Entertainment
The Most Heart-Thumping R-Rated Thriller Of All Time Just Landed On Netflix
By TeeJay Small
| Updated

If psychological thrillers are your game, you owe it to yourself to watch the 2014 smash-hit film Gone Girl. Actually, scratch that, you should watch Gone Girl even if psychological thrillers are your least favorite thing in the world. This film, which adapts the Gillian Flynn novel of the same name, is one of those movies that will make you stare on in horror as your jaw hits the floor, leaving you unable to look away. For a time, the only way to catch Gone Girl was with a physical copy or a digital rental, but it finally just landed on Netflix, so it should jump to the top of your watch-list immediately.
Gone Girl was adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn and directed by auteur filmmaker David Fincher. In case you’re not up on your iconic filmmakers, Fincher is responsible for such classics as Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Social Network. He’s also currently working on helming the Quentin Tarantino-penned Adventures of Cliff Booth as well as Squid Game: America for Netflix.
A Media-Friendly Turn For The Worse

The film centers on the strained marriage of teacher Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). Amy is locally famous for being her parents’ muse in a series of children’s books, so it makes massive headlines when she suddenly disappears without a trace. Police investigators and media journalists swarm the Dunne home, while the general public reacts with disgust at Nick’s apathetic response. Before long, this woman’s disappearance is a national news story, reminiscent of many true crime cases of missing women slain by their romantic partners.
Through a series of flashbacks, memory sequences, and non-linear storytelling, we get glimpses of Nick and Amy’s marriage. We see their whirlwind romance and honeymoon phase, as well as their slow decline into marital malaise. We cringe as the pair lose their jobs and are forced to move in with Nick’s family, and recoil as we learn that Nick has been engaging in an affair with a student. Meanwhile, a blood sample found in the Dunne household reveals that a struggle took place, and that Amy has recently become pregnant.
Essential Viewing For Any Thriller Fan

I won’t give away too much of the mystery here, because you should really go into this one as blind as possible. But, suffice is to say, the evidence keeps mounting that Nick is responsible, even as he and his legal team attempt to drum up support from the public and prove his innocence. Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike offer tour de force performances as Nick and Amy, while the rest of the cast is expertly complimented by Neil Patrick Harris, Carrie Coon, and Tyler Perry. This is the movie that convinced me Tyler Perry has the same unexpected dramatic acting chops as Adam Sandler, when he’s not busy throwing on a dress and making fart noises to the camera.
I recall enjoying this movie when it first came out, but revisiting it today put it on another level for me. In a world dominated by true crime stories, Gone Girl is the perfect modern mystery, highlighting the role that the media, the public, and the police play in shaping narratives. If you’ve got a Netflix subscription, be sure to pull up Gone Girl today. Just don’t make the mistake of putting it on during a first date … or even a fifth anniversary celebration with your spouse.

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.
