Month: March 2024

Enlarge / FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (R) departs Manhattan Federal Court after an arraignment hearing on March 30, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images News)

The CEO of FTX Trading, John Ray, sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan Wednesday to correct what he called "callously" and "demonstrably false" claims that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence for crimes including defrauding FTX customers.

In a sentencing memo, Bankman-Fried asked the court to drastically slash his prison sentence from what he considered a "grotesque" 110-year maximum to five to six years. Prosecutors have suggested the sentence should be between 40 and 50 years, but Bankman-Fried claimed such a sentence painted him as a "depraved supervillain," Bloomberg reported.

The lightest sentence was appropriate, Bankman-Fried claimed, because the "most reasonable estimate of loss" and "harm" to customers, lenders, and investors is "zero."

It's been a long wait for the second season of HBO's House of the Dragon, in which House Targaryen descends into civil war over the heir to the Iron Throne. It's set to premiere in June, and HBO is ramping up its marketing with a rather clever twist: not one official trailer, but two, each presenting the perspective of one side in the bloody conflict. And we get to choose which trailer we'd like to view—although if you're like us, you'll elect to watch both.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

As I've written previously, HBO's House of the Dragon debuted in 2022 with a solid, promising pilot episode, and the remainder of the season lived up to that initial promise. The series is set about 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen's reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood, a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD's "Fluid Motion Frames," which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1, which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available "later this year" in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia's equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

Enlarge / This flexible and conductive material has “adaptive durability,” meaning it gets stronger when hit. (credit: Yue (Jessica) Wang)

Scientists are keen to develop new materials for lightweight, flexible, and affordable wearable electronics so that, one day, dropping our smartphones won't result in irreparable damage. One team at the University of California, Merced, has made conductive polymer films that actually toughen up in response to impact rather than breaking apart, much like mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it (i.e., "oobleck"). They described their work in a talk at this week's meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.

As we've previously reported, oobleck is simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you've got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily and it's a liquid. Punch it hard and it turns more solid under your fist. It's a classic example of a non-Newtonian fluid.

In an ideal fluid, the viscosity largely depends on temperature and pressure: Water will continue to flow regardless of other forces acting upon it, such as being stirred or mixed. In a non-Newtonian fluid, the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force, thereby straddling the boundary between liquid and solid behavior. Stirring a cup of water produces a shearing force, and the water shears to move out of the way. The viscosity remains unchanged. But for non-Newtonian fluids like oobleck, the viscosity changes when a shearing force is applied.