Entertainment
Forgotten ‘90s Sci-Fi Classic Is Begging For A Reboot
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a huge genre nerd, I have complex feelings about television reboots. Specifically, I think it’s a waste of time trying to reboot something truly great because the new show is likely to be a huge disappointment compared to the earlier one. Honestly, that’s why I was happy the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot got canceled; that depressing sixth season notwithstanding, the original show was nearly perfect, and trying to improve on that would be inevitably disappointing. Instead, it’s better to reboot a disappointing show that had potential, like Ronald D. Moore did with Battlestar Galactica.
With that in mind, there has never been a genre show more in need of a reboot than Sliders. The show had an absolutely perfect concept, and it explored how fun the multiverse can be way before Marvel ran this idea into the ground. But after a couple of seasons of awesome storytelling, Sliders transformed into a schlock action show that ripped off almost everything and started bleeding cast members until the series was almost completely unrecognizable. The result is a decent show that should have been a great show, and a reboot may be the only way for Sliders to achieve its full potential.
Playing Slide-And-Seek
The plot of Sliders is that Quinn Mallory (Jerry O’Connell) develops the technology to “slide” to different parallel realities, and he takes three companions (including a professor played by John Rhys-Davies) on a visit to a new universe. Unfortunately, the device they use to slide soon loses the ability to track the coordinates of their home dimension. Now, they are forced to travel to random worlds, hoping to eventually get back to their original reality. But there’s a timelock: they must travel to a new dimension when the countdown timer reaches zero. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck in an alternate reality for decades!
It’s a great concept, and the series is basically the lovechild of The Twilight Zone and Quantum Leap. As in the Twilight Zone, different dimensions are used to explore one fantastic scenario after another, including a world where America lost the Revolutionary War and worlds where time flows backwards. But much like Quantum Leap, our heroes typically spend their time in each reality trying to improve as many lives as possible. The result is a surprisingly heartwarming show in which our characters navigate prickly moral dilemmas while wearing their hearts firmly on their sleeves.
A Cast Driven Away By Bad Writing
Sliders had two seasons of nearly perfect storytelling, and if it had been canceled after that, genre fans would speak of it with the same reverence that we speak about Firefly. Unfortunately, the show went on for two more seasons, and it began to go seriously downhill in Season 3. That’s because the Fox network demanded that the show transition from thought-provoking sci-fi stories to action schlock. In an interview with Digital Spy, Rhys-Davies noted how Sliders “could’ve been the best show on television” but that the network interfered and turned most of the scripts into “incomprehensible gibberish.” This is one of the reasons he exited the show.
Rhys-Davies has been hilariously blunt in describing what went wrong with Season 3. When he was interviewed at the Toulouse Game Show, he discussed how the writers just started ripping off others’ ideas. “We did an episode like Tremors, one like Twister, one like The Night of the Living Dead, and even one like The Island of Doctor Moreau, using the film’s original masks!” Continuing, he said, “The breaking point for me was when I walked in and saw the writers sitting around looking at a DVD of Species, which had just been released, and saying: ‘Look, we could take a bit of that scene there and a bit of that scene there.’
Does Whatever A Slider-Man Can
Conveniently enough, the Raiders of the Lost Ark actor has summed up exactly why Sliders needs a reboot. A new series that never tries to do crappy ripoffs of other movies and shows could take its time exploring all of the practical, ethical, and moral conundrums involved with interdimensional travel. This would reduce the risk of core actors abandoning the show; like, by the end of the original series, only one member of the original cast (Cleavant Derricks) was still there! But a Sliders with a consistent cast and a perfect premise for episodic adventures? That’s a reboot that would be utterly unstoppable.
However, a reboot of this show seems less likely than ever before. Previously, Jerry O’Connell and John Rhys-Davies discussed a possible reboot with Sliders creator Tracy Tormé, who was working on reviving the franchise as recently as 2021. Sadly, he died in 2024, meaning we might have to slide into a new universe to see what a reboot looks like. Fortunately, fans can still experience the original show in its entirety at the click of a button. Sliders is currently streaming for free on Tubi. Just be sure to keep the remote handy; Season 2 is a countdown, and once it hits zero, you’ll want to slide your TV over to a better show!!
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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.
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