This week's flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, NS-31, and its all-female crew has stirred up a mess of coverage, from tabloids to high-brow journalism outlets. And why not? Six women, led by superstar Katy Perry, were flying into space!
By contrast, Ars Technica has been largely silent. Why? Because yet another suborbital flight on New Shepard matters little in the long arc of spaceflight history. Beyond that, I did not want to be too negative about someone else's happiness, especially since it was privately funded. Live and let live, and all of that.
However, if I'm being honest, this flight and its breathless promotion made me uncomfortable. Let me explain. Perhaps the most important change in spaceflight over the last two decades has been the rise of commercial spaceflight, which is bringing down the cost of access to space and marks an essential step to humanity becoming a spacefaring species. This rising tide has been spurred in large part by billionaires, particularly Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and to a lesser extent, Richard Branson.
© Blue Origin
When it comes to actually storing the numerical weights that power an LLM's underlying neural network, most modern AI models rely on the precision of 16- or 32-bit floating point numbers. But that level of precision can come at the cost of large memory footprints (in the hundreds of gigabytes for the largest models) and significant processing resources needed for the complex matrix multiplication used when responding to prompts.
Now, researchers at Microsoft's General Artificial Intelligence group have released a new neural network model that works with just three distinct weight values: -1, 0, or 1. Building on top of previous work Microsoft Research originally published in 2023, the new model's "ternary" architecture offers a reduction in overall complexity and "substantial advantages in computational efficiency," the researchers write, allowing it to run effectively on a simple desktop CPU. And despite the massive reduction in weight precision, the researchers claim that the model "can achieve performance comparable to leading open-weight, full-precision models of similar size across a wide range of tasks."
The idea of simplifying model weights isn't a completely new one in AI research. For years, researchers have been experimenting with quantization techniques that squeeze their neural network weights into smaller memory envelopes. In recent years, the most extreme quantization efforts have focused on so-called "BitNets" that represent each weight in a single bit (representing +1 or -1).
© Getty Images
Following the reveal of specs and “Razr Ultra” branding yesterday, another new leak shows the new Motorola Razr flagship again, this time with dust resistance and with an underwhelming software support schedule.
more…
A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that it’s unconstitutional to obtain swaths of cellular records through “tower dumps” — but will still let police get away with using it as evidence, as reported earlier by 404 Media and Court Watch.
With tower dumps, authorities can dig through the cell records that pinged off a particular tower during a specific time. Though police may be looking for just one record, these dumps often expose the data of thousands of people, making it a major privacy concern. In a 2010 case involving the High Country Bandits, for example, officers caught the two bank robbers by looking through a tower dump containing more than 150,000 phone numbers.
In the ruling, Judge Miranda Du said that searching through these records violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. However, Du denies a motion to suppress using these records as evidence because the court seems to be the first “within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception applies.”
As noted in the filing, the tower dump exposed the data of 1,686 users, but the records helped authorities build their case against Nevada man Cory Spurlock, who faces charges related to a murder-for-hire conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute marijuana. In February, a federal judge in Mississippi similarly deemed tower dumps unconstitutional, preventing FBI officials from pulling information from cell towers spanning nine locations and four carriers, as reported by Court Watch. The Department of Justice has since appealed the decision.
Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its "Plus" tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.
"Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems," a Synology representative told Ars by email. "Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues."
Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.
© Synology
This week, Kia announced its affordable EV4 electric sedan will launch in the US early next year. While the US won’t get a hatchback edition of the EV4 that was mentioned when it was revealed in February, there will be two battery configurations: a 58.3kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 235 miles, and a larger 81.4kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 330 miles. No EPA range estimates are currently available.
The EV4 will get Tesla’s NACS charging port and can charge up from 10 to 80 percent in 31 minutes at a DC fast charging station. It also has vehicle-to-load capability that provides AC power for devices like computers. And on the inside, the EV4 features 30 inches worth of side-by-side screens that run Kia’s latest “connected car Navigation Cockpit (ccNC) software with apps like YouTube.
The automaker’s “first all-electric global sedan” will be built in Korea, and while Kia has not confirmed an official price, MotorTrend reports it could be about $37,000 before any incentives. That price would undercut Tesla’s most affordable and popular Model 3 electric sedan, which costs $42,490 before the Federal $7,500 tax incentive. However, by the time this sedan is ready to ship, President Trump’s tariffs on cars built outside the country may have a significant impact.
We’ve already gotten a new mid-range release from Nothing this year, but what many have been waiting for is a new flagship release in the Nothing Phone (3), and now we’ve got a better idea of its release date.
more…
For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn't faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They're generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative capacity. While some animals like mammals have a limited ability to regenerate lost tissues, planarians can be cut roughly in half and regenerate either an entire head or entire tail, depending on which part of the body you choose to keep track of.
In doing so, they have to re-establish something that is typically only needed early in an animal's development: a signaling system that helps tell cells where the animal's head and tail are. Now, a US-based team asked a question that I'd never have thought of: What happens if you cut the animal in half early in development, while the developmental head-to-tail signaling system is still active? The answer turned out to be surprisingly complex.
Planarians are small flatworms that would probably be living quiet lives somewhere if biologists hadn't discovered their ability to regenerate lots of adult tissues when damaged. The process has been well-studied by this point and involves the formation of a cluster of stem cells, called a blastema, at the site of damage. From there, many of the signals that control the formation of specialized tissues in the embryo get re-activated, directing the stem cells down the developmental pathways needed to reproduce any lost organs.
© NNehring
In a Black Mirror-esque turn, some cash-strapped actors who didn't fully understand the consequences are regretting selling their likenesses to be used in AI videos that they consider embarrassing, damaging, or harmful, AFP reported.
Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, "am I crossing a line by doing this?" His partner's mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsayer predicting disasters, he told the AFP.
South Korean actor Simon Lee's AI likeness was similarly used to spook naïve Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was "stunned" to find his AI avatar promoting "questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram," feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams.
© arvitalya | iStock / Getty Images Plus
In what’s most likely a bug, some Android 16 Beta 4 users no longer have to long-press lockscreen shortcuts.
more…I love outlet adaptors for HomeKit, but if you still use them to automate lamps, it might be time to switch things up (sorry for the pun). Smart plugs are a great way to get started, but smart bulbs give you more control over the lighting experience and work with overhead lights. With smart bulbs, you can change the color, set different brightness levels, and group them by room or scene. It is an easy upgrade that adds flexibility without complicating your setup. This week, I am looking at the .
more…
