AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

The original article contains 2,867 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

The original article contains 11,459 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 98%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

The original article contains 3,300 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 94%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Instagram, while the explore page has filled with scantily-clad women, the feed is largely innocuous, mostly recommending Melbourne-related content and foodie influencers.

Nicholas Carah, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, said the experiment showed how “baked into the model” serving up such content to young men is on Facebook.

She praises the federal government’s Stop it at the Start campaign, which includes an “Algorithm of Disrespect” interactive depicting what a young man may encounter on social media.

The federal government has also funded a $3.5m three-year trial to counteract the harmful impacts of social media messaging targeting young men and boys.

The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, says combatting misogynistic attitudes and behaviour in the online and offline world will help achieve the national plan to end violence against women and children in one generation.

“Around 25% of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and condone violence against women - this is shocking,” she says.

The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

The original article contains 773 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Yvette Cooper described the policy, which was introduced two-and-a-half years ago and sought to send UK asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, as “the biggest waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.

Cooper said the £700m cost included £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining people and then releasing them, and paying more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the policy.

Under the government’s plans, new offences will be created to allow enforcement agencies to treat people smugglers like terrorists and to penalise social media companies that fail to remove advertisements for small boat crossings.

In her statement in the Commons, Cooper blasted the Conservative government’s “unworkable” Illegal Migration Act, which was introduced in March 2023 and cost the taxpayer billions by putting asylum seekers who arrived in the UK in a state of limbo.

James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Cooper of “hyperbole and made-up numbers” and said Labour had “scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds”.

Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, called for the creation of a resettlement scheme to create a safe and legal route and disincentivise asylum seekers from travelling to the UK before they have made an application.

The original article contains 687 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

The original article contains 997 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Three members of the new cabinet have told the BBC that if Labour does not keep its promises, voters will back populists instead.Chancellor Rachel Reeves suggested it would be an “institutional failure” if they could not get things done.Interviewed for a Panorama special, the chancellor, foreign secretary and health secretary all warned separately that the public has lost faith in mainstream politics and that if they fail, voters will turn toward the far-left or far-right.Ms Reeves said that if Labour doesn’t stick to its word, "it will be seen as sort of an institutional failing, that mainstream politics doesn’t deliver.

"The new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, said members of the cabinet had to preserve their connections to working class communities and the constituencies they represent.

"If we don’t, as we’re seeing in other parts of the world, in democracies, the populists - whether from the far-right or the far-left - will offer a different vision.

Now the foreign secretary, who had previously been very critical of Donald Trump, he said he would “embrace the constraint” of being an office-holder where he could no longer speak freely like a backbencher.The programme also captures the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, joking with a group of builders that Ms Reeves is the “moneybags” and she is “tightfisted”.Reeves responds: "I’m a Yorkshire MP… We have a reputation in Yorkshire of being good with money.

"Moving into Downing Street at the weekend, the chancellor said it was a “big change” for her whole family, but that her husband had been unpacking most of the boxes so far.

All three cabinet ministers know only too well the risks if they do not keep their promises.The health secretary admits he is concerned about being able to stick to the targets he has set for 2025.

The original article contains 585 words, the summary contains 298 words. Saved 49%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said.

The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.

“Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don’t need to be translated for anyone to enjoy,” says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.

The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.

This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.

The original article contains 391 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

The original article contains 400 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

The original article contains 246 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 24%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Parents should not take their children on term-time holidays and have a responsibility to keep them in school, the new education secretary has told the BBC.In her first interview in the role with BBC News, Bridget Phillipson said there “will have to be consequences” for parents who fail to do so.She said punishments, like fines, are a “well-established practice” and are “here to stay”.It comes as some parents say weighing a fine against the much larger cost of a trip during the school holidays makes the decision a “no-brainer”.

Minimum fines, imposed by local authorities, for taking children out of class without permission for five school days will rise from £60 per child to £80 per child from August.Head teachers have some say over which cases they refer to the council for potential fines.Repeated failure to ensure school attendance can result in a court prosecution, a fine of up to £2,500, a community order and even a jail sentence of up to three months.But some parents have told the BBC they are saving thousands by going away during term time rather than the school holidays.Ms Phillipson said it was important that parents “honour our responsibilities”.

The education secretary has also been setting out plans for a wide-ranging review of what is taught in schools in England.Launching the curriculum review on Friday, Ms Phillipson said all children should have a strong academic foundation in subjects like English and maths, but also have access to music, art, drama and sports.At Heworth Grange School in Gateshead, Erin Anderson is head of arts and culture, covering subjects like music and drama.

"They learn how to work together as team players, they get to stand on their own two feet, they can speak more confidently.

"Year nine pupil Lucy said she sometimes struggles in lessons like English and science because she is “really dramatic”, but says she finds her creative subjects less stressful.

The Department for Education said that, after the review, all state schools will have to follow the national curriculum up to the age of 16, including academies which do not currently have to do so.Ms Phillipson also told the BBC she was committed to Labour’s promise to deliver free breakfast clubs across all primary schools, but said it would “take time” to roll out.She said the clubs would contribute to tackling the “really big challenge” of widespread persistent absence in schools.She also promised to carry on the roll-out of the government-funded childcare hours promised by the previous government, but said it would be a “tough challenge” to ensure enough places were available and that the workforce was in place to deliver it.Additional reporting by Hope Rhodes.

The original article contains 528 words, the summary contains 444 words. Saved 16%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Maybe that was enough; and it is notable how, on the issue itself, a long static period post-2016 of entrenched views on both sides has in the last year or so given way to a significant majority seeing that vote as a mistake.

A strong attachment to the local, the practical, the empirical; a deeply engrained suspicion of the abstract, of ideas, of intellectuals; above all, an instinctive preference for the moderate over the extreme.

And it was those qualities, combined with a doggedly determined execution of policies – sometimes bold, sometimes incremental – designed to improve life as a whole for working people and their families, that made Attlee our greatest peacetime prime minister of the 20th century.

The winner of four elections out of five, and a Yorkshireman with his values firmly rooted in northern nonconformity, Wilson was utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors at No 10 and had an intuitive grasp of the centre of political gravity, of middle England’s concerns; as PM, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep Britain out of America’s ill-fated Vietnam war; and it was no coincidence that he was one of the Queen’s favourite first ministers.

As for the even more robustly patriotic Callaghan, with his close links to the Royal Navy, it is true that in 1979 he lost his only election; but he was more personally popular than Margaret Thatcher at the time and had, as he recognised, deeper forces against him.

We as a country have made such extraordinary strides in race relations since the 1960s (think Smethwick, think rivers of blood) that it would be foolish to jeopardise them because of inadequate control over immigration.

The original article contains 979 words, the summary contains 277 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world.

It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented.

Meatly’s production facility has been approved by the government to handle its cultivated chicken, and it plans to launch the first samples of its commercially available pet food this year.

If we’re to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat – from enhancing food security to supporting the expansion of regenerative farming – the government must invest in the research and infrastructure needed to make it delicious, affordable and accessible for people across the UK.”

The original article contains 472 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The first “multibank” in London, distributing everything from basic foods to baby products and toiletries, will be officially launched this week, amid continued concerns about levels of poverty as the school summer holidays begin.

“As a new anti-poverty plan is being prepared, the multibanks still need to secure more supplies and more funds from generous donors so that, working with food banks, we can provide poverty relief.”

Thousands of families are set to be helped by the new scheme in west London, overseen by the Felix Project, which sources surplus from the food industry that would otherwise go to waste.

Advocates of the multibank model say that it can be a powerful addition to fighting local poverty by redistributing stock that cannot be sold and taking donations from the corporate world.

However, there continues to be concern among charities about the degree to which food banks and related projects have now become a permanent fixture in relieving hardship as a result of cuts to the welfare state.

He added: “That’s why I pledged to support the introduction of multibanks in the capital as part of my work to help Londoners who are struggling to make ends meet.

The original article contains 664 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The prime minister and his chancellor are heavily relying on what Keynes called “the animal spirits” of enterprise to help them drive up economic growth, without which they are going to find it hard to achieve their other ambitions.

Interventions in areas where capitalist models haven’t worked is evident both in the nationalisation of the rail network as operator franchises expire and the most serious challenge to the filthy practices of the water companies since their privatisation in 1989.

These aspects of Starmerism have antecedents in previous iterations of British social democracy with rather more in common with what Harold Wilson attempted in the 1960s than with the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

That was only partially ameliorated when the Blair government established the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and, after a lot of false starts, the power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland.

The defining test of the sincerity of the commitment to release power from the centre will be the extent to which regional and local government is properly funded and liberated to spend as they think best for their communities.

The government will also use legislative hammers to crack down on high-caffeine energy drinks, junk food advertising, and the flavouring and marketing of vapes in ways that entice children.

The original article contains 1,423 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

The original article contains 193 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 9%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team’s efforts as “scrappy,” which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world’s top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft’s lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it’s true that the overall global console user base hasn’t really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe’s big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

The original article contains 733 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!