Entertainment
Amazon Kindle vs. Kindle Paperwhite: Which one is for you?
Amazon has graced us with yet another October Prime Day this year, and book lovers should be on the lookout for Kindle deals.
The default 2022 Kindle is the base model of the bunch, a device we typically see go on sale during Prime Day and Black Friday. The Kindle Paperwhite could also see a price drop during October’s sales event, so we’re here to compare the two for anyone looking for their next reading companion.
Before diving in, it’s probably a good idea to get some things out of the way first. Namely, there isn’t much difference between the two Kindles we’re comparing. Screen and battery specs differ, but core features (more or less) do not. Either way, you’re getting a well-reviewed e-reader, so you can’t lose.
With that in mind, here we go.
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Price
Our first category is the simplest. One number is higher than the other, after all.
In terms of price, the regular Kindle walks away with this one because it’s $40 cheaper than the Paperwhite. Whatever other advantages the Paperwhite may have, it will never have that one.
Winner: Kindle (2022)
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Design
Warm light is a welcome option.
Credit: Molly Flores / Mashable
Both devices are imminently recognizable as Kindles, with default black colorways giving way to bulky bezels around Amazon’s signature Kindle displays. While one doesn’t necessarily look cooler or all that different from the other, there are major size differences to consider.
Here’s how the two Kindles stack up in terms of dimensions:
The Paperwhite is a good deal larger than the regular Kindle, which is its main selling point. It also has an adjustable front light with 17 LEDs, compared to the four LEDs on the regular Kindle. If you need a bigger and/or brighter display, the Paperwhite is the one to get. It also allows you to use a “warm light” option for a more pleasant reading experience in the dark.
Just know that you’re going to sacrifice some weight along the way. The regular Kindle comes in at 5.56 ounces, while the Paperwhite is a relatively bulky 7.23 ounces. Still, the Paperwhite has more going for it in terms of design, regardless.
Winner: Kindle Paperwhite (2021)
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Features
One of the all-time great book titles.
Credit: Mallory Minich / Mashable
This would’ve been a much more substantial conversation a few years ago. There was a time when the regular Kindle didn’t even have a front light, which made the Paperwhite much more desirable by comparison. However, times have changed.
These days, the two devices’ functionality is very similar. Both can read books (duh), play audiobooks via Bluetooth, and have screens that should look fine in sunlight due to a lack of glare. Unfortunately, both will display advertisements on the lock screen unless you pay an extra $20 for either Kindle.
Because the two devices’ basic functionality is so similar, this one is kind of a wash. You’ll be fine either way.
Winner: Tie
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Storage
Here is where things get interesting.
Usually, the more expensive device has higher storage. That’s how tech works, right? Not so with these two e-readers. The 2022 Kindle, despite being $40 cheaper before any Prime Day discounts, actually has twice as much storage at 16GB as the 8GB Paperwhite base model. Though, you can upgrade the Paperwhite to 16GB for $149.99 (or $10 extra). There’s a substantially more expensive Paperwhite Signature Edition with 32GB of storage, but that doesn’t help us here.
Winner: Kindle (2022)
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Battery life
Time to normalize things a little bit. This time, the more expensive device is the better option.
Amazon rates the 2022 Kindle for six weeks of battery life on a full charge. As for the Paperwhite, the estimated battery life is a whopping 10 weeks. This is arguably splitting hairs because there’s not much functional difference between having to plug in the Kindle every six weeks versus every 10 weeks, but 10 is greater than six, so the Paperwhite wins.
Winner: Kindle Paperwhite (2021)
Kindle (2022) vs. Kindle Paperwhite (2021): Water resistance
Some people like reading at the pool, at the beach, or in the bathtub. Why not? It’s super relaxing. If you’re one of those people, there’s a clear winner here.
The 2022 Kindle is not waterproof at all. Don’t get it wet. The 2021 Paperwhite, meanwhile, has an IPX8 rating, which, according to Amazon, means it can survive for up to 60 minutes submerged in up to two meters of water. That seems like a fairly unrealistic scenario, so if you accidentally drop the Kindle Paperwhite in the bathtub, you won’t need to buy another device.
Winner: Kindle Paperwhite (2021)
Entertainment
AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.
While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.
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The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.
But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)
Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.
Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?
“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”
Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.
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‘You want to learn something from the answer’
Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.
“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”
In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”
The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.
However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.
“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.
And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
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However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
Entertainment
X-Men ‘97 Just Secretly Connected Itself To The Raunchiest Marvel Movies
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated

As a longtime Marvel fan, one of my favorite things about X-Men ‘97 is how many fun Easter eggs are stuffed into every single episode. Sometimes, these are winking references to earlier episodes. More often than not, they are connections to the comics and to the larger Marvel universe. Of course, these references are often of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them variety. Because of this, you sometimes need to be as fast as Quicksilver on the remote control if you want to catch every wacky bit of trivia that pops up onscreen.
That was certainly the case with the recent episode “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs.” This episode follows up on an earlier Animated Series episode (“Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”) and has Wolverine and a team of oddballs discovering major secrets about Weapon X. It’s an episode filled with some jaw-droppingly weird X-Men lore, including an appearance from everyone’s favorite xenomorph knock-offs, the Brood. However, that’s not the weirdest thing about this terrifying tale. The episode provides a list of characters attached to the Weapon X program, and if you pause at the right moment, you’ll see names from the raunchiest, bloodiest Marvel movies ever made: Deadpool and Logan!
The Ultimate In ’90s Media Technology

In Marvel Comics, it’s revealed that Weapon X wasn’t actually the name of the program. Instead, it was the Weapon Plus program, and Wolverine was referred to as “Weapon X” because he was the tenth experiment created by the program (X is the Roman numeral for 10). Incidentally, Weapon I was Captain America, who was turned into the world’s greatest soldier through an experimental super-serum. Later, the project switched to experimenting on mutants, with the goal of creating weaponized warriors who would be easy to control. There have been many characters experimented on or otherwise connected to the program, which is why so many names appear in “Weapon X, Lies, and DVD.”
The episode doesn’t get into the full tangled history of the program, which is consistently referred to as Weapon X. However, the characters do find test subject data on DVDs, all of which are helpfully labeled with the name of the person who was experimented on. One set of DVDs is very easy to view, and the other appears for only a brief moment. With the help of the pause button, though, you can identify some major names. This includes Bucky Barnes, better known to MCU fans as the Winter Soldier. It also includes characters who have only appeared in the comics, including the creepy villain, John Sublime.
The X-Men Get Raunchy

Unsurprisingly, Wolverine and his crew from this episode (including Maverick, Garrison Kane, Sabertooth, and Lady Deathstrike) all appear on the DVDs, as do other characters from Wolverine’s past, including Silver Fox. But for fans of the live-action movies, the most notable names that appear in the episode are Ajax and Deadpool (the villain and hero, respectively, of the first Deadpool movie) and X-23, who appeared in both Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine. Amusingly enough, this effectively connects the (mostly) family-friendly X-Men ‘97 with some of the raunchiest and most vulgar Marvel movies ever made!
Deadpool effectively paved the way for modern, R-rated superhero movies with a film that combined over-the-top ultraviolence and hilariously crass dialogue. It was also unapologetically raunchy, with a naughty Morena Baccarin sex scene that likely made the pre-cancerous Wade Wilson wish that his booty had a healing factor. Logan, meanwhile, was more serious but no less brutal, connecting X-23 (who was created for the kids’ show X-Men: Evolution) to a violent and heartbreaking film where we bid farewell to both Logan and Professor X. Now, that same character (who made a fan-favorite return in the wonderfully offensive Deadpool & Wolverine) is permanently tied to X-Men ‘97.

Does that mean we’re likely to see X-23 onscreen? Not really: even if X-Men ‘97 runs for several more seasons, there are so many ‘80s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s stories to adapt before the writers would ever get to her story. Deadpool might be likelier to appear: after all, he appeared in X-Men: The Animated Series via things like flashbacks and Morph transformations, and Morph continues to take on this appearance in X-Men ‘97. Is all of this leading up to a proper appearance from the Merc With a Mouth? Maybe. Somehow, though, I think Jean Grey will be too busy fighting Apocalypse to help Deadpool properly celebrate International Women’s Day!
