McDonald's to revamp burger patties in major fast food overhaul: 'No more dry patties' - Fox Business

Gradient Investments President Mike Binger explains why he added McDonald's and Ulta Beauty to his portfolio on 'The Claman Countdown.'

Though the menu will look the same, McDonald's is set to make major changes to their most popular items on their menus-burgers, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The Golden Arches said that the new and improved burgers will include over 50 modifications. 

"We can do it quick, fast and safe, but it doesn’t necessarily taste great. So, we want to incorporate quality into where we’re at," Chris Young, McDonald’s senior director of global menu strategy, told the Journal.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
MCD	MCDONALD'S CORP.	281.85	+3.14	+1.13%

The changes come as the fast food corporation gears up for an ad campaign, which will feature "our best burgers ever."

MCDONALD'S, CROCS INTRODUCE 4-SHOE COLLECTION

A McDonald's cheeseburger. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images/File / Getty Images)

McDonald's signature burger, the Big Mac — two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun — is also set for a makeover.

The Journal said that the iconic menu item will feature two all-beef patties that are cooked in smaller batches for a more uniform sear. 

MCDONALD'S, KRISPY KREME IN TALKS TO EXPAND PARTNERSHIP

The revamp will also include more secret special sauce, with lettuce, cheese and pickles that will be "fresher and meltier." 

The former sesame seed bun will be transformed into a buttery brioche, with the sesame seeds more randomly scattered for a homemade look.

A McDonald's Big Mac and fries. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images/File / Fox News)

A McDonald's restaurant sign in Arlington, Va. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts/File / Reuters Photos)

At McDonald's headquarters in Chicago, Chef Chad Schafer has been perfecting the new burger patties for seven years.

The chef made one double cheeseburger in the fast food's current standard and one in the new way.

MCDONALD'S MCCRISPY CHICKEN SANDWICH BECOMES $1B BRAND WORLDWIDE AFTER GETTING FRESH NAME

"One is hotter," Schafer said. "It looks meltier. Look at how my fingers sink into the bun. Smell it and you smell a big difference." 

He said that the old McDonald's burger recipe was "kind of dry."

"This one, it’s kind of dry. It cracks," he said. "And this is the best-case example at headquarters." 

A McDonald's restaurant in San Leandro, Calif. West Coast restaurants will be among the first in the U.S. to offer the new burgers. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/File / Getty Images)

The new burger patties were first tested in Australia, and are expected to roll out in the U.S. by early 2024.

The West Coast and the Midwest will be the first of the 13,460 locations of McDonald's to experience the new burgers, the Journal said.

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Opinion | Ann Telnaes cartoon on the rising costs of fast food - The Washington Post

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Shane MacGowan, fast-living, hard-drinking lead singer of Irish-folk punk band the Pogues – obituary - The Telegraph

Shane MacGowan, who has died aged 65, was the truculent, hard-living lead singer of the Pogues; he was revered as much for his excessive alcohol consumption as for his dark, unsparing but lyrical vision of Irish life.

His growling vocals, drawled through crooked, rotten teeth, explored the dark side of the Irish diaspora. His front teeth, a girlfriend claimed, were lost when he ate a copy of the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits Volume 3 while under the influence of LSD. In October 2006, another two bit the dust when he fell over a wall in Ireland, having got out of a car to be sick.

MacGowan enlivened traditional Irish song with punk-rock attitude, stirring up the stagnant cultural backwater of folk music and inspiring a new generation of Irish musicians to experiment with new musical styles. But the English-born ex-public schoolboy, who became the epitome of the proud, working-class Irishman, diluted his songwriting genius in gallons of Guinness, whiskey and Martini.

MacGowan in 1999 at Finsbury Park, London Credit: Redferns

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born to Irish parents – but, to his chagrin, in England, at Pembury in Kent – on Christmas Day 1957. His father, Maurice, worked in a department store, while his mother, Therese, was a singer and traditional dancer who had been a model in Dublin.

At three months, he was taken to his mother’s family home in Tipperary while his parents worked in England. He was brought up by his Auntie Nora, who introduced him at an early age to the seminal influences of drink, cigarettes, religion and the Irish Sweepstake. Auntie Nora, he later claimed, turned him into “a religious maniac and a total hedonist”, condemning him to swing between piety and sin for the rest of his life.

When he was six, MacGowan’s Irish idyll ended when he was sent to join his parents in London. He described the years that followed as “a miserable, stinking, boring, useless waste of time”. 

MacGowan’s father was a heavy drinker and his mother, who was working as a typist, was often confined to bed with arthritis and depression, forcing their son to take care of himself and his younger sister, Siobhan. At the age of eight, MacGowan was introduced to Powers’ whiskey and by the time he was 14, he was rarely spending a day sober.

With Kirsty MacColl in 1987, the year of the Pogues's Christmas hit Fairytale of New York Credit: Tim Roney/Getty Images

He attended Holmewood House prep school, near Tunbridge Wells, then won a scholarship to Westminster School. His prep school headmaster, Robert Bairamian, recalled: “He was very unusual indeed, one of the most unusual personalities I’ve ever, ever met. I thought he would end up in the drama scene. At Westminster School, they asked whether I’d written his English paper. They said they’d never seen anything like this before.”

He spent only a year at Westminster, however, before being expelled for drug use. He then worked illegally as a shelf-filler, warehouseman, maintenance man at the Indian embassy and, inevitably, as a barman. At 17, he had a drink- and drug-induced mental breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six months. He was diagnosed with acute situational anxiety, which he blamed on living in London.

MacGowan found his musical vocation while working another odd job, at a record shop, where he discovered the shocking new sound of punk rock. He flung himself headlong into London’s emerging punk scene, and in 1976 a picture appeared in a paper of him pouring with blood after his ear was bitten at a gig. He struck up friendships with the Sex Pistols and the Clash and sang (as Shane O’Hooligan) with his own band, the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to the Nips), who supported the Jam and the Clash.

He met Spider Stacy at a Ramones gig and performed occasionally with Stacy’s band, the Millwall Chainsaws, who renamed themselves the New Republicans. They played a gig as part of Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura, but their Irish rebel songs went largely unappreciated: the audience began pelting them with chips, so the management pulled the plug on them.

MacGowan also played in another band with Jem Finer, and the pair began rehearsing his songs together; at one point they applied to busk in Covent Garden but were turned down. They were joined by Stacy and the former Nips guitarist, James Fearnley.

Searching for a name, Stacey came up with Pogue Mahone (“kiss my a---” in Gaelic); they played their first gig in October 1982, and were soon joined by Cait O’Riordan on bass. In 1984, the band released their first single, The Dark Streets of London. Their name was diplomatically shortened when David “Kid” Jensen began calling them the Pogues on his radio show after being told that he was saying “kiss my a---” on live radio.

Performing with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Kentish Town, London, 1992 Credit: Redferns

Their first album, Red Roses for Me, angered purists who accused them of debasing Irish music. But by injecting it with punkish verve and irreverence, they brought it to a new audience and inspired an Irish musical renaissance.

MacGowan was the principal lyricist on the Pogues’ two best albums, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash in 1985 (the title was Sir Winston Churchill’s succinct summary of life in the Navy) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1987), which included the chart-topping Christmas song, Fairy Tale of New York, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, which has become a standard performed wherever the Irish gather around the world.

Despite their recording success, the Pogues remained a quintessentially live band and MacGowan’s captivating drunken, fumbling, onstage antics became legendary. But by the late 1980s he had begun to suffer from his excesses. In 1988, he collapsed in Heathrow Airport and missed the first 10 days of a US tour. 

He began to forget lyrics on stage, would vomit profusely and had difficulty locating the microphone. Rumours circulated that he had six months to live, had 25 per cent of his liver left and lived on a pure alcohol drip. At the height of speculation, a book appeared entitled Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

Tensions within the band peaked in 1991 during a tour of Japan. A sake binge left MacGowan incapable of singing, and after he fell out of the tour bus, damaging his already ravaged face, he was sacked. For the next year, he recuperated in a Martello Tower in Bray, a guest of its owner, U2’s lead singer, Bono. He also travelled, spending long periods in Thailand, Portugal and Spain.

In 1994, MacGowan formed the Popes, whose first two albums, The Snake (1994) and The Crock of Gold (1997), were moderately successful. MacGowan, made several attempts to tackle his addictions, becoming a regular at the Priory clinic in London and the Dublin drying-out home, St John of God.

He continued, however, to take heavy doses of prescription tranquillisers and drink whole pints of Martini. In 1999, his fellow singer, Sinead O’Connor, reported him to the police after finding him in a heroin-induced coma. He claimed he was resting on his sofa, drinking gin and tonic, and no charges were brought.

With his friend Johnny Depp, who made a guest appearance on MacGowan's first solo album, The Snake, in 1994 Credit: MIrrorpix

By the end of the 1990s, MacGowan’s musical gifts seemed to have been eclipsed by his alcohol-saturated reputation. He felt ill at ease in the new, economically prosperous Ireland, which was at odds with the booze and bonhomie of his songs. He became a nostalgic figure, the last link in Ireland’s history of drunken bards, his distinctive voice drowned out by the roar of the “Celtic Tiger”.

In 2001, however, the Pogues reformed, staying together until 2014; the following year, MacGowan, asked if they were still together, replied, “We’re not, no ... we grew to hate each other all over again... We’re friends as long as we don’t tour together.”

In 2015, MacGowan fell as he was leaving a Dublin studio and broke his pelvis, putting him in a wheelchair. That year he had his teeth fixed – including, at his insistence, one gold tooth. The dentist who undertook the Herculean task described the course of treatment as “the Everest of dentistry”. The following year he announced that he had finally given up drinking.

In 2009, with his long-term girlfriend, the journalist Victoria Mary Clarke Credit: Lee Carter/Avalon/Getty Images

In 1999, MacGowan had published Poguetry, his collected lyrics, and in 2001 a memoir, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, written with his long-term girlfriend, the journalist and writer Victoria Mary Clarke, They eventually married in 2018 in a ceremony at Copenhagen City Hall at which his friend Johnny Depp played guitar.

MacGowan’s 60th birthday was celebrated at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, where he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Irish president Michael Higgins. In 2020 Depp made an appearance in Julien Temple’s documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, which also featured Gerry Adams and Tony Blair.

Shane MacGowan is survived by his wife Victoria. They had no children, though he is believed to have fathered several with other women, though he never knew how many.

Shane MacGowan, born December 25 1957, death announced November 30 2023

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Review | 'Slow Horses' goes fast and hard in its third season - The Washington Post

The best spy thrillers are drab and a little hopeless.

Those who agree with me — and there are dozens of us — have probably already discovered “Slow Horses,” the Apple TV Plus drama about Slough House, the dilapidated office to which disgraced MI5 agents are sent to be verbally abused and routinely demoralized by the pungent, alcoholic misanthrope in charge. Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the brilliant grouch in question. And his talents have never, not even when he played George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” been put to better use.

The series’s third season begins Wednesday with an uncharacteristically action-packed sequence set in Istanbul that involves none of the principals but culminates in the death of an agent. The story picks up a year or so later, with the Slough House staff still moldering. The prospects of River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) have not improved after the mistakes he made in the second season, so he childishly revolts when Catherine Standish (the extraordinary Saskia Reeves) asks him to itemize some “Ringo-level” files no one will ever read before transferring them to a new facility. Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) is still mourning the death of her partner, Min, while Roddy Ho, the office hacker (Christopher Chung) comes up with elaborate schemes to get her to sleep with him. Newer team members Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) bond, a little unwillingly, as outsiders struggling with various addictions. And Lamb bullies his worried doctor into lying about how much he really drinks. He’s resigned to the consequences and is disinclined to change course.

When one of the “horses” gets kidnapped, the others … react.

The third season ratchets up the contrast between Slough House and its glitzy counterpart, the Park, where the agents are in good standing, the lights are bright and the staff is stylish, safe and well-funded. It is, however, contested domain, with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her archrival and superior, MI5 Director Dame Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo), wrestling for control, and for the support of sleazy Home Secretary Peter Judd (Samuel West).

It’s not exactly an upstairs/downstairs dynamic, but there is a vaguely classed split between those who care (and are disenfranchised) and those who don’t (and accrue power). The third season confirms, in ways sophomore seasons never quite can, what the show is really is about. “Slow Horses” is ultimately less invested in fake-outs (of which there are many) than it is in the fascinatingly artless conversations that expose them. By this I mean that even bitter antagonists on this show tend to operate with striking candor. People lie, certainly, but everyone is a little too jaded to keep up the pretense once the other has guessed the truth.

That extra layer of cynicism matters. It adds a deliciously fatalistic dimension to a format vulnerable to the fantasy that powers a lot of forgettable “secret agent” entertainment, namely that outcomes can be changed by a combination of quick thinking and violence. That element isn’t entirely absent from “Slow Horses,” of course. The last two episodes of this new season rely on this fetishization of contingency more than they satirize it, in fact — to their detriment. (There is more action in this season of “Slow Horses” than in all the others combined.)

But “Slow Horses” is strongest when it’s thinking in chess metaphors. You can come up with a surprise or two, certainly, but you’re highly constrained by all that’s gone before. Your moves will be mostly predictable, and so will your team’s, because everyone knows roughly how knights and rooks move. The rules of engagement are set, and if you’re any good at the game, you’ll see exactly how it’s all going to shake out long before it does.

End of carousel

Militating against this largely deterministic backdrop is the adrenaline for which thrillers are famous. Some of that split-second decision-making this season comes from Dander, but most of it comes from Cartwright, the character who (if this were a less original show) would be the maverick. The cool guy. The sexy, rule-breaking protagonist. He’d be confident, and he’d be right.

In “Slow Horses,” Cartwright is wrong. A lot. For the consumer of thrills, this turns out to be oddly thrilling! We’re not used to the hero messing up badly, and it’s mildly destabilizing that so many of these agents, even the “good” ones, fail as much, and as spectacularly, as they do. That’s no more a condemnation of their merit than their placement at Slough House was: Cartwright is obviously talented. Many of his instincts are sound. He’s good-looking, resourceful and brave. Not to mention MI5 royalty: His grandfather (played by Jonathan Pryce) is a retired officer. But he’s also incredibly easy to bait, partly because he’s so eager to prove himself, so sure he should be the protagonist.

And indeed, in the first season, he sort of was. “Slow Horses” has since course-corrected, pulling focus from the guy with the leading-man looks. It was the right call. He would have been a bland hero. His adrenaline and idealism, on the other hand — as foils to Lamb’s pessimism and lethargy — make it possible for the show to run parallel plots at bizarrely different paces.

This two-speed trick is part of what makes “Slow Horses” feel new, even though it’s an obvious remix of familiar genres: Cartwright, whose impulsivity keeps landing him in hot water, is almost always running, whereas Lamb, who’s usually several steps ahead of him, barely moves. It’s a very funny setup, even if plot mechanics sometimes sag under the strain. (There are moments this season when Cartwright is seconds away from certain death while a leisurely Lamb storyline develops — with apparent simultaneity — over several minutes.)

The contrast between the two does deeper work, too, of course. Cartwright’s idealism goes a long way toward leavening a dour tone that could — without the former’s commitment and loyalty — pull the viewer asunder with lectures on meaningless work and failed systems. Underpinning “Slow Horses” is a convincing and deeply pessimistic consensus view of what intelligence services (and people, and countries) do. There’s a sense that it’s all been done before, it will all be done again, terrible things will happen, and very little can be done to stop them. Lamb’s “interrogations” don’t feel much like interrogations, because the moves are all so rote by now. (At one point last season, he complained that his hand was tired from holding a gun — so he and his interlocutor agreed to take the gun-pointing as read.)

This is bleak gamesmanship indeed, rivaling “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” (Mick Herron, who wrote the darkly comic books on which “Slow Horses” is based, adores John le Carré.) But Cartwright’s good intentions and Lamb’s strategic malodorousness (and humor) put a new twist on that potent old formula.

That brings me to my one serious criticism: Although the third season develops some long-simmering storylines beautifully, treating a couple of slow, important arcs with the care they deserve, six episodes aren’t sufficient to bridge the massive consequences of this particular plot. The show’s pleasure in twists sometimes feels as if it fails to really reckon with the bigger picture in ways that make Lamb’s conduct, in particular, feel tonally imprecise.

It’s still a fun, drab, smelly, unexpected watch.

Slow Horses Season 3 (six episodes) begins streaming Nov. 29 on Apple TV Plus with two episodes. New episodes will stream weekly.

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Opinion | Ann Telnaes cartoon on the rising costs of fast food - The Washington Post

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How Luke Combs Took the Carpool Lane to Dominance in Country and Pop Formats With Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ - Variety

What part of fast in “Fast Car” did anyone not understand? Country superstar Luke Combs’ cover of the 1988 Tracy Chapman classic proved to be as turbocharged as anything acoustically based in this world can be, with unexpected multi-format success: It was No. 1 at adult pop and country for two weeks each; a healthy No. 6 at Top 40 radio; No. 2 on the Hot 100; and No. 1 on Billboard’s overall Radio Songs chart for four weeks.

At country radio, Combs was experiencing an embarrassment of riches, because before “Fast Car” caught on, Sony Music Nashville already had a different song, “Love You Anyway” — the lead single from his “Growin’ Old” album — on the fast track to become his 15th country airplay No. 1. But the Chapman cover was not destined to remain in the realm of interesting novelties. Top executives at sister label Columbia Records in New York saw his version of “Fast Car” come up in a list of songs being released to streaming on a new-music Friday, along with the rest of the album tracks, and quickly began to wonder if that could work on the pop side.

“We already had two tracks at radio at the exact same time, and we were having to pick and choose,” says Chris Kappy of Make Wake Artists, who co-manages Combs. Those two songs, in the first stage, were actually “Love You Anyway” and “Five Leaf Clover,” both of which the singer had offered fans in advance of the album, under the theory that country listeners are so passionate about Combs, a double-offering wouldn’t dilute any efforts.

“‘Love You Anyway’ was a fan-selected single,” says Liz Cost, VP of marketing for Sony Music Nashville. “It was kind of a unique angle: Luke wanted to (cement the single choice) once the album was out,” she notes, in contrast to the typical country pattern of putting out a first single as much as six months prior to an album release. “He wanted the fans to choose the next single, and they were so passionate about ‘Love You Anyway'” that it was picked to go ahead of “Five Leaf Clover” as the track that would get the big push to No. 1.

Meanwhile, “We didn’t know if we were even going to be able to go to radio with ‘Fast Car'” down the line, then alone right then, Kappy says. “Who knew that ‘Fast Car’ was going to do what it did and then end up jumping one” of the two songs that’d already been delivered to radio? “We had to pull one down (“Five Leaf Clover”) because ‘Fast Car’ started to go crazy. We had to make a very quick pivot when it went wide outside of country.”

Crossover to pop formats was not part of the plan. Brady Bedard, Columbia’s senior VP of pop promotion, was one of the song’s NYC drivers. He recalls his team’s execs convening “on a Friday morning and saying, ‘Hey, did you see Luke Combs put out a song called “Fast Car” on Today’s Top Hits?’ We got really excited about it, like, ‘That’s in the family. We have to figure out how to do this. That’s going to work.’ It sounded pop to us right away. It immediately had elements that could lead to pop success. And between sister labels, I think it was a perfect marriage.”

But then, “also, “we had to get clearance to do it,” Kappy says. He means from Chapman herself. They had already received the blessing of the apparently retired singer-songwriter to cover her song, but now they wanted her permission to fully promote it to radio — even though, technically, they shouldn’t have needed it. “Whatever way she decided to go, we were going to go. We’re just not that camp, and Luke’s not that artist,” to push it to No. 1 without getting a nod of approval. “It’s her song. That’s the right thing to do, and we got to her, and it was blessed for us to do more with it.”

It wasn’t 100% across-the-board smooth sailing when Columbia New York took it to pop. Yes, “Luke Combs is a iconic, modern-day superstar in the music industry,” Bedard says. “And there was some (Chapman-era) nostalgia for programmers that we played it for. But there were also some people (programming station groups in different markets) that came back like, ‘Hey, if people want to listen to country, they can go listen to my country station. I don’t want to play it on my Top 40 Radio or Hot AC…’ Bhen the metrics started to grow, too, there was a certain line in the sand” where it couldn’t be ignored even by the holdouts. “The obstacles were very normal, but we ended up getting across it, and that’s when it started to get real fun, when people really started to see getting over those humps. And we got kind of romantic about it. We’re like, ‘But there’s a whole generation out there that needs to hear this song! That was part of our motivation to wanting to work with the radio, and part of our pitch to radio: It needs to translate to a new generation.”

The pop phenomenon definitely bled back into country, with Sony Nashville bucking conventional wisdom and realizing it could steer two Combs songs to No. 1 simultaneously — just not the exact two that were first put out. “It’s definitely unheard of to have two active radio singles at once, but with Luke’s success at radio over the years, he was the artist to do it,” says Cost. She managed to stick the landing on both “Love You Anyway” and “Fast Car,” which reached No. 1 in the country format within a month of each other.

Global crossover was significant, too, since covers of beloved oldies are a universal language. An additional component in the song’s success: This pivot to promoting “Car” happened at a time when Combs was already out on his 2023 tour, with no time to make a traditional video, which might have been a blessing anyway. “We were able to capture a great live rendition of the song on tour in May; we were excited about capturing it live just because we saw how fans were singing it back and reacting to it at the show..” That, of course, came on top of the pure fan action already happening with excerpts of the nightly sing-alongs populating TikTok and Reels.

Says Cost, “Millennials and older generations feel nostalgia when they hear it because they remember it from being a kid” — just like Combs himself, who associates it with his dad — “and then you have Gen Z that maybe never even heard it before, so it was just this perfect moment of demographics coming together and them all just really feeling something with the song.”

Not to make anything in radio promotion look easy, but in country radio, it might be a bigger news story if Combs didn’t go to No. 1 with a designated single than if he did. But is the success in pop formats repeatable?

“If it happens again, great!” says Kappy of the massive crossover. “If it never happens again, it’s fine, and we’ll go back to playing all our shows for our fans, and doing two nights in stadiums in some markets — plus playing to 16 countries around the world, a lot of which has to do with this song, because it opened up a broader fan base worldwide. If it never happens again,” he reiterates, “we were on a great ride, and it was beautiful.”

“Fast Car”

Artist: Luke Combs

Songwriter: Tracy Chapman

Producers: Chip Matthews, Jonathan Singleton

Label: River House Artists/Columbia Nashville

Hitmakers:

Brady Bedard, senior VP of pop promotion, Columbia Records

Liz Cost, VP of marketing, Sony Music Nashville

Chris Kappy & Sophia Sansone, managers, Make Wake Artists

Lauren Thomas, VP of promotion & artist development, Columbia Nashville

Alaina Vehec, VP of commercial partnerships, Sony Music Nashville

Publisher:

100% Purple Rabbit Music administered by Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman, LLC (ASCAP)

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Stable Diffusion Turbo XL can generate AI images as fast as you can type - Ars Technica

Enlarge / Example images generated using Stable Diffusion XL Turbo.

Stable Diffusion XL Turbo / Benj Edwards

On Tuesday, Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion XL Turbo, an AI image-synthesis model that can rapidly generate imagery based on a written prompt. So rapidly, in fact, that the company is billing it as "real-time" image generation, since it can also quickly transform images from a source, such as a webcam, quickly.

SDXL Turbo's primary innovation lies in its ability to produce image outputs in a single step, a significant reduction from the 20–50 steps required by its predecessor. Stability attributes this leap in efficiency to a technique it calls Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD). ADD uses score distillation, where the model learns from existing image-synthesis models, and adversarial loss, which enhances the model's ability to differentiate between real and generated images, improving the realism of the output.

Stability detailed the model's inner workings in a research paper released Tuesday that focuses on the ADD technique. One of the claimed advantages of SDXL Turbo is its similarity to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), especially in producing single-step image outputs.

A promotional Stable Diffusion XL Turbo video from Stability AI.

SDXL Turbo images aren't as detailed as SDXL images produced at higher step counts, so it's not considered a replacement of the previous model. But for the speed savings involved, the results are eye-popping.

To try it out, we ran SDXL Turbo locally on an Nvidia RTX 3060 using Automatic1111 (the weights drop in just like SDXL weights), and it can generate a 3-step 1024×1024 image in about 4 seconds, versus 26.4 seconds for a 20-step SDXL image with similar detail. Smaller images generate much faster (under one second for 512×768), and of course, a beefier graphics card such as an RTX 3090 or 4090 will allow much quicker generation times as well. Contrary to Stability's marketing, we've found that SDXL Turbo images have the best detail at around 3–5 steps per image.

SDXL Turbo's generation speed is where the "real-time" claim comes in. Stability AI says that on an Nvidia A100 (a powerful AI-tuned GPU), the model can generate a 512×512 image in 207 ms, including encoding, a single de-noising step, and decoding. Speeds like that could lead to real-time generative AI video filters or experimental video game graphics generation, if coherency issues can be solved. In this context, coherency means maintaining the same subject between multiple frames or generations.

Enlarge / A screenshot of the unofficial SDXL Turbo demonstration page on Hugging Face. Obligatory cat with beer attained.

Ars Technica

Currently, SDXL Turbo is available under a non-commercial research license, limiting its use to personal, non-commercial purposes. This move has already been met with some criticism in the Stable Diffusion community, but Stability AI has expressed openness to commercial applications and invites interested parties to get in touch for more information.

Meanwhile, Stability AI itself has faced internal management issues, with an investor recently urging CEO Emad Mostaque to resign. Stability management has reportedly been exploring a potential company sale to a larger entity, but that hasn't slowed down Stability's cadence of releases. Just last week, the firm announced Stable Video Diffusion, which can turn still images into short video clips.

Stability AI offers a beta demonstration of SDXL Turbo's capabilities on its image-editing platform, Clipdrop. You can also experiment with an unofficial live demo on Hugging Face for free. Obviously all the usual caveats apply, including the lack of provenance for training data and the potential for misuse. Even with those unresolved issues, technological progress in AI image synthesis is certainly not slowing down.

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Meet four of Canada's Fast 50 companies - The Globe and Mail

It’s been another wild year for tech companies, with access to capital particularly scarce. But there’s still growth to be found. For more than a quarter-century, Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 program in Canada has been honouring 50 of the best tech-based companies from coast to coast. We profile four of them here. You can also read more about the program here and see the full Fast 50 list here.

No. 1

DAPPER LABS INC.

Three-year revenue growth: 16,910%

When B.C.-based Dapper Labs was founded in 2017, blockchain was a little-known technology with a less-than-steller reputation as stuffy, hard to understand, even boring. Granted, admits Arthur Camara, Dapper’s VP of product, blockchain had mostly financial and business applications at the time. “Our mission became to drive the adoption of cryptotech through play and entertainment,” he says. And what’s a universally beloved, foolproof place to start on the web? Cats, of course. Dapper’s CryptoKitties, the first known game to use blockchain technologies, lets players buy, trade and collect digital cats, which you can then breed to create new “furrever friends.” If that sounds fun and silly and non-threatening, well, that’s kind of the point. “Thousands of people started to understand blockchain technology through CryptoKitties,” says Camara, “and a lot of them today built and run massive companies.” (Among them are the founders of OpenSea and Axie Infinity.)

As Dapper’s players matured, so too did the company’s offerings. Launched in 2020 in partnership with the NBA, Top Shot is a marketplace of officially licensed NFTs—or, as Dapper calls them, “moments” featuring favourite players in action. In two short years, over a million users hopped aboard the blockchain-tech train via Top Shot, and in February 2021, a Top Shot NFT of LeBron James dunking sold for a record high of $208,000. Those kinds of numbers earned Dapper Labs the top spot on this year’s Fast 50, with a staggering three-year growth rate of almost 17,000%. “We’re trying to make onboarding to blockchain less intimidating, more approachable and way more fun,” says Camara. Next up, meanwhile, is their soon-to-launch Disney Pinnacle, where fans will collect and trade NFTs of their favourite characters from Disney and Pixar. Because if Nemo the clownfish can’t cure your blockchain nerves, nothing will.

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No. 20

BRIM FINANCIAL

Three-year revenue growth: 1,028%

As digging through your wallet for a plastic credit card feels more and more like a thing of the past, online banking continues to get better and easier for companies and customers alike. For that, you might thank Rasha Katabi, founder and CEO of fintech company Brim Financial, whose state-of-the-art platform technologies (PaaS) are used everywhere from banks like Laurentian and Canadian Western to reward cards at Indigo, Kobo, Radisson Hotels and The Gap. “When you log in to any of these platforms to make payments or purchases, you’re using a Brim service,” says Katabi. Brim currently offers 330 functionalities that, by design, “feel like they’re coming from the company directly” rather than Katabi’s lean team of 112. As a rare female fintech CEO—women make up just 7% of fintech founders around the globe—Katabi made headlines in 2021 by securing the largest equity round of funding led by a female CEO in Canada: A record-setting $25 million in funds raised. In 2023, to clinch Brim’s spot on Deloitte’s Top 50 list, the company reported three-year revenue growth of more than 1,000%.

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No. 33

ADA

Three-year revenue growth: 525%

Among the ample complaints swirling about looming chatbots and AI technology closing in, you won’t find many about the sudden—and massive—improvement of automated customer service, which you could argue had nowhere to go but up. Get ready to be irritated already: “People on average spend about forty days of their lives waiting on hold,” says Mike Murchison, CEO and co-founder of Ada with David Hariri. Both were once customer service agents, charged with manually responding to thousands upon thousands of the same handful of complaints, where the seeds of Ada (named for the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace) were planted. “We make it really easy for businesses to hire an AI agent much like they’d hire an employee,” explains Murchison, although unlike an imperfect human, the AI agent—you know, that virtual assistant that pops up in a chat box whenever you shop online—has unlimited patience and politeness. It’s even gunning for a promotion: “Ada software can not only be completely customized, but it can actually coach the AI agent over time.” In almost eight years, Ada’s transformed “very dumb” chatbots of yore into virtual agents capable of thinking and reasoning. Its response, meanwhile, feels so fluid and conversational that users often can’t tell they’re not talking to an ever-helpful, never-irritated, extra-knowledgeable human.

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No. 40

MONSTERS ALIENS ROBOTS ZOMBIES

Three-year revenue growth: 426%

If and when an actor needs a little bit of what Jonathan Bronfman calls “2-D beautification”—from erased crows feet, laugh lines or under-eye bags to a full “de-aging” process—producers can call Toronto-based visual effects company Monster Aliens Robots Zombies (colloquially known as MARZ). “This process would traditionally take days, going frame by frame,” Bronfman says of the tedious, time-consuming and therefore expensive work. AI, he figured, could streamline the process. “Effectively, we pick up two or three frames, use our proprietary interface that manipulates the whole shot in one go.” Needless to say, Hollywood immediately came calling. Since its founding in August 2018, MARZ has provided visual effects for premium TV like Disney’s WandaVision, HBO’s The Flight Attendant, Amazon Prime’s Being the Ricardos and Netflix’s Wednesday, where Bronfman’s team was charged with bringing Thing, the Addams’ disembodied pet hand, to life on the small screen.

“Creatures are our specialty,” he says, though certainly business is expanding as technology allows. “De-aging,” for example, let MARZ imagine a young Willem Defoe in Spider-Man and a young(er) Joshua Jackson in Dr. Death. If an actor’s age is now negotiable, so is their spoken language: “As our codes got better and better at faces, we moved over to lip-dubbing, a fully automatized lip-syncing technology.” This means that should you want to watch Squid Game without distracting subtitles, MARZ technology can sync an actor’s lips to the English overdub.

What’s up next for the cutting-edge brains at MARZ? “We’re held under embargo with the studios, so we can’t tell you anything until after the shows come out,” says Bronfman. You’ll have to tune in and be surprised.

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Meet four of Canada's Fast 50 companies - The Globe and Mail
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Our galaxy’s black hole spins fast and drags space-time with it, scientists say - CNN

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CNN  — 

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is spinning rapidly and altering space-time around it, a new study has found.

Space-time is the four-dimensional continuum that describes how we see space, fusing one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space together to represent the space fabric that curves in response to massive celestial bodies.

A team of physicists observed the black hole, which is located 26,000 light-years from Earth, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope designed to detect the X-ray emissions from hot regions of the universe. They calculated Sagittarius A*’s rotational speed by using what is known as the outflow method, which looks at radio waves and X-ray emissions that can be found in the material and gases surrounding black holes, otherwise known as the accretion disk, according to the study published October 21 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The researchers confirmed that the black hole is spinning, which causes what is known as the Lense-Thirring effect. Also known as frame dragging, the Lense-Thirring effect is what happens when a black hole drags space-time along with its spin, said lead study author Ruth Daly, a physics professor at Penn State University who designed the outflow method over a decade ago.

Since the invention of the outflow method, Daly has been working to determine the spin of various black holes and authored a 2019 study that explored over 750 supermassive black holes.

An artist's illustration of the extremely energetic cosmic ray observed by the Telescope Array Collaboration led by the University of Utah and the University of Tokyo. It's been named the "Amaterasu particle."

Osaka Metropolitan University/L-INSIGHT, Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige

Mysterious cosmic ray observed in Utah came from beyond our galaxy, scientists say

“With this spin, Sagittarius A* will be dramatically altering the shape of space-time in its vicinity,” Daly said. “We’re used to thinking and living in a world where all the spatial dimensions are equivalent — the distance to the ceiling and the distance to the wall and the distance to the floor … they all sort of are linear, it’s not like one is totally squished up compared to the others.

“But if you have a rapidly rotating black hole, the space-time around it is not symmetric — the spinning black hole is dragging all of the space-time around with it … it squishes down the space-time, and it sort of looks like a football,” she said.

The altering of space-time is nothing to worry about, but illuminating this phenomenon could be very useful to astronomers, Daly said.

“It’s a wonderful tool to understand the role that black holes play in galaxy formation and evolution,” she said. “The fact that they’re dynamical entities which can be spinning … and then that can impact the galaxy that this is sitting in — it’s very exciting and very interesting.”

The spin of supermassive black holes

The spin of a black hole is given a value from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning the black hole is not spinning, and 1 being the maximum spin value. Previously there was no consensus on a value for the spin of Sagittarius A*, Daly said. 

This artist's concept illustrates the new view of the Milky Way, along with other findings presented at the 212th American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, Mo.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

Webb telescope spots the most distant Milky Way-like galaxy yet

With the outflow method, which is the only method that uses both information from the outflow and from the material within the vicinity of the black hole, Daly said, Sagittarius A* was found to have a spin angular momentum value between 0.84 and 0.96, whereas M87* — a black hole in the Virgo galaxy cluster that is 55 million light-years from Earth, was found to spin at the value of 1 (with a larger uncertainty of plus or minus 0.2) and is near the maximum for its mass.

While the team had found the two black holes to be spinning at similar rates, M87* is much more massive than Sagittarius A*, Daly said, so Sagittarius A* has less distance to cover and spins more times per one spin of M87*.

Sagittarius A* “is spinning much more rapidly (in comparison), not because it has a higher spin angular momentum, but because it has less distance to travel when it goes around once,” Daly explained.

Black holes and galactic history

Knowing the mass and the spin of a black hole helps astronomers understand how the black hole might have formed and evolved, Daly said.

Black holes that formed as a result of smaller black holes merging would typically see a low spin value, said Dejan Stojkovic, a professor of cosmology at the University at Buffalo who was not involved with the study. However, a black hole that was made with accretion of surrounding gas would see a high spin value.

The rate at which Sagittarius A* is spinning would indicate that a significant portion of the mass of the black hole came from accretion, he said.

This panchromatic view of galaxy cluster MACS0416 was created by combining infrared observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope with visible-light data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. To make the image, in general the shortest wavelengths of light were color-coded blue, the longest wavelengths red, and intermediate wavelengths green. The resulting wavelength coverage, from 0.4 to 5 microns, reveals a vivid landscape of galaxies that could be described as one of the most colorful views of the universe ever created.

NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Cosmic ‘Christmas tree’ dazzles in new image captured by Hubble and Webb

“The question of whether our central galactic black hole rotates or not, or how fast it rotates, is quite important,” Stojkovic said in an email.

“Ultimately, we want to measure the properties of the center of our galaxy as good as possible. This way we can learn about the history and structure of our galaxy, put our theories to (the) test, or even infer the existence of some very interesting and intriguing objects like wormholes,” added Stojkovic, who was the lead author of a 2019 study on the hypothetical structures.

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Our galaxy’s black hole spins fast and drags space-time with it, scientists say - CNN
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OpenAI's ChatGPT has evolved insanely fast in one year - Axios

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OpenAI's ChatGPT has evolved insanely fast in one year  Axios
OpenAI's ChatGPT has evolved insanely fast in one year - Axios
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Buyer beware: porch piracy set to ramp up with holiday season fast approaching - CP24

Ritika Dubey, The Canadian Press
Published Monday, November 27, 2023 7:25AM EST
Last Updated Monday, November 27, 2023 7:25AM EST

You've been tracking your online shopping haul for days. It's finally the day your package is set to arrive at your doorstep. But when you get home in the evening, the package is not there.

A recent FedEx survey shows porch thefts have risen over the last two years, with 28 per cent of respondents reporting they've had packages stolen by so-called porch pirates in the past. That compares to 24 per cent of respondents in 2022 and 20 per cent in 2021.

Seventy per cent of surveyed respondents expressed worries about their unattended packages being stolen after delivery.

"It's a natural concern," said James Anderson, a spokesperson with FedEx Express Canada. 

"It's always in the back of your mind — 'What happens with my package (when I'm not home)?'"

Despite the increase in thefts, the survey found only seven per cent of respondents reported it to police. 

"Look — you're a victim of a crime. Contact the police," he said.

Anderson also noted porch piracy increases during the holiday season in particular when more shoppers are ordering items online and getting them delivered.

"When shipping items purchased online, citizens are advised to use the delivery tracking app available," said Carolin Maran, communications adviser with the Edmonton Police Service.

She also suggested shoppers ask the retailer or shipping service to deliver items to a more discrete location, such as the back porch or an alternative address where someone can accept the package promptly.

The FedEx survey showed the number of shoppers reporting porch piracy was generally consistent across the country, ranging from 26 to 30 per cent, except for Atlantic Canada, which reported the lowest percentage of package theft at 20 per cent.

FedEx Canada, in conjunction with Angus Reid, surveyed 1,507 Canadians online between Oct. 1 and Oct. 5. A probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Barbara Agrait, an Amazon spokesperson, said customers should take advantage of order tracking, which is shareable with friends or family and includes photo-on-delivery and pick-up options to avoid losing a package. 

"We know how disappointing it is for customers when porch pirates strike," she said in an email. 

Canada Post said its app allows customers to pick a safe location outside their home, such as the garage or a side door, or allow the parcel to be delivered to a nearby post office.

"We suggest to consumers when ordering online, they should make sure to read the retailer's shipping details and choose the best option that works for them," said Lisa Liu of Canada Post.

While insurance isn't an option with FedEx, Anderson said customers should be honest about the value of their package.

"It's very important for shippers to be as accurate as possible on the value of that shipment," he said, "because that could affect the claims process."

A video doorbell, meanwhile, could bring an extra layer of protection and peace of mind, Anderson added.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 27, 2023.

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Buyer beware: porch piracy set to ramp up with holiday season fast approaching - CP24
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