To me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion’s 1987 book, Miami, which begins like this: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.”

I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact. And then I compared all of it unfavorably with the flailing and feeble way in which I would have pursued the same goals. I marked up my copy of the book in a somewhat desperate fashion and then became depressed.

That type of copying is pretty normal, and they teach it in school. It’s how you learn (and how you become depressed). But in the age of generative AI, there are many new kinds of copying. For instance, Wired reported last week on a tool offered by Grammarly, which briefly offered users the opportunity to put their writing through something called “Expert Review.” This produced AI-generated advice purportedly from the perspective of a bunch of famous authors, a bunch of less-famous working journalists (including myself, per The Verge’s reporting), and a bunch of academics (including some who had recently died).

China’s BYD will aim to take on Porsche and BMW in the European luxury car market with a premium electric vehicle that can be charged in just five minutes.

BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker last year, first demonstrated its “flash charging” technology, which enables an EV to be charged almost as quickly as filling a car with petrol, a year ago.

The Z9GT model, part of the premium Denza brand, can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C.

The vehicle has a range of up to 800 km and will be launched in Europe next month and in the UK in the summer. Pricing is yet to be revealed.

BYD’s international chief Stella Li said the Z9GT marked an important milestone as it began the global rollout of flash charging.

The Chinese carmaker has aggressively expanded in the UK and Europe with affordable EVs and plug-in hybrids as sales in the home market have come under pressure from a government crackdown on pricing competition.

Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment on the case, comparing its digital loot boxes to randomized real-world purchases like blind-bagged toys or packs of trading cards.

“Generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive,” Valve wrote. “On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”

Though that may seem like an apt comparison on the surface, Valve’s loot boxes differ from these real-world examples in large part because of Valve’s control of the Steam Marketplace, which serves as the only legitimate way to exchange or resell those items. While owners of real-world items are free to trade or sell them however they want, Valve has cracked down on many third-party sites that enable the exchange of in-game items—especially when those items are used as glorified chips for gambling games.

Lawyers told Ars last month that Valve’s control of that marketplace—and its 15 percent commission on item resale—helps establish the inherent economic value of the randomized items it sells, both to players and to Valve itself. That could be a crucial legal element in a courtroom in turning a mere “random purchase” into legally defined “gambling.”

The tech billionaire Hemant Taneja admits that AI is a bubble. In fact, he welcomes it: “Bubbles are good,” Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, a venture-capital firm, told me in an email. If AI comes crashing down, it will lead to “some spectacular failures,” he said—companies will go under and people will lose their jobs—but that’s a price worth paying for “enduring companies that change the world forever.”

His view is widespread in Silicon Valley. Some, such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, reject the notion that their companies are overvalued. But many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in tech are embracing the idea of an AI bubble. Jeff Bezos has argued that AI might be a “good” kind of bubble. Sam Altman has made similar comments, predicting that AI will be a “huge net win for the economy” even if “a phenomenal amount of money” is lost along the way.

Indeed, a phenomenal amount of money is at stake: OpenAI, which is still far from profitable, is currently worth more than Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Disney combined. This year, Big Tech plans to spend some $650 billion on the AI build-out—a sum that far exceeds the GDP of most countries. Investors are banking that AI will spur a productivity boom and deliver unimaginable corporate profits, but that future could be far off. If the spending dries up first, the bubble could pop—perhaps dragging the rest of the economy down with it. Nonetheless, Silicon Valley thinks that the present mania will eventually pay back its returns through scientific discovery and economic growth. “Stop trying to make bubbles go away,” as the entrepreneur James Thomason recently wrote. “The benefits of innovation outweigh the costs of volatility.” In other words: Be grateful for the bubble.

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.

The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.

But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.

Suing your readers always ends well.

The key to working at a place like Ars Technica is solid news judgment. [eds note: tell that to Benj Edwards] I’m talking about the kind of news judgment that knows whether a pet peeve is merely a pet peeve or whether it is, instead, a meaningful example of the Ways that Technology is Changing our World.

The difference between the two is one of degree: A pet peeve may drive me nuts but does not appear to impact anyone else. A Ways that Technology is Changing our World story must be about something that drives a lot of people nuts.

“But where is the threshold?” I hear you asking plaintively. “It’s extremely important that I know when something crosses the line from pet peeve to important, chin-stroking journalism topic!”

Fortunately, the answer is simple. The threshold has been breached when your local public transit agency puts up a sign about the behavior in question.

Which brings me to the sign I saw yesterday in Philadelphia.

“Unless the tea is REALLY hot, keep the call off speaker,” it said.

(For those not in the US, “tea” in this context means gossip or news.)

I fucking hate speakerphone and don't use it even in my van unless a photo or document is shared during the conversation that needs to be addressed.

Not sure if it fits here, but I found no community that distinctly focuses on phone repair/data extraction. I hope this is fine.

Recently, my phone's display died. I am trying to save the data.

I bought a more advanced OTG hub that should allow connecting the mouse and an external display. It also has a USB-C power input so the phone doesn’t have to power everything itself. The phone is connected to the hub via USB-C as well.

However, I haven’t even managed to get that setup working with my current phone (CMF Phone 2 Pro). I enabled the “Improve OTG Compatibility” option, but the hub still doesn’t appear to work, even though it’s advertised as being compatible with smartphones and other OTG devices: amazon.com/dp/B0GD7G9HS9

At this point I’m unsure whether the problem is me, the adapter, or possibly an issue with the display I’m trying to use (though the display works fine with other devices).

Any ideas? If OTG is not the right way, I am open for other suggestions. I am not really interested in repairing the phone, I just need the data.

EDIT Why Otg?: I thought of OTG for data extraction, because attaching a display and a mouse should enable me to use the phone again assuming that it is just the display that is broken. In order to verify my correct OTG setup, I attempted it first with my working phone which did not work.

More than a year before his recent standoff with the Pentagon, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 15,000-word manifesto describing a glorious AI future. Its title, “Machines of Loving Grace,” is borrowed from a Richard Brautigan poem, but as Amodei acknowledged, with some embarrassment, its utopian vision bears some resemblance to science fiction. According to Amodei, we will soon create the first polymath AIs with abilities that surpass those of Nobel Prize winners in “most relevant fields,” and we’ll have millions of them, a “country of geniuses,” all packed into the glowing server racks of a data center, working together. With access to tools that operate directly on our physical world, these AIs would be able to get up to a great deal of dangerous mischief, but according to Amodei, if they’re developed—or “grown,” as staffers at Anthropic are fond of saying—in the correct way, they will decide to greatly improve our lives.

Amodei does not explain precisely how the AIs will accomplish this. In most cases, he expects them to do what the smartest humans do, but much more rapidly, compressing decades of scientific progress. He says that by 2035, we could have the theories, cures, and technologies of the early 22nd century. Our infectious diseases and cancers could be cured, and we could live twice as long, and slow the decay of our brains. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, has similarly conceived of superintelligent AI as the ultimate tool to accelerate scientific discovery, and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has said that advanced AI may even solve physics.

Amodei does not say that this utopian AI future is inevitable. To the contrary, among the chief executives at the top AI labs, he may be the one who worries most about the technology’s dangers. “Machines of Loving Grace” is an optimistic outlier in his larger oeuvre of published writing, much of which concerns the risks that will accompany the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence. Amodei seems to think of today’s AI researchers as comparable to Manhattan Project scientists, and has been known to recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In his telling, superhuman AI could be even more dangerous than nuclear weapons, which is why AI needs to be developed the right way, by the right people, so that it doesn’t overpower humanity or tip the global balance of power toward autocracies.

Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. “I have bad news, America,” he told the crowd. “The Fuckening is here.”

The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI’s disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out. Yang has talked with computer-science majors, he said onstage, who can’t find a job and are instead “driving Ubers to make ends meet.” His doomsaying is extreme but familiar: Fears of job losses are mounting as AI continues to rapidly advance. A new generation of AI agents are more capable than traditional chatbots of assisting with sophisticated computer work. Bots are no longer limited to searching the web and answering questions—they can create financial models, generate slide decks, and much more.

Perhaps the most concerning sign yet of an impending jobs crisis came one day after Yang’s announcement. The payments firm Block, which operates Square and Cash App, announced that it was laying off roughly 4,000 workers—nearly half of the company’s workforce—due to AI. “The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,” Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, wrote. Going forward, he added, the company will be laser-focused on integrating AI across layers of its operations.

Autonomous vehicles are already doing so well with two dimensions, why not add a z-axis?

The skies over parts of the US could soon get busier, as the Federal Aviation Administration launches pilot projects spanning 26 states to test electric air taxis and other next-gen aircraft, with operations expected to begin by summer 2026.

Selections for the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) were announced by the FAA on Monday, with eight projects chosen to participate in the initiative. The program will run for three years after the first project begins operations, and the selected efforts span 26 states.

According to the FAA, the projects will explore operational concepts including urban air taxi services, regional passenger transportation, cargo and logistics networks, emergency medical response operations, autonomous flight technologies, and offshore or energy-sector transportation.

"These partnerships will help us better understand how to safely and efficiently integrate these aircraft into the National Airspace System," said FAA Deputy Administrator Chris Rocheleau. "The program will provide valuable operational experience that will inform the standards needed to enable safe Advanced Air Mobility operations."