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ysabetwordsmith
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100wordsoursinWhat I read
Well, most of the time it was One Clear Call, which had (as had preceding volumes) a certain amount of resonance with contemporary events.
Read The Scribbler Annual no 1, which was a change of pace.
On the go
Dipped a bit more into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.
Started the final book in my review pile, which is pretty good though also raises, I think, some interesting points for discussion. (And as a rather tangential thought, during the heyday of lesbian murder mysteries from feminist presses, were there any set in wymmynz communes?)
Have also started a re-read of The Golden Notebook - given how long it is since I last read it, so much seems very familiar.
Up next
Still haven't got to the latest Literary Review. Otherwise, dunno.
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arstechnica_feedThe Super Mario Bros. Movie dominated the box office in 2023, racking up $1.36 billion and snagging several Oscar nominations for good measure. So naturally there’s a sequel, and Nintendo just dropped the official trailer for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, due out next spring.
(Spoilers for the 2023 film below.)
The first attempt at a Super Mario movie adaptation in 1993 was notoriously a dismal failure, although it still has its ’90s-nostalgic fans. But 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie won over gaming fans who were skeptical about another adaption—including Ars Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland. “This film version captures all the fun and vibrancy of the Mario games, with enough references to familiar characters, items, and locations to make even a die-hard Mario fan’s head spin,” he wrote in his 2023 review, adding that, despite a few flaws, the film was “everything that a 10-year-old version of me could ever have dreamed a Mario movie could be.”
arstechnica_feedOpenAI wants a court to reverse a ruling forcing the ChatGPT maker to give 20 million user chats to The New York Times and other news plaintiffs that sued it over alleged copyright infringement. Although OpenAI previously offered 20 million user chats as a counter to the NYT’s demand for 120 million, the AI company says a court order requiring production of the chats is too broad.
“The logs at issue here are complete conversations: each log in the 20 million sample represents a complete exchange of multiple prompt-output pairs between a user and ChatGPT,” OpenAI said today in a filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Disclosure of those logs is thus much more likely to expose private information [than individual prompt-output pairs], in the same way that eavesdropping on an entire conversation reveals more private information than a 5-second conversation fragment.”
OpenAI’s filing said that “more than 99.99%” of the chats “have nothing to do with this case.” It asked the district court to “vacate the order and order News Plaintiffs to respond to OpenAI’s proposal for identifying relevant logs.” OpenAI could also seek review in a federal court of appeals.
arstechnica_feedSix years ago, Valve made its second big virtual reality push, launching the Valve Index headset alongside VR blockbuster Half-Life Alyx. Since then, the company seems to have lost interest in virtual reality gaming, letting competitors like Meta release regular standalone hardware updates as the PC-tethered Index continued to age.
Now, after years of rumors, Valve is finally ready to officially rejoin the VR hardware race. The Steam Frame, set to launch in early 2026, will run both VR and traditional Steam games locally through SteamOS or stream them wirelessly from a local PC.
Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an “up to 110 degrees” field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That’s all roughly in line with 2023’s Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve’s new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly.
arstechnica_feedNearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release.
A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet.
Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling.
james_davis_nicoll
lovelyangel iPhone 13 mini photo |
ghostbustersreddit_feed  | What made this tube appear blue on screen? [link] [comments] |
arstechnica_feedScientists have found that the 2023 marine heat wave caused “functional extinction” of two Acropora reef-building coral species living in the Florida Reef, which stretches from the Dry Tortugas National Park to Miami.
“At this point, we do not think there’s much of a chance for natural recovery—their numbers are so low that successful reproduction is incredibly unlikely,” said Ross Cunning, a coral biologist at the John G. Shedd Aquarium.
This isn’t the first time corals have faced the borderline of extinction over the last 460 million years, and they have always managed to bounce back and recolonize habitats lost during severe climate changes. The problem is that we won’t live long enough to see them doing that again.
arstechnica_feedMeta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported. The French-US scientist has reportedly told associates he will depart in the coming months and is already in early talks to raise funds for the new venture. The departure comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg radically overhauled Meta’s AI operations after deciding the company had fallen behind rivals such as OpenAI and Google.
World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone. Unlike current large language models (such as the kind that power ChatGPT) that predict the next segment of data in a sequence, world models would ideally simulate cause-and-effect scenarios, understand physics, and enable machines to reason and plan more like animals do. LeCun has said this architecture could take a decade to fully develop.
While some AI experts believe that Transformer-based AI models—such as large language models, video synthesis models, and interactive world synthesis models—have emergently modeled physics or absorbed the structural rules of the physical world from training data examples, the evidence so far generally points to sophisticated pattern-matching rather than a base understanding of how the physical world actually works.
arstechnica_feedDirector Gore Verbinski has racked up an impressive filmography over the years, from The Ring and the first three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to the 2011 Oscar-nominated animated western Rango. Granted, he’s had his share of failures (*cough* The Lone Ranger *cough*), but if this trailer is any indication, Verbinski has another winner on his hands with the absurdist sci-fi dark comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
Sam Rockwell stars as the otherwise unnamed “Man from the Future,” who shows up at a Los Angeles diner looking like a homeless person but claiming to be a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit the locals into his war against a rogue AI, although the diner patrons are understandably dubious about his sanity. (“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he assures the crowd about his grubby appearance. “This is the height of f*@ing fashion!”) Somehow, he convinces a handful of Angelenos to join his crusade, and judging by the remaining footage, all kinds of chaos breaks out.
In addition to the eminently watchable Rockwell, the cast includes Haley Lu Richardson as Ingrid, Michael Pena as Mark, Zazie Beetz as Janet, and Juno Temple as Susan. Dino Fetscher, Anna Acton, Asim Chaudhury, Daniel Barnett, and Domonique Maher also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles. Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying, Love and Monsters) penned the script. This is Verbinski’s first indie film, and Tom Ortenberg, CEO of distributor Briarcliff Entertainment, praised it as “wildly original, endlessly entertaining, and unlike anything audiences have seen before.” Color us intrigued.
cimorenewaxjism this story like "Hahah, and then we met here in Finland! Isn't it funny?" but she immediately was like, "There's a Wikipedia list of all the teams that feed the NHL!" and started combing around through the internet until a few minutes later she called, "Is this him?" and showed me his headshot. Apparently he was also the captain of our local Liiga hockey team in 2015, around the time we were going to quite a few matches, and one of his kids is currently on that team. Welp. arstechnica_feedThe original Framework Laptop 16 was trying to crack a problem that laptop makers have wrestled with on and off for years: Can you deliver a reasonably powerful, portable workstation and gaming laptop that supports graphics card upgrades just like a desktop PC?
| Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16 (2025) | |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows 11 25H2 |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (4 Zen 5 cores, 4 Zen 5c cores) |
| RAM | 32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable) |
| GPU | AMD Radeon 860M (integrated)/Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile (dedicated) |
| SSD | 1TB Western Digital Black SN770 |
| Battery | 85 WHr |
| Display | 16-inch 2560×1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen |
| Connectivity | 6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable “Expansion Card” dongles |
| Weight | 4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU |
| Price as tested | Roughly $2,649 for pre-built edition; $2,517 for DIY edition with no OS |
Even in these days of mostly incremental, not-too-exciting GPU upgrades, the graphics card in a gaming PC or graphics-centric workstation will still feel its age faster than your CPU will. And the chance to upgrade that one component for hundreds of dollars instead of spending thousands replacing the entire machine is an appealing proposition.
Upgradeable, swappable GPUs would also make your laptop more flexible—you can pick and choose from various GPUs from multiple vendors based on what you want and need, whether that’s raw performance, power efficiency, Linux support, or CUDA capabilities.
spiralsheepsusandennis
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeedingtehexile in 100words - FUGA: Melodies of Steel - Stalematexkcd_feed - Car Sizeoursin - Wednesday has now had the porcelain inlay donearstechnica_feed - Nintendo drops official trailer for Super Mario Galaxy Moviearstechnica_feed - OpenAI slams court order that lets NYT read 20 million complete user chatsarstechnica_feed - Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Framearstechnica_feed - Steam Deck minus the screen: Valve announces new Steam Machine, Controller hardwarejames_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Ken Writes About Stufflovelyangel - Library Update #21: Rebuildingghostbustersreddit_feed - Whys the tube on top of the ecto blue in this scene?arstechnica_feed - Corals survived past climate changes by retreating to the deepsarstechnica_feed - Meta’s star AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave for own startuparstechnica_feed - Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die trailer ushers in AI apocalypsecyberghostface in scans_daily - Marvel: Black, White & Blood and Guts #2picnicnic in iconcolors - round 180: amnesty round (round 45: dixing)cimorene - Driver's license, upstate NY, and hockey connectionsarstechnica_feed - Review: New Framework Laptop 16 takes a fresh stab at the upgradeable laptop GPUspiralsheep - In which we do the show right heresusandennis - A new, better daybranchandroottimeasmymeasure
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