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When Helene made landfall in Florida earlier this year, 234 people lost their lives to the worst hurricane to strike the US mainland since Katarina in 2005. Its natural disasters like that, and their growing intensity due to climate change, that have pushed scientists to develop more accurate weather forecasting systems. On Wednesday, Googles DeepMind division announced what may go down as the most significant advancement in the field in nearly eight decades of work. In a post on the Google Keyword blog, DeepMinds Ilan Price and Matthew Wilson detailed GenCast, the companys latest AI agent. According to DeepMind, GenCast is not only better at providing daily and extreme weather forecasts than its previous AI weather program, but it also outperforms the best forecasting system in use right now, one thats maintained by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In tests comparing the 15-day forecasts the two systems generated for weather in 2019, GenCast was, on average, more accurate than ECMWFs ENS system 97.2 percent of the time. With lead times greater than 36 hours, DeepMinds was an even better 99.8 percent more accurate. Im a little bit reluctant to say it, but its like weve made decades worth of improvements in one year, Rémi Lam, the lead scientist on DeepMinds previous AI weather program, told The New York Times. Were seeing really, really rapid progress. GenCast is a diffusion model, which is the same tech that powers Googles generative AI tools. DeepMind trained the software on nearly 40 years of high-quality weather data curated by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The predictions the new model generates are probabilistic, meaning they account for a range of possibilities that are then expressed as percentages. Probabilistic models are considered more nuanced and useful than their deterministic counterparts, which only offer a best guess of what the weather might be like on a given day. The former also harder to create and calculate. Indeed, whats perhaps most striking about GenCast is that it requires significantly less computing power than traditional physics-based ensemble forecasts like ENS. According to Google, a single one of its TPU v5 tensor processing units can produce a 15-day GenCast forecast in eight minutes. By contrast, it can take a supercomputer with tens of thousands of processors hours to produce a physics-based forecast. Of course, GenCast isnt perfect. One area the software could provide better predictions on is hurricane intensity, though the DeepMind team told The Times it was confident it could find solutions for the agents current shortcomings. In the meantime, Google is making GenCast an open model, with example code for the tool available on GitHub. GenCast predictions will also soon make their way to Google Earth.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/deepminds-gencast-ai-is-really-good-at-forecasting-the-weather-184751414.html?src=rss
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Meta is taking another important step toward making Threads interoperable with the fediverse. The app now allows users to follow accounts from Mastodon and other fediverse apps directly from Threads, Mark Zuckerberg said in an update. Since the early days of Threads, Meta has promised to bake-in support for ActivityPub, the open-source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services that make up the fediverse. Eventually, the goal is for Threads users to be able to seamlessly interact with other users on Mastodon or other sites that use ActivityPub. With the latest change, Threads users who have previously opted into fediverse sharing in the app will now be able to view profiles and follow accounts from Mastodon and other services directly in Threads. The update is a significant move toward making Threads compatible with the wider Activity Pub ecosystem. That said, there are still some significant limitations to Threads fediverse support. Theres currently no way to search for users on other servers, so the only way to find those accounts is to look for fediverse accounts that have followed you already or otherwise interacted with one of your posts. Users are also still unable to reply to posts that originate on Mastodon or other ActivityPub services, so the interactions are still one way at least for now. And an in-app disclaimer from Meta notes that fediverse sharing is still a beta feature and that some posts from other servers may not be visible in Threads. Adam Mosseri, however, said that more interop features are on the way, so hopefully fediverse enthusiasts wont have long to wait to see deeper integrations.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-now-allows-users-to-follow-fediverse-accounts-directly-in-its-app-183517197.html?src=rss
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If your group chat is anything like Engadget's Slack, Balatro probably comes up several times a week. The indie poker-style title is one of the most talked-about games of the year for good reason: it's endlessly compelling. But what if you don't have a laptop, phone, Steam Deck, Switch or other console nearby and you need your fix, goshdarnit? That's where a physical deck of Balatro playing cards may come in handy. A $16 deck is up for preorder on Fangamerand it's expected to ship in March. The mockups show subtly pixellated cards that ape the game's art style. They have a red design on the rear Balatro players will know that the red deck is the default set in the game. But what of the game-changing jokers? I'm afraid you only get four of those: Joker, Juggler, Blueprint and Gros Michel. Plus, they're just regular ol' jokers here. That's a little disappointing, given how important jokers are in Balatro, but at least my personal favorite banana card is here. The same goes for the apparent lack of tarot, planet and spectral cards, which greatly modify each run. It's fun that there's a physical Balatro deck on the way, but it's a bit of a bummer that it's a standard set of cards that doesn't really play into the convention-breaking ethos of the video game. Perhaps a board game along those lines is in the works. But for now I might have to pick up several of these decks. I'm probably going to ruin at least one set by using a Sharpie to have 52 diamond cards. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-physical-deck-of-balatro-cards-can-soon-be-yours-for-16-180958044.html?src=rss
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