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I made air fryer shrimp and my friends thought I’d bought them

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I’m a huge fan of shrimp and always order them if they’re on a menu, but I’ve always assumed they’d be too difficult to cook at home. Especially because I like them to be soft, succulent and full of flavor, and I didn’t trust my cooking skills to achieve that.   

However, while testing the best air fryers, I recently discovered an air fryer shrimp recipe that not only looked simple enough for even my often-questionable skills, but was packed full of spices and flavor.  



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Featured

Tidal’s game-changing feature lets your friends open shared songs in Spotify

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Music streaming service Tidal is introducing a great new feature to its desktop app, one we hope other platforms implement: universal links. Now, whenever a Tidal user shares a song with a friend, the recipient will be able to listen to the track “on their preferred streaming service.” They won’t be forced to install the app on their compute. As the company put it, your friends can enjoy “your latest musical obsession, regardless of where they listen.”

The platform itself didn’t make an official announcement. This update appears to have been discovered by a Reddit user on the Tidal subreddit who posted screenshots of the patch notes and the feature in action. We can confirm Tidal Version 2024.03.27 of the desktop app is indeed live and rolling out, as we received the patch on our computer.

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Helldivers 2 adds Quasar Cannon and Heavy Machine Gun Stratagems to accidentally shoot your friends with

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Co-op shooter Helldivers 2 is back with yet another update, this time adding two all-new Stratagems that seem specifically designed to help combat the brutal Automaton enemy type.

The official Helldivers 2 X / Twitter account confirmed these powerful weapons with a neat, lore-appropriate graphic that shows off the LAS-99 Quasar Cannon and the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun. Both can be earned in-game and distributed to players on the battlefield by calling them in via their Stratagem loadout.



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Life Style

The real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way

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She was taller than me. Prettier and with better muscle tone. Shinier hair and perfect skin and teeth. Which was odd because she claimed she was me — from the future.

“Mmmmf!” I said.

“Sorry about the gag. Let me loosen it.”

“What the hell!? You’re here to kill me — won’t that kill you, too?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, it didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”

I scoffed. “I might not be a time-travelling assassin supermodel —”

“Yet,” she interjected with a smile.

“— but even I know that’s impossible. It’s a time whatchamacallit … a paradox!”

She leant forward with a gleam in her eyes like I was 101 puppies, and she was in the market for a winter coat. “Yes, exactly! I need a paradox, a large one. Killing myself is the biggest event I can put into motion at such short notice.”

I struggled against the plastic straps that bound my hands behind my kitchen-table chair. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain the general theory of paradoxity or walk you through my calculations.”

“Calculations about what?” I asked — as long as I kept her talking, she wasn’t murdering me.

“About how much energy the death will release. Don’t worry — it will have been enough.”

“Energy for what?”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me make it simple: what’s the biggest paradox you’ve heard of?”

“I don’t know — everything I say is a lie?

“No, that just means you don’t understand set theory. The greatest one is existence itself: why is there something instead of nothing? It gave rise to everything, and — together with other, smaller paradoxes — keeps everything going.

“Uh huh,” I said, humouring my future self.

“But those bastards from the CCCCCC — the Chronological Continuum Consistency Coordinated Consortium Confederacy — are obsessed with timescape integrity. They’ve pushed my team back everywhen, undoing our efforts to make the timeline a better place to live in. They will even make sure World War Three — which we’d managed to avoid, you’re welcome — will begin right on time next Tuesday. I need to finish them once and for all. They’re out of control. They’ll go too far back; undo the Paradox of Life itself —”

“Life’s a paradox?”

“Duh!” — I hadn’t realized how obnoxious it is when I do that — “Why else would dumb, entropic matter organize itself into something that can laugh, love and fart?”

I looked around and saw an old family picture. “Why kill me? Wouldn’t killing somebody like … not mum or dad, um … would grandma Georgina work? We never liked her.”

“No, we didn’t. Remember the haircut incident in third grade?” She chuckled softly. “But no, sorry, it must be me, or it won’t have enough juice. A tight timeloop like this should release ten-to-the-twelfth-power chronojoules. The CCCCCC bastards will never see it coming!”

I grasped for something, anything to distract her. “Aren’t you supposed to be older? Why do you look better than me?”

She looked down at her body. “It’s a back-echo of the energy release. It rearranges nearby systems into their optimal state. And this,” she waved at herself, “is more optimal than, well, that.” She pointed at me.

“Thanks so much for taking the time to insult me before killing me.”

“No problem.” She looked at some glowing numbers on her wrist. “This will have been fun but time has run out of time — we have to do this now.”

She pulled out a knife and slipped behind me.

“Stop!” I said, but she didn’t. I felt something shift and fell forward. There was a flash of something much brighter than ordinary light could ever be.

My hands weren’t tied behind me any more. I leapt up, trying to remember the three weeks of taekwondo I’d taken back in high school — and hoping she didn’t. I turned and saw a hotter version of myself lying on the floor with a gash on the side of her throat. Blood was spreading out on the white carpet my ex-boyfriend had picked out. Good, I never liked it, or him — wait, why was I still breathing?

I looked down — my body had changed. I looked like her now. I felt the energy and knowledge move through me. I knew what I had to do — fight those bastards from the CCCCCC and win.

There was just one thing I didn’t understand. I knelt beside her. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought you had to kill me?”

She looked up with a small, weak smile. I leant in to hear her say, “If it made sense, it wouldn’t be a paradox, would it?”

The story behind the story

Rodrigo Culagovski reveals the inspiration behind The real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way.

My offspring and I love to watch superhero team TV series. They usually feature some — or a lot — of time travel, and are full of plot holes and paradoxes, to the point where we joke that time-travel paradoxes are their real super power.

I’m also a member of Codex, an SFF writers community. We hold flash-fiction contests twice a year. Last year, one of the prompts was “Road trip! Where are you going and who are you bringing with?” I didn’t use it as is, but it got me thinking of my favourite snowclone, “The Real X Was the Friends We Made Along the Way”.

This story is the love child of these two ideas.

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Entertainment

Friends don’t let friends use an AI STI test

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Picture the scene: Your date has gone well and you and your partner might sleep together. Like any safe adult, you assume there will be a conversation about STI status and the use of protection. Now imagine how you would feel if they asked to take a photo of your penis and upload it to a website you’ve never heard of. That’s the future of intimacy, as imagined by Calmara, a new service launched by “men’s health” startup HeHealth.

Banner image from the top of the HeHealth website describing Calmara.ai as as Banner image from the top of the HeHealth website describing Calmara.ai as as

HeHealth Website

Its press release suggests users take a picture of their partner’s penis so it can be run through a deep learning model for visual signs of sexually-transmitted infections. And while the website suggests users should wear protection, a banner atop the HeHealth sites describes the app as “Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex.” Mixed messages aside, you may notice some major issues with the pitch: That this only covers infections that present visually, and that it’s only designed to work with penises.

But even if that use case applies, you might not feel you can trust its conclusions once you’ve looked at the data. The Calmara website claims its scans are up to 90 percent accurate, saying its AI has been “battle-tested by over 40,000 users.” That figure doesn’t match up to its press release, which says accuracy reaches 94.4 percent (a figure cited in this NSFW preprint paper submitted a week ago), but its FAQ says the accuracy ranges “from 65 percent to 96 percent across various conditions.” We’ve reached out to the company and want to learn more about the apparent discrepancy.

Image of the Calmara website showing its claim of Image of the Calmara website showing its claim of

Calmara

It’s not impossible for models to categorize visual information — I reported on how systems like these look at images of cells to aid drug discovery. But there are plenty of reasons as to why visual information isn’t going to be as reliable for an STI test. After all, plenty of conditions don’t have visual symptoms and carriers can often be asymptomatic long after infection. The company admits to this in its FAQ, saying that the app is a “first line of defense, not a full-on fortress.” Not to mention that other factors, like the “lighting, the particular health quirks you’re scouting for and a rainbow of skin tones might tweak those [accuracy] numbers a bit.” Even more alarming, the unpublished paper (which is riddled with typos) admits that a full 40 percent of its training dataset is comprised of “augmented” images, for instance “extracting specific visually recognizable disease patterns from the existing clinical image dataset and layering those patterns on top of images of health (sic) penises.”

Image from the Calmara FAQ highlighting the variability of its tests.Image from the Calmara FAQ highlighting the variability of its tests.

Calmara

The Calmara website’s disclaimer says that its tools are for the purpose of “promoting and supporting general wellness and a healthy lifestyle and are not to be used to diagnose, cure, treat, manage or prevent any disease or condition.” Of course, if it really was intended as a general wellness tool, it probably wouldn’t describe itself as “Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex,” would it.

It doesn’t help that this is a system asking users to send pictures of their, or their partner’s genitalia. Issues around consent and — as writer Ella Dawson raised on Bluesky — age verification, don’t seem to have been considered. The company’s promises that the data is locked in a “digital stronghold” lacks specifics about its security approach or how the data it obtains may be shared. But that hasn’t stopped the company from suggesting that it could, in future, be integrated “directly into dating apps.”

Fundamentally, there are so many red flags and potential vectors for abuse and giving users a false sense of confidence that nobody should try using it.

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Business Industry

Your friends can join the Galaxy Z Flip 5 club and save $720, today only!

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Last updated: March 9th, 2024 at 15:12 UTC+01:00

Samsung would like to see the Galaxy Z Flip 5 in the hands of as many customers as possible. And as the Discover Spring Sale event nears the end, the company has revealed a limited-time one-day deal for the iconic foldable flip phone.

Whether you already own the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and recommend it to a friend or family member, or you’d like the flip phone for yourself, now might be a great time to jump on this offer.

With this one-day Discover Spring deal, you can save $720 on the 512GB Galaxy Z Flip 5 by taking advantage of an enhanced trade-in discount of up to $600 and an extra $120 price cut that applies at checkout — essentially a free memory upgrade from 256GB to 512GB.

You can buy the 512GB Galaxy Z Flip 5 for as low as $400

The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is one of the most interesting smartphones you can buy, even if it doesn’t yet have Galaxy AI features. It enables unique use cases through Flex Mode and Cover Screen Widgets, and no slab-type phone can emulate the Flip 5 experience.

Flex Mode leverages the phone’s foldable design to split app UIs between the screen’s two folding halves, which leads to unique use cases. For example, you can open the Galaxy Z Flip 5 at a 90-degree angle and hold it like a camcorder as you record videos with the Camera app.

Cover Screen Widgets are just as unique to the Galaxy Z Flip 5. They are full-screen minimalistic applets for the Cover Screen. They allow users to access various functions and features without flipping open the phone.

Hit the Buy button below to take advantage of this Discover Samsung Spring Sale deal and save up to $720 on the 512GB Galaxy Z Flip 5 today only!

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