Substack is now letting creators stream live videos as another way to connect with their audiences. Substack has increasingly been expanding from its roots as a newsletter platform, including by adding Twitter-like Notes posts and the ability to publish video podcasts and even letting people follow other users without subscribing to them. As of last month, you don’t even need to set up a publication to share content. With live video, creators will be able to interact with their fans in real time without having to rely on another platform like Twitch. When you go live, your subscribers will be notified immediately, and you can make your streams available to everyone, to all subscribers, or only to paid subscribers, according to a blog...

SocialAI is an online universe where everyone you interact with is a bot—for better or worse.

Enlarge issued to Hezbollah members. The radios exploded in the middle of the day, with at least one going off during a funeral for people killed in yesterday's pager attacks. A New York Times report on that funeral described the moment: When the blast went off, a brief, eerie stillness descended on the crowd. Mourners looked at one another in disbelief. The religious chants being broadcast over a loudspeaker abruptly stopped. Then panic set in. People started scrambling in the streets, hiding in the lobbies of nearby buildings, and shouting at one another, “Turn off your phone! Take out the battery!” Soon a voice on the loudspeaker at the funeral urged everyone to do the same... One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use the reporter’s cellphone to call her children. The woman dialed a number with her hands shaking, then screamed into the phone, “Turn off your phones now!” The story appears to capture the current mood in Lebanon, where no one seems quite sure what will explode next. While today's attack against walkie-talkies is well-attested, various unconfirmed reports suggest that people fear an explosion from just about anything with a battery.

I hope you like radial menus, because you'll be looking at a lot of them. Age of Mythology: Retold brings a lot of the usual advancements that you'd expect for a reboot of both the increasingly dated 2002 original game and its previous reboot: 2014's Extended Edition, which is still perfectly playable and available on Steam. The newest version of this real-time strategy classic comes with the requisite improvements in graphics and user interface, making the whole game much easier to look at and parse at a glance. And while the updated voice acting isn't going to win any awards, neither is the stilted, bare bones dialogue that those actors are working with (which seems faithful to the original game, for better or worse). But Retold does add one thing that I wasn't really expecting in a modern real-time strategy game—full support for a handheld controller. Developers have been trying to make RTS games work without the traditional mouse and keyboard since the days of SNES Populous and Starcraft 64, usually with limited success. Microsoft hasn't given up on the dream, though, fully integrating controller support for Age of Mythology: Retold into both the PC version (which we sampled) and, obviously, the Xbox Series X|S release. The result is definitely the best version of an RTS controller interface that I've tried and proof that a modern controller can be a perfectly functional option for the genre. In the end, though, there are just a few too many annoyances associated with a handheld controller to make it the preferred way to play a game like this.

Donald Trump and JD Vance keep spreading debunked conspiracies.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023. , and Verizon. The brief supports cable firm Cox Communications' attempt to overturn its loss in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony. Cox petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case last month.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga have the whole weirdo couple vibe thing down.

Warehouse workers at the STL8 Amazon Fulfillment Center marched on the boss Wednesday to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage for all workers. Amazon currently faces disgruntled workers in every direction. Office workers are raging against CEO Andy Jassy's return to office mandate, Fortune reported—which came just as a leaked document reportedly showed that Amazon is also planning to gut management, Business Insider reported. Drivers by the hundreds are flocking to join a union to negotiate even better work conditions, CNBC reported, despite some of the biggest concessions in Amazon's history. And hundreds more unionized warehouse workers are increasingly banding together nationwide to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage. On Wednesday, workers everywhere were encouraged to leave Jassy a voicemail elevating workers' demands for a $25 minimum wage. This momentum has been building for years after drivers unionized in 2021. And all this collective fury increasingly appears to be finally pressuring Amazon into negotiating better conditions for some workers.

Now that inflation has cooled, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it is cutting interest rates by half a percentage point. That should be welcome news for all Americans in need of a loan: business owners, college students, and anyone looking to buy a home. Until March 2022, the US enjoyed historically low interest rates. This allowed Americans to lock in an average mortgage interest rate of just under 3 percent in 2021 — a record low. Today, the mortgage interest rate is over 6 percent.  That high mortgage rate made it harder for many Americans to buy a home. It meant that fewer homeowners wanted to sell and, as a result, buyers were competing for fewer homes while also often facing higher monthly mortgage payments.  Because of high mortgage rates and a tight housing market, home sales plummeted from almost 6.5 million in January 2022 to a low of less than 3.8 million in December 2023. Those numbers have only recovered slightly in the months since and remain well below normal levels. Low inventory helped drive up median home prices to $426,900 in June, their highest level ever. Now, however, many would-be buyers who have been waiting for interest rates to drop may start shopping for a home. But lower interest rates aren’t necessarily going to result in lower prices. In fact, some economists think there is a possibility that home prices — and even rent prices — could actually increase. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand right now from first-time home buyers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a big shift in prices right after the rate cut because there are a lot of people waiting on the sidelines,” said Julia Fonseca, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In expectation of lower interest rates, mortgage interest rates had already come down from over 8 percent. They could decrease even more if the Fed signals further rate cuts later this year beyond what financial analysts are expecting.  This could lower Americans’ monthly mortgage payments. But housing costs are affected by factors beyond just interest rates. They are also based on availability, and lower interest rates won’t immediately fix this issue. Buyers, especially first-time buyers — who are often competing for a limited supply of starter homes in urban areas — will likely still find that houses are still in short supply. Part of that is because many homeowners who locked in low rates didn’t want to give those rates up. According to a recent paper by Jack Liebersohn, an economics professor at the University of California Irvine, and his co-author Jesse Rothstein at the University of California Berkeley, higher interest rates meant that homeowners with mortgages were 16 percent less likely to move in 2022 and 2023 than in 2021.  There does seem to be some basis for that hesitation: Lu Liu, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Fonseca found that homeowners with a 4 percent locked-in mortgage rate save an estimated $50,000 compared to what they would pay with a new mortgage of the same value at a rate of 7 percent. As interest rates come down, it should become easier for homeowners to justify selling because they can obtain a comparable mortgage rate on a new home. This might help increase inventory, but perhaps not to a sufficient degree or quickly enough to make up for what is expected to be a big spike in demand from buyers.  Caitlin Gorback, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that economic research suggests that, on average, home prices increase by 5 to 10 percentage points for every 1 percentage point decrease in interest rates. Given that, she said, “it is unlikely house prices come down with a rate cut.”  The forces at play in the housing market also have implications for renters. Liu, Fonseca, and their co-author Pierre Mabille of INSEAD suggest in another recent paper that rents could go up if would-be buyers continue to be shut out of the market.  “There is some chance that price pressure is also going to be felt in the rental market,” Liu said. But there are some long-term factors that could alleviate this pressure. For one, construction of multi-family housing has slowed considerably because of high interest rates, Liebersohn said. Lower interest rates should make it more affordable for developers to get a bank loan to build apartment buildings.  “I’m really hoping that lower interest rates lead to a surge in multifamily construction,” he said. “That won’t have an immediate effect on rents, but it will in the long run, and that could be really important.” Many apartment building owners also have to get a new loan to finance their properties every 10 years. If they can get new loans at a lower interest rate, some may eventually pass some of the savings down to tenants by not raising their rents as much as they would otherwise.  Both of those factors may be slow-moving, but overall, “it means that if the path of interest rates going forward is lower, then renters will benefit,” Liebersohn said. Update, September 18, 2:20 pm: This story, originally published September 17, has been updated to reflect the Fed’s announcement of a rate cut.