Connexion
Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82. (credit: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University)
World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.
(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was a friend and colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)
Stunned reactions to Dennett's unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. "Wrenching news. He's been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career," the Santa Fe Institute's Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. "I will miss him enormously."
Enlarge / This mysterious model appeared on eBay with little fanfare. (credit: eBay)
The first-ever model of Star Trek's USS Enterprise NCC-1701 has been returned to the Roddenberry family, according to an ABC News report.
The three-foot model was used to shoot the pilot and credits scene for Star Trek's original series in the 1960s and was used occasionally for shots throughout the series. (Typically, a larger, 11-foot model was used for shots after the pilot.) The model also sat on series creator Gene Roddenberry's desk for several years.
It went missing in the late 1970s; historians and collectors believe it belonged to Roddenberry himself, that he lent it to a production house working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that it was never returned. Its whereabouts were unknown until last fall, when a listing for a mysterious model of the Enterprise appeared on eBay.
Enlarge / Like the Beach Properties DLC itself, this property looks a bit unfinished and in need of some focus. (credit: Paradox Interactive)
Perhaps the first clue that something was not quite right about Beach Properties, the first $10 DLC "expansion" for the already off-kilter city-building sim Cities: Skylines 2, was that it did not contain a real beach house, which one might consider a key beach property. The oversight seemed indicative of a content pack that lacked for content.
C:S2's developers and publisher now agree and have published a letter to Cities fans, in which they offer apologies, updates, and refunds. Beach Properties is now a free add-on, individual buyers will be refunded (with details at a FAQ page), and Ultimate Edition owners will receive additional Creator Packs and Radio Stations, since partial refunds are tricky across different game stores.
"We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry," reads the letter, signed by the CEOs of developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. "When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we've now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better."
Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." (credit: Microsoft)
On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.
"It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors," reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." It's the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.
The VASA framework (short for "Visual Affective Skills Animator") uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.
Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg/)
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.
A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.
But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.
Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.
Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.
X's chatbot Grok is supposed to be an AI engine crunching the platform's posts to surface and summarize breaking news, but this week, Grok's flaws were once again exposed when the chatbot got confused and falsely accused an NBA star of criminal vandalism.
"Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree," Grok's headline read in an AI-powered trending-tab post that has remained on X (formerly Twitter) for days. Beneath the headline, Grok went into even more detail to support its fake reporting:
In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear.
Grok appears to be confusing a common basketball term, where players are said to be throwing "bricks" when they take an airball shot that doesn't hit the rim. According to SF Gate, which was one of the first outlets to report the Grok error, Thompson had an "all-time rough shooting" night, hitting none of his shots on what was his emotional last game with the Golden State Warriors before becoming an unrestricted free agent.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Password-manager LastPass users were recently targeted by a convincing phishing campaign that used a combination of email, SMS, and voice calls to trick targets into divulging their master passwords, company officials said.
The attackers used an advanced phishing-as-a-service kit discovered in February by researchers from mobile security firm Lookout. Dubbed CryptoChameleon for its focus on cryptocurrency accounts, the kit provides all the resources needed to trick even relatively savvy people into believing the communications are legitimate. Elements include high-quality URLs, a counterfeit single sign-on page for the service the target is using, and everything needed to make voice calls or send emails or texts in real time as targets are visiting a fake site. The end-to-end service can also bypass multi-factor authentication in the event a target is using the protection.
Lookout said that LastPass was one of dozens of sensitive services or sites CryptoChameleon was configured to spoof. Others targeted included the Federal Communications Commission, Coinbase and other cryptocurrency exchanges, and email, password management, and single sign-on services including Okta, iCloud, and Outlook. When Lookout researchers accessed a database one CryptoChameleon subscriber used, they found that a high percentage of the contents collected in the scams appeared to be legitimate email addresses, passwords, one-time-password tokens, password reset URLs, and photos of driver’s licenses. Typically, such databases are filled with junk entries.
Enlarge / That is in no way what the Z button looks like or where it goes...
Apple's decision earlier this month to open the iOS App Store to generic retro game emulators is already bearing fruit. Delta launched Wednesday as one of the first officially approved iOS apps to emulate Nintendo consoles from the NES through the N64 and the Game Boy through the Nintendo DS (though unofficial options have snuck through in the past).
Delta is an outgrowth of developer Riley Testut's earlier sideloadable GBA4iOS project, which recently had its own unauthorized clone removed from the App Store. Before Wednesday, iOS users could load Delta onto their devices only through AltStore, an iOS marketplace that used a Developer Mode workaround to sideload apps from a self-hosted server. European users can now get that AltStore directly on their iOS devices (for a small 1.50 euro/year fee), while North American users can simply download Delta for free from the iOS App Store, with no ads or user tracking to boot.
All that history means Delta is far from a slapdash app quickly thrown together to take advantage of Apple's new openness to emulation. The app is obviously built with iOS in mind and already integrates some useful features designed for the mobile ecosystem. While there are some updates we'd like to see in the future, this represents a good starting point for where Apple-approved game emulation can go on iOS.
Enlarge / The Mercedes-Benz E-Class is the brand's workhorse, covering millions of km a year ferrying German taxi passengers around. (credit: Peter Nelson)
Mercedes-Benz's E Class badge possesses a lot of canon. When asked to picture a '90s-or-newer Mercedes full-size sedan, it's hard not to conjure up mental snapshots of W124-and-up generations schlepping around well-heeled suburban communities. I bet a lot of folks also picture the taxi lineup outside any German train station, too.
Well, at least I do. But I'm not talking about envisioning surly Munich cabbies but rather the faithful four-doors they putter around in. A lot of them are E Classes, which further proves that the cars have always been quintessential Mercedes luxury workhorses.
The brand-new 2024 E 350 4Matic, with its thrifty turbo-four powerplant, might have the most direct lineage in the US market to those cream-colored rickety diesels. It's easy on fuel for its size and ready to soak up all the miles across both traffic-ridden cityscapes and high-speed stretches of highway. And with its expansive suite of tech and mild hybrid propulsion, it's an overall great next chapter for the badge.
Enlarge / A prototype wonder effect—featuring Mario's head turned into blocks that could be eaten by enemies—didn't make it into the final game. (credit: Nintendo)
In a game industry that seems to engage in periodic layoffs as a matter of course, it's often hard for even popular game franchises to maintain continuity in their underlying creative teams from sequel to sequel. Then there's the Mario series, where every person credited with the creation of the original Super Mario Bros. in the 1980s ended up having a role in the making of Super Mario Bros. Wonder just last year.
In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn't that tough to get that kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. "The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don't quit," he said. "For folks who have been there together for such a long time, it's easy for us to talk to each other."
That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not "keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it's very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something."
NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station.
This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay for the damages.
Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, told Ars he is fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA's confirmation. The circumstances strongly suggested that was the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through his roof on March 8, a few minutes after the time US Space Command reported the reentry of a space station cargo pallet and nine decommissioned batteries over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory heading forward the coast of southwest Florida.
Enlarge (credit: Matejmo | Getty Images)
Cisco’s Talos security team is warning of a large-scale credential compromise campaign that’s indiscriminately assailing networks with login attempts aimed at gaining unauthorized access to VPN, SSH, and web application accounts.
The login attempts use both generic usernames and valid usernames targeted at specific organizations. Cisco included a list of more than 2,000 usernames and almost 100 passwords used in the attacks, along with nearly 4,000 IP addresses sending the login traffic. The IP addresses appear to originate from TOR exit nodes and other anonymizing tunnels and proxies. The attacks appear to be indiscriminate and opportunistic rather than aimed at a particular region or industry.
“Depending on the target environment, successful attacks of this type may lead to unauthorized network access, account lockouts, or denial-of-service conditions,” Talos researchers wrote Tuesday. “The traffic related to these attacks has increased with time and is likely to continue to rise.”
Enlarge / SEM Micrograph of a tardigrade, more commonly known as a "water bear" or "moss piglet." (credit: Cultura RM Exclusive/Gregory S. Paulson/Getty Images)
Since the 1960s, scientists have known that the tiny tardigrade can withstand very intense radiation blasts 1,000 times stronger than what most other animals could endure. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, it's not that such ionizing radiation doesn't damage tardigrades' DNA; rather, the tardigrades are able to rapidly repair any such damage. The findings complement those of a separate study published in January that also explored tardigrades' response to radiation.
“These animals are mounting an incredible response to radiation, and that seems to be a secret to their extreme survival abilities,” said co-author Courtney Clark-Hachtel, who was a postdoc in Bob Goldstein's lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has been conducting research into tardigrades for 25 years. “What we are learning about how tardigrades overcome radiation stress can lead to new ideas about how we might try to protect other animals and microorganisms from damaging radiation.”
As reported previously, tardigrades are micro-animals that can survive in the harshest conditions: extreme pressure, extreme temperature, radiation, dehydration, starvation—even exposure to the vacuum of outer space. The creatures were first described by German zoologist Johann Goeze in 1773. They were dubbed tardigrada ("slow steppers" or "slow walkers") four years later by Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian biologist. That's because tardigrades tend to lumber along like a bear. Since they can survive almost anywhere, they can be found in lots of places: deep-sea trenches, salt and freshwater sediments, tropical rain forests, the Antarctic, mud volcanoes, sand dunes, beaches, and lichen and moss. (Another name for them is "moss piglets.")
Enlarge / Photos of iGBA that appeared on the App Store before the app was taken down. (credit: Internet Archive)
Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.
Shortly after iGBA's launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a "knock-off" of GBA4iOS. "I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking)," he wrote.
GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone "use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences." But those expansive licensing terms only apply "unless you plan to submit your app to Apple’s App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required."
Enlarge (credit: Getty | George Frey)
Drug shortages in the US have reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages already tallied this year, according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).
The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.
"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."
Enlarge / An image of a boy amazed by flying letters. (credit: Getty Images)
Some weeks in AI news are eerily quiet, but during others, getting a grip on the week's events feels like trying to hold back the tide. This week has seen three notable large language model (LLM) releases: Google Gemini Pro 1.5 hit general availability with a free tier, OpenAI shipped a new version of GPT-4 Turbo, and Mistral released a new openly licensed LLM, Mixtral 8x22B. All three of those launches happened within 24 hours starting on Tuesday.
With the help of software engineer and independent AI researcher Simon Willison (who also wrote about this week's hectic LLM launches on his own blog), we'll briefly cover each of the three major events in roughly chronological order, then dig into some additional AI happenings this week.
(credit: Google)
On Tuesday morning Pacific time, Google announced that its Gemini 1.5 Pro model (which we first covered in February) is now available in 180-plus countries, excluding Europe, via the Gemini API in a public preview. This is Google's most powerful public LLM so far, and it's available in a free tier that permits up to 50 requests a day.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
In a deckbuilding game, you start out with a basic set of cards, then upgrade it over time, seeking synergies and compounding effects. Roguelikes are games where death happens quite often, but each randomized "run" unlocks options for the future. In both genres, and when they're fused together, the key is staying lean, trimming your deck and refining your strategy so that every card and upgrade works toward unstoppable momentum.
“Lean” does not describe the current scene for roguelike deckbuilder games, but they certainly have momentum. As of this writing, Steam has 2,599 titles tagged by users with “deckbuilding” and 861 with “roguelike deckbuilder” in all languages, more than enough to feed a recent Deckbuilders Fest. The glut has left some friends and co-workers grousing that every indie game these days seems to be either a cozy farming sim or a roguelike deckbuilder.
I, an absolute sucker for deckbuilders for nearly five years, wanted to know why this was happening.
Like the games, the show depicts a Vault Dweller making her way out into the Wasteland. [credit: Amazon ]
Amazon has had a rocky history with big, geeky properties making their way onto Prime Video. The Wheel of Time wasn’t for everyone, and I have almost nothing good to say about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Fallout, the first season of which premiered this week, seems to break that bad streak. All the episodes are online now, but I’ve watched three episodes so far. I love it.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing the games that inspired it, so I can only speak to that experience; I don’t know how well it will work for people who never played the games. But as a video game adaptation, it’s up there with The Last of Us.
Enlarge / Legendary Pictures has confirmed that it plans to make Dune: Part Three with director Denis Villeneuve. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)
Dune: Part Two is still raking in the moolah at the box office, and deservedly so. But judging by my various feeds, fans are already swooning over the prospect of director Denis Villeneuve extending his vision into a trilogy by adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah, for the next installment. Will there be a Dune: Part Three? Most signs currently point to yes, with a couple of caveats. Exactly how soon we'll be seeing a return to Arrakis depends a lot on Villeneuve.
Variety confirmed that Legendary Pictures is working with the director on developing Dune: Part Three, although it remains unclear from the wording of the plethora of news items whether the project has officially been greenlit. ("Development" can mean a lot of things.) Naturally, the studio is eager, as are we: the film is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, with global earnings of $630 million (although the hotly anticipated Deadpool and Wolverine this summer might give it a run for its money).
That confirmation sent fresh frissons of excitement across the Internet, although Villeneuve had been talking about the prospect as far back as September 2021. Those plans always depended on the success of Part Two, and that hurdle has obviously been cleared. By August 2023, the director was on record saying there were "words on paper" for a third film. And we learned just last month that composer Hans Zimmer was already working on the score for Dune: Part Three.
Enlarge (credit: Francesco Carta fotografo | Moment)
On Friday, Meta announced policy updates to stop censoring harmless AI-generated content and instead begin "labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as 'Made with AI.'"
Meta's policy updates came after deciding not to remove a controversial post edited to show President Joe Biden seemingly inappropriately touching his granddaughter's chest, with a caption calling Biden a "pedophile." The Oversight Board had agreed with Meta's decision to leave the post online while noting that Meta's current manipulated media policy was too "narrow," "incoherent," and "confusing to users."
Previously, Meta would only remove "videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say." The Oversight Board warned that this policy failed to address other manipulated media, including "cheap fakes," manipulated audio, or content showing people doing things they'd never done.
Mars has a history of liquid water on its surface, including lakes like the one that used to occupy Jezero Crater, which have long since dried up. Ancient water that carried debris—and melted water ice that presently does the same—were also thought to be the only thing driving the formation of gullies spread throughout the Martian landscape. That view may now change thanks to new results that suggest dry ice can also shape the landscape.
Previously, scientists were convinced that only liquid water shaped gullies on Mars because that’s what happens on Earth. What was not taken into account was sublimation, or the direct transition of a substance from a solid to a gaseous state. Sublimation is how CO2 ice disappears (sometimes water ice experiences this, too).
Frozen carbon dioxide is everywhere on Mars, including in its gullies. When CO2 ice sublimates on one of these gullies, the resulting gas can push debris further down the slope and continue to shape it.
Enlarge / The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has made the largest 3D map of our universe to date. (credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration)
An international collaboration of scientists has created the largest 3D map of our universe to date based on the first results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). It's an impressive achievement, with more to come, but the most significant finding stems from the collaboration's new measurements of dark energy. Those results roughly agree with the current prevailing theoretical model for dark energy, in which dark energy is constant over time. But there are some tantalizing hints that it could vary over time instead, which would call for some changes to that prevailing model.
Granted, those hints are still below the necessary threshold to claim discovery and hence fall under the rubric of "huge, if true." We'll have to wait for more data from DESI's continuing measurements to see if they hold up. In the meantime, multiple papers delving into the technical details behind these first results have been posted to the arXiv, and there will be several talks presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society being held this week in Sacramento, California, as well as at Rencontres de Moriond in Italy.
“Our results show some interesting deviations from the standard model of the universe that could indicate that dark energy is evolving over time,” said Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a physicist at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a member of the DESI collaboration. “The more data we collect, the better equipped we will be to determine whether this finding holds. With more data, we might identify different explanations for the result we observe or confirm it. If it persists, such a result will shed some light on what is causing cosmic acceleration and provide a huge step in understanding the evolution of our universe.”
Enlarge (credit: Malte Mueller | fStop)
A high-level Iowa hospital systems administrator, Matthew Kierans, has admitted to stealing a coworker's identity and posing as William Donald Woods for more than 30 years, The Register reported.
On top of using Woods' identity to commit crimes and rack up debt, Kierans' elaborate identity theft scheme led to Woods' incarceration after Kierans' accused his victim of identity theft and Los Angeles authorities failed to detect which man was the true William Donald Woods. Kierans could face up to 32 years in prison, The Register reported, and must pay a $1.25 million fine.
According to a proposed plea agreement with the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Iowa, Kierans met Woods "in about 1988" when they worked together at a hot dog stand in New Mexico. "For the next three decades," Kierans used Woods' "identity in every aspect of his life," including when obtaining "employment, insurance, a social security number, driver's licenses, titles, loans, and credit," as well as when paying taxes. Kierans even got married and had a child using Woods' name.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Depending on who you ask about AI (and how you define it), the technology may or may not be useful, but one thing is for certain: AI hype is dominating corporate marketing these days—even in fast food. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, corporate fast food giant Yum Brands is embracing an "AI-first mentality" across its restaurant chains, including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Habit Burger Grill. The company's chief digital and technology officer, Joe Park, told the WSJ that AI will shape nearly every aspect of how these restaurants operate.
"Our vision of [quick-service restaurants] is that an AI-first mentality works every step of the way," Park said in an interview with the outlet. "If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it’s endless."
As we've discussed in the past, artificial intelligence is a nebulous term. It can mean many different things depending on the context, including computer-controlled ghosts in Pac-Man, algorithms that play checkers, or large language models that give terrible advice on major city websites. But most of all in this tech climate, it means money, because even talking about AI tends to make corporate share prices go up.
X has named a new head of safety about nine months after Ella Irwin resigned last June, following Elon Musk's criticism of Irwin's team's decision to restrict a transphobic documentary. Shortly after Irwin left, former head of brand safety AJ Brown similarly resigned. And that regime notably took over where former safety chief Yoel Roth—who also clashed with Musk—left off.
Stepping into the safety chief role next is Kylie McRoberts, who was promoted after leading X "initiatives to increase transparency in our moderation practices through labels" and "improve security with passkeys," X's announcement said.
As head of safety, McRoberts will oversee X's global safety team, which was rebranded last month to drop "trust" from its name. On X, Musk had said that "any organization that puts ‘Trust’ in their name cannot [be] trusted, as that is obviously a euphemism for censorship."
Enlarge / The original YouTube thumbnail for Dudesy's Carlin special shows an AI-generated comedian sporting Carlin's signature gray ponytail look. (credit: Carlin estate vs. Dudesy lawsuit)
The George Carlin estate has settled its lawsuit with Dudesy, the podcast that purportedly used a "comedy AI" to produce an hour-long stand-up special in the style and voice of the late comedian.
Dudesy's "George Carlin: Dead and Loving It" special, which was first uploaded in early January, gained hundreds of thousands of views and plenty of media attention for its presentation as a creation of an AI that had "listened to all of George Carlin’s material... to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today." But even before the Carlin estate lawsuit was filed, there were numerous signs that the special was not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail in a feature report.
Shortly after the Carlin estate filed its lawsuit against Dudesy in late January, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso told The New York Times that the special had actually been "completely written by [Dudesy co-host] Chad Kultgen."
Enlarge / With these tips, you too can prompt people successfully.
In a break from our normal practice, Ars is publishing this helpful guide to knowing how to prompt the "human brain," should you encounter one during your daily routine.
While AI assistants like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, a growing body of research shows that it's also possible to generate useful outputs from what might be called "human language models," or people. Much like large language models (LLMs) in AI, HLMs have the ability to take information you provide and transform it into meaningful responses—if you know how to craft effective instructions, called "prompts."
Human prompt engineering is an ancient art form dating at least back to Aristotle's time, and it also became widely popular through books published in the modern era before the advent of computers.
3D model of a 100-year-old shipwreck off the western coast of Australia. Credit: Daniel Adams, Curtin University HIVE.
A small underwater drone called Hydrus has located the wreckage of a 100-year-old coal hulk in the deep waters off the coast of western Australia. Based on the data the drone captured, scientists were able to use photogrammetry to virtually "rebuild" the 210-foot ship into a 3D model (above). You can explore an interactive 3D rendering of the wreckage here.
The use of robotic submersibles to locate and explore historic shipwrecks is well established. For instance, researchers relied on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study the wreckage of the HMS Terror, Captain Sir John S. Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage in 1846. In 2007, a pair of brothers (printers based in Norfolk) discovered the wreck of the Gloucester, which ran aground on a sandbank off the coast of Norfolk in 1682 and sank within the hour. Among the passengers was James Stuart, Duke of York and future King James II of England, who escaped in a small boat just before the ship sank.
In 2022, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic announced the discovery of British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance. In 1915, Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months on the Antarctic ice after the ship was crushed by pack ice and sank into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. The wreckage was found nearly 107 years later, 3,008 meters down, roughly four miles (6.4 km) south of the ship's last recorded position. The wreck was in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the lettering "ENDURANCE" was clearly visible in shots of the stern.
Enlarge / This cylindrical object, a few inches in size, fell through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home in Florida last month. (credit: Alejandro Otero on X)
A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home, and NASA is on the case.
In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.
Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)
On Monday, OpenAI announced that visitors to the ChatGPT website in some regions can now use the AI assistant without signing in. Previously, the company required that users create an account to use it, even with the free version of ChatGPT that is currently powered by the GPT-3.5 AI language model. But as we have noted in the past, GPT-3.5 is widely known to provide more inaccurate information compared to GPT-4 Turbo, available in paid versions of ChatGPT.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has transformed over time from a tech demo to a comprehensive AI assistant, and it has always had a free version available. The cost is free because "you're the product," as the old saying goes. Using ChatGPT helps OpenAI gather data that will help the company train future AI models, although free users and ChatGPT Plus subscription members can both opt out of allowing the data they input into ChatGPT to be used for AI training. (OpenAI says it never trains on inputs from ChatGPT Team and Enterprise members at all.)
Opening ChatGPT to everyone could provide a frictionless on-ramp for people who might use it as a substitute for Google Search or potentially gain new customers by providing an easy way for people to use ChatGPT quickly, then offering an upsell to paid versions of the service.
Enlarge / Two cheapo Intel mini PCs, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an Xbox controller for scale. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
I recently tried to use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a regular desktop PC. The experiment wasn't a failure—I was able to use a Pi to get most of my work done for a few days. But the device's performance, and especially the relative immaturity of the Linux's Arm software ecosystem, meant that there were lots of incompatibilities and rough edges.
One of the problems with trying to use a Pi 5 as a regular desktop computer is that, by the time you've paid for the 8GB version of the board, a decent active cooler and case, and (ideally) some kind of M.2 storage attachment and SSD, you've spent close to a couple of hundred dollars on the system. That's not a ton of money to spend on a desktop PC, but it is enough that the Pi no longer feels miraculously cheap, and there are actually other, more flexible competitors worth considering.
Consider the selection of sub-$200 mini desktop PCs that litter the online storefronts of Amazon and AliExpress. Though you do need to roll the dice on low-to-no-name brands like Beelink, GMKTec, Firebat, BMax, Trigkey, or Bosgame, it's actually possible to buy a reasonably capable desktop system with 8GB to 16GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of storage, a Windows 11 license, and a workaday x86-based Intel CPU for as little as $107, though Amazon pricing usually runs closer to $170.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Image)
On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsén. The so-called "Lenna image," (Forsén added an extra "n" to her name in her Playboy appearance to aid pronunciation) has been used in image processing research since 1973 and has attracted criticism for making some women feel unwelcome in the field.
In an email from the IEEE Computer Society sent to members on Wednesday, Technical & Conference Activities Vice President Terry Benzel wrote, "IEEE's diversity statement and supporting policies such as the IEEE Code of Ethics speak to IEEE's commitment to promoting an including and equitable culture that welcomes all. In alignment with this culture and with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image, Lena Forsén, IEEE will no longer accept submitted papers which include the 'Lena image.'"
An uncropped version of the 512×512-pixel test image originally appeared as the centerfold picture for the December 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine. Usage of the Lenna image in image processing began in June or July 1973 when an assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuck and a graduate student at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute scanned a square portion of the centerfold image with a primitive drum scanner, omitting nudity present in the original image. They scanned it for a colleague's conference paper, and after that, others began to use the image as well.
Enlarge / A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market. (credit: Arcade Blogger)
It's been over two years since major players in the international game industry united to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from a beleaguered Ukraine. The relative isolation has apparently forced Vladimir Putin's government to contemplate the kind of homegrown gaming hardware and software that characterized Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.
PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):
consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users
Oh, is that all?
Enlarge / Hertz currently has more than a thousand Bolt EUVs for sale as they leave its rental car fleet. (credit: Chevrolet)
Electric vehicles have many advantages over cars that still use internal combustion engines. They're far more efficient, they're quieter, and they usually have much more torque than their gasoline-powered equivalents. But we're still far from achieving price parity between powertrains. In other words, EVs are expensive.
One place you can find some bargains, though, is the rental company Hertz, which currently has more than 2,100 EVs for sale, more than half of which are affordable enough to qualify for the IRS used clean vehicle tax credit.
Hertz has been adding a lot of EVs to its fleet as part of the company's decarbonization plan. In 2021, it revealed plans to purchase 100,000 Teslas. However, the controversial car maker had delivered fewer than half of those two years later, and long repair times for customer-inflicted damage have seen the rental agency divest itself of many of those Teslas and diversify its fleet, adding plenty of Polestars, Kias, and Chevrolets.
Enlarge (credit: iStock via Getty Images)
OpenAI has launched a charm offensive in Hollywood, holding meetings with major studios including Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros Discovery to showcase its video generation technology Sora and allay fears the artificial intelligence model will harm the movie industry.
Chief Executive Sam Altman and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap gave presentations to executives from the film industry giants, said multiple people with knowledge of the meetings, which took place in recent days.
Altman and Lightcap showed off Sora, a new generative AI model that can create detailed videos from simple written prompts.
All the available Immersive Video launch content fit on a small strip in the TV app. [credit: Samuel Axon ]
Tonight, Apple will debut some new Immersive Video content for the Vision Pro headset—the first sports content for the device. It doesn't seem like much after two months of no new content, though.
Starting at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET, Vision Pro users will be able to watch a sports film captured for the platform's Immersive Video format. The video will be a series of highlights from last year's Major League Soccer (MLS) playoffs, and according to Six Colors, it will run just five minutes. It will be free for all Vision Pro users.
On February 2, Apple released what appeared to be the first episodes of three Immersive Video series: Adventure, Prehistoric Planet, and Wildlife. Each debuted alongside the Vision Pro's launch with one episode labeled "Episode 1" of "Season 1."
The White House has announced the "first government-wide policy to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits." To coordinate these efforts, every federal agency must appoint a chief AI officer with "significant expertise in AI."
Some agencies have already appointed chief AI officers, but any agency that has not must appoint a senior official over the next 60 days. If an official already appointed as a chief AI officer does not have the necessary authority to coordinate AI use in the agency, they must be granted additional authority or else a new chief AI officer must be named.
Ideal candidates, the White House recommended, might include chief information officers, chief data officers, or chief technology officers, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) policy said.
Enlarge / Claptrap keeps finding himself in wild new places. Now he's heading from Sweden's Embracer Group to New York City's Take-Two Interactive. Okay, maybe not that wild. (credit: Gearbox Interactive)
Embracer Group has been backing away from its all-encompassing position in the games industry lately. The latest divestment is Gearbox Entertainment, the studio behind the Borderlands series it bought in early 2021 for a deal that could have been worth up to $1.37 billion to Gearbox had it stayed inside the Swedish conglomerate's grasp.
The buyer is Take-Two Interactive Software, which had previously partnered with Gearbox on publishing Borderlands and other titles. Take-Two will issue new shares of its common stock to pay $460 million for Gearbox, to be completed before the end of June this year. Embracer paid $363 million in cash and stock for Gearbox in 2021 but promised up to $1 billion more should the developer hit earnings goals over six years.
"Today’s announcement marks the result of the final structured divestment process and is an important step in transforming Embracer into the future with notably lower net debt and improved free cash flow," said Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors in a statement intended to start nobody's imagination running.
Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's final Delta IV Heavy rocket, seen here in December when ground crews rolled it to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
This is the rocket that literally lights itself on fire before it heads to space. It's the world's largest rocket entirely fueled by liquid hydrogen, a propellant that is vexing to handle but rewarding in its efficiency.
The Delta IV Heavy was America's most powerful launch vehicle for nearly a decade and has been a cornerstone for the US military's space program for more than 20 years. It is also the world's most expensive commercially produced rocket, a fact driven not just by its outsize capability but also its complexity.
Now, United Launch Alliance's last Delta IV Heavy rocket is set to lift off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.
Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal." (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)
Puerto Rico has declared a public health emergency amid an ongoing outbreak of dengue infections, a mosquito-spread viral infection that can cause fever, aches, rash, vomiting, and, in about 5 percent of cases, a severe disease marked by internal bleeding and shock.
The US territory has tallied 549 cases since the start of the year, representing a 140 percent increase compared with cases tallied at this point last year, according to the territory's health department. The Associated Press reported that more than 340 of the 549 cases have been hospitalized.
In 2023, the island nation of more than 3.2 million people had over 1,000 cases of dengue throughout the year.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards)
On Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus large language model (LLM) surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT) for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. "The king is dead," tweeted software developer Nick Dobos in a post comparing GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus that has been making the rounds on social media. "RIP GPT-4."
Since GPT-4 was included in Chatbot Arena around May 10, 2023 (the leaderboard launched May 3 of that year), variations of GPT-4 have consistently been on the top of the chart until now, so its defeat in the Arena is a notable moment in the relatively short history of AI language models. One of Anthropic's smaller models, Haiku, has also been turning heads with its performance on the leaderboard.
"For the first time, the best available models—Opus for advanced tasks, Haiku for cost and efficiency—are from a vendor that isn't OpenAI," independent AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. "That's reassuring—we all benefit from a diversity of top vendors in this space. But GPT-4 is over a year old at this point, and it took that year for anyone else to catch up."
Enlarge / Kudos to the designer of this umbrella-shaded rooftop terrace at Colossal Order, perhaps the only worker who can imagine a place that isn't overwhelmed by Steam reviewers. (credit: Paradox Interactive)
Under the very unassuming name of patch 1.1.0f1, Cities: Skylines 2 is getting something quite big. The sequel now has the modding, map editing, and code modding support that made its predecessor such a sprawling success.
Only time will tell if community energy can help restore some of the momentum that has been dispersed by the fraught launch of Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2). The project of relatively small developer Colossal Order arrived in October 2023 with performance issues and a lack of content compared to its predecessor. Some of that content perception stemmed from the game's lack of modding support, which had contributed to entire aspects of the original game not yet available in the sequel.
When Ars interviewed Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen in December, she said that modding support was the thing she was most looking forward to arriving. Modding support was intended to be available at launch, but the challenges of building the new game's technical base, amid many other technical issues, pushed it back, along with console releases.
Enlarge (credit: Lisa5201 | E+)
On Monday, Florida became the first state to ban kids under 14 from social media without parental permission. It appears likely that the law—considered one of the most restrictive in the US—will face significant legal challenges, however, before taking effect on January 1.
Under HB 3, apps like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok would need to verify the ages of users, then delete any accounts for users under 14 when parental consent is not granted. Companies that "knowingly or recklessly" fail to block underage users risk fines of up to $10,000 in damages to anyone suing on behalf of child users. They could also be liable for up to $50,000 per violation in civil penalties.
In a statement, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the "landmark law" gives "parents a greater ability to protect their children" from a variety of social media harm. Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, who spearheaded the law, explained some of that harm, saying that passing HB 3 was critical because "the Internet has become a dark alley for our children where predators target them and dangerous social media leads to higher rates of depression, self-harm, and even suicide."
Enlarge / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Jim Carrey in one of his most powerful dramatic roles. (credit: Focus Features)
Last week, the 2004 cult classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marked its 20th anniversary, prompting many people to revisit the surreal sci-fi psychological drama about two ex-lovers who erase their memories of each other—only to find themselves falling in love all over again. Eternal Sunshine was a box office success and earned almost universal praise upon its release. It's still a critical favorite today and remains one of star Jim Carrey's most powerful and emotionally resonant dramatic roles. What better time for a rewatch and in-depth discussion of the film's themes of memory, personal identity, love, and loss?
(Spoilers for the 2004 film below.)
Director Michel Gondry and co-writer Pierre Bismuth first came up with the concept for the film in 1998, based on a conversation Bismuth had with a female friend who, when he asked, said she would absolutely erase her boyfriend from her memory if she could. They brought on Charlie Kaufman to write the script, and the three men went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for their efforts. The title alludes to a 1717 poem by Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard," based on the tragic love between medieval philosopher Peter Abelard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil and their differing perspectives on what happened between them when they exchanged letters later in life. These are the most relevant lines:
Enlarge / One day I will own griffons in such spectacular fashion. But I'm currently carrying a too-heavy backpack and clipped through a hut wall.
With all due respect to the Capcom team, which poured itself into Dragon’s Dogma 2 and deserves praise, raises, and time off, let me get right to it: I love this game for how dumb it is.
I mean "dumb" in the way most heavy metal lyrics are dumb, but you find yourself rocking out nonetheless. Dumb like when you laugh uncontrollably at the sight of someone getting conked on the head and falling over backward. Dumb as in the silliest bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, just nowhere near as self-aware (unless, due to translation issues, this game actually is self-aware, then I apologize).
Dragon’s Dogma 2 (DD2) reminds me of playing another huge, dumb, enjoyable game: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Not the first time you play through it, though. I’m talking about the second or third run-through (or that 100-plus-hour save in which you refuse to finish the game), and your admiration of this huge, rich world gives way to utter ridiculousness. You one-shot dragons with your broken stealth-archer build, you put buckets on the heads of NPCs to rob them, and you marvel at how the most effective fast travel is horse tilting. You lunge into possibilities, choose chaos, and appreciate all the ways you can do so.
Only the most dedicated "Carmen" fans—or North Dakotan educators of a certain age—are likely to have this one in their collections. [credit: Kyle Orland / VGHF ]
SAN FRANCISCO—Trade shows like the Game Developers Conference and the (dearly departed) E3 are a great chance to see what's coming down the pike for the game industry. But they can also be a great place to celebrate gaming's history, as we've shown you with any number of on-site photo galleries in years past.
The history display tucked away in a corner of this year's Game Developers Conference—the first one arranged by the Video Game History Foundation—was a little different. Rather than simply laying out a parcel of random collectibles, as past history-focused booths have, VGHF took a more curated approach, with mini-exhibits focused on specific topics like women in gaming, oddities of gaming music, and an entire case devoted to a little-known entry in a famous edutainment series.
Then there was the central case, devoted to the idea that all sorts of ephemera—from design docs to photos to pre-release prototypes to newsletters to promotional items—were all an integral part of video game history. The organization is practically begging developers, journalists, and fan hoarders of all stripes not to throw out even items that seem like they have no value. After all, today's trash might be tomorrow's important historic relic.
Enlarge / A Saflok branded lock. (credit: Dormakaba)
When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what's come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it's a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city's elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology. But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room's gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone.
One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room's door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they're finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps.
Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba. The Saflok systems are installed on 3 million doors worldwide, inside 13,000 properties in 131 countries.
Enlarge / The United Nations building in New York. (credit: Getty Images)
On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously consented to adopt what some call the first global resolution on AI, reports Reuters. The resolution aims to foster the protection of personal data, enhance privacy policies, ensure close monitoring of AI for potential risks, and uphold human rights. It emerged from a proposal by the United States and received backing from China and 121 other countries.
Being a nonbinding agreement and thus effectively toothless, the resolution seems broadly popular in the AI industry. On X, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote, "We fully support the @UN's adoption of the comprehensive AI resolution. The consensus reached today marks a critical step towards establishing international guardrails for the ethical and sustainable development of AI, ensuring this technology serves the needs of everyone."
The resolution, titled "Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development," resulted from three months of negotiation, and the stakeholders involved seem pleased at the level of international cooperation. "We're sailing in choppy waters with the fast-changing technology, which means that it's more important than ever to steer by the light of our values," one senior US administration official told Reuters, highlighting the significance of this "first-ever truly global consensus document on AI."
Enlarge (credit: AMD)
Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD's "Fluid Motion Frames," which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.
Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1, which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available "later this year" in games whose developers choose to implement it.
Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia's equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.
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