Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be fully realized, and many for good reason. Particularly when it comes to user interfaces and how humans interact with computers, a lot of wild ideas deserved the obscure burials they got.

But some deserved better. Nearly every aspiring interface designer believed the way we were forced to interact with computers was limiting and frustrating, but one man in particular felt the emphasis on design itself missed the forest for the trees. Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well.

What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know.

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On Thursday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they have signed a non-binding agreement to revise their partnership, marking the latest development in a relationship that has grown increasingly complex as both companies compete for customers in the AI market and seek new partnerships for growing infrastructure needs.

"Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership," the companies wrote in a joint statement. "We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety."

The announcement comes as OpenAI seeks to restructure from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, a transition that requires Microsoft's approval, as the company is OpenAI's largest investor with more than $13 billion committed since 2019.

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A child in Los Angeles has died of a measles-related brain disorder stemming from an infection in infancy, the Los Angeles County health department reported Thursday .

Specifically, the child died of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare, but always fatal complication that strikes years after an initial measles infection. The health department's announcement offered few details about the child, including the child's age, but said that the child had contracted the virus before they were old enough to be vaccinated against measles. The first of two recommended doses of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is given between 12 and 15 months.

"This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members," Muntu Davis, a Los Angeles County health officer, said in a statement. "Infants too young to be vaccinated rely on all of us to help protect them through community immunity. Vaccination is not just about protecting yourself—it's about protecting your family, your neighbors, and especially children who are too young to be vaccinated."

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NASA's interim administrator Sean Duffy was fired up on Wednesday when he joined a teleconference to talk about new scientific findings that concerned the potential for life to have once existed on Mars.

"This is exciting news," said Duffy about an arrow-shaped rock on Mars found by NASA's Perseverance rover. The rock contained chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. The findings were intriguing, but not conclusive. Further study of the rocks in an advanced lab on Earth might prove more definitive.

Duffy was ready, he said, to discuss the scientific results along with NASA experts on the call with reporters. However, the very first question—and for any space reporter, the obvious one—concerned NASA's on-again, off-again plan to return rocks from the surface of Mars for study on Earth. This mission, called Mars Sample Return, has been on hold for nearly two years after an independent analysis found that NASA's bloated plan would cost at least $8 billion to $11 billion. President Trump has sought to cancel it outright.

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We're one month away from the theatrical release of TRON: Ares , and Disney is seeking to stoke interest with a new trailer that shows the titular program going back to the original 1984 grid—and encountering an unexpected figure: the one and only Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).

(Some spoilers for Tron and Tron: Legacy below.)

As previously reported , TRON: Legacy ended with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn, preventing the digital world from bleeding into the real world, as planned by the Grid's malevolent ruling program, Clu. He brought with him Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm targeted for extinction by Clu.

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Back in 1971, the late physicist Stephen Hawking made an intriguing prediction: The total surface area of a black hole cannot decrease, only increase or remain stable. So if two black holes combine, the newly formed black hole will have a larger surface area. This became known as Hawking's area theorem. Analysis of the gravitational signal from a black hole merger detected in January provides the best observational evidence to date in support of Hawking's theorem, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The breakthrough just happens to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the LIGO collaboration's Nobel Prize-winning first detection of a black hole merger. A second paper has been submitted (but not yet accepted), placing theoretical limits on a predicted third tone at a higher pitch that could be lurking in the event's gravitational wave signal.

Now known as LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK), the collaboration searches the Universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry , using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

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Critics are slamming Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) new AI policy framework , which they claim would give the White House unprecedented authority to allow Big Tech companies to make "sweetheart" deals with the Trump administration to void laws designed to protect the public from reckless AI experiments.

Under the framework, Cruz calls for a "light-touch" regulatory approach to "advance American leadership" in AI and ensure that "American values" are at the heart of the world's leading technology—not Chinese values.

Unsurprisingly, the framework requires blocking "burdensome" state AI regulations, as well as foreign ones. Cruz unsuccessfully helped push for a similar decadelong moratorium on state AI laws as part of Republicans' "big beautiful" budget bill. And more recently, he lost a bid to punish states for regulating AI, ultimately voting against his own measure in the face of overwhelming bipartisan opposition.

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VMware will lose a significant chunk of business over the next three years, according to Gartner research VP Julia Palmer.

Of course, some organizations have already abandoned VMware or are plotting partial or total migrations . Broadcom acquired the virtualization business in November 2023 and made sweeping changes that alienated many customers . The biggest concerns have been higher costs driven by a shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions and the bundling of products into fewer, more expensive SKUs and a reduction in the number of channel partners that are allowed to resell VMware technologies. The new VMware business model favors large organizations, forcing many small- to medium-sized businesses to explore alternatives.

However, the wave of departures that Palmer spoke of today at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Gold Coast, Australia, comes from customers who use VMware technology through hyperscalers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), as reported by The Register . Soon after its acquisition, Broadcom made it so that hyperscalers are unable to resell VMware subscriptions to customers using hyperscaler cloud services that rely on VMware. Because of this change, 35 percent of VMware workloads will migrate elsewhere by 2028, Palmer predicted, noting that hyperscalers will push their customers to the public cloud.

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For seven years, the discussion around Hollow Knight: Silksong focused on the cult-like levels of devotion among fans patiently waiting for the sequel . Now that Silksong has been available for about a week, though, that discussion has turned decisively toward seemingly endless takes on the game's relative difficulty (or lack thereof). The discussion has gotten so loud that the developers at Team Cherry have vowed to implement a "slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter" in a coming patch .

So is Silksong too difficult for its own good? Or do players just have to "get good" and stop whining?

To help answer those questions, we felt it was a good time to bust out the Ars Difficulty Matrix (ADM ), which we first used to analyze Elden Ring 's difficulty in 2022 . By breaking down the various ways a game can be "difficult," the ADM can more precisely critique the ways Silksong is and is not designed to challenge players, both for good and for ill.

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