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Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. And Palm Springs is feeling the chill

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Palm Springs relies heavily on Canadian tourists, who are declining to travel to the U.S. or shortening their stays because of Trump. The number of Canadian visitors to California plummeted more than 18% in 2025 compared with the year prior.


An Inside Look at Lego's New Tech-Packed Smart Brick

WIRED

Lego's next release is a digital brick loaded with sensors that add new layers of interactivity to its play sets. WIRED got exclusive access to the Lego labs where the Smart Brick was born. The secretive division of 237 staff based here and in London, Boston, and Singapore is dedicated to thinking up what comes next for the world's largest toy brand. In front of me, on a plain white table, is a batch of prototypes of Lego's new Smart Brick, the final version of which is a small, sensor-laden 2-by-4 black brick with a big brain. No outsider has seen these prototypes, all of which represent stages of a journey Lego has been charting over the past eight years. Lego hopes this innovation, which lands in stores March 1, will safeguard the future of its plastic empire. The diminutive proportions of the finished Smart Brick belie the fact that the thing is exceedingly clever. Inside is a tiny custom chip running bespoke software that can communicate with onboard sensors to monitor and react to motion, orientation, and magnetic fields. It's also likely no exaggeration that the Smart Brick could represent the most radical product Lego has produced since Jens Nygaard Knudsen, the company's former longtime chief designer, created the minifigure nearly 50 years ago.



Core-sets for Fair and Diverse Data Summarization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Second, we show the first core-set w.r.t. the sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances. Finally, we run several experiments showing the effectiveness of our core-set approach. In particular, we apply constrained diversity maximization to summarize a set of timed messages that takes into account the messages' recency.


StoryBench: A Multifaceted Benchmark for Continuous Story Visualization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generating video stories from text prompts is a complex task. In addition to having high visual quality, videos need to realistically adhere to a sequence of text prompts whilst being consistent throughout the frames.


Text Alignment Is An Efficient Unified Model for Massive NLP Tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs), typically designed as a function of next-word prediction, have excelled across extensive NLP tasks. Despite the generality, next-word prediction is often not an efficient formulation for many of the tasks, demanding an extreme scale of model parameters (10s or 100s of billions) and sometimes yielding suboptimal performance. In practice, it is often desirable to build more efficient models--despite being less versatile, they still apply to a substantial subset of problems, delivering on par or even superior performance with much smaller model sizes.





Spain Orders Criminal Investigation Into X, Meta, and TikTok Over Alleged AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

TIME - Tech

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives a speech during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 3, 2026. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives a speech during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 3, 2026. The Spanish government has called for an investigation into social media giants X, Meta, and TikTok over their alleged role in producing and spreading AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The Council of Ministers will invoke Article 8 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecution Service to request that it investigate the crimes that X, Meta and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X on Tuesday. Sánchez accused the platforms of "attacking the mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters," saying that "the impunity of the giants must end."