Hacker reduces GTA Online load times by roughly 70 percent

Enlarge / You could spend less time looking at loading screens like this with a new DLL fix.

A hacker going by the handle T0st says he has figured out a core issue that caused longer-than-necessary load times in Grand Theft Auto Online for years. The hacker has released a proof of concept DLL fix that shortens those lengthy startup times by roughly 70 percent.

Grand Theft Auto Online's PC load times have been a persistent issue for seven years now, remaining slow despite general improvements to hardware and the game's status as a continuing lucrative revenue stream for publisher Take Two. An anonymous Reddit poll last year found that roughly half of players were waiting three to six minutes for the game to load up, and about 35 percent of players waiting even longer to start every session.

That's not a scientific survey or anything, but even accounting for self-selection and reporting issues, those load times are very long, especially for such an old game. The problem is even harder to understand when the single-player Grand Theft Auto V tends to load many times faster.

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Verizon tells users to disable 5G to preserve battery, then deletes tweet

Enlarge / A Verizon booth at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles in September 2018. (credit: Verizon)

Verizon has spent years hyping 5G despite it bringing just a minor speed upgrade outside the limited areas where millimeter-wave spectrum has been deployed, but the carrier's support team advised users yesterday to shut 5G off if their phones are suffering from poor battery life.

The tweet from VZWSupport, now deleted, said, "Are you noticing that your battery life is draining faster than normal? One way to help conserve battery life is to turn on LTE. Just go to Cellular > Cellular Data Options > Voice & Data and tap LTE."

While Verizon didn't mention 5G in the tweet, people who responded to Verizon on Twitter and journalists writing stories noted that the effect of these instructions is to shut 5G off. "LTE is active by default as a backup for those times when 5G isn't available. Following these instructions actually has the effect of turning off 5G," Mashable noted. (Verizon's instructions are for iOS, but it's also possible to disable 5G on Android phones.)

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B.1.1.7 variant now 10% of US cases—and cases are once again ticking up

Enlarge / President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff participate in a moment of silence and candle light ceremony at sundown with 500 candles for the 500,000 dead from the COVID-19 pandemic, at the South Portico at the White House on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

After weeks of dramatic decline, COVID-19 cases in the US have hit a plateau—and in some places are ticking up. Officials are sounding the alarm in hopes of averting a fourth surge in the devastating pandemic.

“We at CDC consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press briefing last week. Though cases are down from their astronomical peak in early to mid January, the overall numbers are still quite high, matching averages seen in late October, at the base of the holiday surge.

“Things are tenuous,” she noted. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”

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Humanitarian airship seeks world’s most powerful hydrogen fuel cell

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

"Ironic" probably isn't the right word to describe the lack of public information about Sergey Brin's airship company. Who better to know the worth of staying private than one of the co-creators of a search engine that changed the world, after all. But to those who know where to look—like eagle-eyed journalist Mark Hughes—some details about LTA's plans have made it out into the open. Hughes spotted a rather revealing job opening at the company for someone to manage a hydrogen fuel cell program.

The really interesting part of the job posting shows up in the list of primary responsibilities:

Engineering hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system through configuration of 1.5MW airship propulsion system including H2 storage, fuel cells, H2O capture, batteries, stern drive, and smaller electric motors and gear trains and retrofit of 750KW fuel cell system on existing airship

Yes, you did read that correctly, LTA is indeed working on configuring a 1.5 MW fuel cell system. For context, the hydrogen fuel cell that powers the Toyota Mirai was just bumped from 113 kW to 128 kW in November, making it ten times less powerful than the system sought by LTA. Even the 500 kW class-8 tractor-trailers that Toyota is testing as drayage trucks at the Ports of LA and Long Beach only use a pair of Mirai fuel cell systems to generate power, and the most powerful hydrogen fuel cell that has taken to the air so far is a 250 kW fuel cell in the ZeroAvia ZA-600, a 20-seat plane with a range of 500 miles (800 km).

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The 2008 moment when triumph turned to torment for SpaceX

Enlarge / The launch of Flight Three of the Falcon 1 rocket looked promising at the beginning. (credit: Chris Thompson/SpaceX)

This is an excerpt from chapter eight of the book LIFTOFF: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by our own Eric Berger. The book will be published on March 2, 2021. In this excerpt, it is the summer of 2008, and SpaceX has attempted to launch the Falcon 1 rocket twice already, failing both times. As the company's engineers prepare for a third launch attempt from tiny Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, time and money are running out...

By the time of Flight Three, the SpaceXers had grown accustomed to their visits out to the central Pacific Kwajalein Atoll for launches. Over the course of three years, they learned how to survive in the tropical environment and even enjoy island life. Some of these lessons were hard won, however.

Fairly early on during the Kwaj experience, engineer Brian Bjelde missed the evening boat back to Kwajalein. It happened. He and a few others slept under the stars, passing a perfectly pleasant night. But the next morning, Bjelde lacked a change of clothes. So he grabbed a T-shirt from a package of Falcon 1 swag items that had shown up in Omelek. The vacuum-packed, white T-shirt may have been wrinkled, but at least it was clean, and it kept the sun off his back. Bjelde went through massive quantities of sunscreen every day—any piece of skin exposed to the tropical sun was covered. Throughout that day, as he slathered himself in it, Bjelde noticed the T-shirt’s wrinkles straightening beneath the island’s heat and humidity.

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Pure nonsense: Debunking the latest attack on renewable energy

Enlarge / Miraculously, the video at issue did not accuse wind turbines of causing cancer. (credit: Pictures Alliance / Getty Images)

Our editor-in-chief obviously hates me. That's the only conclusion I could reach after he asked me to watch an abysmal attack video targeting renewable energy—a video produced by a notorious source of right-wing misinformation.

But despite its bizarre mishmash of irrelevancies and misdirection, the video has been widely shared on social media. Perhaps you've seen it, or maybe you just to want to be ready when a family member brings it up in an argument. What, if anything, is true in this farrago of bad faith?

Yes, it’s awful

The video is hosted by "Prager University." My only previous exposure to the organization's videos had been this excellent one on the Confederacy by Colonel Ty Seidule, a professor of History at West Point who has since been placed on the Pentagon commission that will examine bases named after Confederate generals. Seemed legit!

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Action-packed meta-fantasy, space opera herald a bright future for Asian film

Enlarge / Celebrate the Year of the Metal Ox with two new films: A Writer's Odyssey and Space Sweepers (credit: Aurich Lawson/Netflix/CMC Films/)

February brings the annual celebration of the lunar new year—welcome to the Year of the (Metal) Ox—and with it two new action-packed films from China and South Korea, respectively.

Directed by Lu Yang, A Writer's Odyssey—currently playing in select theaters—centers on a man searching for his lost daughter, hired to assassinate a novelist whose fantasy work-in-progress has begun to shape events in the real world. Over on Netflix, Space Sweepers is being touted as the first Korean bona fide blockbuster, focusing on the adventures of the plucky crew aboard a space junk salvage vessel who must save the Earth from total destruction. Together they make for an action packed, fantasy/sci-fi weekend double feature.

(Some spoilers below for both films, but no major reveals.)

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