Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Apple's event will likely discuss Apple Intelligence, though that's not going to launch until later in the year with iOS 18.1 (credit: Apple)

For years, Apple's September event has focused almost exclusively on new flagship iPhones and new Apple Watch models. Once in a while, other second-tier products make an appearance. And in recent cycles, the Mac and high-end iPads had their shining moment later in the year—often in October or November.

We expect the same to happen this time. You can almost certainly count on new iPhones and Watches. As for what else to expect: well, no Macs, but there are a couple of interesting possibilities.

Here's what we expect to see next week.

Enlarge / The USS Manchester. Just the spot for a Starlink dish. (credit: Department of Defense)

It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions.

For instance, a former US Ambassador to Kenya in 2015 got in trouble after working out of an embassy compound bathroom—the only place where he could use his personal computer (!) to access an unsecured network (!!) that let him log in to Gmail (!!!), where he did much of his official business—rules and security policies be damned.

Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.

Enlarge / The energy captured by Balatro's mobile announcement trailer is terrifyingly spot-on. (credit: LocalThunk)

LocalThunk, the pseudonymous lead developer of the surprise smash hit deckbuilding/roguelike/poker-math-simulation game Balatro, has long given the impression that he understands that his game, having sold 2 million copies, might be a little too good.

To that end, LocalThunk has made the game specifically not about actual gambling, or microtransactions, or anything of the kind. Shortly after it arrived in February 2024 (but after it already got its hooks into one of us), some storefronts removed or re-rated the game on concerns about its cards and chips themes, causing him to explain his line between random number generation (RNG), risk/reward mechanics, and actual gambling. He literally wrote it into his will that the game cannot be used in any kind of gambling or casino property.

So LocalThunk has done everything he can to ensure Balatro won't waste people's money. Time, though? If you're a Balatro fan already, or more of a mobile gamer than a console or computer player, your time is in danger.

At first glance, these AI-generated Super Mario Bros. videos are pretty impressive. The more you watch, though, the more glitches you'll see. (credit: MarioVGG)

Last month, Google's GameNGen AI model showed that generalized image diffusion techniques can be used to generate a passable, playable version of Doom. Now, researchers are using some similar techniques with a model called MarioVGG to see if an AI model can generate plausible video of Super Mario Bros. in response to user inputs.

The results of the MarioVGG model—available as a pre-print paper published by the crypto-adjacent AI company Virtuals Protocol—still display a lot of apparent glitches, and it's too slow for anything approaching real-time gameplay at the moment. But the results show how even a limited model can infer some impressive physics and gameplay dynamics just from studying a bit of video and input data.

The researchers hope this represents a first step toward "producing and demonstrating a reliable and controllable video game generator," or possibly even "replacing game development and game engines completely using video generation models" in the future.