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Full-screen Xbox handheld UI is coming to all Windows PCs “starting next year”

9 June 2025 at 15:20

One weakness of Valve's Steam Deck gaming handheld and SteamOS is that, by default, they will only run Windows games from Steam that are supported by the platform's Proton compatibility layer (plus the subset of games that run natively on Linux). It's possible to install alternative game stores, and Proton's compatibility is generally impressive, but SteamOS still isn't a true drop-in replacement for Windows.

Microsoft and Asus' co-developed ROG Xbox Ally is trying to offer PC gamers a more comprehensive compatibility solution that also preserves a SteamOS-like handheld UI by putting a new Xbox-branded user interface on top of traditional Windows. And while this interface will roll out to the ROG Xbox Ally first, Microsoft told The Verge that the interface would come to other Ally handhelds next and that something "similar" would be "rolling out to other Windows handhelds starting next year."

Bringing a Steam Deck-style handheld-optimized user interface to Windows is something Microsoft has been experimenting with internally since at least 2022, when employees at an internal hackathon identified most of Windows' handheld deficiencies in a slide deck about a proposed "Windows Handheld Mode."

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Nintendo Switch 2’s faster chip can dramatically improve original Switch games

6 June 2025 at 20:32

The Nintendo Switch 2 is launching with a handful of new games, but for many of the people getting one this week, the main thing to play on it is software made for the original Switch.

We’ve known for months that the Switch 2 would maintain backward compatibility with the vast majority of Switch games, but one major question was whether the Switch 2’s improved hardware would benefit older Switch games in some way. Especially in recent years, first- and third-party Switch games have struggled with the original system’s aging Nvidia chipset, which was already a bit dated when the system came out in 2017.

After a day or so of testing various Switch games on the Switch 2, we can report firsthand that Switch games can look dramatically better on the new system. For games that Nintendo has taken the trouble to update—those with Switch 2 upgrade packs and those with free updates—players can expect higher resolutions, better frame rates, less texture and character pop-in, and smoother animations all around. Even games that haven’t been updated for the Switch 2 can run a bit more consistently on the new systems, though games without Switch 2-specific updates don’t improve as much as games with updates.

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© Andrew Cunningham

What to expect from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week

6 June 2025 at 17:05

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday with the company's standard keynote presentation—a combination of PR about how great Apple and its existing products are and a first look at the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and the company's other operating systems.

Reporting before the keynote rarely captures everything that Apple has planned at its presentations, but the reliable information we've seen so far is that Apple will keep the focus on its software this year rather than using the keynote to demo splashy new hardware like the Vision Pro and Apple Silicon Mac Pro, which the company introduced at WWDC a couple years back.

If you haven't been keeping track, here are a few of the things that are most likely to happen when the pre-recorded announcement videos start rolling next week.

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Nvidia RTX 5060/5060 Ti review: You can have “affordable” or “future-proof.” Pick one.

5 June 2025 at 18:28

When it comes to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, the GPU itself is less interesting than the storm Nvidia stirred up by trying to earn it better reviews. If you don’t follow the twists and turns of graphics card launch metanarratives, allow me to recap the company's behavior for you.

Though the RTX 5060 launched on May 19, Nvidia and its partners were uncharacteristically slow to ship graphics cards to reviewers. For outlets that received pre-launch hardware, Nvidia didn’t provide the pre-launch drivers that it usually sends out so that reviewers could run their own tests on the cards, informing reviewers on a call that drivers would be available to them and the public on the 19th.

Except! Nvidia did offer advance drivers to a handful of publications on the condition that they run a few benchmarks that had been pre-selected by Nvidia and that they only report numbers from tests performed with the 50-series new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) setting enabled.

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© Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft wants a version of USB-C that “just works” consistently across all PCs

2 June 2025 at 21:19

We've been covering the small, reversible USB Type-C connector since the days when it was just a USB Implementers Forum tech demo, and in the decade-plus since then, the port has gradually taken over the world. It quietly migrated from laptops to game consoles, to PC accessories, to Android phones, to e-readers, and to iPhones. Despite some hiccups and shortcomings, we're considerably closer to a single connector that does everything than we were a decade ago.

But some confusion persists. A weakness built into the USB-C from the very beginning was that the specification for the physical connector was always separate from the specifications for the USB Power Delivery specification for charging, the USB-C Alt Mode specification for carrying non-USB signals like DisplayPort or HDMI, and for the USB protocol itself (that is, the data transfer speed a given port is capable of).

All of these specifications were frequently grouped together so that individual USB-C ports could handle charging, display output, and data transfers (or some combination of all three at once), but they weren't required to go together, so occasionally users will still run into physical USB-C ports that fall short of the port's do-everything promise.

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It was probably always going to end this way for Amazon’s Wheel of Time show

28 May 2025 at 16:35

Late on Friday, Amazon announced that it was canceling its TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, after several uncomfortable weeks of silence that followed the show’s third season finale.

Fans of the series can take some cold comfort in the fact that it apparently wasn’t an easy decision to make. But as we speculated in our write-up of what ended up being the show’s series finale, an expensive show with a huge cast, tons of complicated costuming and effects, and extensive location shooting only makes mathematical sense if it’s a megahit, and The Wheel of Time was never a megahit.

Adapting the unadaptable

I was sad about the cancellation announcement because I believe this season was the one where the show found its footing, both as an adaptation of a complex book series and as a fun TV show in its own right. But I wasn't surprised by it. The only thing I found surprising was that it took this long to happen.

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My 3D printing journey, part 2: Printing upgrades and making mistakes

28 May 2025 at 11:00

For the last three months or so, I've been learning to use (and love) a Bambu Labs A1 3D printer, a big, loud machine that sits on my desk and turns pictures on my computer screen into real-world objects.

In the first part of my series about diving into the wild world of 3D printers, I covered what I'd learned about the different types of 3D printers, some useful settings in the Bambu Studio app (which should also be broadly useful to know about no matter what printer you use), and some initial, magical-feeling successes in downloading files that I turned into useful physical items using a few feet of plastic filament and a couple hours of time.

For this second part, I'm focusing on what I learned when I embarked on my first major project—printing upgrade parts for the A1 with the A1. It was here that I made some of my first big 3D printing mistakes, mistakes that prompted me to read up on the different kinds of 3D printer filament, what each type of filament is good for, and which types the A1 is (and is not) good at handling as an un-enclosed, bed-slinging printer.

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© Andrew Cunningham

In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you”

22 May 2025 at 22:46

By late 2021, major updates for Windows' built-in Notepad text editor had been so rare for so long that a gentle redesign and a handful of new settings were rated as a major update. New updates have become much more common since then, but like the rest of Windows, recent additions have been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of generative AI.

In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further, allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).

Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft's AI credits. Per this support page, users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.

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What I learned from my first few months with a Bambu Lab A1 3D printer, part 1

22 May 2025 at 11:30

For a couple of years now, I've been trying to find an excuse to buy a decent 3D printer.

Friends and fellow Ars staffers who had them would gush about them at every opportunity, talking about how useful they can be and how much can be printed once you get used to the idea of being able to create real, tangible objects with a little time and a few bucks' worth of plastic filament.

But I could never quite imagine myself using one consistently enough to buy one. Then, this past Christmas, my wife forced the issue by getting me a Bambu Lab A1 as a present.

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© Andrew Cunningham

Nintendo says more about how free Switch 2 updates will improve Switch games

16 May 2025 at 15:24

When Nintendo took the wraps off the Switch 2 in early April, it announced that around a dozen first-party Switch games would be getting free updates that would add some Switch 2-specific benefits to older games running on the new console. We could safely assume that these updates wouldn't be as extensive as the $10 and $20 paid upgrade packs for games like Breath of the Wild or Kirby and the Forgotten Land, but Nintendo's page didn't initially provide any game-specific details.

Earlier this week, Nintendo updated its support page with more game-by-game details about what players of these older games can expect on the new hardware. The baseline improvement for most games is "improved image quality" and optimizations for the Switch 2's built-in display, but others include support for GameShare multiplayer, support for the new Joy-Cons' mouse controls, support for HDR TVs, and other tweaks.

The most significant of the announced updates are frame rate improvements for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the main-series Pokémon games released in late 2022. Most latter-day Switch games suffered from frame rate dips here and there, as newer games outstripped the capabilities of a low-power tablet processor that had already been a couple of years old when the Switch launched in 2017. But the Pokémon performance problems were so pervasive and widely commented-upon that Nintendo released a rare apology promising to improve the game post-release. Subsequent patches helped somewhat but could never deliver a consistently smooth frame rate; perhaps new hardware will finally deliver what software patches couldn't.

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© Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft’s Surface lineup reportedly losing another of its most interesting designs

15 May 2025 at 19:23

Microsoft has continued to design, manufacture, and sell new Surface hardware since longtime team leader Panos Panay left the company for Amazon in late 2023, including both Intel- and Qualcomm-powered Surface Pro tablets and Surface Laptops. New smaller versions of both of these mainstays were introduced just a couple of weeks ago.

But the weirder, more unique parts of the Surface lineup have been mostly neglected since Panay's departure. Late last year, Microsoft discontinued the Surface Studio all-in-one desktop, which was never updated consistently and started at a whopping $4,300. But it provided one of the few alternatives to the basic "monitor with a computer inside it" all-in-one design template. Now, The Verge reports that Microsoft stopped manufacturing the Surface Laptop Studio 2 earlier this month and that the PC will disappear after current retail stock is sold.

Microsoft reportedly plans to officially announce the end-of-life status of the Laptop Studio 2 in June. The company will support the Laptop Studio with driver and firmware updates as necessary through at least October of 2029, in accordance with its six-year support lifecycle for Surface hardware.

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Microsoft effectively raises high-end Surface prices by discontinuing base models

8 May 2025 at 16:27

When Microsoft announced new Surface devices earlier this week, we noted that there wasn't a lot of daylight between the starting prices of the new but lower-end devices ($799 for the 12-inch Surface Pro, $899 for the 13-inch Surface Laptop) and the starting prices of the older-but-higher-end Surfaces from last spring ($999 for both).

It appears Microsoft has quietly solved this problem by discontinuing the 256GB versions of the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 and the 13-inch Surface Pro 11. Microsoft's retail pages for both devices list only 512GB and 1TB configurations, with regular prices starting at $1,199. Though not technically a price hike—the 512GB versions of both devices also cost $1,199 before—it does amount to an effective price increase for last year's Surface hardware, especially given that both devices have user-replaceable storage that can easily be upgraded for less than the $200 that Microsoft charged for the 256GB-to-512GB upgrade.

The upshot is that the new Surface PCs make more sense now than they did on Tuesday in relative terms, but it's only because you'll pay more to buy a Surface Pro 11 or Surface Laptop 7 than you would before. The 15-inch version of the Surface Laptop 7 still lists a 256GB configuration and a $1,299 starting price, but the 256GB models are currently out of stock.

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Apps like Kindle are already taking advantage of court-mandated iOS App Store changes

6 May 2025 at 17:51

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Apple was in "willful violation" of a court injunction that required the company to refrain from "anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing" in its tightly controlled iOS App Store. Part of the ongoing litigation between Epic Games and Apple, the injunction specifically forbade Apple from "denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct purchasers to, other purchasing mechanisms."

Following the ruling, Apple said it would comply with the court's injunction while the company continued to appeal the decision. The day after the ruling was handed down, Apple altered several of its App Review Guidelines to grant developers permission to do things they hadn't been allowed to do before. As summarized in an email to developers, reported by MacRumors:

3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.

3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.

3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.

3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

We're already beginning to see new versions of apps that take advantage of these changes. Case in point: Amazon's Kindle app for iPhones and iPads, which from its original launch in 2009 up until yesterday wouldn't actually let anyone buy books in the app. Users instead needed to navigate on their own to Amazon's store in Safari or on their PC and Mac and buy the books they wanted, at which point the books would be available in the Kindle app.

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Nvidia GeForce xx60 series is PC gaming’s default GPU, and a new one is out May 19

6 May 2025 at 16:27

Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia's DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least, it would if every single GPU launched by any company at any price wasn't instantly selling out these days.

Nvidia announced a May release for the 5060 last month when it released the RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) and $429 (16GB). Prices for that card so far haven't been as inflated as they have been for the RTX 5070 on up, but the cheapest ones you can currently get are still between $50 and $100 over that MSRP. Unless Nvidia and its partners have made dramatically more RTX 5060 cards than they've made of any other model so far, expect this card to carry a similar pricing premium for a while.

RTX 5060 Ti RTX 4060 Ti RTX 5060 RTX 4060 RTX 5050 (leaked) RTX 3050
CUDA Cores 4,608 4,352 3,840 3,072 2,560 2,560
Boost Clock 2,572 MHz 2,535 MHz 2,497 MHz 2,460 MHz Unknown 1,777 MHz
Memory Bus Width 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit
Memory bandwidth 448GB/s 288GB/s 448GB/s 272GB/s Unknown 224GB/s
Memory size 8GB or 16GB GDDR7 8GB or 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR7 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6
TGP 180 W 160 W 145 W 115 W 130 W 130 W

Compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5060 adds a few hundred extra CUDA cores and gets a big memory bandwidth increase thanks to the move from GDDR6 to GDDR7. But its utility at higher resolutions will continue to be limited by its 8GB of RAM, which is already becoming a problem for a handful of high-end games at 1440p and 4K.

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Lighter, cheaper Surface Laptop saves a little money but gives up a lot

6 May 2025 at 13:00

Microsoft is releasing a pair of new Surface devices today, both models that undercut last year's Surface Laptop and Surface Pro on price but also take a pretty big step down in specs. One of the devices is a new 12-inch Surface Pro tablet, which we've covered in more detail here. The other is a new 13-inch Surface Laptop, whose specs and price straddle the narrow gap between the current seventh-generation Surface Laptop and the original price of the aging Surface Laptop Go 3.

The new Surface Laptop starts at $899, and preorders open today. It will be available on May 20.

The new laptop shares many specs in common with last year’s entry-level seventh-generation Surface Laptop, including an Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM, and support for Windows 11’s expanded Copilot+ capabilities. It’s also smaller and lighter than the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop. But the CPU has eight cores instead of 10 or 12, the screen is smaller and lower resolution, and you’re more limited in your upgrade options; we’ve outlined the key differences in the table below.

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Microsoft’s 12-inch Surface Pro is cheaper but unfixes a decade-old design problem

6 May 2025 at 13:00

Microsoft is introducing a pair of new Surface devices today, both aimed slightly down-market from the 11th-generation Surface Pro tablet and 7th-generation Surface Laptop that the company released last spring. One is a 13-inch Surface Laptop, which we've covered in more detail here. The second (and more notably changed) device is a new 12-inch Surface Pro tablet, which is the first significant design change we've seen in the Surface Pro lineup since the first ARM-based Surface Pro X was released in 2019.

Preorders for both new Surface devices begin today, and they begin shipping on May 20. The 12-inch Surface Pro starts at $799, and the keyboard cover remains a separate purchase, available for $149.

The 12-inch Surface Pro is a cheaper alternative to the $939-and-up 13-inch Surface Pro (which Microsoft is continuing to sell), and the smallest Surface Microsoft has tried since the 10.5-inch underspecced Surface Go series. In addition to the smaller screen, the base model includes a bunch of other minor downgrades from the flagship 13-inch tablet, as outlined in the table below. But it's also nearly half a pound lighter, and its 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processor should still deliver solid performance and compatibility with the extra Windows 11 features available on Copilot+ PCs.

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In HBO’s The Last of Us, revenge is a dish best served democratically

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Andrew: And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.

Kyle: Yeah, I've said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.

But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who's played the game knows how central "the porch scene" is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we'd still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.

Andrew: (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)

Kyle: I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn't, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence... I don't know what they were thinking. Then again, if it's just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.

Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he's helped to build. Credit: HBO

Andrew: Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O'Hara, world's least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I'm sure we'll get it at a time that's engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn't it?

We're able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn't want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one "normal" community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.

Kyle: We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between "paramilitary psychopaths" and "normal community." But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson's uniqueness all the more important as a setting.

We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same "Ellie and Dina go out for revenge." While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.

Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant. Credit: HBO

Andrew: Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation, particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the "Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance" meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).

Part of it almost felt too much like "our" politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that's the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific "they" who would be "laughing at us" if the community doesn't track down and execute Abby. I'll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie's attempted vengeance tour doesn't make me feel better about what she's deciding to do here.

Kyle: I will say the line "Nobody votes for angry" rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn't really work...
Andrew: SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It's an extremely reliable indicator!
Kyle: Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!
Andrew: So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn't about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council's better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.
Kyle: One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just "GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING" and even the people that agreed with her were like "Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!"
Andrew: Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it's not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie's impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel's taciturn competence there to leaven it.

Kyle: I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that's already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I'm not sure the town hall "deterrence" arguments would have swayed him.

Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the game). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much "You're gay, I'm not" bit...

Ellie and Dina conspire. Credit: HBO

Andrew: "You're gay, I'm not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!"

I am not inclined to get too on Dina's case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn't go into it, but I've also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.

Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being "out" in this context than Dina would be.

Kyle: As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I'd have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more "grounded" TV show, the odds do not seem great.

Andrew: One thread I'm curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame "Abby and her crew," people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it's easier to kill her when the time comes. We'll see how well it works!

But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the "Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps"-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.

Kyle: They're pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I'm not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous
Andrew: (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this...

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Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it

25 April 2025 at 17:00

Nearly a year after announcing the feature, Microsoft is finally ready to roll the controversial Windows Recall feature out to the general public, the company announced today on its Windows Experience Blog.

Only available on Copilot+ PCs, a subset of Windows 11 systems sold within the last year or so, Recall takes continuous screenshots of everything you do on your PC, saving them, scraping text from them, and saving it all in a searchable database. This obviously has major security and privacy implications—anyone who can get access to your Recall database can see nearly everything you've done on your PC—which is why Microsoft's initial rollout attempt was such a mess.

Recall's long road to release involved a rushed initial almost-launch, harsh criticism of its (then mostly nonexistent) security protections, multiple delays, a major under-the-hood overhaul, and five months of testing in Microsoft's Windows Insider beta program. Microsoft signaled that Recall was nearly ready for release two weeks ago when it came to the near-final Release Preview channel.

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Wheel of Time recap: The show nails one of the books’ biggest and bestest battles

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode seven, "Goldeneyes," which was released on April 10.

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Windows 11’s Copilot Vision wants to help you learn to use complicated apps

9 April 2025 at 16:57

Some elements of Microsoft's Copilot assistant in Windows 11 have felt like a solution in search of a problem—and it hasn't helped that Microsoft has frequently changed Copilot's capabilities, turning it from a native Windows app into a web app and back again.

But I find myself intrigued by a new addition to Copilot Vision that Microsoft began rolling out this week to testers in its Windows Insider program. Copilot Vision launched late last year as a feature that could look at pages in the Microsoft Edge browser and answer questions based on those pages' contents. The new Vision update extends that capability to any app window, allowing you to ask Copilot not just about the contents of a document but also about the user interface of the app itself.

Microsoft's Copilot Vision update can see the contents of any app window you share with it. Credit: Microsoft

Provided the app works as intended—not a given for any software, but especially for AI features—Copilot Vision could replace "frantic Googling" as a way to learn how to use a new app or how to do something new or obscure in complex PC apps like Word, Excel, or Photoshop. I recently switched from Photoshop to Affinity Photo, for example, and I'm still finding myself tripped up by small differences in workflows and UI between the two apps. Copilot Vision could, in theory, ease that sort of transition.

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