Author: Awais

Your Christmas Eve gaming session might not go as planned. Online gaming hub Steam went down on Wednesday.The Steam outage appeared to begin mid-afternoon ET, according to Downdetector, which monitors site outages. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)A representative for Steam did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As of Wednesday noon PT, Steam’s official X and Bluesky accounts hadn’t posted anything about the outage.Gamers certainly noticed. “Steam down, Steam down!!!” wrote one Bluesky user. Others commented on the bad timing just as gamers were enjoying time off or receiving gaming gifts. “‘You…

Raspberry Pis are one of the most popular computers among tinkerers, and I use mine constantly for one thing or another. Despite their enduring popularity, they do have some downsides. Self-hosting ignores one of Raspberry Pi’s best features Despite their popularity as low-power self-hosting devices, most self-hosted projects don’t make use of one of their best features: their GPIO pins. GPIO pins allow you to connect all sorts of interesting accessories, usually in the form of a hat, which physically mounts on top of the Raspberry Pi. Related What Is a HAT for Raspberry Pi, and What Can You Do…

Key Takeaways Adding sour cream creates whipped cream that is smoother, glossier, and fluffier.This recipe makes it harder to overwhip cream, avoiding grainy textures.Storing the whipped cream in a glass jar keeps it fresh and free of fridge odors. Whipped cream is like that one charming friend I can bring anywhere. It gets along with pretty much any dessert—layered between cakes, on top of pies, fizzy drinks, and hot chocolate, and my favorite, strawberry shortcake. If I make a bowl of whipped cream, there’s a 100% chance of a great dessert.  For all the love I have for whipped cream, it…

Netflix has had an interesting year. Its ad tier, introduced last year, has grown significantly, and its live TV initiative has expanded to include not only weird one-offs like hot-dog-eating grudge matches but also WWE programming. Taking KPop Demon Hunters off Sony’s hands for the business equivalent of $200 in a potato chip bag also turned out to be a pretty smart move for Netflix. The animated feature about, well, demon-hunting K-pop stars, became the most watched movie in the platform’s history and a global cultural phenomenon in its own right. The sing-along theatrical release sold out, songs from the…

Apple TV+ has unofficially become the new sci-fi channel, spending hundreds of millions of dollars crafting huge elaborate science fiction shows that often run for years even if they aren’t hugely popular: For All Mankind, Foundation, Invasion, Dark Matter, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Silo, See, Murderbot…it’s clear that the people who run this studio are giant sci-fi dorks, and I couldn’t be happier about it. But two such shows have risen above the rest: Severance and Pluribus, which, for my money are the two best sci-fi shows running right now. You can, of course, enjoy both of these series without…

If someone in your life needs a home office upgrade (that includes yourself!), you’ve come to the right place. WIRED’s Gear team has been working remotely well before the pandemic made it a thing. And as WIRED’s resident home office product reviewer, I’ve been churning through dozens of standing desks, office chairs, monitors, and other desk accoutrements for more than five years.Whether you’re tired of your loved one working at the kitchen table and complaining about how much their wrist hurts or you want to treat them, I’ve got several work-from-home gift ideas that can make remote work even sweeter.…

It’s been quite a year for humanoid robots, with all manner of increasingly advanced designs coming to our attention. The selections here focus more on physical movement than AI smarts, with the latter expected to come to the fore next year. H1 by Unitree So many humanoid robots still walk as if they’re desperately looking for a bathroom. But Unitree’s H1 robot not only walks like a human, it runs like one, too. The impressive contraption proved itself at the first-ever World Humanoid Robot Olympics in August, picking up four gold medals, three silver, and four bronze in various track…

arXiv:2512.21326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Separating signal from noise is central to experimental science. Applying well-established statistical method effectively to LLM evals requires consideration of their unique noise characteristics. We clearly define and measure three types of noise: prediction noise from generating different answers on a given question, data noise from sampling questions, and their combined total noise following the law of total variance. To emphasize relative comparisons and gain statistical power, we propose the all-pairs paired method, which applies the paired analysis to all pairs of LLMs and measures all the noise components based on millions of question-level predictions…

Nvidia has struck a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip competitor Groq. As part of the deal, Nvidia will hire Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees. CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring assets from Groq for $20 billion; Nvidia told TechCrunch that this is not an acquisition of the company and did not comment on the scope of the deal. But if CNBC’s numbers are accurate, this purchase is expected to be Nvidia’s largest ever, and with Groq on its side, Nvidia is poised to become even more dominant in chip manufacturing. As tech companies compete…

South Korea adds facial recognition to SIM registration to choke off scam-driven phone numbersStolen personal data has made mobile fraud cheap, and regulators want higher barriersTelecom security failures forced government to rethink how phone accounts are approvedSouth Korea is moving to tighten how new mobile accounts are created by adding facial recognition to the signup process.A new government post (via The Register) outlined how the change will reduce scams that rely on fraudulently registered phone numbers.Under the new policy, buyers will still present official identity documents, but they will also complete a facial scan through carrier-backed mobile applications. You may…