Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series Does'Carrie' contain a sneaky dig at Elon Musk? Leave it alone, I say. Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series Is a Season 2 in the pipeline? Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series'Carrie' reading list: Every library book Carrie picks has been banned Let Carrie White (and everyone) read The Handmaid's Tale. Shannon Connellan is Mashable's Senior Editor, General Assignments, based in London. She has been Mashable's UK Editor (and still manages the illustrious UK team) and Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives searching for . A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror, and loves to nerd out with movie stars, filmmakers, and TV creators . All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series'Carrie' review: Does Mike Flanagan's modern take on Stephen King's classic novel work? Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Look Up Back to School Mashable Selects Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Stephen King shares his 2-line review of the new'Carrie' TV show Has the horror master given it his seal of approval? Sam Haysom is the General Assignment Editor, UK, for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time. Stephen King is never shy when it comes to sharing his thoughts on new adaptations of his work. It sounds like he's a big fan.

This has led to increasing interest in LLM unlearning: the task of selectively removing specific information from a model without retraining from scratch or degrading overall utility. However, existing methods often rely on large-scale forget and retain datasets, and suffer from unnatural responses, poor generalization, or catastrophic utility loss. In this work, we propose Reinforcement UnLEarning (RULE), an efficient framework that formulates unlearning as a refusal boundary optimization problem. RULE is trained with a small portion of forget set and synthesized boundary queries, using a verifiable reward function that encourages safe refusal on forget-related queries while preserving helpful responses on permissible inputs. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of RULE in achieving targeted unlearning without compromising model utility. Experimental results show that, with only 12% forget set and 8% synthesized boundary data, RULE outperforms existing baselines by up to 17.5% forget quality and 16.3% naturalness response while maintaining general utility, achieving forget-retain Pareto optimality. Remarkably, we further observe that RULE improves the naturalness of model outputs, enhances training efficiency, and exhibits strong generalization ability, generalizing refusal behavior to semantically related but unseen queries.

A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats--and a bunch of other random people, including me. T o me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion's 1987 book,, which begins like this: "Havana vanities come to dust in Miami." I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact.

Machine unlearning is a promising solution for efficiently removing specific knowledge by post hoc modifying models.

In The End of the World As We Know It, other writers are telling stories set in the post-apocalyptic world of Stephen King's The Stand One of my most anticipated books of the year is out this month: a collection of short stories set in the post-apocalyptic devastation of Stephen King's The Stand. I love a good end-times story, and King did it so well in this doorstopper of a book, first published in 1978. How will the writers he has invited to develop his "world" fare? Suitably depressed by these visions of the future, I'm then planning to pick myself up with New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz's cosier take, Automatic Noodle, which comes complete with jolly robots and cooking. From thrillers (Artificial Wisdom) to more literary takes (Helm), Star Wars to the latest from the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, let's get reading!