Q1. ギズモード・ジャパン20周年へのコメントをお願いします。ギズモードが誕生したのって、iPhoneがまだ登場する前だったんですねぇ。僕はもう、スマホがない世の中を思い出せない人間になってしまいました。こいつ（初代iPhone）はとんで…

The Los Angeles Times first calls Ridley Scott's newest movie "a postapocalyptic thriller that trades zombies for pandemics and asks whether hope can outlast catastrophe." But besides The Dog Stars, Scott is also working on an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" starring Hugh Jackman, and is thinking about turning one of his past films into a musical. ("I can't tell you which one because they're being difficult.") The common theme, they suggest, is a director who allows his stories to "speak through evocative, immersive images rather than unnecessary exposition." The British director says it's because he got his start in advertising after attending the Royal College of Art in London. After 1982's neon-coated sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," Scott notably made the iconic Apple Macintosh computer ad "1984," a memorable Orwellian-themed clip that contained suggestions of the dystopias that would continue to fascinate Scott in his filmmaking. "Advertising in England at that point became a competitive art form," he says, pointing to the notorious "Adland Five," a group of directors that included Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Scott and his brother Tony. "I've got a show reel which is 50 years old which would entertain the s — out you. Hasn't aged at all. Our visual drive changed the face of how films looked." That's apparent in Scott's latest, "The Dog Stars" (in theaters Friday), a film about survival after the end of the world. It's based on Peter Heller's 2012 novel and set in Colorado 10 years in the future after an aggressive flu has decimated much of the population. Those remaining alive use any means necessary to stay that way, resulting in instability, brutality and, more hopefully, connection... These days, Scott develops movies with his production company, Scott Free, which he founded with his late brother Tony in 1995. Before that he says he struggled to find good scripts. And rarely has someone handed one to him. "I've only ever had three films land on my desk," he says. "One was 'Alien,' which I was fifth choice for after Robert Altman." He makes a face. "Can you imagine offering Robert Altman 'Alien'? How stupid can you get?" Another was 2015 space adventure "The Martian," which Scott says had been sitting on a shelf for two years before it was sent to him. Scott's grounded, semi-comedic take on Andy Weir's novel resulted in seven Oscar nominations. The third screenplay to materialize was "The Dog Stars." "I read it and I was blown away," Scott says. Deadline notes that Scott is already re-writing the third prequel to Alien, citing Scott's comments to French outlet AlloCiné. "The one that just came out [2024's Alien: Romulus] was OK. I think it needs some help. So, I've gone back in." Scott continued, "I've already got a footprint for the next Alien.... I'm picking up where we left off in Covenant with Micheal Fassbender, who now thinks he's Ozymandius." With the sequel bringing back Fassbender's futuristic AI droid, Scott sees an opportunity to explore the repercussions of artificial intelligence in our current world. "I like the fact that AI has gone off the rails," said Scott of where the character is at the end of Covenant. "If we go AI, the moment we discover it's off the rails is too late. It could switch every digital thing off in the world like that. You'd have fucking chaos. It's that kind of stuff that's scary." Scott tells the Los Angeles Times that the malfunctioning AI character fascinates him, and in the movie will be creating a "brave new world for himself... AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb..." So far, Scott says he hasn't implemented AI technologies into his filmmaking. He holds up his "Treasure Island" Ridleygrams [hand-drawn storyboards] and shakes them at the camera. "I can compete with an AI without any problem making images," he says. "But it's coming, inevitably." Scott was not involved in the forthcoming Prime Video series "Blade Runner 2099," out in November. "I can't blame my lawyers and my agents at that time, but somehow we let 'Blade Runner' go," he says. "And when you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." (He was more involved in Noah Hawley's recent "Alien: Earth" series, which he calls "pretty damn good....") Does that mean he thinks about his legacy as a filmmaker? He does, but not often. "When you think of your legacy, you're too near the end," Scott says. "I'm not near the end." He looks up from his drawings. "I've had a riotous time," he says. He corrects himself: "I'm having a riotous time."

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Rockstar Games has released a 26-minute "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI, due for release November 19th. After one day the video had nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and when Netflix streamed the footage, "some viewers had to refresh the page after receiving error messages, indicating high usage levels," reports CNBC: "Some members briefly experienced an issue accessing Netflix, but we quickly recovered," the company told CNBC. Game streaming platform Twitch, where many viewers were posting their reactions, also experienced bandwidth issues when the trailer was released, according to analysts at Wells Fargo. CNBC notes predictions the game could become one of the most profitable entertainment products of all time, while the Washington Post predicting it's "about to be the biggest pop media event of the year, if not the decade." The data backs this up. The latest evidence arrived Thursday, when Netflix viewership surged for the long-awaited first look at gameplay footage, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm estimates "GTA VI" has already received about 4.6 million preorders. Box office blockbusters like "The Odyssey" take weeks to hit $1 billion. "GTA V" famously did it in three days. Analyst firm Newzoo projects the new game could generate between $3.3 billion and $5.2 billion by the end of its launch week in November... The influence of the series, created by Rockstar Games, extends beyond sales records. In 2025, "GTA V" accumulated 1.89 billion hours watched despite being a 12-year-old title, according to Stream Hatchet. Much of those hours are spent watching people role-play in "GTA Online," particularly through role-play servers managed by studio Cfx.re, which was acquired by Rockstar in 2023. By 2024, the studio said more than 20 million players used its platforms. GTA role-play involves players pretending to be cops, robbers, hapless retail workers or any functioning member of society within the online game... The game can lift up music sales and streams. Tom Petty's 1989 song "Love is a Long Road" saw stream numbers increased by nearly 37,000 percent on Spotify after it was the soundtrack to the debut "GTA VI" trailer in 2023, according to Universal Music Publishing Group. Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief and co-founder of analysis firm The Game Business, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that GTA 5 is still in the top five bestselling video games every year, despite being released 13 years ago, reports CNBC: The response to Thursday's gameplay debut indicated that leaks of the content in advance would not impact the launch commercially, he continued. Rockstar Games, which makes the GTA franchise, had called the leaks "heartbreaking...." The GTA 6 preview follows a mixed reaction from players to the news that GTA 6 would only be released as a digital download, with no physical disc. The alleged source of the leaked content has claimed the leaks were a protest over Rockstar's release strategy, and Sony's plan to end to new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Speaking on the last earnings call on Aug. 7, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said discs did not make sense to the consumer, adding that its business was "well over 90% digitally distributed." Data from Circana shows the sale of physical game discs in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level on record, with spending at $85 million.

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「呪い」はなくても、科学的な意味での災いは降りかかるかもしれない。「古代エジプトの墓には呪いがかけられている」というイメージがありますが、少なくともスコットランド国立博物館の学芸員ダニエル・ポッター氏によると、それはただの迷信なんだそう。と…

現時点において、ほぼ世界最強レベルの14型ノートPC。それはASUS「GA403WW-AI9R5080W」である。4Kや8K動画のエンコードや、PhotoShopの画像加工を高速にしたいから購入した。1秒でも早く作業を進める。それはパソコンで仕事をしてい...続きを読む

Q1. ギズモード・ジャパン20周年へのコメントをお願いします。ギズモード・ジャパン20周年、おめでとうございます。20年前、ギズモードがローンチされたばかりの頃のネットは、今とは別世界でした。まだまだアングラ感が漂う中で偏愛を言語化するゆ…

ジムに行かなくなって久しい私ですが、通っていたときの必需品は「音楽」でした。以前は、スマホの画面で映画を流したり、YouTube動画を見たりしたこともあったんです。でも、音楽が一番捗る。リズムとペースと前向きな歌詞で、ガンガンいける（気がす…

イーロン・マスク氏率いるTeslaが公式Xアカウントを更新。アメリカ現地時間で9月3日にサイバーキャブのイベントを行うとティザー画像を公開しました。一部メディアには「サイバーキャブローンチイベント」の招待状も届いているようで、未来の完全自動…

Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books? It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this? At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

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Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the independent DuckDB Foundation. From the report: Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project's technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects. [...] Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September. Jordan Tigani, the CEO of MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees Amazon's acquisition as a predictable move to turn DuckDB's growing popularity into an AWS business. "That's Amazon's playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "they're not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source." Tigani also believes the deal could ultimately strengthen DuckDB, since Amazon has an incentive to keep the project open and widely adopted: "If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money."

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文脈理解がうますぎる、Apple。突如として発表された、M6およびM5 Pro搭載のMac mini。見た目は変わらず、けれども中身はガッツリ進化した、まさに小さなモンスターです。あわせて新CMもYouTubeで公開されています。Mac m…

知られざる街の歴史と、昭和の消えた風景を紐解く歴史系YouTuber『Old Japanese Memories』をご紹介します。知られざる街の歴史と、昭和の消えた風景を紐解く歴史系YouTuber『Old Japanese Memories』今週のピッ...続きを読む

ギャロウェイ氏は、スペースXの巨額の評価額は、6月の新規株式公開（IPO）時に同社に異例なほど有利に働いた市場メカニズムも一因だと指摘しました。

米Amazonで、スマートスピーカーのEchoシリーズ、電子書籍リーダーのKindleシリーズ、ストリーミングメディアプレイヤーのFire TV Stick、WIFIルーターのeeroなど、自社ハードウェアを一斉値上げ。最も値上げ幅が大きい…

まだ進化の余地があるなんて。新型Beatsのワイヤレスヘッドホンに関するリーク情報が続々登場です。Apple傘下のヘッドホンメーカーが手掛ける新型の“Beats 360”は、どうやら大幅なアップグレードを遂げている模様。カメラ機能付きのAi…

マネーの規模感がまるで違う…。「データセンターを宇宙に建設する」というSFライクなアイディアは、実は着々と進行しています。地表での建設はいずれ限界を迎えるでしょうから、いっそ軌道上に置いてしまうというのは悪くない方法です。実際、スタートアッ…

僕らが望んだアップデート、ついに？正直、最近は物足りないな…とも感じていたのが、Apple Watch。年々薄くなっていくのは嬉しいのですが、チップは一昨年のSeries 10と最新のSeries 11で同じ「S10」を採用するなど、え？ …

思ったより早いぞ！9月にはiPhone 18 Proや折りたたみiPhoneがやってくる！ なんて期待されていますが（iPhoneの噂まとめはこちら）、今年の秋は新製品ラッシュになる可能性があります。iPad miniも10月末までに登場す…

AIデータセンター建設反対で、今、急激に増えているデモ活動。とくにアメリカでは活発で、42州で150件近いデモ活動が起きています。AIデータセンター誘致を反対する地域の人々がもっとも心配するのは環境、とくに水資源への影響です。すでにデータセ…

AIをローカルでガンガン動かすためのMacになってきました。Appleが、新しい「Mac Studio」を発表しました。搭載チップは「M5 Max」と、新登場の「M5 Ultra」の2種類です。今回かなり力が入っているのが、AI処理性能。M…