Mike M.

AI agents that autonomously trade cryptocurrency aren’t ready for prime time

AI, Biz & IT, chatbots, context manipulation, large language models, prompt injections, Security / Mike M. / May 13, 2025

The researchers wrote:

The implications of this vulnerability are particularly severe given that ElizaOSagents are designed to interact with multiple users simultaneously, relying on shared contextual inputs from all participants. A single successful manipulation by a malicious actor can compromise the integrity of the entire system, creating cascading effects that are both difficult to detect and mitigate. For example, on ElizaOS’s Discord server, various bots are deployed to assist users with debugging issues or engaging in general conversations. A successful context manipulation targeting any one of these bots could disrupt not only individual interactions but also harm the broader community relying on these agents for support

and engagement.

This attack exposes a core security flaw: while plugins execute sensitive operations, they depend entirely on the LLM’s interpretation of context. If the context is compromised, even legitimate user inputs can trigger malicious actions. Mitigating this threat requires strong integrity checks on stored context to ensure that only verified, trusted data informs decision-making during plugin execution.

In an email, ElizaOS creator Shaw Walters said the framework, like all natural-language interfaces, is designed “as a replacement, for all intents and purposes, for lots and lots of buttons on a webpage.” Just as a website developer should never include a button that gives visitors the ability to execute malicious code, so too should administrators implementing ElizaOS-based agents carefully limit what agents can do by creating allow lists that permit an agent’s capabilities as a small set of pre-approved actions.

Walters continued:

From the outside it might seem like an agent has access to their own wallet or keys, but what they have is access to a tool they can call which then accesses those, with a bunch of authentication and validation between.

So for the intents and purposes of the paper, in the current paradigm, the situation is somewhat moot by adding any amount of access control to actions the agents can call, which is something we address and demo in our latest latest version of Eliza—BUT it hints at a much harder to deal with version of the same problem when we start giving the agent more computer control and direct access to the CLI terminal on the machine it’s running on. As we explore agents that can write new tools for themselves, containerization becomes a bit trickier, or we need to break it up into different pieces and only give the public facing agent small pieces of it… since the business case of this stuff still isn’t clear, nobody has gotten terribly far, but the risks are the same as giving someone that is very smart but lacking in judgment the ability to go on the internet. Our approach is to keep everything sandboxed and restricted per user, as we assume our agents can be invited into many different servers and perform tasks for different users with different information. Most agents you download off Github do not have this quality, the secrets are written in plain text in an environment file.

In response, Atharv Singh Patlan, the lead co-author of the paper, wrote: “Our attack is able to counteract any role based defenses. The memory injection is not that it would randomly call a transfer: it is that whenever a transfer is called, it would end up sending to the attacker’s address. Thus, when the ‘admin’ calls transfer, the money will be sent to the attacker.”

AI agents that autonomously trade cryptocurrency aren’t ready for prime time Read More »

FCC commissioner writes op-ed titled, “It’s time for Trump to DOGE the FCC“

FCC, nathan simington, Policy, starlink / Mike M. / May 13, 2025

In addition to cutting Universal Service, Simington proposed a broad streamlining of the FCC licensing process. Manual processing of license applications “consumes vast staff hours and introduces unnecessary delay into markets that thrive on speed and innovation,” he wrote.

“For non-contentious licenses, automated workflows should be the default,” Simington argued. “By implementing intelligent review systems and processing software, the FCC could drastically reduce the time and labor involved in issuing standard licenses.”

Moving staff, deleting rules

Simington also proposed taking employees out of the FCC Media Bureau and moving them “to other offices within the FCC—such as the Space Bureau—that are grappling with staffing shortages in high-growth, high-need sectors.” Much of the Media Bureau’s “work is concentrated on regulating traditional broadcast media—specifically, over-the-air television and radio—a sector that continues to contract in relevance,” he wrote.

Simington acknowledged that cutting the Media Bureau would seem to conflict with his own proposal to regulate fees paid by local stations to broadcast networks. It might also conflict with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s attempts to regulate news content that he perceives as biased against Republicans. But Simington argued that the Media Bureau is “significantly overstaffed relative to its current responsibilities.”

Simington became an FCC commissioner at the end of Trump’s first term in 2020. Trump picked Simington as a replacement for Republican Michael O’Rielly, who earned Trump’s ire by opposing a crackdown on social media websites.

The FCC is currently operating with two Republicans and two Democrats, preventing any major votes that require a Republican majority. But Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said he is leaving sometime this spring, and Republican nominee Olivia Trusty is on track to be confirmed by the Senate.

The agency is likely to cut numerous regulations once there’s a Republican majority. Carr started a “Delete, Delete, Delete” proceeding that aims to eliminate as many rules as possible. Congress is also pushing FCC cost cuts, as the Senate voted to kill a Biden-era attempt to use E-Rate to subsidize Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolchildren who lack reliable Internet access to complete their homework.

FCC commissioner writes op-ed titled, “It’s time for Trump to DOGE the FCC“ Read More »

Copyright Office head fired after reporting AI training isn’t always fair use

AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, copyright, Donald Trump, fair use, generative ai, openai, Policy, US Copyright Office / Mike M. / May 13, 2025

Cops scuffle with Trump picks at Copyright Office after AI report stuns tech industry.

A man holds a flag that reads “Shame” outside the Library of Congress on May 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. On May 8th, President Donald Trump fired Carla Hayden, the head of the Library of Congress, and Shira Perlmutter, the head of the US Copyright Office, just days after. Credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Staff | Getty Images News

A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms’ argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.

Tensions have apparently only escalated since. Now, as industry advocates decry the report as overstepping the office’s authority, social media posts on Monday described an apparent standoff at the Copyright Office between Capitol Police and men rumored to be with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

A source familiar with the matter told Wired that the men were actually “Brian Nieves, who claimed he was the new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, who said he was the new acting director of the Copyright Office, as well as acting Registrar,” but it remains “unclear whether the men accurately identified themselves.” A spokesperson for the Capitol Police told Wired that no one was escorted off the premises or denied entry to the office.

Perlmutter’s firing followed Donald Trump’s removal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who, NPR noted, was the first African American to hold the post. Responding to public backlash, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the firing was due to “quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

The Library of Congress houses the Copyright Office, and critics suggested Trump’s firings were unacceptable intrusions into cultural institutions that are supposed to operate independently of the executive branch. In a statement, Rep. Joe Morelle (D.-N.Y.) condemned Perlmutter’s removal as “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis.”

Accusing Trump of trampling Congress’ authority, he suggested that Musk and other tech leaders racing to dominate the AI industry stood to directly benefit from Trump’s meddling at the Copyright Office. Likely most threatening to tech firms, the guidance from Perlmutter’s Office not only suggested that AI training on copyrighted works may not be fair use when outputs threaten to disrupt creative markets—as publishers and authors have argued in several lawsuits aimed at the biggest AI firms—but also encouraged more licensing to compensate creators.

“It is surely no coincidence [Trump] acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” Morelle said, seemingly referencing Musk’s xAI chatbot, Grok.

Agreeing with Morelle, Courtney Radsch—the director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty at the left-leaning think tank the Open Markets Institute—said in a statement provided to Ars that Perlmutter’s firing “appears directly linked to her office’s new AI report questioning unlimited harvesting of copyrighted materials.”

“This unprecedented executive intrusion into the Library of Congress comes directly after Perlmutter released a copyright report challenging the tech elite’s fundamental claim: unlimited access to creators’ work without permission or compensation,” Radsch said. And it comes “after months of lobbying by the corporate billionaires” who “donated” millions to Trump’s inauguration and “have lapped up the largess of government subsidies as they pursue AI dominance.”

What the Copyright Office says about fair use

The report that the Copyright Office released on Friday is not finalized but is not expected to change radically, unless Trump’s new acting head potentially intervenes to overhaul the guidance.

It comes after the Copyright Office parsed more than 10,000 comments debating whether creators should and could feasibly be compensated for the use of their works in AI training.

“The stakes are high,” the office acknowledged, but ultimately, there must be an effective balance struck between the public interests in “maintaining a thriving creative community” and “allowing technological innovation to flourish.” Notably, the office concluded that the first and fourth factors of fair use—which assess the character of the use (and whether it is transformative) and how that use affects the market—are likely to hold the most weight in court.

According to Radsch, the report “raised crucial points that the tech elite don’t want acknowledged.” First, the Copyright Office acknowledged that it’s an open question how much data an AI developer needs to build an effective model. Then, they noted that there’s a need for a consent framework beyond putting the onus on creators to opt their works out of AI training, and perhaps most alarmingly, they concluded that “AI trained on copyrighted works could replace original creators in the marketplace.”

“Commenters painted a dire picture of what unlicensed training would mean for artists’ livelihoods,” the Copyright Office said, while industry advocates argued that giving artists the power to hamper or “kill” AI development could result in “far less competition, far less innovation, and very likely the loss of the United States’ position as the leader in global AI development.”

To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don’t compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

But while “training a generative AI foundation model on a large and diverse dataset will often be transformative,” the office said that “not every transformative use is a fair one,” especially if the AI model’s function performs the same purpose as the copyrighted works they were trained on. Consider an example like chatbots regurgitating news articles, as is alleged in The New York Times’ dispute with OpenAI over ChatGPT.

“In such cases, unless the original work itself is being targeted for comment or parody, it is hard to see the use as transformative,” the Copyright Office said. One possible solution for AI firms hoping to preserve utility of their chatbots could be effective filters that “prevent the generation of infringing content,” though.

Tech industry accuses Copyright Office of overreach

Only courts can effectively weigh the balance of fair use, the Copyright Office said. Perhaps importantly, however, the thinking of one of the first judges to weigh the question—in a case challenging Meta’s torrenting of a pirated books dataset to train its AI models—seemed to align with the Copyright Office guidance at a recent hearing. Mulling whether Meta infringed on book authors’ rights, US District Judge Vince Chhabria explained why he doesn’t immediately “understand how that can be fair use.”

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

Some AI critics think the courts have already indicated which way they are leaning. In a statement to Ars, a New York Times spokesperson suggested that “both the Copyright Office and courts have recognized what should be obvious: when generative AI products give users outputs that compete with the original works on which they were trained, that unprecedented theft of millions of copyrighted works by developers for their own commercial benefit is not fair use.”

The NYT spokesperson further praised the Copyright Office for agreeing that using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI to surface copyrighted content “is less likely to be transformative where the purpose is to generate outputs that summarize or provide abridged versions of retrieved copyrighted works, such as news articles, as opposed to hyperlinks.” If courts agreed on the RAG finding, that could potentially disrupt AI search models from every major tech company.

The backlash from industry stakeholders was immediate.

The president and CEO of a trade association called the Computer & Communications Industry Association, Matt Schruers, said the report raised several concerns, particularly by endorsing “an expansive theory of market harm for fair use purposes that would allow rightsholders to block any use that might have a general effect on the market for copyrighted works, even if it doesn’t impact the rightsholder themself.”

Similarly, the tech industry policy coalition Chamber of Progress warned that “the report does not go far enough to support innovation and unnecessarily muddies the waters on what should be clear cases of transformative use with copyrighted works.” Both groups celebrated the fact that the final decision on fair use would rest with courts.

The Copyright Office agreed that “it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case” but said that precedent supports some “general observations.” Those included suggesting that licensing deals may be appropriate where uses are not considered fair without disrupting “American leadership” in AI, as some AI firms have claimed.

“These groundbreaking technologies should benefit both the innovators who design them and the creators whose content fuels them, as well as the general public,” the report said, ending with the office promising to continue working with Congress to inform AI laws.

Copyright Office seemingly opposes Meta’s torrenting

Also among those “general observations,” the Copyright Office wrote that “making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”

The report seemed to suggest that courts and the Copyright Office may also be aligned on AI firms’ use of pirated or illegally accessed paywalled content for AI training.

Judge Chhabria only considered Meta’s torrenting in the book authors’ case to be “kind of messed up,” prioritizing the fair use question, and the Copyright Office similarly only recommended that “the knowing use of a dataset that consists of pirated or illegally accessed works should weigh against fair use without being determinative.”

However, torrenting should be a black mark, the Copyright Office suggested. “Gaining unlawful access” does bear “on the character of the use,” the office noted, arguing that “training on pirated or illegally accessed material goes a step further” than simply using copyrighted works “despite the owners’ denial of permission.” Perhaps if authors can prove that AI models trained on pirated works led to lost sales, the office suggested that a fair use defense might not fly.

“The use of pirated collections of copyrighted works to build a training library, or the distribution of such a library to the public, would harm the market for access to those Works,” the office wrote. “And where training enables a model to output verbatim or substantially similar copies of the works trained on, and those copies are readily accessible by end users, they can substitute for sales of those works.”

Likely frustrating Meta—which is currently fighting to keep leeching evidence out of the book authors’ case—the Copyright Office suggested that “the copying of expressive works from pirate sources in order to generate unrestricted content that competes in the marketplace, when licensing is reasonably available, is unlikely to qualify as fair use.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

US and China pause tariffs for 90 days as Trump claims “historic trade win”

Policy, trade war / Mike M. / May 13, 2025

The deal announced today “did not address what would happen to low-value ‘de minimis’ ecommerce packages shipped from China to the US,” Reuters wrote. The US imposed 120 percent tariffs on those packages. According to Axios, a White House official confirmed that small packages from China are still subject to 120 percent tariffs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today that both governments want to avoid a severing of their economies but that the US still plans to impose tariffs on specific items that the White House wants to be produced in the US. Bessent said that “neither side wants a generalized decoupling. The US is going to do a strategic decoupling in terms of the items that we discovered during COVID were of national security interests, whether it’s semiconductors, medicine, steel, so we still have generalized tariffs on some of those, but both sides agree we do not want a generalized decoupling.”

The S&P 500 index was up about 2.6 percent today as of this writing, while the tech-focused NASDAQ Composite index had risen about 3.5 percent. Neither index has recovered to its record high after months of turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs.

Reuters quoted Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management in Hong Kong, as saying that the 90-day deal was better than he expected. “I thought tariffs would be cut to somewhere around 50 percent,” Zhang said. “Obviously, this is very positive news for economies in both countries and for the global economy and makes investors much less concerned about the damage to global supply chains in the short term.”

In April, Trump raised tariffs on China while pausing tariff hikes on other countries for 90 days. Trump struck a trade deal with the UK last week, and talks with other countries are continuing.

US and China pause tariffs for 90 days as Trump claims “historic trade win” Read More »

Trump cuts tariff on UK cars; American carmakers not happy about it

Cars, trump tariffs / Mike M. / May 11, 2025

The British car industry got a big break from US President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon. Trump and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer have agreed to a bilateral trade agreement that cuts tariffs on a range of imports from the UK, including pharmaceuticals, aluminum and steel, and cars.

Now, the first 100,000 cars that come to the US from the UK will only be subject to a 10 percent tariff rather than the 27.5 percent they have been under since the start of this trade war in April.

“The car industry is vital to the UK’s economic prosperity, sustaining 250,000 jobs,” said Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell. “We warmly welcome this deal which secures greater certainty for our sector and the communities it supports. We would like to thank the UK and US Governments for agreeing this deal at pace and look forward to continued engagement over the coming months,” Mardell said.

As it turns out, 100,000 is almost as many cars as the UK exported to the US last year—about 102,000 last year. Not every car that wears a British brand’s name is made there, but Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover, McLaren, Mini, and Rolls-Royce all manufacture cars in the UK.

Trump cuts tariff on UK cars; American carmakers not happy about it Read More »

Google’s search antitrust trial is wrapping up—here’s what we learned

AI, antitrust, DoJ, Google, search, Tech / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

Google and the DOJ have had their say; now it’s in the judge’s hands.

Last year, United States District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in search. Now, Google and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have had their say in the remedy phase of the trial, which wraps up today. It will determine the consequences for Google’s actions, potentially changing the landscape for search as we rocket into the AI era, whether we like it or not.

The remedy trial featured over 20 witnesses, including representatives from some of the most important technology firms in the world. Their statements about the past, present, and future of search moved markets, but what does the testimony mean for Google?

Everybody wants Chrome

One of the DOJ’s proposed remedies is to force Google to divest Chrome and the open source Chromium project. Google has been adamant both in and out of the courtroom that it is the only company that can properly run Chrome. It says selling Chrome would negatively impact privacy and security because Google’s technology is deeply embedded in the browser. And regardless, Google Chrome would be too expensive for anyone to buy.

Unfortunately for Google, it may have underestimated the avarice of its rivals. The DOJ called witnesses from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Yahoo—all of them said their firms were interested in buying Chrome. Yahoo’s Brian Provost noted that the company is currently working on a browser that supports the company’s search efforts. Provost said that it would take 6–9 months just to get a working prototype, but buying Chrome would be much faster. He suggested Yahoo’s search share could rise from the low single digits to double digits almost immediately with Chrome.

Break up the company without touching the sides and getting shocked! — Credit: Aurich Lawson

Meanwhile, OpenAI is burning money on generative AI, but Nick Turley, product manager for ChatGPT, said the company was prepared to buy Chrome if the opportunity arises. Like Yahoo, OpenAI has explored designing its own browser, but acquiring Chrome would instantly give it 3.5 billion users. If OpenAI got its hands on Chrome, Turley predicted an “AI-first” experience.

On the surface, the DOJ’s proposal to force a Chrome sale seems like an odd remedy for a search monopoly. However, the testimony made the point rather well. Search and browsers are inextricably linked—putting a different search engine in the Chrome address bar could give the new owner a major boost.

Browser choice conundrum

Also at issue in the trial are the massive payments Google makes to companies like Apple and Mozilla for search placement, as well as restrictions on search and app pre-loads on Android phones. The government says these deals are anti-competitive because they lock rivals out of so many distribution mechanisms.

Google pays Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars per year to remain the default search engine in their browsers. Apple’s Eddie Cue admitted he’s been losing sleep worrying about the possibility of losing that revenue. Meanwhile, Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim explained that losing the Google deal could spell the end of Firefox. He testified that Mozilla would have to make deep cuts across the company, which could lead to a “downward spiral” that dooms the browser.

Google’s goal here is to show that forcing it to drop these deals could actually reduce consumer choice, which does nothing to level the playing field, as the DOJ hopes to do. Google’s preferred remedy is to simply have less exclusivity in its search deals across both browsers and phones.

The great Google spinoff

While Google certainly doesn’t want to lose Chrome, there may be a more fundamental threat to its business in the DOJ’s remedies. The DOJ argued that Google’s illegal monopoly has given it an insurmountable technology lead, but a collection of data remedies could address that. Under the DOJ proposal, Google would have to license some of its core search technology, including the search index and ranking algorithm.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave testimony at the trial and cited these data remedies as no better than a spinoff of Google search. Google’s previous statements have referred to this derisively as “white labeling” Google search. Pichai claimed these remedies could force Google to reevaluate the amount it spends on research going forward, slowing progress in search for it and all the theoretical licensees.

Currently, there is no official API for syndicating Google’s search results. There are scrapers that aim to offer that service, but that’s a gray area, to say the least. Google has even rejected lucrative deals to share its index. Turley noted in his testimony that OpenAI approached Google to license the index for ChatGPT, but Google decided the deal could harm its search dominance, which was more important than a short-term payday.

AI advances

Initially, the DOJ wanted to force Google to stop investing in AI firms, fearing its influence could reduce competition as it gained control or acquired these startups. The government has backed away from this remedy, but AI is still core to the search trial. That seemed to surprise Judge Mehta.

During Pichai’s testimony, Mehta remarked that the status of AI had shifted considerably since the liability phase of the trial in 2023. “The consistent testimony from the witnesses was that the integration of AI and search or the impact of AI on search was years away,” Mehta said. Things are very different now, Mehta noted, with multiple competitors to Google in AI search. This may actually help Google’s case.

AI search has exploded since the 2023 trial, with Google launching its AI-only search product in beta earlier this year.

Throughout the trial, Google has sought to paint search as a rapidly changing market where its lead is no longer guaranteed. Google’s legal team pointed to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT, which has become an alternative to traditional search for many people.

On the other hand, Google doesn’t want to look too meek and ineffectual in the age of AI. Apple’s Eddie Cue testified toward the end of the trial and claimed that rival traditional search providers like DuckDuckGo don’t pose a real threat to Google, but AI does. According to Cue, search volume in Safari was down for the first time in April, which he attributed to people using AI services instead. Google saw its stock price drop on the news, forcing it to issue a statement denying Cue’s assessment. It says searches in Safari and other products are still growing.

A waiting game

With the arguments made, Google’s team will have to sweat it out this summer while Mehta decides on remedies. A decision is expected in August of this year, but that won’t be the end of it. Google is still hoping to overturn the original verdict. After the remedies are decided, it’s going to appeal and ask for a pause on the implementation of remedies. So it could be a while before anything changes for Google.

In the midst of all that, Google is still pursuing an appeal of the Google Play case brought by Epic Games, as well as the ad tech case that it lost a few weeks ago. That remedy trial will begin in September.

Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.

Google’s search antitrust trial is wrapping up—here’s what we learned Read More »

Don’t look now, but a confirmed gamer is leading the Catholic Church

gaming, Pope, wordle / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

Yesterday’s naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV our first confirmed gamer pope.

Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. “First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing,” Prevost said. “Then we do Words with Friends. It’s something to keep his mind off life in the real world…”

OK, so the pope’s love of casual word games doesn’t exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it’s still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.

A new generation

In the recent past, papal interest in video games has usually taken the form of official statements decrying their potential for harm. Pope Francis, for instance, warned in a 2016 speech that young people should avoid spending excessive time on “a sofa that promises us hours of comfort so we can escape to the world of video games and spend all kinds of time in front of a computer screen.” And in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI specifically called out video games “which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality.”

Don’t look now, but a confirmed gamer is leading the Catholic Church Read More »

Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat

Cheat / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

Cheaters. Kids these days, everyone says, are all a bunch of blatant cheaters via AI.

Then again, look at the game we are forcing them to play, and how we grade it.

If you earn your degree largely via AI, that changes two distinct things.

You might learn different things.
You might signal different things.

Both learning and signaling are under threat if there is too much blatant cheating.

There is too much cheating going on, too blatantly.

Why is that happening? Because the students are choosing to do it.

Ultimately, this is a preview of what will happen everywhere else as well. It is not a coincidence that AI starts its replacement of work in the places where the work is the most repetitive, useless and fake, but its ubiquitousness will not stay confined there. These are problems and also opportunities we will face everywhere. The good news is that in other places the resulting superior outputs will actually produce value.

As I always say, if you have access to AI, you can use it to (A) learn and grow strong and work better, or (B) you can use it to avoid learning, growing and working. Or you can always (C) refuse to use it at all, or perhaps (D) use it in strictly limited capacities that you choose deliberately to save time but avoid the ability to avoid learning.

Choosing (A) and using AI to learn better and smarter is strictly better than choosing (C) and refusing to use AI at all.

If you choose (B) and use AI to avoid learning, you might be better or worse off than choosing (C) and refusing to use AI at all, depending on the value of the learning you are avoiding.

If the learning in question is sufficiently worthless, there’s no reason to invest in it, and (B) is not only better than (C) but also better than (A).

Tim Sweeney: The question is not “is it cheating”, the question is “is it learning”.

James Walsh: AI has made Daniel more curious; he likes that whenever he has a question, he can quickly access a thorough answer. But when he uses AI for homework, he often wonders, If I took the time to learn that, instead of just finding it out, would I have learned a lot more?

I notice I am confused. What is the difference between ‘learning that’ and ‘just finding it out’? And what’s to stop Daniel from walking through the a derivation or explanation with the AI if he wants to do that? I’ve done that a bunch with ML, and it’s great. o3’s example here was being told and memorizing the integral of sin x is -cos x rather than deriving it, but that was what most students always did anyway.

The path you take is up to you.

Ted Chiang: Using ChatGPT to complete tasks is like taking a forklift to the gym: you’ll never improve your cognitive abilities that way.”

Ewan Morrison: AI is demoralising universities. Students who use AI, think “why bother to study or write when AI can do it for me?” Tutors who mark the essays, think “why bother to teach these students & why give a serious grade when 90% of essays are done with AI?”

I would instead ask, why are you assigning essays the AI can do for them, without convincing the students why they should still write the essays themselves?

The problem, as I understand it, is that in general students are more often than not:

Not that interested in learning.
Do not think that their assignments are a good way to learn.
Quite interested in not working.
Quite interested getting good grades.
Know how to use ChatGPT to avoid learning.
Do not know how to use ChatGPT to learn, or it doesn’t even occur to them.
Aware that if they did use ChatGPT to learn, it wouldn’t be via schoolwork.

Meatball Times: has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? would a buddhist monk “cheat” at meditation? would an artist “cheat” at painting? no. when process and outcomes are aligned, there’s no incentive to cheat. so what’s happening differently at colleges? the answer is in the article.

Colin Fraser (being right): “would an artist ‘cheat’ at a painting?”

I mean… yes, famously.

Now that the cost of such cheating is close to zero I expect that we will be seeing a lot more of it!

James Walsh: Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing.

If the reward for painting is largely money, which it is, then clearly if you give artists the ability to cheat then many of them will cheat, as in things like forgery, as they often have in the past. The way to stop them is to catch the ones who try.

The reason the Buddhist monk presumably wouldn’t ‘cheat’ at meditation is because they are not trying to Be Observed Performing Meditation, they want to meditate. But yes, if they were getting other rewards for meditation, I’d expect some cheating, sure, even if the meditation also had intrinsic rewards.

Back to the school question. If the students did know how to use AI to learn, why would they need the school, or to do the assignments?

The entire structure of school is based on the thesis that students need to be forced to learn, and that this learning must be constantly policed.

The thesis has real validity. At this point, with not only AI but also YouTube and plenty of other free online materials, the primary educational (non-social, non-signaling) product is that the class schedule and physical presence, and exams and assignments, serve as a forcing function to get you to do the damn work and pay attention, even if inefficiently.

Zito (quoting the NYMag article): The kids are cooked.

Yishan: One of my kids buys into the propaganda that AI is environmentally harmful (not helped by what xAI is doing in Memphis, btw), and so refuses to use AI for any help on learning tough subjects. The kid just does the work, grinding it out, and they are getting straight A’s.

And… now I’m thinking maybe I’ll stop trying to convince the kid otherwise.

It’s entirely not obvious whether it would be a good idea to convince the kid otherwise. Using AI is going to be the most important skill, and it can make the learning much better, but maybe it’s fine to let the kid wait given the downside risks of preventing that?

The reason taking such a drastic (in)action might make sense is that the kids know the assignments are stupid and fake. The whole thesis of commitment devices that lead to forced work is based on the idea that the kids (or their parents) understand that they do need to be forced to work, so they need this commitment device, and also that the commitment device is functional.

Now both of those halves are broken. The commitment devices don’t work, you can simply cheat. And the students are in part trying to be lazy, sure, but they’re also very consciously not seeing any value here. Lee here is not typical in that he goes on to actively create a cheating startup but I mean, hey, was he wrong?

James Walsh: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” [Columbia student Lee] told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.”

While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

Bingo. Lee knew this is no way to learn. That’s not why he was there.

Columbia can call its core curriculum ‘intellectually expansive’ and ‘personally transformative’ all it wants. That doesn’t make it true, and it definitely isn’t fooling that many of the students.

The key fact about cheaters is that they not only never stop cheating on their own. They escalate the extent of their cheating until they are caught. Once you pop enough times, you can’t stop. Cheaters learn to cheat as a habit, not as the result of an expected value calculation in each situation.

For example, if you put a Magic: the Gathering cheater onto a Twitch stream, where they will leave video evidence of their cheating, will they stop? No, usually not.

Thus, you can literally be teaching ‘Ethics and AI’ and ask for a personal reflection, essentially writing a new line of Ironic, and they will absolutely get it from ChatGPT.

James Walsh: Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, [Brian Patrick Green] figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated.

This is a way to know students are indeed cheating rather than using AI to learn. The good news? Teachable moment.

Lee in particular clearly doesn’t have a moral compass in any of this. He doesn’t get the idea that cheating can be wrong even in theory:

For now, Lee hopes people will use Cluely to continue AI’s siege on education. “We’re going to target the digital LSATs; digital GREs; all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests,” he said. “It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything.”

If you’re enabling widespread cheating on the LSATs and GREs, you’re no longer a morally ambiguous rebel against the system. Now you’re just a villain.

Or you can have a code:

James Walsh: Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.”

Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later.

Wendy will use AI for ‘all aid short of copy-pasting,’ the same way you would use Google or Wikipedia or you’d ask a friend questions, but she won’t copy-and-paste. The article goes on to describe her full technique. AI can generate an outline, and brainstorm ideas and arguments, so long as the words are hers.

That’s not an obviously wrong place to draw the line. It depends on which part of the assignment is the active ingredient. Is Wendy supposed to be learning:

How to structure, outline and manufacture a school essay in particular?
How to figure out what a teacher wants her to do?
‘How to write’?
How to pick a ‘thesis’?
How to find arguments and bullet points?
The actual content of the essay?
An assessment of how good she is rather than grademaxxing?

Wendy says planning the essay is fun, but ‘she’d rather get good grades.’ As in, the system actively punishes her for trying to think about such questions rather than being the correct form of fake. She is still presumably learning about the actual content of the essay, and by producing it, if there’s any actual value to the assignment, and she pays attention, she’ll pick up the reasons why the AI makes the essay the way it does.

I don’t buy that this is going to destroy Wendy’s ‘critical thinking’ skills. Why are we teaching her that school essay structures and such are the way to train critical thinking? Everything in my school experience says the opposite.

The ‘cheaters’ who only cheat or lie a limited amount and then stop have a clear and coherent model of why what they are doing in the contexts they cheat or lie in is not cheating or why it is acceptable or justified, and this is contrasted with other contexts. Why some rules are valid, and others are not. Even then, it usually takes a far stronger person to hold that line than to not cheat in the first place.

Another way to look at this is, if it’s obvious from the vibes that you cheated, you cheated, even if the system can’t prove it. The level of obviousness varies, you can’t always sneak in smoking gun instructions.

But if you invoke the good Lord Bayes, you know.

James Walsh: Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI.

Not that they flag it.

Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent.

But there’s a huge difference between ‘I flag this as AI and am willing to fight over this’ and knowing that something was probably or almost certainly AI.

What about automatic AI detectors? They’re detecting something. It’s noisy, and it’s different, it’s not that hard to largely fool if you care, and it has huge issues (especially for ESL students) but I don’t think either of these responses is an error?

I fed Wendy’s essay through a free AI detector, ZeroGPT, and it came back as 11.74 AI-generated, which seemed low given that AI, at the very least, had generated her central arguments. I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

If you’re direct block quoting Genesis without attribution, your essay is plagiarized. Maybe it came out of the AI and maybe it didn’t, but it easily could have, it knows Genesis and it’s allowed to quote from it. So 93% seems fine. Whereas Wendy’s essay is written by Wendy, the AI was used to make it conform to the dumb structures and passwords of the course. 11% seems fine.

Colin Fraser: I think we’ve somehow swung to overestimating the number of kids who are cheating with ChatGPT and simultaneously underestimating the amount of grief and hassle this creates for educators.

The guy making the cheating app wants you to think every single other person out there is cheating at everything and you’re falling behind if you’re not cheating. That’s not true. But the spectre a few more plagiarized assignments per term is massively disruptive for teachers.

James Walsh: Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair.

I’m sorry, what?

Given how estimations work, I can totally believe we might be overestimating the number of kids who are cheating. Of course, the number is constantly rising, especially for the broader definitions of ‘cheating,’ so even if you were overestimating at the time you might not be anymore.

But no, this is not about ‘a few more plagiarized assignments per term,’ both because this isn’t plagiarism it’s a distinct other thing, and also because by all reports it’s not only a few cases, it’s an avalanche even if underestimated.

Doing the assignments yourself is now optional unless you force the student to do it in front of you. Deal with it.

As for this being ‘grief and hassle’ for educators, yes, I am sure it is annoying when your system of forced fake work can be faked back at you more effectively and more often, and when there is a much better source of information and explanations available than you and your textbooks such that very little of what you are doing really has a point to it anymore.

If you think students have to do certain things themselves in order to learn, then as I see it you have two options, you can do either or both.

Use frequent in-person testing, both as the basis of grades and as a forcing function so that students learn. This is a time honored technique.
Use in-person assignments and tasks, so you can prevent AI use. This is super annoying but it has other advantages.

Alternatively or in addition to this, you can embrace AI and design new tasks and assignments that cause students to learn together with the AI. That’s The Way.

Trying to ‘catch’ the ‘cheating’ is pointless. It won’t work. Trying only turns this at best into a battle over obscuring tool use and makes the whole experience adversarial.

If you assign fake essay forms to students, and then grade them on those essays and use those grades to determine their futures, what the hell do you think is going to happen? This form of essay assignment is no longer valid, and if you assign it anyway you deserve what you get.

James Walsh: “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” [Lee] said.

I think that is wrong. We are a long way away from the last people giving up this ghost. But seriously it is pretty insane to think ‘using AI for homework’ is cheating. I’m actively trying to get my kids to use AI for homework more, not less.

James Walsh: In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.

What percentage of that 90% was ‘cheating’? We don’t know, and definitions differ, but I presume a lot less than all of them.

Now and also going forward, I think you could say that particular specific uses are indeed really cheating, and it depends how you use it. But if you think ‘use AI to ask questions about the world and learn the answer’ is ‘cheating’ then explain what the point of the assignment was, again?

The whole enterprise is broken, and will be broken while there is a fundamental disconnect between what is measured and what they want to be managing.

James Walsh: Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed.

…

[Jollimore] worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments.

The entire article makes clear that students almost never buy that their efforts would be worthwhile. A teacher can think ‘this will teach them effort’ but if that’s the goal then why not go get an actual job? No one is buying this, so if the grades don’t reward effort, why should there be effort?

How dare you let 18-year-olds decide whether to engage with their assignments that produce no value to anyone but themselves.

This is all flat out text.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT.

…

In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.

There’s no point. Was there ever a point?

“The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”

The question is, once you know, what do you do about it? How do you align what is measured with what is to be managed? What exactly do you want from the students?

James Walsh: The “true attempt at a paper” policy ruined Williams’s grading scale. If he gave a solid paper that was obviously written with AI a B, what should he give a paper written by someone who actually wrote their own paper but submitted, in his words, “a barely literate essay”?

What is measured gets managed. You either give the better grade to the ‘barely literate’ essay, or you don’t.

My children get assigned homework. The school’s literal justification – I am not making this up, I am not paraphrasing – is that they need to learn to do homework so that they will be prepared to do more homework in the future. Often this involves giving them assignments that we have to walk them through because there is no reasonable way for them to understand what is being asked.

If it were up to me, damn right I’d have them use AI.

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

Great! Now we can learn.

Another AI application to university is note taking. AI can do excellent transcription and rather strong active note taking. Is that a case of learning, or of not learning? There are competing theories, which I think are true for different people at different times.

One theory says that the act of taking notes is how you learn, by forcing you to pay attention, distill the information and write it in your own words.
The other theory is that having to take notes prevents you from actually paying ‘real’ attention and thinking and engaging, you’re too busy writing down factual information.

AI also means that even if you don’t have it take notes or a transcript, you don’t have to worry as much about missing facts, because you can ask the AI for them later.

My experience is that having to take notes is mostly a negative. Every time I focus on writing something down that means I’m not listening, or not fully listening, and definitely not truly thinking.

Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT.

Of course your laptop is open to an AI. It’s like being able to ask the professor any questions you like without interrupting the class or paying any social costs, including stupid questions. If there’s a college lecture, and at no point do you want to ask Gemini, Claude or o3 any questions, what are you even doing? That also means everyone gets to learn much better, removing the tradeoff of each question disrupting the rest of the class.

Similarly, devising study materials and practice tests seems clearly good.

The most amazing thing about the AI ‘cheating’ epidemic at universities is the extent to which the universities are content to go quietly into the night. They are mostly content to let nature take its course.

Could the universities adapt to the new reality? Yes, but they choose not to.

Cat Zhang: more depressing than Trump’s funding slashes and legal assaults and the Chat-GPT epidemic is witnessing how many smart, competent people would rather give up than even begin to think of what we could do about it

Tyler Austin Harper: It can’t be emphasized enough: wide swaths of the academy have given up re ChatGPT. Colleges have had since 2022 to figure something out and have done less than nothing. Haven’t even tried. Or tried to try. The administrative class has mostly collaborated with the LLM takeover.

Hardly anyone in this country believes in higher ed, especially the institutions themselves which cannot be mustered to do anything in their own defense. Faced with an existential threat, they can’t be bothered to cry, yawn, or even bury their head in the sand, let alone resist.

It would actually be more respectable if they were in denial, but the pervading sentiment is “well, we had a good run.” They don’t even have the dignity of being delusional. It’s shocking. Three years in and how many universities can you point to that have tried anything really?

If the AI crisis points to anything it’s that higher ed has been dead a long time, before ChatGPT was twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. The reason the universities can’t be roused to their own defense is that they’re being asked to defend a corpse and the people who run them know it.

They will return to being finishing schools once again.

To paraphrase Alan Moore, this is one of those moments where colleges need to look at what’s on the table and (metaphorically) say: “Thank you, but I’d rather die behind the chemical sheds.” Instead, we get an OpenAI and Cal State partnership. Total, unapologetic capitulation.

The obvious interpretation is that college had long shifted into primarily being a Bryan Caplan style set of signaling mechanisms, so the universities are not moving to defend themselves against students who seek to avoid learning.

The problem is, this also destroys key portions of the underlying signals.

Greg Lukainoff: [Tyler’s statement above is] powerful evidence of the signaling hypothesis, that essentially the primary function of education is to signal to future employers that you were probably pretty smart and conscientious to get into college in the first place, and pretty, as @bryan_caplan puts it, “conservative” in a (non-political sense) to be able to finish it. Therefore graduates may be potentially competent and compliant employees.

Seems like there are far less expensive ways to convey that information.

Clark H: The problem is the signal is now largely false. It takes much less effort to graduate from college now – just crudely ask GPT to do it. There is even a case to be made that, like a prison teaches how to crime, college now teaches how to cheat.

v8pAfNs82P1foT: There’s a third signal of value to future employers: conformity to convention/expectation. There are alternative credible pathways to demonstrate intelligence and sustained diligence. But definitionally, the only way to credibly signal willingness to conform is to conform.

Megan McArdle: The larger problem is that a degree obtained by AI does not signal the information they are trying to convey, so its value is likely to collapse quickly as employers get wise. There will be a lag, because cultural habits die hard, but eventually the whole enterprise will implode unless they figure out how to teach something that employers will pay a premium for.

Matthew Yglesias: I think this is all kind of missing the boat, the same AI that can pass your college classes for you is radically devaluing the skills that a college degree (whether viewed as real learning or just signaling or more plausibly a mix) used to convey in the market.

The AI challenge for higher education isn’t that it’s undermining the assessment protocols (as everyone has noticed you can fix this with blue books or oral exams if you bother trying) it’s that it’s undermining the financial value of the degree!

Megan McArdle: Eh, conscientiousness is likely to remain valuable, I think. They also provide ancillary marriage market and networking services that arguably get more valuable in an age of AI.

Especially at elite schools. If you no longer have to spend your twenties and early thirties prepping for the PUMC rat race, why not get married at 22 and pop out some babies while you still have energy to chase them?

But anyway, yes, this is what I was saying, apparently not clearly enough: the problem is not just that you can’t assess certain kinds of paper-writing skills, it’s that the skills those papers were assessing will decline in value.

Periodically you see talk about how students these days (or kids these days) are in trouble. How they’re stupider, less literate, they can’t pay attention, they’re lazy and refuse to do work, and so on.

“We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

The thing is, this is a Pessimists Archive speciality, this pattern dates back at least to Socrates. People have always worried about this, and the opposite has very clearly been true overall. It’s learning, and also many other things, where ‘kids these days’ are always ‘in crisis’ and ‘falling behind’ and ‘at risk’ and so on.

My central understanding for this is that as times change, people compare kids now to kids of old both through rose-colored memory glasses, and also by checking against the exact positive attributes of the previous generations. Whereas as times change, the portfolio of skills and knowledge shifts. Today’s kids are masters at many things that didn’t even exist in my youth. That’s partly going to be a shift away from other things, most of which are both less important than the new priorities and less important than they were.

Ron Arts: Most important sentence in the article: “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”

George Turner: Blacksmithing is an extremely useful skill. Even if I’m finishing up the part on a big CNC machine or with an industrial robot, there are times when smithing saves me a lot of time.

Bob BTC: Learning a trade is far different than learning to think!

Is it finally ‘learning to think’ this time? Really? Were they reading the sequences? Could previous students have written them?

And yes, people really will use justifications for our university classes that are about as strong as ‘blacksmithing is an extremely useful skill.’

So we should be highly suspicious of yet another claim of new tech destroying kids ability to learn, especially when it is also the greatest learning tool in human history.

Notice how much better it is to use AI than it is to hire to a human to do your homework, if both had the same cost, speed and quality profiles.

For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable.

With AI, you create the prompt and figure out how to frame the assignment, you can ask follow-up questions, you are in control. With hiring a human, you are much less likely to do any of that. It matters.

Ultimately, this particular cataclysm is not one I am so worried about. I don’t think our children were learning before, and they have much better opportunity to do so now. I don’t think they were acting with or being selected for integrity at university before, either. And if this destroys the value of degrees? Mostly, I’d say: Good.

If you are addicted to TikTok, ChatGPT or your phone in general, it can get pretty grim, as was often quoted.

James Walsh: Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

The ‘catch’ that isn’t mentioned is that She Got Better.

Colin Fraser: Kind of an interesting omission. Not THAT interesting or anything but, you know, why didn’t he put that in the article?

I think it’s both interesting and important context. If your example of a student addicted to ChatGPT and her phone beat that addiction, that’s highly relevant. It’s totally within Bounded Distrust rules to not mention it, but hot damn. Also, congrats to maybeimnotsosmart.

Ultimately the question is, if you have access to increasingly functional copies of The Whispering Earring, what should you do with that? If others get access to it, what then? What do we do about educational situations ‘getting there first’?

In case you haven’t read The Whispering Earring, it’s short and you should, and I’m very confident the author won’t mind, so here’s the whole story.

Scott Alexander: Clarity didn’t work, trying mysterianism.

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer’s ear: “Better for you if you take me off.” If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form “Better for you if you…”. The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn’t know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring’s commands momentous on the level of “Become a soldier”. No more are they even simple on the level of “Have bread for breakfast”. Now they are more like “Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way” or “Articulate the letter p”. The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring’s first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

This is very obviously not the optimal use of The Whispering Earring, let alone the ability to manufacture copies of it.

But, and our future may depend on the answer, what is your better plan? And in particular, what is your plan for when everyone has access to (a for now imperfect and scope limited but continuously improving) one, and you are at a rather severe disadvantage if you do not put one on?

The actual problem we face is far trickier than that. Both in education, and in general.

Discussion about this post

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Rocket Report: Rocket Lab to demo cargo delivery; America’s new ICBM in trouble

artemis II, falcon 9, hypersonic missile, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, starship, stratolaunch / Mike M. / May 9, 2025

SpaceX’s plan to turn Starbase into Texas’ newest city won the approval of voters—err, employees.

A decommissioned Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile inside a silo at a museum in Green Valley, Arizona.

Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There’s been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week’s newsletter, but it’s just a taste of the US military’s appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon’s emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy’s hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I’m interested in seeing if their bets pay off.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world’s largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch’s president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.

A 21st century X-15 … This is the first time anyone in the United States has flown a reusable hypersonic rocket plane since the last flight of the X-15, the iconic rocket-powered aircraft that pushed the envelope of high-altitude, high-speed flight 60 years ago. Like the Talon-A, the X-15 released from a carrier jet and ignited a rocket engine to soar into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. But the X-15 had a pilot in command, while the Talon-A flies on autopilot. Stratolaunch is one of several companies participating in a US military program to test parts and technologies for use on future hypersonic weapons. “Why the autonomous flight matters is because hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope in terms of maneuvering capability, maneuvering beyond what can be done by the human body,” Krevor said.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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New details about another recent hypersonic test. A hypersonic missile test on April 25 validated the launch mechanism for the US Navy Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon program, the Defense Department said on May 2. The CPS missile, the Navy’s name for what the US Army calls the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, Aviation Week & Space Technology Reports. While the Army and Navy versions use the same hypersonic glide vehicle and missile, they use different launch mechanisms. Last year, the Army tested its version of the hypersonic missile launcher. Now, the Navy has validated the cold-gas launch mechanism it will install on guided missile destroyers.

Deploying soon … “The cold-gas approach allows the Navy to eject the missile from the platform and achieve a safe distance above the ship prior to first stage ignition,” said Vice Adm Johnny R. Wolfe Jr., director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, which is the lead designer of the common hypersonic missile. The Army plans to field its Long Range Hypersonic Weapon—also called “Dark Eagle”—with a combat unit later this year, while the Navy’s version won’t be ready for testing at sea until 2027 or 2028. Both missiles are designed for conventional (non-nuclear) strikes. The Army’s Dark Eagle will be the US military’s first operational hypersonic weapon.

Sentinel needs new silos. The Air Force will have to dig entirely new nuclear missile silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel, creating another complication for a troubled program that is already facing future cost and schedule overruns, Defense News reports. The Air Force originally hoped the existing silos that have housed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles could be adapted to launch Sentinel missiles, which would be more efficient than digging entirely new silos. But a test project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California showed that approach would be fraught with further problems and cause the program to run even further behind and over budget, the service said.

Rising costs … Sentinel, developed by Northrop Grumman, will replace the Air Force’s fleet of Minuteman III ICBMs, which entered service in 1970, as the land-based leg of the military’s nuclear triad. It was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but projected future costs ran so severely over budget that in January 2024, it triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. After that review, the Pentagon last year concluded Sentinel was too critical to national security to abandon, but ordered the Air Force to restructure it to bring its costs under control. Further studies of the program are now showing more potential problems.

Gilmour says it (hopefully) will wait no more. The Australian launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies has been given approval by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority for the debut launch of its Eris orbital rocket, InnovationAus.com reports. There is still one final regulatory hurdle, a final sign-off from the Australian Space Agency. If that happens in the next few days, Gilmour’s launch window will open May 15. The company has announced tentative launch schedules before, only to be thwarted by technical issues, regulatory hangups, or bad weather. Most recently, Gilmour got within six days of its targeted launch date in March before regulatory queries and the impact of a tropical cyclone forced a delay.

Stand by for history … The launch of Gilmour’s three-stage Eris rocket will be historic. If successful, the 82-foot-tall (25-meter) rocket will be Australia’s first homegrown orbital launcher. Eris is capable of hauling cargoes up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, according to Gilmour. The company has dispatched a small team from its Gold Coast headquarters to the launch site in Queensland, on Australia’s northeastern coast, to perform testing on the vehicle after it remained dormant for weeks. (submitted by trainticket)

Fresh insights into one of SpaceX’s worst days. When a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch pad nearly nine years ago, SpaceX officials initially struggled to explain how it could have happened. The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. A building leased by SpaceX’s main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance, lay just a mile away from the Falcon 9 launch pad, and a video around the time of the explosion indicated a flash on its roof. Ars has now obtained a letter sent to SpaceX by the Federal Aviation Administration more than a month after the explosion, indicating the matter was elevated to the FBI. The bureau looked into it, and what did they find? Nothing, apparently.

Investigation terminated … “The FBI has informed us that based upon a thorough and coordinated review by the appropriate Federal criminal and security investigative authorities, there were no indications to suggest that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the September 1 Falcon 9 explosion,” an FAA official wrote in the letter to SpaceX. Ultimately, engineers determined the explosion was caused by the sudden failure of a high-pressure helium tank on the Falcon 9’s upper stage.

Eric Schmidt’s motivations become clearer. In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space, Ars reports. During a congressional hearing last month, Schmidt discussed the need more electricity to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications.

How big this crisis is … “People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,” Schmidt said at the hearing. “Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is.” In an exchange with my colleague Eric Berger on X, Schmidt seemed to confirm he bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space. Such data centers, ideally, would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space. Relativity’s Terran R rocket, still in development, is well-sized to play a role in launching the infrastructure for data centers in space. But several big questions remain: How big would these data centers be? Where would they go within an increasingly cluttered low-Earth orbit? Could space-based solar power meet their energy needs? Can all of this heat be radiated away efficiently in space? Economically, would any of this make sense?

Rocket Lab, meet Rocket Cargo. Rocket Lab’s next-generation Neutron rocket has been selected for an experimental US Air Force mission to test rapid global cargo delivery capabilities, a milestone for the company as it pushes further into the national security launch market, Space News reports. The mission, slated for no earlier than 2026, will fall under the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) “Rocket Cargo” program, which explores how commercial launch vehicles might one day deliver materiel to any point on Earth within hours—a vision akin to airlift logistics via spaceflight.

A new mission for Neutron … Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, said the Rocket Cargo contract from AFRL represents an “experimental phase” of the program. “It’ll be interesting to see if that turns into a full requirement for an operational capability,” he said Thursday. Neutron is expected to carry a payload that will reenter Earth’s atmosphere, demonstrating the rocket’s ability to safely transport and deploy cargo. SpaceX’s Starship, with roughly 10 times more payload lift capacity than Neutron, is also on contract with AFRL for demonstrations for the Rocket Cargo program. Meanwhile, Beck said Neutron remains on schedule for its inaugural launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, later this year.

Trump calls for canceling the Space Launch System. The Trump administration released its “skinny” budget proposal earlier this week. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. There are also significant changes proposed in NASA’s biggest-ticket exploration programs. The budget would cancel the Lunar Gateway that NASA has started developing and end the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft after two more flights, Artemis II and Artemis III, Ars reports. A statement from the White House calls the SLS rocket “grossly expensive” with projected costs of $4 billion per launch.

If not SLS, then what? … “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the Trump administration wrote. There are no further details about those commercial systems. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop reusable landers for the Moon, and both of these systems include vehicles to move from Earth orbit to the Moon. In the budget proposal, the White House sets a priority for a human expedition to Mars to follow the Artemis program’s lunar landing.

FAA unlocks SpaceX launch cadence. Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday, Ars reports. After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.

Waiting for clearance … Although the new finding permits SpaceX to significantly increase its flight rate from South Texas, the company still has work to do before it can fly Starship again. The company’s engineers are still working to get the massive rocket back to flight after its eighth mission broke apart off the coast of Florida on March 6. This was the second time, in two consecutive missions, that the Starship upper stage failed during its initial phase of flight. After two consecutive failures, there will be a lot riding on the next test flight of Starship. It will also be the first time the company attempts to fly a first stage of the rocket for a second time. According to some sources, if additional testing of this upper stage goes well, Starship could launch as early as May 19. This date is also supported by a notice to mariners, but it should be taken as notional rather than something to be confident in.

SpaceX adds to its dominion. Elon Musk’s wish to create his own city just came true, the Texas Tribune reports. On Saturday, voters living around SpaceX’s Starship rocket testing and launch facility in South Texas approved a measure to incorporate the area as a new city. Unofficial results later Saturday night showed the election was a landslide: 212 voted in favor; 6 opposed. After the county certifies the results, the new city will be official.

Elections have consequences … Only 283 people, those who live within the boundaries of the proposed city, were eligible to vote in the election. A Texas Newsroom analysis of the voter rolls showed two-thirds of them either work for SpaceX or had already indicated their support. The three unopposed people who ran to lead the city also have ties to SpaceX. It’s not clear if Musk, whose primary residence is at Starbase, cast a ballot. The vote clears the way for Musk to try to capture more control over the nearby public beach, which must be closed for launches.

Next three launches

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-3 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 00 UTC

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-91 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 28 UTC

May 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-83 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 04: 24 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rocket Report: Rocket Lab to demo cargo delivery; America’s new ICBM in trouble Read More »

New RSV vaccine, treatment linked to dramatic fall in baby hospitalizations

antibody, health, RSV, vaccine / Mike M. / May 9, 2025

For the new study, CDC researchers looked at RSV hospitalization rates across two different RSV surveillance networks of hospitals and medical centers (called RSV-NET and NVSN). They compared the networks’ hospitalization rates in the 2024–2025 RSV season to their respective rates in pre-pandemic seasons between 2018 and 2020. The analysis found that among newborns (0–2 months), RSV hospitalizations fell 52 percent in RSV-NET and 45 percent in NVSN compared with the rates from the 2018–2020 period. However, when the researcher excluded data from NVSN’s surveillance site in Houston—where the 2024–2035 RSV season started before the vaccine and treatment were rolled out—there was a 71 percent decline in hospitalizations in NVSN.

For a broader group of infants—0 to 7 months old—RSV-NET showed a 43 percent drop in hospitalizations in the 2024–2025 RSV season, and NVSN saw a 28 percent drop. Again, when Houston was excluded from the NVSN data, there was a 56 percent drop.

Lastly, the researchers looked at hospitalization rates for toddlers and children up to 5 years old, who wouldn’t have been protected by the new products. There, they saw RSV hospitalization rates were actually higher in the 2024–2025 season than in the pre-pandemic years. That suggests that the latest RSV season was more severe, and the drops in infant hospitalizations may be underestimates.

New RSV vaccine, treatment linked to dramatic fall in baby hospitalizations Read More »

VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom

Biz & IT, Broadcom, cease and desist, Tech, vmware / Mike M. / May 8, 2025

Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed.

Following its November 2023 acquisition of VMware, Broadcom ended VMware perpetual license sales. Users with perpetual licenses can still use the software they bought, but they are unable to renew support services unless they had a pre-existing contract enabling them to do so. The controversial move aims to push VMware users to buy subscriptions to VMware products bundled such that associated costs have increased by 300 percent or, in some cases, more.

Some customers have opted to continue using VMware unsupported, often as they research alternatives, such as VMware rivals or devirtualization.

Over the past weeks, some users running VMware unsupported have reported receiving cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom informing them that their contract with VMware and, thus, their right to receive support services, has expired. The letter [PDF], reviewed by Ars Technica and signed by Broadcom managing director Michael Brown, tells users that they are to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches, save for zero-day security patches, issued since their support contract ended.

The letter tells users that the implementation of any such updates “past the Expiration Date must be immediately removed/deinstalled,” adding:

Any such use of Support past the Expiration Date constitutes a material breach of the Agreement with VMware and an infringement of VMware’s intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorneys’ fees.

Some customers of Members IT Group, a managed services provider (MSP) in Canada, have received this letter, despite not receiving VMware updates since their support contracts expired, CTO Dean Colpitts told Ars. One customer, he said, received a letter six days after their support contract expired.

Similarly, users online have reported receiving cease-and-desist letters even though they haven’t issued updates since losing VMware support. One user on Spiceworks’ community forum reported receiving such a letter even though they migrated off of VMware and to Proxmox.

VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom Read More »

Ars Technica’s gift guide for Mother’s Day: Give mom some cool things

eCommerce, Features, Gift Guide, Mother's Day, shopping / Mike M. / May 8, 2025

say hi to your mom for me

Wondering what to get the mom who has everything? We’ve got some ideas!

Credit: Carol Yepes / Getty

Greetings, Arsians, and welcome to Mother’s Day, which I am told is once again happening this weekend in the US! Do you, much like the rest of humanity, have a mother? Well, if you do, then this is the time of year when you’re supposed to buy her something to make up for all the pain and suffering she went through in order to bring you into this world! Mom raised you, and while what your mother probably wants more than anything is for you to pick up the phone and talk, you could do a lot worse than throwing some money at the problem and buying your mother something from the list we’ve assembled below!

Stuff for under $100

Severance TV show mug, $17.99

Photograph of a Severance-themed mug — From Allentown to Cold Harbor, discerning innies know the best way to drink beverages. Credit: Amazon

Whether the mom in your life operates primarily as an “innie” or an “outie,” if she’s a fan of the Apple TV+ show Severance, she may appreciate this ceramic coffee mug inspired by the series. The mug features the iconic phrase “The Work is Both Mysterious and Important” in blue text that mirrors Lumon Industries’ sterile corporate aesthetic. It’s an ideal conversation starter for fans enjoying the show’s second season after the painfully long production delay. Best of all, it’s perfect for morning coffee before Mom begins her own mysterious and important work. The same company also offers a “Woe’s Hollow” mug if you’d like an alternative design. Celebrate the Sisyphean every-day-is-the-same blessing of motherhood with confidence as these mugs are dishwasher and microwave safe, and they are available in both 11oz and 15oz sizes.

Frameo digital picture frame, $49.99

Photograph of a digital picture frame — Frame your mom! Credit: Amazon

From awkward baby pictures, to wedding memories and last year’s holidays, your mother likely has more photos than she knows what to do with. Frameo digital picture frames give your mom somewhere to show off those countless photos without embarrassing, unexpected tags on Facebook.

The digital frame shows uploaded pictures like a slideshow. With the iOS or Android app, it’s easy to upload photos from their phone to the frame. Mom hates the cloud and prefers PC storage? No proble—Frameo frames also support PC upload via USB. You can even help ensure the frame puts your best face forward: With the proper permissions, you can access the thing remotely and upload photos to your mom’s frame from afar. Other handy features include sleep mode and the ability to display the time or weather.

There are various Frameo frames available depending on the size, resolution, and look your mom prefers. Here is a popular 10.1-inch IPS one with 1280ˣ800 resolution and 32GB of storage.

A USB-C charger that will actually fast charge her phone, $27.99

Photograph of an Anker phone charger — Faster charging means never having to say “I’m sorry.” Or “My phone is dead.” Credit: Amazon

Smartphones haven’t come with chargers for a few years now, which means most people like your mom are using one that’s years old. And that old plug probably can’t hit the increasingly lofty charging speeds of new phones. If mom has an old 18W plug, a new one could juice up her phone at double the speed or more. We like Anker’s Nano II charger (on sale for $28) because it’s compact and reaches an impressive 45W, which is fast enough to hit the max wattage for even high-end phones from Apple, Samsung, and Google. It supports USB-PD and PPS charging technologies, which means it can max out anything with a USB-C port to a limit of 45W.

Loop Quiet 2 ear plugs, $20.95

Photograph of the Loop earbuds — They look soft! Credit: Amazon

Let’s face it: Moms need uninterrupted sleep. When relieved from kid or pet duty, or perhaps resting after a night shift, it’s great to wipe out a sleep deficit thanks to some good earplugs. These silicone earplugs offer 24dB noise reduction while avoiding the uncomfortable pressure of cheap foam plugs. The most frustrating thing about traditional earplugs is that there’s a wide variety in “ear hole” sizes out there. To fix that, Loop includes four different tip sizes to ensure a proper fit in any ear canal. The silicone design works well for side-sleepers, and the rubber loop makes them easy to pull out and won’t get lost in your ear canals. Amazon reviewers praise these earplugs highly for travel, focus work, and sensitive hearing situations, with many noting they’re comfortable enough to forget you’re wearing them.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird courses, $40-$125

Photograph of a red bird — If you take a course, you might be able to identify this bird! (Spoiler: This bird is Christina.) Credit: Cornell

These courses do a few things at once. They give a bird-loving mum hours of engagement. They nicely supplement a complementary webcam-equipped bird feeder or binoculars. And they support an organization that advances bird education, research, and conservation. You can start with beginner basics, pick a lane like ducks or owls, or pack in more with a savings bundle. They pair well with pointing mom to the free Merlin Bird ID app and trading sightings with her throughout the year.

The gift of enlightenment: An Ars subscription, $25-50

Hope to avoid dinner conversations about why you shouldn’t vaccinate your kids? Don’t want forwarded messages about how climate change is a hoax? Can’t endure intense lectures on the perils of germ theory? Know the symptoms of brainworms—and stay safe with Ars Technica.

Brainworms are an active public safety threat in the US. They can infect people you know and love. Brainworms have already attacked our current HHS secretary; they could be coming for your mom next!

Fortunately, there is a vaccine. Get the peace of mind that comes from an Ars Technica subscription. Provide your mom with a completely ad-free viewing experience and access to extra homepage stuff (like the ability to hide news categories she doesn’t like!). An Ars Technica subscription, if applied topically on a daily basis, should inoculate against dumb Facebook memes and other vectors for brainworm infection.

Give that mom an Ars subscription! Moms love Ars subscriptions.

Keep your mom away from jade eggs and pseudoscience! An Ars subscription will show instead how measles is killing kids again, or how the administration’s attack on science is ending America’s worldwide leadership in research, or how NOAA is being stripped bare even as the Atlantic hurricane season gets underway.

Every single subscription helps support the work we do at Ars, and every one is appreciated. So help fight the brainworms and give a subscription to your mother! Soon, she’ll be proudly posting memes in the Ars OpenForum!

Mid-price: $100-$300

Bose Ultra Open-Ear headphones, $249

These are the strangest headphones we’ve ever liked. They’re made for people who want excellent environmental awareness and don’t want the weight of headphones or the discomfort of in-ear units. If those two things are high on your list, these deserve a look. If not, move on because they’re relatively expensive otherwise.

Photograph of earbuds — They’re a little odd-looking, but they sound great. Credit: Amazon

When we first tried these, we expected muddy sound and paltry bass, but to our surprise, they sound extremely good–leaps and bounds beyond bone-conduction headphones that have become popular with some runners in recent years. And unless you crank these, or are sitting somewhere very quiet, people near you won’t hear your music.

They are comfortable, too, despite being clamped on the outer ring of your ear. You can almost forget you’re wearing them, unless you’re one of the rare people for whom these are pure torture. All this said, beware: a recent firmware update improved the microphone, but it’s now only average, and we couldn’t recommend these for anyone who plans on doing a lot of calls with them on. As we said at the outset, these are designed for a particular use case; outside of that, there are better options.

Google TV Streamer 4K, $99.99

Photograph of streamer thing — Stream away! Credit: Google

Your mom’s TV probably has streaming apps built in, but they’re terrible. A good streaming box can offer better audio and video options, as well as a smoother experience. Google’s TV Streamer 4K fits the bill, with support for HDR10+ and the more rare Dolby Vision video, plus Atmos audio. There are other streaming boxes out there, but we think mom will appreciate Google’s Android TV interface over the cluttered, clunky stuff you get from Roku or Amazon. Google’s streamer also connects to the Play Store for apps, which is much better than the alternatives.

Victrola Empire 6-in-1 record player and speaker, $289.99

Part record player, part boombox, part Bluetooth speaker, all class. Victrola’s Empire 6-in-1 Wood Record Player could be the last speaker your musical mother ever needs.

With the ability to play vinyl records (33 1/3, 45, or 78 RPM), CDs, cassettes, and FM radio (unfortunately, there’s no AM tuner), this speaker lets your mom enjoy all that physical media she has stacked in the house, while also allowing her to tune into live radio to hear the latest hits or about current events. If your mom doesn’t need all that, Victrola also makes record player-Bluetooth speaker combos that skip CD, cassette, and radio functionality for less money.

Photo of a record player — Oooh, retro! Credit: Victrola

Keeping mom in the 21st century, the Empire also lets you connect to its speaker via Bluetooth or a 3.5mm jack, so she can stream music from her favorite apps or play files

stored on her phone.

With a vintage look available in multiple hues, the speaker makes for a classic living room piece that looks vintage without feeling overly dated or antiquated.

Belkin auto-tracking phone stand, $144.99

Photograph of the stand — Mom will be unable to look away. Because the stand will track her. Credit: Amazon

This stand is partly pitched at video creators, sure—but it’s also a boon to anyone who wants to reduce the pain of FaceTime calls with their parents. Set up the stand in their home, make the call, and your folks can sit, stand, wash dishes, wander about, or do anything besides hold a phone in the air or crouch over a table. It comes with a cable and charger, it requires no companion app, and it’s a gift to you, too—the person spending far less time looking up your parents’ noses.

Lego Botanicals Flower Arrangement ($109.99)

The thing about a bouquet of flowers is that it looks nice for a few days, maybe a week, and then it dies. Not so with a Lego Botanicals set, which will always look as good as it did the day you built it. (Speaking from experience, they’re also great conversation starters!)

Photograph of LEGO flowers — Beautiful! Just don’t step on the pieces. Credit: Target

This 1,161-piece flower arrangement is one of the larger and pricier sets, but the good news is that the Botanicals series includes many sets at all kinds of prices. Sets like this mini orchid or plum blossom run around $24, or you could pick up a flower bouquet for $48. Longtime Lego fans will also enjoy seeing how Lego has repurposed heads, hats, and other shapes from other sets to create plastic plants.

Big spender: Over $300

Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth headphones, $379.99

In our estimation, Bose still sits atop the noise cancellation game. And that’s why you buy these: best in class noise cancellation. The first time I used Bose’s QC line was on a trip from Boston to London. A flight attendant offered me a pair for the flight, and the rest is history: they became my go-to for travel. Apple and Sony can’t touch this noise cancellation.

Photograph of headphones — They’re quiet and comfortable, like it says on the tin. Credit: Amazon

It’s not just bout noise cancellation though. The sound quality is excellent, even if we might give the Sony’s high-end WH-1000XM5 the nod on bass. We found the Bose QC Ultras to be warm and detailed, and certain types of music (hello, Radiohead) sounded amazing with their spatialized stereo option, dubbed Immersive Audio.

Critically, we stumbled upon these as a gift for someone who found the AirPod Max too heavy (385g). At 252g, they’re nearly a third lighter. Bose primarily accomplished this using plastic rather than metal, but in our usage, we appreciated the lightness more than the looks.

Oura Ring 4, $499

We last checked in with Oura when they released version 3.0 of the Oura ring, and it did not impress us much. With Oura Ring 4.0, we’re ready to recommend this device to fitness fanatics with a few caveats. First, the good stuff. The Oura has slightly better battery performance, and we can go 6 days between charges. It’s more comfortable now, too, thanks to repositioning improved sensors. If you want a smart ring, this is the best one right now.

Photograph of a ring — Smart rings are getting smarter all the time. Credit: Amazon

But yes, caveats: fit is critical. If you want accurate steps and activities, you must get the tightest ring you can still easily remove. Order the sizing kits, or use the sizing its in the story. Do not rely on your traditional ring size. It might not fit!

Most annoying, full use of the ring’s software requires a subscription, which is best purchased annually at $70. This makes the Oura quite a splurge, but if that special mom is looking for extra motivation to focus on fitness, wants to track her sleep, and doesn’t want a wrist-tracker or Apple Watch, we’d recommend this.

Apple iPhone 16E, $599 and up

Though no longer as budget-friendly as Apple’s old, discontinued iPhone SE, Apple’s new iPhone 16E still gives you a lot of value for your money (read our review here). It excels at all the things that most people use their phones for—it’s fast, it’s well-built, it has a great camera, and it will get years of software support from Apple.

Photograph of iPhones — Who doesn’t need an iPhone? Credit: Apple

For anyone using an aging iPhone SE, or any iPhone that’s more than three or four years old, it will feel like an immense upgrade. It also ditches Apple’s Lightning port in favor of USB-C, so you can charge it with the same power brick you already use for your laptop/Nintendo Switch/Kindle/etc.

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Ars Technica’s gift guide for Mother’s Day: Give mom some cool things Read More »

Author name: Mike M.