Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In a deckbuilding game, you start out with a basic set of cards, then upgrade it over time, seeking synergies and compounding effects. Roguelikes are games where death happens quite often, but each randomized "run" unlocks options for the future. In both genres, and when they're fused together, the key is staying lean, trimming your deck and refining your strategy so that every card and upgrade works toward unstoppable momentum.

“Lean” does not describe the current scene for roguelike deckbuilder games, but they certainly have momentum. As of this writing, Steam has 2,599 titles tagged by users with “ deckbuilding ” and 861 with “ roguelike deckbuilder ” in all languages, more than enough to feed a recent Deckbuilders Fest . The glut has left some friends and co-workers grousing that every indie game these days seems to be either a cozy farming sim or a roguelike deckbuilder.

I, an absolute sucker for deckbuilders for nearly five years, wanted to know why this was happening.

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  The Frankenstein's monster of a GamePad hack responsible for the creation of Trimming the Herbs. [credit: Ahoyo ]

Last month, the Super Mario Maker community was rocked by the shocking admission that the game's last uncleared level —an ultra-hard reflex test named "Trimming the Herbs" (TTH)—had been secretly created and uploaded using the assistance of automated, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) techniques back in 2017. That admission didn't stop Super Mario Maker streamer Sanyx from finally pulling off a confirmed human-powered clear of the level last Friday, just days before Nintendo's final shutdown of the Wii U's online servers Sunday would have made that an impossibility.

But while "Trimming the Herbs" itself was solved in the nick of time, the mystery of the level's creation remained at least partially unsolved. Before TTH creator Ahoyo admitted to his TAS exploit last month, the player community at large didn't think it was even possible to precisely automate such pre-recorded inputs on the Wii U.

Now, speaking to Ars, Ahoyo has finally explained the console hacking that went into his clandestine TAS so many years ago and opened up about the physical and psychological motivations for the level's creation. He also discussed the remorse he feels over what ended up being a years-long fraud on the community, which is still struggling with frame-perfect input timing issues that seem inherent to the Wii U hardware.

Enlarge / For now, Fiat's sole US offering is the (RED) 500e, but future versions will arrive in "drops." (credit: Stephen Edelstein)

Fiat provided flights from New York to Miami and accommodation so Ars could drive the 500e. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

It's cliché to describe an Italian automaker as operating on a slower, more laid-back timetable than its rivals, but that seems to be the case with Fiat's North American product planning.

The outgoing Fiat 500 brought the brand back to the United States in 2011, but it had been on sale in Europe since 2007. An electric 500e arrived after the gasoline models, but as then-CEO Sergio Marchionne was quick to point out, that was only to satisfy California's zero-emission vehicle mandate.

Now the 500e is back, once again later than the European version (which was first shown in 2020), but this time, Fiat is skipping the gasoline engines for the line. The 2024 Fiat 500e is no compliance car—it's now the only version of this retro hatchback you can get and the only Fiat model available in the US—nor is it a mass-market item.

Enlarge / You can learn a lot about traction when there's very little of it around. (credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle)

Lamborghini provided flights from Las Vegas to Montreal and accommodation so Ars could attend the ice driving school. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From the passenger seat of my Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato, 24 Hours of Daytona winner Corey Lewis gives me a "slow down" hand gesture, urging me to avoid an Urus high-centered on a snow bank. I resist the childish impulse to blast by at full throttle and spray the recovery crew with a fresh layer of snow because I don't want to be the next driver to cause a scene. Once we pass the group, I punch it again, countersteering into a wide drift as my studded Blizzak winter tires shred through snow and ice, exhaust wide open and barking at redline, cranking through a series of left-right-left transitions until we come back around to the stuck SUV.

Lewis and I both laugh—everybody spins at least once while ice-drifting Lamborghinis on Lake Catchima north of Montreal, which played host in February to North America's Esperienza Neve winter driving academy. This year, Lamborghini invited customers out to tear up the pristine Canadian winterscape in three Sterratos, four Uruses, and two rear-wheel-drive Huracán Tecnicas—all told, about $3 million worth of cars.

Drifting in six-figure Lambos might make anyone a little nervous. In the controlled environment of a 30-inch (762 mm)-thick ice sheet, though, the consequences are minimal (there are bruised egos whenever anybody loses control and needs a tow, of course). So much power on the slip-and-slide immediately exposes driver skill—or lack thereof—despite 400 studs per tire on the Huracáns and 300 per tire on the Uruses providing grip and confidence. Even for a driver as experienced as Lewis, ice-drifting still has its value. For the mere mortals among us, all the more so.

Enlarge / The Maven. (credit: B. Mole)

The first thing I should say in this bike review is that I am not a bike enthusiast.

My preferred form of exercise is running, where no mechanical components are necessary. But I'm acting as reviewer here because what I lack in longstanding opinions on brand-name bike gearing and motor hubs, I make up for by being the exact target audience for the bike under review: the Maven Cargo E-bike by Integral Electrics. This is a cargo bike designed not for hardcore cyclists but for smaller riders, women specifically, who would happily swap out their family's second car for a simpler e-bike—as long as it can handle the needs of family life: toting children, running errands, and making short commutes.

This is exactly what Integral CEO and co-founder Laura Belmar and her family were looking for amid the pandemic, she told me in an interview. But while her husband picked out e-bikes that were comfortably designed for him, who is taller than her, she consistently found herself top-heavy and struggling as soon as her two kids were loaded onto the bikes. "They were scared to ride with me," she said of her kids. "One time, we were literally going down in the park and a jogger came by and grabbed the rack and pulled us back up."

Enlarge / Engineers from NASA and the National Nuclear Safety Administration lower the wall of a vacuum chamber around the KRUSTY experiment, the Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling Technology. (credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory )

In February, NASA celebrated the arrival of the first US-made lander on the Moon in more than 50 years, an achievement that helps pave the way for the return of American astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. But the clock was ticking for Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft after touching down on February 22 near the Moon's south pole.

Each day and night on the Moon lasts two weeks. When the Sun sets, a solar-powered lunar lander like Odysseus is starved of energy. Temperatures during the lunar night plummet, bottoming out at around minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° Celsius).

Over the course of two weeks, these cold temperatures can damage sensitive spacecraft equipment, killing a lander even if it could start generating power again at lunar sunrise. Surviving the night requires heat and electricity, and NASA officials say nuclear power is one of the most attractive solutions to this problem.

Enlarge / With these tips, you too can prompt people successfully.

In a break from our normal practice, Ars is publishing this helpful guide to knowing how to prompt the "human brain," should you encounter one during your daily routine.

While AI assistants like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, a growing body of research shows that it's also possible to generate useful outputs from what might be called "human language models," or people. Much like large language models (LLMs) in AI, HLMs have the ability to take information you provide and transform it into meaningful responses—if you know how to craft effective instructions, called "prompts."

Human prompt engineering is an ancient art form dating at least back to Aristotle's time, and it also became widely popular through books published in the modern era before the advent of computers.

Enlarge / Two cheapo Intel mini PCs, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an Xbox controller for scale. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I recently tried to use a Raspberry Pi 5 as a regular desktop PC . The experiment wasn't a failure—I was able to use a Pi to get most of my work done for a few days. But the device's performance, and especially the relative immaturity of the Linux's Arm software ecosystem, meant that there were lots of incompatibilities and rough edges.

One of the problems with trying to use a Pi 5 as a regular desktop computer is that, by the time you've paid for the 8GB version of the board, a decent active cooler and case, and (ideally) some kind of M.2 storage attachment and SSD, you've spent close to a couple of hundred dollars on the system. That's not a ton of money to spend on a desktop PC, but it is enough that the Pi no longer feels miraculously cheap, and there are actually other, more flexible competitors worth considering.

Consider the selection of sub-$200 mini desktop PCs that litter the online storefronts of Amazon and AliExpress. Though you do need to roll the dice on low-to-no-name brands like Beelink, GMKTec, Firebat, BMax, Trigkey, or Bosgame, it's actually possible to buy a reasonably capable desktop system with 8GB to 16GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of storage, a Windows 11 license, and a workaday x86-based Intel CPU for as little as $107, though Amazon pricing usually runs closer to $170.

Enlarge / NASA's and Lockheed Martin's X-59 experimental supersonic jet is unveiled during a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on January 12, 2024. (credit: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

When Chuck Yeager reached Mach 1 on October 14, 1947, the entire frame of his Bell X-1 aircraft suddenly started to shake, and the controls went. A crew observing the flight in a van on the ground reported hearing something like a distant, rolling thunder. They were probably the first people on Earth to hear a boom made by a supersonic aircraft.

The boom felt like an innocent curiosity at first but soon turned into a nightmare. In no time, supersonic jets—F-100 Super Sabers, F-101 Voodoos, and B-58 Hustlers—came to Air Force bases across the US, and with them came the booms. Proper, panes-flying-off-the windows supersonic booms. People filed over 40,000 complaints about nuisance and property damage caused by booming jets, which eventually ended up with the Federal Aviation Administration imposing a Mach 1 speed limit for flights over land in 1973.

Now, NASA wants this ban to go. It has started the Quesst mission to go fast over American cities once more. But this time, it wants to do it quietly.