Gizmodo

Uber and Lyft threatened to leave Minneapolis after the city council approved a minimum wage for drivers that would force the tech companies to pay drivers $1.40 per mile and $0.51 per minute during rides. The ordinance, which passed the Council 7-5 on Thursday, could still be vetoed by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey,...Read more...

If you're behind on what's happening with the robot uprising, have no fear. Here's a quick look at some of the weirdest and wildest artificial intelligence news from the past week. Also, don't forget to check out our weekly AI write-up, which will go into more detail on this same topic.

Warner Bros.' Conjuring franchise has a handful of recurring villains, and one of them is Valak the Demon Nun. Played by Bonnie Aarons, Valak first appeared in 2016's The Conjuring 2, then got boosted to primary star status with her own sub-series, whose second installment is set to hit theaters in a few weeks.Read more...

For those in the entertainment industry (and creative fields more generally), AI has been an extremely divisive topic. As various websites like ArtStation have decided to basically let art created by the controversial technology persist on their platforms-either freely or with specific guidelines-Hollywood writers and ...Read more...

Earlier in the year, Prime Video announced that its sci-fi series The Peripheral would return for a second season. With a first season that was said to be fairly enjoyable and starring the likes of Chloe Grace-Moretz and Jack Reynor, it sucks that the biggest bit of news about season two is also its very last, as...Read more...

The BMC Ecology and Evolution photo competition has come to an end, and the winners and runners-up cover a diverse sweep of the animal and fungal kingdoms.Read more...

You've probably got a ton of photos and videos in your social media and messaging apps at this point-pictures of sunsets posted to Instagram, pictures of the kids posted to family WhatsApp groups, and so on-but you might not necessarily have those pictures and videos saved anywhere else.Read more...

These days, it seems like Disney+ has been deleting more shows than it's adding. But yes, it is still adding them, and one of the biggest coming later this year is Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Based on the hit book series by Rick Riordan, the show follows a boy who finds out that he's the son of a God.Read more...

It's time to start planning those Halloween haunt and theme park event trips before they sell out. Seriously, if you think it's early talk to anyone who was unable to secure tickets to Disneyland's Oogie Boogie Bash, all the dates of which are no longer available-unless you score tickets from folks who can't make it....Read more...

You would think that, with as much as the Galaxy Z Fold 5 costs, Samsung would throw in a stylus for good measure. Unfortunately, the $1,800 book-like foldable that opens into a tablet has no accompanying S Pen like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. If any device could benefit from the S Pen, it's the Fold 5's inner...Read more...

If there are two things I love in this world it's The Lost Boys and wasting money. So it should be of little surprise to my friends, family, and you readers that I am salivating over Sideshow Collectables' latest announcement: a 1/6 scale collectible of Kiefer Sutherland's iconic character David from The Lost Boys.Read more...

Twitter, (recently rebranded as X) appears to be taking another turn for the worse as Elon Musk claimed on Friday that he is removing the Block feature from the app. If Musk goes through with it, users will reportedly still have the option to mute other profiles from appearing on their feeds, but the option to block...Read more...

It's the first real day of Gen Con and I'm meeting up with Ned Donovan and Brian David Judkins in the labyrinthine upper suites of Lukas Oil Stadium. We can't go into the Wizards of the Coast press suite, as apparently someone else louder than us called dibs, but we sneak into a suite reserved for someone named...Read more...

An incident at Pinewood Studios during the shoot of The Little Mermaid live-action film, has left a model maker injured into early retirement.Read more...

Devastating wildfires that have killed more than 100 people have also created dangerous conditions for fragile wildlife and natural ecosystems off Maui's shores. Scientists and officials are worried that coral reefs near Maui are going to be hurt in the aftermath of these fires.

Yes, there's a lot of genre TV on a lot of different streamers-and yes, Apple TV+'s Foundation is a high-concept show at the midpoint of its second season. But if you're a sci-fi fan, and you're not tuning in (it's adapted from the works of Isaac Asimov), you're missing out on unique characters, multiple threads of...Read more...

As private space companies have ramped up production and launches in the past several years, they've also been unwittingly putting a target on their back. U.S. government agencies are warning the private space sector that they are in the crosshairs of foreign intelligence agencies.Read more...

Following back-to-back annual losses, SpaceX has reportedly turned a profit during the first quarter of the year despite an increase in costs as the company continues to spend on its unproven Starship rocket, which has not flown.Read more...

A brand new Star Wars show comes to Disney+ next week but, unlike many of its predecessors, it's more of a sequel than an original. Star Wars: Ahsoka debuts on August 22 and though it promises to tell a brand new story, wholly accessible to any Star Wars fan that wants to watch, Ahsoka and her place in the universe is...Read more...

The new era of DC Studios is kicked off with Blue Beetle, originally part of the old regime, it now starts off James Gunn and Peter Safran's new slate of heroes in a big way.Read more...

A US federal judge in California has dismissed a racial discrimination lawsuit brought against YouTube and its parent company Google by non-white YouTube content creators who alleged the platform's recommendation algorithms unfairly throttled and even removed their content. The judge, according to Reuters, said the ...Read more...

The Georgia Department of Agriculture announced earlier this week that a beekeeper in Savannah found an unusual insect later identified by University of Georgia officials as a yellow-legged hornet.Read more...

The iPhone 15 is just a month away, and the rumor mill is spinning in high gear before its expected announcement date. The latest news to come down the pipeline of whispers claims Apple's latest iteration of its smartphone will support charging wired up to 35 watts, faster than the current model. Now, it's no 1.21...Read more...

In a move right from the playbook of little guys who taunt jacked up dudes a bar, Politico reports that Ron DeSantis has said that he's ready to move on" from his lawsuit with Disney... but, buddy, that's not up to you any more, especially not in a legal battle you started.Read more...

Amazon is offering influencers a measly $25 per video to promote products listed on its new shopping feed, Inspire. The company is capping the payout at $12,500, saying influencers can submit a maximum of 500 videos to reach that price.Read more...

If you're a Star Wars fan who was always groggy watching the latest episodes of The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Book of Boba Fett, and Andor, you're in luck. Lucasfilm just announced that all episodes of Ahsoka will debut on Disney+ at 6 p.m. PST, 9 p.m. EST Tuesdays, beginning this Tuesday August 22 with the...Read more...

Atlantic tropical storms are more likely to kill minorities and those in other vulnerable communities, according to a new study published in Science Advances.Read more...

Of all the intriguing tales in the new Return of the Jedi anniversary anthology From a Certain Point of View, one revolving around Attack of the Clones' premiere gourmet establishment proprietor Dexter Jettster was arguably the most intriguing to many when it was announced. What was Dexter up to during the original...Read more...

Wildfires in Maui have devastated the communities in Hawaii over the last week, but a new book listed on Amazon about the natural disaster has raised eyebrows from reviewers.Read more...

Get a look at Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in Amazon's new sci-fi thriller Foe. Archer heads to England in new details about the last season. Plus, Netflix gives us one last look at Disenchanted's own finale, and when to expect a return to Adventure Time in Fionna and Cake. Spoilers now!

Threads is desperately trying to stay relevant by announcing a small update on Thursday to include a repost tab feature to the app. The newest tweaks come as the number of daily active users decreased by 80% since the app launched in July.Read more...

Meta's language-centric LlaMA AI will soon find itself in the company of a nerdier, coding wiz brother. The company's next AI release will reportedly be a big coding machine meant to compete against the proprietary software from the likes of OpenAI and Google. The model could see a release as soon as next week.Read more...

If the spectacular failure of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange wasn't evidence enough, the crypto bubble has officially popped. Now, Bitcoin, one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies, has fallen to a two-month low.Read more...

Star Wars fans have been waiting over five years for this. When Star Wars Rebels ended in March 2018, creator Dave Filoni teased a story where Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren would team up and go to find their friend, Jedi Ezra Bridger. Well, it took a while, and it's not the way we expected, but the story will finally...Read more...

One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law's water. The two...Read more...

A budget laptop has to walk a very fine line. Cut too many features, and it's going to offer disappointing performance and be annoying to use, no matter how low the price. Get too ambitious, and feature creep will drive the price up so much that it's not a budget laptop at all anymore.Read more...

In a previously recorded appearance on Josh Horowitz's podcast Happy Sad Confused promoting Gran Tourismo, the film's star David Harbour discussed the Stranger Things finale and joining James Gunn's Creature Commandos for DC Studios. Both projects are currently being paused as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes continue as...Read more...

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When Ahsoka begins next week, we're getting even further insight into a Star Wars galaxy at a crossroads moment in time-arguably the first major crisis of a nascent New Republic, and a galaxy still picking itself up after the fall of the Galactic Empire. But what do we actually know has happened in the run-up to the...Read more...

The Moon is so hot right now, metaphorically speaking. Several US government agencies, private space ventures, and foreign governments like China are plotting for mankind's return to the lunar surface over the next decade. Unlike the days of Apollo, the modern-day race to the Moon involves establishing a sustainable...Read more...

io9 first caught director and co-writer Laura Moss' debut birth/rebirth at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2023-read our review here-and its grisly yet deeply emotional exploration of motherhood has stuck with us for months. With the film about to hit theaters, we were excited to speak to Moss all about it.

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There's no better way to play video games than lying down. That can be hard to do when the TV is situated straight ahead. But with Samsung's new Freestyle Gen 2 projector, you can lay on your back and indulge in your favorite cozy game projected on the ceiling above.

When Draganfly launched as a small drone company in 1998, its co-founders did not predict hobbyist products like theirs would one day become, in the words of CEO Cameron Chell, bigger than the advent of the tank in World War I." Now, 25 years later, Draganfly's drones-which are credited by the Smithsonian as being...Read more...

Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn is now available digitally on D&D Beyond. This is huge news, not just for Critical Role fans, but for any third-party publisher who writes with Dungeons & Dragons in mind. For years, D&D Beyond has had agreements with Wizards of the Coast to offer digital, interactive versions of...Read more...

The future is nigh, but San Francisco wants to push it off just a little farther. The Bay Area city is asking California regulators to push pause on the expansion of robotaxi services from Waymo and Cruise.Read more...

Microsoft started issuing invitations for a special event" on Thursday where it may introduce some new hardware and software, including upgrades to its Surface laptops and additional AI products. The event is scheduled to be held in New York City on Sept. 21, Microsoft announced in its email and will be the first...Read more...

When all is said and done, the biggest movies of 2023 are going to be based on a 60-year-old doll and a 40-year-old video game. Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie have each, in their own unique ways, shown the best of what modern studio filmmaking can be. In an era when name brands and sequels continue to be the...Read more...

Talk about a killer campaign.Chucky (Brad Dourif) takes the stage for a run-more like a run for the lives of his next victims-to tease whats next in Chucky Season 3.Read more...