Asia
PC building's weird new reality: Your favorite old parts are back on the menu
PCWorld reports that rising RAM and storage prices are driving hardware vendors to re-release older components like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D and GeForce RTX 30-series cards. This trend matters for PC builders seeking affordable alternatives as memory shortages and cost increases make newer hardware less accessible. The shift encourages enthusiasts to find creative solutions with existing components and embrace the joy of tinkering despite market challenges. Your weekly edition of The Full Nerd has arrived, and there's a new face on the team: mine!
Humanoid robot is spotted BEGGING on a street in China - claiming it has 'no money to recharge'
Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann's ex-wife reacts to his sentencing as monster who killed eight women is transferred to new prison to begin life behind bars Boy, three, 'attacked by at least one crocodile' after being'thrown into zoo pit by man with learning difficulties who broke away from carers' - as suspect'not fit for interview' is bailed Jelly Roll stops concert to respond to wife Bunnie XO's bombshell podcast on their divorce Hegseth puts NATO on notice as he launches review of US troops in Europe and blasts allies for'shameful' behavior I was mortified when my husband always said no to sex. Then I realised the mistake I was making. This is the change that's completely transformed marital love-making in middle age: ALICE SNAPE Mom thought popular'natural' health supplement was safer than Xanax. She took it... then never woke up. Don't make the same mistake JD Vance turns on Israeli allies who are criticizing Trump's Iran deal: 'Wake up and smell reality' The other women left devastated by Jelly Roll's divorce... why his daughter is now'disgusted'... and Bunnie XO's one red-line demand before she would agree to the split Joe Biden mumbles to himself and requires stage direction as he aimlessly wanders off at Obama's library debut Tourists run for their lives as gunfire erupts in New York's Times Square as terrified parents drag children to safety Heartbroken family of college girls who drowned dispute account of their final moments before they were swept out to sea as they mourn'responsible and kind' students Oscar-winning director's daughter and her husband's deaths'medically related' as cops give grim update after couple were found in SUV on California highway Furious woke woman storms out of restaurant because customers were singing National Anthem ...and vows never to return A bold new experiment to streamline how Americans buy new cars... and auto dealerships are already scared Secret White House blacklist leaked by insider: 'Worst' influencers named and shamed... as foul-mouthed backstabbing erupts Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Bill Clinton's VERY cozy moment with Michelle while Hillary looks the other way... and the best UNSEEN moments from Obama public library opening Farce of Obama's $850m'monstrosity': As clucking liberal elite cheer Barack's grand opening, outraged Chicago locals tell HARRIET ALEXANDER awkward truth about library Humiliating new joke about Trump that's the talk of Washington... as White House moles tell me there's more to this story than meets the eye: MARK HALPERIN Humanoid robot is spotted BEGGING on a street in China - claiming it has'no money to recharge' READ MORE: China unveils the world's first self-driving TOILET While many people worry that robots are coming to take their jobs, one unlucky bot seems to have fallen on hard times.
Diversity-Aware Policy Optimization for Large Language Model Reasoning
The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, particularly following the release of DeepSeek-R1, which has inspired a surge of research into data quality and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Despite the pivotal role diversity plays in RL, its influence on LLM reasoning remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, this work presents a systematic investigation into the impact of diversity in RL-based training for LLM reasoning, and proposes a novel diversity-aware policy optimization method. Across evaluations on 12 LLMs, we observe a strong positive correlation between the solution diversity and Potential@k (a novel metric quantifying an LLM's reasoning potential) in high-performing models. This finding motivates our method to explicitly promote diversity during RL training. Specifically, we design a token-level diversity and reformulate it into a practical objective, then we selectively apply it to positive samples. Integrated into the R1-zero training framework, our method achieves a 3.5% average improvement across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks, while generating more diverse and robust solutions.
I can't stop using this website that lets me drive through cities around the world
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I can't stop using this website that lets me drive through cities around the world Drive and Listen combines street-level video with live local radio for a surprisingly immersive experience--even if it's only from your desktop. Drive and Listen might not sound like it, but it's strangely relaxing once you try it. The site provides exactly the experience the name suggests: Pick a city anywhere in the world, press play, and sit back as you ride along through the streets listening to local radio stations. The site was created during the pandemic by a student in Turkey who missed traveling and wanted a way to reconnect with places beyond his own neighborhood.
Mixing Expert Knowledge: Bring Human Thoughts Back To the Game of Go
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding, matching or surpassing human capabilities. However, these impressive reasoning abilities face significant challenges in specialized domains. Taking Go as an example, although AlphaGo has established the high performance ceiling of AI systems in Go, mainstream LLMs still struggle to reach even beginner-level proficiency, let alone perform natural language reasoning. This performance gap between general-purpose LLMs and domain experts is significantly limiting the application of LLMs on a wider range of domain-specific tasks. In this work, we aim to bridge the divide between LLMs' general reasoning capabilities and expert knowledge in domain-specific tasks. We perform mixed fine-tuning with structured Go expertise and general long Chain-ofThought (CoT) reasoning data as a cold start, followed by reinforcement learning to integrate expert knowledge in Go with general reasoning capabilities. Through this methodology, we present LoGos, a powerful LLM that not only maintains outstanding general reasoning abilities, but also conducts Go gameplay in natural language, demonstrating effective strategic reasoning and accurate next-move prediction. LoGos achieves performance comparable to human professional players, substantially surpassing all existing LLMs. Through this work, we aim to contribute insights on applying general LLM reasoning capabilities to specialized domains.
This World Cup, Bigger Might Not Really Be Better
The biggest World Cup ever is pushing fans, players, and host cities to their limits--and experts say this is only the beginning. It's often said that bigger means better. This year's FIFA World Cup may put that to the test. By almost any metric, the 2026 tournament is the largest ever: the most host countries; the longest distances between stadiums; the most players, teams, and matches; and then there's the eye-watering ticket prices . The scale is a logistical nightmare for fans, teams, and host cities. Held across three countries-- Canada, Mexico, and the US--48 teams (up from the usual 32) will navigate 16 host cities separated by thousands of miles and four distinct time zones.
The 60-Day Test: What Iran's Agreement with the United States Really Means
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Interpreting Emergent Features in Deep Learning-based Side-channel Analysis
Side-channel analysis (SCA) poses a real-world threat by exploiting unintentional physical signals to extract secret information from secure devices. Evaluation labs also use the same techniques to certify device security. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a prominent method for SCA, achieving state-ofthe-art attack performance at the cost of interpretability. Understanding how neural networks extract secrets is crucial for security evaluators aiming to defend against such attacks, as only by understanding the attack can one propose better countermeasures. In this work, we apply mechanistic interpretability to neural networks trained for SCA, revealing how models exploit what leakage in side-channel traces. We focus on sudden jumps in performance to reverse engineer learned representations, ultimately recovering secret masks and moving the evaluation process from blackbox to white-box. Our results show that mechanistic interpretability can scale to realistic SCA settings, even when relevant inputs are sparse, model accuracies are low, and side-channel protections prevent standard input interventions.
Optimistic Online-to-Batch Conversions for Accelerated Convergence and Universality
In this work, we study offline convex optimization with smooth objectives, where the classical Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) method achieves the optimal accelerated convergence. Extensive research has aimed to understand NAG from various perspectives, and a recent line of work approaches this from the viewpoint of online learning and online-to-batch conversion, emphasizing the role of optimistic online algorithms for acceleration. In this work, we contribute to this perspective by proposing novel optimistic online-to-batch conversions that incorporate optimism theoretically into the analysis, thereby significantly simplifying the online algorithm design while preserving the optimal convergence rates. Specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our conversions through the following results: (i) when combined with simple online gradient descent, our optimistic conversion achieves the optimal accelerated convergence; (ii) our conversion also applies to strongly convex objectives, and by leveraging both optimistic online-to-batch conversion and optimistic online algorithms, we achieve the optimal accelerated convergence rate for strongly convex and smooth objectives, for the first time through the lens of online-to-batch conversion; (iii) our optimistic conversion can achieve universality to smoothness -- applicable to both smooth and non-smooth objectives without requiring knowledge of the smoothness coefficient -- and remains efficient as non-universal methods by using only one gradient query in each iteration. Finally, we highlight the effectiveness of our optimistic online-to-batch conversions by a precise correspondence with NAG.
Wide-Horizon Thinking and Simulation-Based Evaluation for Real-World LLMPlanning with Multifaceted Constraints
Unlike reasoning, which often entails a deep sequence of deductive steps, complex real-world planning is characterized by the need to synthesize a broad spectrum of parallel and potentially conflicting information and constraints. For example, in travel planning scenarios, it requires the integration of diverse real-world information and user preferences.