Chris Wright declared an energy “emergency” in the Pacific Northwest. SEATTLE—The last coal-fired power plant in Washington state was set to go cold at the end of the year. It would then switch to natural gas, cutting carbon emissions in half. The shutdown had been in the works for…
How do four modern LLMs do at re-creating a simple Windows gaming classic? The idea of using AI to help with computer programming has become a contentious issue. On the one hand, coding agents can make horrific mistakes that require a lot of inefficient human oversight to fix, leading many…
South Korean rocket startup Innospace is poised to debut a new nano-launcher. Welcome to Edition 8.23 of the Rocket Report! Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive…
DiskSat’s design offers “a power-to-weight ratio unmatched by traditional aluminum satellites.” Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design. The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical…
They were infected by roundworm, whipworm, and microscopic protozoans called Giardia duodenalis. It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind…
Google loves AI content, except when it doesn’t. Google is generally happy to see people using generative AI tools to create content, and it’s doubly happy when they publish it on its platforms. But there are limits to everything. Two YouTube channels that attracted millions of subscribers with AI-generated…
Subscribers will start seeing ads when selecting a user next year. Peacock subscribers will see ads immediately upon opening the streaming app or website next year. It’s a bold new strategy for attracting advertisers—something that’s been increasingly important to subscription-based streaming services—but it also risks alienating viewers As reported…
Help increase our charity haul of nearly $18,000 in just over a week. If you’ve been too busy planning for Half-Life 3 to take part in this year’s Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don’t worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance…
I would avoid building a PC right now, but if you can’t, here’s our best advice. The first few months of 2025 were full of graphics card reviews where we generally came away impressed with performance and completely at a loss on availability and pricing. The testing in these…
Once researchers turn to LLMs, paper counts go up, quality does not. There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These instances raise serious questions about the…
