Vector is a minimalist take on Spotlight that uses AI to and the gives a conversational twist to the whole experience. It's not perfect, but definitely deserves a chance.

The post I wish Apple made this Mac tool, it’s better than Spotlight and you should try it appeared first on Digital Trends.

UPDATE (12/7): The New York Times clarifies today that the damage at Chernobyl hasn't led to a rise in radiation levels: "If there was to be some event inside the shelter that would release radioactive materials into the space inside the New Safe Confinement, because this facility is no longer sealed to the outside environment, there's the potential for radiation to come out," said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and last visited Chernobyl on October 31. "I have to say I don't think that's a particularly serious issue at the moment, because they're not actively decommissioning the actual sarcophagus." The I.A.E.A. also said there was no permanent damage to the shield's load-bearing structures or monitoring systems. A spokesman for the agency, Fredrik Dahl, said in a text message on Sunday that radiation levels were similar to what they were before the drone hit. But "A structure designed to prevent radioactive leakage at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer operational," Politico reported Saturday, "after Russian drones targeted it earlier this year, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has found." [T]he large steel structure "lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability" when its outer cladding was set ablaze after being struck by Russian drones, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Beyond that, there was "no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems," it said. "Limited temporary repairs have been carried out on the roof, but timely and comprehensive restoration remains essential to prevent further degradation and ensure long-term nuclear safety," IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in astatement. The Guardian has pictures of the protective shield — incuding the damage from the drone strike. The shield is the world's largest movable land structure, reports CNN: The IAEA, which has a permanent presence at the site, will "continue to do everything it can to support efforts to fully restore nuclear safety and security," Grossi said.... Built in 2010 and completed in 2019, it was designed to last 100 years and has played a crucial role in securing the site. The project cost €2.1 billion and was funded by contributions from more than 45 donor countries and organizations through the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which in 2019 hailed the venture as "the largest international collaboration ever in the field of nuclear safety."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Texas Representative Henry Cuellar is running for re-election as a Democrat after Trump pardoned him.

Will Netflix’s $82.7 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. get approval from federal regulators? While Paramount was assumed to be the frontrunner to acquire the storied movie studio thanks to CEO David Ellison’s connections to the Trump administration, new reporting in Bloomberg and The Hollywood Reporter suggests that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos met with President […]

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Sources: Aaru, which uses AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures at multiple valuation tiers, including a $1B tier  —  Aaru, a startup that provides near-instant customer research by using AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures …

[VWestlife] purchased all kinds of USB video capture devices — many of them from the early 2000s — and put them through their paces in trying to digitize VHS classics like Instant Fireplace and Buying an Auxiliary Sailboat. The results were actually quite varied, but almost universally bad. They all worked, but they also brought unpleasant artifacts and side effects when it came to the final results. Sure, the analog source isn’t always the highest quality, but could it really be this hard to digitize a VHS tape?

It turns out there’s an exception to all the disappointment: the Sony Digital Video Media Converter (DVMC) is a piece of vintage hardware released in 1998 that completely outperformed the other devices [VWestlife] tested. There is a catch, but it’s a small one. More on that in a moment.

Unlike many other capture methods, the DVMC has a built-in time base corrector that stabilizes analog video signals by buffering them and correcting any timing errors that would cause problems like jitter or drift. This is a feature one wouldn’t normally find on budget capture devices, but [VWestlife] says the Sony DVMC can be found floating around on eBay for as low as 20 USD. It even has composite and S-Video inputs.

For an old device, [VWestlife] says using the DVMC was remarkably smooth. It needed no special drivers, defaults to analog input mode, and can be powered over USB. That last one may sound trivial, but it means there’s no worry about lacking some proprietary wall adapter with an oddball output voltage.

The catch? It isn’t really a USB device, and requires a FireWire (IEEE-1394) port in order to work. But if that’s not a deal-breaker, it does a fantastic job.

So if you’re looking to digitize older analog media, [VWestlife] says it might be worth heading to eBay and digging up a used Sony DVMC. But if one wants to get really serious about archiving analog media, capturing RF signals direct from the tape head is where it’s at.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Windows has a vast ecosystem of its own apps, but many of my current favorite apps for Windows actually started their digital lives on Linux. If you're looking for a few free or open-source alternatives to your conventional Windows apps, some of these options are a great place to start.

Bittensor’s first token halving is scheduled for Dec. 14, reducing TAO issuance by half as the AI-focused network adopts a Bitcoin-style fixed supply model.

Unless EA decides to sell off the 'Dead Space' IP to someone else, the sci-fi horror series has died a second death.

One does not simply spend more than 11 hours watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single weekend at home when the opportunity to do so in theaters arises. As The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring turns 25, Fathom Entertainment and Warner Bros. announced theatrical screenings of the Peter Jackson trilogy in their extended editions, according to an exclusive report from Variety.

The re-releases will be available in DBOX presentations from January 16 to 19, complete with movements and vibrations to make you feel like you're making the journey to Mordor with Frodo and his entourage. If you prefer a traditional experience, the trilogy will be available in standard format from January 23 to 25.

Fathom Entertainment

Fathom Entertainment

For the collectors out there, the screenings will also feature limited-edition themed concession items. Fans can purchase popcorn buckets that showcase maps of Middle-earth at AMC locations, while Regal venues and other local cinemas will have buckets with designs of the One Ring. Tickets are already on sale at Fathom's website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-lord-of-the-rings-trilogy-returns-to-theaters-in-january-for-25th-anniversary-202433217.html?src=rss

©

© Fathom Entertainment

A hardware security response from ChatGPT ended with "Shop for home and groceries. Connect Target." But "There are no live tests for ads" on ChatGPT, insists Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT. Posting on X.com, he said "any screenshots you've seen are either not real or not ads." Engadget reports The OpenAI exec's explanation comes after another post from former xAI employee Benjamin De Kraker on X that has gained traction, which featured a screenshot showing an option to shop at Target within a ChatGPT conversation. OpenAI's Daniel McAuley responded to the post, arguing that it's not an ad but rather an example of app integration that the company announced in October. [To which De Kraker responded "when brands inject themselves into an unrelated chat and encourage the user to go shopping at their store, that's an ad. The more you pretend this isn't an ad because you guys gave it a different name, the less users like or trust you."] However, the company's chief research officer, Mark Chen, also replied on X that they "fell short" in this case, adding that "anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care." "We've turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model's precision," Chen wrote on X. "We're also looking at better controls so you can dial this down or off if you don't find it helpful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations. That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year... At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about. That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home... The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt. "If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..." As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigeria's government has secured the release of 100 schoolchildren who were abducted from a Catholic boarding school last month, according to local media.

X has seemingly penalized the European Commission's account after the commission fined the company over blue checkmarks and ad transparency.

Hot take: 1TB SSDs are fine for some people, but not for most people. Not anymore.

One of the most anticipated television events of the year has arrived—well, at least part one of it has—and with it comes the return of our favorite monster-fighting 80s teens. It’s been a long three-year wait, but Stranger Things season five has begun. The only bummer is that it’s dropping in three volumes. While we'd all love for the final season to drop at once, we must be patient.

Prominent market analyst Michael Van de Poppe has shared four market conditions that would confirm an altcoin market rally. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency market continues to experience a widespread correction, weighing down the price growth of several assets.

Ethereum Outperforms Bitcoin: A Positive Sign For Altcoins?

Ethereum has shown more resilience in the last month than Bitcoin, which is largely interpreted as a bullish signal for altcoin enthusiasts. In the last week alone, the prominent altcoin reported a slight market gain of 0.86% compared to Bitcoin’s loss of 1.95%. When Ethereum outperforms Bitcoin, it encourages increased altcoin activity, as investor confidence spreads beyond the market leader into the broader crypto ecosystem.

However, a full altcoin market takeover only comes into effect after the following technical developments. Firstly, de Poppe explains that Bitcoin, as the market leader, must achieve a breakthrough above $92,000 resistance, potentially testing the $100,000 mark, to signal renewed market strength. Additionally, the analyst states the ETH/BTC ratio must stay above its 20-day moving average (MA), indicating Ethereum’s continued dominance and further encouraging altcoin accumulation. Together, these signals could set the technical bedrock for a significant altcoin rally.

Macro Factors Could Amplify Altcoin Gains

Beyond crypto-specific indicators, de Poppe also touches on broader financial market plays that could initiate the next altcoin move. The analyst suggests that a 5-10% correction in gold prices, coupled with a peak in silver, could encourage capital to flow into riskier assets like cryptocurrencies including cryptocurrencies. 

Meanwhile, a strong upward movement in the Nasdaq would indicate increased investor risk appetite, a development that often translates into heightened activity in the crypto markets. When combined with positive momentum in Bitcoin and Ethereum, these macro signals could create an environment ripe for a substantial altcoin rally. According to de Poppe, the fulfillment of these conditions indicates that altcoins could achieve market gains of 200%-300% in the present market cycle.

Market Overview

At the time of writing, the total cryptocurrency market is valued at $3.04 trillion, following a significant 15.5% decline over the past month. Meanwhile, the altcoin market cap stands at $1.26 trillion, accounting for 41.44% of all circulating digital assets. In tandem, data from CoinMarketCap shows the altseason index at 20/100, as Bitcoin still maintains a dominant grip on overall market performance, with a 58.6% dominance.

In short, the conditions for a full-scale altcoin breakout have yet to materialize,  but the key indicators highlighted above suggest that scenario may be approaching if momentum shifts decisively toward risk assets.

Покерный мир отметил новое яркое событие: 5 декабря состоялась премьера первого видео на официальном YouTube-канале Марио Мосбека. Профессиональный игрок и амбассадор CoinPoker познакомил зрителей с уникальным материалом, который ранее не попадал ни на одну медиаплатформу. В преддверии премьеры прошел специальный 24-часовой розыгрыш, в ходе которого каждый новый подписчик автоматически участвовал в распределении призов на сумму $5 000. Этот запуск стал заметным шагом вперед в развитии личного бренда Мосбека и предложил поклонникам покера новый источник эксклюзивного контента и аналитики.

ПОДПИСАТЬСЯ НА КАНАЛ

Эксклюзивные кадры из Triton Invitational Montenegro: что увидели зрители

Для первого ролика Мосбек подготовил материалы из турнира, который сам по себе вызывает огромный интерес — Triton Invitational Montenegro с бай-ином $200 000. Это одно из самых элитных событий мирового покера, где за столами собираются признанные мастера и известные VIP-игроки. На Дне 1 Марио оказался за столом с Филом Айви, Артуром Мартиросяном, Леоном Штурмом и Джонатаном Джаффе — соперниками, с которыми попадают в одну раздачу лишь лучшие.

Видео включило разбор ключевых моментов турнира, детальные объяснения решений и взгляд изнутри на те раздачи, которые аудитория в обычных условиях никогда бы не увидела. Мосбек не только показал ход игры, но и поделился личными впечатлениями и комментариями о динамике стола. В ролик также вошла его «кулерная» вылетная раздача, ставшая одним из самых эмоциональных моментов сюжета.

Простой и честный розыгрыш: как пользователи становились участниками

За сутки до премьеры CoinPoker и Мосбек организовали акцию, в рамках которой разыгрывали $5 000 среди зрителей, успевших подписаться на канал. Условия были максимально прозрачными: действия требовалось всего одно — нажать кнопку «Подписаться» за сутки до запуска.

В розыгрыше участвовали 200 билетов CoinMasters номиналом по $25, что давало победителям шанс попасть в турнир с гарантией $10 000. Все победители определялись посредством случайной выборки, а тикеты начислялись напрямую на их CoinPoker-аккаунты. Отсутствие скрытых условий и полного контроля случайности сделало акцию привлекательной как для новых пользователей, так и для постоянных поклонников платформы.

Почему важно подписаться заранее: выгоды для будущих зрителей

Хотя розыгрыш уже завершен, запуск канала ясно продемонстрировал, что это был лишь первый шаг. Канал Мосбека обещает стать регулярным источником аналитики с турниров высоких ставок, образовательных разборов и редких инсайтов, которые могут быть полезны игрокам любого уровня. Поскольку Марио многие годы является частью топовой профессиональной сцены, его контент представляет реальную практическую ценность.

Не менее важно и то, что CoinPoker последовательно внедряет новые активности и промо-кампании. Если ранние подписчики уже получили возможность выиграть билеты CoinMasters, то будущие подписчики также смогут претендовать на новые розыгрыши и бонусы. Чтобы не упускать таких возможностей, достаточно подписаться на канал заранее и следить за обновлениями — это всего один шаг, который легко может превратиться в выгодное участие в следующей акции.

The former Billy Loomis speaks out on what his repeat hauntings would've led to in a different version of 'Scream 7.'

X's clapback came after the Commission fined it $140 million. The gesture appears to be toothless.