'Star City''s Agnes O'Casey and Anna Maxwell Martin spill the tea on Soviet severity, fighting for trousers, and furry hats
I have tested more portable MIDI controllers than I can keep track of, and I will tell you right now: 37 keys is the ideal size. While Arturia's 25-key MiniLab MK3 is a solid controller that easily fits in a backpack, it feels a bit claustrophobic. The new $149 MiniLab 37 adds another octave, giving you much more room to play bass and lead simultaneously, or just play more expansive chords.
Physically, the MiniLab 37 isn't very different from its smaller sibling. It's got the same solid (if slightly springy) keybed, eight pads, eight endless encoders, four faders, a pair of touch strips, USB-C, and a full-size five-pin MIDI DIN out on the b β¦
Three years ago, when the women's World Cup kicked off in Australia and New Zealand, my social feeds were in a strange place. Twitter had just transformed into X, newcomer Threads was seemingly ascendant, and places like Bluesky had yet to garner much momentum. It left me with an odd, and admittedly silly, dilemma: I had nowhere good to post dumb jokes during games. And now, as the next World Cup is set to begin across Canada, the US, and Mexico, not much has changed.
There were a lot of problems with Twitter even when it was at its most popular, but it also introduced a new kind of live experience for many. Its real-time nature and huge au β¦
Summer is almost here, and that means getting outside, having fun in the sun, and touching grass. But if you need to cool down for a bit, allow me to sing the praises of the library. If your local library system is anything like mine, it probably offers a lot of great things for you to do, both tech-related and not, at no extra cost.
I'm part of the Multnomah County Library system, and I'm frankly spoiled by all of the things available with just a free library card. The perk I use most is the ability to fill up my Kindle with the wide selection of ebooks made available through OverDrive, a platform that partners with thousands of libraries β¦

Deezer will now scan your playlists on other streaming platforms to detect AI-generated music. Deezer was the first of the big streaming services to start labeling AI-generated music. It even offered its tech to other platforms, but it doesn't seem like it had many buyers. Qobuz launched its own detection tech, while Apple and Spotify have opted for a voluntary tagging system.
"No other company has followed our lead yet, so we decided to make it possible for everyone to check if their playlists include synthetic music, no matter which streaming platform they use," Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release. So, since nobody is ta β¦
Microsoft's Xbox division will be hit with significant layoffs next month, according to people familiar with Microsoft's plans.
The company has been preparing for the layoffs internally for weeks, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma hinting about "making hard choices" last month. Sources suggest the cuts could even involve a studio closure, or changes to the Xbox studio lineup. In a recent Giant Bomb episode, rumors of 1,000 layoffs for Microsoft's Xbox division were mentioned. Bloomberg also reported today that the cuts would be "major," and involve budget cuts for marketing and other areas of Microsoft's Xbox business.
Moments before Bloomberg's r β¦
New college graduates around the country have been booing and heckling commencement speakers who hype up AI. Microsoft would like everyone to talk it out.
In a blog post running more than 3,100 words, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith addressed the recent spate of viral clips from graduation ceremonies, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting an earful at the University of Arizona, or the speaker in Florida who seemed surprised when students booed at the mention of AI as "the next industrial revolution." The videos speak to a broader societal sentiment around AI - the technology is deeply unpopular even as technology compani β¦
If you've uploaded a song to YouTube, Google almost certainly considers your video fair game for training its Lyria music AI, it just won't admit it right now.
A group of independent musicians is suing Google, claiming that it illegally used songs they uploaded to YouTube to train its Lyria 3 model. Google has filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying:
Their lawsuit is based on the unsupported hypothesis that Google trained on their specific works. Even accepting their untested allegations as fact, the Complaint cannot stand. Plaintiffs each granted YouTube, and Google - which provides the service-a broad license to use the uploaded con β¦
Over 15 years after David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network premiered in theaters, Sony has released the first trailer for The Social Reckoning ahead of its theatrical release on October 9th. The follow-up takes place 17 years after the events portrayed in the original film and follows a young Facebook engineer who enlists the help of a Wall Street Journal reporter to expose the platform's secrets.
The film stars Jeremy Strong as a much older Mark Zuckerberg (doing a memorable impression of the Meta CEO's voice), Mikey Madison as Facebook engineer and whistleblower Frances Haugen, and Jeremy Allen White as WSJ reporter Jeff Horw β¦


