Category: Technology

Raspberry Pi has just released its new computer-in-a-keyboard, the Raspberry Pi 500, the successor to the Raspberry Pi 400. It shares most of the same internal components as the Raspberry Pi 5, but with a keyboard shell and improved heatsink — all for $90.

The Pi 500 is equipped with a 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU and comes with 8GB of RAM. It has three USB A ports (two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port) but no USB-C slots besides the charger, which doesn’t support peripherals like mice and docks. Both WiFi and Ethernet are supported natively, along with Bluetooth 5.0. The package also includes a 32GB microSD card preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS, a Linux distribution based on Debian.

Currently, the Pi 500 only has US and UK keyboards, but variants in other languages like Spanish and Japanese are on the way, TechCrunch notes. Depending on the language, the keyboard can have 78 to 83 keys.

The Raspberry Pi 500, by itself or as a desktop kit, is now available through approved resellers. The $120 desktop kit contains the Pi 500 computer, a mouse, a USB-C power supply, an HDMI cable and a beginner’s guide. Monitors aren’t included in the package, though today Raspberry Pi also introduced its new Raspberry Pi Monitor for $100.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/the-raspberry-pi-500-is-a-90-computer-in-a-keyboard-142900379.html?src=rss 

There are moments with AI that feel like we’re passing a threshold there’s no coming back from. The latest example is happening at UCLA, where a professor is having AI create the textbook, assignments and teaching assistant resources for her class, Survey of Literature: Middle Ages to 17th Century. 

Professor Zrinka Stahuljak is using an AI tool called Kudu, created by UCLA professor of physics and astronomy Alexander Kusenko and a former doctoral student Warren Essey. They bill Kudu as a “high-quality, low-cost” way for students to access all the information they need, while professors focus on teaching. 

Kudu pulls from PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, course notes and other materials Professor Stahuljak provides it. According to UCLA, it shouldn’t take up more than 20 hours of a professor’s time and they can edit the materials afterward. The resulting textbook is available digitally for $25 and can be printed or used with audio readers. Kudu also uses the provided materials to respond to anonymous queries from students. Plus, it can identify whether over half of a student’s content is AI-generated. 

“Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically,” said Stahuljak in a statement. “It allows us to spend more time teaching basic analytical skills, critical thinking and reading skills, in a consistent manner — the things professors are best at doing.” She plans to use Kudu for other courses in the future. The AI-powered tool is already being tested this semester in an introduction to history class and will be available for Stahuljak’s course in 2025. 

We’ll have to see how successful this will be and, critically, if AI will remain a tool for teachers or be a “low-cost” way to replace them. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/ais-next-job-making-assignments-for-college-courses-130008019.html?src=rss 

Apple TV+ has unveiled the intense official trailer for season 2 of Severance, picking up where the first one left off while adding new characters (and mystery). 

(Light spoilers for season one are ahead)

As you may recall, Severance is centered around a group of people who undertook a brain procedure to entirely separate their work (innie) and home (outie) selves. Our four main characters eventually carry out an escape plan by finding a way to blur the lines between the two sets of memories. In the season finale, three of them make some world-shattering discoveries about their outie lives.

In the new trailer, our four heroes Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro) are reluctantly back at work and seemingly not in trouble for their actions in the cliffhanger final season one episode that streamed back in 2022. “Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe,” Apple says in the description. 

The trailer teases potential answers to vexing questions, like what exactly it is that Lumon does. Bizarre incidents in the corporation’s basement (involving goats somehow) “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments on this planet,” says an unknown corporate character. 

The teaser also introduces some new mysteries, including a child that’s somehow going to be an office manager (Sarah Bock). Other new cast members include Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), Merrit Weaver (Nurse Jackie) and Bob Balaban (The French Dispatch). 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/watch-the-full-severance-season-2-official-trailer-133028801.html?src=rss 

I’ve been finding myself consistently impressed by the experiences developers have managed to cram into the Playdate. It’s not that I expected little of the handheld and its potential offerings when I first impulsively pre-ordered it way back when, but I guess I didn’t really know what to expect beyond the crank-focused games Panic first teased ahead of its release, which seemed geared toward short bursts of play. Over the past few months, I’ve played lots of those and thoroughly enjoyed them, but I’ve also spent hours solving puzzles and exploring intricate maps in games with a surprising amount of substance. Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, which recently came to the Playdate Catalog, may be one of the best yet.

Created by developer bumbleborn, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll is a metroidvania, but don’t let that scare you off if combat isn’t your thing; it’s non-violent, putting the emphasis instead on tricky platforming, puzzles and finding your way around sprawling caverns. The map feels huge for a Playdate game — there over 250 rooms spread between its four levels, according to the developer.

In Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, a sickness known as the Blight threatened to wipe out all life, forcing the inhabitants of three kingdoms to escape underground. Humans live on the bottom-most level, in a kingdom called Bottomrock. As the child protagonist of the game, you’re on a mission to deliver a scroll to The Archives, requiring you journey through the somewhat perilous Kingdoms Three. It’s a world that holds a lot of secrets, and you’ll have to interact with certain elements of the environment in unexpected ways in order to move forward or access seemingly inaccessible items.

But there’s a kind of haunting sereneness to it all, even with its challenging moments. The music sets just the right atmosphere, and visually, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll is stunning. The artwork is so crisp down to the tiniest details, and I just love the style of it all. Larger characters especially — like the frog prince whose belly you can bounce on — really come to life. Between the music, the art, the lore and just the overall vibes, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll completely drew me in. If there’s one Playdate game you should pick up right now, it’s this.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/echo-the-oracles-scroll-is-a-must-play-combatless-metroidvania-for-playdate-022534825.html?src=rss 

As spotted by a Reddit user this weekend, Panic is now selling a macaroni yellow charging brick to go with the yellow cable that comes with the distinctively yellow Playdate. Say yellow again. The good news for anyone who wants a complete set of matching accessories is that it’s only $5 — the bad news is that shipping costs almost double that at its cheapest, so it’s kind of hard to justify buying on its own.

Also note that the 10W power adapter has a USB-A connection so it’ll work with your existing Playdate charging cable, but it’s otherwise kind of behind the times considering the general shift toward the USB-C connection. At the moment, Panic is only selling a version that’s compatible with the 2-prong plug type that’s standard in North America and Japan. It goes without saying that absolutely no one needs this — our Playdates have been charging just fine without it so far — but if you’re already on the site getting a pizza case now that they’re back in stock, then sure, go wild.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/you-can-now-get-a-yellow-charging-brick-for-5-to-match-your-playdates-cable-220316721.html?src=rss 

Apple is being sued by victims of child sexual abuse over its failure to follow through with plans to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), The New York Times reports. In 2021, Apple announced it was working on a tool to detect CSAM that would flag images showing such abuse and notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But the company was hit with immediate backlash over the privacy implications of the technology, and ultimately abandoned the plan.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Saturday in Northern California, is seeking damages upwards of $1.2 billion dollars for a potential group of 2,680 victims, according to NYT. It claims that, after Apple showed off its planned child safety tools, the company “failed to implement those designs or take any measures to detect and limit” CSAM on its devices, leading to the victims’ harm as the images continued to circulate. Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment.

In a statement to The New York Times about the lawsuit, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to fighting the ways predators put children at risk. We are urgently and actively innovating to combat these crimes without compromising the security and privacy of all our users.” The lawsuit comes just a few months after Apple was accused of underreporting CSAM by the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-sued-for-failing-to-implement-tools-that-would-detect-csam-in-icloud-202940984.html?src=rss 

On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool’s results on X touting their photorealism. But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok’s model selection menu as “Grok 2 + Aurora (beta),” it’s since been replaced with “Grok 2 + Flux (beta).” It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla’s Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, “This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”

It comes a few days after X made Grok 2 free to use, albeit with limitations for non-paying users. Grok’s previous image generator has been called out for lacking certain restrictions around the types of content it can produce, like offensive images of politicians and celebrities, and Aurora seems pretty much in line with what we’ve seen already in that regard. TechCrunch played around with Aurora for a bit before it was taken down and found it didn’t reject a prompt to create “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump.” 

That’s in addition to examples shared on X of it generating images of public figures and copyrighted characters — including numerous images of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as well as an image of Luigi and Mickey Mouse in a boxing match. But, it wouldn’t produce nudes, according to TechCrunch, so that’s something.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/x-adds-then-quickly-removes-groks-new-aurora-image-generator-181917002.html?src=rss