NVIDIA just officially released the 2008 fan-made Portal mod, Portal: Prelude. The company dropped it on Steam and, what’s more, it’s free for anyone who has the original game. This isn’t a drab re-release, as the updated release features new textures, full ray tracing, DLSS 3 for increased performance, NVIDIA Reflex for decreased latency and RTX IO for quicker load times.

NVIDIA also dropped a GeForce Game Ready Driver to simplify setup. All of the changes to the remaster were done by modders, keeping with the spirit of the original release, via the company’s forthcoming RTX Remix creator toolkit. NVIDIA also hired famed modders to modernize assets and improve the lighting.

For the uninitiated, Portal: Prelude was originally released back in 2008 and developed by modders. It acts as a prequel to the original game and is set before the time of GLaDOS. The game offers a ten-hour campaign with nearly 20 test chambers, a fully voiced story and mechanics that go beyond the first Portal. It continues to be the highest-rated Portal mod, and there’s no shortage of competition.

This remake took eight months of dev time and acts as a showcase for the aforementioned modding toolkit, RTX Remix. Portal: Prelude is available right now on Steam and won’t cost you anything, as long as you have the original Portal, so get downloading.

Facebook is revamping its in-app video hub to give its content an Instagram-style makeover. The changes will bring Reels’ editing tools to all Facebook videos, as well as a new “Explore” section to highlight trending clips and other recommendations.

It also comes with a new name. The tab previously known as “Facebook Watch” will now simply be called “Video.” The section, which will host short-form clips like Reels as well as live video and longer form content, will continue to live at the top of the Facebook app.

The new branding comes as Facebook’s video strategy has changed dramatically since the “Watch” section debuted in 2017. At the time, the company was heavily pushing TV shows and other longform content created for Facebook. Now, much of Meta’s video ambitions center around its TikTok competitor, Reels, and other algorithmically-recommended clips. Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for the last year that his goal is to shift Facebook into becoming more of a “discovery engine” that surfaces more content outside of users’ social graphs.

Some of those themes are apparent in Facebook’s new video tab, which has a new “Explore” section similar to the Explore grid on Instagram. There, users will find clusters of trending video and other recommendations grouped by hashtag.

Meta is also taking steps to integrate Reels on Facebook more closely with those Instagram. Facebook has encouraged users to cross-post Reels from Instagram to Facebook for some time. Now, the company is also unifying comments across the two apps so users no longer need to switch to the Instagram app in order to comment on a Reel that originated on Instagram.

The changes are beginning to roll out now to the Facebook app and website.

Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in ten years (and supposedly his last) premiered in Japan today — without any lead-up marketing from Studio Ghibli. Soon after, Gkids announced that it had acquired the animated movie’s North American rights. Called Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka (translated as “How Do You Live”) in Japan, the international release will use the title The Boy and the Heron. Gkids says it will arrive in North America “later this year.”

Little is known about the new movie, but Gkids describes the hand-drawn animated feature as “an original story written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.” Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki produces it with a musical score from Joe Hisaishi. It was previously announced that Miyazaki’s next film would have an IMAX release (as well as Dolby Atmos, Dolby Cinema and DTS:X) in Japan. However, it isn’t clear if it will screen in IMAX in the US.

When the film arrives stateside, don’t expect to see any more promotion than it got in Japan. Gkids says it will follow Studio Ghibli’s “unprecedented decision” to premiere the film in Japan without any marketing images, trailers, synopses ads — or any information — ahead of its surprise premiere today. Suzuki attributes the decision to honoring another era while hoping to spark imagination. “A poster and a title — that’s all we got when we were children. I enjoyed trying to imagine what a movie was about, and I wanted to bring that feeling back,” Suzuki reportedly told Japanese broadcaster NHK via The Japan Times and Deadline.

Gkids has distributed the North American versions of previous Miyazaki films, including The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There and From Up on Poppy Hill (among others). The 15-year-old producer and distributor has 12 Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations in its short history. “Hayao Miyazaki is a living legend in filmmaking, as evidenced by his Academy Award win for Spirited Away and his two Oscar nominations for Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises,’” David Jesteadt, president of Gkids, wrote in a press release today. “It’s been ten years since the world has seen a new film from Miyazaki-san, and Gkids is so proud and honored to unveil his latest, highly anticipated masterpiece in North America.”

For almost three decades in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt has gone head to head in high-speed motorcycle battles, climbed Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and hung from the side of a plane during takeoff. Oh, and he also died at one point (following an extended free dive into an underwater data bank). But in the latest film, Dead Reckoning Part 1, Ethan Hunt faces his toughest opponent yet: an omnipotent AI that could reshape geopolitics as we know it. After defying the laws of physics, it only makes sense that he has to defeat a god.

As ludicrous as that may sound, it also fits perfectly within the Mission: Impossible series, a universe where Ethan Hunt has been described as the "living manifestation of destiny," and everyone is well aware that the "Impossible Mission Force" sounds like something pulled out of a comic book. At this point, it's a franchise that exists for Tom Cruise and his collaborators — most recently, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie — to go wild with spy gadgets and death-defying stunt sequences. It's made by spy movie geeks, for spy movie geeks.

That's been true of the series from the start. The original TV show centered on grounded spy craft, albeit in a world where people could easily impersonate others with realistic face masks. Brian de Palma's 1996 film was a throwback to paranoid '70s spy thrillers, but it also made room for gadgets like glasses that wirelessly transmitted crystal clear video. And, of course, there's the nail-bitingly tense infiltration of a CIA server room, a scene that infiltrated pop culture for years.

John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 is far less cerebral, but it also leans heavily into his operatic Hong Kong action style. It's not a great movie, I'll admit, but as a fan of Woo's action films, I can't help but be thrilled by the car chase meet cute, and the balletic finale which morphs from a motorcycle chase into a hand-to-hand fight on a beach.

Paramount Pictures and Skydance

After a slight hiatus, JJ Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2006 with Mission: Impossible 3, a film that built upon the spy shenanigans from his TV series, Alias. Since then, the franchise has been on a constant quest to one-up itself. 2011's Ghost Protocol goes full on Buster Keaton with every set piece (director Brad Bird essentially turns Ethan Hunt into a character from The Incredibles), culminating in the scene where Cruise himself actually scaled the Burj Khalifa.

Arriving amid Daniel Craig's James Bond run (which is filled with movies I either love or absolutely hate), and the end of the original Jason Bourne trilogy, Ghost Protocol felt like a throwback to everything that made the Mission: ImpossibleTV show so addictive. There's a loyal and highly-skilled team, a nefarious villain and tons of gadgets on display. But crucially, things don't always work out as Hunt and crew expect, which makes the franchise more relatable to all of us with failing gadgets. (Every time my iPhone crashes, I can't help but be grateful I'm not climbing the Burj Khalifa with only a single high-tech gecko glove.)

With the arrival of Christopher McQuarrie, who directed 2015's Rogue Nation and its sequels, Mission: Impossible found a groove that differentiated it from most other modern franchises. Almost like action film jazz, McQuarrie and Cruise frequently came up with ideas for set pieces and built movies around them. Scripts were reworked on the fly. Normally this would spell disaster, but McQuarrie ended up thriving in the chaos. Together with stunt coordinator Scott Eastwood, he also managed to push the series into astounding new practical set pieces (see: Ethan Hunt hanging out of a plane in Rogue Nation, or the extended skydiving sequence in Fallout).

Paramount Pictures and Skydance

Dead Reckoning Part 1 builds on McQuarrie's previous entries. This time, Hunt and a new companion (Hayley Atwell's Grace) are chased through Rome's narrow streets while driving a souped-up, tiny Fiat. He base-jumps off of a mountain using a motorcycle. He fights on a real train speeding along at 60MPH. All the while, he's trying to stop the villainous AI, known only as The Entity.

On the face of it, Dead Reckoning shares plenty with Mrs. Davis, the latest show co-created by Damon Lindelof which also features a tough protagonist against an all-powerful AI. The film also dabbles in similar themes: Surely an omnipotent artificial intelligence would also inspire near-religious devotion. In Dead Reckoning, that's embodied by Gabriel, the angelically named sociopath played by Esai Morales.

While the film rarely slows down to explore the true impact of AI, Hunt and his team — Simon Pegg's Benji, Ving Rhames' Luther — instantly grasp the larger implications. Whoever can control the AI could basically control the world — not merely through physical force, but by defining truth and reality itself. An AI could erase a person from surveillance footage, or turn them into someone else entirely. Nothing can be trusted. As we grapple with the impact of ChatGPT and generative AI in real life, it’s hard not to feel like we’re on a similar path. (It's also funny to see in the midst of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which are directly tied to complaints about studios taking advantage of creatives with AI.)

As much as I love other action film franchises – like John Wick’s increasingly elaborate choreography, or the sheer ridiculousness of the Fast and the Furious –Mission: Impossible remains uniquely enjoyable. It’s committed to delivering astonishing practical stunt work. It’s self-aware just enough to poke fun at itself. And a part of me hopes that somehow, a team of geeks can also fight back against the excesses of AI.

Twitter’s ad-revenue sharing program for creators has officially launched — and it’s reportedly already begun paying eligible Blue subscribers. Elon Musk announced the initiative in February, but with scant details about how it would work, nobody knew quite what to expect. However, some high-profile users report today they’ve received notifications about incoming deposits — including one user claiming he’s set to receive over $24,000. The rewards are based on ads in replies to eligible users’ content.

The program incentivizes creators who contribute popular content that drives ads — rewarding accounts that help Twitter make money (while driving new Blue subscriptions). “This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts,” a Twitter help article published today reads. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter.” Musk tweeted today that payouts “will be cumulative from when I first promised to do so in February.”

However, the bar is high to receive a transfer from the Musk-owned social media company. The support post says the revenue-sharing system applies to Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations subscribers with at least five million post impressions in each of the past three months. They’ll also need to pass a human review and adhere to the company’s Creator Subscriptions policies; Twitter will then pay eligible users using a Stripe account. The company says it will soon launch an application process, found under Monetization in account settings.

The move aims to make Twitter a more attractive platform for content creators. It may not be a coincidence that the program arrived about a week after Meta launched its Twitter rival Threads, which didn’t take long to gain traction — gaining over 100 million users in its first five days. That’s higher than previous record-holders ChatGPT and TikTok.

The Perseverance Rover has found evidence of organic compounds in the Jezero Crater on Mars. Don’t get too excited: These compounds could have also developed in nonbiological ways. But even if it’s not proof of organic life on Mars, the results hint at complex organic conditions for the “key building blocks for life.” Organic molecules like those observed in the Jezero Crater contain carbon and often hydrogen atoms. They’re the core components of life as we know it on Earth.

The rover found organic materials in all ten targets it observed on the crater floor. “Our results support observations by previous robotic missions to Mars that the Red Planet was once rich in organic material, compounds made primarily of carbon and hydrogen, and that some of that organic material can still be detected billions of years later,” co-author Joseph Razzell Hollis, a London-based astrobiologist, told Gizmodo. “Each detection, each observation, gives us a little bit more information that brings us closer to understanding the history of Mars and whether it could have supported life in the past.”

Hopefully, scientists can maintain this level of excitement. They’ll have to wait for the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, which isn’t expected to launch from Earth until at least the late 2020s.

– Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Apple's iOS 17 public betas are ready to download

How to install the iOS 17 public beta

Chipotle's guacamole robot is cursed to peel and core avocados for eternity

macOS Sonoma preview: For the widget wonks

Sony's 26-megapixel A6700 is its new flagship APS-C mirrorless camera

iPadOS 17 preview: A smoother multitasking experience

For those who really need it.

Engadget

Just a year ago, Apple announced the biggest software update the iPad has ever seen. iPadOS 16 ushered in Stage Manager, a completely revamped multitasking mode. There were several other new features, as usual, but Stage Manager, in particular, brought the iPad closer than ever to a Mac or Windows PC experience. iPadOS 17, on the other hand, is a subtler update. We preview the beta, which is out on public release now.

Continue reading.

Google's Bard AI chatbot has learned to talk

It understands 40 languages and can speak its responses.

Google Bard’s latest round of updates includes expanded linguistic skills. It can now respond with spoken word in addition to text. It can do so in nearly four dozen languages. Users can now converse with the AI in Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish, among others, as well as access the platform from more places on the planet, such as Brazil and "across Europe." Users will have the option to either read or listen to the AI's generated responses, as well as have more control over how friendly Bard is, with five distinct AI tones: simple, long, short, professional or casual. Those are only available for English-language requests at the moment.

Continue reading.

'Roblox' is coming to Meta Quest VR headsets

Zuck says the beta version drops in a few weeks.

Roblox

The immensely popular online game creation platform, Roblox, is coming to VR, thanks to the Meta Quest. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement, which was followed by an official Roblox blog post. A beta version of the app, according to Zuckerberg, launches in just a few weeks, via the Quest platform’s dedicated App Lab. This is going to be a fully cross-platform title, so anything you interact with or make on your phone or console should be accessible in VR.

Continue reading.

Elon Musk’s new AI company aims ‘to understand the true nature of the universe’

The team will be holding a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

Elon Musk has a new AI company. A website has appeared for xAI, which will embark on the self-described mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The announcement comes after filing documents revealed the existence of a company called X.AI Corp earlier this year. Musk also said in April he wanted to start a venture for “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” which “hopefully does more good than harm.”

Not much else is known yet about Musk’s latest venture. He tweeted yesterday: “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company webpage notes the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

Continue reading.

Twitter has published an update on how its "Freedom of Speech Not Reach" moderation approach is working, and according to the company, it has seen some encouraging results. In April, the website started limiting the reach of tweets violating its hateful conduct policy and applying a label to them that reads: "Visibility limited: this tweet may violate Twitter's rules against hateful conduct." Apparently, Twitter has applied the label to more than 700,000 posts since then and has proactively prevented ads from appearing adjacent to those content. 

The company also said that the label reduces the reach of a post by 81 percent, thereby effectively limiting the visibility of posts that potentially exhibit hateful conduct. In addition, Twitter revealed in its update that more than one-third of users choose to delete labeled tweets themselves once they've been notified that they have violated the website's policy and only four percent of authors have appealed labels. 

The company charging for API access means most researchers studying hate speech can't independently verify these claims. But Twitter is clearly claiming that its approach has been effective so far. In fact, the website is pushing through with its plan to expand its labels and include more types of policy violations. According to its announcement, it will now also label and downrank posts that violate its Abusive Behavior and Violent Speech policies. Tweets that will be labeled in the coming weeks include posts with malicious content targeting individuals, those that encourage others to harass an individual or group of people, those that threaten to inflict physical harm on others, and tweets that encourage others to commit acts of violence or harm. 

The immensely popular online game creation platform/thingamajig Roblox is coming to VR, thanks to the Meta Quest platform. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement, which was followed by an official Roblox blog post. A beta version of the app launches in just a few weeks, according to Zuckerberg, which will be accessible via the Quest platform’s dedicated App Lab.

The beta will be available for the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets, so OG Quest owners are out of luck. The recently-announced Quest 3 wasn’t mentioned, but that’s likely because it won’t be out in time for the beta release. A finished version of the game, however, would make for an extremely compelling launch title for the Quest 3, as Roblox boasts more than 66 million daily users across multiple platforms.

To that end, this is going to be a fully cross-platform title, so anything you interact with or make on your phone or console should be accessible in VR, though it depends on the developer. The Roblox team is actively encouraging developers to make experiences in VR with a forthcoming toolset accessible via the Creator Dashboard. You’ll soon see VR as a new device type on this dashboard, along with desktop, mobile, tablet and console.

Meta recently lowered the minimum age to operate a Quest headset from 13 to ten, but this change will not impact Roblox. You have to be at least 13 to use the app in VR. That’s probably for the best, given the addictive nature of the title and associated child safety concerns.

Elon Musk has a new AI company. A website has appeared for xAI, which will embark on the self-described mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The announcement comes after filing documents revealed the existence of a company called “X.AI Corp” earlier this year. Musk also said in an April interview that he wanted to start a venture for “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe” that “hopefully does more good than harm.”

Not much else is known yet about Musk’s latest venture. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO and Twitter Chairman tweeted today, “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company webpage notes that the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

Musk’s previous comments about an AI startup were aimed at creating “a third option” to challenge ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Google. He reportedly bought thousands of GPUs earlier this year for a Twitter-related AI project. It isn’t yet clear whether the two projects are related.

The website lists veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto as working on the project. “Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples,” the xAI website reads. “We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.”

In addition to Musk, the listed team members include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has announced this year's Emmy nominations and there's lots of good news for the team behind The Last of Us. HBO's massively successful series scored 24 nominations, more than any other show this year except Succession (27). The White Lotus (23) and Apple TV+ comedy Ted Lasso (21) followed closely behind.

The Last of Us is the first live-action video game adaptation for film or TV to make a serious dent at a major awards ceremony (League of Legends series Arcanewon the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program last year). It's up for Outstanding Drama Series alongside Andor, Better Call Saul, House of the Dragon, Succession, The White Lotus and Yellowjackets.

Pedro Pascal (who has three nods in total this year) and Bella Ramsay picked up nominations for their lead roles in The Last of Us. So did guest stars Melanie Lynskey, Storm Reid, Anna Torv, Murray Bartlett, Lamar Johnson, Nick Offerman and Keivonn Montreal Woodard. Craig Mazin, the show's co-creator, and Peter Hoar are, respectively, nominated for writing and directing the show's stellar third episode, "Long, Long Time."

Elsewhere, reigning champ Ted Lasso will compete against Abbott Elementary, Barry, The Bear, Jury Duty, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Only Murders In The Building and Wednesday in the Outstanding Comedy Series category. On the Star Wars front, Andor scooped up eight nominations and The Mandalorian got nine. Obi-Wan Kenobi snagged five, including one for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.

Disney+ film Hocus Pocus 2 (three nominations in total) and Roku's Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (eight nods overall) are up for Outstanding Television Movie. Amazon's big-budget The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power landed six nominations, mostly in technical categories. 

Stranger Things, which isn't eligible for top honors this year, also has six nods in down-the-line categories. Meanwhile, Peacock's Poker Face snagged four nominatons, Star Trek: Picard has two in makeup categories and Netflix's brilliant I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson snagged a pair of nods.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given how many nominations Succession, The Last of Us and The White Lotus racked up, HBO leads the pack this year with 127 nominations overall. According to Deadline's tally, Netflix has the most of any streaming-only network with 103, followed by Apple (52), Amazon (46 between Prime Video and Freevee), Hulu (42 or 64 if you include FX shows), Disney+ (40), Peacock (eight) and Paramount+ (seven). By contrast, broadcast networks earned 86 nods between them.

This year's Emmy Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place on September 18th. However, amid the WGA writers' strike and pending action by the actors' union, reports suggest it may be delayed until November or even January.