It's Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, and in celebration, Valve has released a special update that adds the Episode One and Episode Two expansions to the base game so you can play it all straight through, along with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and much more. The game is also free on Steam until November 18. Valve's announcement itself is an interactive experience -- grab the gravity gun at the bottom of the page and you can pick up just about anything on the screen and toss it around (including that can, which you can then put in the trash). "Every map in Half-Life 2 has been looked over by Valve level designers to fix longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog," the team says. The release notes are extensive, including updates to the graphics settings, gamepad controls and the Steam Deck menu. Valve's also published some old demo videos from Half-Life 2's development.

We consider a discrete-time system where a resource-constrained source (e.g., a small sensor) transmits its time-sensitive data to a destination over a time-varying wireless channel. Each transmission incurs a fixed transmission cost (e.g., energy cost), and no transmission results in a staleness cost represented by the Age-of-Information. The source must balance the tradeoff between transmission and staleness costs. To address this challenge, we develop a robust online algorithm to minimize the sum of transmission and staleness costs, ensuring a worst-case performance guarantee. While online algorithms are robust, they are usually overly conservative and may have a poor average performance in typical scenarios. In contrast, by leveraging historical data and prediction models, machine learning (ML) algorithms perform well in average cases. However, they typically lack worst-case performance guarantees. To achieve the best of both worlds, we design a learning-augmented online algorithm that exhibits two desired properties: (i) consistency: closely approximating the optimal offline algorithm when the ML prediction is accurate and trusted; (ii) robustness: ensuring worst-case performance guarantee even ML predictions are inaccurate. Finally, we perform extensive simulations to show that our online algorithm performs well empirically and that our learning-augmented algorithm achieves both consistency and robustness.

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.

Microsoft's next huge Windows 11 feature update, code-named Windows 11 23H2, has a big addition: AI. Microsoft is readying for the era of the AI PC with the addition of Windows Copilot, powered by Bing Chat. And it will debut on Sept. 26. It's the closest thing to a theme that we've seen within a Windows 11 update in some time. AI will power Windows Copilot, of course, but also recommended files in File Explorer and Start as well as a designated AI-specific section within the Microsoft Store app.

The Genius 4.0 Home Intelligence update adds Siri Shortcut Integration to the iRobot Home app, allowing iOS users to connect their devices to Apple's voice assistant. Similar to Google Assistant and Alexa users, they can set up their custom phrases or simply say "Hey Siri, ask Roomba to clean everywhere" to start the vacuum. Genius 4.0 also gives users the capability to create customizable smart maps for the Roomba i3 and i3 models, which they can access if they want their devices to clean specific rooms in the house. They can also create custom cleaning routines based on their schedules, automatons and the rooms they want to send the vacuum to. These particular features are now available in the Americas and will make their way to customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa by the end of the third quarter.

Welcome to the end of the week. Microsoft's second day of its annual conference was a more interesting one.It's trying to bridge your PC and phone, and we get to see what's next for Windows 10. Meanwhile, a Russian blogger was given a suspended jail sentence for playing Pokémon Go in a church. We also unveil The Engadget Experience, an event coming this November, aimed at exploring a new creative revolution, involving virtual reality, augmented reality and everything in between. More new features than the last big update.Windows 10's next Creators Update arrives this fall Microsoft just rolled out a big update for Windows 10, but there's another one on the way later this year.