Features – Page 8

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad

Apple, Apple M2, Apple silicon, Features, ipad, iPad Air, iPadOS, Tech / Mike M. / May 14, 2024

breath of fresh air —

M2 Air won’t draw new buyers in, but if you like iPads, these do all you need.

Andrew Cunningham – May 13, 2024 9: 00 pm UTC

The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside.

Andrew Cunningham
In portrait mode. The 13-inch model is a little large for dedicated tablet use, but if you do want a gigantic tablet, the $799 price is appealing.

Andrew Cunningham
The Apple Pencil Pro attaches, pairs, and charges via a magnetic connection on the edge of the iPad.

Andrew Cunningham
In the Magic Keyboard. This kickstand-less case is still probably the best way to make the iPad into a true laptop replacement, though it’s expensive and iPadOS is still a problem.

Andrew Cunningham
The tablet’s USB-C port, used for charging and connecting to external accessories.

Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s Smart Folio case. The magnets on the cover will scoot up and down the back of the iPad, allowing you a bit of flexibility when angling the screen.

Andrew Cunningham
The Air’s single-lens, flash-free camera, seen here peeking through the Smart Folio case.

Andrew Cunningham

The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air’s 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn’t even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air’s base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac.

Not quite a last-gen iPad Pro

The new iPad Airs have a lot in common with the M2 iPad Pro from 2022. They have the same screen sizes and resolutions, the same basic design, they work with the same older Magic Keyboard accessories (not the new ones with the function rows, metal palm rests, and larger trackpads, which are reserved for the iPad Pro), and they obviously have the same Apple M2 chip.

Performance-wise, nothing we saw in the benchmarks we ran was surprising; the M2’s CPU and (especially) its GPU are a solid generational jump up from the M1, and the M1 is already generally overkill for the vast majority of iPad apps. The M3 and M4 are both significantly faster than the M2, but the M2 is still unquestionably powerful enough to do everything people currently use iPads to do.

That said, Apple’s decision to use an older chip rather than the M3 or M4 does mean the new Airs come into the world missing some capabilities that have come to other Apple products announced in the last six months or so. That list includes hardware-accelerated ray-tracing on the GPU, hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec decoding, and, most importantly, a faster Neural Engine to help power whatever AI stuff Apple’s products pick up in this fall’s big software updates.

The 13-inch Air’s screen has the same resolution and pixel density (2732×2048, 264 PPI) as the last-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And unlike the 13-inch Pro, which truly is a 13-inch screen, Apple’s tech specs page says the 13-inch Air is still using a 12.9-inch screen, and Apple is just rounding up to get to 13.

The 13-inch Air display does share some other things with the last-generation iPad Pro screen, including P3 color, a 600-nit peak brightness. Its display panel has been laminated to the front glass, and it has an anti-reflective coating (two of the subtle but important quality improvements the Air has that the $349 10th-gen iPad doesn’t). But otherwise it’s not the same panel as the M2 Pro; there’s no mini LED, no HDR support, and no 120 Hz ProMotion support.

M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad Read More »

Forget aerobars: Ars tries out an entire aerobike

bicycles, Cars, Features, velomobile / Rejus Almole / May 12, 2024

Here comes a future —

Taking to the road in a modern, high-speed version of a 40-year-old dream.

John Timmer – May 12, 2024 10: 30 am UTC

Image of a aerodynamic recumbent bicycle parked in front of a pickup truck. — Enlarge / The Velomobile Bülk, with its hood in place. Note the hood has an anti-fog covering on the visor (which is flipped up). The two bumps near the front of the hood are there to improve clearance for the cyclist’s knees.

JOHN TIMMER

My brain registered that I was clearly cycling. My feet were clipped in to pedals, my legs were turning crank arms, and the arms were linked via a chain to one of the wheels. But pretty much everything else about the experience felt wrong on a fundamental, almost disturbing level.

I could produce a long list of everything my mind was struggling to deal with, but two things stand out as I think back on the experience. The first is that, with the exception of my face, I didn’t feel the air flow over me as the machine surged forward down a slight slope. The second, related to the first, is that there was no indication that the surge would ever tail off if I didn’t hit the brakes.

Living the dream

My visit with a velomobile was, in some ways, a chance to reconnect with a childhood dream. I’ve always had a fascination with vehicles that don’t require fuel, like bicycles and sailboats. And during my childhood, the popular press was filled with stories about people setting human-powered speed records by putting aerodynamic fiberglass shells on recumbent bicycles. In the wake of the 1970s oil crises, I imagined a time when the roads might be filled with people cycling these pods for their commutes or covering long distances thanks to a cooler filled with drinks and snacks tucked in the back of the shell.

But the pods seemed to vanish from public consciousness as I got older, and I also learned that recumbent bikes are absolutely terrible on hills, which I’m now fond of climbing. The dreams had faded from my awareness when a reader, in response to one of our e-bike reviews, suggested I check out a velomobile. It turns out that my dreams weren’t dead; they had just relocated to Europe without mentioning it to me.

Enlarge / Marc Rosen and two of his velomobiles. The newer model, the Bülk, is closer to him.

John Timmer

Velomobiles are a product category with a variety of designs and manufacturers producing them, most of them based in Europe. They’re also the fiberglass pods of my youth updated to current standards. Gone is the weight of fiberglass, and the one-off, hand-made hardware has been replaced by standardized models that have gone through refinements across generations. Safety features like lights, directionals, and mirrors are now standard.

But the prices, while not exorbitant (mostly in the $8,000–$10,000 range—for bicycles; you can pay more for far less carbon fiber), mean that living my childhood dream really wasn’t an option. The European Union-based companies don’t seem to have any agreements with US bike shops that would let me check one out in a showroom; I’ve heard of only two dealers in the US that keep velomobiles in stock, and neither is anywhere close to me. Fortunately, that didn’t preclude the option of trying one. One major vendor of velomobiles, Romania’s Velomobile World, has an ambassadors program, where people agree to let potential buyers take test rides in return for a discount on purchases.

That’s how I found myself setting out for a short spin near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border in a Velomobile Bülk owned by Marc Rosen, who also fielded a lot of my questions about the hardware.

Forget aerobars: Ars tries out an entire aerobike Read More »

Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid

asteroids, Features, near earth object, near-earth asteroids, Science / Rejus Almole / May 10, 2024

We'd like to avoid this. — Enlarge / We’d like to avoid this.

Science Photo Library/Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images

In 2005, the United States Congress laid out a clear mandate: To protect our civilization and perhaps our very species, by 2020, the nation should be able to detect, track, catalog, and characterize no less than 90 percent of all near-Earth objects at least 140 meters across.

As of today, four years after that deadline, we have identified less than half and characterized only a small percentage of those possible threats. Even if we did have a full census of all threatening space rocks, we do not have the capabilities to rapidly respond to an Earth-intersecting asteroid (despite the success of NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission).

Some day in the finite future, an object will pose a threat to us—it’s an inevitability of life in our Solar System. The good news is that it’s not too late to do something about it. But it will take some work.

Close encounters

The dangers are, to put it bluntly, everywhere around us. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which maintains a list of (no points award for guessing correctly) minor planets within the Solar System, has a running tally. At the time of the writing of this article, the Center has recorded 34,152 asteroids with orbits that come within 0.05 AU of the Earth (an AU is one astronomical unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun).

These near-Earth asteroids (or NEAs for short, sometimes called NEOs, for near-Earth objects) aren’t necessarily going to impact the Earth. But they’re the most likely ones to do it; in all the billions of kilometers that encompass the wide expanse of our Solar System, these are the ones that live in our neighborhood.

And impact they do. The larger planets and moons of our Solar System are littered with the craterous scars of past violent collisions. The only reason the Earth doesn’t have the same amount of visible damage as, say, the Moon is that our planet constantly reshapes its surface through erosion and plate tectonics.

It’s through craters elsewhere that astronomers have built up a sense of how often a planet like the Earth experiences a serious impact and the typical sizes of those impactors.

Tiny things happen all the time. When you see a beautiful shooting star streaking across the night sky, that’s from the “impact” of an object somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a tiny pebble striking our atmosphere at a few tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

Every few years or so, an object 10 meters across hits us; when it does, it delivers energy roughly equivalent to that of our earliest atomic weapons. Thankfully, most of the Earth is open ocean, and most impactors of this class burst apart in the upper atmosphere, so we typically don’t have to worry too much about them.

The much larger—but thankfully much rarer—asteroids are what cause us heartburn. This is where we get into the delightful mathematics of attempting to calculate an existential risk to humanity.

At one end of the scale, we have the kind of stuff that kills dinosaurs and envelops the globe in a shroud of ash. These rocks are several kilometers across but only come into Earth-crossing trajectories every few million years. One of them would doom us—certainly our civilization and likely our species. The combination of the unimaginable scale of devastation and the incredibly small likelihood of it occurring puts this kind of threat almost beyond human comprehension—and intervention. For now, we just have to hope that our time isn’t up.

Then there are the in-betweeners. These are the space rocks starting at a hundred meters across. Upon impact, they release a minimum of 30 megatons of energy, which is capable of leaving a crater a couple of kilometers across. Those kinds of dangers present themselves roughly every 10,000 years.

That’s an interesting time scale. Our written history stretches back thousands of years, and our institutions have existed for thousands of years. We can envision our civilization, our ways of life, and our humanity continuing into the future for thousands of years.

This means that at some point, either we or our descendants will have to deal with a threat of this magnitude. Not a rock large enough to hit the big reset button on life but powerful enough to present a scale of disaster not yet seen in human history.

Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid Read More »

Professor sues Meta to allow release of feed-killing tool for Facebook

communications decency act, facebook, Facebook algorithm, Features, Meta, Policy, pop-up ads, Section 230, social media platforms / Paul Patrick / May 9, 2024

Ethan Zuckerman wants to release a tool that would allow Facebook users to control what appears in their newsfeeds. His privacy-friendly browser extension, Unfollow Everything 2.0, is designed to essentially give users a switch to turn the newsfeed on and off whenever they want, providing a way to eliminate or curate the feed.

Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is suing Meta to release a tool allowing Facebook users to “unfollow everything.” (Photo by Lorrie LeJeune)

The tool is nearly ready to be released, Zuckerman told Ars, but the University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor is afraid that Facebook owner Meta might threaten legal action if he goes ahead. And his fears appear well-founded. In 2021, Meta sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything, Louis Barclay, leading that developer to shut down his tool after thousands of Facebook users had eagerly downloaded it.

Zuckerman is suing Meta, asking a US district court in California to invalidate Meta’s past arguments against developers like Barclay and rule that Meta would have no grounds to sue if he released his tool.

Zuckerman insists that he’s “suing Facebook to make it better.” In picking this unusual legal fight with Meta, the professor—seemingly for the first time ever—is attempting to tip Section 230’s shield away from Big Tech and instead protect third-party developers from giant social media platforms.

To do this, Zuckerman is asking the court to consider a novel Section 230 argument relating to an overlooked provision of the law that Zuckerman believes protects the development of third-party tools that allow users to curate their newsfeeds to avoid objectionable content. His complaint cited case law and argued:

Section 230(c)(2)(B) immunizes from legal liability “a provider of software or enabling tools that filter, screen, allow, or disallow content that the provider or user considers obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” Through this provision, Congress intended to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see.

Unfollow Everything 2.0 falls in this “safe harbor,” Zuckerman argues, partly because “the purpose of the tool is to allow users who find the newsfeed objectionable, or who find the specific sequencing of posts within their newsfeed objectionable, to effectively turn off the feed.”

Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute who helped draft Zuckerman’s complaint, told Ars that some Facebook users are concerned that the newsfeed “prioritizes inflammatory and sensational speech,” and they “may not want to see that kind of content.” By turning off the feed, Facebook users could choose to use the platform the way it was originally designed, avoiding being served objectionable content by blanking the newsfeed and manually navigating to only the content they want to see.

“Users don’t have to accept Facebook as it’s given to them,” Krishnan said in a press release provided to Ars. “The same statute that immunizes Meta from liability for the speech of its users gives users the right to decide what they see on the platform.”

Zuckerman, who considers himself “old to the Internet,” uses Facebook daily and even reconnected with and began dating his now-wife on the platform. He has a “soft spot” in his heart for Facebook and still finds the platform useful to keep in touch with friends and family.

But while he’s “never been in the ‘burn it all down’ camp,” he has watched social media evolve to give users less control over their feeds and believes “that the dominance of a small number of social media companies tends to create the illusion that the business model adopted by them is inevitable,” his complaint said.

Professor sues Meta to allow release of feed-killing tool for Facebook Read More »

Hands-on with the new iPad Pros and Airs: A surprisingly refreshing refresh

Apple, Features, iPad Air, ipad pro, Tech / Rejus Almole / May 8, 2024

Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro. — Enlarge / Apple’s latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience.

iPad Airs: Bigger is better

But let’s begin with the new Airs since there’s a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the sixth-generation model) is mostly the same as the previous-generation A14 and M1 models, design-wise, with identical physical dimensions and weight. It’s still the same slim-bezel design Apple introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro, just with a 60 Hz LCD display panel and Touch ID on the power button rather than Face ID.

So when Apple says the device has been “redesigned,” the company is mainly referring to the fact that the webcam is now mounted on the long edge of the tablet rather than the short edge. This makes its positioning more laptop-y when it’s docked to the Magic Keyboard or some other keyboard.

The most welcome change to the Air is the introduction of a 13-inch model (blessedly, no longer “12.9 inches”). It looks like the old 12.9-inch iPad Pro design from circa 2018 but with the simpler single-lens 12 MP camera and the Touch ID button rather than the Face ID sensor.

Enlarge / The new iPad Air.

Andrew Cunningham

With the iPad Pro and the Air next to each other, it’s clear which has the superior screen—the 120 Hz refresh rate of ProMotion and the infinite contrast of OLED are definitely major points in the Pro’s favor. But if you’re just looking for a big screen for watching videos, reading books, or playing games, or if you’re just looking for a general-use laptop replacement tablet, Apple is still using a great 60 Hz LCD panel here. And the $799 price tag is considerably lower than any of Apple’s past 12.9-inch iPad Pros.

Like the 15-inch MacBook Air, it’s a way for people to get a bigger screen without paying for advanced screen technologies or faster processors if they don’t want or need them. It’s hard to find a downside to that, as long as you’re OK with iPadOS’ differences and restrictions relative to macOS.

Hands-on with the new iPad Pros and Airs: A surprisingly refreshing refresh Read More »

The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all

Boeing, Features, Science, Space, starliner / Kris Guyer / May 6, 2024

Boeing really is going —

“The structural inefficiency was a huge deal.”

Eric Berger – May 6, 2024 11: 00 am UTC

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. — Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch.

United Launch Alliance

NASA’s senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly ten years ago.

These were the people who, for decades, had developed and flown the Space Shuttle. They oversaw the construction of the International Space Station. Now, with the shuttle’s retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting’s conclusion, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a “commercial crew” transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair.

With Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft finally due to take flight this week with astronauts on board, we know the extent of the loss, both in time and money. Dragon first carried people to the space station nearly four years ago. In that span, the Crew Dragon vehicle has flown thirteen public and private missions to orbit. Because of this success, Dragon will end up flying 14 operational missions to the station for NASA, earning a tidy fee each time, compared to just six for Starliner. Through last year, Boeing has taken $1.5 billion in charges due to delays and overruns with its spacecraft development.

So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers.

The early days

When the contracts were awarded, SpaceX had the benefit of working with NASA to develop a cargo variant of Dragon, which by 2014 was flying regular missions to the space station. But the company had no experience with human spaceflight. Boeing, by contrast, had decades of spaceflight experience, but it had to start from scratch with Starliner.

Each faced a deeper cultural challenge. A decade ago, SpaceX was deep into several major projects, including developing a new version of the Falcon 9 rocket, flying more frequently, experimenting with landing and reuse, and doing cargo supply missions. This new contract meant more money but a lot more work. A NASA engineer who worked closely with both SpaceX and Boeing in this time frame recalls visiting SpaceX and the atmosphere being something like a frenzied graduate school, where all of the employees were being pulled in different directions. Getting engineers to focus on Crew Dragon was difficult.

But at least SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing’s space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company’s problem—they were NASA’s. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price.

Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment. When it came to complicated space projects, Boeing was used to spending other people’s money. Now, every penny spent on Starliner meant one less penny in profit (or, ultimately, greater losses). This meant that Boeing allocated fewer resources to Starliner than it needed to thrive.

“The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding,” said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program and is the author of Escaping Gravity.

So Boeing faced financial pressure from the beginning. At the same time, it was confronting major technical challenges. Building a human spacecraft is very difficult. Some of the biggest hurdles would be flight software and propulsion.

The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all Read More »

There’s never been a better time to get into Fallout 76

Bethesda Game Studios, culture, Fallout, fallout 76, Features, gaming / Rejus Almole / April 28, 2024

Enlarge / More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years.

Samuel Axon

War never changes, but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.

In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4-like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.

It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.

Like many older online games, it eventually settled into a situation where most of the players were high-level veterans on the PC and PlayStation platforms. (Microsoft’s Game Pass kept a steady trickle of new players coming in on the Xbox.) That’s all changed now, though; thanks to the TV series, the low-level newbies now outnumber the vets. There’s a wide range of players on every server, and the community’s reputation for being unusually welcoming has held strong amid the influx.

If you’re looking to give it a shot, here’s what you need to know.

A weirdly welcoming wasteland

I generally find the communities in most online games off-putting and toxic. I enjoy the gameplay in Overwatch, for example, but a whole buffet of bad actors makes it a poor experience for me a lot of the time.

That’s not the case with Fallout 76. It’s a phenomenon I also observed with No Man’s Sky’s online community: Games that had disastrous launches that drove away the enthusiastic core gamer crowd early on end up having the best communities.

With Fallout 76, the first few weeks were a storm of negativity like no other. But once the folks who were unimpressed calmed down and moved on, the smaller cadre of people who actually liked the game formed a strong bond. The community was small enough that bad behavior could have social consequences, and it turned out that the kinds of people who stick with a game like Fallout 76 tend to be patient and gracious. Who knew?

Enlarge / These donation boxes give experienced players a chance to give back.

Samuel Axon

For example, there has long been a tradition of experienced players dropping valuable healing items and ammunition by the game’s starting area for newbies to grab. Fallout 76 has strong survival elements, especially at the start, so those gifts make a big difference. This gifting became so common that Bethesda formalized it with a donation box in that starter area. In fact, there are donation boxes scattered all around the game’s map now, and they almost always have stuff in them.

Players will generally be happy to jump on voice chat and talk through the game’s concepts with you or help you defeat difficult enemies. That extends to some communities that talk about the game outside the game, too. (Be sure to look up the subreddit r/fo76FilthyCasuals and its associated Discord; they’re great places to make friends and get advice.)

Time will tell how all that holds as a huge influx of new players shifts the makeup of the community, but so far so good.

There’s never been a better time to get into Fallout 76 Read More »

Why are groups of university students modifying Cadillac Lyriq EVs?

Cadillac Lyriq, Cars, EcoCar EV Challenge, Features / Paul Patrick / April 21, 2024

A Cadillac Lyriq EV — Enlarge / For the previous EcoCar 3 competition, student teams turned Camaro sportscars into hybrids. For the EcoCar EV challenge, their job is to improve on the Cadillac Lyriq.

EcoCar

Across the country, teams of students at 15 different universities are in the middle of a four-year project, dissecting an electric vehicle and figuring out ways to make it even better. The program, called the EcoCar EV Challenge, was founded more than three decades ago by the US Department of Energy and is run by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Over the last 35 years, more than 30,000 students from 95 universities have participated in the EcoCar Challenge, part of the DOE’s Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. Each segment spans four years, with the most recent cycle beginning in 2023 with a new Cadillac Lyriq donated by the General Motors automaker.

The students take this competition very seriously, as participation alone brings a lot of benefits, including the potential for a lifelong career path.

Mobility advancement in progress

One of the organization’s goals is to challenge teams to “identify and address specific challenges with equity in the future of mobility through the application of innovative hardware and software solutions” while working with underserved populations. Through this process, the student-run teams are discovering untapped potential for future EV development and finding solutions that could help local and national communities.

The entire first year is packed with intense research and planning. Students don’t even get to put their hands on a car until year two; meanwhile, they learn how to work together and communicate as a team. They run simulations with propulsion controls and modeling, and by the time they have access to a vehicle, they’re ready to dive in.

University of Alabama student Corban Walsh explains that during the prototyping process, automakers like Cadillac end up with a fleet of pre-production vehicles that can’t be resold. Walsh and his team were given a practically new all-electric Lyriq with just 17,000 miles (27,400 km) on it, and they decided their goal was to transform it from a rear-wheel-drive to an all-wheel-drive configuration and boost the horsepower from 300 to 550 (223 to 373 kW). With tasks like that, one might think this is an ideal club for car fanatics. But Walsh says the team has diverse interests and is in fact very software- and planning-focused.

Year one is research and planning.

EcoCar

“In some ways, we attract the ‘car guy’ type of person, but at the end of the day, you don’t have to be a car guy,” Walsh says. “You can even forget it’s a car sometimes.”

Any student can join the EcoCar EV Challenge, and general onboarding familiarizes them with the tracks and teams they can join. First, they take a lab tour and view required safety videos; then, they choose a subteam under the general categories of hardware, integration, and software development. The Connected and Automated Vehicle Features subteam, for example, integrates sensor hardware and software, stitching together the data.

Along the way, small tasks lead to big advances. One of the first orders of business for the Lyriq was to obtain a clean title and registration as a salvage vehicle to be considered road-legal. Teams strip the cars down as far as they can, sometimes moving forward through a series of trials and errors. They read all the manuals they can get their hands on, consulting with their GM mentor when they get stuck.

GM also supplies some parts, allowing students to order a limited number from the catalog. The University helps defray some of the cost, and companies like American Axle donate critical components like motors. Natick, Massachusetts-based Mathworks provides the simulation software the team needs for planning. Students learn how to use the resources available on campus, too.

“One of the hardest but coolest things we’ve worked on was when we had to plan mountings for two new motors,” Walsh says. “We decided to use the on-campus foundry where we can cast these parts.”

The foundry had excellent advice for the team, Walsh says, helping them figure out how to make mountings that were strong enough to hold the motor and won’t cause corrosion. They 3D-printed the part and made a ceramic mold, then burned out the plastic and let the metal harden.

Why are groups of university students modifying Cadillac Lyriq EVs? Read More »

Framework’s software and firmware have been a mess, but it’s working on them

AMD, BIOS, Biz & IT, Features, framework laptop, framework laptop 13, framework laptop 16, intel, Security, Tech / Paul Patrick / April 15, 2024

Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 13.

Andrew Cunningham

Since Framework showed off its first prototypes in February 2021, we’ve generally been fans of the company’s modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops.

Not that the company’s hardware releases to date have been perfect—each Framework Laptop 13 model has had quirks and flaws that range from minor to quite significant, and the Laptop 16’s upsides struggle to balance its downsides. But the hardware mostly does a good job of functioning as a regular laptop while being much more tinkerer-friendly than your typical MacBook, XPS, or ThinkPad.

But even as it builds new upgrades for its systems, expands sales of refurbished and B-stock hardware as budget options, and promotes the re-use of its products via external enclosures, Framework has struggled with the other side of computing longevity and sustainability: providing up-to-date software.

Driver bundles remain un-updated for years after their initial release. BIOS updates go through long and confusing beta processes, keeping users from getting feature improvements, bug fixes, and security updates. In its community support forums, Framework employees, including founder and CEO Nirav Patel, have acknowledged these issues and promised fixes but have remained inconsistent and vague about actual timelines.

But according to Patel, the company is working on fixing these issues, and it has taken some steps to address them. We spoke to him about the causes of and the solutions to these issues, and the company’s approach to the software side of its efforts to promote repairability and upgradeability.

Promises made

Here’s a case in point: the 12th-generation Intel version of the Framework Laptop 13, which prompted me to start monitoring Framework’s software and firmware updates in the first place.

In November 2022, Patel announced that this model, then the latest version, was getting a nice, free-of-charge spec bump. All four of the laptop’s recessed USB-C ports would now become full-speed Thunderbolt ports. This wasn’t a dramatic functional change, especially for people who were mostly using those ports for basic Framework expansion modules like USB-A or HDMI, but the upgrade opened the door to high-speed external accessories, and all it would need was a BIOS update.

The recessed USB-C ports in the 12th-gen Intel version of the Framework Laptop 13 can be upgraded to fully certified Thunderbolt ports, but only if you're willing to install one in a long series of still-in-testing beta BIOSes. — Enlarge / The recessed USB-C ports in the 12th-gen Intel version of the Framework Laptop 13 can be upgraded to fully certified Thunderbolt ports, but only if you’re willing to install one in a long series of still-in-testing beta BIOSes.

Andrew Cunningham

A final version of this BIOS update finally showed up this week, nearly a year and a half later. Up until last week, Framework’s support page for that 12th-gen Intel laptop still said that there was “no new BIOS available” for a laptop that began shipping in the summer of 2022. This factory-installed BIOS, version 3.04, also didn’t include fixes for the LogoFAIL UEFI security vulnerability or any other firmware-based security patches that have cropped up in the last year and a half.

And it’s not just that the updates don’t come out in a timely way; the company has been bad about estimating when they might come out. That old12th-gen Framework BIOS also didn’t support the 61 WHr battery that the company released in early 2023 alongside the 13th-gen Intel refresh. Framework originally told me that BIOS update would be out in May of 2023. A battery-supporting update for the 11th-gen Intel version was also promised in May 2023; it came out this past January.

Framework has been trying, but it keeps running into issues. A beta 3.06 BIOS update with the promised improvements for the 12th-gen Intel Framework Laptop was posted back in December of 2022, but a final version was never released. The newer 3.08 BIOS beta entered testing in January 2024 but still gave users some problems. Users would go for weeks or months without any communication from anyone at Framework.

The result is multiple long forum threads of frustrated users asking for updates, interspersed with not-untrue but unsatisfying responses from Framework employees (some version of “we’re a small company” is one of the most common).

Framework’s software and firmware have been a mess, but it’s working on them Read More »

Why there are 861 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam all of a sudden

deck-builder, deckbuilders, Features, gaming, roguelike, roguelike deck-builder, roguelike deckbuilders, roguelikes / Mike M. / April 13, 2024

A very full house —

9 answers from 8 devs about why combat card games on screens have blown up.

Kevin Purdy – Apr 12, 2024 1: 31 pm UTC

A hand holding a set of cards from popular roguelike deckbuilders, including Slay the Spire and Balatro — Aurich Lawson

In a deckbuilding game, you start out with a basic set of cards, then upgrade it over time, seeking synergies and compounding effects. Roguelikes are games where death happens quite often, but each randomized “run” unlocks options for the future. In both genres, and when they’re fused together, the key is staying lean, trimming your deck and refining your strategy so that every card and upgrade works toward unstoppable momentum.

“Lean” does not describe the current scene for roguelike deckbuilder games, but they certainly have momentum. As of this writing, Steam has 2,599 titles tagged by users with “deckbuilding” and 861 with “roguelike deckbuilder” in all languages, more than enough to feed a recent Deckbuilders Fest. The glut has left some friends and co-workers grousing that every indie game these days seems to be either a cozy farming sim or a roguelike deckbuilder.

I, an absolute sucker for deckbuilders for nearly five years, wanted to know why this was happening.

In Slay the Spire, and most roguelike deckbuilders, you battle enemies by drawing cards and playing a limited number of them: attack, defend, buff, debuff, etc. Crucially, enemies show you what they are going to do next, so you can triage and strategize.

MegaCrit
Winning battles nets you random new card choices, which may or may not fit your strategy.

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You choose which path to take, full of battles, stores, random “encounters,” rest stops, and “Elite” battles that are more rewarding.

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Stores and encounters will often let you buy cards or artifacts, and sometimes remove them, too.

MegaCrit
Roguelike deckbuilder bosses are often designed to challenge build strategies and force adaptability.

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Or, as often happens, you just die and start over with more cards and upgrades unlocked for next time.

MegaCrit

What is so appealing to developers and players about single-player card games made for screens? How do developers differentiate their deckbuilders? And how do you promote a title in a niche but crowded field?

Seeking these answers, I spoke with a bunch of roguelike deckbuilder developers, and I read interviews and watched conference talks from others. Some common themes and trends revealed themselves. Like a well-honed deck, each element fed into and bolstered the others.

But let’s first go back to the beginning, to perhaps the most powerful single element of roguelike deckbuilders’ success: two college friends in their 20s, tired of working QA jobs.

Slay the Spire’s starting point

Slay the Spire marked what was arguably the start of modern, single-player roguelike deckbuilder video games. Some games may technically have combined combat-oriented deckbuilding with the procedural generation and die/improve/repeat nature of roguelikes, but the 2019 game was the first to crack the formula and build a big audience around it. Slay the Spire also broadly boosted enthusiasm for single-player card games on computers in general—games other than Windows’ Solitaire, at least.

Video directed by Justin Wolfson, edited by John Cappello. Click here for transcript.

In a video interview with Ars Technica, and at Game Developer Conference (GDC) talks in 2019 on marketing and balancing, developers Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano told the game’s story. Giovannetti and Yano had met in college and made some one-off games, then graduated and got jobs. Giovannetti was a card game and tabletop enthusiast, even briefly managing a game store. He was certainly familiar with deckbuilding pioneer Dominion, but his main game was Netrunner—he still maintains the community site StimHack. Yano worked at Amazon, where he said he picked up the company’s “customer obsession” mentality.

In mid-2015, the two reconnected and went all-in on making their genre-melding concept, initially named “Card Crawl.” Starting with stick-figure drawings, a procedurally generated progression scheme cribbed from FTL, and input from some advanced Netrunner playtesters, they worked until the game was ready for early access on Steam. Chief among their in-development discovery was broadcasting enemy intents to the player and simplifying visuals and indicators until they were readable at a glance, even in a foreign language.

Slay the Spire launched in Steam’s Early Access after more than two years of development in November 2017. It sold 200 copies on day one, 300 on day two, and 150 on day three, declining from then on. The developers had made trailers, sent more than 600 emails to press and other outlets, and in the critical first two weeks of release, they had only sold 2,000 copies.

Things looked grim, but eventually, some of the 200 keys they sent to streamers led to some live play. An influential Chinese streamer’s Slay session garnered more than 1 million views, which nudged the game up the top seller list, leading to further sales, which sparked more streams, and so on. Grateful for their second wind, the team released new patches every week and used statistical feedback from early sessions to further tune the game. They took care not to remove “overpowered” strategy discoveries because they understood the joy of “a well-powered Rube Goldberg machine.”

Despite critical raves, a 99 percent positive Steam review rating, and more than 1.5 million sales by September 2019, Yano told the GDC crowd that “we never really improved how to, like, sell the game. I would say it’s still really word-of-mouth. But it’s been doing well that way, so I think we’re gonna keep going that way.”

Multiple developers I spoke with cited Slay the Spire as inspiration; one had more than 1,000 hours in it. The game’s design and success have compounded a few times over, creating new starting points. Balatro‘s developer claimed to have not played deckbuilders before making his own, but he was fascinated by streams of Luck Be a Landlord. That slot machine roguelike was, per its developer’s blog, heavily influenced by Slay the Spire. Even if you don’t know it, you probably know it.

<em>SpellRogue</em>, from a two-person team, has cards, but you use them by rolling dice and fitting the results into the cards’ slots (Yahtzee!).” height=”1440″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Screenshot_EarlyAccess_3840x2160-2-scaled.jpg” width=”2560″></img><figcaption>
<p><em>SpellRogue</em>, from a two-person team, has cards, but you use them by rolling dice and fitting the results into the cards’ slots (Yahtzee!).</p>
<p>Guidelight Games/Ghost Ship Publishing</p>
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The Maven: A user-friendly, $2K Cargo e-bike perfect for families on the go

cargo bike, Cars, e-bike, Features, Reviews / Rejus Almole / April 6, 2024

family fun —

The $2K bike is aimed at smaller riders who want a manageable cargo e-bike. It delivers.

Beth Mole – Apr 5, 2024 11: 30 am UTC

The first thing I should say in this bike review is that I am not a bike enthusiast.

My preferred form of exercise is running, where no mechanical components are necessary. But I’m acting as reviewer here because what I lack in longstanding opinions on brand-name bike gearing and motor hubs, I make up for by being the exact target audience for the bike under review: the Maven Cargo E-bike by Integral Electrics. This is a cargo bike designed not for hardcore cyclists but for smaller riders, women specifically, who would happily swap out their family’s second car for a simpler e-bike—as long as it can handle the needs of family life: toting children, running errands, and making short commutes.

This is exactly what Integral CEO and co-founder Laura Belmar and her family were looking for amid the pandemic, she told me in an interview. But while her husband picked out e-bikes that were comfortably designed for him, who is taller than her, she consistently found herself top-heavy and struggling as soon as her two kids were loaded onto the bikes. “They were scared to ride with me,” she said of her kids. “One time, we were literally going down in the park and a jogger came by and grabbed the rack and pulled us back up.”

Belmar said she knew other families in the same situation. So she set out to design a bike that would essentially be a family station wagon on two wheels, one that would be easy to maneuver and control by smaller riders but still adjustable for taller cyclists—the Maven claims a size range of 5 feet, 0 inches to 6-foot-7. And, aside from ease of use, she sought ideal family-car features: comfort, safety, and affordability.

As a 5-foot-4 person with a 5-year-old, a taller husband, a need to run occasional errands, and an interest in ditching a second car, I’m the best person on Ars’ staff to see if the Maven lives up to its lofty goals. With the help of the cycling enthusiasts and experts on Ars’ staff, I’ll make sure this review hits all of the technical details cycling nerds will be looking for. But this will be an accessible review for families interested in an alternative to a second car and who, like me, may be cargo e-bike newbies. I’ll start with my general impressions and then dive into specifics.

The Maven at a glance

General impressions

As mentioned above, this is a cargo e-bike designed to never feel unwieldy to smaller riders while they’re hauling precious cargo. On this count, the Maven hits the mark. Straight out of the box, before I even dove into the manual, I easily rode around without even turning on the motor. It’s certainly a hefty bike, weighing in at 85 pounds on its own. But I never felt top-heavy on it or struggled to maneuver it. Integral boasts that it accomplishes this with a low center of gravity and fat, stable tires. Its two batteries sit low on the bike, and its 20-inch wheels allow the rear rack to sit just 24 inches off the ground. The tires are also 3 inches wide, giving them extra stability.

The Maven isn’t the only cargo e-bike on the market with these features; 20-inch tires are on several other bikes, including Aventon’s Abound and some others previously reviewed by Ars, like the Trek Fetch+2 and the RadWagon. So, whether the Maven is the best bike for your situation may depend on its other features.

The bike provides a fun, effortless ride—with and without groceries or my kid on the back. My review bike came with a rear railing/handlebar (a $99 add-on) and a seat pad ($69) that allowed my kid to help me test out the bike. He was not afraid to ride with me. In fact, he loved it. And in our many miles together, I found myself periodically forgetting he was back there. Going up hills and accelerating was effortless when the 750-watt motor kicked in. The adjustable front suspension was generously cushiony as we took the bike over gravel, dirt, asphalt, and sidewalks in various states of repair.

On a few occasions, my kid reminded me of his presence by shaking the bike from side to side, pretending we were sliding on ice. (He was having fun imagining us re-creating one of his favorite scenes from the animated movie Polar Express, when the train derails on a frozen lake.) But even with his best efforts to destabilize the bike, I never felt at risk of losing control or going down.

The Maven: A user-friendly, $2K Cargo e-bike perfect for families on the go Read More »

After Concorde, a long road back to supersonic air travel

Features, NASA, Science, supersonic, supersonic boom, supersonic flight / Rejus Almole / March 30, 2024

shhh —

Supersonic flight without loud booms? NASA is working on that.

Jacek Krywko – Mar 29, 2024 10: 45 am UTC

NASA's and Lockheed Martin's X-59 experimental supersonic jet is unveiled during a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on January 12, 2024. — Enlarge / NASA’s and Lockheed Martin’s X-59 experimental supersonic jet is unveiled during a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on January 12, 2024.

Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

When Chuck Yeager reached Mach 1 on October 14, 1947, the entire frame of his Bell X-1 aircraft suddenly started to shake, and the controls went. A crew observing the flight in a van on the ground reported hearing something like a distant, rolling thunder. They were probably the first people on Earth to hear a boom made by a supersonic aircraft.

The boom felt like an innocent curiosity at first but soon turned into a nightmare. In no time, supersonic jets—F-100 Super Sabers, F-101 Voodoos, and B-58 Hustlers—came to Air Force bases across the US, and with them came the booms. Proper, panes-flying-off-the windows supersonic booms. People filed over 40,000 complaints about nuisance and property damage caused by booming jets, which eventually ended up with the Federal Aviation Administration imposing a Mach 1 speed limit for flights over land in 1973.

Now, NASA wants this ban to go. It has started the Quesst mission to go fast over American cities once more. But this time, it wants to do it quietly.

Breaking the sound barrier

The reason Yeager’s X-1 was so difficult to control at Mach 1 was not an actual “sound barrier” the plane broke. The “barrier” aspect is purely metaphorical. While Yeager’s plane experienced turbulence and shaking, it was due to rising drag and aircraft design.

At subsonic speeds, the airflow around the wings, tail, and fuselage is smooth. But at supersonic speeds, the air going over irregular shapes— the nose, canopy, and wings—accelerates to above the speed of sound. Then, where the curvature of the wing or canopy becomes less pronounced, it starts to build up pressure and decelerate back below Mach 1, a phenomenon known as “adverse pressure.” This creates shockwaves, and those are what cause supersonic booms and change the way wings, flaps, and other control surfaces behave in an airplane. The X-1 started acting so wild at Mach 1 because its aerodynamics weren’t designed for supersonic flight.

Lockheed, Bell, McDonell Douglas, and other companies that built early supersonic planes solved the control issues quickly, which made accelerating to Mach speeds pretty uneventful for the pilot. But that left two decades of booming.

Enlarge / A Bell Aircraft Corporation X-1 supersonic test plane, circa 1950. An X-1 was the first plane to break the sound barrier in Chuck Yeager’s flight on October 14, 1947.

Museum of Flight/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

How loud is the boom?

A supersonic jet boom sounds like a thunder strike hitting nearby—a product of the shockwaves generated mainly by the nose and tail of the aircraft. The boom usually falls between 100 and 110 on a perceived level decibel scale (PLdB), which is used to quantify how people experience sound. A car door slam 100 feet away is 60 PLdB; distant thunder, like the one the ground crew heard during Yeager’s first supersonic flight, is around 70 PLdB. A supersonic boom is on par with a nearby thunder strike, which falls at around 105–110 PLdB.

It’s really freaking loud. And you can easily make it even louder.

This 110 PLdB is estimated for an airplane in a steady, level flight at high altitude. These conditions create what’s known as a “carpet boom” that tracks the aircraft on the ground for the entire time it flies supersonic.

Transitions from subsonic to supersonic speeds and vice versa result in so-called “focus booms,” which can be up to three to four times louder than a carpet boom. This likely gave rise to the popular misconception that the boom is heard only when a plane breaks the sound barrier.

Focus booms are also caused by maneuvers like pitch and dive, where an aircraft gains altitude, levels, and flies back down; turns made with aggressive banking angles work as well. Unlike carpet booms, the booms made by transitions and maneuvers are singular events. The military even tested whether those amplified booms could be projected at chosen spots on the ground to weaponize them. As it turned out, you could do targeted booms, but they proved more scary than lethal.

But despite all the problems with booming, the allure of superior speed was irresistible. Supersonic airplanes could cut the time of transatlantic flights by half. So back in the mid-1950s, when the FAA’s Mach 1 speed limit was still many years away, British and French engineers got to the drawing board and conceived one of the most breathtaking airliners to ever pierce the sky: Concorde.

After Concorde, a long road back to supersonic air travel Read More »