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Ryan Fox sends his drive at 18 into the second fairway bunker down the right. He’s not right up against the lip, but the face is a factor. However, when you’re hot, you’re hot, and he opts to go for it, whipping a short iron onto the front-right portion of the green! That was a gutsy move … and a slightly fortunate one, because slow-mo replays show his ball grazing the very top of the lip of the trap. A couple of dimples lower, and that was staying in. In fact, that’s an outrageous stroke of luck, because looking again, the very top layer of the revetted bunker had a small nick taken out of it … and that’s the portion he clipped! So a little bit to either side, and the ball was back at his feet too. He’ll have a putt for a record-breaking 61, albeit from long distance!

A dispatch from the Guardian’s golf correspondent Ewan Murray, straight from Royal Birkdale …

Bryson DeChambeau has arrived at Royal Birkdale, shortly after 2pm and less than 90 minutes before his tee off time. This will mean a short range session for the Open’s man of the moment. Then again, he was whacking balls out there in darkness last night so maybe he feels further practise is needless.

Mark Dardon, the chief executive of the R&A, has just appeared on Sky to assert DeChambeau’s penalty of yesterday evening was “clear cut.” Which leaves us all to ponder why neither Darbon nor any of his officials would field questions on the incident immediately after it happened.

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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the most unspeakably offensive word in most of the cosmos is coincidentally also the name of a small country on Earth. Will anyone be taking Belgium’s name in vain after this weekend’s grand prix?

Well, after this morning’s final practice session, perhaps Lewis Hamilton.

Lewis Hamilton will face a race against time to take part in qualifying for tomorrow’s Belgian Grand Prix after he crashed out of final practice.

In the final seconds on the concluding session at Spa-Francorchamps, Hamilton lost control of his Ferrari on the exit of Fagnes, racing through the gravel with the rear of his car thudding into the barrier.

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Jacob Fox, hardware writer

(Image credit: Future) This week I've been: Trying out a new mouse (a Superlight clone) and finally sacking off CS2's cheater-ridden Premier matchmaking for FaceIt.

I'm known around the PC Gamer streets as a bit of a mouse pad nerd. Though that's just because I take the surface my little rodent skates across seriously, as you should. If you're playing a game that requires good aim, a good pad can be just as important for your gameplay experience as high fps, up to a certain point.

Naturally, then, I fell under the spell of glass mouse pads for a while. With glass, there's the promise of a very slippery glide, if that's your thing, but more important is the promise of consistency and longevity. Cloth pads collect dust and dirt that can't just be wiped away, and the fibres change over time. That's why pros switch them out so often .

Glass pads aren't like this, though. They do have irregularities etched into their surface to help with friction and sensor tracking, but these don't wear down because they're harder than your mouse skates. Your skates, on the other hand, do wear down quicker, but these are easily replaceable, and a cheap pack of dot skates can last a very long time.

Glass pads do require more maintenance, but not as much as I initially thought. When I first started using one—a QPAD Obsidian —I would wipe it down with a microfibre cloth between almost every two-minute Counter-Strike round, just in case something had gotten on it that could cause the skates to feel horribly scratchy when they ran over it. This does happen, but nowhere near as frequently as I initially thought. But eventually, when using a glass pad, I just wiped it down once or twice every 45-minute game, or if I noticed scratchiness.

There's one other bit of maintenance required, too. Unless you're in a cold climate and have dry skin all the time, you'll probably want to use a gamer sleeve so your arm glides consistently over the pad while you aim, whatever the conditions.

(Image credit: Future) I got used to this maintenance and started using a glass pad, and for a while I was hooked. There's just something about having very little static or dynamic friction and having an incredibly consistent glide that makes you feel like you're in the driver's seat. Every little movement is in your control, as is how smoothly you make those movements.

That seemed fantastic at first, but over time I've found I often don't want that much control. Somewhat paradoxically, I gain control over my aim by giving up some control of my mouse. That shouldn't really be a surprise, though, because 'control' pads are designed to be slower, i.e., providing more resistance to your movements, giving you less free control over your mouse movements. That's the opposite of a glide-y glass pad.

There's definitely a place for glass pads, but I just don't think I'm the target market. They're great if you don't need pinpoint aim and love a smooth glide, or if you need the kind of pinpoint aim that benefits from smooth, consistent tracking with a long time-to-kill (TTK). Games such as Quake Champions or The Finals , for instance.

However, in tactical shooters like Counter-Strike 2 (my go-to game), I find I play much better when using a control cloth pad. I'm able to hold angles better and keep my gun very still, and I can make the small adjustments needed when peeking or occasionally flicking thanks to the increased stopping power and static friction.

I know that over time I could develop finer control over my aim with a glass pad, and maybe then I'd find them to be better. But I did try. I've put dozens of hours in on different glass pads, and I still feel a little relief when going back to a control pad like the Razer Gigantus V2 Pro or Zowie HSR-III , or even a smooth cloth pad like the SteelSeries QcK Performance Speed .

A Wallhack SP-005 glass mouse pad. (Image credit: Future) I've even tried a glass mouse pad that's designed to offer a bit more control: the Wallhack CR-005 . And this did feel better to begin with, to the extent that I wondered whether it could be my endgame pad. But that control feeling seemed to wear off a little over many hours of gameplay (perhaps, very speculatively, due to skate debris getting stuck between the micro surface bumps), and regardless I still felt on more solid ground, so to speak, when I whapped a cloth pad back on the desk.

I could have stuck it out with glass, but I ask myself: why ? If pro players are able to reach their heights on cloth, then I see little incentive to switch to glass over the long-term, and there's little incentive to try and stick it out when I'm not getting the benefit in the short-term, either.

Whenever I boot up Counter-Strike, I sleeve up too

So, unless I ditch Counter-Strike and pick up Quake Champions once again (I'll be holding out for that fabled arena shooter genre comeback until the day I die), I'll be sticking with cloth, I think.

There is one thing that using glass pads has given me which I will continue to use, however: the gamer sleeve.

As I mentioned earlier, in most cases, using a sleeve with a glass pad is essential if you want to keep your arm moving across its surface consistently every time. But a couple of months ago, I heard someone say somewhere (I can't remember where) that a gamer sleeve can even be of benefit when using a cloth pad. So I tried it, and now I can't go back.

(Image credit: Future) Yes, whenever I boot up Counter-Strike, I sleeve up too. Even though I play on cloth. I felt a little sheepish the first few times, but I kept reminding myself that some pro players use them and that nobody is here watching me anyway. But now, it feels as natural as putting on my coat before I go outside in the winter.

And if I forget? It's just as noticeable as forgetting my coat. Without my gamer sleeve on, moving my arm around the mouse pad—aiming with low sensitivity, as you do in Counter-Strike—feels inconsistent at best, and downright slow at worst. But with my trusty half-palm-and-forearm sheath properly donned, my arm scoots around deftly, in exactly the same way every time I boot up the game, whatever the weather.

So thank you, glass pads, for opening my eyes to the wonders of the humble sleeve. You might not have won me over for playing my tactical shooters on your slippery surfaces, but you've given me that.

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Much of the discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on grand ideas such as the rise of a hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence . Speculation swirls around the likelihood that the technology will thin out the job market, or even precipitate the death or evolution of human creativity . We haven't focused as much on the multitude of subtle yet hugely consequential ways in which AI is reshaping the social fabric of our society, and how we collectively imagine the future.

That's the argument sociologist and AI researcher Mona Sloane , an assistant professor of data science and media studies at the University of Virginia, puts at the center of her new book, " Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life " (University of California Press, 2026). Whether we consider email filtering, prediction markets or social media platforms, AI systems are embedded in the heart of how we interact with the digital world. Indeed, AI is so ubiquitously integrated into everyday interfaces that it's given rise to a new kind of "prediction logic" that makes assumptions about who we are and how we are likely to behave.

In this excerpt, Sloane compares the AI technology we use today with the oracles of ancient Greece, framing it as an omnipotent presence that has moved to organize society through the prism of prediction models. This in turn affects how we learn, live, love and even picture the future.

We live in a world of oracles. These oracles constantly feed us predictions that shape our social lives — how we socialize, love, work, gain access to resources. Like in ancient Greece, predictions occupy a prominent role in our society. We consider our oracles so mighty that their predictive power rules over the fate of whole economies and even geopolitical constellations. Where the oracle is, there is the center of the world.

But unlike in ancient Greece, our oracles aren't high priestesses delivering divine prophecies. They are artificial intelligence (AI) systems melted into the infrastructure of everyday life. Today, it is nearly impossible to evade the grasp of AI predictions. I voluntarily and involuntarily use AI on a constant basis: by using email providers that build on the predictive properties of AI for spam filters, by conducting online banking and getting enrolled into AI-automated fraud detection, or by using generative AI for supporting administrative chores. It has become part of how I experience the world.

It can be a relief when it helps me do things I dread or am bad at, such as produce a spreadsheet template I desperately need, help streamline language produced by different authors for a report, or generate a specific image for a presentation. Often, I must intently handhold the AI, checking and fixing its outputs. And sometimes, with deep frustration, I give up and start all over to complete my task manually.

The omnipresence of AI prediction can make it easy to think of these systems as inevitable, quasi-natural phenomena we are subject to, rather than a part of. But they are quantitative concepts that arise from social agreements about how we ought to capture and interpret the world around us.

"Quantitative concepts are not given by nature: they arise from our practice of applying numbers to natural phenomena," wrote Rudolf Carnap, a logician and professor of philosophy of science, in 1966. His point was that numbers can be useful, because they allow for information to travel more easily across contexts, as a sort of language. They also make mathematical predictions possible.

To him, this was first and foremost useful for engineering modern life: A quantitative language allows for the articulation of quantitative laws that, in turn, facilitate the routine generation of mathematicized predictions, particularly in the realm of physics. Being able to predict how energy, compounds, and materials will behave in certain configurations is the reason humans were able to build the conveniences of airplanes, cars, and telephones. For Carnap, predictions were simply instrumental in this way.

AI's ability to predict is changing how we think about the future. (Image credit: Yana Iskayeva via Getty Images) Today, almost 60 years later, this pragmatic approach to mathematical prediction has been turned on its head by AI. Prediction is no longer just a handy tool in physics or engineering. The promises of AI's oracular power have turned prediction into a logic for structuring social life. This is a dangerous proposition. It implies that AI is always necessary or even inevitable and diverts attention from the social forces shaping ideas around this technology in the first place.

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AI systems are not natural phenomena that happen to us. They are collective expressions of society. As such, they are not just a hype or a deception concocted and executed by global tech elites. They indicate a wider shift in how we imagine and enact society. Many critical discussions of AI characterize this phenomenon chiefly as heightened surveillance and capitalist extraction. But this is a myopic diagnosis. AI's most powerful effect is the subtle yet comprehensive recalibration toward prediction as a guiding principle for organizing society. In this book, I call this phenomenon the prediction paradigm.

AI is something that we do as part of going about our lives and participating in society — it is social infrastructure, affecting how we relate to one another and how we act in public and in private. Like all infrastructures, AI allows resources and ideas to flow in certain directions, but not others. AI uses data from our collective past to predict our individual future. And because AI deals in futures, it solidifies a linear time regime that hardens our social commitment to causality: The past always predicts the future. The problem of AI is not the rise of intelligent machines, but the extraordinary social significance ascribed to this linearity, fetishizing the future and leaving little room for deliberations about what (other) futures may be possible or we may want.

Reprinted from Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social LIfe by Mona Sloane, courtesy of the University of California Press. Copyright 2026.

University of California Press

Predicted: How Ai Is Restructuring Social Life: 1 (co-Opting Ai)

In Predicted , Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change.