There’s an unspoken rule in PC gaming that goes a little something like this: “Bar cutting off your right leg, you should do everything you can to maximize your PC performance for games.” Because of that, most gamers don’t want any programs running in the background that could cost them critical frames per second, and that includes their antivirus software. But does antivirus software really impair performance? And should you bother switching it off? Does your antivirus really slow down your game? There’s no doubt antivirus software left to run in the background when you’re gaming can slow down your PC. However, the extent of that slowdown, and whether that has any impact on your game depends on what the software is doing. Our antivirus tests show that your security program is likely to have a negligible or minimal impact on your PC when it’s just doing routine monitoring. In this case, the extent to which your PC is slowed down can be anywhere from 0 up to about 20 percent. From those results we can conclude that the effect on your game is going to be very small, if anything. Then again, tests have also shown that when antivirus software is carrying out either a full or partial virus scan the PC slowdown can be a lot higher — as much as 57 percent in some cases. In this case, you’ve got a much higher chance of your game being either interrupted or suffering from lag as your CPU struggles to keep up with the workload. What does that mean for your game? In the most graphically demanding games, you’re likely to see slower frame rates than usual and longer load times. Temporarily disabling your antivirus software will mostly deal with those issues, but is that a wise move? Is switching it off advisable then? Despite the risk of slowdown, switching off your antivirus software while you game isn’t recommended by security professionals. The reason for that is the reason you have anitvirus in the first place…it’s protecting you from viruses, malware, and ransomware; gaming doesn’t automatically shield you from those threats. Online games typically require you to connect to servers and download files like maps, skins, and special items, all of which can be harboring viruses or malware. These malicious files can even be hidden in the game files themselves. In fact, we recently reported two such cases regarding games available for download on Valve’s Steam platform. Gaming communities are also rife with phishing scams, which many antivirus programs now provide protection against. So, if you can get by with running your antivirus while you game, you really should. What else you can do If you want the best of both worlds — minimal PC slowdown and the protection of your antivirus — the best option is to use an antivirus program made for gamers. These kinds of antivirus programs either have a dedicated gaming mode that you can toggle on or off or are complete editions made especially for gamers, like Norton’s 360 for Gamers. These antivirus programs have a minimal impact on your PC’s hardware since they run lightly off your operating system; they usually suspend things like background scans and notifications, so they enable you to play with the best performance, but still with enough monitoring to block viruses and malware. Pexels: Rahul Pandit If you’re committed to seeing out your current contract with your antivirus software, at the very least you should schedule your virus scans to run at off-peak times when you’re not gaming. Creating an exclusion list for games and files not in any danger of being at risk, is also a great way to ensure your antivirus program is not carrying out unnecessary file checks on critical game files. Remember too to always download your games and game files from trusted and respected sources. You can never quite guarantee that the files will always be safe, but you can reduce the likelihood of a nefarious file getting though. Read...

Apple has unveiled initiatives in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand focusing on cultural preservation through updated Indigenous mapping and educational grants. Read...

Although Google was the first to develop the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models, it was OpenAI who raised the bar and ushered in a new era with ChatGPT. Google has since been on their back foot with an internal code red, with an intense two-year period of restructuring, layoffs, and rapid AI development work. When ChatGPT landed in late 2022, everything changed. Google, the giant who invented the tech that paved the way for ChatGPT, is now trailing behind. Wired just published a great article detailing how Google was caught off guard and has been trying to claw back into the lead—or at least recover some lost ground—in the years since then. Led by Sissie Hsiao, Google’s AI team was tasked with building a ChatGPT competitor in 100 days. The result was Bard, brought forward by the work of thousands of employees, scaled-down security checks, and long hours. Meanwhile, Google’s Brain and Deepmind AI units were merged, and that collaboration would result in Gemini, the language modeling project that helped salvage the company’s reputation. But the road back to the top of AI has been bumpy. Bard made embarrassing mistakes, Google’s AI search feature gave inaccurate (and sometimes dangerous) advice, and the company’s image generator caused a media frenzy after generating historically inaccurate images. Despite the setbacks, Google has regained some ground. Gemini launched in late 2023 and beat ChatGPT in several tests. The AI assistant is now being integrated across the Google ecosystem—from Gmail to Google Maps—and efforts at “agentic AI” are now underway. But there’s still much to prove. The AI initiative is expensive, energy-intensive, and taking place at a time when Google is at risk of losing significant search advertising revenue due to ongoing antitrust litigation. Internally, many worry about the pace, the workload, and whether this is really Google’s second chance… or the start of something else. Read...

Operations to look into the sinkhole have been delayed but less intrusive methods may be used. Read...

TL;DR: Upgrade your auto with a 10-inch Touchscreen Car Display on sale for $99.97 (reg. $199) until March 30 at 11:59 p.m. PT.  Your older vehicle may be reliable, but it lacks modern amenities like a display for navigation and media controls. That doesn’t mean you have to get a new car. It just means picking up one of these 10-inch Touchscreen Car Displays. It works with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, is super easy to install, and you can get one on sale for $99.97 (reg. $199) while supplies last.  What does it do? This display runs on Android 12, so you can install familiar apps like Spotify and TikTok. You can also sync it with your phone and use apps like Google Maps or Waze for real-time navigation. And when you’re backing up, it automatically switches to the rear camera view (camera not included, FYI) with handy guidelines to make parking so much easier. It’s not all business. This display supports pretty much every audio and video format you can think of—MP3, WAV, MP4, you name it. There’s even a built-in speaker, so you don’t have to rely on your car’s sound system if you don’t want to. And if you’re into radio, the FM transmission feature lets you tune in to your favorite stations. You have until March 30 at 11:59 p.m. PT to get a 10-inch touchscreen Wireless Car Display on sale for $99.97.  Not many are left.    10? Touchscreen Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Wireless Car Display with Apple CarPlay & Android Auto Support – $99.97 See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

TL;DR: Add a smart display to your ride with this 7-inch wireless car display compatible with Apple and Android, now $75. Are you jealous of your friend’s new car? You’ve probably been eyeing their ride’s sleek display, but did you know you could add CarPlay and Android Auto to your own ride? Grab a 7-inch display while it’s only $74.97 (reg. $139) while supplies last. Yup, there’s no need to replace your trusty ride. This wireless display can be installed on your dashboard or windshield with the included adhesive or suction-based mounts. Your car must have a cigarette lighter for power and a USB or aux input to output sound. From there, you can have hands-free control of your iPhone or Android phone. Dole out commands to Siri and have it switch Spotify playlists, or have Google Maps direct you to your closest gas station. Grab this CarPlay and Android Auto-compatible touchscreen wireless display for just $74.97 while inventory is still available.   7? Wireless Car Display with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto Compatibility & Phone Mirroring Only $74.97 at PCWorld StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

In the future, Microsoft suggests, you may be playing AI. No, not on the battlefield, but on games that actually use AI to simulate the entire game itself. As a first step, Microsoft has developed an AI model, called WHAM, that “beta tests” games early in the development cycle using AI instead of human players. Gamers know that realistic AI can turn a good game into something great, like how the older F.E.A.R. games would realistically model how soldiers might react to a hostile, armed player. Microsoft’s World and Human Action Model (WHAM) takes the opposite approach — it tries to figure out how human players will react in a given situation, right down to a specific frame or setup within the existing game world. Microsoft calls this WHAM by the name “Muse.” The point of Muse’s WHAM, Microsoft said, wasn’t to improve the way NPCs or in-game monsters necessarily reacted to players. Instead, WHAM was developed to make a game “feel right” — not too hard, not too easy, with interactions that felt realistic. That’s something that normally takes hours upon hours of beta testing and evaluating how gamers interact with the environment. WHAM was designed to help automate that, the company said. Simulating video games with Muse’s WHAM Microsoft said Wednesday that it has released the WHAM model to huggingface.com, alongside a “WHAM Demonstrator” to essentially place the AI player in a specific spawn location, and then test and evaluate what would happen if the AI made different decisions. Microsoft also published a paper describing WHAM to the Nature scientific journal, which was made available to PCWorld before publication. To develop the model, Microsoft used about 500,000 anonymized gaming sessions (over all seven of the game’s maps) from Ninja Theory’s Bleeding Edge, a 4×4 multiplayer combat game that Ninja Theory released in 2020 but halted development on less than a year later. Each frame of the session was reduced to 300×180 resolution, then encoded into 540 AI tokens. Likewise, each motion on the Xbox controller, including the buttons, was reduced to 16 different inputs based on the stick direction and button input. Microsoft said that the GIF below was generated by the Muse WHAM. Microsoft Microsoft encoded all of this gameplay into a 1.6-billion parameter model, condensing essentially seven entire years of gameplay into a single transformer. The company also developed smaller models based upon a single map, Skygarden, with 128×128 images used instead, with parameters ranging from 15 million to 894 million. (In AI, a larger number of parameters usually generates more realistic outcomes, at the cost of additional computing resources.) Microsoft then built a concept prototype, known as the “WHAM Demonstrator” — sort of the AI chatbot based upon the WHAM model. In this case, the user was able to “place” the AI player upon a map, in relation to various objects around it. When enabled, the WHAM Demonstrator then sketched out how the “human” player was likely to respond. In this case, the developer could run and then re-run the Demonstrator to see various outcomes, then select an outcome to continue to see how the AI “human” would respond. Microsoft’s Muse WHAM demonstration shows how the model can begin at the same frame and then end up in different places depending upon what decisions the AI makes.Microsoft From its training, Demonstrator understood the gameplay rules and physics, though it took more training iterations to understand that some players could achieve flight, depending upon game conditions. The idea is that the WHAM Demonstrator could be used to run different scenarios from the same starting point. In the Nature paper, Microsoft showed how WHAM, beginning with the same eight frames, could produce 16 widely divergent endpoints, based on the AI decisions that WHAM made. Even more interestingly, WHAM was developed so that users could add additional enemies or objects, and the AI would react accordingly. Microsoft says that its Muse WHAM model is sophisticated enough to react appropriately to changes made, such as injecting another enemy or object.Microsoft Forget fake frames: Is the future of gaming entirely AI? Draw a line through WHAM/Muse into the future, and you arrive at a “game” which is generated more and more in real time using AI. According to Microsoft’s vice president of gaming AI, Fatima Kardar, that’s where Microsoft hopes to go — apparently following Google, which has already demonstrated consistent game worlds from a prompt. “Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people,” Kardar said in a statement. “Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device. We believe this could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future and make them accessible to more players. To imagine that beloved games lost to time and hardware advancement could one day be played on any screen with Xbox is an exciting possibility for us.” Microsoft is also exploring the idea of “modding” games using AI, and making those early experiences available to players via Copilot Labs. Microsoft said, however, that it does not necessarily plan on using AI as part of game development. That will be up to the company’s creative leaders, Kardar said, and any AI work will be shared “earlier on” with players and creators. Read...

It controversially updated the Gulf`s name for US users after President Trump ordered it to be changed. Read...

The Gulf of Mexico has been renamed the Gulf of America on Google Maps in the US. BBC Verify explains why Google made the change. Read...

The Southland city has been reinstated on Google Maps after the city’s council took umbrage that it had vanished. Read...