Netflix Offers More Netflix House Details

Are you ready to see your favorite Netflix shows brough to life? Netflix this week offered up some new details on the company's new immersive fan based experience that does just that! The two colossal complexes set to open later this year in Philadelphia and Dallas, with Las Vegas slated for 2027, transforms over 100K square feet of former department store space into interactive experiences based on Netflix's most popular content. 

Dive into the world of your favorite Netflix shows at Netflix House, where entry is completely free! Once inside, you can choose from a mix of free and paid activities to immerse yourself in the fun. ake selfies with beloved characters like Queen Charlotte, enjoy screenings of hit movies like KPop Demon Hunters, have a meal and a cocktail at NETFLIX BITES, or embark on an adventure with friends, channeling the ONE PIECE crew. 

According to Netflix guests will be able to experience interactive sets from most of their most popular shows including Wednesday, Squid Game, ONE PIECE, Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters, Love Is Blind, and A Knives Out Mystery franchise  Since each Netflix House regularly updates its offerings, you may have an entirely different adventure the next time you return. 

For full details 

New Smart Glasses May Help the Hard of Hearing

Smart glasses have been looking better and better these days with advances in technology and improvements with AI, Now a new tech company is launching a pair of “always-on” AI-powered smart glasses that listen to, record, and transcribe every conversation and then display relevant information to the wearer in real time. Halo, the startup that’s developing the technology says their "goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on.”

“The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say … kinda like IRL Cluely,” Ardayfio told TechCrunch during their interview.  “If somebody says a complex word or asks you a question, like, ‘What’s 37 to the third power?’ or something like that, then it’ll pop up on the glasses,” Ardayfio added. 

While the goal of Halo and the company's founders isn't specially to augment hearing for the hearing impaired it is easy to see how the new devices and their ability to hear what you [should] hear and automatically feed you insights on the display could be beneficial to deaf and hard of hearing users. Halo would give you the ability to not just instantly understand your conversations more clearly, it could also translate for you, have recall of previous conversations and/or help you accurately answer questions you may not have fully understood! 

For now, Halo X glasses only have a display and a microphone, but no camera, although the developers are exploring the possibility of adding it to a future models. Users will still need to have their smartphones handy  as the glasses are tethered to an accompanying appt. So you'll need your phone to help power the glasses and get “real time info prompts and answers to questions,” per Nguyen.  Under the hood, the smart glasses use Google’s Gemini and Perplexity as its chatbot engine, according to the two co-founders. Gemini is better for math and reasoning, whereas they use Perplexity to scrape the internet, they said. 

The Halo X is available for -pre-order for $249 now with no details on exact shipping dates.

Why Reddit is Blocking the Internet Archive for AI Scraping (and its $200M Plan)

Reddit is now restricting the Internet Archive (IA) from indexing its popular threads, a move prompted by Reddit's discovery that some AI companies were circumventing its scraping policies. Instead of scraping Reddit directly, these firms were allegedly pulling data from the IA's archived content. In response, Reddit is now limiting the Wayback Machine to only archive screenshots of its homepage. This means the archive will no longer be a comprehensive record of deleted posts, user activity, or various subreddit cultures. This restriction significantly reduces the IA's utility as a resource for documenting and preserving Reddit's vast content.

Reddit's spokesperson, Tim Rathschmidt, suggested that the Internet Archive could take steps to better protect against AI scraping. Rathschmidt also cited privacy concerns, stating that the Wayback Machine problematically archives content that users have deleted. He noted that until the IA can better "respect user privacy" and comply with Reddit's policies regarding deleted content, the restrictions would remain in place. Although some Redditors previously used the Wayback Machine to find deleted comments, many others have pointed out that several alternative tools exist for this purpose.

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It's probable that Reddit's decision is also financially motivated. The company has recently made lucrative licensing deals with AI companies like OpenAI and Google, with the Google deal reportedly worth $60 million over three years. Reddit expects to earn over $200 million from similar licensing agreements in the next three years. By limiting the Internet Archive's access, Reddit may be aiming to force AI firms to strike similar deals directly with them, rather than getting their data for free from the Wayback Machine.

Conclusion

This situation highlights a growing tension between content platforms, AI companies, and digital archivists. While Reddit claims its primary concern is user privacy and protecting against policy violations, the financial incentives from licensing deals with AI firms are a significant factor. For the Internet Archive, this presents a challenge to its mission of preserving the open web, as a major source of online discourse is now largely inaccessible for archiving. The ongoing discussions between Reddit and the Internet Archive will likely determine the future of how Reddit's content is preserved and accessed outside of its platform.

You can learn more about this topic by visiting these articles from The Verge and Ars Technica.

Note this content was summarized by Google Gemini