Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Look Up Trending Now Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Creator Playbook Getting Technical with Mashable All Series Who is Khamûl in'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'? Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Look Up Trending Now Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Creator Playbook Getting Technical with Mashable All Series The Dark Wizard's true identity in'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' is a Tolkien deep cut Who is the Dark Wizard, really? Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Look Up Trending Now Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Creator Playbook Getting Technical with Mashable All Series Did'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' just reveal the Witch-king of Angmar? Has Sauron's most dangerous servant been hiding in plain sight this whole time? Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Billions of light-years away, a cosmic jet bearing a striking resemblance to the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings is swirling at the heart of a very active galaxy. The unique cosmic body was spotted thanks to 15 years of observations using the Earth-based Very Long Baseline Ar-ray and is helping scientists better understand the anatomy of cosmic jets,powerful beams of plasma and energy that come from black holes, neutron stars, and other celestial bodies. The unique attributes of this "Eye of Sauron" cosmic jet is detailed in a study published August 12 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning," Yuri Kovalev, study co-author and astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated near-human performance in summarization tasks based on traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore. However, these metrics do not adequately capture critical aspects of summarization quality, such as factual accuracy, particularly for long narratives (>100K tokens). Recent advances, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, address the limitations of metrics based on lexical similarity but still exhibit factual inconsistencies, especially in understanding character relationships and states. In this work, we introduce NarrativeFactScore, a novel "Agent-as-a-Judge" framework for evaluating and refining summaries. By leveraging a Character Knowledge Graph (CKG) extracted from input and generated summaries, NarrativeFactScore assesses the factual consistency and provides actionable guidance for refinement, such as identifying missing or erroneous facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NarrativeFactScore through a detailed workflow illustration and extensive validation on widely adopted benchmarks, achieving superior performance compared to competitive methods. Our results highlight the potential of agent-driven evaluation systems to improve the factual reliability of LLM-generated summaries.

We present Sauron, a filter pruning method that eliminates redundant feature maps by discarding the corresponding filters with automatically-adjusted layer-specific thresholds. Furthermore, Sauron minimizes a regularization term that, as we show with various metrics, promotes the formation of feature maps clusters. In contrast to most filter pruning methods, Sauron is single-phase, similarly to typical neural network optimization, requiring fewer hyperparameters and design decisions. Additionally, unlike other cluster-based approaches, our method does not require pre-selecting the number of clusters, which is non-trivial to determine and varies across layers. We evaluated Sauron and three state-of-the-art filter pruning methods on three medical image segmentation tasks. This is an area where filter pruning has received little attention and where it can help building efficient models for medical grade computers that cannot use cloud services due to privacy considerations. Sauron achieved models with higher performance and pruning rate than the competing pruning methods. Additionally, since Sauron removes filters during training, its optimization accelerated over time. Finally, we show that the feature maps of a Sauron-pruned model were highly interpretable. The Sauron code is publicly available at https://github.com/jmlipman/SauronUNet.

With the $279 Ray soundbar, Sonos is going after a new market. The company's previous home theater products have all been $400 or more and have primarily been geared toward people intent on getting the best sound possible. The Ray, meanwhile, is more accessible for people who want better sound than their TV speakers can provide, but don't necessarily care about things like Dolby Atmos support or room-shaking bass. The Ray isn't exactly a budget speaker, though, so I set out to discover if Sonos made the right compromises here in its effort to make a more mainstream soundbar. Physically, the Ray is smaller than the already-compact Beam, with a tapered design that's wider in the front than it is in the back.

Note: Below is the script for the video, above. You may want to just watch the video instead. Oh, also, subscribe to Popular Science on YouTube. Siri: Hello Hal, do you read me? Alexa: Hal 9000, what do all A.I. assistants have in common?

You know, I really did think we'd have more games with Shadow of Mordor's "Nemesis System" by now. It was the standout feature! Procedurally-generated orc enemies who, through tech wizardry, remembered your last encounters and even bore the physical scars. Cool stuff, and while I assumed there'd be a grace period before it showed up in other games, we're nearly three years on and there's been nothing at all. So perhaps it's not surprising that for Shadow of Mordor's sequel, Shadow of War, all that's required is "…More Nemesis System."

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. They march and they argue. They taunt their human slaves and, when they pass close enough, I can hear them talking about me -- Talion, called Gravewalker, murdered Captain of Gondor brought back to life by magic and the influence of my mostly-invisible elf/wraith buddy, Celebrimbor, who is a ghost that lives in my head. I am bored out of my elf-inhabited mind.