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Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition is a little box with big privacy powers
Home Assistant’s voice device is a $60 box that’s both focused and evolving.
Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That’s why Home Assistant is calling it a “Preview Edition.”
Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake word—the default, and most well-trained version, is “Okay, Nabu,” but “Hey, Jarvis” and “Hey, Mycroft” are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: “Turn on living room lights,” “Set thermostat to 68,” “Activate TV time.” And then, that thing usually happens.
“That thing” is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it’s a bit more important with the VPE.
As firms abandon VMware, Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank
Ingram Micro the latest to ditch VMware, but VMware’s still making money.
Another company has publicly cut ties with Broadcom’s VMware. This time, it’s Ingram Micro, one of the world’s biggest IT distributors. The announcement comes as Broadcom eyes services as a key part of maintaining VMware business in 2025. But even as some customers are reducing reliance on VMware, its trillion-dollar owner is laughing all the way to the bank.
IT distributor severs VMware ties
Ingram is reducing its Broadcom-related business to “limited engagement with VMware in select regions,” a spokesperson told The Register this week.
“We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and in the future while providing an appropriate shareholder return,” the spokesperson said.
Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers
Fighting game YouTuber now fighting Google over “monstrous” post-hack revenue loss.
For months, popular fighting game YouTubers have been under attack. Even the seemingly most cautious among them have been duped by sophisticated phishing attacks that hack their accounts to push cryptocurrency scams by convincingly appearing to offer legitimate sponsorships from established brands.
These scams often start with bad actors seemingly taking over verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) with substantial followings and then using them to impersonate marketing managers at real brands who can be easily found on LinkedIn.
The fake X accounts go to great lengths to appear legitimate. They link to brands’ actual websites and populate feeds with histories seemingly spanning decades by re-posting brands’ authentic posts.
Stalker 2 has been enjoyable jank, but it’s also getting rapidly fixed
“A-Life” fixes will ensure even more randomness in an already odd fallout zone.
When the impossibly punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released on November 20, after many delays (that included the Russian invasion of the developer’s native Ukraine), it seemed like it could have used even more delays.
Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem “wrong” in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to it. This expresses itself in both the game world, where a major villain can off themselves by walking through a window, and in the tech stack, where broken save games, DIY optimization, and other unmet needs have created thriving mod scenes.
Developer GSC Game World has been steadfastly patching the game since its release, and the latest one should nudge the needle a bit from “busted” to “charmingly wonky.” Amid the “Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments” in Patch 1.1, the big changes are to “A-Life.” In porting Stalker 2 to Unreal Engine 5, the developer faced a challenge in getting this global AI management system working, but it’s showing its weird self again.
US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft
Drone sightings cause worry; FBI said it hadn’t “identified anything anomalous.”
The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily banned drones over parts of New Jersey yesterday and said “the United States government may use deadly force against” airborne aircraft “if it is determined that the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”
The FAA issued 22 orders imposing “temporary flight restrictions for special security reasons” until January 17, 2025. “At the request of federal security partners, the FAA published 22 Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) prohibiting drone flights over critical New Jersey infrastructure,” an FAA statement said.
Each NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) affects a specific area. “No UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] operations are authorized in the areas covered by this NOTAM” unless they have clearance for specific operations, the FAA said. Allowed operations include support for national defense, law enforcement, firefighting, and commercial operations “with a valid statement of work.”
Intel is testing BIOS updates to fix performance of its new Core Ultra 200S CPUs
Not as serious as the 13th/14th-gen voltage problems, but the fixes are similar.
Intel’s Core Ultra 200S desktop processors—the company’s biggest overhaul of its desktop platform since 2021—consume less power and run a lot cooler than the company’s 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs. However, early reviewers found that the processors sometimes struggled to match, let alone beat, those older desktop CPUs in some tasks. This was particularly true for games, and people who build their own gaming PCs are a key constituency for these kinds of brand-new high-end chips.
Intel quickly blamed optimization issues for some of the problems, promising performance fixes sometime later in November or December, and the company has outlined the first batch of fixes in a lengthy support document. Of the five identified problems, Intel says it has fixed four; users can get those updates by installing Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.2161 or higher, updating their motherboard’s BIOS to the latest version. Non-performance-related blue screens related to Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat software have also been resolved, and users should update to the latest version if they’re still having issues.
The performance problems resolved via the Windows update are both related to a missing power plan specific to the Core Ultra processors—Intel didn’t have those power plans ready for reviewers, who did all their testing using the generic power profiles provided with Windows. Intel said that this by itself could reduce performance by between 6 and 30 percent, depending on the software.
Here’s what we learned driving Audi’s new Q6 and SQ6 electric SUVs
Audi’s mid-sized electric SUV is now on sale in the US, and we’ve tested it.
Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to San Francisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Q6 and SQ6. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
HEALDSBURG, Calif.—Earlier this summer, Ars got its first drive of Audi’s new Q6 e-tron on some very wet roads in Spain. Then, we were driving pre-production Q6s in Euro-spec. Now, the electric SUV is on sale in the US, with more power in the base model and six months more refinement for its software. But the venue change did not bring a change of weather—heavy rain was the order of the day, making me wonder if Audi is building its new electric vehicle on the site of an ancient rain god’s temple?
Of all its rivals, Audi appears to have settled into a nomenclature for its vehicles that at least makes a little sense. Odd numbers are for internal combustion engines, even numbers for EVs, although it also appends “e-tron” on the end to make that entirely clear… and give francophones something to snicker about. (Yes, the e-tron GT does not fit into this schema, but nobody’s perfect.)
The Q6 e-tron is also the most advanced EV to wear Audi’s four rings. Built on a new architecture called PPE (premium platform electric), at its heart is an 800 V powertrain with a 100 kWh (94.4 kWh useable) lithium-ion battery pack that powers a permanently excited synchronous motor driving the rear wheels, and in the case of the quattro versions, an asynchronous motor. The electric motors have 30 percent less energy consumption than those used in the Q8 e-tron, and are smaller and lighter.
The New Glenn rocket’s seven powerful engines may light up as soon as today
“Maybe, maybe, maybe today, maybe soon. I think it’s very soon.”
In a widely anticipated test, Blue Origin may ignite the seven main engines on its New Glenn rocket as soon as Thursday at Launch Complex-36 in Florida.
This is the final test the company must complete before verifying the massive rocket is ready for its debut flight, and it is the most dynamic. This will be the first time Blue Origin has ever test-fired the BE-7 engines altogether, in a final rehearsal before launch.
The company did not respond immediately to a request for comment, but the imminent nature of the test was confirmed by a NASA official.
A new, uncensored AI video model may spark a new AI hobbyist movement
Will Tencent’s “open source” HunyuanVideo launch an at-home “Stable Diffusion” moment for uncensored AI video?
The AI-generated video scene has been hopping this year (or twirling wildly, as the case may be). This past week alone we’ve seen releases or announcements of OpenAI’s Sora, Pika AI’s Pika 2, Google’s Veo 2, and Minimax’s video-01-live. It’s frankly hard to keep up, and even tougher to test them all. But recently, we put a new open-weights AI video synthesis model, Tencent’s HunyuanVideo, to the test—and it’s surprisingly capable for being a “free” model.
Unlike the aforementioned models, HunyuanVideo’s neural network weights are openly distributed, which means they can be run locally under the right circumstances (people have already demonstrated it on a consumer 24 GB VRAM GPU) and it can be fine-tuned or used with LoRAs to teach it new concepts.
Notably, a few Chinese companies have been at the forefront of AI video for most of this year, and some experts speculate that the reason is less reticence to train on copyrighted materials, use images and names of famous celebrities, and incorporate some uncensored video sources. As we saw with Stable Diffusion 3‘s mangled release, including nudity or pornography in training data may allow these models achieve better results by providing more information about human bodies. HunyuanVideo notably allows uncensored outputs, so unlike the commercial video models out there, it can generate videos of anatomically realistic, nude humans.
Krypto steals the show in Superman teaser
Footage gives us glimpses of Lex Luthor, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl and Superman’s plucky little white dog Kryto.
The Internet has been buzzing the last few days about James Gunn’s Superman reboot slated for release next year. The studio released a “motion poster” earlier this week set to a moody cover of John Williams’ “Superman March,” as well as a teaser for a teaser for the film. That teaser just dropped.
Clearly, given all the buildup, what director James Gunn wants for Christmas is for everyone to get excited over his Superman movie. And you know what? It kinda worked, especially since Superman’s dog Krypto makes an adorably welcome appearance.
Gunn describes his take as less of an origin story and more of a journey, with Superman struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origins with his small-town, adoptive human family. Gunn tapped David Corenswet to play Clark Kent/Superman, at 25 a bit more established than the young cub reporter of Smallville, for instance. Rachel Brosnahan plays Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo plays Jimmy Olsen, and Nicholas Holt is arch-nemesis Lex Luther. (Holt’s son shaved his head for the role.) Luther’s sidekicks are played by Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher and Terence Rosemore as Otis.