Month: July 2026

Instagram updates its recommendations: time spent rises 6%

Meta, the company that owns Instagram, says it has updated the recommendation systems behind the app’s feed. According to the company, the change has led to a reported 6% bump in time spent on Instagram.

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Meta says better ranking across Instagram and Facebook is putting more posts, videos, and creators in front of people who are likely to watch, like, or share them. The effect is pretty clear: Instagram keeps moving further away from its old friends-first identity and more toward a discovery machine.

Reels is still at the center of that push. Meta is betting that if it gets better at predicting what you’ll want to watch next, you’ll stay in the app longer, see more ads, and give Instagram a stronger chance of keeping up with TikTok’s deeply personalized feed.

If you use Instagram regularly, your feed will probably feel even more tailored over time. That can make the app feel more useful, but also harder to put down. Critics have been warning for years that highly tuned feeds can encourage compulsive scrolling, especially among younger users.

Instagram is available now on iOS and Android.

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Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is set for Spring 2027: no physical edition yet

Square Enix has finally put a release window on Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the third and last game in the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy: Spring 2027. What it still hasn’t confirmed is whether you’ll be able to buy it on a physical disc.

Director Naoki Hamaguchi says the final SKU lineup is still being worked out, though he added that he’s personally “working to make arrangements” for some kind of boxed edition. That matters if you’ve been following the earlier Final Fantasy 7 remake releases on your shelf as well as through digital storefronts, especially since some versions already needed multiple discs.

There may be a basic technical problem here. Nintendo game cards have storage limits, and other disc formats do too, so a physical release gets harder to pull off if Final Fantasy 7 Revelation ends up being as large as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Physical still matters, though. Square Enix says 81.3% of FY2026 sales were digital, or 21.7 million units, compared with 4.98 million physical. Capcom has reportedly hit 93% digital. A YouGov poll says 51% of console players prefer physical, while 32% prefer digital. Sony is reportedly ending new PlayStation discs in January 2028. And even after falling short of expectations, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth still sold 262,000 physical copies in Japan in its first week and was the top seller there in March 2024, according to Japanese sales data.

So if you’re hoping to buy Final Fantasy 7 Revelation in a box, keep an eye on this one. For now, all you can really pencil in is Spring 2027 while Square Enix decides whether this will be a download-only release or something you’ll still be able to pick up from store shelves.

ChatGPT and Roblox could face the EU’s toughest rules in August

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Roblox could be added to the European Union’s list of very large online platforms under the Digital Services Act as soon as August, a step that would put both services under the bloc’s toughest online governance rules.

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If the European Commission makes that designation official, ChatGPT would become the first major chatbot fully covered by the VLOP framework. Roblox, meanwhile, would face sharper scrutiny over how it protects a user base that includes a lot of children. The move also signals that EU officials believe both services now top the 45 million monthly active user threshold in Europe and create enough systemic risk to justify tighter oversight. Once the designation is formal under the Digital Services Act, each company would have four months to comply with yearly risk assessments, harm-reduction requirements, and tighter transparency rules for advertising and content moderation, as Brussels presses the biggest platforms to show how they handle illegal or harmful material, public debate, and users’ rights.

For people in Europe who use either service often, this matters. ChatGPT would be judged on harmful, unlawful, or misleading outputs, while Roblox would likely face pressure over violent and sexual content, age-appropriate design, and safer social features. A European Union designation under the Digital Services Act would also bring an annual supervisory fee, possible fines of up to 6% of global turnover, and a tougher stretch of regulation as Brussels expands its crackdown on major digital and automated services.

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Mistfall Hunter is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox: it’s on Game Pass too

Bellring Games released Mistfall Hunter on July 29, 2026, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. The studio is pitching it as an extraction shooter with a dark-fantasy edge, and that tone comes through right away.

It also landed on Xbox Game Pass, per Xbox. You play as a Gyldhunter, brought back by Dew to reclaim Gyldenblood in a world swallowed by the Gyldenmist and piece the Web of Fate back together.

Matches have you dropping into maps, fighting both AI enemies and other players, scooping up loot, and then taking down a Returner Woodling to open an escape portal. Die before you get out, and you lose everything. There are six classes in total, from Withered Knight to Seer, covering frontline, ranged, stealth, and support roles, based on the game’s official description.

So far, player response has been split. Early impressions have singled out the Soulslike mood, the clean, easy-to-read interface, and the tension in PvP. But on Steam, reviews sit at Mixed as of July 30, with roughly 57% positive. Player complaints keep circling back to stuttering, latency, PvP gear balance, no Oceania servers, and the absence of a dedicated duo queue.

For people who like extraction games, this one is worth keeping an eye on, especially since Bellring Games already has a lot on the roadmap: Season 1: Soul Hunt, the Solemn Needles map, new bosses, a combat overhaul, and practice modes for both PvE and PvP.

You can download Mistfall Hunter now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, or jump in through Xbox Game Pass.

Steam players are being warned about fake PowerShell fixes: they install XMRig

Steam players are getting a warning today about a scam spreading through Steam discussion forums: users are told to run PowerShell commands as an administrator, and the code reportedly installs XMRig, a cryptocurrency miner.

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On Steam discussions, throwaway accounts have reportedly been replying to posts about crashes, launch failures, or missing items with a supposed PowerShell “fix” and telling people to run it with admin rights. It’s a ClickFix-style setup, so the trick works because you execute the code yourself, which can let it slip past security tools that are better at catching shady downloads.

The script may pretend to do Windows cleanup, repairs, or driver updates, but reports say it pulls down XMRig instead. XMRig is a legitimate mining tool in some situations. Here, though, it’s used to hijack your CPU or GPU, push up power consumption, slow down your system, and possibly disable TLS checks, add exclusions to Microsoft Defender, and set up a scheduled task so it comes back after a reboot with system-level privileges.

If you use Steam forums to look for unofficial fixes, take this seriously. Gamers are easy targets for this kind of thing because frustration makes complicated “repair” steps look more convincing, and gaming PCs have exactly the kind of hardware cryptominers want.

Stick to official Steam support or the game developer’s support on Windows. If you’ve already run one of these commands, disconnect from the internet, run a full antivirus or endpoint scan, check your scheduled tasks and Microsoft Defender exclusions, and think seriously about doing a full OS reinstall. So far, there’s still no public victim count and no statement from Valve, the company behind Steam.

OpenAI disputes ARC-AGI-3 ranking: GPT-5.6 Sol jumps from 7.8% to 38.3%

ARC Prize’s ARC-AGI-3 showdown landed with a split verdict. In the official setup, Anthropic’s Opus 5 scored 30.2%, while OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol posted 7.8%, based on the published results. OpenAI says that gap looks very different when the model gets to carry its reasoning across turns: in the company’s own rerun, GPT-5.6 Sol reached 38.3%.

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That claim matters because ARC-AGI-3 is meant to test what its creators call fluid intelligence through novel, game-like tasks. These aren’t recall questions. They’re supposed to show how well a model reasons through something new. OpenAI’s argument is that the official harness undersells GPT-5.6 Sol because it throws away reasoning between turns. In OpenAI’s rerun through the Responses API, Retained Reasoning and Compaction pushed the score to 38.3% by keeping continuity intact and compressing older context into summaries instead of just cutting it off.

ARC Prize describes the benchmark as provider-neutral. Still, reporting says the official harness may have used an outdated API for GPT-5.6 Sol. François Chollet has also reportedly said provider-specific settings can be acceptable when they’re general-purpose and clearly disclosed. So the disagreement hasn’t really gone away. The open question is whether OpenAI’s rerun belongs in the same comparison, or whether it should be treated as a separate result.

For anyone sizing up models for real deployments, that’s the part to keep in view. OpenAI’s 38.3% is still self-reported, and it’s on the public ARC-AGI-3 set. Independent replication on the private dataset still hasn’t happened. And for now, the official leaderboard still has Anthropic in front.

AI hits a trust wall: speed won’t solve the trust problem

Two years into the push to use artificial intelligence to answer customers faster, speed up internal work, and trim costs, a lot of artificial intelligence strategies have run into the same wall: trust. Reliability, transparency, and accountability aren’t side issues anymore. They’re the issue.

The gap is getting harder to ignore. Executives celebrate the speed; users want something else. They want clear reasoning, some way to challenge a wrong answer, and a person who’s accountable when something breaks. A chatbot or workplace assistant may look efficient in a report, but when it’s opaque, inconsistent, or confidently wrong, it chips away at confidence. That helps explain why trust in artificial intelligence is still low around the world, and why so many projects stall in pilot mode or never produce clear returns.

The deployments that are holding up better treat this as a trust design problem. They’re building systems that behave predictably, offer explanations people can follow, and keep human oversight visible, so output can be reviewed, edited, or overridden. That matters most because persuasive answers that are still inaccurate are common.

If you’re rolling out artificial intelligence across support tools, workplace assistants, or newer agentic systems, keep an eye on this. Shadow tools, sensitive data exposure, and decisions that are hard to trace are pushing organizations toward stronger governance, models people can actually explain, better training, and clearer human accountability.

Shadowhunters: why it succeeded where The Mortal Instruments movie failed

From 2016 to 2019, Freeform’s Shadowhunters wound up being the stronger screen take on The Mortal Instruments than the 2013 movie The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. That film looked like the start of a franchise, then stalled out after weak reviews and a pretty muted audience response.

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Across 3 seasons and 55 episodes on Freeform, Shadowhunters had room to breathe. Demon hunters, Downworlders, forbidden love, family secrets, that Twilight-meets-Harry Potter YA pull, all of it had space here in a way The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones just didn’t once it tried to squeeze everything into one movie. The premiere also brought in Freeform’s biggest audience in more than two years, even if the ratings cooled off later.

Season 1 was shaky. It has a 44% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a lot of the criticism hit the same points: the effects, the dialogue, the pacing. The later seasons landed better as the cast found its footing, the plotting stopped rushing ahead, and Shadowhunters got stronger at emotional arcs, friendships, loyalties, and building a clearer identity of its own.

If richer character work and better representation were what you wanted, this is the version to try. Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood became one of the show’s defining romances, helped Shadowhunters win the 2017 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and powered an online fandom that went big after the 2018 cancellation. That cancellation was tied to the Constantin Film-Netflix output deal. The response included millions of #SaveShadowhunters tweets, petitions, Times Square billboards, a plane flown over Netflix, and, eventually, a two-part finale.

You could watch Shadowhunters on Freeform.

Mistfall Hunter is out now: stuttering, FPS drops, and desync hit launch

Mistfall Hunter is out today on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and it arrives with its Season 1 content ready to go. The bigger story right now, though, is the launch-state performance. Steam reviews, forum threads, and social posts are full of complaints about stuttering, FPS drops, lag, and desync. That includes people on high-end PCs, some of whom say the same problems from the beta are still here.

From what players are describing, two things are probably getting tangled together: Unreal Engine 5 shader stutter and plain old launch-day server congestion. In busy fights, they can feel almost identical. You get hitching, rubber-banding, delayed attacks, and it’s not always obvious whether the game is choking locally or the servers are struggling. Bellring Games says more optimization is on the way after the work it already did before release on shader loading, default settings, and tuning for consoles and lower-end PCs. Until that patching lands, players keep pointing to the same fixes: use exclusive Fullscreen, turn V-Sync off, cap the frame rate, lower shadows, view distance, and volumetric fog, and try DLSS or FSR. A few Nvidia users are even saying FSR feels steadier.

If you still want to jump in now, the game itself may be worth a look, but the response is split because those technical problems are swallowing a launch that otherwise looked promising. On console, you can switch between Quality and Performance modes, and Bellring Games says the PlayStation 5 Pro version is the most polished of the lot. Mistfall Hunter is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Tales from Earthsea returns to theaters for its 20th anniversary: Studio Ghibli Fest brings back a divisive debut

Tales from Earthsea is coming back to theaters on August 8 and 10, 2026, through Studio Ghibli Fest as part of the film’s 20th anniversary. The 2006 fantasy will return to the big screen in both English-dubbed and Japanese-language screenings.

This will be Tales from Earthsea’s first run as part of Studio Ghibli Fest, which makes those August 8 and 10 dates stand out a bit more. It gives audiences a chance to revisit one of the studio’s most argued-over films, a movie that has long sat in the shadow of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro.

The context around the release is part of why it still draws attention. Tales from Earthsea was Goro Miyazaki’s directorial debut. It adapted Ursula K. Le Guin’s first four Earthsea novels and pulled in elements of Hayao Miyazaki’s Shuna’s Journey. It also arrived alongside reports that Hayao Miyazaki doubted his son’s experience and barely spoke to him during production.

Reviews were mixed, but Tales from Earthsea still earned about $75.5 million worldwide on a reported $22 million budget. In Japan, it picked up the 2006 Bunshun Raspberry Awards for Worst Movie and Worst Director. Ursula K. Le Guin also criticized the film for how far it moved away from her books and for leaning harder into violence.

If you’ve ever wanted to revisit a divisive but important Studio Ghibli release, this rerelease is a good reason to do it. Tickets are available through Studio Ghibli Fest theaters.