Oklahoma City Thunder star forward Paul George has been an avid gamer since he was a kid. “I remember on Christmas morning, I unwrapped my gift and sure enough, it was the PS2,” he said. “I’ve been a PlayStation guy ever since.”
It’s really no surprise that his latest Nike signature shoe, the PG2, combines his loves of basketball and gaming. The shoes feature his own logo on one tongue and the familiar PS logo on the other.
The shoes are mostly dark blue, with neon sprinkles just above the sole, and George debuted them in a game against Cleveland last night. The Nike swooshes are blue, pink, and green. George is just the 21st NBA player to have a signature shoe, and he was involved with every step of the design. “It’s amazing the relationship I have with Nike,” he said. “They really took my inspiration and took my input to heart and created the shoe.”
💡💡💡 PG2 PlayStation. @ygtrece @nikebasketball pic.twitter.com/LPaXbdA26E
— OKC THUNDER (@okcthunder) January 20, 2018
The two logos light up and will vibrate when pressed, just like the famous DualShock controller, powered by a non-replaceable 150-hour battery. The blue, green, pink, and red lace holes mimic the controller buttons as well.
There’s also a special bonus included with the shoe for PlayStation owners.
“We worked directly with the PlayStation team on every aspect of this shoe,” said Tony Hardman, designer of both the PG1 and PG2. “One thing that they provided, which was really cool, was the starry graphic from the dynamic theme that will be available for your PlayStation 4 with a code from the shoe. It’s a beautiful graphic, so we made it the sock liner.”
A number of other NBA players were fans of the PG1, and George hopes the new sneaker will inspire future NBA stars. “I’m really excited, more so again for the performance that it’s going to give guys that follow me and are trying to get to the NBA, I’m most excited for those guys to get a chance to wear them and be in them and help them with their careers,” he said. “At the end of the day, that’s what I want.”
The PG2 sneakers will be available on February 10 for $110.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.