Month: February 2019

• 

  Scorbunny makes his fiery debut.

Following a brief teaser back at E3 2017, Nintendo and the Pokémon Company finally gave the world its first look at the next entry in "the main series of Pokémon RPGs" this morning. Named Pokémon Sword and Shield, the games will hit the Nintendo Switch in late 2019, the company said.

In a short announcement video, Nintendo revealed the three new starter Pokémon for these eighth-generation games: Grookey, a "mischievous" chimp with "boundless curiosity"; Scorbunny, a fiery rabbit that's "bursting with energy"; and Sobble, a "timid" water lizard that fires attacks while hiding in water.

The games will take place in the Galar region, a new environment with countryside, cities, plains, and mountains to explore. "The people and Pokémon live here, and they work together to develop the industries in the region," game director Shigeru Ohmori said.

• 

  This is the Polestar 2, the first long-range battery EV from Volvo's new spinoff. [credit: Polestar ]

Back in the olden days Polestar was Volvo's in-house tuning arm, the same way BMW has M Division or Mercedes-Benz has AMG. Polestar would take regular Volvos like the S60 and V60 and breathe on them, adding more power, a sportier interior, and often a coat of shocking blue paint. In fact, a Polestar S60 even held a production car record at the Nürburgring until Porsche and then Alfa Romeo came along and beat it. But that was the old Polestar. In 2017, Volvo revealed it had bigger plans for the name.

Now, Polestar is a brand of its own, one that will specialize in electrified performance vehicles. We saw the first of these, the Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid, when it was revealed in 2017. That car will be a carbon fiber-bodied coupé with 600hp (447kW) that will only be made in small numbers. For the rest of us, there's the Polestar 2, which was unveiled on Wednesday morning. It's a mid-sized, five-door fastback sedan, built using Volvo's Compact Modular Architecture which also underpins the XC40 crossover.

The specs are rather impressive. There's an electric motor at each axle providing the car with a combined 300kW (408hp) and 660Nm (487lb-ft), supplied by a 78kWh battery pack. That should be sufficient for about 275 miles of range on the EPA cycle when tested or 500km on the new but less-accurate European WLTP test. The interior shots reveal that the Swedes have lost none of their touch when it comes to interior design, although the all-black interior is a little somber.

Enlarge / LG's B8 OLED TV. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

It’s getting to be that time of year when TV prices start to drop. The late winter/early spring period is typically when we start to see retailers and TV manufacturers discount last year’s models in order to clear inventory and make way for their successors. Oftentimes, those old TVs are still more than good enough for the average consumer, so the money saved can make up for whatever new features you’d get by waiting for a new model.

These kinds of deals have started to pop up sporadically in recent weeks, but today brings a discount that feels especially worth calling out: the 55-inch variant of LG’s B8 OLED TV is currently down to $1,100 at Walmart and Amazon. That’s a good $400-500 off its usual going rate and as low as we’ve seen this specific model at a major retailer. The purchase comes with a one-year warranty, which is standard for LG.

What you’re getting

Until MicroLED panels start to take off, a good OLED screen is tops in terms of modern TV performance. It has superior contrast, more vivid colors, and better HDR performance than the best LCD panels. The B8, while technically the lowest end of LG’s OLED lineup, is no exception. It supports HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLG, and Technicolor’s Advanced HDR format, and they all look excellent. If it wasn’t already obvious, the display is in 4K resolution. Ultra HD content still isn’t ubiquitous, but OLED’s contrast and color advantages are still handy when you’re stuck streaming in 1080p.

Enlarge (credit: Max Headroom / Aurich)

In 1985, the TV film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future presented a science fictional cyberpunk world where an evil media company tried to create an artificial intelligence based on a reporter's brain to generate content to fill airtime. There were somewhat unintended results. Replace "reporter" with "redditors," "evil media company" with "well meaning artificial intelligence researchers," and "airtime" with "a very concerned blog post," and you've got what Ars reported about last week: Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2), a Franken-creation from researchers at the non-profit research organization OpenAI.

Unlike some earlier text-generation systems based on a statistical analysis of text (like those using Markov chains), GPT-2 is a text-generating bot based on a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (Editor's note: We recognize the headline here, but please don't call it an "AI"—it's a machine-learning algorithm, not an android). With or without guidance, GPT-2 can create blocks of text that look like they were written by humans. With written prompts for guidance and some fine tuning, the tool could be theoretically used to post fake reviews on Amazon, fake news articles on social media, fake outrage to generate real outrage, or even fake fiction, forever ruining online content for everyone. All of this comes from a model created by sucking in 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources linked by high-ranking Reddit posts. You can only imagine how bad it would have been if the researchers had used 40 gigabytes of text from 4chan posts.

After a little reflection, the research team has concerns about the policy implications of their creation. Ultimately, OpenAI's researchers kept the full thing to themselves, only releasing a pared-down 117 million parameter version of the model (which we have dubbed "GPT-2 Junior") as a safer demonstration of what the full GPT-2 model could do.