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In todays edition of What Makes This Trade Great, we had a clean little earnings play flagged by our Trade Ideas AI the stock EGHT. To Subscribe: https://go.trade-ideas.com/SHQUse Promo Code BARRIE15 for 15% off The alert fired at 2:25, and from there EGHT made an impressive percentage move, pushing all the way up to… Source
Blizzard is running a series of showcases for several of its major franchises and on Wednesday, it was time for Overwatch to step up to the plate. Thats Overwatch, by the way, and not Overwatch 2. The studio is formally nixing the number from the game's name. "Overwatch is more than just a digit: it's a living universe that keeps growing, keeps surprising, and keeps bringing players together from around the world," the Overwatch team said in a statement. "This year marks a huge turning point in how the development team envisions the future of Overwatch, so we are officially dropping the '2' and moving forward as Overwatch."Blizzard made a big hullabaloo about Overwatch 2 being a sequel to the original game when it went live in October 2022 as part of a shift to a free-to-play model. There were a ton of major changes, not least a format switch from 6v6 to 5v5, with one tank being dropped from each team a contentious decision that has been walked back with the return of 6v6 modes. The grand vision Blizzard originally had for Overwatch 2 never quite came together. The studio canceled its planned hero missions, which were going to have RPG-like talent trees and long-term progression, but it carried some of that DNA over to the Stadium mode. We only got one round of co-op story missions as well. That paid expansion reportedly sold poorly, leading Blizzard to scrap work on the player vs. environment elements of Overwatch to focus on the competitive player vs. player modes.Over the last couple of years, though, Blizzard really seems to have steadied the ship. Overwatch is arguably in the best shape it's been in for a long time. This is shaping up to be a big year for Overwatch. May will mark its 10th anniversary (I have to imagine the team has something significant planned for that). Blizzard laid out much of the roadmap for 2026 during the Overwatch Spotlight showcase. We wont have to wait long at all to see significant changes to the game. New heroesBlizzard EntertainmentWhen the next season goes live on February 10, it will be the biggest update to Overwatch at least since the Stadium mode and perks system went live last year, and arguably since the dawn of the Overwatch 2 era. Thats partly because Blizzard is adding five new heroes to the mix all at once next week. One of those is a character that the studio said in 2017 it had experimented with but ultimately, um, scratched. Jetpack Cat is alive after all, and is coming to Overwatch in a matter of days.This is a support hero with a permanent flight ability who can "tow" an ally providing a speed boost while healing them. Jetpack Cat's ultimate ability sees the kitty diving into the ground to knock down enemies and tether the closest one to them. It's called Catnapper, which is delightful. Also, the hero's primary weapon is called Biotic Pawjectiles, so I adore Jetpack Cat already. Its fun to see weird Wrecking Ball-type characters coming to Overwatch again. Blizzard EntertainmentThe other new heroes joining the fray next week are Domina (a zone-control tank with "long-range precision"), damage dealer Emre (a "fastpaced, mobile soldier archetype with conflicting identity due to cybernetic modification"), Mizuki (a support who can throw a hat to heal allies) and Anran (a high-mobility hero who deals fire damage and can self-resurrect with their ultimate). As with Jetpack Cat, the latter of those is aligned with the Overwatch faction. You can try Anran out starting February 5 as part of a hero trial. The other three have ties to the villainous Talon organization. Expect another hero to join the fray every couple of months this year as each new season gets under way. That means more heroes will be added to Overwatch in 2026 than in any year since the games debut.A "story-driven era"Blizzard EntertainmentThe next season spells the beginning of what Blizzard is calling a "new story-driven era" for Overwatch, starting with a year-long narrative arc called The Reign of Talon. All of the lore, heroes, events and so on that emerge over the next 12 months will be tied to the rise of Talon. The studio says this is the "the first fully connected annua storyline in Overwatch history." A new arc will begin next year with Season 1 of 2027 (Blizzard is resetting the season counter when The Reign of Talon begins).Elsewhere, each role will be split into sub-roles, and the heroes in each will share a passive ability. For instance, "initiator" tanks heal more while they're in the air, several damage heroes can detect enemies that are below half health through walls after damaging them and some supports have excess ultimate charge that carries over after you use their most powerful ability.Also on the way soon is a "meta event" called Conquest. This is billed as a faction war between Overwatch and Talon that will run for five weeks, with dozens of loot boxes and other rewards (such as some legendary Echo skins) up for grabs. Blizzard EntertainmentBlizzard has overhauled the Overwatch interface too, with updated menus, a new hero lobby, a notification hub and the promise of faster navigation. Stadium will have some updates, such as refreshed ability icons and recommended builds based on global data that will be updated between rounds. Vendetta is joining that mode's roster as well.Along with all the new heroes and other updates, a Hello Kitty collaboration will run for two weeks starting on February 10 with themed cosmetics for several heroes. Lots of other cosmetics are in the pipeline, including Crimson Wolf weapon skins you can unlock using competitive points, and rainy day and Valentine's items. Shop items from the last six seasons are going into loot boxes, while mythic cosmetics for Mercy, Juno and Mei will be available in Season 1.Blizzard EntertainmentLooking further ahead, a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Overwatch will arrive alongside Season 2, which will start in April. Some heroes will be getting their second mythic skins, including Ana and Genji. Genji, Hanzo and Sojourn will have mythic weapon skins in the coming months. Two new maps, including a Japan Night one, for the main modes are coming, along with the return of post-match accolades. Theres so much on the way for my go-to game. I don't know how I'm going to be able to take a long-enough break from Overwatch to play cool indies ever again.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/overwatch-will-drop-the-2-as-jetpack-cat-and-four-other-heroes-arrive-on-february-10-184500327.html?src=rss
When X's engineering team published the code that powers the platform's "for you" algorithm last month, Elon Musk said the move was a victory for transparency. "We know the algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements, but at least you can see us struggle to make it better in real-time and with transparency," Musk wrote. "No other social media companies do this." While it's true that X is the only major social network to make elements of its recommendation algorithm open source, researchers say that what the company has published doesn't offer the kind of transparency that would actually be useful for anyone trying to understand how X works in 2026. The code, much like an earlier version published in 2023, is a "redacted" version of X's algorithm, according to John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University. "What troubles me about these releases is that they give you a pretense that they're being transparent for releasing code and the sense that someone might be able to use this release to do some kind of auditing work or oversight work," Thickstun told Engadget. "And the fact is that that's not really possible at all."Predictably, as soon as the code was released, users on X began posting lengthy threads about what it means for creators hoping to boost their visibility on the platform. For example, one post that was viewed more than 350,000 times advises users that X "will reward people who conversate" and "raise the vibrations of X." Another post with more than 20,000 views claims that posting video is the answer. Another post says that users should stick to their "niche" because "topic switching hurts your reach." But Thickstun cautioned against reading too much into supposed strategies for going viral. "They can't possibly draw those conclusions from what was released," he says. While there are some small details that shed light on how X recommends posts for example, it filters out content that's more than a day old Thickstun says that much of it is "not actionable" for content creators. Structurally, one of the biggest differences between the current algorithm and the version released in 2023 is that the new system relies on a Grok-like large language model to rank posts. "In the previous version, this was hard coded: you took how many times something was liked, how many times something was shared, how many times something was replied and then based on that you calculate a score, and then you rank the post based on the score," explains Ruggero Lazzaroni, a pHD researcher at the University of Graz. "Now the score is derived not by the real amounts of likes and shares, but by how likely Grok thinks that you would like and share a post."That also makes the algorithm even more opaque than it was before, says Thickstun. "So much more of the decisionmaking is happening within black box neural networks that they're training on their data," he says. "More and more of the decisionmaking power of these algorithms is shifting not just out of public view, but actually really out of view or understanding of even the internal engineers that are working on these systems, because they're being shifted into these neural networks."The release has even less detail about some aspects of the algorithm that were made public in 2023. At the time, the company included information about how it weighted various interactions to determine which posts should rank higher. For example, a reply was "worth" 27 retweets and a reply that generated a response from the original author was worth 75 retweets. But X has now redacted information about how it's weighing these factors, saying that this information was excluded "for security reasons." The code also doesn't include any information about the data the algorithm was trained on, which could help researchers and others understand it or conduct audits. "One of the things I would really want to see is, what is the training data that they're using for this model," says Mohsen Foroughifar, an assistant professor of business technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. "if the data that is used for training this model is inherently biased, then the model might actually end up still being biased, regardless of what kind of things that you consider within the model." Being able to conduct research on the X recommendation algorithm would be extremely valuable, says Lazzaroni, who is working on an EU-funded project exploring alternative recommendation algorithms for social media platforms. Much of Lazzaroni's work involves simulating real-world social media platforms to test different approaches. But he says the code released by X doesn't have enough information to actually reproduce its recommendation algorithm. "We have the code to run the algorithm, but we don't have the model that you need to run the algorithm," he says.If researchers were able to study the X algorithm, it could yield insights that could impact more than just social media platforms. Many of the same questions and concerns that have been raised about how social media algorithms behave are likely to re-emerge in the context of AI chatbots."A lot of these challenges that we're seeing on social media platforms and the recommendation [systems] appear in a very similar way with these generative systems as well," Thickstun said. "So you can kind of extrapolate forward the kinds of challenges that we've seen with social media platforms to the kind of challenges that we'll see with interaction with GenAI platforms."Lazzaroni, who spends a lot of time simulating some of the most toxic behavior on social media, is even more blunt. "AI companies, to maximize profit, optimize the large language models for user engagement and not for telling the truth or caring about the mental health of the users. And this is the same exact problem: they make more profit, but the users get a worse society, or they get worse mental health out of it."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xs-open-source-algorithm-isnt-a-win-for-transparency-researchers-say-181836233.html?src=rss
The Pixel 10a is official, though details are limited. On Wednesday, Google posted a teaser video showing the mid-range phone dancing around colorful backgrounds. You can pre-order the Pixel 10a on February 18. Google hasn't yet revealed the phone's specs. In the short video, we can see a blue model that's virtually indistinguishable on the outside from the Pixel 9a. And alleged leaks point to a phone with few changes on the inside. That (unconfirmed) list includes a 6.285-inch display, dual rear cameras (48MP wide and 13MP ultra-wide) and a 5,100mAh battery. Google The teaser's tagline appears to be an attempt to assure Pixel fans that there will, in fact, be meaningful upgrades. "A phone with more in store, in store soon," it reads. Hopefully, its pricing and specs will be "in store" for us soon as well. In the meantime, you can visit the Google Pixel website to register for more info. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/you-can-pre-order-the-pixel-10a-on-february-18-180712018.html?src=rss