AI has some concerning implications for our tech-driven future—but, like a lot of concerning new advances in technology, it’s also being used for memes. Like Plankton from Spongebob sing Maneskin’s Beggin’ with shocking conviction.

Few internet personalities have become as aware of this trend as Jschlatt. He’s an influencer, gaming YouTuber, and streamer who has around 4 million subscribers on YouTube and 2 million followers on Twitch at the time of writing. He’s now also (to his own astonishment) become the voice of over a hundred AI covers.

Jschlatt laid out the issue in a recent video: “It pains me to say this, but they’re really fucking good.” To make a point of how pervasive his AI covers are—which he observes “are like their own genre now”—Jschlatt en…

For the past year and a half, Meta has lost a total of over $30 billion trying to find a way to bring virtual reality and augmented reality to your home.

That total comes from the last set of operating losses for Reality Labs, Meta’s division for researching AR and VR. It lost a total of $10 billion in 2021 and $13.7 billion in 2022. Add in the $4.3 billion it lost in the previous quarter and the $3.99 billion it just lost this year and you get that very, very big number.

The losses are getting smaller, which suggests Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” (which included laying off 21,000 employees) might’ve stemmed the bleeding.

Despite the tech world’s waning interest in “the metaverse,” especially as AI continues to flood the public consciousness, Meta con…

I can’t restart Baldur’s Gate 3 again, not for like, six months at least. I’ve got about half of Act 3 to go on my Tactician difficulty Dark Urge Paladin/Rogue, and then I’ve gotta put this thing down for a while. Imagine my surprise and despair, then, when I discovered that I missed the Dark Urge’s first major cutscene, which helps set the stage for the character and has unique interactions for every race and class.

The Dark Urge origin lets you fully customize the race, class, and appearance of your character, an amnesiac with an insatiable bloodlust and mysterious past. A post from user Hysorn on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit helpfully drew my attention to the scene. It’s one of those long rest cutscenes, like most of the Dark Urge’s major story beats, and lets you muse about y…

I gotta respect Baldur’s Gate 3 for so faithfully translating D&D 5e rules into videogame form, but honestly, some of those rules kinda suck.

Take low-level magic for instance: at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3, most spellcasters can cast only two level 1 spells before they get tuckered out and need a long rest. I get why that’s the case—spellcasters get way more powerful after reaching level 4 and beyond—but in those crucial beginning hours, when you’re still getting a feel for combat and you have fewer health points than fingers, running out of gas after every combat can be more annoying than tactically interesting. Not to mention the waste of burning 40 camp supplies on long rests when most of your party is still healthy.

If you’re runni…

Diablo 4 players can finally rest easy—that is, unless they’re trying to farm these pieces themselves—as the last of Diablo 4’s six elusive super-rare items has been found. As spotted by AnyComputer on the Diablo 4 subreddit, the final piece of the collection was The Melted Heart of Selig. It dropped for a Chinese necromancer player in the Blind Burrows, a dungeon that can be found in the Hawezar region of the map.

The Heart’s effect isn’t that exciting, unfortunately. It gives a substantial boost to your class’s resource, but turns it into a pseudo-barrier, draining 3-8 of your resource for every 1% of damage you would’ve otherwise taken. 

That 3-8 variable is massive: if your character took 10% of its life in damage, for example, a roll of 3 would drain 30…

The phenomenon known as Skibidi Toilet is a little hard to explain. At a glance, it’s a meme where a man’s head pops out of a toilet and spins around as he sings “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes, skibidi double-u reeh reeh.” 

You can stop reading here if that’s quite enough for you. If I could have stopped there myself, believe me, I would have.

Plunge a bit deeper and you’ll discover that singing toilet man is just the beginning of a (currently) 76-part machinima series on the DaFuq!?Boom! YouTube channel. The series depicts a war between toilets with human heads—the very Skibidi Toilets themselves—and our planet’s defenders, humanoids with cameras and other electronics for heads. Animator Alexey Gerasimov, known as Boom, uses Source Filmmaker to create the ser…

Alan Wake 2 is out today, and despite some trepidation about its daunting system requirements on PC (which fortunately appears to be misplaced), it’s going very well: Early reviews, for the most part, are positively glowing. (We’ll have our own review up soon.) With the new tale of the struggling author now out the door, Remedy has offered the world some insight into what it has in mind for future chapters.

The original Alan Wake had two DLC expansions, The Signal and The Writer, and that will also be the case for Alan Wake 2: As revealed in Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 FAQ, two paid expansions are planned, Night Springs and The Lake House, each of which will “tell new stories and offer exciting gameplay within Alan Wake 2.”

The first expansion, Night Springs is about “visions and d…

Learn how to make the most of every Wordle guess with our handy tips and tricks. Read our clue if you need a little help with the May 20 (700) game without giving it all away, and if you do need today’s answer, just scroll or click straight to it. However you like to play Wordle, you’ll find everything you need right here.

Today’s game started off really well—who doesn’t want to see three greens all in a row—and then swiftly turned into something of a nightmare. I had more potential right answers at my fingertips than I had the guesses to narrow them down, so it took more goes than I would have liked it to before I found the correct one. I ended up scraping by today, but it’s still better than not finding the correct Wordle answer at all.

Today’s Wordle hi…

Give yourself a little help with today’s Wordle with our freshly written clue for the June 8 (719) puzzle, or spend some time reading our tips and tricks so you can make the most of every guess. Need something more? You’ve got it: the answer you’ve been looking for is only a quick click away.

Today’s puzzle couldn’t have gone much smoother for me if it had tried—this must have been my lucky day. The first guess laid down clear foundations, the second expanded upon them in a number of helpful ways, and that meant my third go was also my last, finding today’s Wordle answer in record time.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, June 8

You’ll need to think small to solve today’s Wordle, as this word describes a tiny speck of something,…

Minecraft players are no strangers to making odd and complex creations in the sandbox game. Previously, we’ve seen all sorts, like one player who made a redstone PC so they could play Minecraft in Minecraft or when someone else created a word processor in the crafting game. 

Over the last decade or so, I’ve learned never to underestimate a Minecraft player, which is why when I saw that a group of players had managed to recreate a nuclear reactor in a custom server and then subsequently blow it up, I wasn’t actually too surprised. 

“A minor radiological incident occurred on the Minecraft server,” one player on the server tweets. This is also accompanied by a detailed hand-drawn map laying out where the radiological fallout (referred to as a “Giant fucking cloud of a…

Described as “Valheim’s most challenging biome yet”, the Ashlands seem to be trying to give Elden Ring’s Caelid a run for its money as least popular holiday destination in videogames. Not only is the region’s blighted landscape riven with lakes of lava and rained upon by searing cinders, it’s also prowled by a variety of nasty looking monsters, including a smouldering harpy and a gigantic flaming skeleton.

It all looks suitably dramatic, although the trailer doesn’t provide a whole lot of context for how Ashland’s new biome and creatures are likely to affect play. Fortunately, the patch notes issued for the Public Test version of Valheim, where the Ashlands update is available to test now, provide some clarification. At a baseline level, Ashlands will introduce 30 new weapons, 10 …

If you’re looking for a new Wordle angle, hoping to refine your game or want to win today’s Wordle at all costs, then you’ve clicked through to the right place. You’ll find everything from our extensive Wordle archive to hints, tips, and clues just below. If you need the answer to the January 21 (581) puzzle, then that’s just a quick click away too.

I almost came unstuck at the end of today’s puzzle, as I found myself staring at four greens, and all of the most obvious consonants had already been used or eliminated. Luckily there’s no time limit on Wordle, so a quick break gave me the fresh perspective needed to finally see what I’d missed the first time around—and kick myself for not spotting it earlier.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, Ja…

I’m pretty certain my first ever exposure to Tom Petty came via GTA: San Andreas, whose K-DST radio station featured Runnin’ Down a Dream on its tracklist of wall-to-wall dad rock bangers. Now Mr Petty’s made a return as part of the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, which is soundtracked by Love Is a Long Road, and it looks like more than a few other people might have had their first encounter with the artist off the back of it, too.

According to stats from Spotify provided to the BBC, streams for Love Is a Long Road have skyrocketed by an incomprehensible 36,979% compared to this time last week, which either means a whole lot of people pulled up Shazam when they watched the GTA 6 trailer, or every dad in the world has returned to their garage to work on their car all at once.

In …

There’s a hint for today’s Wordle waiting just below if you’d like a helping hand with your daily game, as well as a selection of general tips designed to improve every guess you make, too. Need something a little more direct? I’ve got it covered. The answer to the October 2 (835) Wordle is never more than a quick click away.

I do love it when I get to kick off my Wordle week with a quick game, everything falling into the right places before I’ve even had a chance to rush off down all the wrong rabbit holes with far too many wasted guesses. With a bit of luck I’ll be able to say the same tomorrow—fingers crossed.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, October 2

Thinking of cheerful celebrations and happy feelings will help yo…

After pulling off a Darktide redemption arc last year, Fatshark’s not resting on its inquisitorial laurels. Secrets of the Machine God, Darktide’s latest update, arrived earlier today, bringing a new mission to revive an abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus foundry and a set of new weapon types. If you’re not already thrilled, you should be: It’s never a bad time when the tech-priests are around.

The new mission, Clandestium Gloriana, will have strike teams descend into a derelict “Foundryplex”—a massive production facility where the AdMech tech-priests once worked their fabled wonders, which the Inquisition hopes to reawaken for its war effort. The mission will feature some new tech from Fatshark, like a mission-giver who will accompany the players and a variable end-of-miss…