Shannon Garcia

New Windows 11 build makes mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in even more mandatory

Tech, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, windows 11 25h2 / Shannon Garcia / March 29, 2025

Microsoft released a new Windows Insider build of Windows 11 to its experimental Dev Channel today, with a fairly extensive batch of new features and tweaks. But the most important one for enthusiasts and PC administrators is buried halfway down the list: This build removes a command prompt script called bypassnro, which up until now has been a relatively easy and reliable way to circumvent the otherwise mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in requirement on new Windows 11 PCs and fresh installs of Windows 11 on existing PCs.

Microsoft’s Windows Insider Program lead Amanda Langowski and Principal Product Manager Brandon LeBlanc were clear that this change is considered a feature and not a bug.

“We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11,” Langowski and LeBlanc write in the post. “This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.”

Of course, the removal of bypassnro makes life harder for people who want to exit Windows setup without Internet connectivity or a Microsoft Account. You might be setting up a computer in a place with no Internet connection, or you might simply prefer a local user account like the ones that all past Windows versions allowed you to use.

There are benefits to a Microsoft Account—easy access to any existing Microsoft 365 or OneDrive subscriptions, automated encryption for your local disk and backup of your drive’s encryption key for recovery purposes, and syncing of certain settings between PCs. But using a local account reduces the number of notifications and other upsells that Windows 11 will bother you with. Whatever your reasoning, you’ll need to find a different workaround for future Windows versions.

New Windows 11 build makes mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in even more mandatory Read More »

Beyond RGB: A new image file format efficiently stores invisible light data

Biz & IT, compression, data science, image compression, image formats, JPEG, jpeg xl, multispectrum images, Science, spectral imaging / Shannon Garcia / March 29, 2025

Importantly, it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively. That is then fed into the codec, and rather than inventing a completely new file type, the method uses the compression engine and features of the standardized JPEG XL image format to store the specially prepared spectral data.

Making spectral images easier to work with

According to the researchers, the massive file sizes of spectral images have reportedly been a real barrier to adoption in industries that would benefit from their accuracy. Smaller files mean faster transfer times, reduced storage costs, and the ability to work with these images more interactively without specialized hardware.

The results reported by the researchers seem impressive—with their technique, spectral image files shrink by 10 to 60 times compared to standard OpenEXR lossless compression, bringing them down to sizes comparable to regular high-quality photos. They also preserve key OpenEXR features like metadata and high dynamic range support.

While some information is sacrificed in the compression process—making this a “lossy” format—the researchers designed it to discard the least noticeable details first, focusing compression artifacts in the less important high-frequency spectral details to preserve important visual information.

Of course, there are some limitations. Translating these research results into widespread practical use hinges on the continued development and refinement of the software tools that handle JPEG XL encoding and decoding. Like many cutting-edge formats, the initial software implementations may need further development to fully unlock every feature. It’s a work in progress.

And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications. Some researchers working with spectral data might readily accept the trade-off for the practical benefits of smaller files and faster processing. Others handling particularly sensitive measurements might need to seek alternative methods of storage.

For now, the new technique remains primarily of interest to specialized fields like scientific visualization and high-end rendering. However, as industries from automotive design to medical imaging continue generating larger spectral datasets, compression techniques like this could help make those massive files more practical to work with.

Beyond RGB: A new image file format efficiently stores invisible light data Read More »

Ex-FCC chairs from both parties say CBS news distortion investigation is bogus

fcc chairman brendan carr, Policy / Shannon Garcia / March 29, 2025

The Federal Communications Commission’s news distortion investigation into CBS drew a public rebuke from a bipartisan group of five former FCC commissioners, including two former chairmen.

The group criticizing current Chairman Brendan Carr includes Republican Alfred Sikes, the FCC chair from 1989 to 1993, and Democrat Tom Wheeler, the FCC chair from 2013 to 2017. They were joined by Republican Rachelle Chong, Democrat Ervin Duggan, and Democrat Gloria Tristani, all former commissioners.

“These comments are submitted to emphasize the unprecedented nature of this news distortion proceeding, and to express our strong concern that the Federal Communications Commission may be seeking to censor the news media in a manner antithetical to the First Amendment,” the former chairs and commissioners told the FCC in a filing this week.

The Center for American Rights filed the news distortion complaint against flagship station WCBS over the editing of a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The complaint was dismissed in January by then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the FCC, revived the complaint shortly after taking over.

“Editorial judgment protected by First Amendment”

The Center for American Rights’ claim of news distortion is based on an allegation that CBS misled viewers by airing two different responses from Harris to the same question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one on 60 Minutes and the other on Face the Nation. But CBS provided the FCC with a transcript showing that the programs aired two different sentences from the same response.

“The transcript confirms that the editing choices at issue lie well within the editorial judgment protected by the First Amendment and that the Commission’s January 16 dismissal of the complaint was legally correct,” the former chairs and commissioners wrote. “Yet the Commission has reopened the complaint and taken the highly unusual step of inviting public comment, even though the proceeding is adjudicatory in nature. These developments have unjustifiably prolonged this investigation and raise questions about the actual purpose of the proceeding.”

The FCC has historically punished licensees only after dramatic violations, like “elaborate hoaxes, internal conspiracies, and reports conjured from whole cloth,” they wrote. There is “no credible argument” that the allegations against CBS “belong in the same category.”

Ex-FCC chairs from both parties say CBS news distortion investigation is bogus Read More »

Elon Musk and Trump win fight to keep DOGE’s work secret

elon musk doge, Policy / Shannon Garcia / March 28, 2025

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) don’t have to turn over information related to their government cost-cutting operations, at least for now, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A federal judge previously ruled that 14 states suing the federal government can serve written discovery requests on Musk and DOGE. Musk, DOGE, and President Trump turned to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an attempt to block that order.

A three-judge panel at the appeals court granted an emergency motion for a stay in an order issued yesterday, putting the lower-court ruling on hold pending further orders from the appeals court. “Petitioners have satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay,” the panel ruling said. “In particular, petitioners have shown a likelihood of success on their argument that the district court was required to decide their motion to dismiss before allowing discovery.”

Musk, DOGE, and Trump filed a petition to quash the district court’s discovery order at the same time that they filed their emergency motion for a stay. The appeals court did not rule on the petition to quash the discovery order. The three-judge panel included judges appointed by George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

The states suing the US alleged that “President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities.” They sought “planning, implementation, and organizational documents,” but no emails, text messages, or other electronic communications.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied a request for depositions but otherwise found the states’ discovery requests to be “reasonable and narrowly tailored to their request for injunctive relief.”

Elon Musk and Trump win fight to keep DOGE’s work secret Read More »

After a spacecraft was damaged en route to launch, NASA says it won’t launch

Cygnus, dragon, Space / Shannon Garcia / March 27, 2025

Three weeks ago, NASA revealed that a shipping container protecting a Cygnus spacecraft sustained “damage” while traveling to the launch site in Florida.

Built by Northrop Grumman, Cygnus is one of two Western spacecraft currently capable of delivering food, water, experiments, and other supplies to the International Space Station. This particular Cygnus mission, NG-22, had been scheduled for June. As part of its statement in early March, the space agency said it was evaluating the NG-22 Cygnus cargo supply mission along with Northrop.

On Wednesday, after a query from Ars Technica, the space agency acknowledged that the Cygnus spacecraft designated for NG-22 is too damaged to fly, at least in the nearterm.

Loading up Dragon

“Following initial evaluation, there also is damage to the cargo module,” the agency said in a statement. “The International Space Station Program will continue working with Northrop Grumman to assess whether the Cygnus cargo module is able to safely fly to the space station on a future flight.” That future flight, NG-23, will launch no earlier than this fall.

As a result, NASA is modifying the cargo on its next cargo flight to the space station, the 32nd SpaceX Cargo Dragon mission, due to launch in April. The agency says it will “add more consumable supplies and food to help ensure sufficient reserves of supplies aboard the station” to the Dragon vehicle.

As it mulls stopgap measures, one option available to NASA may be to try to slot in a cargo mission on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. After the propulsion issues experienced on Starliner’s first crew flight to the space station last June, NASA is still evaluating whether the vehicle can be certified for an operational crew mission, or whether it would be better to perform an uncrewed test flight.

After a spacecraft was damaged en route to launch, NASA says it won’t launch Read More »

With Vulcan’s certification, Space Force is no longer solely reliant on SpaceX

Space, united launch alliance, US Space Force, vulcan rocket / Shannon Garcia / March 27, 2025

The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions.

“Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security,” said Brig. Gen. Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. “Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems.”

The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

The first of these, an explosion on a test stand in northern Alabama during the spring of 2023, delayed the first test flight of Vulcan by several months. Then, in October 2024, during the second test flight of the rocket, a nozzle on one of the Vulcan’s two side-mounted boosters failed.

A cumbersome process

This nozzle issue, more than five months ago, compounded the extensive paperwork needed to certify Vulcan for the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive missions. The military has several options for companies to certify their rockets depending on the number of flights completed, which could be two, three, or more. The fewer the flights, the more paperwork and review that must be done. For Vulcan, this process entailed:

52 certification criteria
more than 180 discrete tasks
2 certification flight demonstrations
60 payload interface requirement verifications
18 subsystem design and test reviews
114 hardware and software audits

That sounds like a lot of work, but at least the military’s rules and regulations are straightforward and simple to navigate, right? Anyway, the certification process is complete, elevating United Launch Alliance to fly national security missions alongside SpaceX with its fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

With Vulcan’s certification, Space Force is no longer solely reliant on SpaceX Read More »

Google makes Android development private, will continue open source releases

android, AOSP, Development, Google, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 27, 2025

Google is planning a major change to the way it develops new versions of the Android operating system. Since the beginning, large swaths of the software have been developed in public-facing channels, but that will no longer be the case. This does not mean Android is shedding its open source roots, but the process won’t be as transparent.

Google has confirmed to Android Authority that all Android development work going forward will take place in Google’s internal branch. This is a shift from the way Google has worked on Android in the past, which featured frequent updates to the public AOSP branch. Anyone can access AOSP, but the internal branches are only available to Google and companies with a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license, like Samsung, Motorola, and others.

According to the company, it is making this change to simplify things, building on a recent change to trunk-based development. As Google works on both public and private branches of Android, the two fall out of sync with respect to features and API support. This forces Google to tediously merge the branches for every release. By focusing on the internal branch, Google claims it can streamline releases and make life easier for everyone.

When new versions of Android are done, Google says it will continue to publish the source code in AOSP as always. Supposedly, this will allow developers to focus on supporting their apps without keeping track of pending changes to the platform in AOSP. Licensed OEMs, meanwhile, can just focus on the lively internal branch as they work on devices that can take a year or more to launch.

Google makes Android development private, will continue open source releases Read More »

The Atlantic publishes texts showing Trump admin sent bombing plan to reporter

Policy, signal, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / March 27, 2025

White House didn’t want texts released

Prior to running its follow-up article, The Atlantic asked Trump administration officials if they objected to publishing the full texts. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response:

As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic]—yes, we object to the release.”

Obviously, The Atlantic moved ahead with publishing the texts. “The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security,” the article said.

On Monday, the National Security Council said it was “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.” Trump publicly supported Waltz after the incident, but Politico reported that “Trump was mad—and suspicious—that Waltz had Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number saved in his phone in the first place.” One of Politico’s anonymous sources was quoted as saying, “The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid.”

Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said the committee will investigate, according to The Hill. “We’re going to look into this and see what the facts are, but it’s definitely a concern. And you can be sure the committee, House and Senate, will be looking into this… And it appears that mistakes were made, no question,” he said.

The White House said its investigation is being undertaken by the National Security Council, the White House Counsel’s office, and a group led by Elon Musk. “Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt told reporters.

The Atlantic publishes texts showing Trump admin sent bombing plan to reporter Read More »

Praise Kier for Severance season 2! Let’s discuss.

Apple TV, culture, severance, TV / Shannon Garcia / March 26, 2025

Marching bands? Mammalian Nurturables? An ORTBO? Yup, Severance stays weird.

Severance has just wrapped up its second season. I sat down with fellow Ars staffers Aaron Zimmerman and Lee Hutchinson to talk through what we had just seen, covering everything from those goats to the show’s pacing. Warning: Huge spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 follow!

Nate: Severance season 1 was a smaller-scale, almost claustrophobic show about a crazy office, its “waffle parties,” and the personal life of Mark Scout, mourning his dead wife and “severing” his consciousness to avoid that pain. It followed a compact group of characters, centered around the four “refiners” who worked on Lumon’s severed floor. But season 2 blew up that cozy/creepy world and started following more characters—including far more “outies”—to far more places. Did the show manage to maintain its unique vibe while making significant changes to pacing, character count, and location?

Lee: I think so, but as you say, things were different this time around. One element that I’m glad carried through was the show’s consistent use of a very specific visual language. (I am an absolute sucker for visual storytelling. My favorite Kubrick film is Barry Lyndon. I’ll forgive a lot of plot holes if they’re beautifully shot.) Season 2, especially in the back half, treats us to an absolute smorgasbord of incredible visuals—bifurcated shots symbolizing severance and duality, stark whites and long hallways, and my personal favorite: Chris Walken in a black turtleneck seated in front of a fireplace, like Satan holding court in Hell. The storytelling might be a bit less focused, but it looks great.

Image of Christopher Walken being Christopher Walken. — So many visual metaphors in one frame. Credit: AppleTV+

Aaron: I think it succeeded overall, with caveats. The most prominent thing lost in the transition was the tight pacing of the first season; while season 2 started and ended strong, the middle meandered quite a bit, and I’d say the overall pacing felt pretty off. Doing two late-season “side quest” episodes (Gemma/Mark and Cobel backstories) was a bit of a drag. But I agree with Lee—Severance was more about vibes than narrative focus this season.

Nate: The “side quests” were vocally disliked by a subsection of the show’s fandom, and it certainly is an unusual choice to do two episodes in a row that essentially leave all your main characters to the side. But I don’t think these were really outliers. This is a season, for instance, that opened with a show about the innies—and then covered the exact same ground in episode two from the outies’ perspective. It also sent the whole cast off on a bizarre “ORTBO” that took an entire episode and spent a lot of time talking about Kier’s masturbating, and possibly manufactured, twin. (!)

Still, the “side quest” episodes stood out even among all this experimentation with pace and flow. But I think the label “side quest” can be a misnomer. The episode showing us the Gemma/Mark backstory not only brought the show’s main character into focus, it revealed what was happening to Gemma and gave many new hints about what Lumon was up to. In other words—it was about Big Stuff.

Image the four MDR refiners on ORTBO — Even when we’re outside, the show sticks to a palette of black and white and cold. Winter is almost as much of a character in *Severance* as our four refiners are. Credit: AppleTV+

The episode featuring Cobel, in contrast, found time for long, lingering drone shots of the sea, long takes of Cobel lying in bed, and long views of rural despair… and all to find a notebook. To me, this seemed much more like an actual “side quest” that could have been an interwoven B plot in a more normal episode.

Lee: The “side quest” I didn’t all mind was episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” directed by the show’s cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné. The tale of Mark and Gemma’s relationship—a tale begun while donating blood using Lumon-branded equipment, with the symbolism of Lumon as a blood-hungry faceless machine being almost disturbingly on-the-nose—was masterfully told. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the three episodes after that, but I think that’s just because episode 7 was just so well done. I like TV that makes me feel things, and that one succeeded.

Aaron: Completely agree. I love the Gemma/Mark episode, but I was very disappointed with the Cobel episode (it doesn’t help that I dislike her as a character generally, and the whole “Cobel invented severance!” thing seemed a bit convenient and unearned to me). I think part of the issue for me was that the core innie crew and the hijinks they got up to in season 1 felt like the beating heart of the show, so even though the story had to move on at some point (and it’s not going back—half the innies can’t even be innies anymore), I started to miss what made me fall in love with the show.

Image of Patricia Arquette as Harmony Cobel. — Harmony Cobel comes home to the ether factory. Credit: AppleTV+

Lee: I get the narrative motivation behind Cobel having invented the severance chip (along with every line of code and every function, as she tells us), but yeah, that was the first time the show threw something at me that I really did not like. I see how this lets the story move Cobel into a helper role with Mark’s reintegration, but, yeah, ugh, that particular development felt tremendously unearned, as you say. I love the character, but that one prodded my suspension of disbelief pretty damn hard.

Speaking of Mark’s reintegration—I was so excited when episode three (“Who is Alive?”) ended with Mark’s outie slamming down on the Lumon conference room table. Surely now after two catch-up episodes, I thought, we’d get this storyline moving! Having the next episode (“Woe’s Hollow”) focusing on the ORTBO and Kier’s (possibly fictional) twin was a little cheap, even though it was a great episode. But where I started to get really annoyed was when we slide into episode five (“Trojan’s Horse”) with Mark’s reintegration apparently stalled. It seems like from then to the end of the season, reintegration proceeded in fits and starts, at the speed of plot rather than in any kind of ordered fashion.

It was one of the few times where I felt like my time was being wasted by the showrunners. And I don’t like that feeling. That feels like Lost.

Image of Mark on the table. — Kind of wish they’d gone a little harder here. Credit: AppleTV+

Aaron: Yes! Mark’s reintegration was handled pretty poorly, I think. Like you said, it was exciting to see the show go there so early… but it didn’t really make much difference for the rest of the season. It makes sense that reintegration would take time—and we do see flashes of it happening throughout the season—but it felt like the show was gearing up for some wild Petey-level reintegration stuff that just never came. Presumably that’s for season 3, but the reintegration stuff was just another example of what felt like the show spinning its wheels a bit. And like you said, Lee, when it feels like a show isn’t quite sure what to do with the many mysteries it introduces week after week, I start to think about Lost, and not in a good way.

The slow-rolled reintegration stuff was essential for the finale, though. Both seasons seemed to bank pretty hard on a “slow buildup to an explosive finale” setup, which felt a little frustrating this season (season 1’s finale is one of my favorite TV show episodes of all time).

But I think the finale worked. Just scene after scene of instantly iconic moments. The scene of innie and outtie Mark negotiating through a camcorder in that weird maternity cabin was brilliant. And while my initial reaction to Mark’s decision at the end was anger, I really should have seen it coming—outtie Mark could not have been more patronizing in the camcorder conversation. I guess I, like outtie Mark, saw innie Mark as being somewhat lesser than.

What did you guys think of the finale?

Nate: A solid effort, but one that absolutely did not reach the heights of season 1. It was at its best when characters and events from the season played critical moments—such as the altercation between Drummond, Mark, and Feral Goat Lady, or the actual (finally!) discovery of the elevator to the Testing Floor.

But the finale also felt quite strange or unbalanced in other ways. Ricken doesn’t make an appearance, despite the hint that he was willing to retool his book (pivotal in season 1) for the Lumon innies. Burt doesn’t show up. Irving is gone. So is Reghabi. Miss Huang was summarily dismissed without having much of a story arc. So the finale failed to “gather up all its threads” in the way it did during season one.

And then there was that huge marching band, which ups the number of severed employees we know about by a factor of 50x—and all so they could celebrate the achievements of an innie (Mark S.) who is going to be dismissed and whose wife is apparently going to be killed. This seemed… fairly improbable, even for Lumon. On the other hand, this is a company/cult with an underground sacrificial goat farm, so what do I know about “probability”? Speaking of which, how do we feel about the Goat Revelations ™?

Image of Emile the Goat. — This is Emile, and he must be protected at all costs. Credit: AppleTV+

Lee: I’m still not entirely sure what the goat revelations were. They were being raised in order to be crammed into coffins and sacrificed when… things happen? Poor little Emile was going to ride to the afterlife with Gemma, apparently, but, like… why? Is it simply part of a specifically creepy Lumontology ritual? Emile’s little casket had all kinds of symbology engraved on it, and we know goats (or at least “the ram”) symbolizes Malice in Kier’s four tempers, but I’m still really not getting this one.

Aaron: Yeah, you kind of had to hand-wave a lot of the stuff in the finale. The goats just being sacrificial animals made me laugh—“OK, I guess it wasn’t that deep.” But it could be that we don’t really know their actual purpose yet.

Perhaps most improbable to me was that this was apparently the most important day in Lumon history, and they had basically one security guy on the premises. He’s a big dude—or was (outtie Mark waking up mid-accidental-shooting cracked me up)—but come on.

Stuff like the marching band doesn’t make a lick of sense. But it was a great scene, so, eh, just go with it. That seems to be what Severance is asking us to do more and more, and honestly, I’m mostly OK with that.

Image of Seth Milchick, lord of the dance. — This man can do anything. Credit: AppleTV+

Nate: Speaking of important days in Lumon history… what is Lumon up to, exactly? Jame Eagen spoke in season 1 about his “revolving,” he watched Helena eat eggs without eating anything himself, and he appears on the severed floor to watch the final “Cold Harbor” test. Clearly something weird is afoot. But the actual climactic test on Gemma was just to see if the severance block could hold her personalities apart even when facing deep traumas.

However, (as Miss Casey) she had already been in the presence of her husband (Mark S.), and neither of them had known it. So the show seems to suggest on the one hand that whatever is happening on the testing floor will change the world. But on the other hand, it’s really just confirming what we already know. And surely there’s no need to kidnap people if the goal is just to help them compartmentalize pain; as our current epidemic of drug and alcohol use show, plenty of people would sign up for this voluntarily. So what’s going on? Or, if you have no theories, does the show give you confidence that it knows where it’s going?

Lee: The easy answer—that severance chips will somehow allow the vampire spirit of Kier to jump bodies forever—doesn’t really line up. If Chris Walken’s husband Walter Bishop is to be believed, the severance procedure is only 12 years old. So it’s not that, at least.

Though Nate’s point about Helena eating eggs—and Jame’s comment that he wished she would “take them raw”—does echo something we learned back in season one: that Kier Egan’s favorite breakfast was raw eggs and milk.

Image of a precisely sliced hard boiled egg on a painted plate. — Eggiwegs! I would like… to eat them raw? Credit: AppleTV+

Aaron: That’s the question for season 3, I think, and whether they’re able to give satisfying answers will determine how people view this show in the long term. I’ll admit that I was much more confident in the show’s writers after the first season; this season has raised some concerns for me. I believe Ben Stiller has said that they know how the show ends, just not how it gets there. That’s a perilous place to be.

Nate: We’ve groused a bit about the show’s direction, but I think it’s fair to say it comes from a place of love; the storytelling and visual style is so special, and we’ve had our collective hearts broken so many times by shows that can’t stick the landing. (I want those hours back, Lost.) I’m certainly rooting for Severance to succeed. And even though this season wasn’t perfect, I enjoyed watching every minute of it. As we wrap things up, anyone have a favorite moment from season 2? I personally enjoyed Milchick getting salty, first with Drummond and then with a wax statue of Kier.

Lee: Absolutely! I very much want the show to stick the eventual landing. I have to go with you on your take, Nate—Milchick steals the show. Tramell Tillman plays him like a true company man, with the added complexity that comes when your company is also the cult that controls your life. My favorite bits with him are his office decorations, frankly—the rabbit/duck optical illusion statue, showing his mutable nature, and the iceberg poster, hinting at hidden depths. He’s fantastic. I would 100 percent watch a spin-off series about Milchick.

Image showing Seth Milchick's office. — Mr. Milchick’s office, filled with ambiguousness. I’m including Miss Huang in that description, too. Credit: AppleTV+

Aaron: This season gave me probably my favorite line in the whole series—Irv’s venomous “Yes! Do it, Seth!” as Helena is telling Milchick to flip the switch to bring back Helly R. But yeah, Milchick absolutely killed it this season. “Devour feculence” and the drum major scene were highlights, but I also loved his sudden sprint from the room after handing innie Dylan his outtie’s note. Severance can be hilarious.

And I agree, complaints aside, this show is fantastic. It’s incredibly unique, and I looked forward to watching it every week so I could discuss it with friends. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait three more years for the next season.

Praise Kier for Severance season 2! Let’s discuss. Read More »

Momentum seems to be building for Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator

jared isaacman, Space / Shannon Garcia / March 26, 2025

With the vast majority of President Donald Trump’s cabinet members now approved by the US Senate, focus is turning to senior positions within the administration that are just below the cabinet level.

The administrator of NASA is among the most high-profile of these positions. Nearly four months ago Trump nominated private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become chief of the space agency, but he has yet to receive a hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Almost immediately after his nomination, much of the space community fell in behind Isaacman, who has flown to space twice on private Crew Dragon missions, raised charitable funds, and is generally well-liked. Since then, Isaacman has worked to build support for his candidacy through conversations with people in the space community and officeholders.

However, publicly, not much has happened. This has raised questions within the space community about whether the nomination has stalled. Although some people have expressed concern about financial ties between Isaacman and SpaceX, according to multiple sources, the primary obstacle has been Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate committee.

Cruz is not happy that Isaacman has donated to Democrats in the past, and he is concerned that the private astronaut is more interested in Mars exploration than the Moon. Cruz also did not appreciate Elon Musk’s call to end the life of the International Space Station early. The station is operated by NASA’s field center, Johnson Space Center, in Houston, where Cruz lives.

Nomination on track

Nevertheless, despite the slower pace, people familiar with the nomination process say Isaacman’s candidacy remains on track. And recently, there have been some public announcements that support this notion.

In early March, the governors of several southern US states, including Florida and Texas, sent a letter to Cruz expressing “strong support” for the swift confirmation of Isaacman. A notable absence from this letter was the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is located. However, she also recently sent Cruz a letter praising Isaacman, calling him an “exceptional selection” to lead NASA. It is notable that the governors of all the US states with major human spaceflight activities have now lined up behind Isaacman.

Momentum seems to be building for Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator Read More »

why-anthropic’s-claude-still-hasn’t-beaten-pokemon

Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon

AI, Anthropic Claude, Features, gaming, Pokémon / Shannon Garcia / March 23, 2025

Weeks later, Sonnet’s “reasoning” model is struggling with a game designed for children.

Gotta subsume ’em all into the machine consciousness! Credit: Aurich Lawson

In recent months, the AI industry’s biggest boosters have started converging on a public expectation that we’re on the verge of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—virtual agents that can match or surpass “human-level” understanding and performance on most cognitive tasks.

OpenAI is quietly seeding expectations for a “PhD-level” AI agent that could operate autonomously at the level of a “high-income knowledge worker” in the near future. Elon Musk says that “we’ll have AI smarter than any one human probably” by the end of 2025. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks it might take a bit longer but similarly says it’s plausible that AI will be “better than humans at almost everything” by the end of 2027.

A few researchers at Anthropic have, over the past year, had a part-time obsession with a peculiar problem.

Can Claude play Pokémon?

A thread: pic.twitter.com/K8SkNXCxYJ

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 25, 2025

Last month, Anthropic presented its “Claude Plays Pokémon” experiment as a waypoint on the road to that predicted AGI future. It’s a project the company said shows “glimmers of AI systems that tackle challenges with increasing competence, not just through training but with generalized reasoning.” Anthropic made headlines by trumpeting how Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s “improved reasoning capabilities” let the company’s latest model make progress in the popular old-school Game Boy RPG in ways “that older models had little hope of achieving.”

While Claude models from just a year ago struggled even to leave the game’s opening area, Claude 3.7 Sonnet was able to make progress by collecting multiple in-game Gym Badges in a relatively small number of in-game actions. That breakthrough, Anthropic wrote, was because the “extended thinking” by Claude 3.7 Sonnet means the new model “plans ahead, remembers its objectives, and adapts when initial strategies fail” in a way that its predecessors didn’t. Those things, Anthropic brags, are “critical skills for battling pixelated gym leaders. And, we posit, in solving real-world problems too.”

Over the last year, new Claude models have shown quick progress in reaching new Pokémon milestones. Credit: Anthropic

But relative success over previous models is not the same as absolute success over the game in its entirety. In the weeks since Claude Plays Pokémon was first made public, thousands of Twitch viewers have watched Claude struggle to make consistent progress in the game. Despite long “thinking” pauses between each move—during which viewers can read printouts of the system’s simulated reasoning process—Claude frequently finds itself pointlessly revisiting completed towns, getting stuck in blind corners of the map for extended periods, or fruitlessly talking to the same unhelpful NPC over and over, to cite just a few examples of distinctly sub-human in-game performance.

Watching Claude continue to struggle at a game designed for children, it’s hard to imagine we’re witnessing the genesis of some sort of computer superintelligence. But even Claude’s current sub-human level of Pokémon performance could hold significant lessons for the quest toward generalized, human-level artificial intelligence.

Smart in different ways

In some sense, it’s impressive that Claude can play Pokémon with any facility at all. When developing AI systems that find dominant strategies in games like Go and Dota 2, engineers generally start their algorithms off with deep knowledge of a game’s rules and/or basic strategies, as well as a reward function to guide them toward better performance. For Claude Plays Pokémon, though, project developer and Anthropic employee David Hershey says he started with an unmodified, generalized Claude model that wasn’t specifically trained or tuned to play Pokémon games in any way.

“This is purely the various other things that [Claude] understands about the world being used to point at video games,” Hershey told Ars. “So it has a sense of a Pokémon. If you go to claude.ai and ask about Pokémon, it knows what Pokémon is based on what it’s read… If you ask, it’ll tell you there’s eight gym badges, it’ll tell you the first one is Brock… it knows the broad structure.”

A flowchart summarizing the pieces that help Claude interact with an active game of Pokémon (click through to zoom in). Credit: Anthropic / Excelidraw

In addition to directly monitoring certain key (emulated) Game Boy RAM addresses for game state information, Claude views and interprets the game’s visual output much like a human would. But despite recent advances in AI image processing, Hershey said Claude still struggles to interpret the low-resolution, pixelated world of a Game Boy screenshot as well as a human can. “Claude’s still not particularly good at understanding what’s on the screen at all,” he said. “You will see it attempt to walk into walls all the time.”

Hershey said he suspects Claude’s training data probably doesn’t contain many overly detailed text descriptions of “stuff that looks like a Game Boy screen.” This means that, somewhat surprisingly, if Claude were playing a game with “more realistic imagery, I think Claude would actually be able to see a lot better,” Hershey said.

“It’s one of those funny things about humans that we can squint at these eight-by-eight pixel blobs of people and say, ‘That’s a girl with blue hair,’” Hershey continued. “People, I think, have that ability to map from our real world to understand and sort of grok that… so I’m honestly kind of surprised that Claude’s as good as it is at being able to see there’s a person on the screen.”

Even with a perfect understanding of what it’s seeing on-screen, though, Hershey said Claude would still struggle with 2D navigation challenges that would be trivial for a human. “It’s pretty easy for me to understand that [an in-game] building is a building and that I can’t walk through a building,” Hershey said. “And that’s [something] that’s pretty challenging for Claude to understand… It’s funny because it’s just kind of smart in different ways, you know?”

A sample Pokémon screen with an overlay showing how Claude characterizes the game’s grid-based map. Credit: Anthrropic / X

Where Claude tends to perform better, Hershey said, is in the more text-based portions of the game. During an in-game battle, Claude will readily notice when the game tells it that an attack from an electric-type Pokémon is “not very effective” against a rock-type opponent, for instance. Claude will then squirrel that factoid away in a massive written knowledge base for future reference later in the run. Claude can also integrate multiple pieces of similar knowledge into pretty elegant battle strategies, even extending those strategies into long-term plans for catching and managing teams of multiple creatures for future battles.

Claude can even show surprising “intelligence” when Pokémon’s in-game text is intentionally misleading or incomplete. “It’s pretty funny that they tell you you need to go find Professor Oak next door and then he’s not there,” Hershey said of an early-game task. “As a 5-year-old, that was very confusing to me. But Claude actually typically goes through that same set of motions where it talks to mom, goes to the lab, doesn’t find [Oak], says, ‘I need to figure something out’… It’s sophisticated enough to sort of go through the motions of the way [humans are] actually supposed to learn it, too.”

A sample of the kind of simulated reasoning process Claude steps through during a typical Pokémon battle. Credit: Claude Plays Pokemon / Twitch

These kinds of relative strengths and weaknesses when compared to “human-level” play reflect the overall state of AI research and capabilities in general, Hershey said. “I think it’s just a sort of universal thing about these models… We built the text side of it first, and the text side is definitely… more powerful. How these models can reason about images is getting better, but I think it’s a decent bit behind.”

Forget me not

Beyond issues parsing text and images, Hershey also acknowledged that Claude can have trouble “remembering” what it has already learned. The current model has a “context window” of 200,000 tokens, limiting the amount of relational information it can store in its “memory” at any one time. When the system’s ever-expanding knowledge base fills up this context window, Claude goes through an elaborate summarization process, condensing detailed notes on what it has seen, done, and learned so far into shorter text summaries that lose some of the fine-grained details.

This can mean that Claude “has a hard time keeping track of things for a very long time and really having a great sense of what it’s tried so far,” Hershey said. “You will definitely see it occasionally delete something that it shouldn’t have. Anything that’s not in your knowledge base or not in your summary is going to be gone, so you have to think about what you want to put there.”

A small window into the kind of “cleaning up my context” knowledge-base update necessitated by Claude’s limited “memory.” Credit: Claude Play Pokemon / Twitch

More than forgetting important history, though, Claude runs into bigger problems when it inadvertently inserts incorrect information into its knowledge base. Like a conspiracy theorist who builds an entire worldview from an inherently flawed premise, Claude can be incredibly slow to recognize when an error in its self-authored knowledge base is leading its Pokémon play astray.

“The things that are written down in the past, it sort of trusts pretty blindly,” Hershey said. “I have seen it become very convinced that it found the exit to [in-game location] Viridian Forest at some specific coordinates, and then it spends hours and hours exploring a little small square around those coordinates that are wrong instead of doing anything else. It takes a very long time for it to decide that that was a ‘fail.’”

Still, Hershey said Claude 3.7 Sonnet is much better than earlier models at eventually “questioning its assumptions, trying new strategies, and keeping track over long horizons of various strategies to [see] whether they work or not.” While the new model will still “struggle for really long periods of time” retrying the same thing over and over, it will ultimately tend to “get a sense of what’s going on and what it’s tried before, and it stumbles a lot of times into actual progress from that,” Hershey said.

“We’re getting pretty close…”

One of the most interesting things about observing Claude Plays Pokémon across multiple iterations and restarts, Hershey said, is seeing how the system’s progress and strategy can vary quite a bit between runs. Sometimes Claude will show it’s “capable of actually building a pretty coherent strategy” by “keeping detailed notes about the different paths to try,” for instance, he said. But “most of the time it doesn’t… most of the time, it wanders into the wall because it’s confident it sees the exit.”

Where previous models wandered aimlessly or got stuck in loops, Claude 3.7 Sonnet plans ahead, remembers its objectives, and adapts when initial strategies fail.

Critical skills for battling pixelated gym leaders. And, we posit, in solving real-world problems too. pic.twitter.com/scvISp14XG

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 25, 2025

One of the biggest things preventing the current version of Claude from getting better, Hershey said, is that “when it derives that good strategy, I don’t think it necessarily has the self-awareness to know that one strategy [it] came up with is better than another.” And that’s not a trivial problem to solve.

Still, Hershey said he sees “low-hanging fruit” for improving Claude’s Pokémon play by improving the model’s understanding of Game Boy screenshots. “I think there’s a chance it could beat the game if it had a perfect sense of what’s on the screen,” Hershey said, saying that such a model would probably perform “a little bit short of human.”

Expanding the context window for future Claude models will also probably allow those models to “reason over longer time frames and handle things more coherently over a long period of time,” Hershey said. Future models will improve by getting “a little bit better at remembering, keeping track of a coherent set of what it needs to try to make progress,” he added.

Twitch chat responds with a flood of bouncing emojis as Claude concludes an epic 78+ hour escape from Pokémon’s Mt. Moon. Credit: Claude Plays Pokemon / Twitch

Whatever you think about impending improvements in AI models, though, Claude’s current performance at Pokémon doesn’t make it seem like it’s poised to usher in an explosion of human-level, completely generalizable artificial intelligence. And Hershey allows that watching Claude 3.7 Sonnet get stuck on Mt. Moon for 80 hours or so can make it “seem like a model that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

But Hershey is still impressed at the way that Claude’s new reasoning model will occasionally show some glimmer of awareness and “kind of tell that it doesn’t know what it’s doing and know that it needs to be doing something different. And the difference between ‘can’t do it at all’ and ‘can kind of do it’ is a pretty big one for these AI things for me,” he continued. “You know, when something can kind of do something it typically means we’re pretty close to getting it to be able to do something really, really well.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon Read More »

Boeing will build the US Air Force’s next air superiority fighter

Boeing, Cars / Shannon Garcia / March 22, 2025

Today, it emerged that Boeing has won its bid to supply the United States Air Force with its next jet fighter. As with the last fighter aircraft design procurement in recent times, the Department of Defense was faced with a choice between awarding Boeing or Lockheed the contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance program, which will replace the Lockheed F-22 Raptor sometime in the 2030s.

Very little is known about the NGAD, which the Air Force actually refers to as a “family of systems,” as its goal of owning the skies requires more than just a fancy airplane. The program has been underway for a decade, and a prototype designed by the Air Force first flew in 2020, breaking records in the process (although what records and by how much was not disclosed).

Last summer, the Pentagon paused the program as it reevaluated whether the NGAD would still meet its needs and whether it could afford to pay for the plane, as well as a new bomber, a new early warning aircraft, a new trainer, and a new ICBM, all at the same time. But in late December, it concluded that, yes, a crewed replacement for the F-22 was in the national interest.

While no images have ever been made public, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in 2024 that “it’s an F-22 replacement. You can make some inferences from that.”

The decision is good news for Boeing’s plant in St. Louis, which is scheduled to end production of the F/A-18 Super Hornet in 2027. Boeing lost its last bid to build a fighter jet when its X-32 lost out to Lockheed’s X-35 in the Joint Strike Fighter competition in 2001.

A separate effort to award a contract for the NGAD’s engine, called the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion, is underway between Pratt & Whitney and GE Aerospace, with an additional program aiming to develop “drone wingmen” also in the works between General Atomics and Anduril.

Boeing will build the US Air Force’s next air superiority fighter Read More »

Author name: Shannon Garcia