How cozy gaming is taking mindfulness mainstream
You are a small, pixelated human living in a hamlet known as Pelican Town. On your late grandfather's farm, life is all about toiling the land, improving the tiny village, and forming meaningful relationships with fellow townspeople. That bucolic simplicity is at the heart of Stardew Valley, a 2016 farming simulation that turned turnip harvesting into an uplifting community activity. Nearly ten years later, the game has sold more than 41 million copies, becoming the main example of a growing genre known as "cozy games." Mary Kish, Head of Community at streaming giant Twitch, was one of the first people to review Stardew Valley after it launched on PCs in 2016. "Stardew Valley's meditative activities often lead to personal reflection in the real world," Kish wrote in her GameSpot review of the farming sim.
The best budgeting apps for 2025
Managing your finances doesn't have to be a headache -- especially with the right budgeting app at your fingertips. Whether you're trying to track everyday spending, save for a big purchase or just keep a closer eye on your subscriptions, there's an app that can help. With Mint shutting down, plenty of users have been looking for the best budget apps to replace it, and luckily there are plenty of solid alternatives. From AI-powered spending trackers to apps that break down your expenses into easy-to-follow categories, the best budgeting tools help you take control of your money without the hassle of spreadsheets. Some focus on automating savings, while others give you a deep dive into your finances with powerful analytics and custom reporting. If you're still searching for the right Mint alternative, check out our guide to the best budgeting apps to replace Mint to find the best fit for your needs. If you're not sure where to start, we've rounded up the top budgeting apps to help you track spending, save smarter, and stick to your financial goals. No pun intended, but what I like about Quicken Simplifi is its simplicity. Whereas other budgeting apps try to distinguish themselves with dark themes and customizable emoji, Simplifi has a clean user interface, with a landing page that you just keep scrolling through to get a detailed overview of all your stats.
Brown University student angers non-faculty employees by asking 'what do you do all day,' faces punishment
Alex Shieh is a student at Brown University. He is making waves and facing charges for asking the school's non-faculty employees what they do all day. A sophomore at Brown University is facing the school's wrath after he sent a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees asking them what they do all day to try to figure out why the elite school's tuition has gotten so expensive. "The inspiration for this is the rising cost of tuition," Alex Shieh told Fox News Digital in an interview. "Next year, it's set to be 93,064 to go to Brown," Shieh said of the Ivy League university.
The rise of AI PCs: How businesses are reshaping their tech to keep up
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is transforming industries and reshaping work. The reach and capabilities of AI models go far beyond what people have seen from tinkering around with ChatGPT, which, although a great tool for proofreading or debugging code, only gives a brief glimpse into what large language models (LLMs), the technology powering tools like the chatbot, can do. Also: What is an AI PC exactly? And should you buy one in 2025? For instance, HCLTech, a consulting firm, worked with one of the largest end-to-end healthcare providers in the US to help implement a user-friendly, compliant AI clinical advisor. The clinical advisor, trained using one of the world's largest clinical libraries, allows medical professionals to conversationally ask for the information they need to consult without wasting time digging for it.
Chris Mason: Tariffs are yet another example of colossal, upending change
Look beyond the actions and theatre of the Trump White House to the macro trends of the 21st century. There is the migration of economic and political heft to the East. There is the migration of many, many people towards the West, digitally savvy about the relative riches here, climate change and conflict among the push factors for some too. There is the internet revolution upending business models and working patterns, inventing social media and concentrating vast wealth and influence among a clutch of global behemoths like Apple, Meta, Amazon and X. And there is the artificial intelligence revolution in the infancy of its influence.
End-to-end data-driven weather prediction
A new AI weather prediction system, developed by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, can deliver accurate forecasts which use less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems. The system, Aardvark Weather, has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It provides a blueprint for a new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to improve current practices. The results are reported in the journal Nature. "Aardvark reimagines current weather prediction methods offering the potential to make weather forecasts faster, cheaper, more flexible and more accurate than ever before, helping to transform weather prediction in both developed and developing countries," said Professor Richard Turner from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, who led the research.
'Battlestar Galactica' star says show's AI warnings more timely as sci-fi fantasies come to life
Tricia Helfer, who played a humanoid robot Cylon on "Battlestar Galactica," says the show's look at the conflict between humans and AI still resonates today. "We did warn against AI while we were shooting it," Helfer told Fox News Digital at the Beverly Hills Film Festival this week. She continued, "It was 20 years ago, and I've recently re-watched it and went, 'Oh my gosh, it's even more relevant now.' So I think we just really need to be careful. It's a slippery slope between using it to our advantage and having it maybe be able to control us a little bit." "I think we're a little bit far off from the humanoid Cylons yet and humanoid robots, but I don't know, they're coming," Helfer added.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,135
A Russian ballistic missile strike killed at least four people and wounded 17 in the city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown. The attack also sparked a fire in the city, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of Kryvyi Rih's military administration. Russian drone attacks overnight targeted the Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhia and Kharkiv, killing one person and injuring several others, officials said. Two people were killed and at least 32, including two children, were injured by a Russian drone attack which hit several multistorey apartment blocks in Kharkiv, the region's governor said. One person was also injured in a separate drone attack on Ruski Tyshky, a village outside Kharkiv.
GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoning
Zhao, Jian, Liu, Runze, Zhang, Kaiyan, Zhou, Zhimu, Gao, Junqi, Li, Dong, Lyu, Jiafei, Qian, Zhouyi, Qi, Biqing, Li, Xiu, Zhou, Bowen
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that it is promising to utilize Process Reward Models (PRMs) as verifiers to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, current PRMs face three key challenges: (1) limited process supervision and generalization capabilities, (2) dependence on scalar value prediction without leveraging the generative abilities of LLMs, and (3) inability to scale the test-time compute of PRMs. In this work, we introduce GenPRM, a generative process reward model that performs explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with code verification before providing judgment for each reasoning step. To obtain high-quality process supervision labels and rationale data, we propose Relative Progress Estimation (RPE) and a rationale synthesis framework that incorporates code verification. Experimental results on ProcessBench and several mathematical reasoning tasks show that GenPRM significantly outperforms prior PRMs with only 23K training data from MATH dataset. Through test-time scaling, a 1.5B GenPRM outperforms GPT-4o, and a 7B GenPRM surpasses Qwen2.5-Math-PRM-72B on ProcessBench. Additionally, GenPRM demonstrates strong abilities to serve as a critic model for policy model refinement. This work establishes a new paradigm for process supervision that bridges the gap between PRMs and critic models in LLMs. Our code, model, and data will be available in https://ryanliu112.github.io/GenPRM.