proactively offer information to law enforcement and partner with big pharma.
The company now could be sold to anyone, and there is no way to know what that buyer will want to do with the reams of genetic information it has collected. Customers, meanwhile, still have no way to change their underlying genetic data.
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