Enlarge / Does Mono fit between the Chilean cab sav and Argentinian malbec, or is it more of an orange, maybe? (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft has donated the Mono Project, an open-source framework that brought its .NET platform to non-Windows systems, to the Wine community. WineHQ will be the steward of the Mono Project upstream code , while Microsoft will encourage Mono-based apps to migrate to its open source .NET framework.

As Microsoft notes on the Mono Project homepage , the last major release of Mono was in July 2019. Mono was "a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems" and was the first implementation of .NET on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems.

Ximian, Novell, SUSE, Xamarin, Microsoft—now Wine

Mono began as a project of Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the GNOME desktop. De Icaza led Ximian (originally Helix Code), aiming to bring Microsoft's then-new .NET platform to Unix-like platforms. Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Tuesday, researchers from Google and Tel Aviv University unveiled GameNGen , a new AI model that can interactively simulate the classic 1993 first-person shooter game Doom in real time using AI image generation techniques borrowed from Stable Diffusion . It's a neural network system that can function as a limited game engine, potentially opening new possibilities for real-time video game synthesis in the future.

For example, instead of drawing graphical video frames using traditional techniques, future games could potentially use an AI engine to "imagine" or hallucinate graphics in real time as a prediction task.

" The potential here is absurd," wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. "Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?"

Enlarge (credit: Artur Debat | Moment )

Content warning: The following story describes instances of animal abuse.

An Australian man who pretended to be a famous teenage YouTuber has been sentenced to 17 years for orchestrating what police are calling "one of the worst sextortion cases in history."

Twenty-nine-year-old Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed blackmailed hundreds of victims across 20 countries, ultimately pleading guilty to 119 charges involving 286 people. Most victims were children, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a press release confirming that Rasheed targeted at least 180 kids under 16.

Enlarge / The Apple Books icon on a Mac. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple will cut 100 jobs, all in its digital services teams. Laid off employees will have 60 days to find another job in the company before it cuts ties with them altogether, according to a Bloomberg report.

Compared to some other big tech companies, layoffs are relatively uncommon at Apple. This is the fourth wave this year, but cuts so far (including this one) have been laser-focused and small in scope—a contrast with companies like Intel, Cisco, or Microsoft, which have recently made more drastic cuts of anywhere from 7 to 15 percent of their workforces.

The current set of cuts chiefly affects the Books team. Digital services like this have been a big part of Apple's financial success in recent quarters; in just the past year, services revenue is up 14 percent . However, Books has no subscription offering, and Apple was subject to a US Department of Justice price-fixing lawsuit .

Enlarge / Human driver will continue to be a job at the Boring Company Las Vegas Loop for the foreseeable future. (credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Image)

Autonomous driving capabilities are a central component of Tesla's stratospheric share price, with CEO Elon Musk repeatedly telling investors that they're the difference between "being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero." But real-world performance on the road lags far behind Musk's claims, with the latest data point coming from another Musk venture, the Boring Company, and its tunnels under Las Vegas.

The Boring Company might be Elon Musk's strangest side hustle. Whether it was sparked by a desire to avoid traffic commuting to SpaceX or part of an insidious plan to undermine rail projects, the results for the sewer-sized tunnels have been about what you'd expect: Proposed tunnels between Washington DC and Baltimore , underneath I-405 in Los Angeles , and from Chicago to its major airport remain literal pipe dreams.

So far, there's just a 2.2-mile loop with three stations serving the Las Vegas Convention Center, albeit with the potential to expand the subterranean system to 68 miles (110 km) in total .

Enlarge / Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is heading to court for a possible indictment after being released from police custody, authorities in France said on Wednesday. "An investigating judge has ended Pavel Durov's police custody and will have him brought to court for a first appearance and a possible indictment," according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor's office that was quoted in an Associated Press article .

Durov was arrested in Paris on Saturday and questioned by police for several days. The French investigative judge will "decide whether to place him under formal investigation following his arrest as part of a probe into organized crime on the messaging app," Reuters wrote today .

"Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates that judges consider there is enough to the case to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved," Reuters wrote. The judge's decision on a formal investigation is expected today, the article said.

Enlarge / There's a reason the Ariel Nomad works so well in open-world games like Forza Horizon . Now Ariel has developed an electric version. (credit: Ariel)

The low-volume British carmaker Ariel got its start with a reimagining of the iconic Lotus Seven, gaining something of a reputation for building the car that filled Jeremy Clarkson's epiglottis full of bees on Top Gear , back when that was the most-torrented TV show on the Internet. Then it expanded its lineup with the Nomad, which added off-road ground ability to the mix, creating a car that starred on The Grand Tour as well as in the last few iterations of Forza Horizon . Today, Ariel unveiled its idea for an all-electric take on that go-anywhere car with the E-Nomad.

Ariel says the E-Nomad can match the more than respectable acceleration of its gas-powered car, which means 0–60 mph (98 km/h) in 3.4 seconds despite wearing nobbly all-terrain tires. But rapidly accelerating electric vehicles aren't anything special. What does stand out is the E-Nomad's relative lack of mass—it tips the scales at just 1,975 lbs (896 kg), less than half as much as most of the EVs on sale today.

The E-Nomad's 41 kWh battery pack lives behind the cabin, replacing the internal combustion engine and fuel tank you'd find on the regular car. Ariel sourced it from Rockfort Engineering and says the pouch cells offer "best-in-class energy density." In total, the battery pack weighs less than 660 lbs (300 kg) and can send up to 281 hp (210 kW) to the drive unit at the rear. The drive has a peak torque output of 361 lb-ft (490 Nm) and is optimized for mass, weighing 202 lbs (92 kg).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As far back as 2016, work on AI-based chatbots revealed that they have a disturbing tendency to reflect some of the worst biases of the society that trained them. But as large language models have become ever larger and subjected to more sophisticated training, a lot of that problematic behavior has been ironed out. For example, I asked the current iteration of ChatGPT for five words it associated with African Americans, and it responded with things like "resilience" and "creativity."

But a lot of research has turned up examples where implicit biases can persist in people long after outward behavior has changed. So some researchers decided to test whether the same might be true of LLMs. And was it ever.

By interacting with a series of LLMs using examples of the African American English sociolect, they found that the AI's had an extremely negative view of its speakers—something that wasn't true of speakers of another American English variant. And that bias bled over into decisions the LLMs were asked to make about those who use African American English.

Enlarge / A view of the Pantanal wetlands in Brazil. New research shows a large chunk of global methane emissions are from rotting vegetation in tropical wetlands. (credit: Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images)

A 2021 pledge by more than 100 nations to cut methane emissions from anthropogenic sources 30 percent by 2030 might not slow global warming as much as projected, as new research shows that feedbacks in the climate system are boosting methane emissions from natural sources, especially tropical wetlands.

A new trouble spot is in the Arctic, where scientists recently found unexpectedly large methane emissions in winter. And globally, the increase in water vapor caused by global warming is slowing the rate at which methane breaks down in the atmosphere. If those feedbacks intensify, scientists said, it could outpace efforts to cut methane from fossil fuel and other human sources.

Methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and scientists estimate it’s responsible for 20 to 30 percent of climate warming since the start of the industrial age, when atmospheric methane was at a concentration of about 0.7 parts per million. It has zig-zagged upward since then, spiking with the first fossil gas boom in the 1980s, then leveling off slightly before a huge surge started in the early 2000s. The amount of methane in the atmosphere reached about 1.9 ppm in 2023, nearly three times the pre-industrial level.