
Posted Jun 17, 2025 at 10:00 AM EDT
Counter-Strike's rarest skin IRL.
If you don't feel like paying thousands of dollars to get your hands on the coveted AWP | Dragon Lore skin in Counter-Strike 2, now you can have it on your gaming gear for far cheaper. SteelSeries is teaming up with Valve to launch a $150 wireless gaming mouse and a $45 XXL mousepad wrapped in the ultra-rare design, which shows a knotwork dragon shooting flames from its mouth.
The gaming mouse and mousepad launch on July 1st, but are available for preorder today.
1/3
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Wall Street Journal
21 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Call It CEO Pink: This Muted, Dusty Shade Means Power in the Office
When Palm Beach native McKenna Phillips moved to Manhattan in 2019, she seemed to develop 'an allergic reaction' to wearing color, she said. Phillips, a 29-year-old hospitality manager, even earned Instagram clout for documenting her tough, all-black outfits. But lately, Phillips says she's found similar strength in a particular shade of pink. Meet the new power neutral—a muted, slightly dusty pale pink. It's as if the quiet-luxury beiges of recent seasons have been washed in rosé. Gone are any associations with Barbie, Pepto-Bismol and frilly baby showers. 'This pink emphasizes the power of sharp tailoring, without sacrificing any minimalism,' said Phillips, who credits the brands Khaite and Alaïa for turning her on to the shade.


TechCrunch
22 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Google's Gemini panicked when playing Pokémon
AI companies are battling to dominate the industry, but sometimes, they're also battling in Pokémon gyms. As Google and Anthropic both study how their latest AI models navigate early Pokémon games, the results can be as amusing as they are enlightening — and this time, Google DeepMind has written in a report that Gemini 2.5 Pro resorts to panic when its Pokémon are close to death. This can cause the AI's performance to experience 'qualitatively observable degradation in the model's reasoning capability,' according to the report. AI benchmarking — or, the process of comparing the performance of different AI models — is a dubious art that often provides little context for the actual capabilities of a given model. But some researchers think that studying how AI models play video games could be useful (or, at the very least, kind of funny). Over the last several months, two developers unaffiliated with Google and Anthropic have set up respective Twitch streams called 'Gemini Plays Pokémon' and 'Claude Plays Pokémon,' where anyone can watch in real time as an AI tries to navigate a children's video game from over twenty-five years ago. Each stream displays the AI's 'reasoning' process — or, a natural language translation of how the AI evaluates a problem and arrives at a response — giving us insight into the way that these models work. Image Credits:Google While the progress of these AI models is impressive, they are still not very good at playing Pokémon. It takes hundreds of hours for Gemini to reason through a game that a child could complete in exponentially less time. What's interesting about watching an AI navigate a Pokémon game is not so much about its time of completion, but rather, how it behaves along the way. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW 'Over the course of the playthrough, Gemini 2.5 Pro gets into various situations which cause the model to simulate 'panic,'' the report says. This state of 'panic' can result in the model's performance getting worse, as the AI may suddenly stop using certain tools at its disposal for a stretch of gameplay. While AI does not think or experience emotion, its actions mimic the way in which a human might make poor, hasty decisions when under stress — a fascinating, yet unsettling response. 'This behavior has occurred in enough separate instances that the members of the Twitch chat have actively noticed when it is occurring,' the report says. Claude has also exhibited some curious behaviors in its journeys across Kanto. In one instance, the AI picked up on the pattern that when all of its Pokémon run out of health, the player character will 'white out' and return to a Pokémon Center. When Claude got stuck in the Mt. Moon cave, it erroneously hypothesized that if it intentionally got all of its Pokémon to faint, then it would be transported across the cave to the Pokémon Center in the next town. However, that isn't how the game works. When all of your Pokémon die, you return to whatever Pokémon Center you used most recently, rather than the nearest geographically. Viewers watched on in horror as the AI essentially tried to kill itself in the game. Despite its shortcomings, there are a few ways in which the AI can outperform human players. As of the release of Gemini 2.5 Pro, the AI is able to solve puzzles with impressive accuracy. With some human assistance, the AI created agentic tools — prompted instances of Gemini 2.5 Pro geared toward specific tasks — to solve the game's boulder puzzles and find efficient routes to reach a destination. 'With only a prompt describing boulder physics and a description of how to verify a valid path, Gemini 2.5 Pro is able to one-shot some of these complex boulder puzzles, which are required to progress through Victory Road,' the report says. Since Gemini 2.5 Pro did a lot of the work in creating these tools on its own, Google theorizes that the current model may be capable of creating these tools without human intervention. Who knows, maybe Gemini will therapize itself into creating a 'don't panic' module.


CNET
31 minutes ago
- CNET
Streaming Has Overtaken Traditional TV for the First Time Ever
Streaming became the most popular single form of TV usage years ago, but that was not its final hurdle. The juggernaut of broadcast and cable television combined meant that consumers were still using traditional TV services more than streaming overall, even if streaming was more popular than either of them individually. According to data from Nielsen, streaming just overcame this final hurdle. Nielsen says that in May, cable television accounted for 24.1% of all TV usage and broadcast TV represented 20.1% of all viewership for a total of 44.2%. Streaming services accounted for 44.8% of total viewership, just surpassing the combined efforts of cable and broadcast. This has happened on single days, namely during large events such as the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Netflix, but streaming has never sustained that edge for an entire month. The numbers were aided by the addition of more streaming services to Nielsen's metrics. The original list included streaming giants like Netflix, Disney+, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon's Prime Video. It was expanded to 11 total services and now includes the Roku Channel, Paramount+, Tubi, Peacock, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The next milestone for streaming will be keeping this lead for an entire quarter. For the time being, cable and broadcast still rule that statistic, combining for 57.6% of all TV streaming in the first quarter of 2025, with streaming comprising 42.4%. Should streaming keep its current lead, the second quarter of 2025 could mark the first quarter that streaming overtakes traditional TV and holds the lead. YouTube and Netflix winning big YouTube led the way for streaming services at a hefty 12.5% of viewership. Following that is Netflix, which remains the largest single video-on-demand service, a title it's held for four years in a row. Rounding out the top five is Disney via Disney+ and Hulu, Prime Video, and the Roku Channel. However, YouTube is the biggest winner. Not only does it lead all streaming services in market share, but it also has the highest share ever measured by Nielsen and leads the way in a growing segment of free, ad-supported services, also known as FAST services. The other FAST services measured by the data firm, including PlutoTV, the Roku Channel, and Tubi, combined for 5.7% of all TV viewing in May 2025, which is more than any individual broadcast network over the same time.