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Tag: ars technia

  • Playing SimCity 2000 as adult

    SimCity 2000 was a fun sandbox game as a kid, and looking back, building an airport first wasn’t a good choice. Ars Technia played the game with an adult lens.

    Can I live my values by sparing some money in a tight budget for homeless shelters or anti-smoking initiatives? Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood? Do I really want to spend more money and land space on solar power plants, or is a little pollution from the cheaper coal plant worth the trade-off?

    While these kinds of decisions plague me now in a way they never did as a child, the trade-offs I don’t have to make in SimCity 2000 also stand out. If I want to build a train line in SimCity 2000, I can literally pause time and just drag the tracks across the entirety of downtown. Here in the real world of suburban DC, I’ve watched as construction of the Purple Line light rail has dragged on outside my window for years, snarling traffic and running up costs in the process.

  • The case for memes as a new form of comics

    There is an argument to be made that memes, the visual kind, are a new form of comics. Communicating an idea or argument in an unexpected way.

    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.

  • Waymo crashes less than human drivers

    Maybe we’ll get driverless cars some day. Waymo vehicles are showing promise, crashing less than human drivers.

    Last September, I analyzed Waymo crashes through June 2024. So this section will focus on crashes between July 2024 and February 2025. During that period, Waymo reported 38 crashes that were serious enough to either cause an (alleged) injury or an airbag deployment.

    In my view, only one of these crashes was clearly Waymo’s fault. Waymo may have been responsible for three other crashes—there wasn’t enough information to say for certain. The remaining 34 crashes seemed to be mostly or entirely the fault of others

  • WikiTok to infinitely scroll Wikipedia

    WikiTok infinitely scrolls Wikipedia, randomly loading articles.

    From the developer, Isaac Gemel, Ars Technia describes WikiTok as

    … a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.

    A fun bookmark to avoid doomscrolling.