Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When it comes to sex in 2025--who's having it, who isn't, and how--perceptions are all over the place. Is Gen Z sliding back in time? Are middle-aged women finally having good sex, or none at all? And what exactly is going on with seniors in retirement homes? In the series Pillow Talk, we interview one person in a specific time and place in their lives about what sex looks like for them and their peers, in every enlightening (and excruciating) detail. Get in touch if you have an idea for a subject--or if you have a story to tell.

I've made a big deal about how much I love the "Civilization" games to anyone who will listen. I made a big deal about it earlier this week to anyone reading about the awesome new MSI laptops for 2025. But sometimes an 18-inch laptop might not be the most convenient way to enjoy some on-the-go gaming (shocking, right), so I'm also making a big deal about the MSI Claw 8 AI handheld. Equipped with a bright eight-inch FHD (1920 1200) 120Hz 500 nit 100% sRGB IPS-level touchscreen (hence the Claw 8 name), the new model is even more immersive than the Claw 7 AI . At the same time, it's also more comfortable--with ergonomic grips based on extensive hand-mapping research measuring digits of varying lengths from multiple angles.

Google has unveiled a new quantum computer and is once more claiming to have pulled ahead in the race to show that these exotic machines can beat even the world's best conventional supercomputers – so does that mean useful quantum computers are finally here? Researchers at the tech giant were the first in the world to demonstrate this feat, known as quantum supremacy, with the announcement of the Sycamore quantum computing chip in 2019. But since then, supercomputers have caught up, leaving Sycamore behind. Now, Google has produced a new quantum chip, called Willow, which Julian Kelly at Google Quantum AI says is the firm's best yet. "You can think of this as having all the advantages of Sycamore, but if you were to look under the hood, we changed the geometry… we reimagined the processor," he says.

This phenomenon is a bit curious and perhaps deserves more elaboration. This, I am afraid, is likely what is going on here (if you drop the separable assumption). The main contribution of this work is to prove that by adding a single exponential function (directly) from input to output and adding a mild l_2 regularizer, the slightly modified, highly nonconvex loss function does not have any non-global local minima. Moreover, all of these local minima actually correspond to the global minima of the original, unmodified nonconvex loss. This surprising result, to the best of my knowledge, is new and of genuine interest.

I thought OpenAI's GPT-4o, its leading model at the time, would be perfectly suited to help. I asked it to create a short wedding-themed poem, with the constraint that each letter could only appear a certain number of times so we could make sure teams would be able to reproduce it with the provided set of tiles. The model repeatedly insisted that its poem worked within the constraints, even though it didn't. It would correctly count the letters only after the fact, while continuing to deliver poems that didn't fit the prompt. Without the time to meticulously craft the verses by hand, we ditched the poem idea and instead challenged guests to memorize a series of shapes made from colored tiles. However, last week OpenAI released a new model called o1 (previously referred to under the code name "Strawberry" and, before that, Q*) that blows GPT-4o out of the water for this type of purpose.

On Tuesday, Alphabet's self-driving vehicle developer Waymo said it would begin operating all-day, curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona. The announcement came with little fanfare--a post on X. But it signals that after years of delay, self-driving vehicles might be (literally) moving in the right direction. The new curbside airport service sends a good signal about Waymo's business, says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst with Gartner. "The airport is the primary destination and departure point for any sort of mobility service, whether it's a cab, shuttle bus--or an autonomous robocab," he says.

After three years, it's finally time to upgrade to Windows 11. With Windows 11, Microsoft shifted into productivity mode, and to this day Windows 11 still feels like the operating system for work, while Windows 10 still feels lively and fun. But Windows 11 not only is where entertaining new features are landing, but also includes new AI capabilities that may improve your lives. It's time to embrace the change. Last year, I was split: I wrote five reasons to switch to Windows 11, and five more to remain on Windows 10.

After three years, it's finally time to upgrade to Windows 11. With Windows 11, Microsoft shifted into productivity mode, and to this day Windows 11 still feels like the operating system for work, while Windows 10 still feels lively and fun. But Windows 11 not only is where entertaining new features are landing, but also includes new AI capabilities that may improve your lives. It's time to embrace the change. Last year, I was split: I wrote five reasons to switch to Windows 11, and five more to remain on Windows 10.

Microsoft's recent AI-powered updates to Windows 11 are a big deal for the company, arguably bigger than its new Surface hardware. But as often happens, it's having a few growing pains with some hardware and software configurations, particularly machines running AMD. According to users across several social networks, the Copilot AI program is interfering with AMD's Adrenalin software and causing users some headaches. Specifically, the updated version of Windows with Copilot enabled will completely reset Adrenalin's settings on every boot, at least for some users reporting their issues on Reddit and AMD's official forums. While this isn't a huge problem in terms of functionality, it's a big deal if you have meticulously adjusted settings for graphics in games and other apps.

You might have heard about LLaMa or maybe you haven't. In a nutshell, LLaMa is important because it allows you to run large language models (LLM) like GPT-3 on commodity hardware. In many ways, this is a bit like Stable Diffusion, which similarly allowed normal folks to run image generation models on their own hardware with access to the underlying source code. We've discussed why Stable Diffusion matters and even talked about how it works. LLaMa is a transformer language model from Facebook/Meta research, which is a collection of large models from 7 billion to 65 billion parameters trained on publicly available datasets.