Month: April 2023

Enlarge / The S23 Series. Everything has a similar camera design this year. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung's already-slow charging speeds have again been caught not meeting people's expectations. This time it is the wireless charging on the Galaxy S23 series, which is slower than older Galaxy S22 phones, according to new tests from PhoneArena. The site compared wireless charging for all three models—the base, Plus, and Ultra S22s and S23—and came away with the conclusion that "All three new members of the Galaxy S23 series charge way slower than the Galaxy S22 series as per our tests."

The worst model to make it out of the test is the flagship Galaxy S23 Ultra. The S23 Ultra and S22 Ultra have 5000 mAh batteries and 15 W wireless charging, but even with the official chargers, the new phone came out way slower. The S22 Ultra took 1 hour and 58 minutes to charge to full via the wireless charger, while the S23 took 33 percent longer: 2 hours and 37 minutes. It's not just charging to full that adds an extra 39 minutes, either, the phone shows an across-the-board reduction in charging rate that was never reflected in Samsung's spec sheet.

The base and Plus model changes year over year are less relevant since they also came with increased battery capacities, so naturally, the new models will take longer to charge. For the record, the two cheaper S23 models added 200 mAh of battery capacity and 15 more minutes of wireless charge time. That is not the same huge decline that the S23 Ultra experienced.

Enlarge / An AI-generated and human composited image of "Wolverine programming on a computer." (credit: Benj Edwards / Midjourney)

Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.)

"Run your scripts with it and when they crash, GPT-4 edits them and explains what went wrong," wrote BioBootloader in a tweet that accompanied a demonstration video. "Even if you have many bugs it'll repeatedly rerun until everything is fixed."

GPT-4 is a multimodal AI language model created by OpenAI and released in March, available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and in API form to beta testers. It uses its "knowledge" about billions of documents, books, and websites scraped from the web to perform text processing tasks such as composition, language translation, and programming.

Enlarge / F1 cars use engines with thermal efficiencies that even a Prius could only dream about. They are not the cause of the sport's carbon footprint. (credit: Dan Istitene - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Formula 1 might be a sport, but it's also a $2.6 billion business with shareholders, and like pretty much every other multibillion-dollar business with shareholders, that means it's under increasing scrutiny regarding the amount of carbon emissions it's responsible for. Currently, that's about 250,000 tons a year, but the sport says it wants to reduce that to net zero by 2030. I spoke with F1's chief sustainability to learn more about how it's doing that, and you may be surprised to learn that race cars have very little to do with it.

While F1's carbon footprint is just a fraction of other global sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup, it's a more visible target, considering it involves cars driving around a track burning gasoline. But focusing only on the cars is a mistake.

Forget the cars

For one thing, since the introduction of hybrid powertrains in 2014, F1 cars have become extremely efficient. There are a pair of hybrid systems—one that captures energy under braking and another that captures energy from exhaust gases—and the 1.6 L V6s burn their gasoline more efficiently than any other internal combustion engine ever made, approaching or perhaps even passing 50 percent now.

Enlarge (credit: Loewe)

Move over, Microsoft. There's a new company out there peddling clothing evoking memories of old tech. Loewe, a Spanish fashion company that apparently makes really expensive clothing, is paying homage to pixelated graphics à la Minecraft with a recently released line of clothing that makes you look like you plucked clothing out of a retro game and slapped it on your 3D body.

2D meets 3D. (credit: Loewe)

If you're a retro gamer (and especially if you're the type of retro gamer who uses a modern TV), you may deal with pixelated graphics frequently. The low-resolution look is so popular that Minecraft and other modern titles swear by it today. And now Loewe is expecting people to pay thousands to dress like their part of a retro reality.

As reported by The Verge, Loewe previewed the Pixel collection at Paris Fashion Week in October. Now, it's listing the products—including a $2,500 hoodie, $3,400 purse, $2,500 pants, $1,850 T-shirt, and $790 denim skirt—on its website for purchase.