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EU pledges 90 percent cut to carbon emissions by 2040

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The European Union has provisionally agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent (based on 1990 levels) by 2040, the EU parliament announced in a press release. That goes beyond the goals of most other major economies, including China, but falls short of the original one recommended by the EU's climate science advisors. "The target delivers on the need for climate action while safeguarding our competitiveness and security," said Denmark's minister Lars Aagaard, who helped negotiate the deal. 

The new accord — a vital step in the bloc's long-term goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050 — was a political compromise months in the making. On one hand, countries like Poland and Hungary argued that deeper cuts would be too onerous for industries already facing high energy costs. And on the other, members including Spain and Sweden said action was needed to help blunt extreme weather events and allow the EU to catch up with China in green tech manufacturing. 

To achieve the target, European industries will need to reduce emissions by 85 percent and sell carbon credits to developing nations to make up the balance. The EU also agreed on an option to use additional international carbon credits (up to five percent) to soften the impact on industry and to delay a carbon tax for fuel by a year to 2028. 

Even with the reduced targets Europe is more committed than all other major polluters, having already cut emissions 37 percent from 1990 levels. During the same period, the US has only managed a reduction of about 7 percent, according to Statista. And under the Trump administration, the US has once again pulled out of the Paris climate accord, scrubbed references to climate change from government sites and promoted polluting energy sectors like coal and gas. 

The deal must still be ratified by the EU parliament and individual countries to become law. Normally, though, that's a formality for such pre-agreed deals.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/eu-pledges-90-percent-cut-to-carbon-emissions-by-2040-133919256.html?src=rss

Instagram will let you control which topics its algorithm recommends

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For the first time, Instagram will start letting you control the topics its algorithm recommends, much as you now can on TikTok. The new feature is starting with the Reels tab but will eventually come to Explore and other areas of the app. Like much of what Meta is doing right now (for better or worse), the "Your Algorithm" feature will be powered by AI. 

"As your interests evolve over time, we want to give you more meaningful ways to control what you see," Instagram wrote on its blog post. "Using AI, you can now more easily view and personalize the topics that shape your Reels, making recommendations feel even more tailored to you."

To see and control the Reels algorithm, tap the icon in the upper right corner (two lines with hearts) to open Your Algorithm. It will show what topics Instagram thinks you're interested in, then you can specify which ones you want to see more or less of and your recommendations will adapt. You can fine tune topics as well: 

  • See your top interests: View a summary of the topics Instagram thinks you care about most, right at the top.

  • Tune your preferences: Type in the topics you want to see more or less of, and your Reels will reflect your choices.

  • Share your algorithm: If you’d like, you can share your interests to your Story, so friends and followers can see what you’re into.

Another AI "feature" that surfaced yesterday on the platform didn't go over well with some users. It was discovered that Instagram was generating sensational and often inaccurate headlines that were likely created by an LLM. And you can expect AI to infiltrate its apps even more down the road, judging by the company's recent acquisitions and priority shifts. In any case, the new Your Algorithm feature for the Reels tab is debuting today in the US only and expanding to other territories in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-will-let-you-control-which-topics-its-algorithm-recommends-133002612.html?src=rss

The best things Engadget editors bought in 2025

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For many of us at Engadget, a big part of our jobs is testing out new tech on a regular basis. Our desks are cluttered with new smartphones, power banks, gaming accessories and more pretty much all the time, and there are plenty of winners and losers amongst them. Similarly, there are winners and losers in the things we buy for ourselves throughout the year, and we like to sing their praises just as much as we do for the best new tech that (professionally) comes across our desks. These are the best things Engadget staffers purchased in 2025 that will continue to get lots of use in the new year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-best-things-engadget-editors-bought-in-2025-130000576.html?src=rss

Adobe brings Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express to ChatGPT

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Back in October, OpenAI announced apps like Spotify and Canva would be accessible in ChatGPT. At the time, the company said more software was on the way, and now one of the most popular professional applications is available through the chatbot.    

Starting today, you can access Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express inside of ChatGPT. All the apps are free to use through OpenAI’s website, though before you can begin generating PDFs and illustrations using Acrobat and Adobe Express, you'll need to sign into your Adobe account. To use any of the apps in ChatGPT, either name them in your prompt or select them from the plus menu.

Of the three apps, the way OpenAI's chatbot connects to Photoshop is probably the most interesting. Depending on the prompt, the interface will change to display the sliders most relevant to your request. For example, if you want to brighten an image, you'll see one slider allowing you to adjust the exposure, alongside other ones for the shadows and highlights. By comparison, if you want to add an effect to an image, ChatGPT might display options related to dithering and tri-tone, among others. 

What's interesting about all this is the way ChatGPT is interacting with Adobe's tools, through an MCP server, to offer a slice of the company's apps. I don't know about you, but I’ve always found Adobe software to be far too complicated, with often one too many ways to accomplish the same task. Granted, what I saw was a hands-off demo, but the routing Adobe created worked well. 

A ChatGPT user asks the chatbot to create a dance party invitation.
A ChatGPT user asks the chatbot to create a dance party invitation.
Adobe

"We build the Lego blocks, which are the MCP tools, and we create detailed instructions, and then ChatGPT figures out what it wants to do," Aubrey Cattell, vice-president of developer platform and partner ecosystem at Adobe, explains. "Sometimes it does what we want it, and sometimes it doesn't. That's the nature of it being non-deterministic, and we're continuing to hone as much as we can from users' intent and natural language to give them the result that they're looking for."

Of course, if you ever want more control, the web versions of Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express are a click away.         

For OpenAI, this is easily the biggest coup to date of its push to reshape ChatGPT into an operating system for all the apps its more than 800 million users depend on daily. For Adobe, it feels like the company is partnering with an entity out to eat its lunch. After all, OpenAI offers its own image generation. However, Cattell said Adobe doesn't see it that way. 

"A couple weeks back, OpenAI dropped Apps SDK as a new paradigm for accessing ChatGPT, we saw there was a natural fit in the work we were doing with our applications," he said. "Essentially, they gave us an operating system we were able to leverage to bring our applications to their surface. There's a lot of natural affinity there between the workflows OpenAI is trying to enable and Adobe's best in class capabilities."  

Cattell promised Adobe would continue to explore what it could offer inside of ChatGPT, but added the company's apps will continue to be the place users can go if they want more power, precision and control.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/adobe-brings-photoshop-acrobat-and-adobe-express-to-chatgpt-130000389.html?src=rss

Watch the Day of the Devs: Game Awards 2025 edition right here at 1PM ET

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The Game Awards 2025 edition of the Day of the Devs digital showcase goes live on Wednesday, December 10 at 1PM ET on Twitch and YouTube. That’s more than 30 hours before The Game Awards itself kicks off, which makes perfect sense. It is called Day of the Devs, after all, and if we’re judging by past appearances, the event absolutely deserves its own full 24 hours in the spotlight.

This year, the Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Digital Showcase will feature 22 indie titles, including three release date announcements and six world premieres. That’s a packed show, even by Day of the Devs standards. Expect to see projects from developers including 17-BIT, BONE Assembly, Capybara Games, Deconstructeam and Panic Stations, and publishers Annapurna Interactive, Devolver and Blumhouse Games, among others.

Each Day of the Devs showcase lasts about an hour and highlights a batch of extremely rad-looking independent games across a wide range of genres, complete with commentary from creators. The featured games are curated by industry veterans at Day of the Devs, and past shows have offered early looks at future hits like Animal Well, Blue Prince, Cocoon, Despelote, Crow Country, Phoenix Springs, Skate Story, UFO 50, Eternights, Sorry We’re Closed and many others.

Day of the Devs is a non-profit operation that provides a platform for select independent creators to showcase their games to large audiences for free, founded by folks at Double Fine Productions and iam8bit. On top of accepting donations, it receives support from various industry players, including Xbox, PlayStation and Summer Game Fest.

The Game Awards 2025 begins on Thursday, December 11 at 7:30PM ET, with a half-hour pre-show up first. The whole thing will certainly last longer than one hour, but we’ll find out together whether it’ll have more game reveals than Day of the Devs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/watch-the-day-of-the-devs-game-awards-2025-edition-right-here-at-1pm-et-060000319.html?src=rss

Repair iconic 2000s-era gadgets in upcoming indie game ReStory

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We love a little nostalgia mixed in with our cozy gaming, and ReStory looks like a perfect blend of those two. In this upcoming indie game, you play the owner of a Tokyo electronics repair shop in the mid 2000s. The trailer that dropped today shows you tinkering with some very familiar gadgets from the era, such as renamed riffs on a Tamagotchi, a Nokia brick phone, a PSP and a Walkman. You clean and repair these devices for customers, and it looks like your conversations with them might have as much impact on their lives as your official work does. 

The whole thing looks exceedingly charming and chill. It's nice to see a game like ReStory as a counterpart to something with a similar premise but wildly different tone like Kaizen, which was a highlight during the Steam Automation Fest over the summer. ReStory is being developed by Mandragora, and it is currently playtesting ahead of a planned 2026 release.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/repair-iconic-2000s-era-gadgets-in-upcoming-indie-game-restory-233445848.html?src=rss

Uber is installing kiosks for booking rides without the mobile app

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Uber is rolling out kiosks for travelers to book rideshares without using the mobile app. The company is pitching the service as a convenience for international travelers who may not have a data plan, but it could also be a lifesaver if your phone runs out of juice and you don't have a way to recharge it. A passenger can use the kiosk to enter their destination and desired ride type, then will receive a printed receipt with the details about their booked ride. The first kiosk will debut in Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, but Uber said it would have additional locations in airports, hotels and ports over the coming months. 

In airport situations, these kiosks make Uber even more of a direct competitor to traditional taxis. With the removal of the app, the kiosk can essentially stand in as the dispatcher and a passenger can decide how to travel based on their preferences (or on wait times) for a rideshare versus a yellow cab.

Uber also used LaGuardia as the starting point for its shuttle bus service in New York, with $18 rides between the airport and Manhattan transit hubs in October 2024; it later rolled out the shuttles to John F. Kennedy Airport in March 2025. Today, Uber said it is bringing the shuttle bus option to Newark Liberty International Airport, so all major NYC airports now have access to the service.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/uber-is-installing-kiosks-for-booking-rides-without-the-mobile-app-220904106.html?src=rss

Instagram is generating SEO-bait headlines for its users’ posts

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It looks like Meta has decided to turn Instagram users into unwitting SEO spam pawns. On Tuesday, 404 Media reported that the platform is generating sensational, likely AI-generated headlines and descriptions for user posts without their knowledge or explicit consent. An Engadget editor has also noticed this on their posts. The headlines are found in the pages’ code and are only visible in search results.

The scheme appears to be an effort to boost the Google search ranking of Instagram content. An Instagram post by Engadget’s Sam Chapman, about a board game he created, received an unwanted generated description. “Floramino is a cozy puzzle game where you arrange gardens as a traveling florist,” the generated text reads. “The demo looks fun, with charming visuals and strategic elements.”

In this case, there’s a significant factual error. The board game is called Bloomhunter. Floramino, which the generated text referenced, is a puzzle game on Steam.

In an example cited by 404 Media, author Jeff VanderMeer's untitled video about a bunny eating a banana received a generic, SEO-style title. "Meet the Bunny Who Loves Eating Bananas, A Nutritious Snack For Your Pet," it reads. That indeed reads like the work of an LLM. A Massachusetts library's post promoting a reading of a VanderMeer book got the same treatment. "Join Jeff VanderMeer on a Thrilling Beachside Adventure with Mesta …", the headline reads.

Multiple cosplayers also found their posts gaining strange titles. "I would not write mediocre text like that, and it sounds as if it was auto-generated at scale with an LLM," cosplayer Brian Dang told 404 Media. "This becomes problematic when the headline or description advertises someone in a way that is not how they would personally describe themselves."

The headlines appear in the posts’ code, as confirmed by Google's Rich Result Test tool. (They're found in the <title> tags for the post. The descriptions appear in the "text": section) The spammy headlines differ from the page's alt text, which Instagram generates for people with low vision.

You might want to search for your recent content to see if you’re affected. 

Engadget reached out to Meta. In a statement, the company said it "recently began using AI to generate titles for posts that appear in search engine results. This helps people better understand the content that was shared." Users can disable indexing; however, it appears to remove all indexing, reducing the likelihood that users will discover the Instagram account.

The statement continued: "As with all AI-generated content, these titles may not always be 100% accurate." 

Update, December 9, 2026 at 5:07 PM ET: The story was updated to include more detail about a post from Engadget’s Sam Chapman receiving a generated description.

Update, December 10, 2026 at 4:30 AM ET: Added a statement from Meta about how it's recently started using AI for index titles in search results.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-is-generating-seo-bait-headlines-for-its-users-posts-213702800.html?src=rss

Slack’s CEO is joining OpenAI to find the money to pay for all those data centers

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OpenAI has announced that Denise Dresser, the current CEO of Slack, will be the company's new Chief Revenue Officer. Dresser will oversee the company's revenue strategy "across enterprise and customer success," according to OpenAI's announcement, and will presumably play a key role in leading the company towards profitability now that it's reorganized as a public benefit corporation.

"We're on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, across every industry," Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Products said in the announcement. "Denise has led that kind of shift before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable, and accessible for businesses everywhere."

Simo joined OpenAI in May of this year, after serving as CEO of Instacart, and before that, the head of Facebook at Meta. Hiring Simo and Dresser could be a good indication of how OpenAI plans to approach ChatGPT going forward. Which is to say, the company is taking a very Silicon Valley approach to growing its chatbot business and focusing on scale and monetizing as many AI interactions as possible. It's not a mistake that Simo helped establish Meta's ads business and OpenAI is reportedly planning to introduce ads into chats with its AI models.

Even with the possibility of ad revenue, Dresser will still have to overcome what OpenAI continues to spend to offer its various AI products. OpenAI pays for multiple partnerships for data center access and has commitments to both buy and build server components for those data centers. Add in the cost of just processing a ChatGPT query itself, and growing the company’s revenue seems like a tall order.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/slacks-ceo-is-joining-openai-to-find-the-money-to-pay-for-all-those-data-centers-220411962.html?src=rss

How to watch The Game Awards 2025 on December 11

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The Game Awards are this week, with the grand showcase for 2025 coming up on Thursday, December 11 at 8PM ET. There's also a pre-show (in case the multi-hour affair just isn't enough TGA for you) and that kicks off at 7:30PM ET. The ceremony will be a mix of honoring games from the past year and debuting trailers for future releases, so expect a couple interesting announcements to emerge from Thursday night. Engadget will be reporting on any big stories as they happen at The Game Awards, but if you want to watch along with us, the whole shebang is available to watch for free on just about every streaming platform you could want. 

The primo spot to watch is probably YouTube, since it will be broadcasting the show in 4K and you'll want to see all those trailers in their full glory. The video is embedded above. The other official co-streaming partners are Twitch and TikTok Live, but you can also watch everything on Steam and Amazon Prime Video. The Game Awards will also be on social media via Facebook Live, Instagram and X. 

It's been a good year for gaming and lots of top-notch projects are up for nominations at the show this year. The Game Awards will also shine a light on important subjects such as Innovation in Accessibility and Games For Impact as well as recognizing recent releases for excellence in artistry and design. And don't sleep on the Day of the Devs showcase happening tomorrow, Wednesday, December 10; that will almost certainly have some hype stuff emerging from the indie scene.

In terms of reveals, host Geoff Keighley has shared a few looks at what's to come. There will definitely be an appearance by Lara Croft and whatever is happening at Wildflower Interactive, the new studio helmed by The Last of Us co-director Bruce Straley, is due to be announced. PlayStation will also have more to say about Saros, which is Housemarque's follow-up to Returnal. And of course, hope springs eternal (as do the memes) for Half-Life 3.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/how-to-watch-the-game-awards-2025-on-december-11-205500124.html?src=rss