Enlarge / A screenshot from What the Car? , one of the more intriguing games from Apple's new Arcade additions. (credit: Apple)

Apple Arcade is still around, and it's still a priority—at least, that's the message we imagine Apple's surprise launch of 20 new games on the same day seeks to send.

The new games include (but aren't limited to) a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-branded battler titled TMNT Splintered Fate , a Disney-themed Scrabble-like game called Spellstruck developed in partnership with a Words With Friends co-creator, a city builder called Cityscapes: Sim Builder , and a follow-up to the Arcade smash hit What the Golf? titled What the Car? (If you haven't played What the Golf? yet, you probably should—it's available on other platforms now, too.)

There are also a few updated versions of classic premium games from prior eras of iPhone gaming, like LIMBO , Kingdom Two Crowns , Farming Simulator 20 , Octodad: Dadliest Catch , Temple Run , and Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It —think of those like Apple's equivalent of a TV-streaming service also offering episodes of classic TV shows like The Office or Star Trek .

Enlarge / Star Wars: Luke's Awakening imagines a Game Boy Color game that never was. (credit: Shoehead)

Just in time for Star Wars Day , Irish pixel artist and indie game developer Shoehead debuted nine delightful mock-up images of a non-existent Game Boy Color game called Star Wars: Luke's Awakening . It's a fan tribute that melds the design sensibilities of the 1993 Game Boy classic Zelda: Link's Awakening with the storyline of the original Star Wars trilogy.

In the pixel art, Shoehead depicts a title screen and eight key scenes that reflect important events in A New Hope , The Empire Strikes Back , and Return of the Jedi . The scenes include watching the "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" sequence with the Jedi master, an encounter with a Wampa on Hoth, a Darth Vader boss battle, evading the Rancor monster, getting zapped by the Emperor, and seeing the Force ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan at the end of Return of the Jedi .

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  Fan-made mock-up title screen artwork for a fantasy Star Wars: Luke's Awakening game. [credit: Shoehead ]

The images abound with delightful details, such as choices of weapons appropriate for each scene and how Shoehead perfectly adapted the "chibi" style of Zelda's Game Boy adventures to Star Wars .

Enlarge / Snoop Dogg talking about AI at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference on May 3, 2023. (credit: Milken Institute)

On Wednesday, celebrated multi-platinum recording artist Snoop Dogg took part in a panel at the Milken Institute's 2023 Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. After fielding a question by Variety editor Shirley Halperin about AI in relation to the 2023 WGA writers' strike , Snoop expressed his bemused feelings on AI in a genuinely funny exchange, resulting in convivial laughter from the audience.

During his response, Snoop described how conversing with a large language model (such as ChatGPT or Bing Chat ) reminds him of sci-fi movies he watched as a kid. Showing that he keeps up with current events, Snoop also referenced Geoffery Hinton, who resigned this week from Google so he could speak of the dangers of AI without conflicts of interest:

Well I got a motherf*cking AI right now that they did made for me. This n***** could talk to me. I'm like, man this thing can hold a real conversation? Like real for real? Like it's blowing my mind because I watched movies on this as a kid years ago. When I see this sh*t I'm like what is going on? And I heard the dude, the old dude that created AI saying, "This is not safe, 'cause the AIs got their own minds, and these motherf*ckers gonna start doing their own sh*t. I'm like, are we in a f*cking movie right now, or what? The f*ck man? So do I need to invest in AI so I can have one with me? Or like, do y'all know? Shit, what the f*ck?" I'm lost, I don't know.

Snoop's confusion over today's AI systems reflects what may be a common sentiment among people who are trying to understand and follow the latest developments in generative AI, which have unfolded rapidly over the past year. His unguarded observations on AI are notable coming from a highly respected multi-award-winning musical artist and entrepreneur.

Enlarge / A new Star Wars card game from FFG? Predictably, I'm in.

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game —that’s gotta be a cash grab, right? Deckbuilders are immensely popular these days, and Star Wars is…well, Star Wars. Slap the two together, headline the thing with a generic (if accurate) title, and extract money from devoted fans who can’t help but buy anything Star Wars-related from board game publisher Fantasy Flight (I’m categorically not talking about myself here, of course).

As it turns out, no. Star Wars: TDG is not a soulless exercise in marketing. It’s a fantastic little two-player card brawler I feel confident in recommending to anyone who likes both card games and Star Wars. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it’s my favorite Star Wars game in years.

Deckbuilding 101

When Rio Grande Games released Donald X. Vaccarino’s Dominion 15 years ago, it introduced a hugely influential new mechanic to tabletop games. “Deckbuilding,” in this context, refers not to building a deck of cards before play, as one might do in, say, Magic: The Gathering. Here, building your deck is the game.

We've been waiting to catch a glimpse of Dune: Part 2 , the second part of Denis Villeneuve's visually stunning, ambitious adaption of Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi novel. Warner Bros. dropped the first official trailer today, featuring Timothee Chalamet's Paul Atreides riding a sandworm to win the respect of the Fremen, as well as the introduction of the nefarious new villain from House Harkonnen.

(Some spoilers for Dune: Part 1 below.)

As we've reported previously (also here and here ), Herbert's novel Dune is set in the distant future and follows the fortunes of various noble houses in what amounts to a feudal interstellar society. Much of the action takes place on the planet Arrakis, where the economy is driven largely by a rare, life-extending drug called melange ("the spice"). Melange also conveys a kind of prescience and makes faster-than-light travel practical. There's betrayal, a prophecy concerning a messianic figure, giant sandworms, and battle upon battle, as protagonist Paul Atreides (a duke's son) contends with rival House Harkonnen and strives to defeat the forces of Shaddam IV, Emperor of the Known Universe.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of "an office copy machine in front of a hollywood-style explosion." (credit: Midjourney)

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is seeking to restrict the use of generative AI in writing film and TV scripts as part of an ongoing strike, reports Reuters . The concerns come at a time when anxiety over the economic impact of tech like ChatGPT looms large in the minds of many.

The WGA strike is the first in 15 years , and it's taking place over issues beyond just AI. But in particular, Reuters reports that WGA writers have two main concerns about automation in writing, quoting screenwriter John August, who is part of the WGA negotiating committee: They don't want their material to be used as training data for AI systems, and they don't want to be tasked with fixing AI-generated "sloppy first drafts."

An excerpt of the WGA's position on AI, as posted by novelist Hari Kunzru and several others on Twitter. MBA stands for "Minimum Basic Agreement," the name of the union's collective bargaining agreement. (credit: WGA )

That's because writers who are hired to polish first drafts get paid at a lower rate, and WGA writers are fighting to make sure that a ChatGPT-generated first draft would not be counted as "literary material" or "source material," which are terms defined in their contract.

Enlarge / The 7040U series has four different CPUs, mostly separated by the number of CPU and GPU cores. (credit: AMD)

Today AMD announced additional details about its new Ryzen 7040U series of laptop chips, which bring the company's newest Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 integrated graphics into thin-and-light laptops. Though just part of AMD's ( often-confusing ) Ryzen 7000 laptop lineup, the 7040U processors will be the ones to hold out for if you want to maximize performance without stepping up to a larger laptop with a dedicated GPU.

AMD has delayed the announcement of these chips twice. AMD announced in mid-March that systems would begin shipping in April, and it's currently the beginning of May. One of the laptop makers offering a Ryzen 7040-series laptop, Framework , won't actually be shipping its preorders until sometime in Q3, though the larger PC companies will presumably be able to get things to market a bit sooner.

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  AMD published a number of broad, flattering performance comparisons. Here, AMD compares itself to the i7-1360P, which isn't quite Intel's fastest CPU for these kinds of PCs. [credit: AMD ]

For most apps and games, the most relevant thing about the Ryzen 7040 chips is the improved CPU and GPU performance. The top-end Ryzen 7 7840U combines 8 CPU cores running at speeds of up to 5.1 GHz and a Radeon 780M GPU with 12 RDNA 3 cores. The Ryzen 5 7640U has 6 CPU cores running at up to 4.9 GHz and a Radeon 760M GPU with 8 cores. The Ryzen 5 7540U has the same 6 CPU cores but with a lower-end Radeon 740M GPU with 4 cores, while the Ryzen 3 7440U combines the same Radeon 740M GPU with 4 CPU cores.

Enlarge / A still image from "Synthetic Summer," an AI-generated beer commercial. (credit: Privateisland.tv)

While many fear a future where AI-generated media becomes indistinguishable from traditional media, destroying society and/or civilization in the process, we aren't quite there yet. Exhibit A comes in the form of a surreal AI-generated beer commercial that went viral over the weekend.

Titled " Synthetic Summer ," the 30-second video first appeared on Instagram about a week ago, created by Helen Power and Chris Boyle of a London-based production company called Privateisland.tv. The pair were not available for comment before this story was published, but judging by the look of the video, it appears they likely created it using Runway's new Gen-2 AI model, which can create short video clips based on written prompts similar to how Stable Diffusion can create still images.

In the video, set to a raucous crowd backing track and Smash Mouth's "All Star," we see simulacra of people partying at a stereotypical American backyard barbecue, occasionally physically merging with impressionistic beer vessels. Women laugh, jaws flaring. Beer glasses turn into beer cans. Flaming grills achieve columnar fire tornado status and arc across the yard. It's a vision of surrealistic hell that is at once familiar and impressively alien.

Enlarge / Researchers examined folio 843 of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus to determine the cause of mysterious black stains. (credit: Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan)

Researchers at the Politecnico di Milan in Italy examined mysterious black stains on a folio of Leonardo da Vinci 's Codex Atlanticus and confirmed the presence of starch and vinyl glues in the affected areas. The glues were most likely applied during an earlier restoration effort some 50 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. They also identified a likely cause of the dark stains: nanoparticles of a mercury sulphide called metacinnabar in the protective paper holding the folio, although it is unclear how this unusual black crystalline phase might have formed.

Da Vinci produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a man to walk on water. The notebooks also contain da Vinci's detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can ebb blood flow 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basics of the human circulatory system.

The largest single set is the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus , in which (among other observations) da Vinci foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope when he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged”—a century before the instrument’s invention. The codex was subjected to a major 10-year restoration effort from 1962 to 1972, in which each individual folio in the 12 volumes was framed by a "passe-partout": a protective paper cover consisting of three modern paper layers glued to each folio so they could be more easily handled and displayed. It also enabled the double-sided documents to be read and examined. The codex is currently housed in the Biblioteca Ambrosia in Milan.