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The stage is set for 32 club teams — including some of the top ones around the world — to compete for the chance to emerge as the champion of a revamped tournament. It hasn't gone great so far.

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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 13.

• The Browser Company has launched an AI-powered browser named Dia
• Dia integrates a personalized AI assistant directly into the address bar
• The AI lets you chat with tabs and will adapt to your style over time

The Browser Company has a new way to travel the web using AI. Best known for its Arc browser, the company has introduced a new browser called Dia, which was first teased at the end of last year. This release follows an announcement last month that active development on Arc was winding down and the company would place its full weight behind Dia.

Unlike traditional browsers that send users searching across tabs or toggling between tools to get things done, Dia places an AI assistant directly into the browser’s address bar.

The idea is that instead of opening ChatGPT in another tab or copying content into a separate tool to summarize or rewrite, you just type your question where you’d usually enter a URL. From there, the assistant can search the web, answer questions about the page you’re on, compare tabs, or even draft content in the tone of a specific site.

Dia is built on Chromium and resembles a standard browser at first glance, but the key differences are found in the way AI suffuses its structure. The AI is omnipresent and customizable, plus there is no need to log in to a separate service. You stay on the page, talk to the browser, and it responds.

In many ways, Dia's AI behaves similarly to most other AI chatbots. You can ask it to summarize an article you're reading, help write an email based on your calendar and browser activity, or generate code with your preferred programming language. You can also personalize how the assistant writes for you in terms of style.

One of the more distinctive features is the browser’s ability to take on the “voice” of a given webpage. If you’re reading a corporate blog or product page and want to generate a document in a similar tone, Dia can adapt its output to match the site’s style.

Dia AI

The features are designed to blend seamlessly with the browser and your other online activities. The AI not only sees your current tabs but also remembers previous interactions, allowing it to use context in its responses. The more you interact with it, the more personalized the AI is supposed to become.

Eventually, it will remember your writing preferences and know which tasks you ask for often and surface those options. Dia is currently in an invite-only beta for Mac, though you can sign up for a waiting list to gain access.

Dia is arriving as browsers race to incorporate AI, and many AI developers are working on browsers. Google Chrome is testing Gemini-powered overlays and sidebars, Opera has its Neon browser promising a full AI agent experience, and Perplexity has its new Comet browser with AI features.

For the many people understandably concerned about privacy when the AI is this clever, The Browser Company claims that Dia handles user context locally where possible and does not send browsing data to third-party providers unless required by the task.

Notably, Dia is centering AI as the main way to engage with the browser. The experience is meant to be rooted in user prompts and direct interaction, not automation. It's also worth noting that Dia means The Browser Company no longer sees Arc as worth spending resources on, despite praise for its design and rethinking of tab management. Dia is less about reinventing browser layouts and more about AI as core functions.

With AI rapidly becoming embedded in everything you touch online, Dia represents a very direct approach to making generative AI central to going online rather than treating AI as a bolt-on feature. The Browser Company is betting that it can be the primary interface for how users browse the web.

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Israel launched an airstrike on Iran overnight. Blasts were heard in the capital Tehran around 3am local time. Israel's defense ministry warned it expects missile and drone retaliation.

(Image credit: Vahid Salemi)

The White House could appeal the injunction issued by the judge but the decision in a federal court is a setback for President Trump.

(Image credit: Damian Dovarganes)

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the Trump administration will continue to build up its deportation operation in Los Angeles. Nationwide protests are planned for this weekend.

(Image credit: Etienne Laurent)

We go hands-on with Towa, a roguelike hack-and-slash published by Bandai Namco, that has its own cool twists on the genre.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 263, for June 13.

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Iran declared it would accelerate its nuclear enrichment program. That announcement came after the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Iran is violating its obligations. Meanwhile a new round of talks between Iran and the U.S. are scheduled for the weekend and President Trump says he is preventing Israel from striking Iran and he wants to see cooperation. We hear the latest developments and the voices of average Iranians who seem unfazed by news from the talks.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia: a name that's become near-synonymous with the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown.

Abrego Garcia was arrested by ICE agents on March 12th, as he was leaving his job in Baltimore. In the days and months that followed, the fate of the 29-year-old father of three was in the hands of the Trump administration and El Salvador's President.

At the time of his arrest the administration alleged he was an active member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.

His family and his legal team deny this. He was deported to a supermax prison in El Salvador despite a protective order that he should remain in the U.S.

But then – less than a month after his arrest, a federal judge and then the Supreme Court ruled the government should facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the U.S.

Now nearly three months after Abrego Garcia was sent to a prison in another country... he's back on US soil.

What happens now?

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

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The sun has been photographed and imaged many times, but never from the top or bottom.

Streaming service quietly has upped the hourly ad amount since the initial launch of Prime Video ads.

The company isn't sharing a lot of details yet, but promises more flexibility.

• SpiNNaker 2 supercomputer operates without disks or an operating system for unmatched speed
• Sandia’s system uses 152 cores per chip to mimic the parallelism of the human brain
• With 138,240 terabytes of DRAM, the SpiNNaker 2 relies entirely on memory speed

A new computing system modeled after the architecture of the human brain has been activated at Sandia National Laboratories in the US state of New Mexico.

Developed by Germany-based SpiNNcloud, the SpiNNaker 2 stands out not only for its neuromorphic design, but also for its radical absence of an operating system or internal storage.

Backed by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program, the system marks a noteworthy development in the effort to use brain-inspired machines for national security applications.

SpiNNaker 2 differs from conventional supercomputers

Unlike conventional supercomputers that rely on GPUs and centralized disk storage, the SpiNNaker 2 architecture is designed to function more like the human brain, using event-driven computation and parallel processing.

Each SpiNNaker 2 chip carries 152 cores and specialized accelerators, with 48 chips per server board. One fully configured system contains up to 1,440 boards, 69,120 chips, and 138,240 terabytes of DRAM.

These figures point to a system that is not just large but built for a very different kind of performance, one that hinges on speed in DRAM rather than traditional disk-based I/O.

In this design, the system’s speed is attributed to data being retained entirely in SRAM and DRAM, a feature SpiNNcloud insists is crucial, stating, “the supercomputer is hooked into existing HPC systems and does not contain any OS or disks. The speed is generated by keeping data in the SRAM and DRAM.”

SpiNNcloud further claims that standard parallel Ethernet ports are “sufficient for loading/saving the data,” suggesting minimal need for the elaborate storage frameworks typically found in high-performance computing.

Still, the real implications remain speculative. The SpiNNaker 2 system simulates between 150 and 180 million neurons, impressive, yet modest compared to the human brain’s estimated 100 billion neurons.

The original SpiNNaker concept was developed by Steve Furber, a key figure in Arm’s history, and this latest iteration appears to be a commercial culmination of that idea.

Yet, the true performance and utility of the system in real-world, high-stakes applications remain to be demonstrated.

“The SpiNNaker 2’s efficiency gains make it particularly well-suited for the demanding computational needs of national security applications,” said Hector A. Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of SpiNNcloud, emphasizing its potential use in “next-generation defense and beyond.”

Despite such statements, whether neuromorphic systems like SpiNNaker 2 can deliver on their promises outside specialized contexts remains an open question.

For now, Sandia’s activation of the system marks a quiet but potentially important step in the evolving intersection of neuroscience and supercomputing.

Via Blocks & Files

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President Trump warned that a "massive" war could break out in the Middle East over Iran's nuclear program, after the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Iran wasn't complying with its nonproliferation duties.

(Image credit: Iranian Presidency Office)

Demonstrators take to the streets in Kenya's capitol over the suspicious death of a popular blogger in police custody — a flashpoint of outrage in a country still reeling from last year's deadly crackdown on anti-tax protests.

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GOP lawmakers on Thursday blasted Democratic immigration policies as coddling violent criminals. Democrats portrayed Trump's escalating migrant sweeps as a dangerous assault on civil liberties.

(Image credit: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images)