Thursday’s top tech news: leaving, on an @ElonJet plane

When you’re an automotive journalist, sometimes you spend a few hours testing a car and are left with such a negative impression that you wonder for days whether you were maybe just in a bad mood. Then, sometimes you drive a car and it leaves such an overwhelmingly positive impression that you can’t help thinking you must have been blissed out of your mind, that the car can’t have really been that good.

I was left with those sorts of doubts after getting some seat time in a Lucid Air sedan earlier this year. It was a short demo a few hours from my home, early spring on roads still torn up from the winter’s worst. I couldn’t believe how well that car handled all the frost heaves and potholes while still hustling and turning in ways that no 5,200-pound sedan should. Later, on the drive home in my humble Subaru, I was already questioning myself. It couldn’t have been that good.

Nuclear fusion is back in the news. This week, the US Department of Energy announced what it called a “major scientific breakthrough” in fusion power research: for the first time, a fusion experiment had produced more energy than the energy used to kick off the reaction. It’s not the first time we’ve heard about fusion progress. There have been decades of headlines touting breakthroughs large and small, usually implying that we’re closer than ever to generating all the clean energy we’ll ever need from nuclear fusion.

It’s a lot to take in, so The Verge put together this guide to fusion power with the help of some experts. Below, we’ve summarized scientists’ dreams for fusion, as well as the harsh realities the technology faces to bring the power of fusion from scientific ambition to commercial reality.

Grand Theft Auto V now has ray-traced reflections on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles. A new patch, spotted by Eurogamer, brings ray-traced reflections to the game’s fidelity mode (30fps), adding a lot more realistic detail to vehicles, characters, windows, and basically any glossy surfaces. The results are truly impressive.

Now if you walk up to a window your character’s reflection will appear, or if you venture into areas where there is water or puddles you’ll see reflections of the objects nearby. Much like the ray tracing we’ve seen in Cyberpunk 2077, it makes the game feel more immersive.

Elon Musk has sold another $3.5 billion in Tesla shares, according to a form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Since November 2021, the high point of Tesla’s share price, Musk has sold more than $39 billion of shares, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Musk, who recently lost the title of being the world’s richest man, last filed with the SEC about Tesla share sales in November, when he sold $3.4 billion. Before that, he sold $8.4 billion in April and $6.9 billion (nice) in August. He said he was done selling twice, once in April and once in August.

Hours after suspending @ElonJet, an account that tracked the trips taken by Elon Musk’s private plane, Twitter banned the account’s creator, Jack Sweeney, and dozens of other accounts he operates. Twitter then un-suspended @ElonJet, which was briefly tweeting to try and get its account back before Twitter banned it again.

If you try and visit @ElonJet or Sweeney’s account, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended. Twitter has also been blocking links to versions of the Elon Jet tracker on other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook. Attempting to tweet certain links to Sweeney’s Elon Musk jet tracker on other platforms will display a message that the link is “potentially harmful,” as spotted by Tony Webster.

Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its “smart canvas” system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, such as Python, C, and Javascript.

Before this, getting code to look nice in Google Docs required workarounds or add-ons, which weren’t necessarily the most convenient. While that wasn’t the end of the world, making sure code displays properly is important for documentation, and having different parts of the code display in different colors makes it much easier to read if there’s more than a single line or two.