Latest news with #Luan
RTÉ News
04-05-2025
- General
- RTÉ News
15 dog-friendly cafés in Dublin to visit for a puppuccino
If you don't follow my page you might not know that my life became infinitely more joyful this year because we rescued a puppy, Luan, from Wicklow Animal Welfare. As a result, the last few months have introduced a whole new subsection on my usual hunt to find the best places to eat in Dublin. Thankfully, Dublin has lots of dog-friendly cafes and restaurants available, and it seems to be becoming more and more common. So if you're like me and you dream of finding places where your furry friend is welcome inside, this list is for you. Slice, Stoneybatter Slice is a real local legend of Dublin 7, and definitely one of my favourite places to eat in the entire country - I visit at least once a month. Thankfully, when my little dog Luan came into my life, those brunch plans didn't have to change. In fact, he was welcomed us with open arms and treats on arrival. Slice has one of the most interesting brunch menus out there. You're getting the best of the best ingredients served to you on colourful plates. Try the hash browns if you're there for breakfast, and the Bahn Mi if you're visiting for lunch. Park Lane Deli, Chapelizod It's açai season, and let me tell you, I've tried almost every açai place in Dublin, and this is the best in my opinion. Park Lane Deli is nestled in the idyllic village of Chapelizod, beside the Phoenix Park. So you can pop in for a fruity bowl and a coffee with your pup and then head to the park for a walk. Perfection. If you're not into açai, their bacon and egg sandwich with relish is ridiculously good. Two Pups, Francis Street One of the trendiest cafes in Dublin has to be Two Pups. Inside, it's a surprisingly large space with many nooks and crannies for you and your doggo. The menu is constantly evolving to match what's in season, and the coffee here never fails. They recently launched an evening menu here, so if small plates and wine are more up your street, this is a great option. 3fe, Grand Canal 3fe coffee can be found in a plethora of cafes across the country, so it's very likely you've had their coffee, but have you visited their own cafe? They have quite a few branches across the city, but the one on Grand Canal Street has to be my favourite. Their menu is simple but effective and really reasonably priced. Eggs on toast for eight euroS? You can't beat it. Dogs are allowed inside each of the 3fe cafes. Clement & Pekoe, South William You can't get more central than Clement and Pekoe on South William Street. Specialising in tea and coffee, with a selection of pastries on offer, it's my go-to for a caffeine kick close to Grafton Street. There's a few tables inside this spacious venue for you and your furry friend to escape from the bustling streets of Dublin City. One Kinda Folk, Rathmines To matcha or not to matcha? Don't come for me, but I'm not a big matcha drinker. I do, however, have quite a few friends who are extremely passionate about it and swear that One Kinda Folk is the best place to order it. One Kinda Folk has two branches - one in Rathmines and one of Upper Leeson Street - both dog-friendly, of course. Both venues have a really calming energy and are especially lovely on sunny days. Two Boys Brew Another one of my all-time favourite cafes in Dublin is Two Boys Brew in Phibsborough. It's the little things like the staff remembering your dog's name and bringing him treats while you tuck into brunch. The avocado toast here is worth sacrificing some of your savings toward a mortgage. Blas, Rotunda There are few buildings as impressive as The Chocolate Factory in Dublin, home to the stunning Blas Cafe. The space here is huge, with loads of seating, so you'll never be stuck for a table. They welcome dogs of all sizes inside. My top pick is the Marrakech breakfast for a taste of Middle Eastern flavours. Groundstate, Dublin 8 Groundstate café can be found in the heart of the Liberties, Dublin 8. They roast their own coffee and curate their menu around seasonal produce from local suppliers. There is also a yoga studio on site. It's a great one for veggies and vegans, with something for all on the menu. There's lots of seating, with a long section along the window, making a great people-watching perch for solo diners. Vada, Grangegorman Vada is one of the most beautiful cafes I've visited in Dublin, and the presentation of their food is equally as impressive. Thankfully, it tastes as good as it looks. The menu is small but mighty, maybe only four or five options to choose from, but each one is totally different from the other. Flavours are unique and inventive. Bibi's, Portobello Bibi's has been around for as long as I can remember and it's always been a great place for dog owners to dine. They have two branches - one in Dun Laoghaire and one in Portobello, which is my favourite. Their sandwiches are some of the best you'll find. BaaBaa Chapelizod The love affair with Chapelizod continues. BaaBaa is an absolutely stunning venue. It's super cosy inside with just a few seats but during the summer months they put out more tables outside, in front of the cafe. The creativity behind the dishes here blow me away every time. If you like sweet flavours for brunch, this cafe has mastered it. The French toast will leave you drooling. Southbank, Harold's Cross Maybe it's in the name, maybe it's the vibe, but Southbank feels like a place you'd find in the bustling streets of London Town. It's a bright, spacious venue with brunch dishes taking centre stage. The perfect place to grab a bite to eat before strolling along the canal with your pooch. The Middle Child If it's baked goods you're after, The Middle Child in Beaumont is the one for you. They have perfected the 'sweet treat' from cookies to carrot cake, cinnamon swirls to brioche buns. It's super dog-friendly and well worth checking out. Honey Honey, Portmarnock It's my dream (probably most people's dream) to live in Portmarnock. The village has such a sense of community, and the beach is one of the best sea swim locations around. For now (until I win the lottery), I'll have to settle for weekend visits. No visit to Portmarnock is complete for me (or Luan) without a visit to Honey Honey. Their pup cups are sprinkled with doggy treats, and they even have a Polaroid wall of fame for the dogs that visit.
WIRED
31-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Amazon's AGI Lab Reveals Its First Work: Advanced AI Agents
Mar 31, 2025 9:00 AM Led by a former OpenAI executive, Amazon's AI lab focuses on the decision-making capabilities of next generation of software agents—and borrows insights from physical robots. The Amazon logo on the façade of one of their global headquarters. Photograph:Amazon is still seen as a bit of a laggard in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence, but it has quietly created a lab that is now setting records when it comes to AI performance. Amazon's AGI SF Lab, which is located in San Francisco and dedicated to building artificial general intelligence, or AI that surpasses the capabilities of humans, revealed the first fruits of its work today: A new AI model capable of powering some of the most advanced AI agents available anywhere. The new model, called Amazon Nova Act, outperforms ones from OpenAI and Anthropic on several benchmarks designed to gauge the intelligence and aptitude of AI agents, Amazon says. On the benchmarks GroundUI Web and ScreenSpot, Amazon Nova Act performs better than Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI Computer Use Agent. A major part of Amazon's plan to compete in the AI market is to focus on building agents, and the new model's abilities reflect its efforts to build a generation of tools that can measure up to the very best available. 'I believe that the basic atomic unit of computing in the future is going to be a call to a giant [AI] agent,' says David Luan, who leads Amazon's AGI SF Lab. He was previously a vice president of engineering at OpenAI and later cofounded Adept, a startup that pioneered work on AI agents, before joining Amazon in 2024 when the ecommerce giant took a stake in the company. Most of the leading AI labs are now focused on building increasingly capable AI agents. Getting AI to master independent actions, as well as conversation, promises to make the technology more useful and valuable. The shift from chat to action is still very much a work in progress, however. In the past six months, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others have demonstrated web-browsing agents that take actions in response to a prompt. But for the most part, these agents are still unreliable, and they can easily be tripped up by open-ended requests. Luan says that Amazon's goal is building AI agents that are dependable rather than flashy. The thing holding agents back is not the need for 'more cool demos of interesting capabilities that work 60 percent of the time, it's the Waymo problem,' he says, referring to how self-driving cars needed to be trained to deal with unusual edge cases before they could take to the streets unsupervised. Many so-called agents are built by combining large language models with multiple human-written rules that are designed to prevent them from veering off course, but also makes their behavior brittle. Amazon Nova Act is a version of the company's most powerful homegrown model Amazon Nova that has received additional training to help it make decisions about what actions to take and at what time. In general, Luan says, AI models struggle to decide when they should intervene in a task. To improve Nova's agential abilities, Amazon is using reinforcement learning, a method that has helped other AI models better simulate reasoning. Amazon is also taking inspiration from physical robots with its new models. Laun's team is working with another group at Amazon based in San Francisco led by Pieter Abbeel, a professor at University of California, Berkeley who works on finding AI applications for robotics. Abbeel, a fellow early OpenAI employee, joined Amazon in August 2024 after it invested in his startup, Covariant. Amazon is well positioned to make progress in robotics given the vast numbers of those already deployed in its fulfillment centers. The release of Amazon Nova Act suggests that Amazon could emerge as a dark horse in the race to create useful software agents. The company was slow in responding to ChatGPT, but it has more recently shown signs of getting its act together. In February, the company announced a new version of its voice assistant Alexa with improved conversational abilities as well as the capacity to automate certain web tasks. One use case Amazon cited is Alexa helping to book a repair service for a broken oven. Luan says Alexa's new agentic capabilities were developed by his team. As WIRED revealed last October, Amazon has also done research on how agents might eventually improve ecommerce by automating the process of finding and buying things. Such an agent might preemptively add items to a user's cart based on their interests and habits, Amazon's engineers said. Besides unveiling the new model, Amazon today announced a software development kit (SDK) designed to make it easier for computer engineers to use Amazon Nova Act to build software agents. The SDK lets developers give their agent specific instructions to help them navigate an internet built for human users. For example, an agent can be instructed 'don't accept the insurance upsell' when booking a rental car. Ultimately, Luan says, Amazon's agents should become smart enough not to fall for the upsell on their own. 'Nova Act is really like the very first step in that vision,' he says.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dynasty Warriors: Origins' Weapon Reforging Is Kind Of A Scam
Dynasty Warriors: Origins reveals a plethora of new systems and mechanics to strengthen your protagonist in the postgame. We're talking expanded level caps, new game plus, a brand new difficulty level which grants new skills and weapons, and…weapon reforging. If you're au fait with Dynasty Warriors and its innumerable spinoffs, weapon reforging should look pretty familiar: If you have two copies of the same weapon, you can merge them to either mix-and-match skills or wholesale increase a weapon's strength. Do this enough times, and you can theoretically get a +99 weapon with insane attack power. Neat, right? Well… I come to you today as someone who has mastered every nook and cranny of Dynasty Warriors: Origins. With my shiny platinum trophy under my belt, I have conquered all the challenges, seen every sight, and felled entire armies by myself. And throughout all of that, not only did I never need reforged weapons to overcome any postgame challenges, I almost made an otherwise easy-to-get trophy way harder on myself. Here's the breakdown. Let's cut to the chase: weapon reforging technically offers you the best weapons in the game. As you progress into the endgame, you can find weapons as high as Grade 7 as drops in battle. If you grind out enough Grade 7 weapons, you can merge them into an armament with a whopping 623 Attack stat and a slew of six passive skills of your own choosing. It's those passives that are key here; normally weapons feature a mix of common and rare passive traits, but nothing's stopping you from loading your weapon with all rare traits that will push your damage per second to the moon. Nothing in the game will quite match the power of a fully upgraded Grade 7 weapon. But you will find weapons that come awfully close, and therein lies the rub. Yes, while Grade 7 weapons are the best equipment you can find as drops, you can attain mythical Grade 8 'Luan' weapons by completing challenges on the postgame-exclusive Ultimate Warrior difficulty. Considering you can attain these weapons early in your postgame grind, they offer a huge jump in power. We're talking attack power on par with a fully upgraded Grade 7 weapon and a suite of six passive abilities that aren't great, but are still perfectly acceptable for a non-forged weapon. Luan weapons are all unique, so they can't be upgraded or edited at all via weapon reforging. This is why a maxed out Grade 7 weapon can still outperform a Luan weapon in the end. But is the minor difference in power worth the massive difference in effort? Getting a maxed Grade 7 weapon involves a huge grind. For reference, even after completing everything in the game, I didn't get a single Grade 7 weapon past +40 with the drops I naturally acquired. Conversely, many Luan weapons aren't even locked behind especially hard postgame challenges. For example, the Lurking Luan sword is locked behind the 'Final Battle against the Yellow Turbans' mission in Chapter 1, and I completed this challenge with time to spare even though I was several levels below the recommended level 71. By the time I reached max level through naturally completing Ultimate Warrior missions, I had ample power to defeat anything and everything the game could throw at me. Taking the time to grind out maxed Grade 7 weapons would have been total overkill. Still, you don't want to ignore weapon forging completely. The Deadly Perfection achievement is unlocked by fully upgrading a weapon, so you can't miss this if you want 100 percent completion. Fortunately, as long as you're not gunning for a fully upgraded Grade 7 weapon, this one is pretty easy. To easily get Deadly Perfection, just save your game and spend all your money on upgrading any weapon Grade 6 or lower. Since you can find and outright purchase weapons with +20 modifiers already on them, this is significantly easier to grind out as long as you have the cash. In fact, a +99 Grade 6 weapon will perform about on par with a +13 Grade 7 weapon, so you could choose to use one if you're starting Ultimate Warrior. But if you'd rather save your cash, you can reload your game after getting your trophy. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with wanting a fully upgrade Grade 7 weapon! If you're down for the grind, it'll certainly make the rest of your postgame challenge easier. But if you'd rather save your time, you're not missing much. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
