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The Retcon That Ruined The Best Star Wars Movie

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated

I’m on the record as being a very big fan of Solo: A Star Wars Story. While I still think Lucasfilm made a mistake by firing Lord and Miller (like, can you imagine the Spider-Verse guys directing a movie set in that galaxy far, far away?!), this is a very solid standalone film. Talented actors bring familiar characters like Han Solo and Lando Calrissian to vivid life. Additionally, the film introduces a colorful assortment of new characters, including the beautiful Qi’ra and the scheming Dryden Vos. However, none of the newbies are quite as entertaining as L3-37, the droid voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The movie presents her as a kind of love interest for Lando, with dialogue hinting at a sexual relationship between them. As disturbing as it is to ponder the scoundrel having a living (non)Fleshlight, that’s not the most disturbing thing about this character. Towards the end of Solo, this plucky droid is uploaded into the Millennium Falcon’s computer, meaning she is technically part of the entire Original Trilogy and Sequel Trilogy. This retroactively ruins The Empire Strikes Back, making Lando seem like a heartless monster while forcing us to question if L3-37 nearly got our favorite heroes killed.

Bringing A Third Into The Cockpit

The revelation that L3-37 was part of the Millennium Falcon’s computer retroactively makes many events in the Original Trilogy kind of weird, in retrospect. For example, she was technically part of the Battle of Yavin. Remember when Han Solo showed up at the last minute and nearly got Darth Vader killed? If the Sith Lord had actually bitten the dust, L3-37 would have gotten the assist! She was also in the Falcon when Lando Calrissian led the attack against the second Death Star. That means that she and Wedge Antilles are basically the only living things to have fought against both Death Stars, landing them a place in the galaxy’s history books.

While all of that is pretty cool, L3-37’s presence in the Millennium Falcon’s computer arguably makes the events of The Empire Strikes Back much, much weirder. For example, we see Lando make no real effort to check in on his old flame despite knowing she is still in there (before you finish typing the comment: yes, he checks in on her in a short story, but we never see it onscreen, and 99 percent of fans will never read that book). This, combined with his gambling the ship away in the first place, makes him seem like a monster that never really cared about her in the first place. 

The Most Important Droid In The Galaxy?

Additionally, L3-37 being in the Falcon retroactively makes our heroes’ hyperspace issues in the second Star Wars movie problematic. There are some cute moments, of course: when C-3PO gripes about the computer having an “appalling dialect,” we now know that Lando’s old droid was basically cussing him out. That’s funny, but it also implies that L3-37 was effectively hindering repairs to the ship that were necessary to help Han Solo, Leia Organa, and Chewbacca escape the Empire. Everyone loves a droid with some attitude (just ask Star Wars fans who love Chopper!), but it’s hard to root for L3-37 when she’s clapping back so hard that it nearly gets our heroes killed.

At any rate, this snarky droid gets multiple chances to redeem herself. In addition to helping with the attack on the second Death Star, she was part of the attack on Exegol that freed the galaxy, once and for all, from Emperor Palpatine. In this sense, it’s fair to say that she helped save countless lives throughout the entire galaxy far, far away. Forget all the pilots, Jedi, smugglers, and soldiers that we see onscreen. At the end of the day, the greatest hero in Star Wars just happens to be Lando Calrissian’s former sex toy!


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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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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.

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.


‘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.


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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.

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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