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Get 20% Off This Akai MIDI Controller And Get Your Music Journey Going

While it's true that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are both over, there are still a ton of deals available if you know where to look. We've found one example that will get you an Akai MIDI keyboard controller for just $79, but you'll need to be quick - this deal won't last forever.

The post Get 20% Off This Akai MIDI Controller And Get Your Music Journey Going first appeared on Redmond Pie.

Beeples billionaire robot dogs โ€” Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos โ€” are pure nightmare fuel

billionaire-faced robot dogs on a red carpet

Hey man, I don't know what message you're trying to send by plastering extremely realistic-looking billionaire faces onto robot dogs โ€” that's between you and your higher power, or lack thereof โ€” but no thanks. I'm good, actually, thanks for offering.

I actually do not need to witness Elon Musk's smirking visage attached to a robot that then defecates AI-generated Polaroids to the audience. I've got errands to run.

Look at these damn things.

The exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach is called โ€œRegular Animals.โ€ Created by digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, it features robot dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, according to Storyful.

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โ€” The Wall Street Journal (@wsj.com) December 5, 2025 at 11:22 AM

โ€œRegular Animalsโ€, an art installation by Beeple ๐Ÿคฎ at Art Basel in Miami, features billionaire-faced robodogs that take photos of spectators & then โ€œdefecateโ€ the so called โ€œartistic impressionsโ€, some of which link to NFTs. Printed โ€œExcrement Samplesโ€ sell for $100k. Creepy af innit?

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โ€” trish (@omerta22.posts.art) December 4, 2025 at 2:13 PM

The art installation I'm referring to is calledย Regular Animals,ย located in Miami during Art Basel. It's a creation by Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, the artistย who sold his NFT artย for $69 million during the 2021 NFT boom.

The penned-up billionaire dogs include Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as well as art-world figures like Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself. It's unnerving and weird to see the hyper-realistic faces wandering around on the picture-pooping dogs. Some folks might be tempted to draw some meaning from the installation. Not me, I've got laundry to do. No thanks.

Need a Christmas tree? Amazon Prime members can save 66% on this Pre-Lit Dunhill Fir

dunhill fir tree

SAVE $189: As of Dec. 6th, this Pre-Lit Dunhill Fir artificial Christmas tree is 66% percent off, coming in at $99. This is down from the National Tree Companyโ€™s list price of $289.99 on Amazon.ย 


Credit: National Tree Company Store

It's Dec. 6th, which means that Thanksgiving has come and gone, Black Friday and Cyber Monday spun in like the Tasmanian Devil and spun back out, and now we're more than one-fifth of the way through 25 days of Christmas. It's that time of the holiday season when many windows are filling up with the lights of beautifully decorated trees and/or menorahs. If you don't have a tree quite yet or if you've been on the fence, this weekend, the National Tree Company has a deal you might be interested in. The NTC has its Pre-Lit DunHill Fir artificial Christmas tree on sale for 66% off.ย 

This particular Pre-Lit artificial tree measures 7.5 ftย in heightย with a 55-inch diameter at its base. When it comes to being "Pre-Lit", that means that the tree is wrapped with lights before packaging, offering you a stress-free setup. The tree comes replete with 700 white light bulbs for sparkling holiday-season ambiance, on full-bodied branches designed to look as real as possible. The tree also features attached drop-down branches, allowing you to set it up quickly once you take it out of the box.ย 

The instructions indicate that one should spend about 45-60 minutes fluffing and pulling apart the branches so they look extra real.ย 

Meta plans to push back the debut of its next mixed reality glasses to 2027

The big reveal for Meta's next mixed reality glasses is being postponed until the first half of 2027, according to a report from Business Insider. Based on an internal memo from Maher Saba, the vice president of Meta's Reality Labs Foundation, the report said that the company's project, which is codenamed "Phoenix," will no longer be scheduled for a 2026 debut.

In a separate memo, Meta execs explained that the delay would help deliver a more "polished and reliable experience." According to BI, a memo from Meta's Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns said this new release window is "going to give us a lot more breathing room to get this right." Meta hasn't publicly revealed many details about its Phoenix project, but The Information previously reported that it would feature a goggle-like form factor with an external power source, similar to how the Apple Vision Pro is attached to a battery pack.

In the memo from Saba, BI reported that Meta is also working on a "limited edition" wearable with the codename "Malibu 2." Yesterday, Meta announced its acquisition of Limitless, a startup that recently developed an AI wearable called Pendant. Even though Meta's current product portfolio is dominated by smart glasses and VR headsets, the Limitless acquisition and Malibu 2 project could hint at the company's plans to expand its offerings.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-plans-to-push-back-the-debut-of-its-next-mixed-reality-glasses-to-2027-172437374.html?src=rss

ยฉ

ยฉ Meta

A person using the Meta Orion prototype for a mixed reality experience.

Why These Parents Want Schools to Stop Issuing iPads to the Their Children

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News. His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized โ€” and growing โ€” campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms.... [In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class... Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session. In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..." One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazonโ€™s new frontiers: Robotaxis, ultrafast deliveries, AI teammates

Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the companyโ€™s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire teamโ€™s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.

In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazonโ€™s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as โ€œteammates,โ€ and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.

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With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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