Kelly Newman – Page 25

Florida man eats feral pig meat, contracts rare biothreat bacteria

antibiotics, bacteria, Brucella, Brucellosis, defibrillator, health, infection, pigs, select agents / Kelly Newman / March 19, 2025

B. suis is an extremely infectious bacteria that’s usually found in pigs. The most common symptom in pigs is reproductive losses, such as stillbirths, though they can also develop other symptoms, such as abscesses and arthritis. In humans, it causes an insidious, hard to detect infection called brucellosis, which is used to describe an infection from any Brucella species: B. suis, B. melitensis, B. abortus, and B. canis.

In the US, there are only about 80 to 140 brucellosis cases reported each year, and they’re mostly caused by B. melitensis and B. abortus. People tend to get infected by eating raw (unpasteurized) milk and cheeses. B. suis, however, is generally linked to hunting and butchering feral pigs and hogs.

Until recently, the Brucella species were designated as select agents by the US government, a classification to flag pathogens and toxins that have the potential to be a severe threat to public health, such as if they’re used in a bioterror attack. The current list includes things like anthrax and Ebola virus. Brucella species were originally listed because they can be easily aerosolized, and only a small number of the bacterial cells are needed to spark an infection. In humans, infections can be both localized and systemic and have a broad range of clinical manifestations. Those include brain infections, neurological conditions, arthritis, anemia, respiratory involvement, pancreatitis, cardiovascular complications, like aneurysms, and inflammation of the spinal cord, among many other things.

In January, federal officials removed Brucella species from the select agents list—a designation that limits the types and amount of research that can be done on a pathogen. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the reason for the removal was to ease those limits, thereby making it easier for researchers to conduct veterinary studies and develop vaccines for animals.

Perilous present

After finding B. suis, the doctors went to gather more information about how the man could have contracted this rare species. The man said he wasn’t a hunter, but recalled receiving a gift of feral swine meat on several occasions in 2017 from a local hunter. Though he couldn’t recall the specific hunter who gave him the biohazardous bounty, he did remember handling the raw meat and blood with his bare hands—a clear transmission risk—before cooking and eating it.

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Nvidia announces DGX desktop “personal AI supercomputers”

AI, AI GPU, ASUS, Biz & IT, dell, desktop AI PC, desktop PC, DGX, DGX Spark, DGX Station, GPUs, HP, Jensen Huang, Lenovo, machine learning, NVIDIA, Nvidia DGX, Nvidia GTC, personal AI supercomputer, supermicro, Tech / Kelly Newman / March 19, 2025

During Tuesday’s Nvidia GTX keynote, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled two “personal AI supercomputers” called DGX Spark and DGX Station, both powered by the Grace Blackwell platform. In a way, they are a new type of AI PC architecture specifically built for running neural networks, and five major PC manufacturers will build the supercomputers.

These desktop systems, first previewed as “Project DIGITS” in January, aim to bring AI capabilities to developers, researchers, and data scientists who need to prototype, fine-tune, and run large AI models locally. DGX systems can serve as standalone desktop AI labs or “bridge systems” that allow AI developers to move their models from desktops to DGX Cloud or any AI cloud infrastructure with few code changes.

Huang explained the rationale behind these new products in a news release, saying, “AI has transformed every layer of the computing stack. It stands to reason a new class of computers would emerge—designed for AI-native developers and to run AI-native applications.”

The smaller DGX Spark features the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip with Blackwell GPU and fifth-generation Tensor Cores, delivering up to 1,000 trillion operations per second for AI.

Meanwhile, the more powerful DGX Station includes the GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip with 784GB of coherent memory and the ConnectX-8 SuperNIC supporting networking speeds up to 800Gb/s.

The DGX architecture serves as a prototype that other manufacturers can produce. Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will develop and sell both DGX systems, with DGX Spark reservations opening today and DGX Station expected later in 2025. Additional manufacturing partners for the DGX Station include BOXX, Lambda, and Supermicro, with systems expected to be available later this year.

Since the systems will be manufactured by different companies, Nvidia did not mention pricing for the units. However, in January, Nvidia mentioned that the base-level configuration for a DGX Spark-like computer would retail for around $3,000.

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Furious at the FCC, Arkansas jail cancels inmate phone calls rather than lower rates

FCC, jail, phone calls, Policy / Kelly Newman / March 19, 2025

If “the Federal Communications Commission reverses their adverse regulations,” Montgomery said, “the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office will revisit the feasibility of reimplementing the inmate phone system.”

One might expect this view to generate some sympathy in the MAGA-fied halls of FCC HQ. But the Commission’s two Republicans actually voted in favor of the rate control order last year. Current FCC Chair Brendan Carr even agreed that inmate phone calls in American prisons were often “excessive” and that the private operators behind these systems represented a “market failure.” He then voted for straight-up, old-school price caps.

In fact, Carr went on to offer a robust defense of inmate calling, saying: “[I often] heard from families who experienced firsthand the difficulties of maintaining contact with their incarcerated loved ones. I also heard from formerly incarcerated individuals who underscored the decline in mental and emotional health that can result from a lack of external communications. Beyond that, studies have repeatedly shown that increased communication between incarcerated people and their families, friends, and other outside resources helps reduce recidivism rates.”

So Montgomery may not get this decision reversed easily. (On the other hand, Carr did just launch a “Delete! Delete! Delete!” initiative focused on cutting regulations, so who knows.)

Baxter County claims that the FCC decision means that phone services are no longer “feasible.” In 2018, however, when Baxter County wanted to expand its jail and didn’t have the cash, officials found a way to make it feasible by asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax collected between April and September of that year. (You can even watch a time-lapse video of the jail expansion being built.) Feasibility, it turns out, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Montgomery did say that he would add some additional in-person visiting hours at the jail to compensate for the lack of phone calls, and last week his office posted the new schedule. But as positive as in-person contact can be, in a busy world it is still nice to have the option of a reasonably priced phone call—you know, the kind that’s “feasible” to offer at most other jails in the US.

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OpenAI #11: America Action Plan

openai / Kelly Newman / March 19, 2025

Last week I covered Anthropic’s submission to the request for suggestions for America’s action plan. I did not love what they submitted, and especially disliked how aggressively they sidelines existential risk and related issues, but given a decision to massively scale back ambition like that the suggestions were, as I called them, a ‘least you can do’ agenda, with many thoughtful details.

OpenAI took a different approach. They went full jingoism in the first paragraph, framing this as a race in which we must prevail over the CCP, and kept going. A lot of space is spent on what a kind person would call rhetoric and an unkind person corporate jingoistic propaganda.

Their goal is to have the Federal Government not only not regulate AI or impose any requirements on AI whatsoever on any level, but also prevent the states from doing so, and ensure that existing regulations do not apply to them, seeking ‘relief’ from proposed bills, including exemption from all liability, explicitly emphasizing immunity from regulations targeting frontier models in particular and name checking SB 1047 as an example of what they want immunity from, all in the name of ‘Freedom to Innovate,’ warning of undermining America’s leadership position otherwise.

None of which actually makes any sense from a legal perspective, that’s not how any of this works, but that’s clearly not what they decided to care about. If this part was intended as a serious policy proposal it would have tried to pretend to be that. Instead it’s a completely incoherent proposal, that goes halfway towards something unbelievably radical but pulls back from trying to implement it.

Meanwhile, they want the United States to not only ban Chinese ‘AI infrastructure’ but also coordinate with other countries to ban it, and they want to weaken the compute diffusion rules for those who cooperate with this, essentially only restricting countries with a history or expectation of leaking technology to China, or those who won’t play ball with OpenAI’s anticompetitive proposals.

They refer to DeepSeek as ‘state controlled.’

They claim that DeepSeek could be ordered to alter its models to cause harm, if one were to build upon them, seems to fundamentally misunderstand that DeepSeek is releasing open models. You can’t modify an open model like that. Nor can you steal someone’s data if they’re running their own copy. The parallel to Huawei is disingenuous at best, especially given the source.

They cite the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and claim to expect China to coerce people into using DeepSeek’s models.

For copyright they proclaim the need for ‘freedom to learn’ and asserts that AI training is fully fair use and immune from copyright. I think this is a defensible position, and myself support mandatory licensing similar to radio for music, in a way that compensates creators. I think the position here is defensible. But the rhetoric?

They all but declare that if we don’t apply fair use, the authoritarians will conquer us.

If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI.

It amazes me they wrote that with a straight face. Everything is power laws. Suggesting that depriving American labs of some percentage of data inputs, even if that were to happen and the labs were to honor those restrictions (which I very much do not believe they have typically been doing), would mean ‘the race is effectively over’ is patently absurd. They know that better than anyone. Have they no shame? Are they intentionally trying to tell us that they have no shame? Why?

This document is written in a way that seems almost designed to make one vomit. This is vice signaling. As I have said before, and with OpenAI documents this has happened before, when that happens, I think it is important to notice it!

I don’t think the inducing of vomit is a coincidence. They chose to write it this way. They want people to see that they are touting disingenuous jingoistic propaganda in a way that seems suspiciously corrupt. Why would they want to signal that? You tell me.

You don’t publish something like this unless you actively want headlines like this:

Evan Morrison: Altman translated – if you don’t give Open AI free access to steal all copyrighted material by writers, musicians and filmmakers without legal repercussions then we will lose the AI race with China – a communist nation which nonetheless protects the copyright of individuals.

There are other similar and similarly motivated claims throughout.

The claim that China can circumvent some regulatory restrictions present in America is true enough, and yes that constitutes an advantage that could be critical if we do EU-style things, but the way they frame it goes beyond hyperbolic. Every industry, everywhere, would like to say ‘any requirements you place upon me make our lives harder and helps our competitors, so you need to place no restrictions on us of any kind.’

Then there’s a mix of proposals, some of which are good, presented reasonably:

Their proposal for a ‘National Transmission Highway Act’ on par with the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act seems like it should be overkill, but our regulations in these areas are deeply fed, so if as they suggest here it is focused purely on approvals I am all for that one. They also want piles of government money.

Similarly their idea of AI ‘Opportunity Zones’ is great if it only includes sidestepping permitting and various regulations. The tax incentives or ‘credit enhancements’ I see as an unnecessary handout, private industry is happy to make these investments if we clear the way.

The exception is semiconductor manufacturing, where we do need to provide the right incentives, so we will need to pay up.

Note that OpenAI emphasizes the need for solar and wind projects on top of other energy sources.

Digitization of government data currently in analog form is a great idea, we should do it for many overdetermined reasons. But to point out the obvious, are we then going to hide that data from PRC? It’s not an advantage to American AI companies if everyone gets equal access.

The Compact for AI proposal is vague but directionally seems good.

Their ‘national AI Readiness Strategy’ is part of a long line of ‘retraining’ style government initiatives that, frankly, don’t work, and also aren’t necessary here. I’m fine with expanding 529 savings plans to cover AI supply chain-related training programs, I mean sure why not, but don’t try to do much more than that. The private sector is far better equipped to handle this one, especially with AI help.

I don’t get the ‘creating AI research labs’ strategy here, it seems to be a tax on AI companies payable to universities? This doesn’t actually make economic sense at all.

The section on Government Adaptation of AI is conceptually fine, but the emphasis on private-public partnerships is telling.

Some others are even hasher than I was. Andrew Curran has similar even blunter thoughts on both of the DeepSeek and fair use rhetorical moves.

Alexander Doria: The main reason OpenAI is calling to reinforce fair use for model training: their new models directly compete with writers, journalists, wikipedia editors. We have deep research (a “wikipedia killer”, ditto Noam Brown) and now the creative writing model.

The fundamental doctrine behind the google books transformative exception: you don’t impede on the normal commercialization of the work used. No longer really the case…

We have models trained exclusively on open data.

Gallabytes (on the attempt to ban Chinese AI models): longshoremen level scummy move. @OpenAI this is disgraceful.

As we should have learned many times in the past, most famously with the Jones Act, banning the competition is not The Way. You don’t help your industry compete, you instead risk destroying your industry’s ability to compete.

This week, we saw for example that Saudi Aramco chief says DeepSeek AI makes ‘big difference’ to operations. The correct response is to say, hey, have you tried Claude and ChatGPT, or if you need open models have you tried Gemma? Let’s turn that into a reasoning model for you.

The response that says you’re ngmi? Trying to ban DeepSeek, or saying if you don’t get exemptions from laws then ‘the race is over.’

From Peter Wildeford, seems about right:

The best steelman of OpenAI’s response I’ve seen comes from John Pressman. His argument is, yes there is cringe here – he chooses to focus here on a line about DeepSeek’s willingness to do a variety of illicit activities and a claim that this reflects CCP’s view of violating American IP law. Which is certainly another cringy line. But, he points out, the Trump administration asked how America can get ahead and stay ahead in AI, so in that context why shouldn’t OpenAI respond with a jingoistic move towards regulatory capture and a free pass to do as they want?

And yes, there is that, although his comments also reinforce that the price in ‘gesture towards open model support’ for some people to cheer untold other horrors is remarkably cheap.

This letter is part of a recurring pattern in OpenAI’s public communications.

OpenAI have issued some very good documents on the alignment and technical fronts, including their model spec and statement on alignment philosophy, as well as their recent paper on The Most Forbidden Technique. They have been welcoming of detailed feedback on those fronts. In these places they are being thoughtful and transparent, and doing some good work, and I have updated positively. OpenAI’s actual model deployment decisions have mostly been fine in practice, with some troubling signs such as the attempt to pretend GPT-4.5 was not a frontier model.

Alas, their public relations and lobbying departments, and Altman’s public statements in various places, have been consistently terrible and getting even worse over time, to the point of being consistent and rather blatant vice signaling. OpenAI is intentionally presenting themselves as disingenuous jingoistic villains, seeking out active regulatory protections, doing their best to kill attempts to keep models secure, and attempting various forms of government subsidy and regulatory capture.

I get why they would think it is strategically wise to present themselves in this way, to appeal to both the current government and to investors, especially in the wake of recent ‘vibe shifts.’ So I get why one could be tempted to say, oh, they don’t actually believe any of this, they’re only being strategic, obviously not enough people will penalize them for it so they need to do it, and thus you shouldn’t penalize them for it either, that would only be spite.

I disagree. When people tell you who they are, you should believe them.

Discussion about this post

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Even the worst mass extinction had its oases

Biology, Ecology, end-permian, Great Dying, mass extinction, paleontology, refugee, Science / Kelly Newman / March 18, 2025

Some earlier plants might not have made it through the extinction since rock layers from the onset of the End-Permian Mass Extinction showed a decrease in pollen and spores, as well as fewer plant species. Other species were scarce because they had not been as well-preserved as others; the team did not automatically assume the scarcity of a plant that did not fossilize meant it had gone extinct.

While there were plant species that ended up being victims of the Great Dying, analysis of species through spore and pollen told the team that only about 21 percent of them succumbed to extinction.

Life will not be contained

The fossils also revealed the presence of plant species known to grow near lakes, which meant an environment that most likely provided drinking water for land-dwelling animals. Fossilized spores farther from what were once the banks of an ancient lake or the edge of a lakeplain suggest it was surrounded by a forest of gymnospermous trees, such as conifers or ginkgo, and ferns.

Because the researchers found so many spores from plant species known to grow in humid climates, they think the regional climate before the extinction was either humid or sub-humid, with plenty of rain. It was a lush environment that would see dry periods during the mass extinction event, but not be completely devastated.

Despite some species of plants vanishing, those that were found to have survived during and after the extinction mostly belonged to conifers and pteridosperms (now-extinct plants similar to ferns), which showed “a remarkable ability to adapt to drought,” as Liu and his team said in the same study.

The drought turned out to be only temporary. Younger rock layers were found to contain a greater abundance of pollen and spores from species that grew during the extinction event. The types of plants represented suggest a climate that had returned to subhumid and was more habitable.

Fossils of animals found at the site support its role as a haven for life. From the herbivorous Lystrosaurus (not a dinosaur), which looked something like a walrus with legs and a shovel face, to the carnivorous chroniosuchians that resembled giant lizards and fed on insects and small amphibians, the refugium in what is now Xinjiang kept life going.

Both flora and fauna would soon spread across terrestrial environments once again. Life on land flourished only 75,000 years after the End-Permian Mass Extinction, so life really does find a way.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads5614

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People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions

optical illusion, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / March 18, 2025

A hint came from our previous work comparing mathematical and social scientists’ judgements of illusions (we work in universities, so we sometimes study our colleagues). Social scientists, such as psychologists, see illusions more strongly.

Researchers like us have to take many factors into account. Perhaps this makes us more sensitive to context even in the way we see things. But also, it could be that your visual style affects what you choose to study. One of us (Martin) went to university to study physics, but left with a psychology degree. As it happens, his illusion perception is much stronger than normal.

Training your illusion skills

Despite all these individual differences, researchers have always thought that you have no choice over whether you see the illusion. Our recent research challenges this idea.

Radiologists need to be able to rapidly spot important information in medical scans. Doing this often means they have to ignore surrounding detail.

Radiologists train extensively, so does this make them better at seeing through illusions? We found it does. We studied 44 radiologists, compared to over 100 psychology and medical students.

Below is one of our images. The orange circle on the left is 6% smaller than the one on the right. Most people in the study saw it as larger.

The orange circle on the left is actually smaller Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

Here is another image. Most non-radiologists still saw the left one as bigger. Yet, it is 10% smaller. Most radiologists got this one right.

Does the left orange circle look bigger or smaller to you? Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

It was not until the difference was nearly 18%, as shown in the image below, that most non-radiologists saw through the illusion.

Most people get this one right. Credit: Radoslaw Wincza, The Conversation

Radiologists are not entirely immune to the illusion, but are much less susceptible. We also looked at radiologists just beginning training. Their illusion perception was no better than normal. It seems radiologists’ superior perception is a result of their extensive training.

According to current theories of expertise, this shouldn’t happen. Becoming an expert in chess, for example, makes you better at chess but not anything else. But our findings suggest that becoming an expert in medical image analysis also makes you better at seeing through some optical illusions.

There is plenty left to find out. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that training on optical illusions can improve radiologists’ skills at their own work.

So, how can you learn to see through illusions? Simple. Just five years of medical school, then seven more of radiology training and this skill can be yours too.

Martin Doherty, Associate Professor in Psychology, University of East Anglia and Radoslaw Wincza, Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences, University of Central Lancashire. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Old Bolt, new tricks: Making an EV into a backup power station with an inverter

Cars, Chevy Bolt, chevy bolt euv, DIY, electricity, EVs, Features, inverter, power station, Tech / Kelly Newman / March 17, 2025

Putting big batteries to use

Using a custom kit to make a budget EV offer some emergency power.

Back when EV enthusiasm was higher, there were fits and starts of vehicle-to-home concepts and products. If EVs and their ginormous batteries are expensive, resource-intensive purchases, the thinking went, maybe we should get something more out of them than just groceries and school pick-ups. Maybe we could find other things for that huge battery to do during the 95 percent of time it spends parked in or near our homes.

An EV powering your whole home, or even pushing power back to the grid, is something higher-end EVs might do at some point with some utilities. I have a Chevy Bolt, an EV that does not have even a three-prong 110 V plug on it, let alone power-your-home potential. If I wanted to keep the essentials running during an outage, it seemed like I needed to buy a fuel-based generator—or one of those big portable power stations.

Or so I thought, until I came across inverter kits. Inverters take the direct current available from your vehicle’s 12V battery—the lead-acid brick inside almost every car—and turns it into alternating current suitable for standard plugs. Inverters designed for car batteries have been around a long time (technically, the “cigarette lighter” port on a car is an inverter), opening up both novel and emergency uses. The catch is that you have to start the car’s gas engine often enough to keep the battery charged.

The author’s Chevy Bolt EUV, last seen on Ars Technica exploring the then-new world of Tesla charging with an adapter. Credit: Kevin Purdy

What’s different about this Bolt-specific kit is that, as the inverter pulls power from the 12 V battery, the car’s larger battery, the high-voltage one that makes it actually drive, steadily refills it. And given that it’s an EV without emissions, it’s OK to keep it running in the garage. It’s by no means a whole-home solution—my kit maker, EV Extend, recommends drawing just 1,000 watts of continuous power so as not to drain the battery too far or damage the electronics. But it’s certainly better than having only flashlights, USB battery packs, and the power utility’s website open on your phone.

What can you do with 1,000 W, plus a bit of “surge” overhead for devices that kick on strong, like a refrigerator? I can’t run my home’s central HVAC system, so an outage in the depths of a DC summer, or the occasionally painful winter, would still be unpleasant. There are only three plugs, and they’re inside the car hood, so everything that needs power has to be reached by extension cord (and you don’t want to go too far with those). The car is also unlocked and running, with its key fob nearby, so it can’t be left alone.

But for backup power I never planned to have, in an area where outages are less frequent, I have something like minimum viable backup power. With properly rated extension cords, I could run fans, a small space heater, or a single-room-sized window A/C unit for a day or two on conservative settings. I could, if my fiber provider is still up, keep the Internet and router running. At a minimum, I could keep a lot of distraction devices running with the Bolt’s 64–66 kW battery (assuming I fully charged it before an outage).

I have not had a chance to really test this inverter, as the residential power in Washington, DC has been stubbornly reliable since I bought it. But I did run it for about an hour mid-day to try out some of my assumptions.

What’s in the kit

I bought a $444 kit from EV Extend, which specializes in inverter packages for the non-flashy and early adopter EVs: Chevy Bolts and Volts and Nissan Leafs. I opted for a 1,500 W pure sinewave inverter, capable of briefly handling surges of up to 3,000 W. The inverter itself is a commodity, and you can find it lots of places. The things I was really buying with this kit were:

Quick connect/disconnect couplings for attaching to the 12V battery
A safety fuse between the 12 V battery and inverter
Cables and connectors, cut and crimped and soldered specifically for the angles and spaces of the Bolt’s front compartment
Detailed instructions on how to attach, run, fit, and use everything

The owner of EV Extend makes a point of not offering his instruction manuals publicly. This is in part for “low-volume niche market” reasons. But it’s also because of a real concern that folks will see EV Extend setups, do some “I could rig that together” thinking, and expose themselves to a whole bunch of electrical, mechanical, or safety problems. He’s not opposed to DIY-ers, he writes, so much as he’s concerned about wiring quality and bad assumptions.

From the images on EV Extend’s site and various Reddit installs, you can get the gist. A big brick of an inverter, with two thick cables running to a gray plug, and another gray plug running out from the 12 V battery area, easily tucked away (with velcro) when not in use. You can buy more or less surge protection, opt to skip pure sinewave inversion (not a great idea if you’re powering electronics), or upgrade and get a remote switch. But they are all largely the same.

Among the frequently asked questions on the product page is “will this void my warranty?”

The answer: No, it should not, because the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act still exists, so there needs to be proof that this damaged your 12 V system. But there is also the unwritten caveat that it can still be very painful if your car maker or dealer is not up on their consumer rights laws.

Just a little 12-hour vehicle panic attack

My installation took about 20 minutes. It involved some socket-wrenching, and I had to saw off an inconvenient but inessential plastic bit. The toughest part involved fishing some stiff, thick wire through a space between the coolant tank and a metal bracket (which the manual warned about).

That night, I plugged in the inverter, turned on the Bolt, flipped on the inverter, and plugged in a USB-C wall plug. I connected an iPad, it started charging, and I felt a weird sense of accomplishment at having found one of the most expensive and inefficient ways to watch YouTube. For a few hours, I held some project-completing pride.

iPad charging on top of a car trunk, with an inverter visible in the background. — That feeling of project success, which would remain unfettered by diagnostic warnings until the author checked his phone. Credit: Kevin Purdy

Later that night, the myChevrolet app flung about a dozen notifications at me. The gist: Every single system on the Bolt was failing, I needed to have it towed to a dealer, and I was wrong to try and redistribute its precious electrons. These were bad messages to receive in the middle of brushing my teeth, and sleep did not come easy.

Why the panic? The majority of EVs, however sophisticated, are heavily dependent on their old-fashioned 12 V batteries. This is due in part to how many of an EV’s ancilliaries—locks, lights, infotainment, power steering, and more—are designed to run at 12 V, in common with the rest of the auto industry. But it’s also because when an EV’s higher-voltage traction battery is off, it needs to be fully off and de-energized, and the 12 V helps switch it off and keep residual systems running (Inside EVs has a good explainer on this). Disconnecting my 12 V battery, even for just a minute to attach a connector, gave the car fits about lacking this crucial reserve of juice.

It’s weird, and it can be quite frustrating in the wrong circumstances. But the next morning, I started the Bolt, let it idle for a few minutes, and all the divinations of doom disappeared from the Chevy app. Six months later, I have yet to see any others. I’ve taken my car in for a general check-up since, and the mechanic made no note of my velcro-anchored connector.

A deeper test: Pretend office outage

The inverter hook-ups were set, but household power remained stubbornly stable for months, so I decided to stage a pretend outage. Could the Bolt keep me and my wife reasonably comfortable in my office, the next room over from the garage? Could I keep a space heater or window air conditioning unit running, with occasional kick-on surges? What about the fridge? And how annoying would it be to have the car running in neutral in my garage the whole time?

Here’s what I figured could fit into 1,000 W from the inverter and its three plugs, using appropriately sized and rated extension cords:

At their lowest settings, either a bigger space heater (750 W), or a 15,000 BTU window unit (350–450 W, running roughly 50 percent of the time)
The fiber optic network terminal (ONT) and my Ubiquity network gear (Dream Machine Pro and two power-over-Ethernet access points)
My whole working desk setup: monitor, M2 MacBook Air, Sonos speakers, too many peripherals
If possible, the refrigerator (typically 60 W, with surges up to 1,200 W and defrost cycles at 240 W)
A bit of overhead, should I need to run anything else, like lamps, off my desk’s power strip

I unplugged the Bolt, opened the hood, placed the inverter on a reasonably flat part of the compartment (next time, I will have a flat piece of wood to place there), turned on the car, and flipped on the inverter. So far, so good!

Because the car was in park, it would automatically shut itself off after two hours. A number of committed campers and preppers on Reddit have suggested putting the car in neutral, engaging the parking brake (or putting chocks behind the rear wheels), and exiting the car from the passenger side (as opening the driver side door can make the car auto-shift for safety). Because it’s not in park at a low speed, the Bolt will make a whirring noise for pedestrian safety. I could temporarily cancel it by pulling the right fuse from the engine compartment box, so long as I left a note for myself with big letters to put it back in.

I first plugged in my desk and all its accompaniments, then nudged and woke up my laptop and monitor: 14.7 watts. That seemed a bit low, given that monitors are typically more than 20 watts, but the inverter is perhaps slow to report the full draw. Still, there was lots of headroom remaining.

Adding in the fiber optic modem, the Dream Machine Pro router (specified at a 50 W maximum power draw), and its PoE-based devices boosted the number to 90 watts. That left 910 watts, which felt like a lot until I plugged in the big space heater and set it to its lowest setting. Once the heater had been on for a bit, I was at 850–860 watts, combined with the other gear. I knew space heaters were inefficient in a broad sense, but now that fact is burned into my brain in little red digits.

All three plugs in—desk, networking gear, space heater—and the 850 watts the inverter eventually settled at once the heater ran a while. Credit: Kevin Purdy

All these things ran off the inverter for about 30 minutes (I wrote the previous two paragraphs with mostly inverter power), floating between 810 and 920 watts, and I saw the car’s projected mileage dip one mile when I checked on it. If I had the Bolt fully charged, I might get a maximum of 60 hours of this, or 48 hours at my typical 80 percent charge, give or take some resistance and use variables. Given what I learned, I would need to use a smaller space heater or very light air conditioning if I also wanted to keep the fridge running without nervous monitoring (and make up for some loss to an extension cord). That, or hope the power only goes out during comfortable temperatures.

But I’m using the Bolt and inverter as a just-in-case option, not something I would lean on if regular multi-day outages were occurring. It would also be quite useful for car camping, though I can’t speak to that personally. The process has, like most DIY projects, taught me some things: about power draw, EVs, and my priorities. If you have a similarly nifty but not exactly new EV, consider checking out your inversion options for it—after you fully understand the limits and know-how required.

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

Old Bolt, new tricks: Making an EV into a backup power station with an inverter Read More »

Behind the scenes of The Electric State

culture, Entertainment, netflix, production design, Russo brothers, Simon Stalenhag, streaming television, the electric state / Kelly Newman / March 16, 2025

The directors adopted more of a colorful 1990s aesthetic than the haunting art that originally inspired their film. While some fans of Stålenhag’s work expressed disappointment at this artistic choice, the artist himself had nothing but praise. “When you paint or draw something, you can do anything,” Stålenhag has said. ‘There are no constraints other than the time you spend painting. To see a live action movie make something I painted and to see it so truthfully translated impressed me on all levels.”

Bringing a vision to life

The task of bringing that aesthetic to the screen fell to people like Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner, whose many credits include Barton Fink, Bugsy, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Truman Show, Blade Runner 2049, Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, Spectre, Into the Woods, and Big Fish. (In fact, there’s a carousel featured in the design of the Happyland amusement park that Gassner first used in Big Fish.) He and Richard L. Johnson (Pacific Rim, The Avengers) led a team that not only designed and constructed more than 100 sets for the film, but also created a host of original robot characters to augment the ones featured in Stålenhag’s book.

On set during filming of The Electric State Netflix

All the robots featured in the film have their own stories, “distinct personalities and emotional arcs,” per Anthony Russo. The directors wanted the robots to “feel authentic to the alternate 1990s but still had roots in recognizable designs,” according to Joe Russo—the kinds of things one would see in vintage commercials, shopping malls, corporate branding, and so forth. “Everything is story,” Gassner told Ars. “Story is paramount. What story are you telling? Who are the characters in this story? What are their environments? How do they feel within the environments?”

Gassner’s team designed about 175 robots all told, selecting their favorites to be featured in the final film. “It’s like a great casting call,” Gassner said. “So we played a lot, there was a long time of development in the art department between myself and a vast team of artists. We worked very closely with the visual effects department, but what the characters look like are part of the art department, and our collaboration with Joe and Anthony Russo on the study of characters. That was the fun part, getting the shape right, the character right, the color right, the clothing right.”

Behind the scenes of The Electric State Read More »

I threw away Audible’s app, and now I self-host my audiobooks

audible, Audiobooks, books, digital rights management, DRM, self-hosted, Tech / Kelly Newman / March 16, 2025

Stream your DRM-free audiobooks to devices yourselves, without the cloud’s chains.

We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We’ve collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon’s Audible) and from older physical “books on tape” (most of which are actually on CDs). I don’t mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible’s app to play things directly—it’s (sometimes) quick, it’s (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app’s “Library” button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the “right” way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

Screenshot of Lee's library — Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Audiobookshelf

Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server, and after two weeks of use, so far it works vastly better than trying to stream within Audible’s app. My wife can now actually listen to audiobooks instead of staring at a spinning loading icon forever.

To get Audiobookshelf running, you need something to run it on—a spare desktop or other computer you’re not using should fit the bill, as Audiobookshelf’s requirements are relatively meager. You can either install it via a Docker image, or on bare metal on Windows or several different Linux distros. (The Linux distro installations include a repository for handling updates via your system’s update method, so you won’t have to be manually installing releases willy-nilly.)

Since I already have a Proxmox instance up and running on my LAN, I chose to install Audiobookshelf inside an Ubuntu 24.04 LXC container using the “bare metal” method. It’s not particularly resource-intensive, using about 150MB of RAM at idle; as noted above, if you don’t have a server handy, running Audiobookshelf via Docker on your desktop or laptop shouldn’t be much of a burden on your memory or CPU. (It does suck up a fair amount of processing power when it’s bulk-importing or matching books in your library, but these aren’t things you’ll be doing terribly often.)

Screenshot of htop — Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Getting it going

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf installed via your preferred method, your next stop is creating and then populating your library. You can do this directly in the application’s web interface, if desired:

Screenshot of Audiobookshelf upload page — You can populate your library via Audiobookshelf’s upload page, if desired. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

I chose to do it the old-fashioned way and copy files into the library location myself, which also works.

There are a number of ways to make sure Audiobookshelf properly ingests and categorizes your books; first, it is aware of and respects metadata tags if your books have them. If your files lack tags, the Audiobookshelf docs provide several other methods of organization using file and directory structure. Between tags and being able to just name things per the guide, I had no problem uploading all 300-ish of my books into Audiobookshelf, with no misses or mismatches.

Of course, this all presupposes that you’ve got some DRM-free audiobooks. There are plenty of sources where you can get books free of charge—like Librivox, for example. If you’re using pay sites like Audible, you’ll want to actually log in to your library via a web browser and download each audiobook locally; this will give you a pile of files in .AAX format or something similar—which leads to a significant caveat.

The DRM elephant in the room

While books that come on audio CDs don’t have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won’t play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.

Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. “In the US, the law against ‘circumventing’ effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country,” explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. “That’s as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy.”

And that means you’re kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with.

Playing things

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf set up and your DRM-free books stuffed into it, the last piece of the puzzle is an app to actually listen to books with. There is an official Audiobookshelf app, and if you’re an Android user you can grab it right here. The iOS app is perpetually stuck in beta and requires Test Flight, but there are third-party alternatives.

Personally, I’ve been using Plappa, and I’ve found it to be not just perfectly acceptable, but also more responsive and less prone to crashing than Apple’s own Books app (not to mention there’s no annoying in-app audiobook store page always trying to get in my face!).

Administrating things

Audiobookshelf itself has plenty of tunable options for the home system administrator who just can’t leave well enough alone; I’ve found most of the defaults are exactly what I want, but there’s tons of stuff to tweak if you want to do the tweaking.

Notably, Audiobookshelf supports multiple libraries if you want more organizational options. It has accounts you can set up for different listeners, logging options, notification options, RSS support, and a whole mess of other things I honestly haven’t even looked at yet. The good news for me is that you don’t have to look at any of that stuff if you don’t want to—Audiobookshelf is set up to be workable right out of the box.

But what if I’m not home?

Sharper readers might already have spotted a major problem with self-hosting audiobooks on one’s LAN: How do you listen when you’re not on the LAN?

This is probably worth another article, but the way I’m tackling this particular problem is with a local instance of Wireguard and a VPN profile on my mobile devices. When I’m out and about or in the car or whatever, I can tap the “VPN” shortcut on my iOS home screen, and boom—Plappa is now able to see Audiobookshelf, and streaming works just as well as it does at home.

One potential concern for doing this is cellular data usage, but this fear seems minor. The biggest audiobook I’ve got is a cool multicast recording of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which weighs in at about 2.4GB—so, the most data I’m going to transfer even for my biggest audiobook is 2.4GB max, and that’d only be if I listened to all hillion-jillion hours of Dune at the same time. And depending on the app you’re using for playback, you’ll likely also have the option to download the books to your device and listen to them locally, without streaming. (This is true for Plappa, at least.)

Self-hosting happiness achieved

I glossed over a lot of the setup steps to keep this a relatively short piece, but even so, getting Audiobookshelf going is a relatively simple self-hosting task, as self-hosting tasks go.

We also haven’t talked about Audiobookshelf’s other major feature: podcast hosting. I’m not a big podcast kind of guy (I tend to prefer audiobooks if I have time to listen to something), but Audiobookshelf is also (purportedly) great for hosting a giant pile of podcasts. If those are your jam, then that’s another point for Audiobookshelf.

I can’t vouch for the podcasting bits, but I can say that it’s gratifying to have solved a problem—especially one that was driving my wife crazy, and any day I can solve a problem for her via nerdery and server-wrangling is a good day. At least as of right now, the Audible app on her phone remains nonfunctional for reasons that are beyond me, but with luck—and a bit of ongoing care and maintenance for the server in the closet where this stuff all lives now—neither of us will ever have to deal with that app again.

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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The same day Trump bought a Tesla, automaker moved to disrupt trade war

Donald Trump, Electric vehicles, elon musk, EVs, Policy, tariffs, Tesla / Kelly Newman / March 16, 2025

Tesla hopes to slow down Trump’s tit-for-tat tariffs amid financial woes.

Donald Trump and White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk deliver remarks next to a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy.

In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports.

“Tesla supports a robust and thorough process” to “address unfair trade practices,” but only those “which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies,” the letter said.

The carmaker recommended that the USTR—in its ongoing review of unfair trade practices and investigation into harms of non-reciprocal trade agreements—”consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices.”

According to Tesla, the current process to address unfair trade threatens to harm its more than 70,000 employees, and more broadly could trigger job losses and revenue dips in the US auto industry. It could also disrupt supply chains, as Tesla claims that even its best efforts prove it would be “impossible” to source all parts from the US currently.

“Even with aggressive localization of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States,” the letter said, asking the USTR to “evaluate domestic supply chain limitations.”

If left unchanged, the process could make the US less competitive in global auto markets, Tesla warned, recommending that the “USTR should investigate ways to avoid these pitfalls in future actions.”

Moving forward, Tesla recommends that the USTR “take into account” how the trade war could hurt US exporters, as “US exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to US trade actions.”

In the letter, Tesla appears to suggest that Trump’s tariffs were rushed, suggesting that “US companies will benefit from a phased approach that enables them to prepare accordingly and ensure appropriate supply chain and compliance measures are taken.”

Tesla was not alone in submitting comments to the USTR. So far, hundreds of companies have chimed in, many hoping to push back on Trump’s aggressive tariffs regime.

Among them was a trade group representing major foreign automakers like BMW, Honda, and Toyota—Autos Drive America—which agreed with Tesla that the USTR should slow Trump down and require considerations about long-term impacts of sudden actions to address unfair trade. They similarly warned that imposing “broad-based tariffs will disrupt production at US assembly plants,” Reuters reported.

“Automakers cannot shift their supply chains overnight, and cost increases will inevitably lead to some combination of higher consumer prices, fewer models offered to consumers and shut-down US production lines, leading to potential job losses across the supply chain,” the group said.

Disrupting Trump trade war may be tough

Last week, Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, likely frustrating Tesla, which relies on a small parts manufacturer in Canada, Laval Tool, to source parts for the already costly molds for its Cybertrucks. Those tariffs threatened to spike costs beyond the current rate of nearly $500,000 per mold at a time when the Cybertruck hasn’t been selling well, InsideEVs reported. And for Tesla, Trump’s China tariffs may hit even harder, as China is Tesla’s second biggest market.

On the day that those tariffs kicked in, the head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation—which represents all the major US automakers, except Tesla—John Bozzella warned that “all automakers will be impacted by these tariffs on Canada and Mexico,” Reuters reported. He joined others predicting price hikes on cars coming soon, perhaps as high as 25 percent.

Tesla’s letter to the USTR is notably unsigned, despite CEO Musk’s close allyship with Trump as a senior advisor in his administration—suggesting Musk may be hesitant to directly criticize Trump’s trade war or his opposition to EVs.

Many have questioned how long Musk’s friendship with Trump can possibly last, given their strong personalities and seeming unwillingness to bend to critics. At the beginning of this administration, Musk seemed unafraid to question Trump despite teaming up with him. Perhaps most notably, Trump’s team was supposedly “furious” after Musk trashed Trump’s $500 billion “Stargate” project with OpenAI, Politico reported, which Trump had hyped as “tremendous” and “monumental.”

“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” a Trump ally granted anonymity told Politico. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks.”

Officially, Trump downplayed Musk’s public criticism of his major announcement, seeming to understand that Musk views OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—whom Musk is suing for making a “fool” out of him—as an enemy.

“He hates one of the people in the deal,” Trump told a reporter who asked if Musk’s comments had bothered him, confirming, “it doesn’t.”

Despite a long history of harsh comments about EVs, Trump has recently hyped Tesla cars, which Tesla noted in its letter to the USTR, further its mission “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” The BBC noted Tesla’s letter was sent the same day that Trump hosted a White House event where the president vowed to purchase a Tesla in defiance of Tesla boycotts and protests that some believe are driving a steep Tesla stock fall and even degrading the price of used Teslas. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that he was buying a Tesla to support “one of the World’s great automakers” and “Elon’s ‘baby,'” alleging that protests and boycotts were somehow illegal.

The Hill suggested that their friendship isn’t likely to end soon, even though Trump has supposedly complained in private about taunts suggesting that Musk is really the president or somehow pulling the strings, The Independent reported.

Musk may be settling into a good dynamic with Trump after spending ample time at the president’s side, reportedly even joining meetings and sensitive calls. Or perhaps Musk is giving Trump space to call the shots, after Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s aggressive cuts at federal agencies sparked backlash that finally pushed Trump to rein in Musk’s power a little.

Musk’s proximity to Trump was predicted to be a boon to his businesses, but Tesla has been stuck in a slump that seemingly some Trump allies think Trump might fear makes him look weak, The New Republic reported. But Trump has made tariffs the core of his trade policy, hoping aggressive taxes will force more industry into the US, and it’s hard to see how Musk could easily influence him to shift gears.

In Tesla’s letter, the automaker told the USTR that it was “essential to support US manufacturing jobs” by ensuring that cost-prohibitive tariffs or other import restrictions don’t disrupt critical auto industry supply chains. For Tesla, the stakes couldn’t be higher, as the company reminded the USTR that “Tesla was ranked as the world leader in the transition to vehicle electrification,” manufacturing “the best-selling car in the world (EV or otherwise).”

“Tesla’s US facilities support over 70,000 employees and are responsible for billions of dollars of US investment and economic activity each year,” Tesla’s letter said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

The same day Trump bought a Tesla, automaker moved to disrupt trade war Read More »

Scoop: Origami measuring spoon incites fury after 9 years of Kickstarter delay hell

Crowdfunding, Features, fraud, Kickstarter, Policy, shopify, tiktok / Kelly Newman / March 16, 2025

The curious case of the missing Kickstarter spoons.

An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons.

The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design.

Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. “Regular spoons are so 3000 BC,” a tagline on the project’s website joked.

For gadget geeks, it’s a neat example of thinking outside of the box, and fans found it appealing to potentially replace a drawer full of spoons with a more futuristic-looking compact tool. Most backers signed up for a single set, paying $8–$12 each, while hundreds wanted up to 25 sets, a handful ordered 50, and just one backer signed up for 100. Delivery was initially promised by 2017, supposedly shipping to anywhere in the world.

But it’s been about nine years since more than 30,000 backers flocked to the Kickstarter campaign—raising more than $1 million and eclipsing Polygons’ $10,000 goal. And not only have more than a third of the backers not received their spoons, but now, after years of updates claiming that the spoons had been shipped, some backers began to wonder if the entire campaign might be a fraud. They could see that Polygons are currently being sold on social media and suspected that the maker might be abusing backers’ funds to chase profits, seemingly without ever seriously intending to fulfill their orders.

One Kickstarter backer, Caskey Hunsader, told Ars that he started doubting if the spoon’s designer—an inventor from India, Rahul Agarwal—was even a real person.

Ars reached out to verify Agarwal’s design background. We confirmed that, yes, Agarwal is a real designer, and, yes, he believes there is a method to the madness when it comes to his Kickstarter campaign, which he said was never intended to be a scam or fraud and is currently shipping spoons to backers. He forecasted that 2025 is likely the year that backers’ wait will finally end.

But as thousands of complaints on the Kickstarter attest, backers have heard that one before. It’s been two years since the last official update was posted, which only promised updates that never came and did not confirm that shipments were back on track. The prior update in 2022 promised that “the time has finally arrived when we begin bulk shipping to everyone!”

Hunsader told Ars that people seem mostly upset because of “bullshit,” which is widely referenced in the comments. And that anger is compounded “by the fact that they are producing, and they are selling this product, so they are operating their business using funds that all these people who were their first backers gave them, and we’re the ones who are not getting the product. I think that’s where the anger comes from.”

“It’s been years now, and [I’ve] watched as you promise good people their products and never deliver,” one commenter wrote. “Wherever you try… to sell [your] products, we will be there reminding them of the empty orders you left here.”

“Where is my item? I am beyond angry,” another fumed.

Those who did receive their spoons often comment on the substantial delays, but reviews are largely positive.

“Holy crap, folks,” a somewhat satisfied backer wrote. “Hell has frozen over. I finally got them (no BS).”

One backer was surprised to get twice as many spoons as expected, referencing an explanation blaming Chinese New Year for one delay and writing, “I can honestly say after 8 years… and an enormous amount of emails, I finally received my pledge. Except… I only ordered 3… and I received 6. I’d be inclined to ship some back to Polygons… bare with me… I’ll return them soon… I appreciate your patience… mebbe after Chinese New Years 2033…”

Agarwal agreed to meet with Ars, show us the spoon, and explain why backers still haven’t gotten their deliveries when the spoon appears widely available to purchase online.

Failing prototypes and unusable cheap knockoffs

As a designer, Agarwal is clearly a perfectionist. He was just a student when he had the idea for Polygons in 2014, winning design awards and garnering interest that encouraged him to find a way to manufacture the spoons. He felt eager to see people using them.

Agarwal told Ars that before he launched the Kickstarter, he had prototypes made in China that were about 85 percent of the quality that he and his collaborators at InventIndia required. Anticipating that the quality would be fully there soon, Agarwal launched the Kickstarter, along with marketing efforts that Agarwal said had to be squashed due to unexpectedly high interest in the spoons.

This is when things started spiraling, as Agarwal had to switch manufacturers five times, with each partner crashing into new walls trying to execute the novel product.

Once the Kickstarter hit a million dollars, though, Agarwal committed to following through on launching the product. Eventually, cheap knockoff versions began appearing online on major retail sites like Walmart and Amazon toward the end of 2024. Because Agarwal has patents and trademarks for his design, he can get the knockoffs taken down, but they proved an important point that Agarwal had learned the hard way: that his design, while appearing simplistic, was incredibly hard to pull off.

Ars handled both a legitimate Polygons spoon and a cheap knockoff. The knockoff was a flimsy, unusable slab of rubber dotted with magnets; the companies aping Agarwal’s idea are seemingly unable to replicate the manufacturing process that Agarwal has spent years perfecting to finally be able to widely ship Polygons today.

On the other hand, Agarwal’s spoon is sturdy, uses food-grade materials, and worked just as well measuring wet and dry ingredients during an Ars test. A silicon hinge connects 19 separate plastic pieces and ensures that magnets neatly snap along indented lines indicating if the measurement is a quarter, half, or whole teaspoon or tablespoon. It took Agarwal two and a half years to finalize the design while working with InventIndia, a leading product development firm in India. Prototyping required making special molds that took a month each to iterate rather than using a 3D-printing shortcut whereby multiple prototypes could be made in a day, which Agarwal said he’d initially anticipated could be possible.

Around the time that the prototyping process concluded, Agarwal noted, COVID hit, and supply chains were disrupted, causing production setbacks. Once production could resume, costs became a factor, as estimates used to set Kickstarter backer awards were based on the early failed Chinese prototype, and the costs of producing a functioning spoon were much higher. Over time, shipping costs also rose.

As Kickstarter funds dwindled, there was no going back, so Agarwal devised a plan to sell the spoons for double the price ($25–$30 a set) by marketing them on social media, explaining this in a note to backers posted on the Polygons site. Those sales would fund ongoing manufacturing, allowing profits to be recycled so that Kickstarter backers could gradually receive shipments dependent on social media sales volumes. Orders from anyone who paid extra for expedited shipping are prioritized.

It’s a math problem at this point, with more funding needed to scale. But Agarwal told Ars that sales on Shopify and TikTok Shop have increased each quarter, most recently selling 30,000 units on TikTok, which allowed Polygons to take out a bigger line of credit to fund more manufacturing. He also brought in a more experienced partner to focus on the business side while he optimizes production.

Agarwal told Ars that he understands trust has been broken with many Kickstarter backers, considering that totally fair. While about 38 percent of backers’ orders still need filling, he predicts that all backers could get their orders within the next six to eight months as Polygons becomes better resourced, but that still depends on social media sales.

Agarwal met Ars after attending a housewares show in Chicago, where he shopped the spoons with retailers who may also help scale the product in the coming years. He anticipates that as the business scales, the cost of the spoons will come back down. And he may even be able to move onto executing other product designs that have been on the backburner as he attempts to work his way out of the Kickstarter corner he backed himself into while obsessing over his first design.

Kickstarter problem goes beyond Polygons

Hunsader told Ars there’s a big difference “in a lie versus bad management,” suggesting that as a business owner who has managed Kickstarter campaigns, he thinks more transparency likely could’ve spared Polygons a lot of angry comments.

“I am not sitting here with a dart board with [Agarwal’s] face on it, being like, when am I going to get my damn spoons?” Hunsader joked. But the campaign’s Kickstarter messaging left many backers feeling like Polygons took backers’ money and ran, Hunsader said.

Unlike people who saw the spoons going viral on social media, Hunsader discovered Polygons just by scrolling on Kickstarter. As a fan of geeky gadgets, he used to regularly support campaigns, but his experience supporting Polygons and monitoring other cases of problematic Kickstarters have made him more hesitant to use the platform without more safeguards for backers.

“It’s not specifically a Polygons problem,” Hunsader told Ars. “The whole Kickstarter thing needs maybe just more protections in place.”

Kickstarter did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But Kickstarter’s “accountability” policy makes clear that creators “put their reputation at risk” launching campaigns and are ultimately responsible for following through on backer promises. Kickstarter doesn’t issue refunds or guarantee projects, only providing limited support when backers report “suspicious activity.”

Redditors have flagged “shitty” Kickstarter campaigns since 2012, three years after the site’s founding, and the National Association of Attorneys General—which represents US state attorneys general—suggested in 2019 that disgruntled crowdfunding backers were increasingly turning to consumer protection laws to fight alleged fraud.

In 2015, an independent analysis by the University of Pennsylvania estimated that 9 percent of Kickstarter projects didn’t fulfill their rewards. More recently, it appeared that figure had doubled, as Fortune reported last year that an internal Kickstarter estimate put “the amount of revenue that comes from fraudulent projects as high as 18 percent.” A spokesperson disputed that estimate and told Fortune that the platform employs “extensive” measures to detect fraud.

Agarwal told Ars that he thinks it’s uncommon for a campaign to continue fulfilling backer rewards after eight years of setbacks. It would be easier to just shut down and walk away, and Kickstarter likely would not have penalized him for it. While the Kickstarter campaign allowed him to reach his dream of seeing people using his novel measuring spoon in the real world, it’s been bittersweet that the campaign has dragged out so long and kept the spoons out of the hands of his earliest supporters, he told Ars.

Hunsader told Ars that he hopes the Polygons story serves as a “cautionary tale” for both backers and creators who bite off more than they can chew when launching a Kickstarter campaign. He knows that designers like Agarwal can take a reputational hit.

“I don’t want to make somebody who has big dreams not want to dream, but you also, when you’re dealing with things like manufacturing technology, have to be realistic about what is and is not accomplishable,” Hunsader said.

Polygons collaborators at InventIndia told Ars that Agarwal is “dedicated and hard-working,” describing him as “someone deeply committed to delivering a product that meets the highest standards” and whose intentions have “always” been to “ship a perfect product.”

Agarwal’s team connected with Hunsader to schedule his Kickstarter reward shipment on Friday. Hunsader told Ars he doesn’t really care if it takes another nine years. It’s just a spoon, and “there are bigger fish to fry.”

“Listen, I can buy that narrative that he was somebody who got totally overwhelmed but handled it in the worst possible way ever,” Hunsader said.

He plans to continue patiently waiting for his spoons.

This story was updated on March 14 to update information on the Polygons Kickstarter campaign.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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The Wheel of Time is back for season three, and so are our weekly recaps

culture, Features, tv recap, wheel of time, wheel of time season 3 / Kelly Newman / March 15, 2025

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon’s WoT TV series. Now we’re back in the saddle for season three—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We’ll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there’s always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers the entire three-episode season premiere, which was released on March 13.

Lee: Welcome back! Holy crap, has it only been 18 months since we left our broken and battered heroes standing in tableaux, with the sign of the Dragon flaming above Falme? Because it feels like it’s been about ten thousand years.

Andrew: Yeah, I’m not saying I want to return to the days when every drama on TV had 26 hour-long episodes per season, but when you’re doing one eight-episode run every year-and-a-half-to-two-years, you really feel those gaps. And maybe it’s just [waves arms vaguely at The World], but I am genuinely happy to have this show back.

This season’s premiere simply whips, balancing big action set-pieces and smaller character moments in between. But the whole production seems to be hitting a confident stride. The cast has gelled; they know what book stuff they’re choosing to adapt and what they’re going to skip. I’m sure there will still be grumbles, but the show does finally feel like it’s become its own thing.

Rosamund Pike returns as as Moiraine Damodred. Credit: Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: Oh yeah. The first episode hits the ground running, with explosions and blood and stolen ter’angreal. And we’ve got more than one episode to talk about—the gods of production at Amazon have given us a truly gigantic three-episode premiere, with each episode lasting more than an hour. Our content cup runneth over!

Trying to straight-up recap three hours of TV isn’t going to happen in the space we have available, so we’ll probably bounce around a bit. What I wanted to talk about first was exactly what you mentioned: unlike seasons one and two, this time, the show seems to have found itself and locked right in. To me, it feels kind of like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season versus its first two.

Andrew: That’s a good point of comparison. I feel like a lot of TV shows fall into one of two buckets: either it starts with a great first season and gradually falls off, or it gets off to a rocky start and finds itself over time. Fewer shows get to take the second path because a “show with a rocky start” often becomes a “canceled show,” but they can be more satisfying to watch.

The one Big Overarching Plot Thing to know for book readers is that they’re basically doing book 4 (The Shadow Rising) this season, with other odds and ends tucked in. So even if it gets canceled after this, at least they will have gotten to do what I think is probably the series’ high point.

Lee: Yep, we find out in our very first episode this season that we’re going to be heading to the Aiel Waste rather than the southern city of Tear, which is a significant re-ordering of events from the books. But unlike some of the previous seasons’ changes that feel like they were forced upon the show by outside factors (COVID, actors leaving, and so on), this one feels like it serves a genuine narrative purpose. Rand is reciting the Prophesies of the Dragon to himself and he knows he needs the “People of the Dragon” to guarantee success in Tear, and while he’s not exactly sure who the “People of the Dragon” might be, it’s obvious that Rand has no army as of yet. Maybe the Aiel can help?

Rand is doing all of this because both the angel and the devil on Rand’s shoulders—that’s the Aes Sedai Moiraine Damodred with cute blue angel wings and the Forsaken Lanfear in fancy black leather BDSM gear—want him wielding Callandor, The Sword That is Not a Sword (as poor Mat Cauthon explains in the Old Tongue). This powerful sa’angreal is located in the heart of the Stone of Tear (it’s the sword in the stone, get it?!), and its removal from the Stone is a major prophetic sign that the Dragon has indeed come again.

Book three is dedicated to showing how all that happens—but, like you said, we’re not in book three anymore. We’re gonna eat our book 4 dessert before our book 3 broccoli!

Natasha O’Keeffe as Lanfear. Credit: Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: I like book 4 a lot (and I’d include 5 and 6 here too) because I think it’s when Robert Jordan was doing his best work balancing his worldbuilding and politicking with the early books’ action-adventure stuff, and including multiple character perspectives without spreading the story so thin that it could barely move forward. Book 3 was a stepping stone to this because the first two books had mainly been Rand’s, and we spend almost no time in Rand’s head in book 3. But you can’t do that in a TV show! So they’re mixing it up. Good! I am completely OK with this.

Lee:What did you think of Queen Morgase’s flashback introduction where we see how she won the Lion Throne of Andor (flanked by a pair of giant lions that I’m pretty sure came straight from Pier One Imports)? It certainly seemed a bit… evil.

Andrew: One of the bigger swerves that the show has taken with an established book character, I think! And well before she can claim to have been under the control of a Forsaken. (The other swerves I want to keep tabs on: Moiraine actively making frenemies with Lanfear to direct Rand, and Lan being the kind of guy who would ask Rand if he “wants to talk about it” when Rand is struggling emotionally. That one broke my brain, the books would be half as long as they are if men could openly talk to literally any other men about their states of mind.)

But I am totally willing to accept that Morgase change because the alternative is chapters and chapters of people yapping about consolidating political support and daes dae’mar and on and on. Bo-ring!

But speaking of Morgase and Forsaken, we’re starting to spend a little time with all the new baddies who got released at the end of last season. How do you feel about the ones we’ve met so far? I know we were generally supportive of the fact that the show is just choosing to have fewer of them in the first place.

Lee: Hah, I loved the contrast with Book Lan, who appears to only be capable of feeling stereotypically manly feelings (like rage, shame, or the German word for when duty is heavier than a mountain, which I’m pretty sure is something like “Bergpflichtenschwerengesellschaften”). It continues to feel like all of our main characters have grown up significantly from their portrayals on the page—they have sex, they use their words effectively, and they emotionally support each other like real people do in real life. I’m very much here for that particular change.

But yes, the Forsaken. We know from season two that we’re going to be seeing fewer than in the books—I believe we’ve got eight of them to deal with, and we meet almost all of them in our three-episode opening blast. I’m very much enjoying Moghedien’s portrayal by Laia Costa, but of course Lanfear is stealing the show and chewing all the scenery. It will be fascinating to see how the show lets the others loose—we know from the books that every one of the Forsaken has a role to play (including one specific Forsaken whose existence has yet to be confirmed but who figures heavily into Rand learning more about how the One Power works), and while some of those roles can be dropped without impacting the story, several definitely cannot.

And although Elaida isn’t exactly a Forsaken, it was awesome to see Shohreh Aghdashloo bombing around the White Tower looking fabulous as hell. Chrisjen Avasarala would be proud.

The boys, communicating and using their words like grown-ups. Credit: Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Maybe I’m exaggerating but I think Shohreh Aghdashloo’s actual voice goes deeper than Hammed Animashaun’s lowered-in-post-production voice for Loial. It’s an incredible instrument.

Meeting Morgase in these early episodes means we also meet Gaebril, and the show only fakes viewers out for a few scenes before revealing what book-readers know: that he’s the Forsaken Rahvin. But I really love how these scenes play, particularly his with Elayne. After one weird, brief look, they fall into a completely convincing chummy, comfortable stepdad-stepdaughter relationship, and right after that, you find out that, oops, nope, he’s been there for like 15 minutes and has successfully One Power’d everyone into believing he’s been in their lives for decades.

It’s something that we’re mostly told-not-shown in the books, and it really sells how powerful and amoral and manipulative all these characters are. Trust is extremely hard to come by in Randland, and this is why.

Lee: I very much liked the way Gaebril’s/Rahvin’s crazy compulsion comes off, and I also like the way Nuno Lopes is playing Gaebril. He seems perhaps a little bumbling, and perhaps a little self-effacing—truly, a lovable uncle kind of guy. The kind of guy who would say “thank you” to a servant and smile at children playing. All while, you know, plotting the downfall of the kingdom. In what is becoming a refrain, it’s a fun change from the books.

And along the lines of unassuming folks, we get our first look at a Gray Man and the hella creepy mechanism by which they’re created. I can’t recall in the books if Moghedien is explicitly mentioned as being able to fashion the things, but she definitely can in the show! (And it looks uncomfortable as hell. “Never accept an agreement that involves the forcible removal of one’s soul” is an axiom I try to live by.)

Olivia Williams as Queen Morgase Trakand and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Elaida do Avriny a’Roihan. Credit: Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: It’s just one of quite a few book things that these first few episodes speedrun. Mat has weird voices in his head and speaks in tongues! Egwene and Elayne pass the Accepted test! (Having spent most of an episode on Nynaeve’s Accepted test last season, the show yada-yadas this a bit, showing us just a snippet of Egwene’s Rand-related trials and none of Elayne’s test at all.) Elayne’s brothers Gawyn and Galad show up, and everyone thinks they’re very hot, and Mat kicks their asses! The Black Ajah reveals itself in explosive fashion, and Siuan can only trust Elayne and Nynaeve to try and root them out! Min is here! Elayne and Aviendha kiss, making more of the books’ homosexual subtext into actual text! But for the rest of the season, we split the party in basically three ways: Rand, Egwene, Moiraine and company head with Aviendha to the Waste, so that Rand can make allies of the Aiel. Perrin and a few companions head home to the Two Rivers and find that things are not as they left them. Nynaeve and Elayne are both dealing with White Tower intrigue. There are other threads, but I think this sets up most of what we’ll be paying attention to this season.

As we try to wind down this talk about three very busy episodes, is there anything you aren’t currently vibing with? I feel like Josha Stradowski’s Rand is getting lost in the shuffle a bit, despite this nominally being his story.

Lee: I agree about Rand—but, hey, the same de-centering of Rand happened in the books, so at least there is symmetry. I think the things I’m not vibing with are at this point just personal dislikes. The sets still feel cheap. The costumes are great, but the Great Serpent rings are still ludicrously large and impractical.

I’m overjoyed the show is unafraid to shine a spotlight on queer characters, and I’m also desperately glad that we aren’t being held hostage by Robert Jordan’s kinks—like, we haven’t seen a single Novice or Accepted get spanked, women don’t peel off their tops in private meetings to prove that they’re women, and rather than titillation or weirdly uncomfortable innuendo, these characters are just straight-up screwing. (The Amyrlin even notes that she’s not sure the Novices “will ever recover” after Gawyn and Galad come to—and all over—town.)

If I had to pick a moment that I enjoyed the most out of the premiere, it would probably be the entire first episode—which in spite of its length kept me riveted the entire time. I love the momentum, the feeling of finally getting the show that I’d always hoped we might get rather than the feeling of having to settle.

How about you? Dislikes? Loves?

Ceara Coveney as Elayne Trakand and Ayoola Smart as Aviendha, and they’re thinking about *exactly* what you think they’re thinking about. Credit: Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Not a ton of dislikes, I am pretty in the tank for this at this point. But I do agree that some of the prop work is weird. The Horn of Valere in particular looks less like a legendary artifact and more like a decorative pitcher from a Crate & Barrel.

There were two particular scenes/moments that I really enjoyed. Rand and Perrin and Mat just hang out, as friends, for a while in the first episode, and it’s very charming. We’re told in the books constantly that these three boys are lifelong pals, but (to the point about Unavailable Men we were talking about earlier) we almost never get to see actual evidence of this, either because they’re physically split up or because they’re so wrapped up in their own stuff that they barely want to speak to each other.

I also really liked that brief moment in the first episode where a Black Ajah Aes Sedai’s Warder dies, and she’s like, “hell yeah, this feels awesome, this is making me horny because of how evil I am.” Sometimes you don’t want shades of gray—sometimes you just need some cartoonishly unambiguous villainy.

Lee: I thought the Black Ajah getting excited over death was just the right mix of of cartoonishness and actual-for-real creepiness, yeah. These people have sold their eternal souls to the Shadow, and it probably takes a certain type. (Though, as book readers know, there are some surprising Black Ajah reveals yet to be had!)

We close out our three-episode extravaganza with Mat having his famous stick fight with Zoolander-esque male models Gawyn and Galad, Liandrin and the Black Ajah setting up shop (and tying off some loose ends) in Tanchico, Perrin meeting Faile and Lord Luc in the Two Rivers, and Rand in the Aiel Waste, preparing to do—well, something important, one can be sure.

We’ll leave things here for now. Expect us back next Friday to talk about episode four, which, based on the preview trailers already showing up online, will involve a certain city in the desert, wherein deep secrets will be revealed.

Mia dovienya nesodhin soende, Andrew!

Andrew: The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.

Credit: WoT Wiki

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Author name: Kelly Newman