Entertainment
How A Blockbuster 80s Thriller Changed TV Forever With Phil Collins' Drums
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published

The Golden Age of prestige television started when Tony Soprano first walked into Dr. Melfi’s office, but the groundwork for The Sopranos was laid a decade earlier. On September 16, 1984, Michael Mann introduced the world to Miami Vice.
So much of the 80s style and culture can be traced back to the series’ impact, from the cars to the men’s wear, but its lasting legacy has been to show that, at its best, television can be better than the movies. And it’s thanks to Phil Collins.
The Greatest Drums In Music History

Before Miami Vice debuted, television was considered secondary to movies. On the big screen, fans could see larger-than-life stories and characters, such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Jaws, which were reserved for cinema. Television was where stars who couldn’t make it in the movies went. You could tell by the vast difference between their budgets. Even the best-looking television series looked inferior to the movies, until that is, Michael Mann turned a TV pilot into a music video.
“My Brother’s Keeper,” the pilot episode for Miami Vice, set the stakes for the rest of the series to follow. Crockett (Don Johnson) is coping with the loss of his partner when he’s paired up with Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) in an undercover sting to take down the ruthless drug lord, Calderone (Miguel Pinero). It’s standard police procedural stuff today, but in 1984, it was a new level of grit and darkness under the flashy exterior of cool cars, bright lights, and designer shades.
No sequence summed it up better than the ending, when Corckett and Tubs get in their car to confront Calderone while “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins starts up. Shots of the car going down the road, the two detectives are silent as each is lost in their own thoughts, and then Crockett gets out of the car to place a phone call. All episode, he’s been bothered by his relationship with his estranged wife, but she picks up, and he asks a simple question: “It was real?”
As he hangs up, the drums kick in. You know exactly what drums. And right there, Miami Vice arrived, and television has never been the same. Over 40 years later, and guys still blast “In the Air Tonight” while driving around at night.
A Movie On A TV Budget

The Miami Vice pilot was a two-hour television event, which is why the production team pulled out all the stops to make it a hit. Licensing music wasn’t common back then, and not only did “My Brother’s Keeper” use “In the Air Tonight,” but it also included “Miss You” by The Rolling Stones, and “Somebody Watching Me” by Rockwell. Recognizable music was the key ingredient to turn stretches of the episode into music videos.
Beyond the soundtrack and award-winning cinematography, Miami Vice was a breath of fresh air for its dark, cynical tone. Sonny Crockett was a cop on the edge, watching his life slowly fall apart around him, while Ricardo Tubbs didn’t only want to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of Calderon, he was consumed by it. This was a far cry from the sunny shores of Hawaii 5-0, or the cheese of Cagney & Lacey, Hart to Hart, and The A-Team.
Miami Vice didn’t look, sound, or play out (the villain wins) like any of its contemporaries. By the time “My Brother’s Keeper” came to an end, the bar for success in television was raised to a nearly unattainable standard. Dark heroes were in, licensed music was expected, and grittier storylines replaced the fairytale endings.
Entertainment
Everything we expect from Samsung’s July event (Fold 8, watches, and glasses!)
Samsung’s next big event could reveal foldables, smartwatches, and its first Android XR glasses.
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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.
