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If you're looking for a new smartwatch but aren't keen on Apple devices, Amazon's latest price cut may excite you. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Pro is down from $450 to $394.49, which is a 12 percent savings and lower than the price we saw back on Cyber Monday. 

The Galaxy Watch Pro is one of Samsung's newer options and includes GPS route tracking, a full analysis of your body composition and a titanium case. The Pro also goes beyond the original with an advanced sleep tracker, improved bioactive sensor and better battery life. 

It's worth mentioning that, while not on sale, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is still over $100 cheaper— a good option if you're looking for a reliable smartwatch with all the basics. It's our pick for best smartwatch for Android users. Plus, it comes in some fun band colors, like like purple and sapphire.

As for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, just the black model with bluetooth are discounted. The gray with bluetooth and the LTE version of both colors are still full price. 

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Razer has launched a new streaming deck called the Stream Controller X, and it would most likely look familiar to experienced streamers and content creators. It has a very similar form factor to Elgato‘s Stream Deck MK.2, with its 15 LCD switchblade key buttons and a face plate that users can easily swap. The bevel’s spacing is a bit different, though, and according to Tom’s Hardware, it’s just slightly smaller than Elgato’s model. While both streaming decks are priced $150 at launch, Elgato’s has been on sale several times since then and has gone for as low as $120.

The Stream Controller X lets users program multiple actions into one button by dragging them into the custom action editor. Users can even program actions so that they can be triggered consecutively or simultaneously. They can also create custom profiles for various tasks and then automatically switch between them based on the program that’s currently open by enabling the Dynamic Mode. To make multi-tasking even easier, the device is compatible with some of the most popular streaming software and relevant tools, such as Twitch and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Those programs come with ready-made profiles, so users don’t have to create their own. 

Like Razer’s first Stream Controller, the X model is still powered by Loupedeck. The older model was a rebadged version of the Loupedeck Live, though, and looks more like a distant cousin than a sibling to the Stream Controller X.

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For Twitter Blue users in the US, the website’s 280-character limit has been a thing of the past since February when it gave them the ability to post 4,000-character tweets. Now, the company has more than doubled that limit and has launched support for tweets up to 10,000 characters in length. In addition, the website now supports bold and italics text formatting, allowing content creators to use those elements to break up potentially huge blocks of text. Twitter chief Elon Musk first announced that the website is making long-form tweets even longer in early March, almost a month after the initial 4,000-character expansion. 

While a 10,000-character limit sounds excessive for most casual users — that’s around 2,000 words, or a pretty lengthy essay — Twitter likely introduced the capability for people looking to make money off their posts. The company has just rebranded “Super Follows” as “Subscriptions,” allowing users to charge people $3, $5 and $10 a month for exclusive content, including subscriber-only chats in Spaces. Twitter also promised not to take any of their earnings for the next 12 months. 

By increasing the character tweet limit for Blue users, as well as allowing them to post “hours long videos,” Twitter is giving creators more ways to keep their subscribers engaged. At the same time, getting users to spend more time on the website means more opportunities to serve them with ads that would make the company more money. That said, Super Follows never quite took off, and it remains to be seen whether this iteration of the subscription service will fare better.

The FBI has made an arrest in connection to a recent leak of classified documents that revealed sensitive details about the war in Ukraine and other US intelligence matters, apprehending a young Massachusetts Air National Guard member on Thursday, April 13th. 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, who holds the rank of airman first class, allegedly shared the files to a Discord server primarily dedicated to Minecraft. According to The Washington Post, he first transcribed the documents manually when he started sharing them late last year before posting photos of the classified materials themselves.  

The Justice Department has arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into “alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information,“ Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement issued by the Justice Department. As NBC News notes, public military records show that Texeira was assigned as a cyber transport systems journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. 

Based on the The Post’s investigation, Teixeira, who used the pseudonym “OG” on the Discord server, claimed he partly worked at a secure facility where phones and cameras are prohibited. That’s reportedly the reason why he originally copied the documents by hand before the lack of interaction on the server prompted him to post photographs of the original documents. Some of the photos contained random items and furniture that may have given investigators a clue on his identity. 

Despite the sensitive information contained in the documents, the suspect apparently did not intend to be a whistleblower — according to The New York Times, members of "Thug Shaker Central," the original Discord server, say the documents were never intended to be shared outside of their small group. Eventually, though, they were shared to other Discord servers before finding their way to Telegram channels, 4chan and other social media platforms.   

The documents Teixeira had leaked included large amounts of information regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including detailed battlefield conditions and missile strike maps for the latter. They also reportedly showed how Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and how Russia approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons. In addition, the documents apparently contained information showing how the US spies on its foreign allies.  

Discord previously said that it was cooperating with authorities regarding their investigation on the leak. As for Teixeira, he will make his initial appearance in the US District Court for Massachusetts. 

Amazon is joining the generative AI fray. Bedrock is the company’s new API for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lets developers use and customize AI tools that generate text or images. Think of it as a cloud-based and configurable alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 aimed at businesses and developers.

AWS customers can use Bedrock to write, build chatbots, summarize text, classify images and more based on text prompts. It gives its users a choice of Amazon’s Titan foundation model (FM) and several startups’ models, including Anthropic’s Claude (a Google-backed ChatGPT rival from former OpenAI employees), AI21’s Jurassic-2 (a language model specializing in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch) and Stable Diffusion (a popular open-source image generator). Additionally, businesses and developers can customize how the models work based on input — which Amazon says won’t be used for training the models, according toCNBC. That should (theoretically) address a crucial privacy concern for businesses entering sensitive data.

Amazon views the range of AI models on offer as a way of providing flexibility to customers. The company’s description reads, “With Bedrock’s serverless experience, you can get started quickly, privately customize FMs with your own data, and easily integrate and deploy them into your applications using the AWS tools and capabilities you are familiar with (including integrations with Amazon SageMaker ML features like Experiments to test different models and Pipelines to manage your FMs at scale) without having to manage any infrastructure.”

“Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don’t want to go through that,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy toldCNBC on Thursday. “So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that’s what Bedrock is.”

Amazon says C3.ai, Pegasystems, Accenture and Deloitte are some early businesses lined up to try Bedrock. The company hasn’t yet announced pricing for the AWS toolset, and it’s currently opening access through a waitlist. You can read more and apply for admission at the project’s website.

Twitter creators who want to make money on the platform will now turn to Subscriptions, not Super Follows, in a rebrand announced by Elon Musk. Twitter originally introduced Super Follows in 2021 as a way for creators to charge for exclusive tweets. Now, subscriptions also include long-form content (thanks to those extra-long tweets) as well as “hours long videos,” according to Musk.

But the details of the program seem to be largely unchanged from Super Follows. Creators can charge $2.00, $4.99 or $9.99 a month, with exclusive content including subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces, as well as special badges for paid subscribers. Interestingly, as The Verge, points out, a help page says that “we hope to include newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.” That’s notable given Musk’s recent feud with Substack as well as because he shut down Revue, the newsletter platform Twitter acquired in 2021, soon after taking over as CEO.

Super Follows never seemed to gain much traction, even before Musk took over Twitter. Now, it seems he’s trying to lure creators with more favorable terms, at least initially. He said that Twitter would not be taking an additional cut of creators’ earnings from Subscriptions “for the next 12 months.” Instead, creators can expect 70 percent of their earnings from mobile and about 92 percent from web-based subscriptions, which should account for all revenue after app store and payment processing fees. “We will also help promote your work,” Musk said, though he didn’t elaborate on what that would entail.

It'll be quite a while before you can help take out the Justice League. As recent reports suggested, Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady Studios have delayed Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League once again following a brutal reaction to a showcase of the game. Rather than arriving on May 26th, the title now has a release date of February 2nd, 2024. That's yet another delay after Warner Bros. Games pushed back the game from an initial 2022 release window to sometime this spring.

"We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players," a statement on the Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Twitter account reads. "Thank you to our amazing community for the continued support, patience and understanding. There is much more to share in the months ahead and we look forward to seeing you in Metropolis next year."

We got our most in-depth look at the game to date during a PlayStation State of Play in February, but it's fair to say that fans gave the deep dive a poor reception. The live service elements that Rocksteady showed off were the focus of the criticism, with many folks reacting negatively to the always-online requirement (something Arcane is working to nix from Redfall's single-player mode), as well as gating cosmetic items behind microtransactions and a battle pass system.

However, Rocksteady is reportedly using the extra time to polish the game rather than overhaul its live service aspects. The studio will be focusing on ironing out bugs and improving elements it feels aren't quite up to scratch, according to Bloomberg.

Whatever Rocksteady feels as though it needs more time to work on, announcing a delay of eight months only six weeks or so before the game was supposed to drop isn't a great look. That said, WB has the biggest-selling title of the year so far under its belt, which perhaps gives it a bit more flexibility to scuttle off Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League into early 2024. When it does eventually arrive, the co-op action-adventure game will be available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life. The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings as an open-source project other developers will be able to create new, richer experiences.

The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team originally released a web-based version of the tool in 2021. It asks users to upload a drawing of a single human-like character or to select a demo figure. If you use your own doodle, you'll see a consent form that asks if Meta can use your drawing to help train its models. You don't need to provide consent to keep using the tool.

Next, you'll need to resize a capture box so it fits snugly around your creation. The tool gives you a pen and eraser to tweak the drawing before adjusting where the joints should be. After all that, you'll see an animated version of your sketch. You can pick from a variety of preset animations from four categories: dance, funny, jumping and walking.

Animated Drawings harnesses object detection models, pose estimation models and image processing-based segmentation methods to capture a digital version of a drawing. It then uses traditional computer graphics techniques to deform and animate the image.

Within a few months of the demo going live, users had granted Meta permission to use more than 1.6 million images for training purposes. Some folks uploaded images of company logos, anime characters, fish and stuffed animals, despite the tool stipulating that only human figures would work.

Along with requests for a more in-depth toolset that includes sound effects and text overlays, the array of images that people uploaded to the tool suggested there was broad interest in more extensive drawing-to-animation experiences. That, in part, led to Meta open sourcing the project with a dataset of around 180,000 drawings. "By releasing the models and code as open source, the project provides a starting point for developers to build on and extend the project, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration within the open source community," Meta wrote in a blog post.

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