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Baldur’s Gate 3 Mac countdown: Exact release date and time

Max Miceli writing for DOT ESPORTS (Apple News) Baldur’s Gate 3 officially launches for Mac on Thursday, Sept. 21. The launch will coincide with the release of the game’s third patch. Larian Studios has not yet released an exact time for the launch. I’ve been playing the pre-release version on my Mac for a couple of weeks now, just trying to get a sense of the gameplay, controls and classes. Can’t wait to dive into the full thing!

Bought #BaldursGate3 on MacOS assuming it was coming out Sep 6. When I found out it wasn’t coming out until later in Sep I decided I’d wait to play until the full game was released. Well, today I decided to just play around in the character creator, then I started playing the starting mission, and man, I just wish the full game was released for Mac already!

Elon Musk can filter offensive tweets for advertisers. Why not for users?

Chris Taylor writing for Mashable (Apple News) But there’s another reason why the advertising options are self-defeating: Because they bring up another troubling question for users who are sick of the site’s lack of content moderation. If Twitter/X can identify and filter out content such as hate speech “with a 99% efficacy rate,” according to the company’s blog, why only offer that service to advertisers? Plenty of users would also prefer a version of Twitter that is 99% Nazi free, too. By offering that option to advertisers but not caring about the potential customers they’re trying to reach, Musk’s company is drawing attention to the fact in a way that serves neither.

A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work

Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott writing for Ars Technical (Apple News) Why use such a baroque notation? Here’s an analogy. Washington, DC, is located at 38.9 degrees north and 77 degrees west. We can represent this using a vector notation: Washington, DC, is at [38.9, 77] New York is at [40.7, 74] London is at [51.5, 0.1] Paris is at [48.9, -2.4] This is useful for reasoning about spatial relationships. You can tell New York is close to Washington, DC, because 38.9 is close to 40.7 and 77 is close to 74. By the same token, Paris is close to London. But Paris is far from Washington, DC.

Greg Morris - Apple Notes Is Just About Perfect in iOS17

Greg Morris writing on his blog The biggest update to Apple Notes is linking between notes easily, and it’s not an exaggeration to say Apple absolutely nailed the implementation. You can tap link and just type out the name of the note you want to link to, there’s no double bracket or back linking bandwagon joining, it’s simple, elegant and exactly what is needed. I’m really looking forward to this update to Notes. I have over 2,000 notes in Apple Notes, so I think I’m a fairly heavy user. This new feature coupled with tags, which were introduced a couple of years ago, and folders, will make organizing and navigating all those notes much easier. The improvements to Notes over the years has been great, I hope Apple keeps it up.

Some thoughts on Apple’s New Vision Pro

Some thoughts on Apple’s new Vision Pro I’m surprised the FaceTime avatar isn’t your Memoji. I’m assuming it’ll be an option, but the 3D digital face thing has some room to improve. The hardware they’ve put into this thing is amazing! The screens, the cameras, the eye tracking, the M2 and R1 chips, just 🤯 When I saw the R1 I immediately thought car. I think Eye Sight (the outward facing screen showing the wearer’s eyes) is really well done and a key component to making this something you can wear and still interact with other people. Now some questions

Not as much smoke today as the past few days. Not sure how long it’ll last.

I wouldn’t buy a new car without #CarPlay to begin with, but if GM’s iOS app is any indication of their future infotainment systems, they have a long way to go!

The app is just terrible.

They plugged GPT-4 into Minecraft—and unearthed new potential for AI

Will Knight writing at Ars Technica (Apple News) The Nvidia team, which included Anima Anandkumar, the company’s director of machine learning and a professor at Caltech, created a Minecraft bot called Voyager that uses GPT-4 to solve problems inside the game. The language model generates objectives that help the agent explore the game, and code that improves the bot’s skill at the game over time. Voyager doesn’t play the game like a person, but it can read the state of the game directly, via an API. It might see a fishing rod in its inventory and a river nearby, for instance, and use GPT-4 to suggest the goal of doing some fishing to gain experience. It will then use this goal to have GPT-4 generate the code needed to have the character achieve it.