Entertainment
Samara Weaving Made A Subversive, Extremely R-Rated Thriller Before Her Fame
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Steven Yeun became a horror icon thanks to The Walking Dead, and Samara Weaving became a scream queen thanks to movies like Ready or Not and The Babysitter. In 2017, these two teamed up to create the most subversive horror movie ever made: Mayhem, which is about killing your bosses in the most brutal way and getting away with it thanks to an insane legal loophole. It’s a fast, frenetic film that turns the zombie genre on its head, and you can now stream this macabre masterpiece for free on Tubi.
The premise of Mayhem is that Steven Yeun plays a lawyer with a very specific claim to fame. He helped set the legal precedent that those infected with the Red Eye virus (which removes inhibitions and morality but otherwise leaves intelligence intact) are not liable for what they do during this altered state.
However, he loses his job on the same day that his building is flooded with the virus, resulting in every employee being quarantined until the virus runs its course. At this point, he decides to team up with a disgruntled client (Samara Weaving) to kill his bosses, knowing full well he won’t have to face any legal repercussions for any violent mayhem he causes.
A Cast That Bleeds Pure Talent
The cast of Mayhem is lean and mean, with Steven Brand (best known for Saw X) playing the amoral boss that our plucky protagonists are determined to kill. One of our heroes is played by Samara Weaving (best known for Ready or Not), whose insanely unpredictable character serves as the film’s ultimate chaos agent. Our other protagonist is played by Steven Yeun (best known for The Walking Dead), and his character has so much charisma that it’s hard not to support his goal: getting away with murder against the worst boss you could possibly imagine.
When Mayhem came out, it impressed reviewers who were hungry for more than just another horror flick. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a rating of 84 percent, with critics praising the movie’s stylish violence and dark humor. They particularly commended the movie for tying its bonkers fictional plot to real-world economic anxieties, which serves to elevate the film without turning everything into a preachy mess.
Violence Has Never Been Sexier
I first saw Mayhem when it appeared on The Last Drive-In, the popular Shudder program hosted by horror legend Joe Bob Briggs. As Briggs described the movie, I had a bad feeling that the Red Eye virus would be nothing more than an excuse to turn characters into mindless zombies. After watching Steven Yeun’s Glenn get violently murdered on The Walking Dead (the exact point that I walked away from the show), I wasn’t really in the mood to see the actor tangle with mindless zombies yet again.
However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this wasn’t really a zombie movie; instead, the Red Eye virus is just a plot MacGuffin to explain why an entire building of stuffy lawyers would suddenly transform into violent killers. They aren’t mindless, either, and the fact that everyone retains their intelligence is a big part of why this movie is so scary. Instead of transforming into slow, shambling monsters, everyone in the building becomes someone with the morality and violent appetites of movie monsters like Hannibal Lecter.
I was also impressed by the bonkers premise in which our lawyer protagonist has figured out that he can attack and even kill his employers without seeing so much as a day of jail time. In this way, Mayhem channels movies like The Purge, asking viewers to consider what they would do if they had a certain amount of time (in this case, eight hours before the virus dissipates) to commit any possible crime. Anyone watching who has ever had a crazy jerk of a boss (which is basically, well, everyone watching) will also sympathize with the plight of a protagonist fighting against a broken system of capitalism in the only way he knows how.
A Freaky Film Worth Fighting For
In addition to the great premise and tight script, the movie delivers everything a horror fan could ask for: killer action, a perfect pace, and entire buckets full of blood. Steven Yeun and Samara Weaving also make the perfect onscreen team, each of them utilizing their genre experience to bring their characters to vivid, violent life. Overall, I found Mayhem to be one of the freshest horror films of the last decade, and the biggest problem with this movie is that not enough people have seen it!
You can change that by streaming this subversive horror classic for free on Tubi. Mayhem is a great movie to watch for anyone looking for a new take on an old genre or who simply wants to see two veteran performers chew the scenery in the most captivating way. Of course, it’s also the perfect movie for another group of viewers: anyone who needs a bit of catharsis after working for a terrible boss day in and day out!
Entertainment
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6: Benchmark performance, how to try it
Anthropic has just released its latest Large Language Model (LLM), Claude Sonnett 4.6. The Tuesday release quickly follows the launch of Claude Opus 4.6, the company’s premium AI model, on Feb. 5.
According to Anthropic, “Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most capable Sonnet model yet.” The company says Sonnet 4.6 has a 1 million token context window in beta. Crucially, Anthropic reports that Sonnet 4.6 performed well on internal safety tests, showing a low tendency to hallucinate and engage in sycophancy.
“Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users,” Anthropic said, referring to Claude’s popularity among developers who use AI to code.
If you’re looking to use Anthropic’s latest AI model, the company has made it really easy. Here’s how to access Clause Sonnet 4.6.
How to use Claude Sonnet 4.6
For both free and Pro users, Claude Sonnett 4.6 is available now as the default model on claude.ai and Claude Cowork. Anthropic has also rolled the model out through its API and all major cloud platforms.
Mashable Light Speed
Free users will have limited usage rates that depend on current demand. Limits reset every five hours. For those who need higher limits, Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs the same price rate as the previous model. The Claude Pro plan costs $20 per month or $17 per month if paid annual. If going through the API, Claude Sonnett 4.6 starts at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 benchmark performance
According to Anthropic’s benchmark tests, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the company’s most powerful model for agentic financial analysis and office tasks, beating out competitors like Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT 5.2.
On those tasks, Claude Sonnet 4.6 also beats out Anthropic’s own Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s most powerful AI model.
In its release announcement, Anthropic said that many developers with early access to Claude Sonnet 4.6 preferred the model — not just to its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 4.5, but also Claude Opus 4.5. According to the Sonnet 4.6 system card, the new model improves on key benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam, though Claude Opus 4.6 scored higher.
Benchmark performance
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GPQA Diamond: 89.9 percent
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ARC-AGI-2: 58.3 percent
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MMMLU: 89.3 percent
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SWE-bench Verified: 79.6 percent
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HLE (Humanity’s Last Exam): With tools 49.0 percent, without tools 33.2 percent
AI-powered insurance company Pace told VentureBeat that Sonnet 4.6 scored the best out of any Claude model on its complex insurance computer use benchmark.
These results are notable as Claude Opus models are generally the more intelligent and preferable for complex reasoning.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is not only more powerful than some Opus models, but more affordable too. As previously mentioned, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is priced at $3/$15, whereas Opus 4.6’s rates are $5/$25.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
YouTube is down. Heres what we know.
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9:15 p.m. ET — As of this writing, YouTube appears to be working again. So far, Google and YouTube have not announced the cause of the outage, or confirmed that the problems are resolved.
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9.26 p.m. ET — YouTube has revealed the cause of the outage. In a statement on X, the company said it was due to an issue with their recommendations system, which stopped videos from appearing. “The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix – more coming soon!”
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 10:19 p.m. ET — YouTube has announced that the issue has been solved.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Original story follows.
If you can’t watch YouTube videos right now, you’re not alone. A Tuesday evening YouTube outage affected users across the globe, with problems starting around 8:00 p.m. ET. Early reports are sketchy, but here’s what we know.
The platform DownDetector received 837,973 user error reports (and rising) in the U.S. alone, with 46.7 percent of users reporting problems accessing the YouTube app and 21.1 percent reporting problems with the website. Users in Canada, Brazil, the UK, and Germany are also reporting problems. (Disclosure: Mashable and Downdetector share the same parent company.)
Mashable Light Speed
Mashable editors in both the U.S. and Australia were unable to access YouTube’s website and app. Attempts to access the website resulted in a blank black screen with only YouTube’s sidebar and search bar appearing.
The YouTube homepage goes dark…
Credit: Amanda Yeo / Mashable
YouTube acknowledged the outage on X, urging users to check the Google Support page for more information.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The initial update from YouTube simply read, “Hi everyone, We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.”
An additional update from YouTube read, “We are aware of the ongoing issue impacting YouTube homepage, recommendations, search and uploads and are working to fix it. Please follow along in our Community for updates. Our support agents do not have any additional information to share with you at this time.”
YouTube is the largest streaming service by far in the U.S.
At this time, the cause of the outage is unknown. Mashable reached out to Google for more information (YouTube is owned by Google), and we’ll update this story if we receive more information.
This is a developing story …
Entertainment
YouTube outage cause revealed: What we know
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9:15 p.m. ET — As of this writing, YouTube appears to be working again. So far, Google and YouTube have not announced the cause of the outage, or confirmed that the problems are resolved.
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9.26 p.m. ET — YouTube has revealed the cause of the outage. In a statement on X, the company said it was due to an issue with their recommendations system, which stopped videos from appearing. “The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix – more coming soon!”
Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 10:19 p.m. ET — YouTube has announced that the issue has been solved.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Original story follows.
If you can’t watch YouTube videos right now, you’re not alone. A Tuesday evening YouTube outage affected users across the globe, with problems starting around 8:00 p.m. ET. Early reports are sketchy, but here’s what we know.
The platform DownDetector received 837,973 user error reports (and rising) in the U.S. alone, with 46.7 percent of users reporting problems accessing the YouTube app and 21.1 percent reporting problems with the website. Users in Canada, Brazil, the UK, and Germany are also reporting problems. (Disclosure: Mashable and Downdetector share the same parent company.)
Mashable Light Speed
Mashable editors in both the U.S. and Australia were unable to access YouTube’s website and app. Attempts to access the website resulted in a blank black screen with only YouTube’s sidebar and search bar appearing.
The YouTube homepage goes dark…
Credit: Amanda Yeo / Mashable
YouTube acknowledged the outage on X, urging users to check the Google Support page for more information.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The initial update from YouTube simply read, “Hi everyone, We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.”
An additional update from YouTube read, “We are aware of the ongoing issue impacting YouTube homepage, recommendations, search and uploads and are working to fix it. Please follow along in our Community for updates. Our support agents do not have any additional information to share with you at this time.”
YouTube is the largest streaming service by far in the U.S.
At this time, the cause of the outage is unknown. Mashable reached out to Google for more information (YouTube is owned by Google), and we’ll update this story if we receive more information.
This is a developing story …
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6: Benchmark performance, how to try it
YouTube is down. Heres what we know.
