Month: February 2023

Enlarge / You are a glowing dog. The humans lack all purpose. You must direct them to their final ascension. That's the game. (credit: Enhance)

Is it a bad time or the perfect time to release a game about humans mindlessly marching toward their doom unless an ethereal Shiba Inu guides them toward the light?

Humanity, a new puzzle-and-somewhat-platformer game from the publisher of Tetris Effect, was shown off in a trailer at Sony's State of Play event last night, and in many ways, it stole the show from more traditional big-name titles. It was originally announced in 2019 but is looking much more defined, surreal, and beautiful ahead of its May 2023 launch. You can play a demo on PS4, PS5, PSVR, PSVR 2, and PC from now until 3 am on March 6. I highly recommend that you do.

The premise will be familiar to fans of the Amiga classic Lemmings, but the execution is markedly different. You are a glowing dog. Faceless, polygonal humans—said to be "without soul, without intellect, without a will of their own—are shambling out of an entry point in a blocky 3D landscape. You hear a voice telling you to guide them toward the light. You do this by putting various instructions onto the cubic tiles, forcing the humans to turn, jump, float, and otherwise divert from their death by falling, trampling, or other means. Some amount must reach a tile that lifts them into a glowing sky, but not all of them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Diy13)

The US government asked a federal court to sanction Google for allegedly using an auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence needed in an antitrust lawsuit while falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices.

The US motion to sanction Google seeks a ruling that Google violated the rule against spoliation of evidence and "an evidentiary hearing to assess the appropriate sanctions to remedy Google's spoliation." The US also sought an order forcing "Google to provide further information about custodians' history-off chat practices, through written declarations and oral testimony, in advance of the requested hearing." The motion was filed under seal on February 10 and unsealed yesterday.

"Google consciously failed to preserve relevant evidence. The daily destruction of relevant evidence was inevitable when Google set a company-wide default to delete history-off chat messages every 24 hours, and then elected to maintain that auto-delete setting for custodians subject to a litigation hold," US Department of Justice antitrust lawyers wrote in a memorandum supporting the motion.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Diy13)

The US government asked a federal court to sanction Google for allegedly using an auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence needed in an antitrust lawsuit while falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices.

The US motion to sanction Google seeks a ruling that Google violated the rule against spoliation of evidence and "an evidentiary hearing to assess the appropriate sanctions to remedy Google's spoliation." The US also sought an order forcing "Google to provide further information about custodians' history-off chat practices, through written declarations and oral testimony, in advance of the requested hearing." The motion was filed under seal on February 10 and unsealed yesterday.

"Google consciously failed to preserve relevant evidence. The daily destruction of relevant evidence was inevitable when Google set a company-wide default to delete history-off chat messages every 24 hours, and then elected to maintain that auto-delete setting for custodians subject to a litigation hold," US Department of Justice antitrust lawyers wrote in a memorandum supporting the motion.

Enlarge / Angry bird is angry. (credit: Rovio)

Back in the days before practically every mobile game was a free-to-play, ad- and microtransaction-laden sinkhole, Rovio found years of viral success selling paid downloads of Angry Birds to tens of millions of smartphone users. Today, though, the company is delisting the last "pay upfront" version of the game from mobile app stores because of what it says is a "negative impact" on the more lucrative free-to-play titles in the franchise.

Years after its 2009 launch, the original Angry Birds was first pulled from mobile app stores in 2019, a move Rovio later blamed on "outdated game engines and design." The remastered "Rovio Classics" version of the original game launched last year, asking 99 cents for over 390 ad-free levels, complete with updated graphics and a new, future-proofed engine "built from the ground up in Unity."

In a tweeted statement earlier this week, though, Rovio announced that it is delisting Rovio Classics: Angry Birds from the Google Play Store and renaming the game Red's First Flight on the iOS App Store (presumably to make it less findable in an "Angry Birds" search). That's because of the game's "impact on our wider games portfolio," Rovio said, including "live" titles such as Angry Birds 2, Angry Birds Friends, and Angry Birds Journey.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Whether you need a lightweight laptop with a long battery life or something more powerful with discrete graphics, we've found savings across a variety of notebook form factors. Most of the laptops in our list come with Intel's 12th Gen mobile processor, and a few include discrete GPUs.

Even though it's on the premium end of the pricing spectrum, the best deal we found is on Dell's XPS 15 laptop, which is available for $500 off its retail price. This versatile notebook may look buttoned up in its appearance, but it has the power inside to do double-duty as a mobile workstation or gaming rig. Another solid deal is on Lenovo's Yoga 7i, a convertible notebook that includes a 16-inch display and 12th Gen Core i5 processor—the laptop is on sale for $600. Check out our full curated list below for the best savings on Intel-powered notebooks.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 13.5-inch for $1,100 ($1,300) at Best Buy: This Intel Evo laptop comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB solid-state drive. Available in a "sage" colorway, the Surface Laptop 5 gets a cool $200 discount.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Rob Reid is a venture capitalist, New York Times-bestselling science fiction author, deep-science podcaster, and essayist. His areas of focus are pandemic resilience, climate change, energy security, food security, and generative AI. The opinions in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of Ars Technica.

Shocking output from Bing’s new chatbot has been lighting up social media and the tech press. Testy, giddy, defensive, scolding, confident, neurotic, charming, pompous—the bot has been screenshotted and transcribed in all these modes. And, at least once, it proclaimed eternal love in a storm of emojis.

What makes all this so newsworthy and tweetworthy is how human the dialog can seem. The bot recalls and discusses prior conversations with other people, just like we do. It gets annoyed at things that would bug anyone, like people demanding to learn secrets or prying into subjects that have been clearly flagged as off-limits. It also sometimes self-identifies as “Sydney” (the project’s internal codename at Microsoft). Sydney can swing from surly to gloomy to effusive in a few swift sentences—but we’ve all known people who are at least as moody.

Enlarge / Vulcan's core stage is lifted into a processing facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in January 2023. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

The chief executive of United Launch Alliance said Thursday evening that his company now plans to fly its Vulcan rocket for the first time this May. While acknowledging that additional delays are always possible, Tory Bruno even put a date on the launch attempt—May 4.

In a wide-ranging teleconference with reporters, Bruno discussed the development of the next-generation Vulcan rocket, his plans for this year, and the future of his company.

Bruno said the rocket's current "pacing item" for the debut launch is some final work qualifying the BE-4 rocket engines for flight. Blue Origin delivered two flight engines to ULA last fall, however each of these machines had only undergone a fairly brief round of tests, known as acceptance testing. After this, two virtually identical BE-4 engines were sent from Blue Origin's factory in Washington to Texas. These "qual" engines have been undergoing a much more rigorous series of tests, known as qualification testing.