Tech Boys

Rockstar Games, developer of Grand Theft Auto VI , has been accused of deliberately laying off employees who were trying to unionize, Bloomberg reports . The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) claims over 30 employees who were eliminated at the developer's offices in the UK and Canada were either already part of a union or attempting to organize. "Rockstar has just carried out the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry," IWGB President Alex Marshall said in a blog post about the layoffs. "This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry."  Besides the disruption of having to find a new job, the union notes that several employees who were let go are particularly vulnerable. "Amongst the staff dismissed were those with visas sponsored by Rockstar and those with medical conditions who will lose access...

Bluesky is adding a dislike button as a way to signal the kind of posts you don't want to see in your Discover feed. The experiment is part of several new ideas Bluesky is exploring to a improve conversations on its platform. The new experiments Bluesky is running are primarily built around the notion of "social proximity." The company says it's aiming to build a system that maps your place in a "social neighborhood" of "people you already interact with or would likely enjoy knowing." By prioritizing replies and posts from the people in your general "neighborhood," the company believes it can make conversations "feel more relevant, familiar, and less prone to misunderstandings." Following that logic, the beta test of the dislike button (which sounds private, rather than public-facing) will "help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of," but could also affect reply rankings in your thread...

Opens in a new window Credit: Anker Anker Solix C1000   Get Deal Opens in a new window Credit: Anker Anker Solix C1000 Gen 2   Get Deal It's time to load up on Halloween candy , and while you're at, why not start a holiday wish list ? Black Friday is just a handful of weeks away and each year it seems retailers start dropping prices earlier and earlier. That means some of our favorite products could start seeing discounts soon. And what am I excited for? Portable power stations, of course. In particular, I'm hoping to see new record-low prices on the Anker Solix C1000 and the Solix C1000 Gen 2. Why we love the Anker Solix C1000 and C1000 Gen 2 Both models of the Anker Solix C1000 provide a bit over 1,000Wh of capacity and both use long-lasting LiFePO4 battery cells which can last for a decade. Port options on both models of the Solix C1000 are great and give you plenty of AC options, USB-C, and USB-A. Both models are exceptional optio...

OpenAI has started selling power users extra credits for its Sora AI video generation tool. An extra 10 video gens will retail for $4 through Apple’s App Store. The company currently has a limit of 30 free gens per day, a rate that will likely decrease as OpenAI starts to monetize the offering. Bill Peebles, who heads OpenAI's Sora, posted on X about the changes.  "Eventually we will need to bring the free gens down to accommodate growth (we won't have enough gpus to do it otherwise!), but we’ll be transparent as it happens," he said. we are launching the ability to buy extra gens in sora today. we are doing this for two main reasons: first, we have been quite amazed by how much our power users want to use sora, and the economics are currently completely unsustainable. we thought 30 free gens/day would be… — Bill Peebles (@billpeeb) October 30, 2025 Peebles also said that OpenAI plans to monetize by letting entities essentially license out their copyrighted ...

The future of Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, subscription-free alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, was uncertain after the apps' developer Serif was acquired by Canva in 2024. Now, over a year later, the changes Canva has introduced are big, but not necessarily unwelcome. The newly relaunched Affinity by Canva combines all three apps into a single piece of illustration, photo editing and layout software, and rather than move to a subscription model as many feared, Canva's made it entirely free. Or, at least, freemium. Affinity is available now as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, with an iPadOS version on the way at some point in the future. The basic functionality of the app doesn't seem all that different from the three separate apps Serif offered before, only now you can toggle between their tools via separate Vector, Pixel and Layout tabs. Canva stresses you also have the option to mix and match tools, and save custom toolbars to use for specific types ...

Be careful what you "ghost post" on Threads because it might actually live on forever. It appears that at least some ghost posts — the new Threads feature Meta launched this week that automatically deletes posts after 24 hours — are being scraped by Google, making them searchable. While writing about the internet’s reaction to the feature, I tested this by plugging text from several screengrabbed ghost posts into Google Search. In multiple cases, I was able to find cached versions of those posts still appearing in search results. Here’s a screenshot showing the text from Mark Zuckerberg’s own ghost post announcing the feature. Credit: Screenshot: Google Here's another screenshot of a Google result for what appears to be a ghost post from the Threads account @hi.nixson . Credit: Screenshot: Google Here's a Bluesky post, included in my initial article about the internet's response, that shows screenshots of those original ghost posts. Everyone is G...

How do you capture what it looks like to fall head over heels? This was the challenge writer/director Nia DaCosta faced in adapting Henrik Ibsen's classic play Hedda Gabler into a steamy and salacious sapphic romance. Hedda stars Tessa Thompson as the eponymous antiheroine, a woman who hungers for luxury, love, and freedom. And when she doesn't get what she wants, she proves to be a vicious mastermind. So, when Hedda's ex-lover, genderswapped by DaCosta to be Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), turns up at the big party she's throwing with her newly minted husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman), trouble is in the air. But so is love. SEE ALSO: 'Hedda' review: 'Hedda Gabler' meets 'Saltburn' in Nia DiCosta's sexy, sapphic adaptation As Eileen enters the ballroom, she is elegant, robust, and sensual, instantly awing the audience and capturing the mercurial Hedda's full attention. In interviews with DaCosta, Thompson, Hoss, and Bateman, Masha...

Threads has grown to 150 million daily active users. Mark Zuckerberg shared the latest milestone for the company's text-based app during Meta's third-quarter earnings call. The company previously reported in August that Threads had reached more than 400 million monthly users. Zuckerberg, who has mused that Threads could become Meta's next billion-person app, said that it was "on track to become the leader in its category." He also said that time spent in the app had increased by 10 percent, which he credited to improvements to the company's AI recommendation systems.  On Wednesday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that Meta was also " exploring " algorithm personalization controls for Threads. The company is currently testing the ability to "tune" Instagram's algorithmic recommendations.  As Threads has grown, Meta also confirmed that ads are ramping up on the platform. During the call with analysts, Meta CFO Susan Li said that ...

Sometimes, game development is a labor of love. Other times, it's an agonizing experience akin to pulling teeth. More than a decade after first announcing the project, Lunar Software and Raw Fury appear to be in the home stretch with their project Routine . The sci-fi horror game has been given a December 4, 2025 release date. For their sakes, I hope it comes to pass. The duo first announced Routine all the way back at Gamescom in 2012 and gave it a 2013 release date. After that window came and went, the project went dark until Summer Game Fest 2022 , with promises that the game a) still existed and b) had been fully remade for the new generation of gaming hardware. If the current schedule holds, Routine will be on Steam and Xbox, including day one availability on Game Pass, by the end of this year.  The Aliens vibes are strong in the brief release date teaser. Think film grain effects, janky gadgets and of course the looming threat of death around every corner. The player ...

In a Monday blog post, OpenAI touted the improvements its default model, GPT-5 , has made in identifying and responding to users' troubling responses, including suicidal ideation. While new safeguards and the introduction of psychiatrists in helping train GPT-5 are leading to improved AI responses to mental health prompts, the blog post also pointed out some numbers that are bound to raise eyebrows. While explaining GPT-5's abilities to detect serious mental health concerns, like psychosis and mania, the post noted that troubling user conversations with the chatbot are “rare.” "While, as noted above, these conversations are difficult to detect and measure given how rare they are, our initial analysis estimates that around 0.07% of users active in a given week and 0.01% of messages indicate possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania." The percentage seems small, but ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users, according to Sam Altman, the C...