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With how difficult players are finding the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the final boss is a whole new level of pain. While some players are finding new ways to take it on, one player just got lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). 

Spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree’s final boss below. 

Player Gneurshk_ uploaded a video of their showdown with the final boss to Elden Ring’s subreddit with the caption, “What the f*ck?! I was robbed of the fight!!!” They had managed to get Promised Consort Radahn down to about two-thirds of his health, and apparently, that was all they needed. After nearly killing Gneurshk_, Radahn celebrated by phasing into the wall and disappearing completely. You can still see some attacks firing, but a couple of seconds go by and then he just dies.  

When I first saw this, my initial thoughts were just how lucky this player was, imagining getting a free pass to beat one of the hardest bosses in the DLC. But then I thought about how I’d actually feel if this had happened to me. Imagine putting your all into the DLC, fighting all the infuriating minor bosses,…

Fuel cells are one of those technological developments, a bit like nuclear fusion, that occasionally show promise but always seem at least a few major steps away from becoming a reality in day-to-day life. However, Japanese researchers seem to have made some major developments in the efficiency of the tech, thanks to that wonderful, magical substance, caffeine.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan have published a study in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, detailing their discovery that the addition of caffeine to platinum electrodes in fuel cells lessens the obstruction of efficient oxygen reaction. 

Currently the presence of water affects the performance of fuel cells by reacting with platinum catalysts, meaning that fuel cells need to make use of a substantial amount of platinum, a particularly valuable substance to maintain an effective reaction.

By immersing the platinum electrodes in an electrolyte solution containing caffeine, the researchers noted that there was a marked improvement in ORR activity, or oxygen reduction reaction. This was attributed to the caffeine absorbing onto the electro…

A new day for democracy, a new Helldivers 2 patch. Though this one is perhaps arriving to a more muted reception than usual, as both Arrowhead Game Studios and the game’s players lick their wounds following last week’s big controversy over Sony account linkage. A throwdown which ended in a gigantic u-turn, bodies in the road, and a reverse review-bombing.

Such is the drama, you’d be forgiven for forgetting there’s still a galactic war going on, and Arrowhead’s latest patch addresses a few annoyances that have cropped up along the way: as well as including one quiet revelation.

Remember how the Helldivers collectively annihilated two billion bugs in less than 24 hours? What a great day for democracy though, even at the time, some wondered if game master Joel had put his thumb on the scale to help out with this major order. Turns out that, appropriately enough, there was a bug in the system:

“Major orders with the ‘Kill task’ now track score correctly. Previously it counted the entire squad’s kills once for each player, meaning it would multiply the score by the number of people on the mission; this is now amended.”

Well we…

After a long stretch of teasing, mechs have finally arrived in Helldivers 2, providing players the opportunity to stomp around the battlefield in heavily-armored style. Unfortunately, with that good news comes a bit of bad: The arrival of the heavy-duty war machines has brought with it a renewed round of server errors.

“We are aware of an issue with players not being able to get into the game,” an Arrowhead developer said earlier today on the Helldivers Discord. “This happened when the Combat Walkers became available. People rushed to get it and it overwhelmed our backend. We are working to fix it as soon as we can. We want you to enjoy the Mech as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!”

Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt said the issue is “intermittent,” and luck may still get you in the door: PC Gamer Helldiver-in-Chief Morgan Park is in the game at this very moment, and has been for some time now, because I guess he just gets to do that kind of thing on a Friday. I, however, have been stuck at a “failed to connect to server” message for the past 20 minutes.

(Honestly compels me to admit that Morgan is actually playing Helldivers 2 for a work thing, which you…

On July 7 Sarah Silverman, a stand-up comedian—also known for her acting work as the voice of Vanellope in the Wreck-It Ralph movies—joined authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey in twin lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta.

As reported by The Verge earlier this week, the suit concerns Silverman’s written work, with all three claiming that both ChatGPT and LLaMA (Meta’s own large language model program) had been trained on data harvested from “shadow library” sites such as “Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others.” 

The OpenAI suit offers a trio of exhibits, which demonstrate the model’s ability to summarise copyrighted books with very few mistakes. These include The Bedwetter, a memoir by Silverman, Ararat, a horror-thriller by Christopher Golden, and Sandman Slim, a supernatural fantasy noir thriller by Richard Kadrey. 

In short—they’d been caught in the program’s net at some point, which the suit claims is an infringement of copyright: “Defendants, by and through the use of ChatGPT, benefit commercial and profit richly from the use of Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ copyrighted materials.”