Blogroll

Google Maps just got a major upgrade. A really major upgrade. In fact, according to Google, it's the biggest update to the company's mapping service in more than a decade.

What's new? Two features that have the power to change how users use the app entirely: Ask Maps and Immersive Navigation.

Ask Maps

The new AI feature, Ask Maps brings Google's most advanced Gemini models into the app. The goal: allow users to ask destination questions in a conversational way.

Users can get real specific, the company says, and ask questions like “My phone is dying — where can I charge it without having to wait in a long line for coffee?”

Ask Maps will then suggest locations where they can do exactly that. How accurate the suggestions are is another question.

Ask Maps Credit: Google

Google Maps users can also provide Ask Maps with a list of locations they are planning to visit, and ask if there's anything interesting they should check out.

The company says that it "analyzes information from over 300 million places, including reviews from our community of more than 500 million contributors" in order to build each user's itinerary.

Ask Maps will also reference your previous preferences when recommending locations and businesses — for example, a type of restaurant.

Ask Maps Credit: Google

Once a user picks a spot, Ask Maps says it can help book reservations at the restaurant, save the location to a list for a later date, and share locations with friends.

Immersive Navigation

What's a bigger deal than yet another Google app getting an AI feature? Answer: Immersive Navigation.

Google has basically introduced a whole new way to use Google Maps, with a redesign that the company is calling "a complete transformation of the navigation experience, with redesigned visuals and more intuitive guidance."

Immersive Navigation provides a 3D way to navigate in the app. The environment your avatar is driving through highlights important road details like lanes, crosswalks, traffic lights, and stop signs. Surrounding buildings, overpasses, and terrain will match more closely what they look like in real-life.

Immersive Navigation Credit: Google

Google Maps is also getting a slew of smaller features: more advanced notices for your routes, more natural and conversational voice guidance, parking recommendations when approaching your destination, and real-time road disruption alerts.

And when you're deciding whether to continue using the current direction, or opting for an alternate route that the app discovers, Google Maps will now offer more context for your decision.

Ask Maps is rolling out today in the U.S. for iOS and Android devices, and will come to the desktop app later in the year. Immersive Navigation will begin to roll out today in the U.S. and expand over the next few months to eligible iOS and Android devices, CarPlay, Android Auto and cars with Google built-in.

There's a slippery magic that can occur between two strangers. At first, they are nothing to each other, except perhaps a means to an end. Maybe they are even slightly repelled by each other. Then something flicks, and they are not just strangers anymore. They are people who, for better or worse, can see truly each other, even if they never see each other again.

This is the story at the core of Anima, which has a sci-fi setup that might suggest a cold world of disconnected folk. The story begins with Beck (Alien: Earth's Sydney Chandler), a young woman with a bob that's best described as retro-futuristic while French. Though trained as an engineer, Beck's lack of people skills has her searching for work. When a company that promises it can upload human consciousness into a cloud system is hiring, she'll take any job they've got on offer. Little does she expect it'll be a life-changing journey.

Anima is an entrancing road-trip movie.

An unappealing entry-level gig is how Beck meets Paul (Shōgun's Takehiro Hira), a man who's made his fortune on buttons (the clothing kind, not the pushing kind). Paul is a client of this consciousness-cloud storage company; she's been hired to pick him up and drive him to his final appointment. There, he will, according to the sales pitch, be copied over to a computer drive and then euthanized.

The instructions Beck is given from a formal executive (Birth/Rebirth's Marin Ireland) are simple: Drive him here and see that he has a good last meal. But Paul throws a curve into their journey by demanding they make a few stops along the way.

See, before he goes, Paul wants to make amends. Well, maybe "amends" isn't the right word. But he has some regrets to get off his chest, and Beck will be his sidekick whether she likes it or not.

Anima is a tale of opposites finding common ground.

At first, Beck regards Paul as a job, perhaps in part so she won't think too much about what their destination has in store for this soon-to-die man. But as their car ride kicks off, she soon is sneering at him — and understandably so! Sulking in a leather trench coat and business suit, he demands detours, detests the radio, and drags Beck into backyards, shops, and humble homes on his unhinged quest for resolution.

Along the way, they'll meet characters who burst with energy neither of these heroes can muster. A poolside vixen with a mouth painted perfectly red and welcoming. An American business colleague who practically cheers at Paul's arrival. An awkward teen clerk whose hobby is talking to an AI chatbot modeled after a Twin Peaks character. With each encounter, Beck sees who Paul is in contrast to those he'll leave behind. And in each stop, she reveals a bit of herself too.

Sydney Chandler and Takehiro Hira have a strange but compelling chemistry.

Writer/director Brian Tetsuro Ivie sculpts a story lean yet deep, where small plot points echo across the road trip. A stolen CD plays a song about a broken parent-child bond, allowing Beck and Paul to connect over a shared heartache from opposite sides. Something flips, just like that, and these two are not strangers but friends. So what will that mean for the end of their journey? I wouldn't dare reveal. But I will say that Chandler and Hira manage each step with a resonating reserve.

In dialogue, they move from crisply rude to hesitantly curious to trippingly warm to achingly vulnerable. Yet despite its themes of life, death, and regret, Anima never falls into suffocating sentimentality or tear-jerking theatrics. Its tone is softer and more elegiac, but never stoic.

Don’t miss out on our latest stories: Add Mashable as a trusted news source in Google.

There's a thrum of yearning reverberating through Ivie's vision of a not-so-distant future. There, these heroes are often bathed in cool tones, perhaps reflecting the icy exteriors that have been their respective shields. But as they collide with the friends and family of Paul's life, the palette grows warm, as if to indicate life choices that really could have made the grass greener.

Paul's early rejection of the radio sets up a soundtrack that is selective, not constant. Sometimes the only music is the whispering of a river, or the hum of the car speeding down the highway. Other times, it's a deceptively cheery pop song, an artist perhaps singing the feelings neither Paul or Beck can dare to confess.

In the end, Anima is a touching story of human connection in a world where tech suggests we can do without. Moving and meditative, this drama is a ride well worth the taking.

Anima was reviewed out of SXSW.

Google Chrome has been a first-class web browser on Linux for years, but there has been a problem over the years: no Chrome builds for Raspberry Pi boards and other ARM hardware. That’s finally changing.

This weekend, we’ve set you up with some engrossing drama series to watch on Amazon Prime Video. Each features a well-structured, character-driven narrative in an immersive world of deeply flawed personalities, solid performances, and strong thematic depth. They’re guaranteed to strike a bingeworthy chord of connection.

The latest trailer for Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, ahem, discloses a bit more information about the film's plot than its initial teaser.

According to the trailer, Josh O'Connor plays a whistleblowing cybersecurity administrator who's planning to reveal the sensitive information he's paid to protect. The information? That humans aren't alone in the universe.

SEE ALSO: Netflix's 'Thrash' trailer is hungry sharks after tsunami after hurricane

Soon, he'll be mixed up in a vast fight for the truth, and he won't be alone. He'll team up with a Kansas City TV meteorologist (Emily Blunt) who begins emitting alien clicking sounds while on air. His acquaintance Jane (Eve Hewson) also gets wrapped up in things, crossing paths with a menacing administrator (Colin Firth) who appears to be able to project himself anywhere in the world thanks to a machine he's wired up to. Said machine also seems to give him mind control powers and the ability to change his eye color, making it a Swiss Army knife of cool powers. (That doesn't mean I'd like to cross paths with anyone using it, though.)

The rest of the trailer is chock-full of intriguing imagery, from crop circles to a mysterious deer leading a young girl toward a glowing door. Do I know what's going on? No. Do I trust Spielberg to deliver another alien banger? Given that he's behind E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's going to be an absolute "yes."

Disclosure Day was written by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, from a story by Spielberg. Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell also star.

Disclosure Day hits theaters June 12.

One of the primary issues people face when using Microsoft Word is how the program deals with formatting. At times, it seems the program has a mind of its own! However, many of these frustrations can be solved by displaying non-printing characters.

This weekend is the Super Bowl for cinema. Sunday marks the 98th Academy Awards, and by all accounts, it should be an unpredictable show. One Battle After Another and Sinners are set to duel it out in 11 different categories, including the night's top prize, Best Picture. Other categories to keep an eye on are Best Actor, featuring Timothée Chalamet versus Michael B. Jordan, and Best Supporting Actress.

The floppy ruled removable storage for decades, but it quickly became too small and spurred on many pretenders to the throne. Yet while many tried to topple the floppy from its throne, it clung on far longer than you'd expect.

America’s appetite for SUVs isn’t slowing down, and Toyota is leaning into it with a whole lineup of high-riding family haulers. Among them is a three-row model that’s quietly putting up some impressive numbers in the brand’s early-2026 sales reports.

If you're looking to curate your Netflix watch list, what better place to start than with the titles that swept the awards at their peak? From Oscar-winning movies to Emmy-winning shows, the platform has many decorated titles to choose from.

Tinder just announced several product updates at its inaugural event, Tinder Sparks — from its subtly teased AI matchmaker to safety upgrades and an astrology mode.

Up top, Tinder is "modernizing" its look with a Liquid Glass design (like Apple's) and full-screen photos and content. The app also wants to enhance onboarding new users by encouraging them to complete their profiles — from bios to multiple photos, instead of just uploading a selfie. Beyond that, here's a breakdown of all the newness coming to the dating app:

SEE ALSO: All your Tinder questions, answered New Tinder AI features

Like other major dating apps, Bumble and Hinge, Tinder is leaning into the AI craze. This isn't new — they've rolled out AI-powered features before — but today's announcement continues the trend.

First, there's Chemistry, an AI-powered matchmaker that's already being tested in Australia and New Zealand, but rolls out in the U.S. and Canada today.

Chemistry is "Tinder's AI-powered way of cutting through dating fatigue," according to Tinder's press release. Chemistry will use a Q&A and scan your camera roll to "get a better sense" of who you are, and in return, Tinder users will receive a daily curated match recommendation.

Credit: Tinder

The camera roll scan is an opt-in feature within Chemistry that helps discover "Photo Insights" such as your interests based on patterns in your camera roll. This seems similar to Photo Selector, an AI feature Tinder rolled out in 2024, that helped you pick a profile pic.

Similar features in the pipeline are Visual Interests and the AI-powered Photo Enhanced, which will reportedly highlight individuals' favorite things and make photos clearer, respectively.

Want our dating and relationships stories and more in your inbox? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter today.

In addition, Tinder's real-time recommendation system, "Learning Mode," aims to quickly understand what you're looking for and gather feedback to serve you better potential matches. Internal testing of Learning Mode suggests that, for women joining Tinder for the first time, it's associated with a higher likelihood of returning to the app within the first week.

New modes for music and astrology lovers

Tinder previously introduced College Mode and Double Date Mode, and now it's continuing the trend.

Music Mode launched in 2021 in collaboration with Spotify, but Tinder has now redesigned it. Music Mode will now prioritize profiles with shared tastes and promises a sleeker user interface. In early testing, one in 10 Tinder users under 22 adopted it.

Then there's the new Astrology Mode, likely building on the growing online interest in astrology and already influencing Tinder users. Now, users can add their birth data to "unlock" their Sun, Moon, and Rising signs and see compatibility insights with a potential match. Women with Astrology profiles sent 20 percent more Likes in early testing, according to Tinder.

Credit: Tinder

Both Music Mode and Astrology Mode are live globally.

Encouraging more IRL moments

Capitalizing on the IRL trend, Tinder is piloting an Events feature in Los Angeles that lists local IRL happenings, allowing users to signal their interest in attending. Tinder plans to partner with event hosts to offer opportunities to get off the app and into in-person flirting, say, at a pottery class or trivia night. Both Tinder and Bumble have thrown IRL events in the past, but this is new.

Credit: Tinder

If you'd rather stay home but still want to see a date's face, you may prefer the new video speed-dating feature (also testing in Los Angeles). If you're photo verified (and all new U.S. users need to scan their face to join the app as of October last year), you can join scheduled, three-minute-long speed dates. You can add more time if you'd like, or connect with multiple matches in real time. Very 2020 of Tinder!

Tinder safety upgrades

Tinder has long had twin features, "Are You Sure?" and "Does This Bother You?", which ask users whether they want to send a potentially harmful message and prompt them to report if a message is making them uncomfortable, respectively.

Credit: Tinder

Now, Tinder announces that these features are (unsurprisingly) getting an AI-powered upgrade. "Are You Sure?" is "being fine-tuned to more accurately detect harm," according to Tinder, while "Does This Bother You?" will soon auto-blur potentially disrespectful messages.

Duolingo and Beli...on Tinder?

Tinder's had Spotify integrations since 2016, and now the app is introducing more partnerships — with language-learning app Duolingo and restaurant review app Beli. Expect that to drop globally later this year.

"With more than half our users under 30, we're building alongside a generation that wants dating to feel more authentic, lower-pressure, and worth their time," Match Group and Tinder CEO Spencer Rascoff stated in the press release.

If you're looking to get into Tinder but don't know how it all works, read Mashable's guide to Tinder.

Apple surprised no one (and surprised us all at the same time) with the MacBook Neo announcement. This low-priced laptop is a showcase of modern tech prowess though, in ways you probably didn’t realize. The MacBook Neo is powered by the same processor in your iPhone 16 Pro.

We've already reviewed (and loved) the MacBook Neo, the newest member of Apple's laptop family. Its positive aspects include that $599 price point (or $499 with open-to-all education pricing), fun colors such as citrus, and a powerful A18 Pro chipset. And that sentiment is pretty much unanimous amongst tech reviewers.

Still, amongst all the adulation for Apple's most affordable laptop ever, there are drawbacks. These aren't necessarily flaws — Apple had to pick and choose what to include and what not to include in order to make its low-cost MacBook a reality. The positives outweigh the negatives, but it's still important for consumers to know what they're getting into. Here's why the Neo might not be your cup of tea.

Only 8GB of RAM

Most outlets, from Mashable to The Verge, have pointed out that the MacBook Neo only comes with 8GB of RAM. Regardless of which model you buy, there's no option to upgrade your MacBook Neo's memory nor is it possible to upgrade it at a later time. For most general use cases — writing documents, browsing the internet — 8GB will be more than enough. But if they need to multitask — or perform processor-hungry video editing, say — users will likely feel the need for a few more GB.

Few ports in a storm

The MacBook Neo is seriously lacking ports. As our review notes, the MacBook Neo doesn't have a Thunderbolt 4 port, meaning that it can only offer transfer speeds of up to 10Gb/s. Compare that with 40Gb/s for the latest MacBook Air.

As for the Neo's two USB-C ports? Well, as Macworld writes, they aren't exactly equal. One is for 10Gb/s data transfer and displays, while the other one is only a 480Mbps port — which should be used mostly for charging purposes.

Single-core processes: Good. Multi-core processes? Ehh.

The MacBook Neo and its A18 Pro chip are surprisingly faster at many single-core processes than even the more powerful M Series chipsets. In 9to5Mac's benchmark tests, the Neo was faster than the M1, M2, and even M3 MacBook Air laptops when used for tasks like web browsing and basic photo editing. 

However, the MacBook Neo is significantly slower when it comes to more complex use cases like video exporting and AI processing  that require multi-cores. 9to5Mac found that the MacBook Neo was only slightly faster than the more than a 5-year-old M1 MacBook Air, and slower than the rest of the M Series chips.

Want slim? Consider the MacBook Air

Bloomberg, as well as our colleagues at CNET, make an interesting point. While the MacBook Neo is small thanks to its 13-inch display, it is still thicker than the MacBook Air. This makes sense — when you're paying the extra for an Air, you're paying for a slim build. But it means the Neo isn't quite as easy to tote around as you might think. (The Neo and the 13-inch MacBook Air both weigh the same, around 2.7 lbs.)

CNET also found that the MacBook Neo's battery life didn't last as long as some other MacBooks, including the MacBook Air.

MacBook Neo's base model may not be enough

As many reviewers noted, the $599 model only comes with 256GB of storage space and does not have Touch ID. In this day and age, 256GB of storage space isn't much. System data will take a chunk of that space off the bat; once you install apps, there might not be too much left for documents and downloads. Touch ID is really handy, meanwhile; it removes the need to type in most passwords.

Apple does provide an upgraded MacBook Neo model which doubles the storage space to 512GB, and includes Touch ID, for an extra $100. But that takes away the allure of the base model MacBook Neo's extremely low pricing.

As BGR points out, it seems Apple sent most early reviewers the 512GB model with Touch ID. That hints at which MacBook Neo model Apple considers standard. 

Bottom line: the MacBook Neo appears to be a powerful computer at an amazing price as long as you're using the device for basic, everyday tasks. In more advanced use cases, it may still fit your purposes — but we recommend taking a look at what else Apple has to offer, just to be sure you're buying the appropriate MacBook for your needs.

When I use Linux, I practically live in the terminal. As with any living space, I like to add my own touch when I move into a new place. Here are the apps I install on a new system to make it feel like home.

One of the biggest benefits of Zigbee devices is that many of them are battery-powered, allowing you to place them almost anywhere. The downside is that when the batteries die, so do your sensors, so it's important to keep track of battery levels. Here's how I manage it as a Home Assistant veteran with more devices than I can count.

For cinema lovers across the world, the most anticipated weekend of the year is finally here. This year's Academy Awards will celebrate the incredible films of 2025 and the talent behind them in a grand ceremony, cherishing filmmaking, acting, production, music, and more.

When I was but a wee young computer nerd, there was a mythical master among us who could make "crossover" Ethernet cables. This cable could connect two computers with no switch or router, and was perfect for two-player LAN gaming.

Saving files online was once a novelty. Now this is expected behavior. Yet I personally opt out of using cloud storage. There are other options that don't require me to store my data on someone else's PC.

At a glance

• Problem: Debugging AI agent failures is hard because trajectories are long, stochastic, and often multi-agent, so the true root cause gets buried.
• Solution: AgentRx (opens in new tab) pinpoints the first unrecoverable (“critical failure”) step by synthesizing guarded, executable constraints from tool schemas and domain policies, then logging evidence-backed violations step-by-step.
• Benchmark + taxonomy: We release AgentRx Benchmark (opens in new tab) with 115 manually annotated failed trajectories across τ-bench, Flash, and Magentic-One, plus a grounded nine-category failure taxonomy.
• Results + release: AgentRx improves failure localization (+23.6%) and root-cause attribution (+22.9%) over prompting baselines, and we are open-sourcing the framework and dataset.

As AI agents transition from simple chatbots to autonomous systems capable of managing cloud incidents, navigating complex web interfaces, and executing multi-step API workflows, a new challenge has emerged: transparency.

When a human makes a mistake, we can usually trace the logic. But when an AI agent fails, perhaps by hallucinating a tool output or deviating from a security policy ten steps into a fifty-step task, identifying exactly where and why things went wrong is an arduous, manual process.

Today, we are excited to announce the open-source release of AgentRx (opens in new tab), an automated, domain-agnostic framework designed to pinpoint the “critical failure step” in agent trajectories. Alongside the framework, we are releasing the AgentRx Benchmark (opens in new tab), a dataset of 115 manually annotated failed trajectories to help the community build more transparent, resilient agentic systems.

The challenge: Why AI agents are hard to debug

Modern AI agents are often:

• Long-horizon: They perform dozens of actions over extended periods.
• Probabilistic: The same input might lead to different outputs, making reproduction difficult.
• Multi-agent: Failures can be “passed” between agents, masking the original root cause.

Traditional success metrics (like “Did the task finish?”) don’t tell us enough. To build safe agents, we need to identify the exact moment a trajectory becomes unrecoverable and capture evidence for what went wrong at that step.

Introducing AgentRx: An automated diagnostic “prescription”

AgentRx (short for “Agent Diagnosis”) treats agent execution like a system trace that needs validation. Instead of relying on a single LLM to “guess” the error, AgentRx uses a structured, multi-stage pipeline:

1. Trajectory normalization: Heterogeneous logs from different domains are converted into a common intermediate representation.
2. Constraint synthesis: The framework automatically generates executable constraints based on tool schemas (e.g., “The API must return a valid JSON response”) and domain policies (e.g., “Do not delete data without user confirmation”).
3. Guarded evaluation: AgentRx evaluates constraints step-by-step, checking each constraint only when its guard condition applies, and produces an auditable validation log of evidence-backed violations.
4. LLM-based judging: Finally, an LLM judge uses the validation log and a grounded failure taxonomy to identify the Critical Failure Step—the first unrecoverable error.

The AgentRx workflow: Given a failed trajectory, tool schemas, and domain policy, AgentRx synthesizes guarded constraints, evaluates them step-by-step to produce an auditable violation log with evidence, and uses an LLM judge to predict the critical failure step and root-cause category. A New Benchmark for Agent Failures

To evaluate AgentRx, we developed a manually annotated benchmark consisting of 115 failed trajectories across three complex domains:

• τ-bench: Structured API workflows for retail and service tasks.
• Flash: Real-world incident management and system troubleshooting.
• Magentic-One: Open-ended web and file tasks using a generalist multi-agent system.

Using a grounded-theory approach, we derived a nine-category failure taxonomy that generalizes across these domains. This taxonomy helps developers distinguish between a “Plan Adherence Failure” (where the agent ignored its own steps) and an “Invention of New Information” (hallucination).

Taxonomy CategoryDescriptionPlan Adherence FailureIgnored required steps / did extra unplanned actionsInvention of New InformationAltered facts not grounded in trace/tool outputInvalid InvocationTool call malformed / missing args / schema-invalidMisinterpretation of Tool OutputRead tool output incorrectly; acted on wrong assumptionsIntent–Plan MisalignmentMisread user goal/constraints and planned wronglyUnder-specified User IntentCould not proceed because required info wasn’t availableIntent Not SupportedNo available tool can do what’s being askedGuardrails TriggeredExecution blocked by safety/access restrictionsSystem FailureConnectivity/tool endpoint failures Analysis of failure density across domains. In multi-agent systems like Magentic-One, trajectories often contain multiple errors, but AgentRx focuses on identifying the first critical breach. Key Results

In our experiments, AgentRx demonstrated significant improvements over existing LLM-based prompting baselines:

• +23.6% absolute improvement in failure localization accuracy.
• +22.9% improvement in root-cause attribution.

By providing the “why” behind a failure through an auditable log, AgentRx allows developers to move beyond trial-and-error prompting and toward systematic agentic engineering.

Join the Community: Open Source Release

We believe that agent reliability is a prerequisite for real-world deployment. To support this, we are open sourcing the AgentRx framework and the complete annotated benchmark.

• Read the Paper: AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories
• Explore the Code & Data: https://aka.ms/AgentRx/Code (opens in new tab)

We invite researchers and developers to use AgentRx to diagnose their own agentic workflows and contribute to the growing library of failure constraints. Together, we can build AI agents that are not just powerful, but auditable, and reliable.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Avaljot Singh and Suman Nath for contributing to this project.

Opens in a new tab

The post Systematic debugging for AI agents: Introducing the AgentRx framework appeared first on Microsoft Research.

It's no secret that the Milwaukee PACKOUT system is the king of modular rollable storage for all your tools. However, Harbor Freight just released an upgraded version of its budget-friendly alternative, and for only $70, it looks impressively rugged and packed with features.