summary
Latest
Amazon begins rolling out AI-generated review summaries
Amazon announced a new generative AI feature today that summarizes product reviews. Available initially to “a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a broad selection of products,” the artificial intelligence tool creates a recap paragraph highlighting common themes from customer feedback. The company first confirmed in June it was testing an AI-powered summarization tool, but it now begins its official rollout. CEO Andy Jassy said earlier this month that AI is “at the heart of what we do.”
ICYMI: The best space, drone and car tech of the year
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-377507{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-377507, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-377507{width:570px;display:block;}try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-377507").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: We are rounding up our very favorite transportation stories since launching ICYMI in June and it wouldn't be us if we didn't talk about NASA taking applications for astronauts again. Couple that with NASA's Pluto fly-by this year and it's clear that the space agency is on the upswing.
ICYMI: The best health innovations of the year
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-766185{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-766185, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-766185{width:570px;display:block;}try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-766185").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: It's been a pretty magical year for medical innovation, with something for everyone but most especially Star Trek fans. The FDA approved 3D-printed medicine for the first time, prosthetic arms for kids got awesome and researchers helped a man with a severed spine walk, with sensor connections on either side of his spine.
ICYMI: The best robot news of the year
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777059{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777059, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777059{width:570px;display:block;}try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777059").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: We hit just over 120 episodes since our launch in June and from the beginning, we have been obsessed with robot innovation. That's why we put together a special year-end episode of ICYMI, rounding up our very favorite robot stories.
EVE Evolved: Six years of EVE Evolved
Six years ago to this exact day, I joined the Massively crew and published the first edition of this column dedicated to the ins and outs of EVE Online. The column has been home to over 300 featured articles since its creation, offering everything from guides and expansion reveals to opinion pieces, fiction, and tales of real in-game events. It's been my pleasure in the past six years to offer the Massively readers a digestible glimpse into the ordinarily somewhat impenetrable world of EVE Online and to introduce new players to the only game (other than Master of Orion II) that's managed to keep me hooked for over a decade. It's been a fantastic year to be a fan of EVE Online, with CCP announcing its long-term vision for deep space colonisation and the game being revitalised through the Odyssey and Rubicon expansions. I've had the opportunity to explore both expansions in this column and to share some hands-on experience with DUST 514 and CCP's upcoming dogfighter EVE Valkyrie. There's been no shortage of opinion pieces this year either, with articles on everything from PvP consequences and twitch controls to whether Star Citizen and Elite are a threat to the sandbox giant. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I round up the best articles from the column's sixth year of operation in one place.
Twitter now sending email summaries, will keep weekly tabs on the Biebs
Twitter hasn't wasted any time in making good on its Summify acquisition. Not even half a year after the ink has dried, you can now opt to get a curated summary of the "most relevant Tweets" and linked stories sent to your email inbox. The layout borrows more than a few cues from the new Discover tab and will let you respond from the email message itself, although we can imagine friends being slightly irked at reviving a conversation that was so very three days ago. Even so, once the option has rolled out to everyone within the space of a few weeks, it'll be an easier way to keep up on one Mr. Bieber's Twitter adventures without others' pesky life events and politics getting in the way.
Choose My Adventure: A fond farewell
Well, ladies and gents, the time has come for the final edition of my run with Final Fantasy XIV on Choose My Adventure. After many travails, I was still unable to hunt down a leveling party, so I'm afraid that is one thing I'm not going to be able to provide my views on during this feature. It's been a good run with good ol' FFXIV, though, and I enjoyed the bite-size samples of each feature I inspected (well, mostly anyway). So after the cut, I'm just gonna recount my general impressions of the game, something of a tl;dr for the ADD folks in the audience. I do want to preface this with a disclaimer, however: This is by no means a comprehensive or complete review. This is my take on the game after playing it casually (about three to five hours per week) for the duration of this CMA. There are many features in Final Fantasy XIV that I didn't get to explore, such as the later levels of crafting, the later levels of combat (which apparently introduce some keen new features such as Battle Regimens), and so forth. That being said, follow on past the cut for my final opinion of my time in FFXIV.
Cool Guys and Girls needed to play Warlocks
Axel on LJ points us to an easter egg on the Official WoW page that I can't help think must be fairly old, but I've never seen it before, so here you go: highlighting text under the Warlock and Warrior listings on the class page reveals some funny flavor text.The US page seems to have been changed from the original above (as of this writing, under Warlocks it says "hey you found some hidden text, there must be some giant conspiracy here"), but the European page shows the original "cool guy/girl" as a recommended player for Warlocks. At least one commenter on the LJ page says this has been around since day one on the main page, and I wouldn't be surprised -- Blizzard is familiar with leaving secrets on the official page for players.
Suggestion: an instance summary screen
Got this idea while doing a Shadow Labs run with my guildies this weekend: there should be a screen, in instances, that you can pull up to give stats about what players have done in there, just like battlegrounds. During the instance, every player should be able to pull up a screen that lists killing blows, damage done, healing done, and maybe even experience gained or even the loot dropped-- kind of an instance summary at a glance.I know, as with all of my personal ideas, that opposition to this from you readers will likely be strong. I can just hear you saying now: "We can already do this!" Yes, mods like DamageMeters can track damage and healing done, in an instance or out, and across the group or otherwise. But they can't track killing blows and other stats, and not every player has access to the info-- it would benefit from being done by Blizzard (we already know they can do it in the battlegrounds, instances would be no different), and it would give us a standard system to track these kinds of stats for those of us who are interested.The other objection, I'm sure, will be that some players don't want to know this info. Guilds will sometimes ban DamageMeters output in the chat channels, because they want their raiders to be working for a win, not for individual DPS. But to those objections, I say that if that was a problem, we'd already be dealing with it. If anyone is going to work for individual DPS, what's to stop them from installing DamageMeters and doing it right now? And if someone is working for themselves instead of for the raid, the simple solution is to just not bring them along to the raid. If a meter makes them ignore helping others, who needs them?Of course, the other objection you might have to this one is that Blizzard should be working on more important things, and on that I can't really argue. But Blizzard, if you're listening and have the time to do it, I'd like to see the numbers on what my party is doing in instances.
Macworld: The many faces of Get Info
The Get Info window works in a few similar but at times mysterious ways, and Rob Griffiths has put together an article that outlines each of its three iterations in Mac OS X 10.4 (Panther has two). While this might be rudimentary to some of you hard-core Mac OS X users out there, this is a handy feature walk-through of each slightly different version - Get Info, Super Get Info and Summary Info - for those who haven't covered this ground yet. Check it out.
Insider Roundup (bi)weekly: March 26-April 8
Amidst the torrid times of server troubles, buggy patches and April Fools, WoW Insider helps us stand firm: Due to the fact that US servers were offline nearly all day yesterday, players are being given a free day of service. more» Terra Nova reports the interesting tidbit that character transfer on-demand could soon be available - at a cost. more» ...General is filled with shouted insults and puerile behaviour fit more for Xbox Live than WoW. more» ...Caydiem has been running around the forums posting 1.11 patch notes, and all I can say is that they're utterly hilarious. more» ...this announcement of the new Alliance race is an early April Fool's joke. more»
Insider Roundup weekly: March 2-8
The latest scoop from Azeroth courtesy of WoW Insider, Joystiq's very own World of Warcraft blog: ..."to make things interesting" there will be three skill-based contests that will grant the winner entry into the Burning Crusade beta. more» The rumor that we might soon see World of Warcraft ported to the Xbox 360 has been a persistent one. ... Not so, says Blizzard, who has recently denied any plans for an Xbox port. more» ...it may be the Englishness of it, but saying "I'm terribly sorry, old chap, but would you mind pushing off for a few minutes while I finish this quest?" has surprising effects. more» ...Why is it that when two (or more) groups try to combine their resources and members, they fail most of the time? more»
