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Pedro Pascal Finally Returns to the Apocalypse. Here's When to Watch 'The Last of Us' Season 2

CNET News - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 05:00
The record-breaking video game hit is back.
Categories: Technology

The Best Juicers of 2025

CNET News - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 05:00
Looking for a tasty blast of nutrients? We juiced a mountain of kale, carrots, ginger and more to find the best-performing juicer for every budget.
Categories: Technology

Chai Jing: China's Lesley Stahl returns to spotlight on YouTube

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 05:00

Chai Jing's interviews appear to strike a chord back home in China, even as YouTube is blocked in the country and popular platforms have deleted videos repackaging her show.

(Image credit: Chai Jing)

Categories: News

Worried About the Economy? A CD Can Keep Your Money Safe. Today's CD Rates, April 11, 2025

CNET News - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:30
Shield your cash from economic turmoil with one of these high-yielding accounts.
Categories: Technology

The controversial and obscure law being used against immigrant student protestors

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:03

The Trump Administration is using an obscure and controversial immigration law from 1952 to try to deport Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

(Image credit: Ted Shaffrey)

Categories: News

What ELSE does the president want to make great again? Find out in the quiz!

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:00

This week was more than tariffs! There were tortoises, genetically engineered animals, smart vacuums and a lot of other news!

Categories: News

Lightning strikes usually kill trees. This one just grows stronger

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:00
Dipteryx oleifera, often survives being hit by lightning — and even benefits from the overall effects. One of the trees is seen here at center, four weeks after it was hit by a lightning strike that killed neighboring trees (the brown mass at lower center).'/>

An author of a recent study about lightning's effect on trees in Panamanian forests says his team has gotten a large, positive response from people, including those who call the trees inspirational.

(Image credit: Evan Gora /Screenshot by NPR)

Categories: News

4 takeaways from the week: In a world that craves stability, Trump brings the chaos

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:00

President Trump's trade war sent global markets reeling this week. How Trump has handled tariffs shows the farthest thing from stability and predictability. A look at this and three other takeaways.

(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski)

Categories: News

How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 04:00

A DOGE staffer working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing questionable claims about noncitizens voting — apparently using data that court records suggest DOGE shouldn't have.

(Image credit: Scott Olson)

Categories: News

Beijing slaps 125% tariffs on U.S. goods in latest U.S.-China trade escalation

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 03:50

China signals the latest tariff hike will be its last round of tit-for-tat measures, prompting sharp falls in European shares, as Asian stocks end the day mixed.

(Image credit: Andy Wong)

Categories: News

Burials begin for victims in the Dominican nightclub collapse that killed 221

NPR News Headlines - Fri, 04/11/2025 - 00:23

Many people have been anxiously waiting for news of their loved ones, growing frustrated with the drip-drip of information provided by hospitals and the country's forensic institute.

(Image credit: Matias Delacroix)

Categories: News

Today's NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, April 11

CNET News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 22:47
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 11.
Categories: Technology

Will Adobe's AI agents cause the death of creativity?

TechRadar News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 22:30

The promise of a lot what we currently call AI is that these tools can streamline some of the most tedious bits of life. They can summarize that meeting you missed without having to read a transcript or they can trim a video without you manually cutting every silent second. Adobe has taken that to the next stage with its new range of AI agent features.

Adobe’s new agentic AI actively takes on full tasks, not just bits of larger projects. It can suggest edits in Photoshop and make them happen with a click. The AI can analyze hours of raw video footage in Premiere Pro, then make a judgment call about the best clips, assemble a rough cut, and even make color corrections. The AI agents will build an animated flyer from scratch in Express and read your PDFs in Acrobat, highlighting what they believe matters. They will even use them to produce a full sales pitch.

The idea of delegating the mind-numbing roles to AI so you can focus on the parts that engage your mind creatively is appealing. Adobe isn’t wrong when it says this could significantly shift how people carry out these projects. But it's also a moment fraught with uncertain implications.

The more we let the AI handle the heavy lifting, the fewer hours we spend manually adjusting every image or organizing the minutes of every meeting, and the easier it becomes for those passing out those assignments to devalue the creativity underlying the toil.

It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re still in control. That we’re just tweaking what the machine gives us. But at some point, if all we’re doing is picking from drop-downs and nudging sliders, how much of the “creative” in the “creative process” is left?

Creative business

Adobe says this isn’t about replacing creativity but amplifying it. The AI isn’t the artist; it’s the assistant. And in many ways, that’s true. The AI doesn’t know your brand voice, your weird sense of humor, or your obsession with putting subtle frog references in every campaign.

It can’t feel the rush of a good idea or the gut instinct that something just works. It doesn’t daydream in the shower or scribble storyboards on napkins. It just calculates.

Artists, whether professional painters, commercial designers, or guerrilla documentarians, all understand that the AI's help is only as good as the human vision. Even so, there are plenty of people who would reason that if an AI can generate 10 polished options in seconds, then it's not worth paying a human to spend hours coming up with one that may not work out.

After all, why wrestle with structure, tone, or typography when your digital agent is happy to make those calls for you?

In a business context, speed and cost often win out. If the AI can generate something that’s “good enough,” will anyone fight for the slower, messier, more human-made alternative?

If a marketing department can produce entire campaigns in minutes that are on-brand, on-message, and 85% ready to go, how long before creative teams become more like editors, checking the machine’s work rather than making their own?

Uncertain visions

This isn't happening today or tomorrow or even next year. There are still a thousand tiny decisions that only a human can make, or at least make well. The inevitable mockery and outrage that greets attempts to delegate creative tasks to AI fully makes that clear.

Remember the ad Google had for the Olympics suggesting a little girl use AI to write a fan letter? There's a reason Google had to answer a lot of questions about the point of that ad. There’s still a soul in the work. But the slope is starting to feel a little slippery.

I don't claim to have all the solutions, but I do have a few ideas on how to think about AI's place among creative tools. I do think there's a place for it, but at the same time, the more people and companies that reserve space in a project for actual creative exploration, the better.

Related to that, talking about the value of AI is certainly worthwhile, but it shouldn't outweigh highlighting human creativity. AI might be 'good enough' almost always, but rough ideas, weird experiments, and even bad drafts are still worth making. Sometimes, they're the only things worth remembering.

Creative future

Adobe does seem to get this. They talk a lot about keeping the human in the loop in their announcement, about making the creator the director and the agent the crew. They describe how these tools are transparent, responsive, and in service of creative goals. And for now, that feels mostly true. You can reject suggestions. You can still do things the long way. You’re not being forced to hand over the reins.

It still feels like a potential cultural shift as much as a technological one. The future Adobe is working toward is one where creative professionals may be expected to do more, faster, with fewer people, by relying on agents that never sleep and don’t charge hourly rates. That’s great for productivity. Maybe less great for careers built on the slow, joyful chaos of making stuff.

Agentic AI is not the death of creativity, but it might constrain its presence without conscious effort. If we don’t pay attention and let speed and convenience dictate artistic efforts, creativity might become mostly a hobby and not something valued outside of that. If ideas come from prompts and output comes from agents, humans will mostly be there to sign off.

That doesn’t have to happen. These tools can be incredible if we use them intentionally. They can give beginners a head start and help pros focus on what matters most. They can democratize design and storytelling in ways we’ve never seen. I'm sure we can come up with all new ways for creativity to flourish beyond the reach of any AI if we use our imagination.

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Categories: Technology

24 Great Mother's Day Gifts for New Mamas

CNET News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 18:44
Make this Mother's Day one to remember for the new mom in your life.
Categories: Technology

Why some are accusing Trump of manipulating stock markets

NPR News Headlines - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 18:17

Senators Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego have asked for "an urgent inquiry" into whether President Trump or others engaged in insider trading on advanced knowledge of his tariff policy changes.

(Image credit: Spencer Platt)

Categories: News

Supreme Court says Trump officials should help return wrongly deported Maryland man

NPR News Headlines - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 18:15

The Supreme Court ordered the administration to "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly taken to El Salvador and remains in custody there.

(Image credit: Alex Wong)

Categories: News

Google Docs' new AI voice will help you catch mistakes

TechRadar News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 17:30
  • Google Docs is introducing a new Audio Overviews feature
  • Audio Overviews can read your documents aloud or summarize them like a podcast
  • The tool aims to help users improve their writing and enable multitasking

Reading your writing out loud is one of the best ways to discover any mistakes or awkwardness that could use some editing. But as the writer, you might have a blind spot for your own typos or be too close to what you wrote to note where it needs some rewriting (or outright cutting).

So, if you don't always have a friend on hand to help, Google will start jumping in with a new Audio Overview feature for Google Docs.

Audio Overviews are already a part of Google's NotebookLM platform. Now, Google is sending that “natural-sounding” narration to Google Docs to read your documents aloud.

The goal is for the user to hear Audio Overviews read a document back to you, uncovering every mistyped word and stilted phrase you didn't hear when you wrote it.

(Image credit: Google)

Google is also including a second option besides just getting an AI recitation. You'll be able to hear what the company calls a “podcast-style overview” of the text, meaning just a collection of the highlights instead of every single word. For texts that are more than a dozen pages long and full of research, that could be a big help.

Alas, this isn't the kind of podcast-style review available on NotebookLM, which will generate an actual conversation between two AI voices discussing everything you've uploaded.

Reciting AI

Google claims the voices will be indistinguishable from an actual human, and if it's the same AI voice model employed by NotebookLM, that's not far from the truth. Of course, mispronouncing words, especially proper nouns they haven't heard before, is a very human foible when reading out loud. Still, that might not matter much if it also catches your actual errors.

The feature also has a major accessibility benefit as AI voices reading text have been a boon for people with impaired sight or other reading difficulties. An upgraded, more natural-sounding voice to read Google Docs would only make text more accessible. Plus, it could help anyone who just has a lot going on. You could 'read' a long report while driving, folding laundry, or doing anything else that keeps your eyes busy.

This isn't a world-shaking feature, but it's the kind of quality-of-life improvement to a widely used product, Google Docs, that AI is uniquely suited to provide. It's hard to argue that using AI to enhance productivity software to make it more adaptive is unnecessary.

Anything to streamline how you polish your writing will be a draw. Not that Google is unique in this pursuit, though, as both Microsoft and Apple have been experimenting with similar AI augmentation of their word processors.

Even so, Google Docs is the go-to for millions of people, students, and professionals alike, and this move makes the product that much easier to stick with.

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Categories: Technology

The FDA Just Cleared the Dexcom G7 15-Day, the Longest-Lasting CGM

CNET News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 17:27
The new sensor — expected to launch in the second half of 2025 — will provide easier diabetes management for eligible users.
Categories: Technology

Best-Sounding Bluetooth Speakers for 2025

CNET News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 17:08
There are so many portable Bluetooth speakers on the market, but which ones sound the best? Our experts tested many to find the cream of the crop, and here they are.
Categories: Technology

Best Internet Providers in Temple, Texas

CNET News - Thu, 04/10/2025 - 17:00
Looking for the top internet providers for your home? CNET experts tested and compiled a list of the most reliable options to explore in Temple.
Categories: Technology

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