Entertainment
Star Wars Finally Succeeded By Embracing Its Worst Failure
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Star Wars has been trying to frantically pull itself out of a tailspin for many years now. When did this franchise first start facing major problems, though? Arguably, the beginning of the end was Solo: A Star Wars Story. That movie’s budget had already ballooned once Lucasfilm switched directors, and many fans were already annoyed by The Last Jedi. They ended up voting with their dollars, and Solo ended up becoming the lowest-earning live-action Star Wars movie ever made. That’s a pretty grim achievement, one which was recently surpassed by an even lower-earning franchise film: The Mandalorian and Grogu.
While the Star Wars films continue to flounder, the franchise has found a bit more success on the small screen. Fans have generally loved shows like Andor, Ahsoka, and The Mandalorian (at least, the first two seasons), and that goes double for animated fare like Maul–Shadow Lord and the final season of The Clone Wars. What has made these shows so successful, though? Believe it or not, it all comes from embracing Star Wars’ biggest failure. That is, Lucasfilm finally learned to lean into the best parts of Solo, which audiences are now responding to like they never have before.
See You Later, Space Cowboy
I’ve always had complicated feelings about Solo: A Star Wars Story. On the one hand, I think Lucasfilm made a huge mistake by firing Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as directors. These two went on to create the Spider-Verse movies, and I can’t help but think their more comedic take on a galaxy far, far away would have been awesome enough to change the fate of the franchise for the better. The final cut was directed by Ron Howard, who tried to create a more traditional sci-fi adventure. While I think Lord and Miller’s cut would have been better, Solo is still a great film: it has plenty of action, romance, and characterization, featuring actors who have surprisingly great chemistry.
It might have taken nearly a decade, but both Lucasfilm and the Star Wars fandom have begun belatedly acknowledging how great Solo is. How can you tell? Simple: some of the best TV shows in the franchise have taken their creative cues from that movie. The most obvious example is the recent animated series Maul–Shadow Lord. Part of what has made the show so successful is that audiences love its exploration of the seedier side of Star Wars, including vicious crime syndicates and bloodthirsty characters who would fit right in at the Mos Eisley cantina back in A New Hope.
The Best Shows Came From The Worst Movie
This was, of course, the driving narrative force of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which tracked Han Solo’s increasing involvement with assorted criminals and the vicious Crimson Dawn Syndicate. Back in 2018, fans thought it was weird for this movie to focus on characters who are (at best) morally grey instead of upstanding, morally upright heroes. Now, though, the most beloved Star Wars shows focus on these kinds of characters, and audiences just can’t get enough of them. This includes Andor, which showed how the Rebellion could never have thrived without characters who are willing to make hard decisions and even harder compromises in the name of the greater good.
Of course, part of what makes Cassian Andor a compelling protagonist is that, while he’s rough around the edges, he is determined to do the right thing. Arguably, this is another major inspiration from Solo: A Star Wars Story. In that film, Han Solo is the archetypal outlaw with a heart of gold. Aside from Andor, other popular characters were made in that mold, including Din Djarin from The Mandalorian, Boba Fett from The Book of Boba Fett, and Jod Na Nawood in Skeleton Crew.
Found Families And Dark Mentors
How else did Star Wars TV take its cues from Solo? Like that movie, there are multiple shows that emphasize the importance of found family. The core of The Mandalorian is the relationship between the titular character and the little baby Jedi that he adopts. Ahsoka, like Rebels before it, emphasizes how Ezra and Sabine are like siblings to each other. Incidentally, Ahsoka also borrows Solo’s use of a dark mentor character to demonstrate the relationship between Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati. For all its faults, The Acolyte also followed this trope when Osha rejected the Jedi and decided to train under Dark Side user Qmir.
The similarities go on, really. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Andor all focused more on the ordinary people of the galaxy, something that arguably started with Solo. Additionally, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Book of Boba Fett expanded our knowledge of a familiar character, just like Solo did. Long story short? Solo wasn’t a perfect movie, but it’s far better than its reputation. If you need any proof, just look at the most ambitious TV shows in which Lucasfilm has spent nearly a decade creating new things from the creative building blocks of a box office disaster.
Killer TV shows growing from the corpse of the franchise’s first box office failure? Like Star Wars’ best character might put it, never tell me the odds!
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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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