Month: November 2024

I played Half-Life 2 for the first time this year—here’s how it went

Wake up and smell the ashes, Ms. Washenko.

It's Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2—a game of historical importance for the artistic medium and technology of computer games. Each day up through the 16th, we'll be running a new article looking back at the game and its impact.

The time has finally come to close one of the most notable gaps in my gaming history. Despite more than a decade of writing about video games and even more years enjoying them, I never got around to playing Half-Life 2.

Not only have I not played it, but I've managed to keep myself in the dark about pretty much everything to do with it. I always assumed that one day I would get around to playing this classic, and I wanted the experience to be as close as possible to it would have been back in 2004. So my only knowledge about Half-Life 2 before starting this project was 1) the game is set in the same universe as Portal, a game I love, 2) the silent protagonist is named Gordon Freeman, and he looks uncannily like a silent, spectacled young Hugh Laurie, and 3) there's something called the Gravity Gun.

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OpenAI accused of trying to profit off AI model inspection in court

How do you get an AI model to confess what’s inside?

Since ChatGPT became an instant hit roughly two years ago, tech companies around the world have rushed to release AI products while the public is still in awe of AI's seemingly radical potential to enhance their daily lives.

But at the same time, governments globally have warned it can be hard to predict how rapidly popularizing AI can harm society. Novel uses could suddenly debut and displace workers, fuel disinformation, stifle competition, or threaten national security—and those are just some of the obvious potential harms.

While governments scramble to establish systems to detect harmful applications—ideally before AI models are deployed—some of the earliest lawsuits over ChatGPT show just how hard it is for the public to crack open an AI model and find evidence of harms once a model is released into the wild. That task is seemingly only made harder by an increasingly thirsty AI industry intent on shielding models from competitors to maximize profits from emerging capabilities.

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Nasa: Schweißen in der Schwerelosigkeit

Diese Möglichkeit ist bisher kaum erforscht. Für eine florierende Wirtschaft auf dem Mond und die Kolonisierung des Mars ist das Laserschweißen im All jedoch notwendig. (Nasa, Raumfahrt)

Diese Möglichkeit ist bisher kaum erforscht. Für eine florierende Wirtschaft auf dem Mond und die Kolonisierung des Mars ist das Laserschweißen im All jedoch notwendig. (Nasa, Raumfahrt)

Voyager-Mission: “Wir werden definitiv das 50. Jubiläum erreichen”

Garry Hunt ist für die Voyager-Missionen der Nasa verantwortlich. Trotz einiger Probleme glaubt er an ein großes Jubiläum für die 1977 gestarteten Raumsonden. (Nasa, Raumfahrt)

Garry Hunt ist für die Voyager-Missionen der Nasa verantwortlich. Trotz einiger Probleme glaubt er an ein großes Jubiläum für die 1977 gestarteten Raumsonden. (Nasa, Raumfahrt)

Review: Amazon’s 2024 Kindle Paperwhite makes the best e-reader a little better

If you use any Kindle other than the 2021 Paperwhite, this is a huge upgrade.

I've never particularly loved Amazon, either as a retail behemoth or as a hardware and software company, but despite that I still probably get more excited about new Kindle releases than I do about most other gadgets at this point.

Some of that is because I rely on my Kindle for distraction-free reading and because I'm constantly highlighting things and taking notes, so even minor improvements have a major impact on my day-to-day experience. And some of it is because the Kindle's relatively limited tech has left it without a lot of headroom to shove additional ads or other paid add-ons; they include lockscreen ads and "special offers," but they can be permanently turned off with a nominal $20 fee, and even when you don't turn them off, they don't degrade the device's performance or intrude on the actual reading experience. This isn't to say that Kindles are perfect, just that it's rare that I am roughly the same amount of annoyed by a software platform's ads and tracking than I was a decade ago.

Enter the new 12th-generation $160 Kindle Paperwhite, which like most Paperwhites is the Kindle that most people should buy.

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