My Arcade just rolled out a pair of officially licensed Pac-Man gadgets to celebrate 45 years of the yellow dot-muncher. The Mighty Player looks like a tiny arcade cabinet with a 3.5-inch screen and wood-style casing, while the Pocket Player Max is the handheld version for people who want their nostalgia portable. Both devices come loaded with five games from the franchise, and they run about five to six hours on a charge.
The cabinet-style unit sells for 119.99 bucks and comes with an AC adapter, but the handheld is cheaper at 69.99 and throws in a protective case plus a screen protector. Both versions let you plug in headphones, adjust volume, and avoid the whole emulation setup nightmare that usually comes with playing old arcade...
Amazon just dropped its first 3nm chips for AI work in AWS data centers. Trainium2 handles the heavy training stuff with better memory design and more power efficiency, while Graviton5 takes care of regular cloud tasks without needing crazy cooling upgrades. Both chips help AWS pack more compute into the same racks, and they work together to support the massive model training setups everyone's running these days.
The wild part is Amazon's planning to bake in NVLink support for its next batch of processors. That means you can mix Amazon silicon with Nvidia GPUs in the same cluster without everything grinding to a halt at the interconnect layer. It's basically Amazon hedging its bets while still building out its own hardware, which makes...
Simon Cowell went from being the mean judge everyone remembers to admitting he was kind of a jerk on American Idol and X Factor after losing his parents, having a kid named Eric with his partner Lauren, and watching Liam Payne die. The music exec talked about how he regrets the harsh stuff he said on TV, like calling singers the worst in America and making fat jokes, and getting older, plus therapy made him realize fame absolutely wrecked some of the people he discovered.
The Netflix documentary about him trying to build another boy band shows his softer side, but he keeps saying that being famous or managing fame is both brutal. Payne's dying hit him hard since they talked about fatherhood before it happened, and Cowell wishes he had...
Tunisian authorities grabbed opposition lawyer Ayachi Hammami from his house near Tunis after an appeals court hit him with a five-year prison sentence for terrorism charges and plotting against the state. The conviction came from a sketchy mass trial where roughly 40 defendants got slammed with sentences reaching up to 45 years, and rights groups are calling the whole thing politically motivated garbage aimed at silencing critics of President Kais Saied.
Hammami dropped a pre-recorded video saying he was starting a hunger strike because the charges were pure political retaliation, and Human Rights Watch says most of the convicted people just did normal political stuff like meeting with diplomats. The arrests show how far the country...
Somalia's prime minister basically shrugged off Trump calling Somali immigrants garbage during a cabinet meeting rant, saying it was better to just ignore the insults since America still sends them around 128 million for fighting terrorists. Some Somalis back home were pissed their government stayed quiet about the disrespect, but analysts figure they need that US cash after droughts killed tens of thousands of people and wiped out aid programs.
Trump went off about how the country stinks and ramped up deportation raids targeting Somalis around Minneapolis, where most of the 79,400 Somali Minnesotans live as citizens or legal residents. The president keeps fixating on Rep Ilhan Omar and claims gangs are roaming the streets hunting for...
Algerian actress Biyouna died from lung cancer at age 73, and she became legendary for refusing to bail during the civil war when Islamist groups were murdering artists and threatening women who worked outside traditional roles. The performer got famous playing Fatma on national TV right after independence from France, and her raspy voice plus sharp attitude made her the face of working-class Algiers neighborhoods where she grew up.
She stopped performing for two years under death threats but came back because hiding at her mother-in-law's place in Oran was worse than dealing with terrorists, according to what she told reporters later. Director Nadir Moknèche's films turned her into a Mediterranean star, and French audiences went wild...
Trump dropped a pardon for Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who was staring down federal charges about taking 600k in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank. The congressman and his wife, Imelda, got hit with bribery and money laundering accusations for allegedly influencing US policy toward Azerbaijan and pressuring officials on behalf of the bank through shell company consulting scams.
The pardon wrecks another Justice Department case after the public integrity section already got nuked over the Eric Adams situation, and career prosecutors saw this coming for months since Trump keeps trashing corruption cases filed before he took office. Cuellar thanked the president on social media while Trump blamed the whole thing...
Charles Booker jumped into the Kentucky Senate race to replace Mitch McConnell with a pitch about guaranteed 40k yearly minimum wages and universal childcare, even though the state has not elected a Democratic senator since the 1990s. The progressive former state lawmaker already lost two Senate bids before, but thinks an open seat plus weak Republican opponents gives him a shot this time around.
He has to get through a messy primary against Amy McGrath, who blew 93 million against McConnell and still got destroyed by 20 points, plus some horse trainer guy. Booker got some clout from the Breonna Taylor protests and wants workers to strike against corporations, but Kentucky stays super red despite recent Democratic wins in places like...
Border Patrol agents rolled into New Orleans and started hitting up Home Depot parking lots where immigrants hang out looking for work, and the whole operation got the cringey nickname Catahoula Crunch from Homeland Security. Gregory Bovino brought his green team after doing similar sweeps in LA, Chicago, and Charlotte, where they grabbed way more regular people than actual criminals despite claiming they were hunting the worst offenders.
The feds say they want violent criminals who got released from jail, but Charlotte's numbers showed only 44 out of 370 arrests had any criminal history at all. Louisiana's Republican governor is hyped about it, while the Democratic mayor-elect is worried about due process violations, and immigrant...
