Month: November 2022

Enlarge / AI-generated portraits of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek from The Infinite Conversation. (credit: Giacomo Miceli / Ars Technica)

This week, an Italian artist and programmer named Giacomo Miceli debuted The Infinite Conversation website, an AI-powered nonstop chat between artificial versions of German director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, complete with realistic voices.

Upon visiting the site—which is unaffiliated with either person—you'll see AI-generated charcoal portraits of the two men in profile. Between them, a transcript of AI-generated text is highlighted in yellow as AI-generated voices simulating those of Herzog or Žižek read through it. The conversation goes back and forth between them, complete with distinct accents, and you can skip between each segment by clicking the arrows beneath the portraits.

Its creator positions the site as social commentary on audio deepfakes and upcoming technologies that may undermine trust in media in the near future. "This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice," Miceli writes on the site. "Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom."

Enlarge / Now we'll never know how Dolores Abernathy's story ends. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

HBO surprised its subscribers and the TV industry on Friday by announcing that it has canceled the big-budget science-fiction series Westworld just a few months after its fourth season concluded, Variety reports.

The series, which has received 54 Emmy nominations during its run, was intended to end with its fifth season, according to recent statements from its two showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The husband-and-wife creative couple had a specific ending in mind that now won't make it to the screen, though many viewers felt that the ending of the fourth season also worked as a conclusion.

Several reasons contributed to HBO's decision, including high production costs, declining viewership, and sliding critical response amid an overall effort to cut costs at the newly formed parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. Westworld set records when it first premiered, but its viewership declined with each season, with the recently aired season four experiencing an especially sharp drop.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Future Publishing)

The new bivalent COVID-19 booster spurred neutralizing antibody levels that were fourfold higher against the omicron subvariants BA.4/BA.5 in older adults than those seen after the original booster, Pfizer reported Friday.

The new data may help calm concerns about whether the updated booster is an improvement over the previous booster. But the fall booster campaign—aimed at preventing another devastating winter wave—still faces considerable challenges. For one thing, a shockingly low number of Americans are rolling up their sleeves to get the shot.

Better boost

Experts all agree that the new booster shot, like the old one, will revive waning immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 and provide strong protection from severe COVID-19. But some experts have expressed skepticism about whether the updated bivalent booster—which in part targets omicron subvariants BA.4/BA.5—will offer a clinically meaningful advantage over the previous booster in preventing mild infections against the subvariant.

Enlarge / An Intel Arc GPU. (credit: Intel)

In our review of Intel's Arc GPUs, we were generally impressed by their performance for the price, especially as a first-generation product. But buyers have plenty of potential caveats to consider, including unstable drivers, inconsistent performance, and a couple of weird problems that you need to dig around in your computer's BIOS settings to resolve.

Linux developers working on Arc support appear to have uncovered another oddity about the cards. According to developer Richard Hughes (as reported by Phoronix), updating the firmware on Arc GPUs appears to be handled by the Intel Management Engine, a small microcontroller that is only included in PCs with Intel processors. Hughes ran into the problem specifically in the context of IBM's POWER CPU architecture, but it seems to make firmware updates impossible on any non-Intel platform, including those based on AMD or Arm CPUs.

Luckily, these kinds of GPU firmware updates don't happen all that often, and when they do happen, it's usually to fix a specific obscure problem or add minor features—using a GPU with outdated firmware isn't the end of the world. On the other hand, if ever a GPU was going to need important firmware updates somewhere down the line, it would be this first generation of Arc cards, which are Intel's first widely released dedicated GPUs and have already proven to be exceptionally rough around the edges in a bunch of other ways.

Enlarge (credit: OLIVIER DOULIERY / Contributor | AFP)

Elon Musk’s strategy to make Twitter profitable as quickly as possible seems to be to turn Twitter into everything the platform is not, seemingly ignoring much of what made the platform profitable in the first place.

Instead of creating the town square where important public discourse is freely debated (which Musk claimed was his Twitter vision), he’s now making moves to potentially skew discussions by ranking unauthenticated accounts with freshly granted blue checks above others in feeds, not because they're users who have more informed or more popular points of view, but because they are just about anyone who paid $8 that month. His other big ideas to drive profits reportedly include charges to direct-message celebrity users and charges to see OnlyFans-like videos posted by paid, verified users. In weighing these ideas, Musk is seemingly ready to charge fees wherever he can and unafraid to throw up paywalls between users and the content that arguably initially drew them to Twitter.

According to The New York Times’ interviews with two people familiar with the matter and reviews of internal documents, Musk and his advisers have discussed all these strategies to monetize Twitter and dig the platform out of debt.

Enlarge (credit: Cherry)

Cherry, the original mechanical switch maker, is continuing to tap the mechanical keyboard community for new product ideas. Its new mechanical switch, the Cherry MX Black Clear-Top, is a nod to enthusiasts who would love to turn in their modern-day clacker for an old-school terminal keyboard with extra-smooth typing.

’80s roots

Before Cherry's Thursday announcement of plans to release the MX Black Clear-Top, the switch was known to hobbyists as the Nixie switch. Cherry made the switch in the 1980s for German office machine-maker Nixdorf Computer AG. The German switch maker was tasked with creating a version of its linear MX Black switch with "milky" upper housing, a 63.5 g actuation force rather than 60 g, and "the relatively rare solution at the time of having a diode integrated into the switch for n-key rollover," Cherry's announcement explained.

The linear switch ended up being used primarily in Nixdorf's CT06-CT07/2 M Softkeys keyboards targeted at terminals, servers, and minicomputers.

Enlarge / Linus Åkesson playing his homemade "Commodordion" in a YouTube video. (credit: Linus Åkesson)

In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Åkesson unveiled a playable accordion—called "The Commodordion"—he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Åkesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

Åkesson—a versatile musician himself—can actually play the Commodordion in real time like a real accordion. He plays a melody with his right hand on one C64 keyboard and controls the chord of a rhythm and bass line loop (that he can pre-record using the flip of a switch) using his left hand on the other keyboard.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Åkesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.