One of the most influential—and by some counts, notorious—AI models yet released will soon fade into history. OpenAI announced on April 10 that GPT-4 will be “fully replaced” by GPT-4o...
Redditor accidentally reinvents discarded ’90s tool to escape today’s age gates
The ’90s called. They want their flawed age verification methods back. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net...
Intel says it’s rolling out laptop GPU drivers with 10% to 25% better performance
Intel’s oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips—codenamed Lunar Lake—will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They’re Intel’s only processors with memory integrated...
OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT a sycophantic mess
In search of good vibes OpenAI, along with competitors like Google and Anthropic, is trying to build chatbots that people want to chat with. So, designing the model’s apparent personality...
Google search’s made-up AI explanations for sayings no one ever said, explained
But what does “meaning” mean? A partial defense of (some of) AI Overview’s fanciful idiomatic explanations. Mind…. blown Credit: Getty Images Last week, the phrase “You can’t lick a badger...
Dating Roundup #4: An App for That
Previously: #1, #2, #3. As time goes by, the fundamental things in life are still the same, and yet they change quite a lot with the times. But they don’t...
Tuesday Telescope: Yes, you can see stars in space, and they’re spectacular
Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other...
AI-generated code could be a disaster for the software supply chain. Here’s why.
AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant...
Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50
Ars staffers reflect upon the things they love most about this masterpiece of absurdist comedy. Credit: EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures Credit: EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures Monty Python and the Holy...
Seasonal COVID shots may no longer be possible under Trump admin
Under President Trump, the Food and Drug Administration may no longer approve seasonal COVID-19 vaccines updated for the virus variants circulating that year, according to recent statements by Trump administration...
Spain is about to face the challenge of a “black start”
Local conditions While the grids in Spain and Portugal are connected to each other, they have limited connections to elsewhere. The only sources of external power to the grid come...
ChatGPT goes shopping with new product-browsing feature
On Thursday, OpenAI announced the addition of shopping features to ChatGPT Search. The new feature allows users to search for products and purchase them through merchant websites after being redirected...
Backblaze responds to claims of “sham accounting,” customer backups at risk
Backblaze went public in November 2021 and raised $100 million. Morpheus noted that since then, “Backblaze has reported losses every quarter, its outstanding share count has grown by 80 percent,...
Trump’s hasty Take It Down Act has “gaping flaws” that threaten encryption
Legal challenges will likely immediately follow law’s passage, experts said. Everyone expects that the Take It Down Act—which requires platforms to remove both real and artificial intelligence-generated non-consensual intimate imagery...
What’s it like to be 70 years old in space? “All those little aches and pains heal up.”
Not many people celebrate their birthday by burning a fiery arc through the atmosphere, pulling 4.4gs in freefall back to planet Earth, thudding into the ground, and emptying their stomach...
50 years later, Vietnam’s environment still bears the scars of war
Large amounts of Agent Orange had been stored at the Da Nang airport during the war and contaminated the soil with dioxin. The cleanup project, including heating contaminated soil to...
GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant
GPT-4o tells you what it thinks you want to hear. The results of this were rather ugly. You get extreme sycophancy. Absurd praise. Mystical experiences. (Also some other interesting choices,...
iOS and Android juice jacking defenses have been trivial to bypass for years
SON OF JUICE JACKING ARISES New ChoiceJacking attack allows malicious chargers to steal data from phones. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images About a...
In HBO’s The Last of Us, revenge is a dish best served democratically
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be...
Revisiting iZombie, 10 years later
We loved the show’s wicked humor, great characters, and mix of cases-of-the-week with longer narrative arcs. Zombies never really go out of style, but they were an especially hot commodity...
