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Amazon has created a new rule limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.

The company announced the new limitations in a post on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Monday. “While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations,” read the statement. KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and list them for sale on Amazon’s site.

Amazon told the Guardian that the limit is set at three titles, though this number may be adjusted “if needed”. The company confirmed that there was previously no limit to the number of books authors could list a day.

The Mississippi Legislature’s attempt to create four unelected special circuit court judges in Hinds County is unconstitutional, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled today, while upholding House Bill 1020’s creation of a single inferior court in Jackson’s Capitol Complex Improvement District. Justices heard arguments in the case in July.

In an 8-0 decision, the justices agreed with resident plaintiffs Ann Saunders, Sabvreen Sharriff and Dorothy Triplett’s argument that H.B. 1020 “Section 1’s creation of four new appointed ‘temporary special circuit judges’ in the Seventh Circuit Court District for a specified, almost-four-year term violates our Constitition’s requirement that circuit judges be elected for a four-year term.”

“While Section 1 calls these new judges ‘special circuit judges’ on paper, we see nothing special or unique about them—certainly nothing expressly tethering them to a specific judicial need or exigency,” says the ruling, which reversed a lower court decision. “Rather, Section 1’s text merely creates four unelected circuit court judgeships, appointed into Hinds County to serve three-and-a-half years instead of four.” Justice James D. Maxwell II wrote for the majority.

If H.B. 1020 had been fully upheld, Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael K. Randolph, who is white and recused himself from the case, would have appointed four unelected circuit court judges in Hinds County, which is more than 70% Black. Opponents said doing so would have diminished the majority-Black population’s ability to select their own judges.

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.

Copilot will begin to roll out in its early form as part of our free update to Windows 11, starting Sept. 26 — and across Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot this fall. We’re also announcing some exciting new experiences and devices to help you be more productive, spark your creativity, and to meet the everyday needs of people and businesses.

YouTube Video

Norway’s Fyllingsdalen tunnel is a showstopping piece of urban cycling infrastructure — for a city where car-centric development still dominates.

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Bergen’s most recent attraction is a unique one: In April, the city of around 270,000 opened the Fyllingsdalen tunnel, a three-kilometer bike-pedestrian pathway that was bored through a mountain. Local officials proudly declared Fyllingsdalen tunnel to be “the world’s longest purpose-built cycling tunnel.” (The Snoqualmie tunnel in Washington State is lengthier, but it used to be rail line.)

Fyllingsdalen tunnel is about as photogenic as an urban bike path can get. Inside, it offers art installations and creative lighting; at its exit, there are stunning mountain views. CNN and Smithsonian have lavished it with international attention, and visiting cycling advocates like the Netherlands-based authors Melissa and Chris Bruntlett have swooned.

Last month I hopped on a bike to traverse the tunnel for myself, and I can confirm that it is an ingenious piece of healthy, climate-friendly infrastructure; I have never seen anything remotely like it. The tunnel is also practical, providing a car-free connection between Bergen’s bustling city center and a fast-growing neighborhood on the other side of the mountain.

But — there is a big “but.” As awe-inspiring as Fyllingsdalen tunnel is, it is still only a Band-Aid fix for Bergen’s decades of car-oriented development. The tunnel reflects the city’s current efforts to shift local trips away from cars, but that goal clashes with a national government whose transportation policies still revolve around the automobile. In such an environment, even the most spectacular bike path can only do so much

Five and a half years and endless requests from the community later, Rare has announced it'll finally be adding private servers to Sea of Thieves - meaning a single crew of up to four players can explore the world without fear of PvP encounters - starting this December, as part of the multiplayer pirate adventure's Season 10.

Season 10 itself gets underway on 19th October, and will introduce a major new feature each month ahead of 2024 - essentially meaning all content originally planned for 2023 will arrive before the end of the year, despite a painfully protracted, seven-month-long Season 9.

First up, on 19th October, Sea of Thieves will introduce Guilds, described as a "new way for players to form meaningful bonds beyond their immediate crew". Essentially, any player that's reached Captain status and has their own ship can start a guild - picking a name, logo, and emblem when then do so - which can then support up to 24 invited players.

I figured I was going to have to uninstall my Cyberpunk 2077 mods before checking out Phantom Liberty and update 2.0⁠. Most of the mods I went for on my last playthrough were difficulty and loot adjustments that'd clash with 2.0's big changes, and for the rest, mod authors would likely need to update their files to play nice with the patch. What I wasn't expecting was needing to do a clean reinstall⁠—complete with deleting some leftover files⁠—to clear up a persistent crash on startup.

I'm not sure exactly what borked my game, but big, foundational mod projects like Cyber Engine Tweaks need to be updated with each major patch in turn, and some users in the past have reported similar crash on startup issues to what I experienced. Mod author yamashi has noted on the mod's page that they will be working on a patch 2.0 version of Cyber Engine Tweaks in the coming days.

In the meantime, if you're a returning player, you may want to preemptively pull the nuclear option and do a clean install of Cyberpunk 2077 following CD Projekt's own instructions. The developer recommends:

• First, backup your save files in user/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077
• Disable Steam or GOG's cloud save feature for the game (I forgot to do this but still cleared up my issue)
• Uninstall Cyberpunk and delete the following folders:
• The Cyberpunk 2077 folder in your Steam or GOG directory (ex: Seam/steamapps/common/Cyberpunk 2077)
• user/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077
• user/AppData/Local/REDEngine
• user/AppData/Local/CD Projekt Red
• Restart your PC, reinstall the game, restore your saves, then reactivate cloud saves if you disabled them.

Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty will take a new role at Ubisoft once that game is done: executive producer of everything Tom Clancy's The Division. That includes oversight of all the Division-branded games: The Division 2, The Division Heartland, mobile game The Division Resurgence, and, what's this? The Division 3, which Ubisoft casually announced in the press release about Gerighty's new job.

Star Wars Outlaws and The Division 2 studio Massive Entertainment is "actively building a team" for The Division 3 right now, the press release says. As for Gerighty's current project, open world Star Wars game Outlaws, Ubisoft says he "remains fully committed" to it and that he'll "remain on the project through launch" before starting his new role.

The Division 3 is very early in development then, which helps explain the lowkey announcement—there's no trailer or even artwork to share. We've seen similarly concise, early game announcements from other big developers in recent years. Blizzard, for instance, announced last year that it's working on a survival game without giving it a name, a move we interpreted as an effort to recruit talent.

Jonathan Guessford was first confronted, then hassled, then pursued, then pulled over, and, finally, cited for a moving violation he didn’t commit by Delaware state troopers.

Guessford managed to attract the attention of Corporal Stephen Douglas, Trooper Nicholas Gallo, and Master Corporal Raiford Box by calling attention to a state police speed trap. As is detailed in Guessford’s lawsuit [PDF] (and captured on multiple cameras, including Guessford’s phone), the officers rolled up on Guessford armed with their attitudes and some convenient lies.

This is from the NBC report on the recent lawsuit settlement:

The cell phone video shows troopers approaching Guessford, who was standing in a grassy area next to the shoulder of Route 13 north of Dover. Douglas told Guessford that he was “disrupting traffic,” while Gallo, based on a witness report, said Guessford was “jumping into traffic.”

“You are a liar,” Guessford told Gallo.

“I’m on the side of the road, legally parked, with a sign which is protected by the First Amendment,” he told troopers.

Dascham video shows Douglas twice lunging at Guessford to prevent him from raising his sign. Gallo then ripped it from his hands and tore it up.

A lawsuit, filed by patrons of a county library in Arkansas, has been allowed to move forward by a federal court. The First Amendment lawsuit plausibly alleges the library’s decision to move anything determined to be “LGBTQ” from the children’s section to the adult’s section violates the First Amendment right to equitable access to information. (via Courthouse News Service)

Here’s how this started, according to the decision [PDF] that moves this lawsuit forward:

[I]n late 2022 or early 2023 the Crawford County Library System implemented a policy under which its library branches must remove from their children’s sections all books containing LGBTQ themes, affix a prominent color label to those books, and place them in a newly-created section called the “social section.” Plaintiffs allege this policy was imposed on the Library System by the Crawford County Quorum Court in response to political pressure from constituents who objected, at least partly on religious grounds, to the presence of these books in the children’s section.

The fallout from the big Unity mess continues, with the MonoGame team jumping in to present a new plan for the future of this open-source and cross-platform framework for game developers.

If you've not actually heard of MonoGame you've likely still played something originally created with it including the likes of Bastion, Streets of Rage 4, Chasm, FEZ, Axiom Verge, Stardew Valley, Tooth and Tail and a great many more (although some moved to FNA). That's just a few taking from their limited showcase page.

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The best part is that DLSS 3.5 not only brings Ray Reconstruction support but is supported across all RTX GPUs and also supports the latest DLSS Super Resolution AI framework for much better image reconstruction.

The elimination of these denoisers also means that the engine is less crammed up and has more room to breathe which as a result opens up room for better performance too. We will get to the performance aspect in a bit but for now, let's talk about how to enable DLSS 3.5 within Cyberpunk 2077.

(OP - here's some related video links)
Gamers Nexus Cyberpunk 2.0 Ray Reconstruction COmparison
Hardware Unboxed- Better Ray Tracing, (Almost) No Cost -

The 4X strategy genre has a new upstart – with Paradox’s Interactive’s Millenia taking aim at Civilization’s crown.

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Enter Millenia, a new IP from Paradox Interactive, developed by independent developer C Prompt Games. You won’t know C Prompt – they’re new – but core members of their team have worked on titles like Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo. The strategy pedigree is there.

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Announcement Trailer