In case you missed it, yes, of course Harvard admissions are way up and Harvard did this on purpose. The new finding is that Harvard was recruiting African American applicants in particular, partly in order to balance conditional acceptance rates. One could of course also argue that the goal was ‘to find more worthy students,’ with the counterevidence being that the test scores of such applicants declined as more applications came in (as they obviously would for any group) but the scores of those who got admitted didn’t change.
As a student, one needs to understand that schools love applications they can then reject, and might care about that even more depending on your details. So when they tell you to apply, that you have a shot, that is not the evidence you want it to be.
Or, your future depends on knowing exactly the right way to lie your ass off, and having sufficiently low integrity to do so shamelessly.
One can ask questions like: If you can get hired by Google for an engineering job, you have a 4.4 GPA and a 1590 SAT score, and you get rejected by 5 University of California schools and 16 out of 18 schools overall, is it fair to say that was probably an illegal form of racial discrimination, as his lawsuit is claiming? It doesn’t automatically have to be that, there could in theory be other details of his application that are problems.
I’d like to say to that objection ‘who are we kidding’ but maybe? You had two groups debating this recently, after a different applicant, Zack Yadegari, got rejected from all the colleges for being too successful and daring to write about that.
One group said this was the situation, And That’s Terrible.
The other group said, yes this is the situation, And You’re Terrible, get with the program or go off and die, oh and it’s just the essay, he can apply next year it’s fine.
Stanford ❌ MIT ❌ Harvard ❌ Yale ❌ WashU ❌ Columbia ❌ UPenn ❌ Princeton ❌ Duke ❌ USC ❌ Georgia Tech ✅ UVA ❌ NYU ❌ UT ✅ Vanderbilt ❌ Brown ❌ UMiami ✅ Cornell ❌
I dedicated 2 straight weeks to my essays doing nothing else. Had them looked over by the best writers I know.
Michael Druggan: When I applied to Harvard, I was a USAMO winner (only 12 per year and with significant duplicates that works out to significantly less than 12 per graduating class). I also had a clean 36 in every section on the ACT from my very first attempt. Neither of those are dime-a-dozen stats.
The admissions committee didn’t care. They rejected me in favor of legions of clearly academically inferior candidates who did a better job kissing their asses in their application essays. Let’s not pretend this process is anything but a farce.
Avi Shiffmann: My (in my opinion awful) personal statement that got me into Harvard. [comments mostly talk about how the essay is good actually]
Felpix: College admissions is so competitive, kids are just crashing out [describes a kid who basically did everything you could imagine to get in to study Computer Science, and still got rejected from the majors, reasons unknown.]
Gabriel: this is incredibly sad, someone spent their entire childhood to get into MIT with perfect scores without getting in, and now can’t live his dream
all this effort could have been spent on becoming economically valuable and he’d now have his dream job. this is obviously not this persons fault, but the fault of collective inability to change, and constantly reaffirming our beliefs that whatever we have now is working great. we put this talented person into doing fake work to get the chance to do more fake work, to get a degree, which is seen as much more important than the actual work being performed later
he wasted his entire childhood, literally irreparable damage
The kid Felpix is quoting is going to have a fine future without academia, and yes they’d be a year ahead of the game if they’d spent all that time learning to code better instead of playing the college game. It’s not even clear they should have been trying to go to college at all, other than VCs wanting to see you go for a bit and then drop out.
Zack’s mistake was, presumably, asking the best writers he knew rather than people who know to write college essays in particular.
Dr. Ellie Murray, ScD: The fact that every academic reads this guy’s essay and is like, yeah of course you didn’t get in, but tech twitter all seem to think he was a shoe-in and cheated out of a spot… We’re living in 2 different worlds and it’s a problem.
If you’re writing your own college apps & want to know how to avoid these pitfalls, there are lots of great threads about this guy’s essay. Start here.
Mason: The essay is easily the most regressive and gameable part of the app. The point tech twitter is making is not that the essay is good, but that if this kid came from the “right” family his essay would have been ghostwritten by an admissions coach anyway
Amal Dorai: It’s supposed to be gameable! They’re trying to put their imprimatur on a meritocratic class that can “game” its way into the country’s power elite. Yes it’s a sort of pre-Trumpian way of thinking but they are not just looking for the country’s future NVIDIA engineers.
Monica Marks: Statistically well-qualified applicants come a dime a dozen in elite admissions, more than most people realise.
For every student w/ perfect scores like Zach, there’s a student w/ near perfect scores & more humility who’s overcome terrible circumstances & does not seem entitled.
[she gives advice on how to write a good essay, basically ‘sell that you can pretend that you need this in order to fight some Good Fight that liberals love and are super motivated and shows the proper appreciation and humility etc, and in his case he should have emphasized his Forbes essay rather than his actual achievements.’]
Wind Come Calling: I’ve read applications from kids like this and, being obviously very bright, they tend to think they can hide their arrogance or sense of entitlement, that it won’t come through in their application or that the reviewers will miss it. they are mistaken.
Lastdance: “You must follow my lead and feign humility. If you are merely gifted then go somewhere else, it’s the gifted liar we want!”
Kelsey Piper: before you make fun of someone’s college application personal statement, I urge you to go way back into your old emails and read your own college application essays, I promise this will cure you of the urge to say anything mean about anyone else’s
Tracing Woodgrains: I’m seeing people criticize this personal statement, and—look. Don’t subject yourself to the indignity of defending arbitrary games. the Personal Statement is the lowest genre of essay and the worst admissions practice. his resumé speaks for itself.
“but the personal statement is…”
…an arbitrary game of “guess what’s in my head,” inauthenticity embodied by writers and readers alike. an undignified hazing ritual whether written by you, your $200/hr advisor, or your good friend Claude.
good? bad? junk either way.
every time people defend this system on its own terms it makes me grimace
do not validate a system that encourages kids to twist themselves into pretzels and then purports to judge their whole persons
the whole game is socially corrosive.
so like [Monica Marks from above] seems perfectly nice but I simply do not want access to be gatekept by “did I strike the perfect tone to flatter her sensibilities”
the red flags – someone go tell UMass Amherst they got a dud! or don’t, bc it’s a deranged process
Tracing Woods (also): It’s not the competition that gets people, I suspect, but the arbitrariness. Young, ambitious people jump through a million hoops to roll the dice. It is unhealthy to let this process control so much of the collective youth psyche. Elite college admissions are twisted.
It’s college season and this is the #1 post last week on r/ApplyingToCollege.
Competition is fine, but this just feels unfair.
Of course, some people will say it’s fake but if you read the OP’s comments it feels real. Son is 1/4th Korean 3/4th white, according to his comments.
Depending on where you set the bar for applicants, ‘statistically well-qualified’ might be ‘dime a dozen,’ maybe even being #1 in your HS with 1580 SAT and 18 5/5 APs is ‘a dime a dozen.’ That’s by design, as I discuss elsewhere, the tests cap out on purpose. If the top colleges wanted differentiation the tests would provide it.
But you know what very much is not ‘a dime a dozen’? Things like being a USAMO winner or founding a $30mm ARR business.
If admissions chooses not to care much about even that, and merely puts it into the ‘statistical qualification’ bucket and mostly looks to see who within that bucket is better at playing the Guess the Teacher’s Password game and playing their PTCs (Personal Trauma Cards) and being members of the preferred groups and so on, well, it is what it is.
If you see someone thinking being a USAMO winner and founding a $30mm ARR business means they shouldn’t be feigning false humility, and think ‘that’s an asshole,’ well, I have a humble suggestion about who the asshole is in this situation.
And it’s totally fair to point out that this is indeed what it is, and that our academic system checks your ‘statistical qualifications’ but is mostly actively selecting for this form of strategic dishonesty combined with class performance and some inherent characteristics.
That is very different from saying that this is good, actually. It’s not good.
I would also however say that it is now common knowledge that this is how it works. So, given that it is common knowledge how this works, while I place a super high value on honesty and honor, I hereby give everyone reading this full ethical and moral permission to completely lie your ass off.
College admission essays are not a place where words have meaning and you are representing your statement as true. So aside from specific verifiable things like your GPA or SAT score, you can and should lie your ass off the same way you would lie when playing a game of Diplomacy or Balderdash. It doesn’t count, and I will not hold it against you, at all.
Oh, also, requiring all these hours of volunteer work is straight up enslavement of our kids for child labor, and not the good kind where you learn valuable skills.
Those disputes were at the top of the scale. An at least somewhat reasonable response would be ‘boo hoo, you didn’t get into the top 25 colleges in the country, go to your state college and you’ll be fine.’
Except that the state colleges are sometimes doing it too. And that’s not okay, at all.
Analytic Valley Girl Chris: State universities should be legally mandated to accept any in state graduate who meets certain academic thresholds, save some compelling disqualification. Generic “not what we’re looking for” shouldn’t be allowed.
As in, MIT can do what it wants, it’s their loss, but UC San Diego and UC Davis?
Yes, obviously if you simply want ‘any college at all’ there will always be options for such students, but that degree and experience, and the connections available to be made, will offer dramatically lower value. Going is probably a large mistake.
The ‘top X% of your class’ system is excellent, such as Texas’s top 10% rule. I’d supplement that with a points system or threshold rules or both for grades, test scores and other quantifiable achievements, with a known minimum auto-admission threshold.
University of Austin (AUTX): College admissions are unjust.
Not just biased. Not just broken. Unjust.
Students spend high school anxiously stacking their résumés with hollow activities, then collect generic recommendation letters and outsource their essays to tutors or AI. Admissions at elite colleges now come down to who you know, your identity group, or how well you play the game.
This system rewards manipulation, not merit. It selects for conformity, not character.
That’s why we’re introducing the University of Austin’s new admissions policy:
If you score 1460+ on the SAT, 33+ on the ACT, or 105+ on the CLT, you will be automatically admitted, pending basic eligibility and an integrity check. Below that threshold, you’ll be evaluated on your test scores, AP/IB results, and three verifiable achievements, each described in a single sentence.
That’s it.
We care about two things: Intelligence and courage.
Intelligence to succeed in a rigorous intellectual environment (we don’t inflate grades). Courage to join the first ranks of our truth-oriented university.
College admission should be earned—not inherited, bought, or gamed. At UATX, your merit earns you a place—and full tuition scholarship.
Note the deadline. Because your decisions are deterministic, you get to move last.
As in, all they get to sweep up all these students whose essays were rejected or got discriminated against. Then we get to find out what happens when you put them all together. And you get to see which employers are excited by that, and which aren’t.
The basic version is indeed a new virtue to fake, combined with a cultural code to crack and teacher’s password to guess, the ‘disagreement question’:
Alex Bronzini-Vender (Sophomore, Harvard University, hire him): This time I found a new question: “Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?”
It’s known as the disagreement question, and since the student encampments of spring 2024 and the American right’s attacks on universities, a growing number of elite colleges have added it to their applications.
This didn’t escalate quickly so much as skip straight to the equilibrium. Kids are pros.
The trouble is that the disagreement question — like much of the application process — isn’t built for honesty. Just as I once scrambled to demonstrate my fluency in D.E.I., students now scramble to script the ideal disagreement, one that manages to be intriguing without being dangerous.
So now there’s a new guessing game in town.
Then again, maybe demonstrating one’s ability to delicately navigate controversial topics is the point. Perhaps the trick is balance? Be humble; don’t make yourself look too right. But you can’t choose a time when you were entirely wrong, either. Or should you tailor your responses by geography, betting that, say, a Southern admissions officer would be more likely to appreciate a conservative-leaning anecdote?
The emerging consensus in the application-prep industry is that it’s best to avoid politics entirely. … Dr. Jager-Hyman, for her part, usually advises students to choose a topic that is meaningful to them but unlikely to stoke controversy — like a time someone told you your favorite extracurricular activity was a waste of time.
So far, ordinary terrible, sure, fine, I suppose it’s not different in kind than anything else in the college essay business. Then it gets worse.
This fall, an expanding number of top schools — including Columbia, M.I.T., Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago — will begin accepting “dialogues” portfolios from Schoolhouse.world, a platform co-founded by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, to help students with math skills and SAT prep.
High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness. The Schoolhouse.world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.
“I don’t think you can truly fake respect,” Mr. Khan said.
Even as intended this is terrible already:
Owl of Athena: Remember when I told you Sal Khan was evil? I didn’t know the half of it!
Meet the Civility Score, courtesy of Khan’s “Dialogues.”
Get your kids used to having a social credit score, and make sure they understand their highest value should be the opinion of their peers! What could possibly go wrong?!
Steve McGuire: Elite universities are going to start using peer-scored civility ratings for admissions?!
Sorry, that’s a terrible idea. Why not just admit people based on their scores and then teach them to debate and dialogue?
You don’t need to go full CCP to solve this problem.
Nate Silver: This is basically affirmative action for boring people.
Blightersort: it is kind of amazing that elite schools would look at the current world and worry they are not selecting for conformity strongly enough and then work on new ways to select for conformity
Except of course it is way worse than that on multiple levels.
Remember your George Burns: “Sincerity is the most important thing. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Of course you can fake respect. I do it and see it all the time. It is a central life skill.
Also, if you’re not generally willing to or don’t know how to properly pander to peers in such settings, don’t ‘read the room’ or are ugly? No college for you.
You can, and people constantly do, fake empathy, curiosity and kindness. It is not only a central life skill, but it is considered a central virtue.
And the fortunate ones won’t have to do it alone: They’ll have online guides, school counselors and private tutors to help them learn to simulate earnestness.
You could argue that one cannot fake civility, because there is no difference between faked civility and real civility. It lives in the perception of the audience. And you can argue that to some extent this applies to other such virtues too.
Quite possibly, there will be rampant discrimination of other kinds, as well. Expect lots of identify-based appeals. The game will be won by those who play to win it.
And then let’s address the elephant in the room. Notice this sentence:
High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness.
Yeah. Um.
Neils Hoven: Oh look, they figured out how to scale ideological conformity testing.
Brain in a jar: Haha hot people and conformists will win. Fuck.
If you have a bunch of high schoolers rating each other on ‘empathy, curiosity or kindness’ on the basis of discussions of those topics, that is a politics test. If you go in there and take a right-wing stance on immigration? No college for you. Not pledging your support for ending the state of Israel? No college for you. Indeed, I’m willing to bet that going in with actual full empathy and curiosity will get you lower, not higher, scores than performative endorsement.
To be fair, the website doesn’t emphasize those topics in particular, although I’m assuming they were listed because the author here encountered them. Instead, it looks like this:
The problem will persist regardless, if less egregiously. Across essentially all topics, the peer consensus in high school is left-wing, and left-wing consensus holds that left-wing views are empathic and curious and kind, whereas anything opposed to them is not. I would very much not advice anyone oppose student debt ‘relief,’ meaning abrogation of contracts, or anything but the most radical positions on climate change, or oppose aggressive moderation and censorship of social media.
Short of using AI evaluators (an actually very good idea), I don’t see a way around the problem that this is not a civility test, it is a popularity and ideological purity challenge, and we are forcing everyone to put on an act.
On the positive side (I am not sure if I am kidding), it also is potentially a game theory challenge. 5 for 5, anyone? Presumably students will quickly learn the signals of how to make the very obvious deals with each other.
Also you see what else this is testing? You outright get a higher score for participating in more of these ‘dialogues.’ You also presumably learn, over time, the distribution of other participants, and what techniques work on them, and develop your ‘get them to rank you highly’ skills. So who wants to grind admissions chances between hours of assigned busywork (aka ‘homework’) and mandatory (‘community service’) shifts working as an indentured servant, perhaps at the homeless shelter?
Zaid Jilani: Make SAT and GPA almost all of the college admissions standard, any essays should be analytical like on GRE rather than personal.
Mike Riggs: And you have no concerns about grade inflation?
Zaid Jilani: I do but how is that any different than status quo? Have to deal with that issue regardless. FWIW that’s much worse in college than high school.
Kelsey Piper: yep. just cut all the holistic shit. it turns high school into hell without meaningfully identifying the kids most prepared to contribute at top schools let alone teaching them anything
Emmett Shear: Overfit! Overfit! You cannot make your model robust by adding more parameters, only more accurate in the moment! Trying to create a global rating for “best students” is a bad idea and intrinsically high-complexity. Stop doing that.
Most of the holistic stuff needs to go. The essay needs to either go fully, or become another test taken in person, ideally graded pass-fail, to check for competence.
You do need a way to control for both outstanding achievement in the field of excellence.
I would thus first reserve some number of slots for positive selection outside the system, for those who are just very obviously people you want to admit.
I also think you need to have a list of achievements, at least on AP and other advanced tests, that grant bonus points. The SAT does not get hard enough or cover a wide enough set of topics.
I think you mostly don’t need to worry about any but the most extreme deal breakers and negative selection. Stop policing anything that shouldn’t involve actual police.
The other problem then is that at this level of stakes everything will get gamed. You cannot use a fully or even incompletely uncontrolled GPA if you are not doing holistic adjustments. GPAs would average 4.33 so fast it would make your head spin. Any optional class not playing along would be dropped left and right. And so on. If you want to count GPA at all, you need to adjust for school and by-class averages, and adjust for the success rate of the school of origin as a function of average-adjusted GPA controlling for SAT, and so on.
The ultimate question here is whether you want students in high school to be maximizing GPA as a means to college admissions. It can be a powerful motivating factor, but it also warps motivation. My inclination is to say you want to use it mostly as a threshold effect, with the threshold rising as you move up the ladder, with only modest bonus points for going beyond that, or use it as a kind of fast-track that gets you around other requirements, ideally including admission fees.
Where it gets tricky is scholarships. Even if admission depends only on SAT+AP and similar scores plus some extraordinary achievements and threshold checks, the sticker prices of colleges are absurd. So if scholarships depend on other triggers, you end up with the same problem, or you end up with a two-tier system where those who need merit scholarships have to game everything, probably with the ‘immune tier’ rather small since even if you can afford full price that doesn’t mean you want to pay it.
Sahsa Gusev has a fun thread pointing out various flaws that lead one back to a holistic approach rather than an SAT+GPA approach. I think that if you do advanced stats on the GPA (perhaps create GPV, grade percentile value, or GVOA, or grade value over average), and add in advanced additional objective examinations as sources of additional points, perhaps including a standardized entrance exam at most, and have a clearly defined list of negative selection dealbreakers (that are either outright dealbreakers or not, nothing in between), you can get good enough that letting students mostly game that is better than the holistic nightmare, and you can two-track as discussed above by reserve some slots for the best of the best on pure holistic judgment.
It’s not perfect, but no options are perfect, and I think these are the better mistakes.
Another way of putting this is:
Sasha Gusev: *Open: Office of the president at the new 100% Meritocratic University*
President: We’ve admitted the top 2,000 applicants by GPA and SATs. How are they doing?
Admissions: Several hundred valedictorians who’ve never gotten a B in their life are now at the bottom of all their classes and are experiencing a collective mental breakdown. Also our sports teams are an embarrassment.
[Zvi’s alternative continuation]: President: Okay. Is there a problem?
Admissions: Yes, this is scaring off some potential applicants, and also our sports teams are an embarrassment.
President: If a few get scared off or decide to transfer to feel smarter because they care mainly about signaling and positional goods rather than learning, that seems fine, make sure our office helps them get good placements elsewhere. And yeah, okay, or sports teams suck, but remind me why I should care about that?
Admissions: Because some students won’t want to go to a school whose sports teams suck and alumni won’t give us money that way.
President: Fine, those students can go elsewhere, too, it’s not like we’re going to be short on applicants, and that’s why we charge tuition.
Admissions: But if all we do is math then you’re going to replace me with an AI!
President: Well, yes.
[End scene.]
Paul Graham: Part of the problem with college admissions is that the SAT is too easy. It doesn’t offer enough resolution at the high end of the scale, and thus gives admissions officers too much discretion.
The problem is that we have tests that solve this problem but no one cares that much about them. Once you are maximizing the SAT, the attitude is not ‘well then, okay, let’s give them the LSAT or GRE and see how many APs they can ace,’ it’s ‘okay we’ll give them a tiny boost for each additional AP and such but mostly we don’t care.’ If the SAT bell curve went up to 2000, then they’d be forced to care, and differentiate 1570 from 1970.
That doesn’t seem hard to do? All you have to do is add some harder questions?
Or alternatively, you could have the ASAT (Advanced SAT), which is the same test on the same curve (a 1500 on ASAT is a 1500 on the SAT), except it’s harder, if you don’t earn at least 1400 you get back a null result the way you do on the USAMO or Putnam, and it goes up to 2500, and you can choose to take that instead. Yes, that’s not technically so different from what we do already, but it would feel very different – you’d be looking at that 1950 in that spot and it would be a lot harder to ignore.
Steve McGuire: Reading passages on the SAT have been shortened from 500-750 words down to 25-150. They say “the eliminated reading passages are ‘not an essential prerequisite for college’ and that the new, shorter content helps ‘students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.’” The reality, of course, is that the test is getting easier because so many students are struggling.
Zac Hill: This is capital-B bad not just for the obvious reason (reading is Good) but for the maybe-more-important second-order reason that this is not just about reading; it’s about all information synthesis involving the construction of models as a product of sustained attention.
Alex Tabarrok: SOD: “The SAT now caters to students who have trouble reading long, complex texts.”
Meanwhile in the math section, students have more time per question and free use of a calculator, without the questions changing.
On top of that, this paper says the Math SAT declined in rigor by 71 points between 2008 and 2023, which would mean that we have a 107-point decline in average performance that cuts across major demographic groups. Yikes, but also comments point out that the decline is largely caused by more students taking the test, which should indeed cause them to lower the grading curve. Relative score is what matters, except that we’re running into a lot more cases where 800 isn’t getting the job done.
Schools could of course move to the Classic Learning Test (CLT) or others that would differentiate between students. Instead, they are the customers of the ACT and SAT, and the customer is always right.
The only way to interpret this is that the colleges want to differentiate student ability up to some low minimum threshold, because otherwise the students fail out, but they actively do not want to differentiate on ability at the high end. They prefer other criteria. I will not further speculate as to why.
Perhaps even more important than all that is this, it cannot be overstated how much I see this screwing almost everyone and everything up:
Nephew Jonathan (QTing Tracing Woods above): I’m gonna hijack this: if there’s one thing that explains why everyone under the age of 40 seems to be a nervous wreck it’s the reduction of life to “guessing the teacher’s password” for everything.
Dating apps? Guess the girl’s password. College admissions? Grad school? HR personality screenings?
Also on Friday, the Windscribe VPN service posted a screenshot on X claiming to show a spike in new subscribers. The makers of the AdGuard VPN claimed that they have seen a 2.5X increase in install rates from the UK since Friday.
Nord Security, the company behind the NordVPN app, says it has seen a “1,000 percent increase in purchases” of subscriptions from the UK since the day before the new laws went into effect. “Such spikes in demand for VPNs are not unusual,” Laura Tyrylyte, Nord Security’s head of public relations, tells WIRED. She adds in a statement that “whenever a government announces an increase in surveillance, Internet restrictions, or other types of constraints, people turn to privacy tools.”
People living under repressive governments that impose extensive Internet censorship—like China, Russia, and Iran—have long relied on circumvention tools like VPNs and other technologies to maintain anonymity and access blocked content. But as countries that have long claimed to champion the open Internet and access to information, like the United States, begin considering or adopting age verification laws meant to protect children, the boundaries for protecting digital rights online quickly become extremely murky.
“There will be a large number of people who are using circumvention tech for a range of reasons” to get around age verification laws, the ACLU’s Kahn Gillmor says. “So then as a government you’re in a situation where either you’re obliging the websites to do this on everyone globally, that way legal jurisdiction isn’t what matters, or you’re encouraging people to use workarounds—which then ultimately puts you in the position of being opposed to censorship-circumvention tools.”
Tesla has a new battery cell supplier. Although the automaker is vertically integrated to a degree not seen in the automotive industry for decades, when it comes to battery cells it’s mostly dependent upon suppliers. Panasonic cells can be found in many Teslas, with the cheaper, sturdier lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells being supplied by CATL. Now Tesla has a new source of LFP cells thanks to a deal just signed with LG Energy Solutions.
According to The Korea Economic Daily, the contract between Tesla and LGES is worth $4.3 billion. LGES will begin supplying Tesla with cells next August through until at least the end of July 2030, with provisions to extend the contract if necessary.
The LFP cells probably aren’t destined for life on the road, however. Instead, they’ll likely be used in Tesla’s energy storage products, which both Tesla and LGES hope will soak up demand now that EV sales prospects look so weak in North America.
The deal also reduces Tesla’s reliance on Chinese suppliers. LGES will produce the LFP cells at its factory in Michigan, says Reuters, and so they will not be subject to the Trump trade war tariffs, unlike Chinese-made cells from CATL.
Although Tesla CEO Elon Musk has boasted about the size of the energy storage market, its contribution to Tesla’s financials remains meagre, and actually shrank during the last quarter.
It derives from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that named greenhouse gases as “air pollutants,” giving the EPA the mandate to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.
Critics of the rule say that the Clean Air Act was fashioned to manage localized emissions, not those responsible for global climate change.
A rollback would automatically weaken the greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and heavy-duty vehicles. Manufacturers such as Daimler and Volvo Cars have previously opposed the EPA’s efforts to tighten emission standards, while organized labour groups such as the American Trucking Association said they “put the trucking industry on a path to economic ruin.”
However, Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All Campaign, said that the ruling would be “disastrous for curbing toxic truck pollution, especially in frontline communities disproportionately burdened by diesel exhaust.”
Energy experts said the move could also stall progress on developing clean energy sources such as nuclear power.
“Bipartisan support for nuclear largely rests on the fact that it doesn’t have carbon emissions,” said Ken Irvin, a partner in Sidley Austin’s global energy and infrastructure practice. “If carbon stops being considered to endanger human welfare, that might take away momentum from nuclear.”
The proposed rule from the EPA will go through a public comment period and inter-agency review. It is likely to face legal challenges from environmental activists.
Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.
Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip
It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.
“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now.”
Her most recent book is 2024’s Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”
So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science book, The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building.
Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp
In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”
For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.
Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.
In fact, The New Yorker’s hugely popular cartoon caption contest—in which the magazine prints a single-panel drawing with no speech balloons or dialogue boxes and asks readers to supply their own verbal jokes—is basically a meme generator. “It’s seen more as a highbrow thing, crowdsourcing everybody’s wit,” said Abate. “But [the magazine supplies] the template image and then everybody puts in their own text or captions. They’re making memes. If they only published the winner, folks would be disappointed because the fun is seeing all the clever, funny things that people come up with.”
Memes both mirror and modify the comic genre. For instance, the online nature of memes can affect formatting. If there are multiple panels, those panels are usually arranged vertically rather than horizontally since memes are typically read by scrolling down one’s phone—like the “American Chopper” meme:
Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip
Per Abate, this has the added advantage of forcing the reader to pause briefly to consider the argument and counter-argument, emphasizing that it’s an actual debate rather than two men simply yelling at one another. “If the panels were arranged horizontally and the guys were side by side in each other’s face, installments of ‘American Chopper’ would come across very differently,” she said.
A pad with infinite sheets
Scott McCloud is widely considered the leading theorist when it comes to the art of comics, and his hugely influential 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, explores the boundless potential for digital comics, freed from the constraints of a printed page. He calls this aspect the “infinite canvas,” because cartoonists can now create works of any size or shape, even as tall as a mountain. Memes have endless possibilities of a different kind, per Abate.
“[McCloud] thinks of it very expansively: a single panel could be the size of a city block,” said Abate. “You could never do that with a book because how could you print the book? How could you hold the book? How could you read the book? How could you download the book on your Kindle? But when you’ve got a digital world, it could be a city block and you can explore it with your mouse and your cursor and your track pad and, oh, all the possibilities for storytelling and for the medium that will open up with this infinite canvas. There have been many places and titles where this has played out with digital comics.
“Obviously with a meme, they’re not the size of a city block,” she continued. “So it occurred to me that they are infinite, but almost like you’re peeling sheets off a pad and the pad just has an endless number of sheets. You can just keep redoing it, redo, redo, redo. That’s memes. They get revised and repurposed and re-imagined and redone and recirculated over and over and over again. The template gets used inexhaustibly, which is what makes them fun, what makes them go viral.”
Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp
Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. “It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text,” she said. “It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it’s recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms.”
In other words, a really good meme must be generalizable if it is to last longer than a few weeks. The recent kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert is a case in point. When a married tech CEO was caught embracing his company’s “chief people officer,” they quickly realized they were on the Jumbotron, panicked, and hid their faces—which only made it worse. The moment went viral and spawned myriad memes. Even the Phillies mascots got into the spirit, re-enacting the moment at a recent baseball game. But that particular meme might not have long-term staying power.
“It became a meme very quickly and went viral very fast,” said Abate. “I may be proved wrong, but I don’t think the Coldplay moment will be a meme that will be around a year from now. It’s commenting on a particular incident in the culture, and then the clock will tick, and folks will move on. Whereas something like ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ or ‘This is Fine’ has more staying power because it’s not tied to a particular incident or a particular scandal but can be applied to all kinds of political topics, pop culture events, and cultural experiences.”
Credit: Sean Carroll via imgflp
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.
Microsoft continues to roll out AI features, particularly to PCs that meet the qualifications for the company’s Copilot+ features. These betas enable “agent-powered search” for Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs, which continue to get most of these features a few weeks or months later than Qualcomm Snapdragon+ PCs. This agent is Microsoft’s latest attempt to improve the dense, labyrinthine Settings app by enabling natural-language search that knows how to respond to queries like “my mouse pointer is too small” or “how to control my PC by voice” (Microsoft’s examples). Like other Copilot+ features, this relies on your PC’s neural processing unit (NPU) to perform all processing locally on-device. Microsoft has also added a tutorial for the “Click to Do” feature that suggests different actions you can perform based on images, text, and other content on your screen.
Finally, Microsoft is tweaking the so-called “Second Chance Out of Box Experience” window (also called “SCOOBE,” pronounced “scooby”), the setup screen that you’ll periodically see on a Windows 11 PC even if you’ve already been using it for months or years. This screen attempts to enroll your PC in Windows Backup, to switch your default browser to Microsoft Edge and its default search engine to Bing, and to import favorites and history into Edge from whatever browser you might have been trying to use before.
If you, like me, experience the SCOOBE screen primarily as a nuisance rather than something “helpful,” it is possible to make it go away. Per our guide to de-cluttering Windows 11, open Settings, go to System, then to Notifications, scroll down, expand the “additional settings” drop-down, and uncheck all three boxes here to get rid of the SCOOBE screen and other irritating reminders.
Most of these features are being released simultaneously to the Dev and Beta channels of the Windows Insider program (from least- to most-stable, the four channels are Canary, Dev, Beta, and Release Preview). Features in the Beta channel are usually not far from being released into the public versions of Windows, so non-Insiders can probably expect most of these things to appear on their PCs in the next few weeks. Microsoft is also gearing up to release the Windows 11 25H2 update, this year’s big annual update, which will enable a handful of features that the company is already quietly rolling out to PCs running version 24H2.
Exec: “Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry.”
“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.
Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.
“The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.
That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.
The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.
There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office January 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.
The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.
That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.
Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.
“They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”
Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April-June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.
These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.
The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent, and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.
“Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”
Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.
Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.
“Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”
In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.
It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry.
What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.
However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”
A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.
Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
Despite concerns over the environmental impacts of AI models, it’s surprisingly hard to find precise, reliable data on the CO2 emissions and water use for many major large language models. French model-maker Mistral is seeking to fix that this week, releasing details from what it calls a first-of-its-kind environmental audit “to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs.”
The results, which are broadly in line with estimates from previous scholarly work, suggest the environmental harm of any single AI query is relatively small compared to many other common Internet tasks. But with billions of AI prompts taxing GPUs every year, even those small individual impacts can lead to significant environmental effects in aggregate.
Is AI really destroying the planet?
To generate a life-cycle analysis of its “Large 2” model after just under 18 months of existence, Mistral partnered with sustainability consultancy Carbone 4 and the French Agency for Ecological Transition. Following the French government’s Frugal AI guidelines for measuring overall environmental impact, Mistral says its peer-reviewed study looked at three categories: greenhouse gas (i.e., CO2) emissions, water consumption, and materials consumption (i.e., “the depletion of non-renewable resources,” mostly through wear and tear on AI server GPUs). Mistral’s audit found that the vast majority of CO2 emissions and water consumption (85.5 percent and 91 percent, respectively) occurred during model training and inference, rather than from sources like data center construction and energy used by end-user equipment.
Through its audit, Mistral found that the marginal “inference time” environmental impact of a single average prompt (generating 400 tokens’ worth of text, or about a page’s worth) was relatively minimal: just 1.14 grams of CO2 emitted and 45 milliliters of water consumed. Through its first 18 months of operation, though, the combination of model training and running millions (if not billions) of those prompts led to a significant aggregate impact: 20.4 ktons of CO2 emissions (comparable to 4,500 average internal combustion-engine passenger vehicles operating for a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency) and the evaporation of 281,000 cubic meters of water (enough to fill about 112 Olympic-sized swimming pools).
The marginal impact of a single Mistral LLM query compared to some other common activities.
The marginal impact of a single Mistral LLM query compared to some other common activities. Credit: Mistral
Comparing Mistral’s environmental impact numbers to those of other common Internet tasks helps put the AI’s environmental impact in context. Mistral points out, for instance, that the incremental CO2 emissions from one of its average LLM queries are equivalent to those of watching 10 seconds of a streaming show in the US (or 55 seconds of the same show in France, where the energy grid is notably cleaner). It’s also equivalent to sitting on a Zoom call for anywhere from four to 27 seconds, according to numbers from the Mozilla Foundation. And spending 10 minutes writing an email that’s read fully by one of its 100 recipients emits as much CO2 as 22.8 Mistral prompts, according to numbers from Carbon Literacy.
A rare global interruption in the Starlink satellite Internet network knocked subscribers offline for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread outage since SpaceX opened the service to consumers nearly five years ago.
The outage affected civilian and military users, creating an inconvenience for many but cutting off a critical lifeline for those who rely on Starlink for military operations, health care, and other applications.
Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, wrote on X that the network outage lasted approximately 2.5 hours.
“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls wrote. “We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, apologized for the interruption in service on X: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Effects big and small
The Ukrainian military has been at the leading edge of adopting Starlink services and adapting the system for use in war zones. Ukraine’s exploitation of Starlink connectivity has been instrumental in directing military operations, supporting battlefield communications, and controlling drones engaged in reconnaissance and offensive strikes.
The commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, Robert Brovdi, confirmed Thursday’s Starlink outage reached his country’s ongoing war with Russia.
“Starlink went down across the entire front,” Brovdi wrote on Telegram. “Combat operations were carried out without broadcasts; reconnaissance was carried out … using shock weapons.”
Brovdi added that the interruption in service illustrates the importance of having multiple paths of connectivity, especially for time-critical military operations. “This incident, which lasted 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks,” he wrote, urging the military to diversify its means of communication and connectivity.
Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage was an example of the shortcomings of relying on cloud services for military operations, particularly battlefield drone reconnaissance.
In all, the astronomic hype was met with earth-shaking backlash in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Science published twostudies refuting the claim that GFAJ-1 incorporates arsenic atoms into its DNA. Outside scientists concluded that it is an arsenic-tolerant extremophile, but not a profoundly different life form.
Retraction
But now, in 2025, it is once again spurring controversy; on Thursday, Science announced that it is retracting the study.
Some critics, such as Redfield, cheered the move. Others questioned the timing, noting that 15 years had passed, but only a few months had gone by since The New York Times published a profile of Wolfe-Simon, who is now returning to science after being perceived as a pariah. Wolfe-Simon and most of her co-authors, meanwhile, continue to defend the original paper and protest the retraction.
In a blog post on Thursday, Science’s executive editor, Valda Vinson, and Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp explained the retraction by saying that Science’s criteria for issuing a retraction have evolved since 2010. At the time, it was reserved for claims of misconduct or fraud but now can include serious flaws. Specifically, Vinson and Thorp referenced the criticism that the bacterium’s genetic material was not properly purified of background arsenic before it was analyzed. While emphasizing that there has been no suggestion of fraud or misconduct on the part of the authors, they wrote that “Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data,” and it should therefore be retracted.
Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, criticized the move. Speaking with Science’s news team, which is independent from the journal’s research-publishing arm, Eisen said that despite being a critic of the 2010 paper, he thought the discussion of controversial studies should play out in the scientific literature and not rely on subjective decisions by editors.
In an eLetter attached to the retraction notice, the authors dispute the retraction, too, saying, “While our work could have been written and discussed more carefully, we stand by the data as reported. These data were peer-reviewed, openly debated in the literature, and stimulated productive research.”
One of the co-authors, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist at Arizona State University, told Nature that the study had no mistakes but that the data could be interpreted in different ways. “You don’t retract because of a dispute about data interpretation,” he said. If that were the case, “you’d have to retract half the literature.”
Descent is a big part of gaming history, but not many people talk about it.
The sound these enemies make is an instant hit of menacing nostalgia. Credit: GOG
I maintain a to-do list of story ideas to write at Ars, and for about a year “monthly column on DOS games I love” has been near the top of the list. When we spoke with the team at GOG, it felt less like an obligation and more like a way to add another cool angle to what I was already planning to do.
I’m going to start with the PC game I played most in high school and the one that introduced me to the very idea of online play. That game is Descent.
As far as I can recall, Descent was the first shooter to be fully 3D with six degrees of freedom. It’s not often in today’s gaming world that you get something completely and totally new, but that’s exactly what Descent was 30 years ago in 1995.
Developed by Parallax Studios and published by Interplay, the game was a huge success at the time, moving millions of copies in a market where only an elite few had ever achieved that. It was distributed in part via shareware and played a role in keeping that model alive and bringing it from the just-retail-and-friends-sharing-floppies era to the Internet-download era.
And fittingly for this list, Descent is also a part of GOG history. For one thing, it was one of the launch titles for GOG’s open beta in 2008. Later, it and its sequels mysteriously disappeared from the platform in 2015. It came out that the game’s publisher had not been paying royalties as owed to the developer, leading to a breakdown in the relationship that resulted in the game being pulled from all storefronts. In 2017, the Descent titles returned to GOG and other digital sales platforms.
Unfortunately, the story of the studio that evolved from the one that originally made Descent ended sadly, as is so often the case for classic studios these days. Parallax morphed into Volition, the company that most recently made the Saints Row games, among others. Volition was acquired by Embracer Group, a holding company that has made a reputation for itself by gutting storied studios and laying off industry luminaries. Volition was among the ones it shuttered completely.
So, let’s pour one out for Parallax->Volition and take a flight through the memory of Descent‘s evil-robot-infested mines.
Single player
I played Descent when I was a teenager. Obviously, some of you were older, playing it in college or well into adulthood. Others reading this probably weren’t even born when it came out. But for me, this was a defining game of my teenage years, alongside Mechwarrior 2, Command & Conquer, Meridian 59, Civilization II, and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.
I remember my friend giving me the shareware demo, telling me that it was the most technically impressive and visceral thing he’d ever played. I installed it and launched it, and the whole vibe immediately resonated with me: It was just the kind of gritty, corpo-sci-fi I loved then and still do today.
It took some getting used to, though. The default keyboard controls were not great, and it was a lot to learn trying to operate in so many axes of movement and rotation. I’ll admit I had trouble making it stick at first.
That changed a few months later; the same friend who was obsessed with Descent often played the tabletop game BattleTech with his brother and me, and so we were all eyeing Mechwarrior 2—which launched not long after Descent—with great interest. I had never purchased a flight stick before, but that seemed important for Mechwarrior 2, so I did, and that was the secret to unlocking Descent‘s charms for me.
(Of course, the GOG version of Descent and various community patches offer mouse support, so it’s far easier to get into without extra hardware now than it was back then.)
Once my flying went from chaos to control, I became completely hooked. I beat the game more than a dozen times, though I’ll admit in the later playthroughs I made liberal use of cheats (gabbagabbahey!).
I loved the loop of destroying the reactor then escaping through the labyrinthine tunnels—something I don’t think many other games have truly copied since then. I loved the music (though Descent 2‘s astoundingly good soundtrack by Skinny Puppy far surpassed it) and the process of getting better at the movement through practice.
The story is minimal, but something about the vibes just work for me in that ’80s anti-corporate sci-fi sort of way. Credit: GOG
I played so much that as I improved, I found even the harder difficulty levels were not enough to challenge me. That’s when the world of online deathmatches (or Anarchy, as Descent called the mode) opened to me for the first time.
Multiplayer
To be clear, I had played some multiplayer games online before, but up to that point, that only included text MUDs. I loved MUDs and still do, but there’s nothing like a fast-paced, action-packed online deathmatch.
It started with playing with my friends via direct dial-up; I have distinct memories of Descent Anarchy matches that were interrupted at pivotal moments by parents picking up the phone to make a call and inadvertently killing the connection.
As a side note, it turns out that my colleague Lee Hutchinson was also heavily into Descent matches with his friends, and he was so kind as to provide a short clip of one of those original matches from 30 years ago to include here, which you can watch below. (Unfortunately, I was not so forward thinking as Lee, and I did not preserve my replays for posterity.)
Lee Hutchinson attempting to defeat his friend with flares
I was the first of my friends to put in the effort to test my skills against the wider world. My memory of the details is fuzzy, but as I recall, online matches were arranged through Kali, an MS-DOS emulator of the IPX protocol for TCP/IP connections. It was nontrivial to set up, but it could have been worse.
I still remember, like it was last week, the Friday night I spent playing Descent online for the first time. It was a defining moment of my gamer origin story.
I’m not saying it was the best-balanced game in the world; balance was barely a thought then, and multiplayer game design was nascent. But the range of skills, the trash talk (which I’m not into now, but at the time I enjoyed, being the young punk I was), the rage-inducing lag: these were all a taste of an experience I still enjoy to this day in games like Call of Duty, The Finals, and Overwatch 2, among others.
Maybe it’s pure nostalgia talking, but there was nothing quite like playing Descent on Kali.
Entering the mines in 2025
For this article, I spent several hours playing Descent for the first time in I don’t even know how long. It was just as fun as I remembered. I was surprised at how well it holds up today, apart from the visual presentation.
Fortunately, the game’s community has done an amazing job with patches. DXX-Rebirth and DXX-Redux add support for modern display resolutions, bring much-needed quality of life and input changes, and more. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even launch the game without installing one of them. The GOG version has the essential tweaks to make the game run on modern systems and input devices, but these community patches go the extra mile to make it feel more like a modern remaster without sacrificing the art or vibe of the original release in any way.
Single-player is easier to get into than ever, and you might be surprised to learn that there are still people playing multiplayer. A “getting started guide” post by Reddit user XVXCHILLYBUSXVX lists Discord channels you can join to arrange games with other players; some have regularly scheduled matches in addition to impromptu, ad hoc matchups.
If you give it a shot, maybe you’ll run into me there. Or at least, you’ll run into my mega missile!
Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.
The –no-preserve-root flag is specifically designed to override safety protections that would normally prevent deletion of the root directory.
The postinstall script that includes a Windows-equivalent destructive command was:
rm /s /q
Socket published a separate report Wednesday on yet more supply-chain attacks, one targeting npm users and another targeting users of PyPI. As of Wednesday, the four malicious packages—three published to npm and the fourth on PyPI—collectively had been downloaded more than 56,000 times. Socket said it was working to get them removed.
When installed, the packages “covertly integrate surveillance functionality into the developer’s environment, enabling keylogging, screen capture, fingerprinting, webcam access, and credential theft,” Socket researchers wrote. They added that the malware monitored and captured user activity and transmitted it to attacker-controlled infrastructure. Socket used the term surveillance malware to emphasize the covert observation and data exfiltration tactics “in the context of malicious dependencies.”
Last Friday, Socket reported the third attack. This one compromised an account on npm and used the access to plant malicious code inside three packages available on the site. The compromise occurred after the attackers successfully obtained a credential token that the developer used to authenticate to the site.
The attackers obtained the credential through a targeted phishing attack Socket had disclosed hours earlier. The email instructed the recipient to log in through a URL on npnjs.com. The site is a typosquatting spoof of the official npmjs.com domain. To make the attack more convincing, the phishing URL contained a token field that mimicked tokens npm uses for authentication. The phishing URL was in the format of https://npnjs.com/login?token=xxxxxx where the xxxxxx represented the token.
A phishing email targeting npm account holders.
Credit: Socket
A phishing email targeting npm account holders. Credit: Socket
Also compromised was an npm package known as ‘is.’ It receives roughly 2.8 million downloads weekly.
Potential for widespread damage
Supply-chain attacks like the ones Socket has flagged have the potential to cause widespread damage. Many packages available in repositories are dependencies, meaning the dependencies must be incorporated into downstream packages for those packages to work. In many developer flows, new dependency versions are downloaded and incorporated into the downstream packages automatically.
The packages flagged in the three attacks are:
@toptal/picasso-tailwind
@toptal/picasso-charts
@toptal/picasso-shared
@toptal/picasso-provider
@toptal/picasso-select
@toptal/picasso-quote
@toptal/picasso-forms
@xene/core
@toptal/picasso-utils
@toptal/picasso-typography.
is version 3.3.1, 5.0.0
got-fetch version 5.1.11, 5.1.12
Eslint-config-prettier, versions 8.10.1, 9.1.1, 10.1.6, and 10.1.7
Eslint-plugin-prettier, versions 4.2.2 and 4.2.3
Synckit, version 0.11.9
@pkgr/core, version 0.2.8
Napi-postinstall, version 0.3.1
Developers who work with any of the packages targeted should ensure none of the malicious versions have been installed or incorporated into their wares. Developers working with open source packages should:
Monitor repository visibility changes in search of suspicious or unusual publishing of packages
Review package.json lifecycle scripts before installing dependencies
Use automated security scanning in continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines
Regularly rotate authentication tokens
Use multifactor authentication to safeguard repository accounts
Additionally, repositories that haven’t yet made MFA mandatory should do so in the near future.
