Excellent news for load-shedding
The rather short nightmare is officially over. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Eskom suspended load shedding, a day earlier than was initially predicted. The energy company announced the departure in a post on X, noting that it had managed to restore its emergency reserves following ten load-shedding-free months.
Eskom first announced the return to rolling blackouts on Friday, 31 January, stating that several breakdowns – requiring full repairs – forced the company to rely on its energy reserves. With repairs on five coal-fired generation units now complete (adding 2,930MW back to the grid) and emergency reserves fully replenished, Eskom shared its confidence in returning to full-time power.
The company reiterated that the Summer Outlook, published on 26 August 2024, will not be affected by the recent slip-up, and provided an update to what still needs to be accomplished.
“Currently, unplanned outages stand at 13,279MW and continue to trend downward, averaging 12,087MW. Planned maintenance outages account for 6,298MW and are aligned with our summer maintenance strategy to further improve reliability in preparation for winter 2025 and beyond.”
OpenAI strikes back with o3-mini model
The AI world was set ablaze by the recent release of DeepSeek, striking fear into the hearts of the West’s best artificial intelligence efforts. OpenAI, however, is continuing with business as usual, delivering the promised o3-mini model the company first announced in its ’12 days of OpenAI’ inside ChatGPT and the API that supposedly beats out the old tech by a sizeable amount. Also, it’s free.
OpenAI calls o3-mini its most “cost-efficient model in our reasoning series,” promising a significant leap in its STEM abilities, excelling particularly in maths, science, and coding “all while maintaining the low cost and reduced latency of OpenAI o1-mini,” the company said in a blog post. It’s also faster than its predecessor, with a promised 24% speed increase, as well as more accurate replies in the process.
If the company’s benchmarks are something you’d like to get behind, you can. o3-mini is the first of OpenAI’s reasoning models that are available to non-paying users, though their time with it will be heavily supervised, featuring similar rates to the free version of GPT-4o. Only the Pro users giving up $200/m can use o3-mini to their heart’s content.
YouTube gets experimental
YouTube appears to be in a perpetual state of confusion, either deploying the most heinous, app-breaking updates or nothing burgers that’ll entice a few people who come across them. Fortunately, the company’s latest slew of experimental features fall into the latter category and can be beta-tested right now – as long as you’re paying the R72/m Premium fee.
The latest addition is Jump Ahead Web, expanding upon the Jump Ahead feature that mobile users have enjoyed for some time. Rather than sit through the usual preamble (like, subscribe, comment), YouTube provides a button that’ll skip all the nonsense and take you straight to the meat of a video, calculated by other users’ scrubbing in the early hours of a video’s release.
Also new is faster playback speeds, doubling the previous limit of 2x speed that could be accessed from the settings while watching a video. We’re not quite sure why you’d want to watch something at 4x speed, but the option is available. Those looking for something more specific – like 1.05x or 1.85x speeds – can use the new slider in the settings to customise it even further.
MultiVersus dies a second, more painful death
It’s not often that video games are sent so quickly to the Gulag within years (and in some cases, months) of their release, but they rarely perish quite as spectacularly as MultiVersus. Sure, there’s the embarrassing $400 million hole in the ground that is Concord and we’re still hurting over the loss of XDefiant, but fans of MultiVersus are now watching their free-to-play arena-fighter die for the second time.
Yup, MultiVersus will officially be shut down on 30 May 2025, at the end of its next season, just a year after the game’s launch in May 2024, likely due to the reported $100 million+ budget and lacking fanbase. The game was initially released in early access in 2022 before Warner Bros. killed it off in anticipation of its full launch two years later. After 30 May, however, the game won’t be making a return after the developers shut the servers down.
It’s not all bad news though. Unlike Concord and XDefiant, which both rely on servers to play, MultiVersus will live on as an offline arena-fighter title. You’ll need to grab it on your console and PC and log in once ahead of the 30 May shutdown date, however, when it will be delisted from all digital storefronts forever.
