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 Your Google Photos library could soon influence the kind of images you can generate with Gemini. After letting users personalize the AI assistant's responses with data from Gmail, Search and YouTube, Google says it's bringing that same "Personal Intelligence" to Nano Banana 2 to make it easier for users to create personalized images with the AI model.
The goal is to have the data affiliated with your Google account — your YouTube history, emails, Google Photos, etc. — provide context to Nano Banana 2 so you don't have to. Rather than prompting Gemini's image generation model with information about you or photos of your belongings, a direction to "create a picture of my desert island essentials" should produce an image that includes the things you care about without any extra context. Similarly, if you use labels in Google Photos to identify people or pets, you can tell Gemini to "create a hand-drawn illustration of mom," and it should be able to use Google Photo's labels to find the right reference photo and create an image of the right person.
GoogleIf Gemini creates images that don't look right, you can still send a follow-up p
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Spotify has a new look today for listeners on tablets. The streaming service's updated tablet UI now provides adaptive orientation, switching between portrait and landscape layouts rather than simply resizing the interface when changing how the device is held.
Spotify's tablet app now sports a collapsible sidebar so listeners can take advantage of their larger screen space when watching a music video or podcast. Parallel browsing lets you continue to scroll through the app while a video or lyrics are in the sidebar, and the "switch to video" toggle has been made more prominent.
The new design had appeared for some users earlier this year during tests. The final version is rolling out today for both iPad and Android devices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-debuts-a-new-ui-just-for-tablets-130000533.html?src=rss
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 iOS 27 is likely to introduce at least four new Apple Intelligence features that function within system apps, based on backend code discovered by Nicolás Alvarez and confirmed by MacRumors.
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A group of researchers from across the US and the UK have conducted a study on what AI does to our brains and the results are, in a word, grim. These results were published in a paper called "AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance" which kind of tells you everything you need to know.
"We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost," the study declares. Researchers went on to state that just ten minutes of using AI made people dependent on the technology, which led to worsening performance and burnout once the tools were removed.
The study followed people who use AI for "reasoning-intensive" cognitive labor. This refers to stuff like writing, coding and brainstorming new ideas, which are some of the most common use cases.
The researchers recruited 350 Americans, who were asked to complete some fraction-based equations. Half of the participants were randomly granted access to a specialized chatbot built on OpenAI's GPT-5 for help and the others had to go it alone. Halfway through the exam, the AI group had their access cut off.
This led to a steep decline in correct answers by the AI group and many instances of people simply giving up. This result, in which performance and perseverance both dropped, was repeated in a larger experiment with 670 people. Finally, the scientists performed one final experiment with reading comprehension questions, and not math. The results were more of the same.
"Once the AI is taken away from people, it's not that people are just giving wrong answers. They're also not willing to try without AI," Rachit Dubey, an assistant professor at the University of California and coauthor of the study,
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Apple's MacBook Neo is a $600 (or $500 for students) shot across the bow at affordable Windows laptops, and it seems like Microsoft has ready its first response. The newly announced "Microsoft College Offer" is a bundle of Microsoft 365 Premium, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, custom Xbox controller and discounted laptop that the company thinks could woo students away from Apple's new deal.
With the purchase of a discounted machine directly from Microsoft, retailers like Amazon and Best Buy or PC makers like HP, ASUS and Acer, you can get what the company says is an extra $500 of value from its bundle. The laptop deals include a Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x with a Snapdragon X chip, 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $500 from Best Buy, around $250 off the laptop's usual $750 price. Or if you wanted something even cheaper, Walmart is selling an HP Omnibook 3 for $429, a discount of $270 off its usual $699 price. Microsoft is less generous with the deals on its own laptops and tablets, but you can even get a discount on a Surface Laptop as part of the offer.
A discounted laptop is great, but where the value of the Microsoft College Offer gets harder to define is with the services the company is packing in. Getting what would normally be a $200 year-long subscription to Microsoft 365 Premium for free is a meaningful deal, but many colleges give their students access to Microsoft's ap
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Google News has begun showing Polymarket bets and odds alongside actual stories, according to a report by Futurism. These look to appear as large blocks that include links to numerous ways for people to lose their money.
Bets tend to appear in the "For you" section of Google News, which is supposed to be tailored to a person's particular interests. Futurism notes that the platform actually placed a Polymarket bet as the top news result when inquiring about the price of Bitcoin.
The publication saw links to the prediction market all over Google News, including in searches. It popped up in queries regarding the Strait of Hormuz, which presents a link that lets people bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical passageway. The report even indicates that users were able to set the gambling platform as a source, which directs readers to an aggregate page of other Polymarket links.
We Cooked. pic.twitter.com/IFBbYFdn2A
— Anthony Higman (@AnthonyHigman) March 26, 2026
There's a caveat here. I wasn't personally able to confirm most of these results. This could indicate that Google has quietly made some changes behind the scenes following Futurism's initial report.
Complaints from user
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