Author: Awais

“If you don’t eat soup joumou on New Year’s Day, you’ll have a bad year,” my dad always told me growing up. On January 1, I would scramble to get my siblings and myself dressed so we could make it to my grandmother’s house for a bowl. By any means necessary, I had to have it. It wasn’t until around first grade that I truly began to grasp the history behind the dish—that’s when my dad’s message finally clicked. While skipping soup joumou might not bring a sour future, he saw it as a way for us to intentionally start…

2025 was the year generative AI made its presence felt in the video game industry. Its use has been discovered in some of the most popular games of the year, and CEOs from some of the largest game studios claim it’s being implemented everywhere in the industry including in their own development processes. Meanwhile, rank-and-file developers, especially in the indie games space, are pushing back against its encroachment, coming up with ways to signal their games are gen-AI free.Generative AI has largely replaced NFTs as the buzzy trend publishers are chasing. Its proponents claim that the technology will be a…

Your iPhone has hidden features and Easter eggs scattered throughout iOS that Apple never advertises. Some are genuinely useful shortcuts that will change how you use your phone daily, while others are completely pointless but surprisingly entertaining.If, you’re anything like me, you could go ages without discovering them because they’re tucked away in unexpected places or require specific commands that most users would never think to try.You certainly won’t stumble across these features by accident, which is exactly why they feel so satisfying to discover. Here are five iPhone easter eggs you probably didn’t know existed. You may like 1.…

January is a time of new beginnings and resolutions. One thing about making New Year’s resolutions is that it’s hard to stick to them perfectly. So why not try a perfectly imperfect resolution? If you want to cut back on your meat consumption, simply resolve to add a few more meatless meals to your weekly menu. These 10 recipes will get you started. Some are vegetarian. Some are vegan. Pick a few and resolve to take part in Meatless Monday or perhaps even Veganuary. Not only will you cut down on your meat consumption, but you’ll also discover some tasty…

This was a surprisingly fun year for smartphones. I wasn’t expecting it to be; the category is often described as stale or “plateaued.” But as WIRED’s resident phone reviewer, I’ve tested nearly all of this year’s handsets—devices as cheap as $130 all the way to an eye-watering $2,000—and I don’t think there’s been a year filled with as many varied styles in quite some time.It all started with the Nothing Phone (3a) series, which the UK company launched at Mobile World Congress early in the year. While I wasn’t a fan of the Pro model’s top-heavy camera module, the electric…

The holiday season is here. You’ve finally unboxed that new iPhone or perhaps just made the decision to actually install iOS 26. Whether you’re upgrading from a much older model or simply making the jump from iOS 18, you’re entering the world of a new operating system. We’re talking a completely new Liquid Glass design, plus a suite of dazzling new Apple Intelligence features. As a tech expert who has been diving deep into the latest OS, I can tell you that the real fun lies in the details — the quiet game-changers Apple didn’t feature on the main stage. Zooey Liao/CNETI’ve…

If you’re someone who struggles to stay on task or simply want to boost your productivity as the new year approaches, there are several apps and extensions you can try that are designed to help you focus by blocking out distractions.  Whether you need to limit social media scrolling or block off time to be productive, these tools will keep you focused. Here are some of the best options. Freedom Image Credits:Freedom If you want to block distractions across all of your devices at once, Freedom is a good option. You can choose which websites and apps to block for…

The Ruby programming language continues its tradition of delivering major updates on Christmas Day, announcing the release of Ruby 4.0.0, which introduces two massive new experimental features: the isolation mechanism known as Ruby Box and the next-generation just-in-time compiler, ZJIT. The biggest architectural change arriving with version 4.0 is definitely Ruby Box. This new experimental feature has strict separation for definitions loaded within the box. If you’ve ever wrestled with complex dependency issues or had a rogue monkey patch mess up your global environment, you know how crucial isolation can be. Definitions loaded inside a Ruby Box are isolated from…

arXiv:2512.21010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse specialized benchmarks necessitates a shift from fragmented, task-specific metrics to a holistic, competitive ranking system that effectively aggregates performance across multiple ability dimensions. Primarily using static scoring, current evaluation methods are fundamentally limited. They struggle to determine the proper mix ratio across diverse benchmarks, and critically, they fail to capture a model’s dynamic competitive fitness or its vulnerability when confronted with sequential, high-stakes tasks. To address this, we introduce the novel Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics (CSD) framework. CSD simulates a multi-round, sequential contest where models are…

If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine. There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it’ll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters…