An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTubers and other digital content creators are selling their unused video footage to AI companies seeking exclusive videos to better train their AI algorithms, oftentimes netting thousands of dollars per deal. OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, AI media company Moonvalley and several other AI companies are collectively paying hundreds of content creators for access to their unpublished videos, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

That content, which hasn't been posted elsewhere online, is considered valuable for training artificial intelligence systems since it's unique. AI companies are currently paying between $1 and $4 per minute of footage, the people said, with prices increasing depending on video quality or format. Videos that are shot in 4K, for example, go for a higher price, as does non-traditional footage like videos captured from drones or using 3D animations. Most footage, such as unused video created for networks like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, is selling for somewhere between $1 and $2 per minute.

Delta Air Lines has partnered with YouTube to provide ad-free YouTube Premium and YouTube Music to SkyMiles members on flights. "The deal includes a selection of curated content from key YouTube creators," notes Variety. The airline also said it would upgrade its fleet with better Wi-Fi and 4K HDR QLED displays, alongside AI-driven enhancements like a personal assistant on the Fly Delta app to improve travel experiences. From the report: Delta executives announced the YouTube deal and other flight-experience enhancements to its Delta Sync platform as the aviation giant gave an expansive presentation Tuesday evening at the Sphere in Las Vegas, in connection with the Consumer Electronics Show. Delta touted plans to mark the company's 100th anniversary this year, noting that it is the first airline to reach the centennial mark.

It's also no surprise that Delta is leaning hard into AI tech. The company hopes its Delta Concierge AI-powered personal assistant feature that is rolling out this year on its Fly Delta app will make strides in improving the overall customer experience. The goal is that with repeated use the Concierge tool will come to anticipate individual consumers' needs and help them streamline the logistics of travel -- or what Delta dubbed "contextualized guidance" on everything from departure gates to baggage claim details to alerting travelers to weather conditions at their destinations. [...]

Mary Ellen Coe, chief business officer of YouTube, emphasized that the ad-free YouTube offering will allow viewers to access streaming content as well as podcasts and music. She also asserted that consumers are increasingly gathering travel tips and inspiration through YouTube creators. "Creators are producing the must-see TV of today," Coe said.

According to police, the man killed in the January 1st Las Vegas Cybertruck blast used ChatGPT to plan the explosion. The Hill reports: In a press conference, Tuesday, Las Vegas police released more details of the intentions of 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, who died of a gunshot wound prior to the car exploding. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said it was concerning that Livelsberger used ChatGPT, a popular artificial intelligence model created by OpenAI, to carry out the explosion. According to police, Livelsberger asked ChatGPT various questions, including where the largest gun stores in Denver were, information about the explosive targets Tannerite and pistols. "We knew that AI was going to change the game at some point or another in really all of our lives and certainly, I think this is the first incidence that I'm aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device, to learn information all across the country as they're moving forward," McMahill said.

"And so, absolutely, it's a concerning moment for us," he continued.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes.

It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages.

Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.

The OnePlus 13 launched in the North American market today, making it the first flagship smartphone of 2025. As the smartphone market continues to consolidate, it has become increasingly difficult for non-Samsung, Google, and Apple devices to gain significant traction in the competitive U.S. market. Nevertheless, OnePlus has continually released premium flagship-tier devices at relatively modest price points, hoping to pry users away from the Big Tech monoliths.

The OnePlus 13 features Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, up to 16GB of RAM, a 6.82" QHD+ OLED display, a triple Hasselblad-branded camera system, a massive 6,000mAh battery, and support for 5G networks across all major carriers in the U.S. and Canada. A full list of specifications can be found here.

Based on the early reviews, the OnePlus 13 appears to set the bar high with not a lot of faults to highlight among reviewers. Here are some of our favorite reviews published today:

OnePlus 13 review: finally, a flagship that can hang (The Verge)
OnePlus 13 review: I'm dumbfounded, I can't find anything wrong with this phone (TechRadar)
OnePlus 13 Review: Ship Shape? (Michael Fisher)
OnePlus 13 Review: The Bar Has Been Set! (Marques Brownlee)
The OnePlus 13 is finally a OnePlus flagship I trust to do it all (Android Authority)
OnePlus 13 Review: 2025's First Flagship Finds Success (Forbes)
OnePlus 13 review: The complete package (BGR)
The OnePlus 13 sets a new bar for smartphone performance (Business Insider)

This is not a Slashvertisement. We just like shiny, new tech.

A forthcoming peer-reviewed study (PDF) from Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute argues that TikTok surfaces fewer anti-CCP posts compared to Instagram and YouTube, despite higher user engagement with such content. It also found that heavy TikTok usage correlates with more favorable views of China's human rights record. The findings come a Supreme Court hearing later this week on whether the federal government can ban TikTok. Gizmodo reports: The new peer-reviewed paper, which was first reported by The Free Press, begins by examining whether content on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube related to the keywords "Tiananmen," "Tibet," "Uyghur," and "Xinjiang" tends to display pro- or anti-CCP sentiment. The researchers found that TikTok's algorithm didn't necessarily surface more pro-CCP content in response to searches for those terms, but it delivered fewer anti-CCP posts than did Instagram or YouTube and significantly more posts that were irrelevant to the subject.

In the second stage of their study, the NCRI team tested whether the lower performance of anti-CCP content was a result of less user engagement (likes and comments) with those posts. They found that TikTok users "liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content" while there was no similar discrepancy on Instagram or YouTube.

Finally, the researchers surveyed 1,214 Americans about their social media usage and their views on China's human rights record. The more time users spent on any social media platform, the more likely they were to have favorable views of China's human rights record, the survey showed. Users were particularly more likely to have favorable views if they spent more than three hours a day using TikTok. The researchers wrote that they could not definitively conclude that spending more time on TikTok resulted in more positive views of China, but "taken together, the findings from these three studies raise the distinct possibility that TikTok is a vehicle for CCP propaganda."

The Walt Disney Co. will merge its streaming multichannel video service Hulu with Live TV with its competitor Fubo in a surprise deal that will shake up the streaming TV business, the companies said Monday. From a report: The new company will continue to be traded publicly under the Fubo name, however Disney will control 70% and appoint a majority of the board. Fubo management, including co-founder and CEO David Gandler, will run the combined venture.

The deal will do a couple of big things if and when it is completed: For starters, it will create a much bigger player in the virtual multichannel video provider (vMVPD) space, one that can more aggressively take on the market leader YouTube TV. YouTube TV said a year ago that it had 8 million subscribers, while Hulu + Live TV had 4.6 million subscribers and Fubo had 1.6 million subscribers, giving a combined offering 6.2 million subs.

Developer/data journalist Josh Renaud is also long-time Slashdot reader Kirkman14 — and he's got a story to tell: How do you get people interested in an obscure Atari ST graphics format used on BBSes in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it off! That's the idea behind IGNITE, a new artpack from Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" format.

I love telling unknown underdog computer stories, and IGS sucked me in. This fall, I published a six-part, 14,000-word history, introducing readers to a cast of characters that included Mears, the self-described "working man without a degree" who often downplayed his own coding ability; Kevin Moody and Anthony Rau, two Navy guys in Florida who bonded over their love of Atari and BBSing; Steve Turnbull, an artist and scenic designer working in Hollywood; and many others.

But IGS isn't just a thing of the past. Two years ago, on New Years Eve 2022, Mears made a surprise announcement — he was releasing a new version of IGS, thirty years after he had stopped working on the project.

Because I (inadvertently) had spurred Larry to action, I felt an obligation to make some art using his new tools. I completed my first piece — a drawing of a ship from the sci-fi game FTL — in early 2023. Over the subsequent months, I kept at it, and ended up creating a number of fun animations. I'm particularly proud of the [Star Trek-themed] animated Guardian of Forever login sequence, and a brand-new Calvin and Hobbes-themed animation I created just for this pack.

I had long wanted to release an all-IGS artpack as a way to honor Mears, highlight IGS, and maybe stir other people's interest in trying this format. To lower the barrier to entry, I created my own web-based drawing tool, JoshDraw, which supports a small subset of IGS's features. To my surprise, I successfully recruited seven other people to submit nine static images to include in the pack.

Today 34-year-old chess champion Magnus Carlsen married 26-year-old Ella Victoria Malone, "in a ceremony packed with guests on a sunny winter day in Oslo," reports Chess.com. According to Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, a film crew from Netflix was also present. The streaming giant is shooting a chess-related TV show rumored to air in 2025... Ella Victoria is now expected to have a more central role in her husband's career. According to VG, she played a crucial role in securing Magnus a deal with fashion brand G-Star Raw...

Their wedding was surely a fairy tale, but the Carlsens aren't heading for their honeymoon just yet. Magnus is set to make his debut for St. Pauli in the German Bundesliga on January 10, when he'll face Dusseldorf led by none other than GM Gukesh Dommaraju.
The article adds that "For Carlsen, this caps off a whirlwind week that began in New York, highlighted by his eighth World Blitz Championship title," a victory that they say was "controversially" shared with Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi. CNN reports: [Carlsen] had taken a 2-0 lead in the four-game contest before Nepomniachtchi launched a stunning comeback to level the scores, sending the match to a sudden death tie-break. The pair then drew the next three games, and it was later determined that they would share the title after the proposal was accepted by Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of chess governing body FIDE. "I thought, at that point, we had already played for a very long time and I was, first of all, very happy to end it, and I thought, at that point, it would have been very, very cruel on both of us if one gets first and the other gets second," Carlsen later told reporters....

[T]he decision to share the Blitz title with long-time rival Nepomniachtchi has sparked outcry from some of the world's top players — the first time in history that a world championship title has been shared. "This is a situation where I cannot stand with what Magnus has done," prominent player Hikaru Nakamura said on his YouTube channel. "I do not think that there is any precedent for this, when you put out rules about the game itself and then suddenly you decide, 'It's okay, we're going to go home' ... It's unconscionable to me...."

"FIDE goes from forfeiting Carlsen (over the jeans debacle) to creating an entirely new rule," Hans Niemann, whom Carlsen had defeated in the quarterfinals, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Seems like the the regulatory body of chess has no intention of being unbiased. They seem to only care about what one player thinks...." Former world champion Garry Kasparov made a pointed reference to the jeans controversy, writing on X: "I thought the first FIDE tiebreak was pants."
Magnus apparently tells his opponent "If they like refuse, we can just play short draws until they give up," according to a behind-the-scenes video clip posted to X.com. The CEO of FIDE, Emil Sutovsky, re-posted it on X.com, complaining that FIDE president Dvorkovich's decision to accept the players' proposed draw was made "under the spur of a moment, and of course, the video appeared much later. I do think it is VERY BAD though..."

FIDE later told CNN that "This situation has already prompted valuable discussions within FIDE management to improve our regulations." (And their article adds that some — including grandmaster Ivan Sokolov — suggested ties be settled with a new chess format known as Armageddon.) "In Armageddon, White has more time but a draw on the board counts as a win for Black," explains the Guardian — adding that back in 1983, "Fide determined the winner of a Candidates match by a roulette wheel."

The Guardian adds that Russian-born FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich "probably felt he had little choice but to rubber stamp the agreement by the players." He would have been pilloried in Moscow as preventing a Russian world champion had he ruled otherwise, and a negative could also have provoked a series of the notorious Berlin draws, the standard method for a quick mutually agreed half point. However, that course of action would have brought the players into disrepute, and it is more likely that an inspired game or a blunder would have settled the final. The audience on Wall Street applauded the decision, but the considerable online reaction from professional players and fans has been mostly critical.

It was the first ever shared over-the-board individual world title in chess history.

Samsung and Google are introducing Eclipsa Audio, an open-source 3D audio standard set to debut on select YouTube videos and Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars. The new format "could eventually serve as a free alternative to Dolby Atmos, the dominant 3D audio format that hardware makers like Samsung pay to license for TVs and other equipment," reports The Verge. "Samsung says that similar to Atmos, this audio format supports adjusting 'audio data such as the location and intensity of sounds, along with spatial reflections' to create a 3D experience." From the report: The two companies first announced a partnership to develop spatial audio technology in 2023, initially calling it Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF). At the time, Samsung spatial audio head WooHyun Nam said the format would provide "a complete open-source framework for 3D audio, from creation to delivery and playback."

The IAMF spec has also been adopted by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that has been pushing for royalty-free codec support since 2015 and counts companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix -- along with Samsung and Google -- among its members. If they also add support for this audio format, it could help it catch on, although it's already taken years for their AV1 video codec to see more use. Samsung and Google are also creating a certification program with the Telecommunications Technology Association "to ensure consistent audio quality" across devices using the format, which also sounds similar to the way companies like Dolby and THX manage the labeling for their specs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rolling Stone: Sun pours through the lush foliage of a jungle, bleaching the pale limestone as a rotting man stands in the center of an otherwise empty arena, his yellow eyes leering from beneath a fringe of limp, blonde hair. Positioned around the edge are a hundred bodies, Orcs and Trolls and bipedal oxen shouting, demanding, the death of the dishonorable. Their voices swell into a cacophony of noise before one rings out above the rest, howling, 'Kill the cheater and you'll get 20 gold!' There is silence, and then another frenzy. As I watch, eyes fixed on the dim glow of a laptop screen, I think of the colosseum in Rome -- sweat running down the muscled arms of battle-tested gladiators, the crowd cheering for blood.

This might sound like a moment pulled from a high fantasy drama made for prestige TV, but this is World of Warcraft, a now 20-year old online RPG. Instead of actors parading in front of green screens, this story's cast are streamers that occupy a virtual world. Tensions are high not because they're scripted, but because in World of Warcraft's Hardcore mode, death is permanent. Dejected, though acknowledging the transgression made, Sequisha -- the streamer who was promptly executed for cheating -- sighs, and goes back to the character select screen. He creates a new avatar; it's time to start the game all over again.

Sequisha's execution and subsequent reincarnation is just one of hundreds of stories playing out everyday in World of Warcraft as streamers have flocked to the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) to play together. Through their strife, and a commitment to staying in-character via roleplay, groups like the guild OnlyFangs have turned World of Warcraft into an RPG within an RPG, playing out improvisational personal drama where the stakes are high. In Hardcore mode, World of Warcraft has become the best soap opera on the internet, all playing out across over dozens of OnlyFangs creator streams every day. The new "Classic" and "Hardcore" servers were launched in celebration of World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary, helping to reignite interest in the game and increase viewership on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. The Hardcore server, where character death is permanent, attracted top streamers, leading to the formation of guilds like OnlyFangs.

After a successful first season, OnlyFangs reshuffled its roster, embracing a more immersive roleplaying approach in its second season. "What they didn't know was their experiment in World of Warcraft roleplay would inadvertently create one of the best emergent dramas on the internet," reports Rolling Stone.

"I still can't quite believe that I'm using an Arm-powered Windows laptop every day," writes a senior editor at the Verge: After more than a decade of trying to make Windows on Arm a reality, Microsoft and Qualcomm finally nailed it this year with Copilot Plus PCs. These new laptops have excellent battery life and great performance — and the app compatibility issues that have plagued Windows on Arm are mostly a thing of the past (as long as you're not a gamer). Microsoft wanted 2024 to be "the year of the AI PC," but I think it was very much the year of Windows on Arm...

The key to Windows on Arm's revival this year was Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, which were announced in April. They've provided the type of performance and power efficiency only previously available with Apple's MacBooks and challenged Intel and AMD to do better in the x86 space. After much debate over Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks, the reviews rolled in and showed that Windows on Arm was indeed capable of matching and beating Apple's MacBook Air. Qualcomm even hired the "I'm a Mac" guy to promote Windows on Arm PCs, showing how confident it was in challenging Apple's laptop dominance.

Microsoft and Qualcomm also worked closely with developers to make key apps compatible, and it's now very rare to run into an app compatibility issue that can't be solved by a native Arm64 version or Microsoft's improved emulator. Even Google, which previously shunned Windows Phone, has created Arm64 versions of Chrome and Google Drive to support Microsoft's efforts. With developers continually providing native versions of their apps, it makes it a lot easier to switch to a Windows on Arm laptop. The only big exception is gaming, where x86 still reigns supreme for compatibility and performance...

It's hard not to see 2025 as the year that Windows on Arm continues to eat into the laptop space. A Dell leak revealed Qualcomm is preparing new chips for 2025, and the chip maker has also been rolling out cheaper Arm-based chips to bring laptop prices down.
The article acknowledges that both AMD and Intel "have the key advantage of game compatibility that Windows on Arm is definitely not ready for..." But "Given the Windows on Arm gaming situation, a new generation of Nvidia's GPUs could help generate fresh excitement around x86 laptops throughout 2025." And "Nvidia might also be planning to help the Windows on Arm effort. The chip maker has long been rumored to be planning to launch Arm PC chips as soon as 2025... Whatever happens to laptops in 2025, you can guarantee that there's going to be fierce competition between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm."

But the author still complains about the dedicated Copilot key on his new WIndows-on-Arm laptop. "While the Copilot experience on Windows has gone through several confusing revisions, it's still a key I accidentally press and then get frustrated when a Copilot window appears."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. Born in 1924, he had just celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1st. If you want to catch a glimpse of his political charisma, YouTube has a clip of Carter's appearance on "What's My Line" when he was still only governor of Georgia. Within five years he'd be president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981.

But it seems like today everyone has a story to tell. More than two decades later, long-time Slashdot reader destinyland saw Jimmy Carter speak in Las Vegas in 2001 on the final day of the CTIA Wireless tradeshow. "I feel thrilled to be a part of this," 77-year-old Carter had said.... Carter applauded the work of "entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers that are transforming the face of the globe." And he noted their technologies could address problems targeted by the Carter Center.

Interrupted by a few cellphone rings, the former President conversed on a stage at the Sands Expo and Venetian Hotel with Tom Wheeler, the president of the wireless communications trade association. Wheeler reminded the audience of Carter's decidedly nontechnical background, discussing An Hour Before Daylight, Carter's memoir about growing up on a farm in Georgia during the Great Depression. "We were the only family blessed with an outhouse," Carter told the crowd.

Wheeler also asked a question many in the technology community could relate to. Carter, he pointed out, had been involuntarily retired. "What's it feel like?" The former President told the audience he'd re-focussed his energies into humanitarian efforts through the Carter Center, which is active in providing health services around the world as well as monitoring elections. Carter donated his appearance fee to the Carter Center...

Midway through the hour-long discussion, the former President touted his administration's record of deregulating several industries, including transportation, energy, and communications, saying "If it hadn't been for that deregulation, this environment in which you all live wouldn't have been possible." Carter also shared with the business crowd that it was a belief in free enterprise that made him want to enter politics, drawn from his experiences selling peanuts as a young boy for a dollar a day.

The audience greeted the former president warmly, giving him a standing ovation both when he took the stage and when he left. Carter joked it was almost enough to make him want to get back into politics.
Everyone has their own opinion. When a friend of mine was in high school, she got to meet Jimmy Carter early in his presidency. He'd seemed unusually kind and good, she said, but remembered her first reaction. "They're going to eat you alive." And yet then, pointing to the humanitarian work he would continue for four decades, she said he was also clearly America's very best ex-president.

And the liberal blog Talking Points Memo argues Carter's accomplishments as president are being re-evaluated: Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights. And some just liked him. A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.... "People assume that because he wasn't warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn't get much through," said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. "He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson."

That record includes, by Alter's count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter's more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971. What's most wrenching about Carter's improvements in energy and environmental policy now is what he wasn't able to accomplish. On his way out of office, he issued a report that included recommendations for cutting carbon emissions — at exactly the same rate the Paris Climate Accords coalesced behind 35 years later....

His Carter Center has virtually eradicated certain devastating diseases on the African continent, part of the work for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He and Rosalynn have also helped build and repair over 4,000 homes for Habitat for Humanity, work that continued well into his 90s.
I've got my own story. As a young boy I saw Jimmy Carter give a speech in 1977 — just six months after he'd assumed the presidency. A crowd of teenagers thrilled to see the president gave him a long, loud round of applause. And when it finally died down, Carter said...

"I wish I got that kind of reception from Congress."

"Every single one of the top ten box office hits of 2024 was a sequel, a remake... or a prequel," writes The Hollywood Reporter.

Here's the list of 2024's top-grossing films published by the movie blog SlashFilm:

10. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
9. Venom: The Last Dance
8. Kung Fu Panda 4
7. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
6. Wicked
5. Dune: Part Two
4. Moana 2
3. Despicable Me 4
2. Deadpool & Wolverine
1. Inside Out 2


2024 was the year Godzilla celebrated its 70th year as a franchise — but it wasn't the only long-running franchise. "When the Marvel Cinematic Universe went R-rated with Deadpool & Wolverine... it was literally more successful than any other R-rated movie in history," SlashFilm points out, while Venom: The Last Dance was the year's 9th highest-earner. (But several other big superhero movies flopped and "the misses outweighed the hits this year, while DC sat it out entirely as the world waits for Superman to usher in James Gunn's new DC Universe.")

They also marvel that Wicked earned $572 million after opening on the same day as Ridley Scott's Gladiator II....

But in the end SlashFilm describes 2024 as "a banner year for animation," with computer-animated movies filling four of the top ten spots (Kung Fu Panda 4, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, and Inside Out 2). And another interesting trend? Though the world flocked to Tim Burton's first sequel to Beetlejuice after 36 years, Warner Bros. was, "at one point, pushing for Beetlejuice 2 to go directly to streaming on Max." And Disney original had the same idea for Moana 2, leading SlashFilm to conclude that 2024's box office "should be the death of the big direct-to-streaming movie." SlashFilm notes that Disney also sent several Pixar originals to Disney+ between 2020 and 2022, which "did immeasurable damage to the brand, something that even CEO Bob Iger has acknowledged." And then after a theatrical debut Pixar's Inside Out 2 became "the eighth biggest movie ever at the box office, with $1.698 billion to its name" — and the highest-grossing animated film ever made.

And Dune: Part Two? Denis Villeneuve accomplished nothing shy of a miracle with 2021's "Dune," an adaptation of Frank Herbert's cherished sci-fi novel that was faithful to the material, massive in scale, but still felt like an auteur film... The only downside? 2021 was a terrible time to release a movie, particularly a Warner Bros. movie, as all of the studio's films were going to HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. Yet, "Dune" made $400 million in its original run, which was enough to justify a sequel. Evidently, the audience for this franchise grew exponentially in the years before "Dune: Part Two" hit theaters in early March... All told, Villeneuve's sweeping, epic sequel pulled in $714.4 million worldwide, all while garnering tons of acclaim once again. Also, not for nothing, Villeneuve got it made for less than $200 million...

Without "Dune: Part Two" making what it made, the box office might have been in truly dire shape. As a relatively dead April and very weak May followed, this overperformance helped keep theaters afloat until greener pastures arrived in the back half of the year. The Spice must flow, as it were.
The Hollywood Reporter offers another take on the significance of 2024: Total domestic box office revenue appears to be heading toward around $8 billion, down from 2023's exhilarating post-COVID turnaround of $9 billion, but the National Association of Theatre Owners prefers to accentuate the positive, attributing the dip to a shortage of product due to the labor strikes and taking encouragement from the renewal of the movie habit...

Interestingly, or thankfully, the cinematic universes of Marvel, DC, and Star Wars failed to expand: except for Deadpool & Wolverine, not one of the huge hits came from a comic book franchise or a galaxy far, far away.
The article then complains about people using their phones during the movie for texting, talking, and photographing the movie itself. (Though it applauds a PSA against the practice in which Deadpool and Wolverine "delivered the message in laudably blunt terms.")

And on Wikipedia, Deadpool & Wolverine and Dune: Part Two were the eighth and 23rd most popular articles of 2024.

It had a 4.8-inch display. Introduced in 1991, Hewlett-Packard's (DOS-based) HP 95LX Palmtop PC — a collaboration with Lotus — was finally discontinued back in 2003.

But one found its way to long-time Slashdot reader Shayde (who in November repaired a 48-year-old handheld videogame console from Mattel). "I really wanted to get this HP95LX talking to the internet at large," they told Slashdot, " but network stacks for DOS in 1991 were pretty limited, and this machine didn't even have the hardware for a network connection.

"It did have a serial port though — a flat 4-pin custom interface. I did a bunch of research and learned how to custom-build an RS-232 hookup for this port, and using an external Wifi module, got it online — and talking to the retrocomputing BBS!"

There's a video documenting the whole experience. (Along the way he uses 20-gauge hook-up wire from Amazon, a zip tie, solder cups, and an internet modem (the WiFi232 Hayes modem emulator). The whole thing is powered by two AA batteries — it has 512K of memory, and about half a meg of storage. My favorite technical detail?

"Conveniently, the HP 95 [Palmtop PC] uses the exact same pinout as the HP 48GX handheld graphing calculator. So looking up on the Internet, we can determine what pins we need to map from the HP unit over to what would be a DB25 serial port..."

A wave of fraudulent copyright takedowns on YouTube has exposed vulnerabilities in the platform's content moderation system, enabling anonymous users to threaten creators' channels through false legal claims, The Verge is reporting. Several gaming content creators, including a channel with 1.5 million subscribers, received takedown notices from someone impersonating Nintendo's legal team. Though YouTube acknowledged the false claims, the company declined to explain how it verifies takedown requests or detail measures to prevent abuse of its copyright system.

PayPal-owned browser extension Honey manipulates affiliate marketing systems and withholds discount information from users, according to an investigation by YouTube channel MegaLag.

The extension -- which rose in popularity after promising consumers it would find them the best online deals -- replaces existing affiliate cookies with its own during checkout, diverting commission payments from content creators who promoted the products to PayPal, MegaLag reported in a 23-minute video [YouTube link].

The investigation revealed that Honey, which PayPal acquired in 2019 for $4 billion, allows merchants in its cashback program to control which coupons appear to users, hiding better publicly available discounts.

"From the moment GPT-4 came out in March 2023, OpenAI has been working on GPT-5..." reports the Wall Street Journal. [Alternate URL here.] But "OpenAI's new artificial-intelligence project is behind schedule and running up huge bills. It isn't clear when — or if — it'll work."

"There may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough." OpenAI's closest partner and largest investor, Microsoft, had expected to see the new model around mid-2024, say people with knowledge of the matter. OpenAI has conducted at least two large training runs, each of which entails months of crunching huge amounts of data, with the goal of making Orion smarter. Each time, new problems arose and the software fell short of the results researchers were hoping for, people close to the project say... [And each one costs around half a billion dollars in computing costs.]

The $157 billion valuation investors gave OpenAI in October is premised in large part on [CEO Sam] Altman's prediction that GPT-5 will represent a "significant leap forward" in all kinds of subjects and tasks.... It's up to company executives to decide whether the model is smart enough to be called GPT-5 based in large part on gut feelings or, as many technologists say, "vibes."

So far, the vibes are off...
OpenAI wants to use its new model to generate high-quality synthetic data for training, according to the article. But OpenAI's researchers also "concluded they needed more diverse, high-quality data," according to the article, since "The public internet didn't have enough, they felt." OpenAI's solution was to create data from scratch. It is hiring people to write fresh software code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from. [And also theoretical physics experts] The workers, some of whom are software engineers and mathematicians, also share explanations for their work with Orion... Having people explain their thinking deepens the value of the newly created data. It's more language for the LLM to absorb; it's also a map for how the model might solve similar problems in the future... The process is painfully slow. GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words a day would take months to produce a billion tokens.

OpenAI's already-difficult task has been complicated by internal turmoil and near-constant attempts by rivals to poach its top researchers, sometimes by offering them millions of dollars... More than two dozen key executives, researchers and longtime employees have left OpenAI this year, including co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. This past Thursday, Alec Radford, a widely admired researcher who served as lead author on several of OpenAI's scientific papers, announced his departure after about eight years at the company...

OpenAI isn't the only company worrying that progress has hit a wall. Across the industry, a debate is raging over whether improvement in AIs is starting to plateau. Sutskever, who recently co-founded a new AI firm called Safe Superintelligence or SSI, declared at a recent AI conference that the age of maximum data is over. "Data is not growing because we have but one internet," he told a crowd of researchers, policy experts and scientists. "You can even go as far as to say that data is the fossil fuel of AI."

And that fuel was starting to run out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: TikTokasked the Supreme Court on Monday to temporarily block a law that would effectively ban it in the United States in a matter of weeks. Saying that the law violates both its First Amendment rights and those of its 170 million American users, TikTok, which is controlled by a Chinese parent company, urged the justices to maintain the status quo while they decide whether to hear an appeal. "Congress's unprecedented attempt to single out applicants and bar them from operating one of the most significant speech platforms in this nation presents grave constitutional problems that this court likely will not allow to stand," lawyers for TikTok wrote in their emergency application.

President Biden signed the law this spring after it was enacted with wide bipartisan support. Lawmakers said the app's ownership represented a risk because the Chinese government's oversight of private companies would allow it to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred. They have also noted that American platforms like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China, and that TikTok itself is not allowed in the country.

YouTube is introducing an optional feature allowing creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models, with the default setting being opt-out. The Verge reports: "We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era," a TeamYouTube staffer named Rob says in a support post. "As we gather feedback, we'll continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods to access content."

YouTube will be rolling out the setting in YouTube Studio "over the next few days," and unauthorized scraping "remains prohibited," Rob writes. Another support page says that you'll be able to pick and choose from a list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simply allow all third-party companies to train on them.