'My son genuinely believed it was real': Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Some believe AI can spark their child's imagination through personalized stories and generative images. Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his "super loquacious" four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed. "He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone," recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. "I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off."

This study evaluates the recently proposed Document Attention Network (DAN) for extracting key-value information from Uruguayan birth certificates, handwritten in Spanish. We investigate two annotation strategies for automatically transcribing handwritten documents, fine-tuning DAN with minimal training data and annotation effort. Experiments were conducted on two datasets containing the same images (201 scans of birth certificates written by more than 15 different writers) but with different annotation methods. Our findings indicate that normalized annotation is more effective for fields that can be standardized, such as dates and places of birth, whereas diplomatic annotation performs much better for fields containing names and surnames, which can not be standardized.

This week I took my son, Zac, to see the new Minecraft movie, which is hardly a remarkable statement in the highly video game-branded world of 21st-century cinema – except that what followed was not typical at all. As you may have seen from a number of bewildered news reports over the last few days, A Minecraft Movie has quickly engendered a community of, let's say, highly engaged and enthusiastic fans. Spurred on by TikTok meme posts, vast portions of the film's audience are now yelling out key lines of dialogue as they happen and singing along to the songs. In one key moment where a rare character from the game – the zombie chicken jockey – is introduced, they go absolutely crazy, throwing drinks and popcorn around, and in some US cinemas, getting escorted from the screening by police. The reaction was a little more muted in our tiny independent cinema in Frome, but still, there were rows of teenagers who had clearly seen all the TikTok posts telling them which lines to shout along to, and went to throw stuff, and they were extremely excited to be doing so, a few surreptitiously filming their mates' reactions so they could add to the social media carnage.

It'd be pretty fascinating to see the Democratic Party's latest internal polling on COVID restrictions. We haven't seen it, but it must have been pretty awful, apocalyptic, because something spooked them bad. Over the course of less than a week, the same people who have systematically turned America into a quarantine camp suddenly, out of nowhere, started calling in unison for medical freedom. Suddenly, they sounded like Bobby Kennedy Jr., pretty much all of them. Even the whiny hypochondriacs at The Atlantic Magazine, those neurotic cat owners who've turned COVID hysteria into a religion are now calling for a total abandonment of all Coronavirus restrictions. Believe it or not, that was the headline on The Atlantic's website today.

Aggregative deontic detachment is a new form of deontic detachment that keeps track of previously detached obligations. We argue that it handles iteration of successive detachments in a more principled manner than the traditional systems do. To study this new form of deontic detachment, we introduce a'minimal' logic for aggregative deontic detachment, and we discuss various properties of the logic.

Google says minors and their families can ask for an image to be removed from its search results, in a new policy unveiled Wednesday. Google says minors and their families can ask for an image to be removed from its search results, in a new policy unveiled Wednesday. Google installed a new policy Wednesday that will allow minors or their caregivers to request their images be removed from the company's search results, saying that "kids and teens have to navigate some unique challenges online, especially when a picture of them is unexpectedly available on the internet." The policy follows up on Google's announcement in August that it would take a number of steps aiming to protect minors' privacy and their mental well-being, giving them more control over how they appear online. Google says the process for taking a minor's image out of its search results starts with filling out a form that asks for the URL of the target image.

Social media services like Facebook and Twitter will need to have databases of Russian users kept in Russia by July or face fines. The news was first reported by Interfax news agency, citing communications regulator Roskomnadzor as saying on Wednesday. Russia is considering legislation that would force foreign technology companies to open offices in Russia or face penalties such as advertising bans, as part of Moscow's wider efforts to exert greater control over Big Tech. Google and Facebook were fined on Tuesday for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, while Twitter has been the victim of a punitive slowdown since March. Facebook, Twitter and others must localise their databases of Russian users by July 1 or face a fine of up to 18 million roubles ($245,100) for non-compliance, the deputy head of Roskomnadzor Milos Wagner was cited as saying on Wednesday.

"The Roblox business model is more than a game - it's a platform that encourages creators to build experiences for other users. While many games have some form of user-generated content, it's more uncommon to find games whose entire business model is built upon it," she says.

Released in April, Nintendo Labo was one of the more unusual games of this year – or any year. The box contains cardboard sheets, rubber bands and string along with a game cartridge, inviting players to build ingenious little cardboard models that, when combined with the Nintendo Switch console and its controllers, become working interactive toys. It's rather like cardboard Lego, presented in a way that gently introduces the basics of engineering. Labo is not as playground-popular as Minecraft or Fortnite, but it's a rare video game that provides educational value as well as fun, and does so without forcing it down kids' throats. There are three Nintendo Labo sets available: the Variety Kit, the Robot Kit and the Vehicles Kit.

Jeanne Pepper Bernstein has been searching for her 19-year-old son since he went missing in Lake Forest last Tuesday. On Sunday afternoon, she had a message for him. "If there's any way you can come home, whatever has happened, wherever you've been, whoever you've talked to -- it doesn't matter," she said in an interview with The Times. "We love you so much that we would give up everything we have to have you back." As she offered her wrenching plea, family and friends used drones to canvass the Foothill Ranch area of Lake Forest, where authorities believe Blaze Bernstein was last seen by a friend in Borrego Park.