Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal You'll pay way mo' for a lot less compared to the competition. Waymo -- the Alphabet-owned driverless taxi service which has seen a rapid expansion in recent years -- is rolling out a new rewards program today. The service is called Waymo Premier, and it promises priority pickups along with a 10 percent in-app rebate applied to future rides. Subscribers will also get fee-free cancellations, though only up to five a month. Lastly, Premier gives subscribers the chance to be among the first to use Waymo in new cities as the service expands, which is certainly one way to reframe the concept of paying to beta test those new coverage areas.

A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites. For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription.

Summer Game Fest just wrapped up its sixth year and, like a beautifully cel-shaded version of The Blob, the show just keeps on growing. The official Summer Game Fest 2026 showcase took place on June 5, but the surrounding buffet of new game reveals, release date announcements, review opportunities and developer spotlights actually ran from June 1 all the way to June 9. That's more than an entire week of near-constant video game news and trailers to consume, and here we've gathered absolutely all of it in one tidy but lengthy package. First up, a collection of Engadget's previews and reporting from Summer Game Fest Play Days in Los Angeles, which ran from June 6-8: Control Resonant's take on New York feels like the Backrooms Silent Hill Townfall brings atmospheric horror to '90s Scotland with incredible attention to detail Saw: Genesis looks the most fun when you're the murderous mastermind Alien: Isolation 2 keeps the classic horror game's uncompromising approach to raising tension Spyro: A Realm Beyond sees the '90s purple dragon make a big comeback Be like Carl from Summer House and get in the MIX with another high-energy stream filled with great-looking upcoming indie games, gathered by the folks at the Media Indie Exchange. The MIX hosts a smattering of annual online indie showcases, and alongside in-person events, they've been spreading the good gaming word for the past 10 years.

This time, her character is positioned between the Survivor trilogy of the last decade and her iconic debut in 1996. At Summer Game Fest 2026, Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog shared the first gameplay demo, with Unreal Engine 5 adding vivid detail and lushness to Lara's travails. The developers made a clever choice, centering the demo on an early part of the original game. Set in the Peruvian mountainside, my playthrough included a giant cog puzzle I remember from playing the original. There were also several shootouts with a herd of dinosaurs, the same vivid red velociraptor-adjacent creatures from 1996).

I played the ultimate game of strategy on a variety of smart chess boards to find the best for online and in-person matches. Playing chess can be challenging, fun, and at times frustrating. Garry Kasparov called the game "mental torture." With virtually limitless possibilities, chess offers unparalleled depth, and you could easily fill a library with books on how to play it. The internet has opened up a wealth of potential competitors, and smart chess boards enable you to play anyone online or off, not to mention dabble in a variety of chess programs.

Generating music with coherent structure, harmonious instrumental and vocal elements remains a significant challenge in song generation. Existing language models and diffusion-based methods often struggle to balance global coherence with local fidelity, resulting in outputs that lack musicality or suffer from incoherent progression and mismatched lyrics. This paper introduces SongBloom, a novel framework for full-length song generation that leverages an interleaved paradigm of autoregressive sketching and diffusion-based refinement. SongBloom employs an autoregressive diffusion model that combines the high fidelity of diffusion models with the scalability of language models. Specifically, it gradually extends a musical sketch from short to long and refines the details from coarse to fine-grained. The interleaved generation paradigm effectively integrates prior semantic and acoustic context to guide the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that SongBloom outperforms existing methods across both subjective and objective metrics and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art commercial music generation platforms.

Americans Are Trading Billions of Dollars on Polymarket's Banned Offshore Platform It's the first estimate of how many Americans are sneaking onto Polymarket's banned crypto-based platform. Approximately 30 percent of the trading volume on Polymarket comes from the United States, according to a new study--an eye-popping number, considering that none of those people are legally allowed to use the crypto -based platform. The study, conducted by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane, estimated that people in the US funneled between $10.6 to $26.7 billion through Polymarket. To track the platform's activity, Crane looked at what appeared to be US-based trades on offshore prediction market platforms from May 2025 to the end of April 2026. He found that many of the highest-volume markets on Polymarket were US-centric, including those covering US elections and sporting events.

It might not feel all that different from older World Cups--for better or worse. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it's ready for the FIFA World Cup . Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo . The company says it's serving half-a-million paid rides a week--paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember that the things don't have drivers.

Trump's Border Crackdown Is Wreaking Havoc on the World Cup Travel bans and other visa issues are creating problems for World Cup participants even before the whistle blows. Even before the first whistle blows, the 2026 World Cup --taking place from June 11 to July 19 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico--already has winners and losers away from the field. Here, amidst denied visas, prolonged checks, and contested entries, a parallel competition is emerging where human rights are at stake. This World Cup was meant to be a global celebration of soccer in North America. For the first time in history, the tournament is being held in three different countries, a move meant to unite the entire continent and turn the World Cup into an even more inclusive event.

No one can say for sure what's going on in the president's head. His 25 greatest obsessions can get us a little closer. This is the year the first baby boomers--those born in 1946--turn 80, and that cohort includes Donald Trump. We have all recently lived through what it means to have an 80-year-old commander in chief, but at a political moment that's simultaneously more horrific, erratic, and just plain befuddling than anything this country has seen in ages, we wanted to understand the brain of 80-year-old president. Plenty of people are trying to discern whether his recent rants and raves are due to a more serious cognitive decline--we understand the instinct; we've done it too --but we went a different (if related) route. The more we dug into Trump's many fixations, the more we realized that this man still thinks he lives in the 1980s. We also discovered--without too much surprise--that he often seems to fundamentally misunderstand the works he treasures most deeply. These items might not replace a brain map, but they do create a certain holistic view of what animates and splinters Trump's mind. Sometimes, they just help explain his worldview. Other times, they seem to have had real influence on policy and the America that Trump is trying to create. Welcome to Trump Brain, the 25 things that define who the president is--and what he wants. Please enable javascript to fully experience this interactive. When millions of people took to the streets in October to protest Trump's authoritarianism, the president responded by dunking on his critics online. Specifically, he posted an A.I.-generated video of a fighter jet, piloted by himself in a literal crown, dropping human excrement onto the crowds. It was perhaps Trump's most juvenile use of A.I. slop yet--the kind of low-quality, feverish content made possible by artificial intelligence. Trump undoubtedly is the perfect president for the A.I. slop era. In some ways, this is because he's the ideal audience for it: Like many older internet users delighted by the technology, Trump seems to enjoy mindless, cartoonish, childish content. One of the videos he shared depicted him playing soccer with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office.