Author name: Shannon Garcia

83-year-old-man-married-50-years-nearly-stumps-doctors-with-surprise-sti

83-year-old man married 50 years nearly stumps doctors with surprise STI

bacterial, case report, health, infection, new england journal, syphilis / /

In the end, his combination of rash, malaise, liver and kidney problems, facial paralysis, and swelling all fit with syphilis. However, syphilis that affects the liver is rare, occurring in less than 10 percent of cases, which made the diagnosis particularly difficult.

Doctors think the infection was likely in the second stage. In the first stage, people just develop a chancre at the site of the infection. The chancre develops usually around a month after an exposure, is painless, and resolves on its own. Then the second stage emerges with the bacterial infection going systemic, usually with rash, malaise, loss of appetite, joint pain, swelling, fevers, and sore throat—similar to the man’s symptoms. After that, the infection can become latent (third stage) before reemerging in the tertiary (late stage), which can manifest in various ways, including with the destruction of the heart, central nervous system, and organs.

While late-stage syphilis can show up years or even decades after an initial infection, the secondary stage doesn’t, the doctors note. “Secondary syphilis typically emerges within the first year after untreated primary infection and only rarely beyond 4 years,” they wrote in the report. It’s possible an immunosuppressing drug, like the steroid he took for his facial paralysis, could reactivate a latent infection, but once reactivated, it would be a late-stage infection, not a secondary one.

Although the man’s STI history decades ago led the doctors to the right diagnosis, it doesn’t explain the current infection. A “more recent, unreported exposure must be considered,” the doctors wrote, but, ultimately, the timing and source of the infection remain unknown.

With a treatment of antibiotics, the man made a full recovery. His doctors note that local health authorities would be contacted to track down and notify the man’s actual sexual partners. How things went with the man’s wife also remains unknown.

83-year-old man married 50 years nearly stumps doctors with surprise STI Read More »

5-ai-developed-malware-families-analyzed-by-google-fail-to-work-and-are-easily-detected

5 AI-developed malware families analyzed by Google fail to work and are easily detected

AI, Biz & IT, generative ai, guardrails, malware, ransomware, Security / /

The assessments provide a strong counterargument to the exaggerated narratives being trumpeted by AI companies, many seeking new rounds of venture funding, that AI-generated malware is widespread and part of a new paradigm that poses a current threat to traditional defenses.

A typical example is Anthropic, which recently reported its discovery of a threat actor that used its Claude LLM to “develop, market, and distribute several variants of ransomware, each with advanced evasion capabilities, encryption, and anti-recovery mechanisms.” The company went on to say: “Without Claude’s assistance, they could not implement or troubleshoot core malware components, like encryption algorithms, anti-analysis techniques, or Windows internals manipulation.”

Startup ConnectWise recently said that generative AI was “lowering the bar of entry for threat actors to get into the game.” The post cited a separate report from OpenAI that found 20 separate threat actors using its ChatGPT AI engine to develop malware for tasks including identifying vulnerabilities, developing exploit code, and debugging that code. BugCrowd, meanwhile, said that in a survey of self-selected individuals, “74 percent of hackers agree that AI has made hacking more accessible, opening the door for newcomers to join the fold.”

In some cases, the authors of such reports note the same limitations noted in this article. Wednesday’s report from Google says that in its analysis of AI tools used to develop code for managing command-and-control channels and obfuscating its operations “we did not see evidence of successful automation or any breakthrough capabilities.” OpenAI said much the same thing. Still, these disclaimers are rarely made prominently and are often downplayed in the resulting frenzy to portray AI-assisted malware as posing a near-term threat.

Google’s report provides at least one other useful finding. One threat actor that exploited the company’s Gemini AI model was able to bypass its guardrails by posing as white-hat hackers doing research for participation in a capture-the-flag game. These competitive exercises are designed to teach and demonstrate effective cyberattack strategies to both participants and onlookers.

Such guardrails are built into all mainstream LLMs to prevent them from being used maliciously, such as in cyberattacks and self-harm. Google said it has since better fine-tuned the countermeasure to resist such ploys.

Ultimately, the AI-generated malware that has surfaced to date suggests that it’s mostly experimental, and the results aren’t impressive. The events are worth monitoring for developments that show AI tools producing new capabilities that were previously unknown. For now, though, the biggest threats continue to predominantly rely on old-fashioned tactics.

5 AI-developed malware families analyzed by Google fail to work and are easily detected Read More »

“so-much-more-menacing”:-formula-e’s-new-gen4-car-breaks-cover

“So much more menacing”: Formula E’s new Gen4 car breaks cover

Cars, Formula E, Formula E Gen4 / /

In fact, there will be two different bodywork configurations, one for high downforce and the other with less. But that doesn’t mean Formula E teams will run out and build wind tunnels, like their F1 counterparts. “There’s significant gains that can be made out of software improvements, efficiency improvements, powertrain developments,” said Dodds, so there’s no incentive to spend lots of money on aero development that would only add fractions of a second.

The biggest opportunity for finding performance improvements may be with traction control and antilock braking systems. Formula E wants its technology to be road-relevant, so such driver aids will be unlimited in the Gen4 era. But efficiency will remain of utmost importance; the cars will still have to regenerate 40 percent of the energy they need to finish the race, as the 55 kWh battery is not sufficient to go flat-out to the end. Happily for the drivers, the new car can regen up to 700 kW of energy under braking.

A grainy shot of a Formula E gen4 car testing

The Gen4 car in testing. Credit: Formula E

Finally, the car’s end of life has been considered. The entire race car is entirely recyclable, Formula E says, and it already contains 20 percent recycled content.

So far, the Gen4 car has been put through its paces for more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km), which is more than the mileage of an entire Formula E season, including testing. Now the teams have started to receive their chassis and have started the work of getting to know them and preparing to race them in season 13, all while getting ready to start season 12 next month.

What we won’t know until season 13 gets underway is how the Gen4 era will change the races. With bigger, faster cars, not every Formula E circuit will still be suitable, like London’s very tight Excel Arena track, but with a continued focus on making efficiency count, it’s quite likely we’ll continue to see the same close pack racing as before.

“So much more menacing”: Formula E’s new Gen4 car breaks cover Read More »

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After confusing driver release, AMD says old GPUs are still actively supported

AMD, gaming, Radeon, rdna, rdna 2, Tech / /

The release notes for the 25.10.2 Adrenalin release also dropped Windows 10 from the list of “compatible operating systems,” listing only Windows 11 21H2 and later. But AMD confirmed to Windows Latest that the driver packages would still support Windows 10 for the foreseeable future. The company said that the OS is not listed in the release notes because Microsoft has technically ended support for Windows 10, but home users running Windows 10 on their PCs can get an extra year of security patches relatively easily. Microsoft will continue to provide support for the OS in businesses, schools, and other large organizations until at least 2028.

Why all the fuss?

It would look bad if AMD dropped or reduced support for those Radeon 5000- and 6000-series GPUs, given that Nvidia continues to support GeForce RTX 20- and 30-series graphics cards launched in the same 2019 to 2022 time window. But the end of support could have been even worse for gaming handhelds and lower-end PCs with integrated graphics.

The RDNA 2 architecture, in particular, has enjoyed a long and ongoing life as an integrated GPU, including for systems that are explicitly marketed and sold as gaming PCs. And because so many of AMD and Intel’s lower-end chips are just rebranded versions of older silicon, AMD continues to launch “new” products with RDNA 2 GPUs. The RDNA 2 architecture is the one Valve has used in the Steam Deck since 2022, for example, but Microsoft and Asus’ just-launched ROG Xbox Ally series also includes an RDNA 2 GPU in the entry-level model.

The last time AMD formally scaled back its GPU driver support was in 2023, when it moved drivers for its Polaris and Vega GPU architectures into a separate package that would only get occasional “critical updates.” At the time, AMD had launched its last dedicated Vega-based GPU just four years before, and many lower-end desktop and laptop processors still shipped with Vega-based integrated GPUs.

For the Steam Deck and other SteamOS and Linux systems, at least, it seems that things aren’t really changing, no matter what happens with the Windows drivers. Phoronix points out that the Linux driver package for AMD’s GPUs has always been maintained separately from the Windows drivers and that GPU architectures considerably older than RDNA 1 continue to get official support and occasional improvements.

After confusing driver release, AMD says old GPUs are still actively supported Read More »

openai-signs-massive-ai-compute-deal-with-amazon

OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon

AI, AI chips, AI infrastructure, Amazon, AWS, Biz & IT, chatbots, datacenters, generative ai, Google, large language models, machine learning, microsoft, NVIDIA, openai, oracle, sam altman / /

On Monday, OpenAI announced it has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon Web Services to power products like ChatGPT and Sora. It’s the company’s first big computing deal after a fundamental restructuring last week that gave OpenAI more operational and financial freedom from Microsoft.

The agreement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models. “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

OpenAI will reportedly use Amazon Web Services immediately, with all planned capacity set to come online by the end of 2026 and room to expand further in 2027 and beyond. Amazon plans to roll out hundreds of thousands of chips, including Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators, in data clusters built to power ChatGPT’s responses, generate AI videos, and train OpenAI’s next wave of models.

Wall Street apparently liked the deal, because Amazon shares hit an all-time high on Monday morning. Meanwhile, shares for long-time OpenAI investor and partner Microsoft briefly dipped following the announcement.

Massive AI compute requirements

It’s no secret that running generative AI models for hundreds of millions of people currently requires a lot of computing power. Amid chip shortages over the past few years, finding sources of that computing muscle has been tricky. OpenAI is reportedly working on its own GPU hardware to help alleviate the strain.

But for now, the company needs to find new sources of Nvidia chips, which accelerate AI computations. Altman has previously said that the company plans to spend $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources, an amount that is enough to roughly power 25 million US homes, according to Reuters.

OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon Read More »

research-roundup:-6-cool-science-stories-we-almost-missed

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

Archeology, Food science, geophysics, Mars, planetary geology, research roundup, Science, snakes / /

Also: the science of regular vs. gluten-free spaghetti, catching high-speed snake bites in action, etc.

Karnak Temple, Luxor, Egypt. Credit: Ben Pennington

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. October’s list includes the microstructural differences between regular and gluten-free spaghetti, capturing striking snakes in action, the mystery behind the formation of Martian gullies, and—for all you word game enthusiasts—an intriguing computational proof of the highest possible scoring Boggle board.

Highest-scoring Boggle board

boggle board showing highest scoring selection of letters

Credit: Dan Vanderkam

Sometimes we get handy story tips from readers about quirkily interesting research projects. Sometimes those projects involve classic games like Boggle, in which players find as many words as they can from a 4×4 grid of 16 lettered cubic dice, within a given time limit. Software engineer Dan Vanderkam alerted us to a a preprint he posted to the physics arXiv, detailing his quest to find the Boggle board configuration that yields the highest possible score. It’s pictured above, with a total score of 3,625 points, according to Vanderkam’s first-ever computational proof. There are more than 1000 possible words, with “replastering” being the longest.

Vanderkam has documented his quest and its resolution (including the code he used) extensively on his blog, admitting to the Financial Times that, “As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem.” That’s not entirely true: there was an attempt in 1982 that found an optimal board yielding 2,195 points. Vanderkam’s board was known as possibly being the highest scoring, it was just very difficult to prove using standard heuristic search methods. Vanderkam’s solution involved grouping board configurations with similar patterns into classes, and then finding upper bounds to discard clear losers, rather than trying to tally scores for each board individually—i.e., an old school “branch and bound” technique.

DOI: arXiv, 2025. 10.48550/arXiv.2507.02117  (About DOIs).

Origins of Egypt’s Karnak Temple

Core samples being extracted at Karnak Temple

Credit: Ben Pennington

Egypt’s Karnak Temple complex, located about 500 meters of the Nile River near Luxor, has long been of interest to archaeologists and millions of annual tourists alike. But its actual age has been a matter of much debate. The most comprehensive geological survey conducted to date is yielding fresh insights into the temple’s origins and evolution over time, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity.

The authors analyzed sediment cores and thousands of ceramic fragments from within and around the site to map out how the surrounding landscape has changed. They concluded that early on, circa 2520 BCE, the site would have experienced regular flooding from the Nile; thus, the earliest permanent settlement at Karnak would have emerged between 2591 and 2152 BCE, in keeping with the earliest dated ceramic fragments.  This would have been after river channels essentially created an island of higher ground that served as the foundation for constructing the temple. As those channels diverged over millennia, the available area for the temple expanded and thus, so did the complex.

This might be supported by Egyptian creation myths. “It’s tempting to suggest the Theban elites chose Karnak’s location for the dwelling place of a new form of the creator god, ‘Ra-Amun,’ as it fitted the cosmogonical scene of high ground emerging from surrounding water,” said co-author Ben Pennington, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Southampton. “Later texts of the Middle Kingdom (c.1980–1760 BC) develop this idea, with the ‘primeval mound’ rising from the ‘Waters of Chaos.’ During this period, the abating of the annual flood would have echoed this scene, with the mound on which Karnak was built appearing to ‘rise’ and grow from the receding floodwaters.”

DOI: Antiquity, 2025. 10.15184/aqy.2025.10185  (About DOIs).

Gullies on Mars

Mars dune with gullies in the Russell crater. On their way down, the ice blocks threw up levees.

Credit: HiRISE/NASA/JPL/University of Arizon

Mars has many intriguing features but one of the more puzzling is the sinuous gullies that form on some its dunes. Scientists have proposed two hypotheses for how such gullies might form. The first is that they are the result of debris flow from an earlier time in the planet’s history where liquid water might have existed on the surface—evidence that the red planet might once have been habitable. The second is that the gullies form because of seasonal deposition and sublimation of CO2 ice on the surface in the present day. A paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters demonstrated strong evidence in favor of the latter hypothesis.

Building on her earlier research on how sublimation of CO2 ice can drive debris flows on Mars, earth scientist Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands collaborated with scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, which boasts a facility for simulating conditions on Mars. She ran several experiments with different sediment types, creating dune slopes of different angles and dropping blocks of CO2 ice from the top of the slope. At just the right angle, the blocks did indeed start digging into the sandy slope and moving downwards to create a gully. Roelofs likened the effect to a burrowing mole or the sandworms in Dune.

Per Roelofs, on Mars, CO2 ice forms over the surface during the winter and starts to sublimate in the spring. The ice blocks are remnants found on the shaded side of dune tops, where they break off once the temperature gets high enough and slide down the slope. At the bottom, they keep sublimating until all the CO2 has evaporated, leaving behind a hollow of sand.

DOI: Geophysical Research Letters, 2025. 10.1029/2024GL112860  (About DOIs).

Snake bites in action

S.G.C. Cleuren et al., 2025

Snakes can strike out and bite into prey in as little as 60 microseconds and until quite recently it just wasn’t technologically possible to capture those strikes in high definition. Researchers at Monash University in Australia decided to test 36 different species of snake in this way to learn more about their unique biting styles, detailing their results in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. And oh yes, there is awesome video footage.

Alistair Evans and Silke Cleuren traveled to Venomworld in Paris, France, where snake venom is harvested for medical and pharmaceutical applications.  For each snake species, they poked at said snake with a cylindrical piece of warm medical gel to mimic meaty muscle until the snake lunged and buried its fangs into the gel. Two cameras recorded the action at 1000 frames per second, capturing more than 100 individual strikes in great detail.

Among their findings: vipers moved the fastest when they struck, with the blunt-nosed viper accelerating up to 710 m/s2, landing a bite within 22 microseconds. All the vipers landed bites within 100 microseconds of striking. By contrast, the rough-scaled death adder only reached speeds of 2.5 m/s2. Vipers also sometimes pulled out and reinserted their fangs if they didn’t like the resulting angle; only then did they inject their venom. Elapids like the Cape coral cobra bit their prey repeatedly to inject their venom, while colubrids would tear gashes into their prey by sweeping their jaws from side to side, ensuing the maximum possible amount of venom was delivered.

DOI: Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025. 10.1242/jeb.250347  (About DOIs).

Spaghetti secrets

Spaghetti, like most pasta, is made of semolina flour, which is mixed with water to form a paste and then extruded to create a desired shape. The commercial products are then dried—an active area of research, since it’s easy for the strands to crack during the process. In fact, there have been a surprisingly large number of scientific papers seeking to understand the various properties of spaghetti, both cooking and eating it—the mechanics of slurping the pasta into one’s mouth, for instance, or spitting it out (aka, the “reverse spaghetti problem”); how to tell when it’s perfectly al dente; and how to get dry spaghetti strands to break neatly in two, rather than three or more scattered pieces.

Pasta also has a fairly low glycemic index, and is thus a good option for those with heart disease or type 2 diabetes. With the rise in the number of people with a gluten intolerance, gluten-free spaghetti has emerged as an alternative. The downside is that gluten-free pasta is harder to cook correctly and decidedly subpar in taste and texture (mouthfeel) compared to regular pasta. The reason for the latter lies in the microstructure, according to a paper published in the journal Food Hydrocolloids.

The authors used small-angle x-ray scattering and small-angle neutron scattering to analyze the microstructure of both regular and gluten-free pasta—i.e., the gluten matrix and its artificial counterpart—cooked al dente with varying salt concentrations in the water. They found that because of its gluten matrix, regular pasta has better resistance to structural degradation, and that adding just the right amount of salt further reinforces that matrix—so it’s not just a matter of salting to taste. This could lead to a better alternative matrix for gluten-free pasta that holds its structure better and has a taste and mouthfeel closer to that of regular pasta.

DOI: Food Hydrocolloids, 2025. 10.1016/j.foodhyd.2025.111855  (About DOIs).

Can machine learning identify ancient artists?

Dr Andrea Jalandoni studies finger flutings at a cave site in Australia

Credit: Andrea Jalandoni

Finger flutings are one of the oldest examples of prehistoric art, usually found carved into the walls of caves in southern Australia, New Guinea, and parts of Europe. They’re basically just marks made by human fingers drawn through the “moonmilk” (a soft mineral film) covering those walls. Very little is known about the people who left those flutings and while some have tried to draw inferences based on biometric finger ratios or hand size measurements—notably whether given marks were made by men or women—such methods produce inconsistent results and are prone to human error and bias.

That’s why digital archaeologist Andrea Jaladonia of Griffith University decided to experiment with machine learning image recognition methods as a possible tool, detailing her findings in a paper published the journal Scientific Reports. She recruited 96 adult volunteers to create their own finger flutings in two different settings: once in a virtual reality environment, and once on a substitute for the moonmilk clay that mimicked the look and feel of the real thing. Her team took images of those flutings and then used them to train two common image recognition models.

The results were decidedly mixed. The virtual reality images performed the worst, yielding highly unreliable attempts at classifying whether flutings were made by men or women. The images produced in actual clay produced better results, even reaching close to 84 percent accuracy in one model. But there were also signs the models were overfitting, i.e., memorizing patterns in the training data rather than more generalized patterns, so the approach needs more refinement before it is ready for actual deployment. As for why determining sex classifications matters, “This information has been used to decide who can access certain sites for cultural reasons,” Jalandoni explained.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2025. 10.1038/s41598-025-18098-4  (About DOIs).

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed Read More »

cursor-introduces-its-coding-model-alongside-multi-agent-interface

Cursor introduces its coding model alongside multi-agent interface

AI, coding model, cursor, Cursor Composer, IDE, llm, vibe coding / /

Keep in mind: This is based on an internal benchmark at Cursor. Credit: Cursor

Cursor is hoping Composer will perform in terms of accuracy and best practices as well. It wasn’t trained on static datasets but rather interactive development challenges involving a range of agentic tasks.

Intriguing claims and strong training methodology aside, it remains to be seen whether Composer will be able to compete with the best frontier models from the big players.

Even developers who might be natural users of Cursor would not want to waste much time on an unproven new model when something like Anthropic’s Claude is working just fine.

To address that, Cursor introduced Composer alongside its new multi-agent interface, which allows you to “run many agents in parallel without them interfering with one another, powered by git worktrees or remote machines”—that means using multiple models at once for the same task and comparing their results, then picking the best one.

The interface is an invitation to try Composer and let the work speak for itself. We’ll see how devs feel about it in the coming weeks. So far, a non-representative sample of developers I’ve spoken with has told me they feel that Composer is not ineffective, but rather too expensive, given a perceived capability gap with the big models.

You can see the other new features and fixes for Cursor 2.0 in the changelog.

Cursor introduces its coding model alongside multi-agent interface Read More »

sam-altman-wants-a-refund-for-his-$50,000-tesla-roadster-deposit

Sam Altman wants a refund for his $50,000 Tesla Roadster deposit

Cars, sam altman, tesla roadster / /

2017 feels like another era these days, but if you cast your mind back that far, you might remember Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vaporware Roadster 2.0. Full of nonsensical-sounding features that impressed people who know a little bit about rockets but nothing about cars, the $200,000 electric car promised to have a suction fan and “cold gas thrusters,” plus 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and a whole load of other stuff that’s never happening.

Plenty of other electric automakers have introduced electric hypercars in the eight years since Musk declared the second Roadster a thing, with no sign of it being any closer to reality, if the latest job postings are accurate. And it seems that over time, a lot of the people who gave the company a hefty deposit—some say interest-free loan—have become tired of waiting and want their money back.

And that’s not quite so easy, it turns out. Musk’s current Silicon Valley rival is the latest to discover this. According to Sam Altman’s social media account, he placed an order for a Roadster on July 11, 2018, with a deposit of $45,000 ($58,206 in today’s money). But after emailing Tesla for a refund, he discovered the email address associated with preorders had been deleted.

A screenshot of Sam Altman's X posts about cancelling his car

Credit: Twitter

Perhaps Altman forgot to ask ChatGPT how best to go about getting his money. If he had, he might have stumbled across the experience of streamer Marques Brownlee, who eventually had to pick up a telephone and call someone to get most of his $50,000 back. Or perhaps some of the threads at Reddit or the Tesla forums, where other people who fell for the cold gas thruster-equipped two-seater with Lucid-busting range and F1-beating acceleration have gathered to share stories of how best to make Tesla return their money.

Sam Altman wants a refund for his $50,000 Tesla Roadster deposit Read More »

2026-hyundai-ioniq-9:-american-car-buyer-tastes-meet-korean-ev-tech

2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9: American car-buyer tastes meet Korean EV tech

car review, Cars, Hyundai Ioniq 9 / /

The Ioniq 9 interior. Jonathan Gitlin

The native NACS charge port at the rear means all of Tesla’s v3 Superchargers are potential power-up locations; these will take the battery from 10–80 percent state of charge in 40 minutes. Or use the NACS-CCS1 adapter and a 350 kW fast charger (or find one of Ionna’s 350 kW chargers with a NACS plug) and do the 10–80 percent SoC top-up in a mere 24 minutes.

With this most-powerful Ioniq 9, I’d mostly keep it in Eco mode, which almost entirely relies upon the rear electric motor. When firing with both motors, the Calligraphy outputs 422 hp (315 kW) and more importantly, 516 lb-ft (700 Nm). In Sport mode, that’s more than enough to chirp the tires from a standstill, particularly if it’s damp. Low rolling resistance and good efficiency was a higher priority for the Ioniq 9’s tire selection than lateral grip, and with a curb weight of 6,000 lbs (2,735 kg) it’s not really a car that needs to be hustled unless you’re attempting to outrun something like a volcano. It’s also the difference between efficiency in the low 2 miles/kWh range.

Life with the Ioniq 9 wasn’t entirely pain-free. For example, the touch panel for the climate control settings becomes impossible to read in bright sunlight, although the knobs to raise or lower the temperature are at least physical items. I also had trouble with the windshield wipers’ intermittent setting, despite the standard rain sensors.

A Hyundai Ioniq 9 seen from the rear 3/4s.

Built just outside of Savannah, Georgia, don’t you know. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

At $74,990, the Ioniq 9 Calligraphy comes more heavily specced than electric SUVs from more luxury, and therefore more expensive, brands and should charge faster and drive more efficiently than any of them. If you don’t mind giving up 119 hp (89 kW) and some options, all-wheel drive is available from $62,765 for the SE trim, and that longer-legged single-motor Ioniq 9 starts at $58,955. Although with just 215 hp (160 KW) and 285 lb-ft (350 Nm), the driving experience won’t be quite the same as the model we tested.

2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9: American car-buyer tastes meet Korean EV tech Read More »

tiktok-may-become-more-right-wing-as-china-signals-approval-for-us-sale

TikTok may become more right-wing as China signals approval for US sale

bytedance, Donald Trump, Policy, tiktok, tiktok us, us-china trade war / /

TikTok US app may look radically different

If the sale goes through without major changes to the terms, TikTok could radically change for US users.

After US owners take over, they will have to retrain TikTok’s algorithm, perhaps shifting what content Americans see on the platform.

Some speculate that TikTokers may only connect with American users through the app, but that’s likely inaccurate, as global content will remain available.

While global content will still be displayed on TikTok’s US app, it’s unclear how it may be filtered, Kelley Cotter, an assistant professor who studies social media algorithms in the Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics at Pennsylvania State University, told Scientific American.

Cotter suggested that TikTok’s US owners may also tweak the algorithm or change community guidelines to potentially alter what content is accessed on the app. For example, during conversations leading up to the law that requires either the sale of TikTok to US allies or a nationwide ban, Republican lawmakers voiced concerns “that there were greater visibility of Palestinian hashtags on TikTok over Israeli hashtags.”

If Trump’s deal goes through, the president has already suggested that he’d like to see the app go “100 percent MAGA.” And Cotter suggested that the conservative slant of Trump’s hand-picked TikTok US investors—including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz—could help Trump achieve that goal.

“An owner that has a strong ideological point of view and has the will to make that a part of the app, it is possible, through tweaking the algorithm, to sort of reshape the overall composition of content on the platform,” Cotter said.

If left-leaning users abandon TikTok as the app shifts to US ownership, TikTok’s content could change meaningfully, Cotter said.

“It could result in a situation,” Cotter suggested, where TikTok would be “an app that is composed by only people based in the US but only a subset of American users and particularly ones that perhaps might be right-leaning.” That could “have very big impact on the kinds of content that you see there.”

For TikTok’s US users bracing for a feared right-wing overhaul of their feeds, there’s also the potential for the app to become glitchy as all US users are hastily transferred over to the new app. Any technical issues could also drive users off the app, perhaps further altering content.

Ars updated this story on Oct. 30 to note that speculation that American users will be siloed off is inaccurate.

TikTok may become more right-wing as China signals approval for US sale Read More »

halloween-film-fest:-15-classic-ghost-stories

Halloween film fest: 15 classic ghost stories

culture, Features, film, ghost stories, Halloween, listicles / /

From The Uninvited to Crimson Peak, these films will help you set the tone for spooky season.

It’s spooky season, and what better way to spend Halloween weekend than settling in to watch a classic Hollywood ghost story? To help you figure out what to watch, we’ve compiled a handy list of 15 classic ghost stories, presented in chronological order.

What makes a good ghost story? Everyone’s criteria (and taste) will differ, but for this list, we’ve focused on more traditional elements. There’s usually a spooky old house with a ghostly presence and/or someone who’s attuned to said presence. The living must solve the mystery of what happened to trap the ghost(s) there in hopes of setting said ghost(s) free. In that sense, the best, most satisfying ghost stories are mysteries—and sometimes also love stories. The horror is more psychological, and when it comes to gore, less is usually more.

As always, the list below isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Mostly, we’re going for a certain atmospheric vibe to set a mood. So our list omits overt comedies like Ghostbusters and (arguably) Ghost, as well as supernatural horror involving demonic possession—The Exorcist, The Conjuring, Insidious—or monsters, like The Babadook or Sinister. Feel free to suggest your own recommendations in the comments.

(Various spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

The Uninvited (1944)

B&W image of man and woman in 1940s evening wear holding a candle and looking up a flight of stairs

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Brother and sister Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) fall in love with an abandoned seaside abode called Windward House while vacationing in England. They pool their resources and buy it for a very low price, since its owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), is oddly desperate to unload it. This upsets his 20-year-old granddaughter, Stella (Gail Russell), whose mother fell to her death from the cliffs near the house when Stella was just a toddler.

Rick, a musician and composer, becomes infatuated with the beautiful young woman. And before long, strange phenomena begin manifesting: a woman sobbing, an odd chill in the artist’s studio, a flower wilting in mere seconds—plus, the Fitzgeralds’ dog and their housekeeper’s cat both refuse to go upstairs. Whatever haunts the house seems to be focused on Stella.

The Uninvited was director Lewis Allen’s first feature film—adapted from a 1941 novel by Dorothy Macardle—but it has aged well. Sure, there are some odd tonal shifts; the light-hearted sibling banter between Rick and Pamela, while enjoyable, does sometimes weaken the scare factor. But the central mystery is intriguing and the visuals are striking, snagging an Oscar nomination for cinematographer Charles Lang. Bonus points for the tune “Stella by Starlight,” written specifically for the film and later evolving into a beloved jazz standard, performed by such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, and Miles Davis.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

young woman and middle aged man standing and talking

Credit: 20th Century Fox

This is one of those old Hollywood classics that has ably withstood the test of time. Gene Tierney stars as the titular Mrs. Lucy Muir, a young widow with a little girl who decides to leave London and take up residence in the seaside village of Whitecliff. She rents Gull Cottage despite the realtor’s reluctance to even show it to her. Lucy falls in love with the house and is intrigued by the portrait of its former owner: a rough sea captain named Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison), who locals say died by suicide in the house. Gregg’s ghost still haunts Gull Cottage, but he tries in vain to scare away the tough-minded Lucy. The two become friends and start to fall in love—but can any romance between the living and the dead truly thrive?

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir earned cinematographer Charles Lang another well-deserved Oscar nomination. Tierney and Harrison have great on-screen chemistry, and the film manages to blend wry humor and pathos into what is essentially a haunting love story of two people finding each other at the wrong time. There’s no revenge plot, no spine-tingling moments of terror, no deep, dark secret—just two people, one living and one dead, coming to terms in their respective ways with loss and regret to find peace.

The Innocents (1961)

B&W still of young boy being tucked in by a young woman.

Credit: 20th Century Fox

Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw has inspired many adaptations over the years. Most recently, Mike Flanagan used the plot and central characters as the main narrative framework for his Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Bly Manor. But The Innocents is widely considered to be the best.

Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) has been hired for her first job as a governess to two orphaned children at Bly Manor, who sometimes exhibit odd behavior. The previous governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), had died tragically the year before, along with her lover, Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde). Miss Giddens becomes convinced that their ghosts have possessed the children so they can still be together in death. Miss Giddens resolves to free the children, with tragic consequences.

Literary scholars and critics have been debating The Turn of the Screw ever since it was first published because James was deliberately ambiguous about whether the governess saw actual ghosts or was simply going mad and imagining them. The initial screenwriter for The Innocents, William Archibald, assumed the ghosts were real. Director Jack Clayton preferred to be true to James’ original ambiguity, and the final script ended up somewhere in between, with some pretty strong Freudian overtones where our repressed governess is concerned.

This is a film you’ll want to watch with all the lights off. It’s dark—literally, thanks to Clayton’s emphasis on shadows and light to highlight Miss Giddens’ isolation. The first 45 seconds are just a black screen with a child’s voice humming a haunting tune. But it’s a beautifully crafted example of classic psychological horror that captures something of the chilly, reserved spirit of Henry James.

The Haunting (1963)

B&W still of group of people in 1960s clothing standing in drawing room of a haunted house

Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

There have also been numerous adaptations of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 Gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, including Mike Flanagan’s boldly reimagined miniseries for Netflix. But many people—Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg among them—consider director Robert Wise’s The Haunting to be not only the best adaptation but one of the best horror films of all time. (Please do not confuse the Wise version with the disappointing 1999 remake, which tried to make up for its shortcomings with lavish sets and showy special effects—to no avail.)

Psychologist Dr. John Markaway (Richard Johnson) brings three people to the titular Hill House, intent on exploring its legendary paranormal phenomena. There’s a psychic named Theodora (Claire Bloom); the emotionally vulnerable Eleanor (Julie Harris), who has experienced poltergeists and just lost her domineering mother; and the skeptical Luke (Russ Tamblyn), who will inherit the house when its elderly owner dies. The house does not disappoint, and the visitors experience strange sounds and mysterious voices, doors banging shut on their own, and a sinister message scrawled on a wall: “Help Eleanor come home.”

Initial reviews were mixed, but the film has grown in stature over the decades. Jackson herself was not a fan. Wise did make considerable changes, shortening the backstory and cutting out several characters. He also downplayed the overt supernatural elements in Jackson’s novel, focusing on Eleanor’s mental instability and eventual breakdown. Wise envisioned it as the house taking over her mind. Modern sensibilities accustomed to much more intense horror might not find The Haunting especially scary, but it is beautifully rendered with skillful use of clever special effects. For instance, to make the house seem alive, Wise filmed the exterior shots in infrared to give it an otherworldly vibe, framing the shots so that the windows resemble the house’s eyes.

The Shining (1980)

twin girls in matching light blue dresses and white knee socks standing in a hallway with yellow flowered wallpaper

Credit: Warner Bros.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the 1977 bestselling novel by Stephen King probably needs no introduction. But for those not familiar with the story, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a position as the winter caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains, bringing his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny has a psychic gift called “the shining,” which allows him to communicate telepathically with the hotel cook, Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers). The previous caretaker went mad and murdered his family. Over the course of the film, Jack slowly begins to succumb to the same madness, putting his own wife and child in danger.

Initial reviews weren’t particularly favorable—King himself is not a fan of the film—but it’s now considered a horror classic and a subject of much academic study among film scholars. This is another film that has seen a lot of debate about whether the ghosts are real, with some arguing that Jack and Danny might just be hallucinating the Overlook’s malevolent ghosts into existence. Or maybe it’s the hotel manifesting ghosts to drive Jack insane. (I choose to interpret the ghosts in The Shining as real while appreciating the deliberate ambiguity.) There are so many memorable moments: the eerie twin girls (“Come and play with us”), the bathtub lady in Room 237, Lloyd the creepy bartender, the elaborate hedge maze, “REDRUM,” Jack hacking through a door and exclaiming, “Heeere’s Johnny!” and that avalanche of blood pouring down a hotel hallway. It’s a must-watch.

Ghost Story (1981)

young woman with dark haired bob wearing a 1920s white dress and hat, standing in a road illuminated by headlights on a snowy night

Credit: Universal Pictures

Adapted from the 1979 novel by Peter Straub, Ghost Story centers on a quartet of elderly men in a New England town called Milburn. They are lifelong friends who call themselves the Chowder Society and gather every week to tell spooky stories. Edward Wanderly (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is the town’s mayor; Ricky Hawthorne (Fred Astaire) is a businessman; Sears James (John Houseman) is a lawyer; and John Jaffrey (Melvyn Douglas) is a physician. The trouble starts when Edward’s son, David (Craig Wasson), falls to his death from a New York City high-rise after the young woman he’s engaged to suddenly turns into a putrefying living corpse in their shared bed.

The apparent suicide brings Edward’s other son, Dan (also Wasson), back to Milburn. Dan doesn’t believe his brother killed himself and tells the Chowder Society his own ghost story: He fell in love with a young woman named Alma (Alice Krige) before realizing something was wrong with her. When he broke things off, Alma got engaged to David. And it just so happens that Alma bears a striking resemblance to a young woman named Eva Galli (also Krige) captured in an old photograph with all the members of the Chowder Society back in their youth. Yep, the old men share a dark secret, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

I won’t claim that Ghost Story is the best film of all time. It has its flaws, most notably the inclusion of two escaped psychiatric hospital patients purportedly in the service of Eva’s vengeful ghost. The tone is occasionally a bit over-the-top, but the film honors all the classic tropes, and there are many lovely individual scenes. The main cast is terrific; it was the final film for both Astaire and Fairbanks. And that spooky New England winter setting is a special effect all its own. The sight of Eva’s apparition materializing through the swirling snow to stand in the middle of the road in front of Sears’ car is one that has stuck with me for decades.

Poltergeist (1982)

back view of little girl silhouetted against the TV glow; screen is all static and girl is holding both hands to the screen

Credit: MGM/UA Entertainment

“They’re heeere!” That might be one of the best-known movie lines from the 1980s, announcing the arrival of the titular poltergeists. In this Tobe Hooper tale of terror, Steven and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) have just moved with their three children into a suburban dream house in the newly constructed community of Cuesta Verde, California. Their youngest, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), starts hearing voices in the TV static late at night, and things soon escalate as multiple ghosts play pranks on the family. When Carol Anne mysteriously disappears, Steven and Diane realize at least one of the ghosts is far from friendly and call on local parapsychologists for help.

Steven Spielberg initiated the project, but his obligations to filming E.T. prevented him from directing, although he visited the set frequently. (There’s been considerable debate over whether Hooper or Spielberg really directed the film, but the consensus over time credits Hooper.) Despite the super-scary shenanigans, it definitely has elements of that lighter Spielberg touch, and it all adds up to a vastly entertaining supernatural thriller. Special shoutout to Zelda Rubinstein’s eccentric psychic medium with the baby voice, Tangina, who lends an element of whimsy to the proceedings.

Lady in White (1988)

young boy curled up near an arched window at night with a har and wearing red gloves

Credit: New Century Vista Film

As a child actor, Lukas Haas won audience hearts when he played an Amish boy who sees a murder in the 1985 film Witness. Less well-known is his performance in Lady in White, playing 9-year-old Frankie Scarlatti. On Halloween in 1962, school bullies lock Frankie in the classroom coatroom, where he is trapped for the night. That’s when he sees the apparition of a young girl (Joelle Jacobi) being brutally murdered by an invisible assailant. Then an actual man enters, trying to recover something from a floor grate. When he realizes someone is there, he strangles Frankie unconscious; Frankie’s father, Angelo (Alex Rocco), finds and rescues him in the nick of time.

Frankie has a vision of that same girl while unconscious, asking him to help her find her mother. That little girl, it turns out, was one of 11 child victims targeted by a local serial killer. Frankie and his older brother, Geno (Jason Presson), decide to investigate. Their efforts lead to some shocking revelations about tragedies past and present as the increasingly desperate killer sets his sights on Frankie.

Director Frank LaLoggia based the story on the “lady in white” legend about a ghostly figure searching for her daughter in LaLoggia’s hometown of Rochester, New York. Granted, the special effects are cheesy and dated—the director was working with a lean $4.7 million budget—and LaLoggia can’t seem to end the film, adding twist after twist well after the audience is ready for a denouement. But overall, it’s a charming film, with plenty of warmth and heart to offset the dark premise, primarily because the Scarlattis are the quintessential Italian American New England family. Lady in White inexplicably bombed at the box office, despite positive critical reviews, but it’s a hidden 1980s gem.

Dead Again (1991)

young woman, frightened, pointing gun at the camera

Credit: Paramount Pictures

In 1948, a composer named Roman Strauss is convicted of brutally stabbing his pianist wife, Margaret, to death with a pair of scissors and is executed. Over 40 years later, a woman (Emma Thompson) shows up with amnesia and is unable to speak at a Catholic orphanage that just happens to be the old Strauss mansion. The woman regularly barricades her door at night and inevitably wakes up screaming.

The nuns ask private investigator Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh) to find out her identity. Antiques dealer and hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) offers his assistance to help “Grace” recover her memory. Madson regresses her to a past life—that of Margaret and Roman Strauss’s doomed marriage. The truth about what really happened in 1948 unfolds in a series of black-and-white flashbacks—and they just might be the key to Grace’s cure.

As director, Branagh drew influences from various Hitchcock films, Rebecca, and Citizen Kane, as well as the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. The film is tightly written and well-plotted, and it ably balances suspense and sentiment. Plus, there are great performances from the entire cast, especially Robin Williams as a disgraced psychiatrist now working in a grocery store.

Some might question whether Dead Again counts as a bona fide ghost story instead of a romantic thriller with supernatural elements, i.e., hypnotherapy and past-life regression. It’s still two dead lovers, Roman and Margaret, reaching through the past to their reincarnated selves in the present to solve a mystery, exact justice, and get their happily ever after. That makes it a ghost story to me.

Stir of Echoes (1999)

shirtless man in jeans digging a hole in his backyard

Credit: Artisan Entertainment

Stir of Echoes is one of my favorite Kevin Bacon films, second only to Tremors, although it hasn’t achieved the same level of cult classic success. Bacon plays Tom Witzky, a phone lineman in a working-class Chicago neighborhood. He loves his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and son Jake (Zachary David Cope), but he struggles with the fact that his life just isn’t what he’d imagined. One night, he agrees to be hypnotized by his sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) after mocking her belief in the paranormal. This unlocks latent psychic abilities, which he shares with his far more gifted son, and he begins having disturbing visions of a young girl who disappeared from the neighborhood the year before. Naturally, Tom becomes obsessed with solving the mystery behind his intensifying visions.

Based on a novel by Richard Matheson, director David Koep drew on films like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Dead Zone for tonal inspiration, but Stir of Echoes still falls firmly into the ghost story genre. It’s just grounded in an ordinary real-world setting that makes the spooky suspense all the more effective, further aided by Bacon inhabiting the role of Tom so effortlessly that he barely seems to be acting. Alas, the film suffered at the box office and from unfavorable (and unfair) contemporary comparisons to The Sixth Sense (see below), released that same year. But it’s well worth a watch (and a rewatch).

The Sixth Sense (1999)

little boy looking scared being comforted by a man kneeling in front of him

Credit: Buena Vista Pictures

This is the film that launched director M. Night Shyamalan’s career, snagging him two Oscar nominations in the process. Child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is shot by a troubled former patient, Vincent (Donnie Wahlberg), one night at home. A year later, he has a new case with striking similarities—9-year-old Cole Sears (Haley Joel Osment)—and devotes himself to helping the boy, as a way to atone for his failure to help Vincent. Malcolm thinks Cole’s problems might be even more severe, especially when Cole confesses (in a famous scene), “I see dead people.” And those dead people can be really scary, especially to a 9-year-old boy.

The Sixth Sense was a massive hit, grossing over $672 million globally, fueled in part by a jolting final plot twist that hardly anyone saw coming. But it’s Osment’s astonishing performance as Cole that anchored it all and marked the young actor as a rising talent. (It’s also one of Willis’ best, most nuanced performances.) Shyamalan has made many films since, and several are really good, but none have ever come close to this one.

What Lies Beneath (2000)

Beautiful blond woman in a sweater standing in the fog hugging herself to keep warm

Credit: DreamWorks Pictures

A luminous Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Claire Spencer, a gifted cellist who gave up her career for marriage to scientist Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) and motherhood. But when their daughter goes off to college, Claire finds herself struggling to cope, particularly since there are tensions in her marriage. Plus, she’s still recovering psychologically from a car accident the year before, of which she has no memory. When mysterious psychic disturbances begin to manifest, Claire is convinced the ghost of a young woman is haunting her; everyone else thinks she’s just dealing with delayed grief and trauma. Claire nonetheless slowly begins to uncover the truth about the mysterious presence and her accident—and that truth just might end up costing her life.

What Lies Beneath started out as a treatment for Steven Spielberg, who envisioned something along the lines of a ghost story equivalent to Close Encounters of the Third Kind—primarily about discovery and first contact, while also exploring the psychological state of a new empty nester. But Spielberg ultimately passed on the project and handed it over to director Robert Zemeckis, who turned it into a psychological thriller/ghost story with a Hitchcockian vibe. Those earlier elements remain, however, and the leisurely pacing helps develop Claire as a character and gives Pfeiffer a chance to show off her acting chops, not just her exquisite beauty. It’s broody and satisfying and a perennial seasonal favorite for a rewatch.

The Others (2001)

young girl, back to camera, dressed n white with a veil playing with a marionette

Credit: Dimension Films

This film might be director Alejandro Amenábar’s masterpiece, merging the sensibilities of arthouse cinema with mainstream movie-making. A young mother named Grace (Nicole Kidman) and her two children are living in a remote house on the Channel Island of Jersey, recently liberated from German occupation at the end of World War II. The house is kept in near darkness at all times because the children have a severe sensitivity to light. But there are disturbances in the house that Grace fears may be evidence of a haunting, and the three creepy new servants she hired seem to have ulterior motives for being there. And just who is buried in the small, overgrown cemetery on the grounds?

Much of the film’s success is due to Kidman’s incredibly disciplined, intense performance as the icily reserved, tightly wound Grace, whose gradual unraveling drives the plot. It’s a simple plot by design. All the complexity lies in the building tension and sense of oppressiveness, augmented by Amenábar’s claustrophobic sets and minimalist lighting of sepia-toned scenes. It all leads up to a chilling climax with an appropriately satisfying twist.

Crimson Peak (2015)

woman with long blonde hair in Gothic period dress holing a candelabra in a dark corridor

Credit: Universal Pictures

Guillermo del Toro has always had an extraordinary knack for lush visuals teeming with Gothic elements. The director went all in on the Gothic horror for this ghostly tale of a Victorian-era American heiress (Mia Wasikowska) who weds a handsome but impoverished English nobleman, Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). Edith finds herself living in his crumbling family mansion, which is definitely haunted. And Edith should know. She’s had ghostly visits from her dead mother since childhood, warning her to “beware of Crimson Peak,” so she’s sensitive to haunted vibes.

Edith really should have listened to her mother. Not only is Thomas strangely reluctant to consummate their marriage, but his sister, Lucille—played to perfection by Jessica Chastain—is openly hostile and might just be slipping a suspicious substance into Edith’s tea. Will Edith uncover the dark secret of Crimson Peak and escape a potentially terrible fate? Del Toro set out to put a modern twist on the classic haunted house genre, and he succeeded, drawing on several other films on this list for inspiration (The Haunting, The Innocents, and The Shining, specifically). But at its heart, Crimson Peak is pure del Toro: sinister, atmospheric, soaked in rich colors (and sometimes blood), with a spectacular payoff at the end.

A Ghost Story (2017)

young woman seated at a desk with a small figure draped in a sheet wth eye holes cut out standing beside her

Credit: A24

This is probably the most unconventional approach to the genre on the list. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play a husband and wife known only as C and M, respectively, who have been at odds because M wants to move and C does not. Their house isn’t anything special—a small ranch-style affair in a semi-rural area—but it might be haunted.

One night, there is a mysterious bang, and the couple can’t locate the source when they search the house. Then C is killed in a car accident, his body covered with a sheet at the hospital morgue. C rises as a ghost, still wearing the sheet (now with two eyeholes) and makes his way back to the house, where he remains for a very long time, even long after M has moved out. (There’s also another ghost next door in a flowered sheet, waiting for someone it can no longer remember.)

There is almost no dialogue, Affleck spends most of the movie covered in a sheet, there is very little in the way of a musical soundtrack, and the entire film is shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Director David Lowery has said he made that choice because the film is “about someone trapped in a box for eternity, and I felt the claustrophobia of that situation could be amplified by the boxiness of the aspect ratio.” Somehow it all works. A Ghost Story isn’t about being scary; it’s a moody, poignant exploration of love lost—and it takes the audience to some conceptual spaces few films dare to tread.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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please-do-not-sell-b30a-chips-to-china

Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China

Please / /

The Chinese and Americans are currently negotiating a trade deal. There are plenty of ways to generate a win-win deal, and early signs of this are promising on many fronts.

Since this will be discussed for real tomorrow as per reports, I will offer my thoughts on this one more time.

The biggest mistake America could make would be to effectively give up Taiwan, which would be catastrophic on many levels including that Taiwan contains TSMC. I am assuming we are not so foolish as to seriously consider doing this, still I note it.

Beyond that, the key thing, basically the only thing, America has to do other than ‘get a reasonable deal overall’ is not be so captured or foolish or both as to allow export of the B30A chip, or even worse than that (yes it can always get worse) allow relaxation of restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing imports.

At first I hadn’t heard signs about this. But now it looks like the nightmare of handing China compute parity on a silver platter is very much in play.

I disagreed with the decision to sell the Nvidia H20 chips to China, but that chip was and is decidedly behind the frontier and has its disadvantages. Fortunately for us China for an opaque combination of reasons (including that they are not yet ‘AGI pilled’ and plausibly to save face or as part of negotiations) chose to turn those chips down.

The B30A would not be like that. It would mean China could match B300-clusters at only a modest additional cost. If Nvidia allocated chips sufficiently aggressively, and there is every reason to suggest they might do so, China could achieve compute parity with the United States in short order, greatly enhancing its models and competitiveness along with its entire economy and ability to fight wars. Chinese company market share and Chinese model market share of inference would skyrocket.

I turn over the floor to IFP and Saif Khan.

Saif Khan: Trump is meeting Xi this week for China trade talks. Congress is worried Trump may offer downgraded Blackwell AI chips as a concession. If this happens, it could effectively mean the end of US chip restrictions. Thread with highlights from our new 7,000-word report.

First – the reported chip specs: The “B30A” is rumored to be half of NVIDIA’s flagship B300: half the processing performance, half the memory bandwidth, and half the price. This means the B30A’s performance per $ is similar to the B300.

The B30A would: – Be far better than any Chinese AI chip – Have >12x the processing performance of the H20, a chip requiring an export license that has been approved for export in only limited quantities. – Exceed current export control thresholds by >18x

At a system level, a B30A-cluster would cost only ~20% more than a B300-cluster, a cost China can subsidize. Chinese AI labs would have access to supercomputers for AI training as powerful as those available to US AI labs.

When you put it that way, selling these chips to China seems like a really crazy thing to do if you care about whether American AI and American AI models are better than their Chinese counterparts, or you care about who has more compute. It would be a complete repudiation of the idea that we should have more and better compute than China.

Caleb Watney: I would simply not give away the essential bottleneck input for the most important dual-use technology of our era to the US’s primary geopolitical rival.

Hard to understate what a blow this would be for American leadership in AI if [sales of B30As] happens.

The US was not selling our supplies of enriched uranium to the Axis powers as we were building the Manhattan Project.

We could go from a 31x compute lead (in the best case scenario) to actually giving China a 1.1x compute lead if we sell the farm here.

The full report is here.

But won’t US chip restrictions cause Huawei to backfill with its own AI chips? No, for both supply and demand reasons.

On the supply side, China faces bottlenecks due to US/allied chipmaking tool controls. AI chips require two components: processor dies and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). US capacity for processors is 35-38x of China’s (or adjusting for China’s higher mfg errors, 160-170x).

China fares even worse on HBM, making virtually none this year. Even next year, the US advantage will be 70x.

As a result, five different analysts find Huawei makes an extremely small number of AI chips. They’ll be at 1-4% of US AI chips this year, and 1-2% in 2026 as the US ramps and Huawei stalls.

On the demand side, China will likely create artificial demand for inferior Huawei chips. So B30A sales to China will have minimal effect on Huawei market expansion. Instead, sales would supercharge China’s frontier AI & arm Chinese cloud to compete globally with US cloud.

Michael Sobolik (Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute): Allowing Nvidia to sell modified Blackwell chips to China would unilaterally surrender our greatest AI advantage to the Chinese Communist Party.

This would be a grave mistake.

This is why @SenatorBanks’ GAIN AI Act is so important. American chips should go American companies, not China.

America First!

China is going to maximize production on and progress of Huawei chips no matter what because they (correctly) see it as a dependency issue, and to this end they will ensure that Huawei chips sell out indefinitely, no matter what we do, and the amounts they have is tiny. The idea that they would be meaningfully exporting them any time soon is absurd, unless we are selling them so many B30As they have compute to spare.

Huawei is going to produce as many chips as possible, at as high quality as possible, from this point forth, which for a while will be ‘not many.’ Our decision here has at most minimal impact on their decisions and capacity, while potentially handing the future of AI to China by shoring up their one weakness.

Congress is trying to force through the GAIN Act to try and stop this sort of thing, and despite the political costs of doing so Microsoft sees this as important enough that it has thrown its support behind the GAIN Act. If the White House wants to make the case that the GAIN Act is not necessary, this is the time to make that case.

Even if you believe in the White House’s ‘tech stack’ theory (which I don’t), and that Huawei is much closer to catching up than they look (which again I don’t), this is still madness, because ultimately under that theory what matters are the models not the chips.

The the extent anyone was locked into anything, this newly empowered and market ascendant hybrid Nvidia-China stack (whether the main models were DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi or someone else) would lock people far more into the models than the chips, and the new chips would provide the capacity to serve those customers while starving American companies of compute and also profit margins.

Then, if and when the Huawei chips are produced in sufficient quantity and quality, a process that would proceed apace regardless, it would be a seamless transfer, that PRC would insist upon, to then gradually transition to serving this via their own chips.

Again, if anything, importing massive supplies of Nvidia compute would open up the opportunity for far earlier exports of Huawei chips to other nations, if China wanted to pursue that strategy for real, and allows them to offer better products across the board. This is beyond foolish.

Is a major driver of potentially selling these chips that they would be exports to China, and assist with balance of trade?

I don’t know if this is a major driving factor, especially since the chips would be coming from Taiwan and not from America, but if it is then I would note that China will use these chips to avoid importing compute in other ways, and use them to develop and export services. Chips are inputs to other products, not final goods. Selling these chips will not improve our balance of trade on net over the medium term.

Is it possible that China would not see it this way, and would turn down even these almost state of the art chips? I find this highly unlikely.

One reason to find it unlikely is to look at Nvidia’s stock over the last day of trading. They are a $5 trillion company, whose stock is up by 9% and whose products sell out, on the chance they’ll be allowed to sell chips to China. The market believes the Chinese would buy big over an extended period.

But let’s suppose, in theory, that the Chinese care so much about self-sufficiency and resilience or perhaps pride, or perhaps are taking sufficient queues from our willingness to sell it, that they would turn down the B30As.

In that case, they also don’t care about you offering it to them. It doesn’t get you anything in the negotiation and won’t help you get to a yes. Trump understands this. Never give up anything the other guy doesn’t care about. Even if you don’t face a backlash and you somehow fully ‘get away with it,’ what was the point?

This never ends positively for America. Take the chips off the table.

Does Nvidia need this? Nvidia absolutely does not need this. They’re selling out their chips either way and business is going gangbusters across the board.

Here’s some of what else they announced on Tuesday alone, as the stock passed $200 (it was $139 one year ago, $12.53 post-split five years ago):

Morning Brew: Nvidia announcements today:

– Eli Lilly partnership

– Palantir partnership

– Hyundai partnership

– Samsung partnership

– $1 billion investment in Nokia

– Uber partnership to build 100,000 robotaxi fleet

– $500 billion in expected revenue over through 2026

– New system connecting quantum computers to its AI chips

– Department of Energy partnership to build 7 new supercomputers

Throughout this post, I have made the case against selling B30As to China purely on the basis of the White House’s own publicly stated goals. If what we care about are purely ‘beating China’ and ‘winning the AI race’ where that race means ensuring American models retain market share, and ensuring we retain strategic and military and diplomatic advantages, then this would be one of the worst moves one could make. We would be selling out our biggest edge in order to sell a few chips.

That is not to minimize that there are other important reasons to sell B30As to China, as this would make it far more likely that China is the one to develop AGI or ASI before we do, or that this development is made in a relatively reckless and unsafe fashion. If we sell these chips and China then catches up to us, not only do we risk that it is China that builds it first, it will be built in extreme haste and recklessness no matter who does it. I would expect everyone to collectively lose their minds, and for our negotiating position, should we need to make a deal, to deteriorate dramatically.

Even if it is merely the newly supercharged Chinese models getting market penetration in America, I would expect everyone to lose their minds from that alone. That leads to very bad political decisions all around.

That will all be true even if AGI takes 10 years to develop as per Andrej Karpathy.

But that’s not what is important to the people negotiating and advising on this. To them, let me be clear: Purely in terms of your own views and goals, this is madness.

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