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New standards for masculinity are stacked against men’s health

This is Optimizer , a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here . Whenever the algorithm serves up a steaming pile of looksmaxxing, I flash back to an old sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look . An ordinary woman is told by a commercial narrator that she's "leaking, hairy, aging, overweight, and everything hurts." Women, the smug narrator says, for god's sake, sort yourselves out by buying roughly $300 of products. After a jump cut, an average man is told to shave and get drunk, guitars blari … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/Qvr2g0L
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Snapchat makes it easier to plan events and meetups

Plan your next event with friends without ever leaving the app. | Image: Snap Snapchat is launching Plans, a new suite of features designed to help turn the plans already being made in group chats - everything from birthday celebrations to study sessions and weekend hangouts - into real life get-togethers without ever leaving the app. Plans lets users set event details, invite up to 200 friends with invitations adorned with dynamic Bitmoji that change as friends respond, and track RSVPs. Invites are sent via one-to-one chat and reminders are automatically sent to attendees before the scheduled event starts. A dedicated "My Plans" tab on user profiles lets you keep track of upcoming and past plans. Snap is strugglin … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/Fvir9z2

Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work 

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center. | Bloomberg via Getty Images Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company's models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and "dishonest" behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data. In a series of posts on Mastodon, mathematician Andreas Thom raised concerns that interactions he and his colleagues had had with the ChatGPT chatbot before OpenAI's triumphant announcement may have contributed to its success in the field. One of the … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/WOfkwdh

The variable aperture isn’t the cool part of the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera

The iPhone 18 Pro’s triple camera setup with a variable aperture in the main (bottom) camera. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Apple always makes a big show of the latest cameras in its phones, and the major talking point of the iPhone 18 Pro is about the new variable aperture . Both the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max have an adjustable mechanical iris in their main camera modules to let more or less light into the sensor, allowing users to shoot at f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. You can, of course, let the camera select your aperture automatically, but the manual aperture control comes along with other new pro controls allowing you to dial in shutter speeds, manual white balance, and even manual focusing. As a whole, this is a wealth of new controls for an iPhone camera … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/mkcXuAd

Amazon Prime Video’s new AI tech matches lips to dubbed audio

Maxton Hall. | Image: Prime Video Amazon's Prime Video is launching a new AI-powered feature that lines up an actor's mouth with "human-dubbed" audio. The feature is only available with the English dub of the German series Maxton Hall for now, but Prime Video plans to expand it to "additional titles" in the future. In its announcement, Prime Video says it uses a combination of AI and visual effects technologies to make lip movements match up with translated speech. Meta and YouTube recently launched an AI-powered auto-dubbing feature for creators, while allowing them to turn on a "lip sync" option to make it look like creators are actually speaking in a user's preferred lan … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/cJ5xYyj

Students who use AI generally score worse at school

Students who use AI to help them study tend to perform worse at school than those who don't, according to data from a global OECD educational report. The situation is more complex than it sounds though, with certain types of AI use giving learners a slight boost, especially among students taught to critically assess how well the AI tools perform. The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) takes data from countries around the world every few years. This year's study, based on data collected in 2025, is the first to be carried out since AI use went truly mainstream. It tests 15-year-old students in science, math and read … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/GTgpe6k

Worried Anthropic researchers warn that AI ‘could kill all humans’

A senior Anthropic safety researcher has said there is more than a 10 percent chance artificial intelligence "could kill all humans" by the end of the decade, just hours after a colleague resigned over fears the AI lab and its rivals are carelessly racing to build "superhuman systems" they cannot control. In a post on X announcing his departure, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who has trained AI systems at Anthropic, said he had quit the company over its lax approach to safety. Coxon, who previously trained systems for OpenAI, accused the two AI companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," even … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/G9vd2qS