The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad

That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.

With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.

Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.

“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.

Acid test

SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/the-key-moment-came-38-minutes-after-starship-roared-off-the-launch-pad/

I, too, installed an open source garage door opener, and I’m loving it

This is not egregious behavior, at least on the scale of garage door opener firms. And Aladdin’s app works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, but not with Home Assistant or my secondary/lazy option, HomeKit/Apple Home. It also logs me out “for security” more often than I’d like and tells me this only after an iPhone shortcut refuses to fire. It has some decent features, but without deeper integrations, I can’t do things like have the brighter ceiling lights turn on when the door opens or flash indoor lights if the garage door stays open too long. At least not without Google or Amazon.

I’ve seen OpenGarage passed around the Home Assistant forums and subreddits over the years. It is, as the name implies, fully open source: hardware design, firmware, and app code, API, everything. It is a tiny ESP board that has an ultrasonic distance sensor and circuit relay attached. You can control and monitor it from a web browser, mobile or desktop, from IFTTT, MQTT, and with the latest firmware, you can get email alerts. I decided to pull out the 6-foot ladder and give it a go.

Prototypes of the OpenGarage unit. To me, they look like little USB-powered owls, just with very stubby wings. Credit: OpenGarage

Installing the little watching owl

You generally mount the OpenGarage unit to the roof of your garage, so the distance sensor can detect if your garage door has rolled up in front of it. There are options for mounting with magnetic contact sensors or a side view of a roll-up door, or you can figure out some other way in which two different sensor depth distances would indicate an open or closed door. If you’ve got a Security+ 2.0 door (the kind with the yellow antenna, generally), you’ll need an adapter, too.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/i-too-installed-an-open-source-garage-door-opener-and-am-loving-it/

Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the choices you make while saving the world

In a field packed with quality roleplaying game developers, this is where BioWare has historically shined: making me have big feelings about my companions and the world they live in. This is what I crave.

Who is (my) Rook, anyway?

The Veilguard sets up your protagonist, Rook, with a lightly sketched backstory tied to your chosen faction. You pick a first name, you are assigned a last name, and you read a brief summary of an important event in Rook’s recent history. The rest is on you, and you reveal Rook’s essential nature through the dialog wheel and the major plot choices you make. Those plot choices are necessarily mechanically limited in scope and in rewards/consequences, but narratively, there’s a lot of ground you can cover.

One version of the protagonist in Dragon Age The Veilguard, with a dialogue wheel showing options — For the record, I picked “Oof.” That’s just how my Rook rolls. Credit: Marisol Cuervo

During the game’s tutorial, you’re given information about a town that has mysteriously fallen out of communication with the group you’re assisting. You and your companions set out to discover what happened. You investigate the town, find the person responsible, and decide what happens to him next. Mechanically, it’s pretty straightforward.

The real action is happening inside your head. As Rook, I’ve just walked through a real horror show in this small village, put together some really disturbing clues about what’s happening, and I’m now staring down the person responsible while he’s trapped inside an uncomfortably slimy-looking cyst of material the game calls the Blight. Here is the choice: What does my Rook decide to do with him, and what does that choice say about her character? I can’t answer that question without looking through the lens of my personal morality, even if I intend for Rook to act counter to my own nature.

My first emotional, knee-jerk reaction is to say screw this guy. Leave him to the consequences of his own making. He’s given me an offensively venal justification for how he got here, so let him sit there and stare at his material reward for all the good it will do him while he’s being swallowed by the Blight.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/11/dragon-age-the-veilguard-and-the-choices-you-make-while-saving-the-world/

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment 50 years later

Ramsay’s experience as a prisoner was a bit different. “I don’t think any of the prisoners were conscious of the camera, honestly,” he told Ars. “We were not entirely sure where it was, we thought we saw it sometimes. But we were not getting regular instructions, we were being fed badly, clothed badly, et cetera. In a situation like that, what the camera angle is, it’s the least of your worries.”

In retrospect, the Stanford Prison Experiment may have more in common with reality TV; the industry term has evolved into “unscripted” TV because of the countless ways the final product is manipulated and shaped over the course of filming. Zimbardo even admits as much in the documentary, calling his experiment “the first ever reality TV show.”

Controlling the narrative

Zimbardo’s version of events has long dominated the prevailing understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment, even though some of the original participants have frequently tried to counter that narrative; their voices just never held as much sway. While Eshleman has participated in many media interviews over the ensuing decades, he said that much of his commentary was often edited out in favor of Zimbardo’s preferred narrative.

For his part, Zimbardo has said repeatedly that Korpi, for instance, was lying about faking his breakdown, pointing to the fact that Korpi became a prison psychologist because of how deeply the experiment affected him. Zimbardo also denies in the NatGeo documentary that Eshleman was acting for the duration of the experiment; his interpretation is that this is how Eshleman rationalized his behavior and dealt with the guilt.

“I think I knew if I was acting or not,” Eshleman countered. “How could he not even consider the possibility that not just I, but everybody in his little demonstration was acting, that we simply fell into roles that were expected of us, to be paid $15 a day? That’s what galls me. He kind of decided to throw us [the guards] under the bus after directing us to do what he wanted. Maybe he never took an acting class. Those of those in the theater department are always acting in some way.” In fact, the basic scenario of the Stanford Prison Experiment has found its way into many improv classes as an exercise prompt.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/revisting-the-stanford-prison-experiment-50-years-later/

How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom

So in 2006, Nvidia announced the CUDA platform. CUDA allows programmers to write “kernels,” short programs designed to run on a single execution unit. Kernels allow a big computing task to be split up into bite-sized chunks that can be processed in parallel. This allows certain kinds of calculations to be completed far faster than with a CPU alone.

But there was little interest in CUDA when it was first introduced, wrote Steven Witt in The New Yorker last year:

When CUDA was released, in late 2006, Wall Street reacted with dismay. Huang was bringing supercomputing to the masses, but the masses had shown no indication that they wanted such a thing.

“They were spending a fortune on this new chip architecture,” Ben Gilbert, the co-host of “Acquired,” a popular Silicon Valley podcast, said. “They were spending many billions targeting an obscure corner of academic and scientific computing, which was not a large market at the time—certainly less than the billions they were pouring in.”

Huang argued that the simple existence of CUDA would enlarge the supercomputing sector. This view was not widely held, and by the end of 2008, Nvidia’s stock price had declined by seventy percent…

Downloads of CUDA hit a peak in 2009, then declined for three years. Board members worried that Nvidia’s depressed stock price would make it a target for corporate raiders.

Huang wasn’t specifically thinking about AI or neural networks when he created the CUDA platform. But it turned out that Hinton’s backpropagation algorithm could easily be split up into bite-sized chunks. So training neural networks turned out to be a killer app for CUDA.

According to Witt, Hinton was quick to recognize the potential of CUDA:

In 2009, Hinton’s research group used Nvidia’s CUDA platform to train a neural network to recognize human speech. He was surprised by the quality of the results, which he presented at a conference later that year. He then reached out to Nvidia. “I sent an e-mail saying, ‘Look, I just told a thousand machine-learning researchers they should go and buy Nvidia cards. Can you send me a free one?’ ” Hinton told me. “They said no.”

Despite the snub, Hinton and his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, obtained a pair of Nvidia GTX 580 GPUs for the AlexNet project. Each GPU had 512 execution units, allowing Krizhevsky and Sutskever to train a neural network hundreds of times faster than would be possible with a CPU. This speed allowed them to train a larger model—and to train it on many more training images. And they would need all that extra computing power to tackle the massive ImageNet dataset.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/how-a-stubborn-computer-scientist-accidentally-launched-the-deep-learning-boom/

Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y‘all

The global space community awoke to a new reality on Wednesday morning.

The founder of this century’s most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time, and energy to help elect Donald Trump to president of the United States. Already, Musk was the dominant Western player in space. SpaceX launches national security satellites and NASA astronauts and operates a megaconstellation. He controls the machines that provide essential space services to NASA and the US military. And now, thanks to his gamble on backing Trump, Musk has strong-armed himself into Trump’s inner circle.

Although he may not have a cabinet-appointed position, Musk will have a broad portfolio in the new administration for as long as his relations with Trump remain positive. This gives Musk extraordinary power over a number of areas, including spaceflight. Already this week, he has been soliciting ideas and input from colleagues. The New York Times reported that Musk has advised Trump to hire key employees from SpaceX into his administration, including at the Department of Defense. This reflects the huge conflict of interest that Musk will face when it comes to space policy. His actions could significantly benefit SpaceX, of which he is the majority owner and has the final say in major decisions.

It will be a hugely weird dynamic. Musk is unquestionably in a position for self-dealing. Normally, such conflicts of interest would be frowned on within a government, but Trump has already shown a brazen disregard for norms, and there’s no reason to believe that will change during his second go at the presidency. One way around this could be to give Musk a “special advisor” tag, which means he would not have to comply with federal conflict-of-interest laws.

So it’s entirely possible that the sitting chief executive of SpaceX could be the nation’s most important advisor on space policy, conflicts be damned. Musk possesses flaws as a leader, but it is difficult to argue against results. His intuitions for the industry, such as pushing hard for reusable launch and broadband Internet from space, have largely been correct. In a vacuum, it is not necessarily bad to have someone like Musk providing a vision for US spaceflight in the 21st century. But while space may be a vacuum, there is plenty of oxygen in Washington, DC.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/space-policy-is-about-to-get-pretty-wild-yall/

Review: M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis are probably Apple’s best Mac minis ever

In our tests on the Mac mini, any performance gain from using High Power mode was essentially negligible, so small that we haven’t bothered to make charts showing the difference—there are signs of a very small upward nudge in a couple of GPU tests, but all the CPU tests and many of the GPU tests show differences that are essentially within the margin of error.

While performance is a bit of a wash, fan noise is considerably increased under High Power mode. The Mac mini is mostly inaudible most of the time, the same way most Apple Silicon Macs have been, but under sustained CPU or GPU load, the mini emits a louder whoosh that you’ll definitely hear unless you’re wearing headphones. That could be a sign that, over many hours of activity, High Power mode will produce better or more consistent results than most of our tests, which generally take no more than a few minutes to run. But from where I sit, the benefits of High Power mode in the M4 Pro Mac mini are negligible, and the downside is noticeable. I would generally leave it turned off.

The default desktop Mac

Apple’s new Mac mini, sandwiched in between a Mac Studio and Apple TV. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I’ve always liked the Mac mini, and the ones Apple sends for reviews are always the idealized versions of the machines: plenty of RAM, plenty of storage, and fully enabled chips. But those upgrades drove the price up quickly, and the entry-level version of the Mac mini that was meant to exist as an inexpensive, competent desktop computer has always been harder to recommend than I really wanted it to be.

The M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis are the best ones Apple has ever made because they’re good mini workstations and good entry-level PCs. The M4 combined with 16GB of RAM means the $599 mini can handle basic browsing and office use; casual photo, audio, and video editing; and high-resolution multi-monitor setups. The M4 Pro version of the mini is an excellent replacement for any power user’s aging Intel iMac, with a level of CPU performance, display capabilities, and RAM capacity that required an expensive M1 Ultra Mac Studio just a couple of years ago.

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/review-m4-and-m4-pro-mac-minis-are-probably-apples-best-mac-minis-ever/

The PS5 Pro’s biggest problem is that the PS5 is already very good

In many ways, the timing of Sony’s 2016 launch of the PS4 Pro couldn’t have been better. The slightly upgraded version of 2013’s PlayStation 4 came at a time when a wave of 4K TVs was just beginning to crest in the form of tens of millions of annual sales in the US.

Purchasing Sony’s first-ever “mid-generation” console upgrade in 2016 didn’t give original PS4 owners access to any new games, a fact that contributed to us calling the PS4 Pro “a questionable value proposition” when it launched. Still, many graphics-conscious console gamers were looking for an excuse to use the extra pixels and HDR colors on their new 4K TVs, and spending hundreds of dollars on a stopgap console years before the PS5 served that purpose well enough.

Fast-forward to today and the PS5 Pro faces an even weaker value proposition. The PS5, after all, has proven more than capable of creating excellent-looking games that take full advantage of the 4K TVs that are now practically standard in American homes. With 8K TVs still an extremely small market niche, there isn’t anything akin to what Sony’s Mike Somerset called “the most significant picture-quality increase probably since black and white went to color” when talking about 4K TV in 2016.

Instead, Sony says that spending $700 on a PS5 Pro has a decidedly more marginal impact—namely, helping current PS5 gamers avoid having to choose between the smooth, 60 fps visuals of “Performance” mode and the resolution-maximizing, graphical effects-laden “Fidelity” mode in many games. The extra power of the PS5 Pro, Sony says, will let you have the best of both worlds: full 4K, ray-traced graphics and 60 fps at the same time.

While there’s nothing precisely wrong with this value proposition, there’s a severe case of diminishing returns that comes into play here. The graphical improvements between a “Performance mode” PS5 game and a “Performance Pro mode” PS5 game are small enough, in fact, that I often found it hard to reliably tell at a glance which was which.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/11/the-ps5-pros-biggest-problem-is-that-the-ps5-is-already-very-good/

Laptop, smartphone, and game console prices could soar after the election

“At that point, it’s prohibitive” to do business with China, Brzytwa told Ars, suggesting that Trump’s proposed tariffs are about “blocking imports,” not safeguarding American tech.

How soon would tech prices increase?

It’s unclear how quickly prices would rise if Trump or Harris expanded tariffs.

Lovely told Ars that “it’s really up to the manufacturers, how fast they pass through the prices.” She has spoken to manufacturers using subcontractors in China who “say they’re in no position to move their business” “quickly” to “someplace else.”

Those manufacturers would have a difficult choice to make. They could “raise prices immediately” and “send a very clear signal to their customers” that “this is because of the tariffs,” Lovely said. Or they could keep prices low while scaling back business that could hamper US innovation, as the CTA has repeatedly warned.

“I think I would just say, ‘Hey everybody, you elected this guy, here’s the tariff,'” Lovely said. “But some might decide that that’s not the best thing.”

In particular, some companies may be reluctant to raise prices because they can’t afford triggering a shift in consumer habits, Lovely suggested.

“Demand is not infinitely elastic,” Lovely told Ars. “People will say, ‘I can use my cell phone a little longer than every three years’ or whatever.”

Tech industry strategist and founder of Tirias Research, Jim McGregor, told Ars that if Trump is elected and the tariffs are implemented, impacts could be felt within a few months. At a conference this month, Trump’s proposed China tariffs were a hot topic, and one tech company CEO told McGregor that it’s the global economic X-factor that he’s “most worried about,” McGregor told Ars.

On top of worrying about what tariffs may come, tech companies are still maneuvering in response to Biden’s most recently added tariffs, analysts noted.

In May, McGregor warned in Forbes that Americans will likely soon be feeling the crunch from those tariffs, estimating that in the “short term,” some tariffs “will drive up prices to consumers, especially for consumer electronics, due particularly to the tariffs on chips, batteries, and steel/aluminum.”

Staring down November 5, it appears that most tech companies can’t avoid confronting the hard truth that US protectionist trade policies increasingly isolating China are already financially burdening American consumers and companies—and more costs and price hikes are likely coming.

“It just doesn’t look good,” Brzytwa told Ars.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/laptop-smartphone-and-game-console-prices-could-soar-after-the-election/

iPod fans evade Apple’s DRM to preserve 54 lost clickwheel-era games

Even the bad clickwheel iPod games—like Sega’s nearly impossible-to-control Sonic the Hedgehog port—might find their own quirky audience among gaming subcommunities, Olsro argued. “One [person] beat Dark Souls using DK bongos, so I would not be surprised if the speedrun community could try speedrunning some of those odd games.”

More than entertainment, though, Olsro said there’s a lot of historical interest to be mined from this odd pre-iPhone period in Apple’s gaming history. “The clickwheel games were a reflect[ion] of that gaming period of premium games,” Olsro said. “Without ads, bullshit, and micro-transactions and playable fully offline from start to end… Then the market evolved [on iOS] with cheaper premium games like Angry Birds before being invaded with ads everywhere and aggressive monetizations…”

The iPod might not be the ideal device for playing *Sonic the Hedgehog*, but you can do it! Credit: Reddit / ajgogo

While Olsro said he’s happy with the 42 games he’s preserved (and especially happy to play Asphalt 4 again), he won’t be fully satisfied until his iTunes Virtual Machine has all 54 clickwheel titles backed up for posterity. He compared the effort to complete sets of classic game console ROMs “that you can archive somewhere to be sure to be able to play any game you want in the future (or research on it)… Getting the full set is also addictive in terms of collection, like any other kind of collectible things.”

But Olsro’s preservation effort might have a built-in time limit. If Apple ever turns off the iTunes re-authorization servers for clickwheel iPods, he will no longer be able to add new games to his master clickwheel iPod library. “Apple is now notoriously known to not care about announcing closing servers for old things,” Olsro said. “If that version of iTunes dies tomorrow, this preservation project will be stopped. No new games will be ever added.”

“We do not know how much time we still have to accomplish this, so there is no time to lose,” Olsro wrote on Reddit. iPod gamers who want to help can contact him through his Discord account, inurayama.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/11/ipod-fans-evade-apples-drm-to-preserve-54-lost-clickwheel-era-games/