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If you missed out on grabbing one of Amazon's Fire TV devices during Prime Day, then you're in luck: Most of the lineup is currently marked down, and they're each only a tiny bit more than they were during the site's big sale. The cheapest option is Amazon's Fire TV Stick Lite, with a 33 percent discount cutting its price from $30 to $20. 

Amazon's Fire TV Stick Lite is a great entry point into the series, giving you all the basics for the price of two movie tickets (or, let's be real, basically one at this point). It works with TV streamers like Netflix and Disney+ alongside Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also watch live TV and have Alexa Voice Remote Lite control your smart home devices to dim the lights. 

On the more technical side, The Fire TV Stick Lite has 8GB of storage, HDMI passthrough of Dolby-encoded audio and Wi-Fi 5 compatibility. However, unlike the classic Fire TV Stick, the remote doesn't include TV controls like volume. The Fire TV Stick is $5 more than its Lite counterpart thanks to the sale dropping its price from $39 to $25. It also includes Alexa Voice Remote and Dolby Atmos. Both devices have a quad-core CPU 1.7GHz and a GPU 650MHz. 

The Fire TV Stick 4K Max has the biggest sale of all, with a 51 percent discount bringing its price from $55 to $27. For $2 more than the classic, you can get 4K Ultra HD, Dolby Vision and Wi-Fi 6 support. It also has live view picture-in-picture and a quad-core CPU 1.8GHz and a GPU 750MHz. Then there's the big one, the Fire TV Cube, which has a 14 percent discount cutting its price from $140 to $120. It's significantly more expensive than its counterparts but also comes with many more features, like an octa-core 4x 2.2GHz 4x 2.0GHz and a GPU 800MHz. Plus, Amazon's Fire TV Cube has 16GB of storage, hands-free control with Alexa and Wi-Fi 6E support with an Ethernet port. Oh, and you can connect all your devices to it, like game consoles and webcams. 

Are you just looking for some high-tech control? Amazon's Alexa Voice Remote Pro is also on sale, dropping from $35 to $30. This device is a good option if you tend to lose things as you can tell Alexa, "find my remote," and it will ring. 

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Earlier this year, Pew Research reported that a majority of US Twitter users reported spending less time on the platform since Elon Musk’s takeover last year. Now, new data suggests another important group of users are also pulling back from the service now called X.

More than half of scientific researchers who use Twitter report they’ve reduced the amount of time they spend there or have left altogether, according to a survey of thousands of scientists conducted by Nature. And nearly half of those polled said they’ve turned to alternative social networks like Mastodon

Of the 9,200 researchers polled, more than 47 percent said they had decreased their usage of the site, while nearly 7 percent reported quitting the site altogether. Notably, almost the same number said they had started an account on at least one new platform over the last year.

Of these, Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll.

As with the earlier data from Pew, Nature’s findings suggest that Twitter usage is down among those who were once active on the platform. It also highlights how much the dynamics of Twitter have changed over the last year.

Twitter, as Nature points out, has historically been an important platform for researchers and scientists. It’s been used to publicize research and promote scientific debate. And Twitter’s researchers have served as an important source of authoritative information on a platform that's long struggled to combat misinformation. Twitter has also been a valuable source of data for countless researchers studying everything from public health to linguistics.

But much of that has now changed. Many users now feel that their voices are drowned out on a platform that prioritizes content from those with paid verification. And the company has made its API for researchers so expensive that most can no longer access it. So while not all the researchers that spoke to Nature were ready to give up on Twitter entirely, it does seem the company’s tactics have alienated large swaths of the scientific community.

X didn't respond to a request for comment. 

The Associated Press published standards today for generative AI use in its newsroom. The organization, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a fairly restrictive and common-sense list of measures around the burgeoning tech while cautioning its staff not to use AI to make publishable content. Although nothing in the new guidelines is particularly controversial, less scrupulous outlets could view the AP’s blessing as a license to use generative AI more excessively or underhandedly.

The organization’s AI manifesto underscores a belief that artificial intelligence content should be treated as the flawed tool that it is — not a replacement for trained writers, editors and reporters exercising their best judgment. “We do not see AI as a replacement of journalists in any way,” the AP’s Vice President for Standards and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its approach to AI today. “It is the responsibility of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and fairness of the information we share.”

The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content as “unvetted source material,” to which editorial staff “must apply their editorial judgment and AP’s sourcing standards when considering any information for publication.” It says employees may “experiment with ChatGPT with caution” but not create publishable content with it. That includes images, too. “In accordance with our standards, we do not alter any elements of our photos, video or audio,” it states. “Therefore, we do not allow the use of generative AI to add or subtract any elements.” However, it carved an exception for stories where AI illustrations or art are a story’s subject — and even then, it has to be clearly labeled as such.

Barrett warns about AI’s potential for spreading misinformation. To prevent the accidental publishing of anything AI-created that appears authentic, she says AP journalists “should exercise the same caution and skepticism they would normally, including trying to identify the source of the original content, doing a reverse image search to help verify an image’s origin, and checking for reports with similar content from trusted media.” To protect privacy, the guidelines also prohibit writers from entering “confidential or sensitive information into AI tools.”

Although that’s a relatively common-sense and uncontroversial set of rules, other media outlets have been less discerning. CNET was caught early this year publishing error-ridden AI-generated financial explainer articles (only labeled as computer-made if you clicked on the article’s byline). Gizmodo found itself in a similar spotlight this summer when it ran a Star Wars article full of inaccuracies. It’s not hard to imagine other outlets — desperate for an edge in the highly competitive media landscape — viewing the AP’s (tightly restricted) AI use as a green light to make robot journalism a central figure in their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content or failing to label AI-generated work as such.

My AI, the in-app digital assistant that rides herd on your Snapchat Plus experience, has suffered numerous breakdowns and technical malfunctions since its debut in February. Tuesday was more of the same as the chatbot took it upon itself to post single-second-long Stories to users' feeds and then go unresponsive for extended periods of time. Thing is, My AI doesn't have the capacity to post to Stories. And now it's got a bunch of people on Twitter wondering if we're at the dawning of the Singularity.

As first reported by TechCrunch, the My AI chatbot posted a two-tone image in Stories, which one user mistook for a shot of their ceiling. What's more, upon being asked about the mysterious post, the bot would either go dark or respond that it was suffering a technical issue. This explanation proved insufficient for many users, causing minor panic and jokes about the AI system's imminent awakening. In the end however, it really was a technical issue.

“My AI experienced a temporary outage that’s now resolved,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that "At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature."

The My AI bot is bundled as part of the company's $3.99/month Snapchat Plus package and offers users a variety of features. These include AR filter recommendations and suggestions for restaurant and activities based on currently popular places on the Snap Map. It also offers AI functionality in group chat, photo and video snaps, and text messages, as well as an AI persona. A text-to-image genAI is also reportedly in the works, though the ads have already arrived.

Solo Stove may have made its name with fire pits, but the company also sells pizza ovens. Today, it's adding a second model: the Pi Prime. This version offers the same overall design and features from the original dual-fuel Pi, a total package that earned a spot on best pizza ovens list. But the Prime is gas-only and it's more affordable at $349. 

Like the Pi, the Pi Prime has a "demi-dome" construction and a round shape akin to Solo Stove's fire pits. The panoramic opening remains in the front, giving you plenty of room to maneuver 12-inch pizzas and other foods in the cooking chamber. Inside, there's a two-piece stone that can be easily removed for transport or cleaning. The key difference on the Pi Prime is the built-in gas burner that makes this oven a self-contained unit — aside from a propane tank. There's a flame control knob up front that you push and turn to ignite the fire, in addition to using the dial to adjust the temperature. Lastly, the Pi Prime has a black base where the Pi has an all-stainless-steel construction. 

Solo Stove has designated "a workable baseline" for baking pizzas with two orange indicators on the front-mounted knob. According to the Pi Prime startup guide, this is around 700 degrees Fahrenheit and enough to cook a pizza in under 90 seconds. However, the company says the oven is capable of temperatures over 950 degrees and you're able to go lower than 700 should you need to. Solo Stove didn't specify the full temperature range, but those orange marks are just beyond halfway on the dial. 

Solo Stove/Matthew King

The company also has a slate of accessories for the Pi and Pi Prime that are due to arrive at the end of the month. Those include a cover for the newer model, cast iron grill pan, a regular cast iron pan, dough docker, wire cleaning brush, rocker pizza cutter and a prep board with built-in toppings containers. Solo Stove already sells a cart for its pizza ovens, the Pi Stand, that has side shelves, a place to rest your peel under the oven and a spot for a propane tank. Best of all, it has four casters so it's easily movable. 

At $349, the Pi Prime is $50 cheaper than Ooni's most affordable gas-only oven, the Koda 12. Solo Stove has significantly reduced the price of the multi-fuel Pi since its launch as that model is now $400. Should you go the wood-burning route, the addition of a propane burner will cost you another $100 if you buy it with the oven ($130 if you wait until later). Ooni's cheapest multi-fuel option is the Karu 12G at $429 and the optional gas burner is another $99. Gozney's Roccbox is another popular gas-only model at $499 and you can add a wood burner for $100.

The Pi Prime will be available Friday, August 18th on Solo Stove's website.

Valve just dropped a Steam Client Beta update that finally introduces a sought-after feature. The Steam Remote Play service will now offer 4K support, providing a series of presets to allow gamers to find the perfect high-res settings for preferred titles. Prior to this update, 4K was still possible when playing remotely, but it required plenty of experimentation with settings and didn’t always work right. This should fix many of those issues.

This move lets gamers finally make use out of high-end peripherals, like 4K monitors, when engaging with remote streaming play. For the uninitiated, Steam Remote Play is a useful service that streams PC games from your Steam library to phones, tablets, laptops and related devices. Its sibling service, Steam Remote Play Together, adds online multiplayer to the mix, actually allowing players who don’t even own the game to join in competitive or co-op play.

4K streaming isn’t the only new feature included in this update, though it’s certainly the most notable. Valve also now allows users to resize the settings window and it has made the back button more reliable when making minute adjustments, like fiddling with 4K streams. The company also fixed a whole bunch of bugs, like folders not being re-created when verifying game installations and overlays freezing when file dialogs are displayed.

Finally, Big Picture Mode received some minor bug fixes and Steam added support for the Indonesian language. The update is available for download now, but this is a beta so you may want to wait until an official final release.

Opera announced today that its Aria AI assistant has made its way to iOS. The feature launched on desktop in June and stems from a partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Opera says Aria, now available on all major desktop and mobile platforms, has tallied over a million users on desktop and Android.

Like Microsoft’s Bing Copilot and Google’s Search Generative Experience, Aria can answer questions and respond to context around active web pages. The assistant taps into OpenAI’s GPT API while using Opera’s Composer architecture for real-time web results. “As an expert in both web navigation and browser functions, Aria facilitates AI collaboration in tasks such as information retrieval, text or code generation, and product inquiries,” Opera’s Kseniia Sycheva wrote in the company’s announcement post today.

Using the AI bot will require an Opera account, but nobody will be enrolled by default. “You have the autonomy to opt in based on your preference for engaging with AI services,” the company wrote. “Once activated, Aria offers intelligent insights, innovative ideas, and responsive voice commands.” As TechCrunchnotes, Aria is available from the “more” menu (the far right tab on the bottom) in the Opera iOS app.

In addition to the chatbot, Opera for iOS includes a built-in ad blocker and supports Apple Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which limits cross-site tracking. The browser also has a built-in VPN service you can use for free. The updated app with Aria is available today in 180 countries, including the US and the European Union.