Comment on Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for July 12, #131

Enlarge / AI-generated image by FLUX.1 dev: "A beautiful queen of the universe holding up her hands, face in the background." (credit: FLUX.1) On Thursday, AI-startup Black Forest Labs announced the launch of its company and the release of its first suite of text-to-image AI models, called FLUX.1. The German-based company, founded by researchers who developed the technology behind Stable Diffusion and invented the latent diffusion technique, aims to create advanced generative AI for images and videos. The launch of FLUX.1 comes about seven weeks after Stability AI's troubled release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in mid-June.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for potential antitrust violations, said a person familiar with discussions the government agency has had with third parties. The DoJ has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction, which Nvidia announced in April.

Enlarge / There is something so wonderfully obscene about having a town with hundreds of people living their lives, running into conflict, hoping for better, and your omnipotent self is stuck on which bookcase best fits this living room corner. (credit: YesBox) Naming a game must be incredibly hard. How many more Dark Fallen Journeys and Noun: Verb of the Noun games can fit into the market?

Enlarge / Muscle atrophy is a known hazard of spending time on the International Space Station. (credit: NASA) Muscle-on-chip systems are three-dimensional human muscle cell bundles cultured on collagen scaffolds. A Stanford University research team sent some of these systems to the International Space Station to study the muscle atrophy commonly observed in astronauts. It turns out that space triggers processes in human muscles that eerily resemble something we know very well: getting old.

Enlarge / Even mainstream CPUs like the Core i5-13400 could theoretically be affected by Intel's crashing issues. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Intel will be releasing a microcode update to prevent further damage to crashing 13th- and 14th-generation desktop processors sometime this month if it can stick to its previously announced schedule.

Enlarge / The Pocket 386 is fun for a while, but the shortcomings and the broken stuff start to wear on you after a while. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) The Book 8088 was a neat experiment, but as a clone of the original IBM PC, it was pretty limited in what it could do.