Enlarge / The iPhone 13 Pro Max, photographed by the iPhone 13 Pro in low light. Imagine you were visited by a genie who would grant you three wishes, but they all had to be about what you want from your next smartphone. As market research and surveys tell it, almost everyone would make the […]
Shot by Sean Dacanay, edited by Jeremy Smolik. Click here for transcript . When you hear the name Crash Bandicoot , you probably think of it as Sony’s platformy, mascoty answer to Mario and Sonic. Before getting the full Sony marketing treatment, though, the game was developer Naughty Dog’s first attempt at programming a 3D […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) We’re in phase three of our machine-learning project now—that is, we’ve gotten past denial and anger, and we’re now sliding into bargaining and depression. I’ve been tasked with using Ars Technica’s trove of data from five years of headline tests, which pair two ideas against each other in […]
Enlarge / Turning the lens on ourselves, as it were. There’s a moment in any foray into new technological territory that you realize you may have embarked on a Sisyphean task. Staring at the multitude of options available to take on the project, you research your options, read the documentation, and start to work—only to […]
Enlarge Every day, some little piece of logic constructed by very specific bits of artificial intelligence technology makes decisions that affect how you experience the world. It could be the ads that get served up to you on social media or shopping sites, or the facial recognition that unlocks your phone, or the directions you […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of either understanding being achieved or intergalactic war being incited, I’m not sure which. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, is a good book that you’ll almost certainly enjoy if you enjoyed Weir’s freshman novel The Martian. It’s another tale of solving problems with science, […]
Produced by Adam Lance Garcia, edited by Ron Douglas. Click here for transcript. (video link) Fresh from our talk with Warhammer remembrancer Dan Abnett on the unsolved mysteries of the Warhammer universe, we now turn our attention to a science fiction property with a bit less grimdark: the one where a polymath with an eidetic […]
Shot by Adam Lance Garcia and edited by Justin Sloan. Click here for transcript. (video link) It’s been a while since we last got to do an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” our series wherein we ask creators to take us on a journey into the deeper and more mysterious aspects of their created universes (our […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of some kind of cool integrated battlespace AR/VR interface kind of thing. (credit: Jackie Niam / Getty Images) Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously (or infamously) said in 2004, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a […]
Enlarge / Believe it or not, this fictional version of NORAD shows off the idea of the “connected battlespace” even better than the reali thing. (credit: MGM/UA) Since the earliest days of warfare, commanders of forces in the field have sought greater awareness and control of what is now commonly referred to as the “battlespace”—a […]