Ars Technica

There's a general consensus that we won't be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It's still an open question, however, whether we could perform limited but useful calculations at an earlier point. IBM is one of the companies that's betting the answer is yes, and on Wednesday, it announced a series of developments aimed at making that possible.

On their own, none of the changes being announced are revolutionary. But collectively, changes across the hardware and software stacks have produced much more efficient and less error-prone operations. The net result is a system that supports the most complicated calculations yet on IBM's hardware, leaving the company optimistic that its users will find some calculations where quantum hardware provides an advantage.

Better hardware and software

IBM's early efforts in the quantum computing space saw it ramp up the qubit count rapidly, being one of the first companies to reach the 1,000 qubit count. However, each of those qubits had an error rate that ensured that any algorithms that tried to use all of these qubits in a single calculation would inevitably trigger one. Since then, the company's focus has been on improving the performance of smaller processors. Wednesday's announcement was based on the introduction of the second version of its Heron processor, which has 133 qubits. That's still beyond the capability of simulations on classical computers, should it be able to operate with sufficiently low errors.

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Amazon is shutting down Freevee, its free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service, as it heightens focus on selling ads on its Prime Video subscription service.

Amazon, which has owned IMDb since 1998, launched Freevee as IMDb Freedive in 2019. The service let people watch movies and shows, including Freevee originals, on demand without a subscription fee. Amazon's streaming offering was also previously known as IMDb TV and rebranded to Amazon Freevee in 2022.

According to a report from Deadline this week, Freevee is being “phased out over the coming weeks,” but a firm closing date hasn’t been shared publicly.

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President-elect Donald Trump today announced that a new Department of Government Efficiency—or "DOGE"—will be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy, who founded pharma company Roivant Sciences, "will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies," according to the Trump statement on Truth Social.

DOGE apparently will not be an official federal agency, as Trump said it will provide advice "from outside" of government. But Musk, who has frequently criticized government subsidies despite seeking public money and obtaining various subsidies for his own companies, will apparently have significant influence over spending in the Trump administration. Musk has also had numerous legal disputes with regulators at agencies that regulate his companies.

"Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of 'DOGE' for a very long time," Trump said. "To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before."

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By now, it has been firmly established that the Earth went through a series of global glaciations around 600 million to 700 million years ago, shortly before complex animal life exploded in the Cambrian. Climate models have confirmed that, once enough of a dark ocean is covered by reflective ice, it sets off a cooling feedback that turns the entire planet into an icehouse. And we've found glacial material that was deposited off the coasts in the tropics.

We have an extremely incomplete picture of what these snowball periods looked like, and Antarctic terrain provides different models for what an icehouse continent might look like. But now, researchers have found deposits that they argue were formed beneath a massive ice sheet that was being melted from below by volcanic activity. And, although the deposits are currently in Colorado's Front Range, at the time they resided much closer to the equator.

In the icehouse

Glacial deposits can be difficult to identify in deep time. Massive sheets of ice will scour the terrain down to bare rock, leaving behind loosely consolidated bits of rubble that can easily be swept away after the ice is gone. We can spot when that rubble shows up in ocean deposits to confirm there were glaciers along the coast, but rubble can be difficult to find on land.

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It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

There has been some debate about which product was the first modern “triple-A” video game, but ask most people and one answer is sure to at least be a contender: Valve’s Half-Life 2.

For Western PC games, Half-Life 2 set a standard that held strong in developers’ ambitions and in players’ expectations for well over a decade. Despite that, there’s only so much new ground it truly broke in terms of how games are made and designed—it’s just that most games didn’t have the same commitment to scope, scale, and polish all at the same time.

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The classic PC games market is "in a sorry state," according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren't currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk.

Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG's catalog, and the firm hasn't actually called itself "Good Old Games" in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making "a significant commitment of resources" toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG's own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a "Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG" stamp.

Credit: GOG

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Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company resurrected from bankruptcy, is riding high these days. In a few months, Firefly will attempt to become the second company to safely place a commercial lander on the Moon. Firefly's Alpha rocket has reached orbit four times, and engineers are developing a larger medium-class rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, one of the largest US aerospace and defense contractors.

There's also an orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, in Firefly's diversified portfolio. This diversification is proving attractive to investors. Firefly announced Tuesday that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

"Firefly is extremely grateful for our existing and new investors whose support demonstrates a huge vote of confidence in our capabilities and future," said Jason Kim, who took over as the company's CEO in October. He replaced Bill Weber, who resigned as chief executive after reports of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a female employee.

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Tesla has issued yet another recall for the angular, unpainted Cybertruck. This is the sixth recall affecting the model-year 2024 Cybertruck to be issued since January, and it affects 2,431 vehicles in total. And this time, there's no fix being delivered by a software update over the air—owners will need to have their pickup trucks physically repaired.

The problem is a faulty drive unit inverter, which stranded a Cybertruck at the end of July. Tesla says it started investigating the problem a week later and by late October arrived at the conclusion that it had made a bad batch of inverters that it used in production vehicles from November 6, 2023, until July 30, 2024. After a total of five failures and warranty claims that the company says "may be related to the condition," Tesla issued a recall.

Tesla is often able to fix defects in its products by pushing out new software, something that leads many fans of the brand to get defensive over the topic. Although there is no requirement for a safety recall to involve some kind of hardware fix—20 percent of all car recalls are now software fixes—in this case, the solution to the failing inverters very much requires a technician to work on the affected trucks.

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Former US Air National Guard Jack Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking confidential military documents on Discord.

Teixeira was arrested last year for sharing hundreds of pages of information online, some of which detailed national security secrets tied to US foreign adversaries and allies, including Russia, China, Ukraine, and South Korea. He secured the documents through his position at a Massachusetts military base, hoping to impress his young military-obsessed friends in a Discord group called "Thug Shaker Central."

Back in March, Teixeira pled guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information." But in taking a plea deal, he got the government's bigger spy charges tossed, avoiding a much longer possible maximum sentence of 60 years.

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A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada's first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday.

The teen's case was announced Saturday by provincial health officials, who noted that the teen had no obvious exposure to animals that could explain an infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza. The teen tested positive for H5 bird flu at BC's public health laboratory, and the result is currently being confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

The teen's case reportedly began with conjunctivitis, echoing the H5N1 human case reports in the US. The case then progressed to fever and cough, and the teen was admitted to BC's Children's hospital late Friday. The teen's condition varied throughout the weekend but had taken a turn for the worse by Tuesday, according to BC provincial health officer Bonnie Henry.

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Polestar's range expands a little more today. The Swedish spinoff announced that it is opening its order books for a cheaper, longer-range version of the Polestar 3 electric SUV that rather impressed us when we drove it earlier this year. The Polestar 3 Long Range Single Motor will cost $67,500—well under the price cap for the IRS clean vehicle tax credit, for which it qualifies, as it is built in South Carolina.

Dropping the front motor/generator unit means that the Polestar 3 LRSM is a good deal less powerful than the Long Range Dual Motor version we've driven, but 296 hp (220 kW) and 361 lb-ft (489 Nm) should ensure that while it isn't as fast, it shouldn't be any kind of slouch.

And the boost in range should more than make up for any increase in 0-60 times. The Polestar 3 LRSM can go 350 miles (563 km) on a single charge of the 111 kWh battery, compared to 315 miles (507 km) for the Polestar 3 LRDM.

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Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is set to boost X’s flagging business, with some marketers poised for a return to the social media platform in order to seek favor with the incoming administration.

Media executives told the Financial Times that some brands were preparing to advertise on X once again, as its billionaire owner was likely to gain an influential role within a second Trump White House.

The platform’s revenues have fallen dramatically since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition two years ago, with some investor estimates suggesting its current valuation is less than $10 billion.

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In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a notorious experiment in which he randomly divided college students into two groups, guards and prisoners, and set them loose in a simulated prison environment for six days, documenting the guards' descent into brutality. His findings caused a media sensation and a lot of subsequent criticism about the ethics and methodology employed in the study. Zimbardo died last month at 91, but his controversial legacy continues to resonate some 50 years later with The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth, a new documentary from National Geographic.

Director Juliette Eisner started working on the documentary during the pandemic when, like most people, she had a lot of extra time on her hands. She started looking at old psychological studies exploring human nature and became fascinated by the Stanford Prison Experiment, especially in light of the summer protests in 2020 concerning police brutality. She soon realized that the prevailing narrative was Zimbardo's and that very few of the original subjects in the experiment had ever been interviewed about their experiences.

"I wanted to hear from those people," Eisner told Ars. "They were very hard to find. Most of them were still only known by alias or by prisoner number." Eisner persevered and tracked most of them down. "Every single time they picked up the phone, they were like, 'Oh, I'm so glad you called. Nobody has called me in 50 years. And by the way, everything you think you know about this study is wrong,' or 'The story is not what it seems.'"

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Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology

An Asian elephant named Mary living at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers by figuring out how to use a hose to take her morning showers, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. “Elephants are amazing with hoses,” said co-author Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”

Tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins have been observed using sea sponges to protect their beaks while foraging for food, and sea otters will break open shellfish like abalone with rocks. Several species of fish also use tools to hunt and crack open shellfish, as well as to clear a spot for nesting. And the coconut octopus collects coconut shells, stacking them and transporting them before reassembling them as shelter.

Birds have also been observed using tools in the wild, although this behavior was limited to corvids (crows, ravens, and jays), although woodpecker finches have been known to insert twigs into trees to impale passing larvae for food. Parrots, by contrast, have mostly been noted for their linguistic skills, and there has only been limited evidence that they use anything resembling a tool in the wild. Primarily, they seem to use external objects to position nuts while feeding.

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On Friday, research organization Epoch AI released FrontierMath, a new mathematics benchmark that has been turning heads in the AI world because it contains hundreds of expert-level problems that leading AI models solve less than 2 percent of the time, according to Epoch AI. The benchmark tests AI language models (such as GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT) against original mathematics problems that typically require hours or days for specialist mathematicians to complete.

FrontierMath's performance results, revealed in a preprint research paper, paint a stark picture of current AI model limitations. Even with access to Python environments for testing and verification, top models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini 1.5 Pro scored extremely poorly. This contrasts with their high performance on simpler math benchmarks—many models now score above 90 percent on tests like GSM8K and MATH.

The design of FrontierMath differs from many existing AI benchmarks because the problem set remains private and unpublished to prevent data contamination. Many existing AI models are trained on other test problem datasets, allowing the AI models to easily solve the problems and appear more generally capable than they actually are. Many experts cite this as evidence that current large language models (LLMs) are poor generalist learners.

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Barely nine months after the last cut, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will again reduce its workforce. On Wednesday, the lab will lay 325 employees off, representing about 5 percent of the workforce at the California-based laboratory that leads the development of robotic space probes for NASA.

"This is a message I had hoped not to have to write," JPL Director Laurie Leshin said in a memo to staff members on Tuesday morning, local time. "Despite this being incredibly difficult for our community, this number is lower than projected a few months ago thanks in part to the hard work of so many people across JPL."

The cuts this week follow a reduction of 530 employees in February of this year due to various factors, including a pause in funding for the Mars Sample Return mission. The NASA laboratory has now cut about one-eighth of its workforce this year.

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For years now, many AI industry watchers have looked at the quickly growing capabilities of new AI models and mused about exponential performance increases continuing well into the future. Recently, though, some of that AI "scaling law" optimism has been replaced by fears that we may already be hitting a plateau in the capabilities of large language models trained with standard methods.

A weekend report from The Information effectively summarized how these fears are manifesting amid a number of insiders at OpenAI. Unnamed OpenAI researchers told The Information that Orion, the company's codename for its next full-fledged model release, is showing a smaller performance jump than the one seen between GPT-3 and GPT-4 in recent years. On certain tasks, in fact, the upcoming model "isn't reliably better than its predecessor," according to unnamed OpenAI researchers cited in the piece.

On Monday, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who left the company earlier this year, added to the concerns that LLMs were hitting a plateau in what can be gained from traditional pre-training. Sutskever told Reuters that "the 2010s were the age of scaling," where throwing additional computing resources and training data at the same basic training methods could lead to impressive improvements in subsequent models.

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The big three record labels notched another court victory against a broadband provider last month, but the music publishing firms aren't happy that an appeals court only awarded per-album damages instead of damages for each song.

Universal, Warner, and Sony are seeking an en banc rehearing of the copyright infringement case, claiming that Internet service provider Grande Communications should have to pay per-song damages over its failure to terminate the accounts of Internet users accused of piracy. The decision to make Grande pay for each album instead of each song "threatens copyright owners' ability to obtain fair damages," said the record labels' petition filed last week.

The case is in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously ruled last month that Grande, a subsidiary of Astound Broadband, violated the law by failing to terminate subscribers accused of being repeat infringers. Subscribers were flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads monitored by Rightscorp, a copyright-enforcement company used by the music labels.

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Bitcoin hit a new record high late Monday, its value peaking at $89,623 as investors quickly moved to cash in on expectations that Donald Trump will end a White House crackdown that intensified last year on crypto.

While the trading rally has now paused, analysts predict that bitcoin's value will only continue rising following Trump's win—perhaps even reaching $100,000 by the end of 2024, CNBC reported.

Bitcoin wasn't the only winner emerging from the post-election crypto trading. Crypto exchanges like Coinbase also experienced surges in the market, and one of the biggest winners, CNBC reported, was dogecoin, a cryptocurrency linked to Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and may join his administration. Dogecoin's value is up 135 percent since Trump's win.

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Spotify has lost all enthusiasm for the little music devices it sold for just half a year. Firmware hackers, as usually happens, have a lot more interest and have stepped in to save, and upgrade, a potentially useful gadget.

Spotify's idea a couple years ago was a car-focused device for those who lacked Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, or built-in Spotify support in their vehicles, or just wanted a dedicated Spotify screen. The Car Thing was a $100 doodad with a 4-inch touchscreen and knob that attached to the dashboard (or into a CD slot drive). All it could do was play Spotify, and only if you were a paying member, but that could be an upgrade for owners of older cars, or people who wanted a little desktop music controller.

But less than half a year after it fully released its first hardware device, Spotify gave up on the Car Thing due to "several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues." A Spotify rep told Ars that the Car Thing was meant "to learn more about how people listen in the car," and now it was "time to say goodbye to the devices entirely." Spotify indicated it would offer refunds, though not guaranteed, and moved forward with plans to brick the device in December 2024.

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