‘No bloat, no telemetry, no nonsense.’ Former Microsoft coding wizard makes an OG Notepad clone that’s just 2,686 bytes in size

Once nothing more than a basic text editor, Windows Notepad has been expanded in recent years to become almost a fully-fledged word processor. For some people, the little tool has become synonymous with Microsoft’s penchant for bloat and unnecessary changes, so one former Redmond coder decided to do something about it. The person in question…

Read More

EA accidentally made the right decision twice in one month and reverted it both times, inflicting psychic damage on Battlefield 6 players

In an update early last month, Battlefield 6 accidentally made a change everyone loved. The in-game description of XP Boosters was changed to say that they would now count down only while you’re actively playing a match, rather than in real time, as they have since launch. Wasting your precious boosts because you’ve had to…

Read More

Security researchers have leveraged bad maths to get around AI safety guardrails, naming the attack method after one of 2007’s best PC games

LLMs can be most simply understood as sycophantic, ‘yes, and’ machines. To the surprise of very few, that’s gotten AI companies in hot water when LLM-based chatbots and AI agents attempt to answer users’ more unsavoury requests. So, AI companies have implemented safety guardrails that make fulfilling certain requests off limits. Unfortunately, these have proven…

Read More

‘I cannot do my job when Microsoft refuses to do theirs’, say Xbox union workers as destructive reset looms from a company that spent over $80 billion on AI last year

Microsoft’s likely got another wave of layoffs and studio closures coming, it’s my displeasure to say—with multiple studios on the chopping block. It’s another pip in a pattern of scattershot project cancellations and studio closures, in the same vein as the company shutting down Project Blackbird despite Phil Spencer loving it, or closing Tango Gameworks…

Read More

With 32 GB as a minimum and 64 GB as the recommended amount, Cinder City’s RAM requirements are all kinds of wrong in today’s AI-mangled memory market

As big-budget, blockbuster PC games have become increasingly more packed with cutting-edge graphics over the years, their minimum hardware requirements have naturally scaled upwards too. But there’s one forthcoming game that has taken that quite a lot further than you’d expect, with the memory specs likely to cause more than a few raised eyebrows. It’s…

Read More

Total War: Warhammer 3 is getting new endgames, individual victory conditions, a Vampire Counts rework, and Nurgle’s three grossest champions

Creative Assembly’s recent What’s Next livestream dropped a few bombshells about the upcoming 9.0 update and the Lords of the End Times DLC. It’s good news for anyone who loves vampires and Chaos, and for anyone who has ever found themselves underwhelmed by the conclusion to an Immortal Empires campaign. First things first, it was…

Read More