What if you could get an iPhone alarm that could be shared with your family? An app developer has a lot of novel ideas like that. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Quine on Flickr.

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On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Unalarming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Sorry, Rowan Atkinson, electric cars are here to stay — and improve • The Washington Post

Michael Coren:

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EVs [electric vehicles] still pollute. As [comedian but also car enthusiast Rowan] Atkinson writes, manufacturing EVs can generate more emissions than making conventional ones — nearly 70% more, according to Volvo statistics he cites.

There’s some truth to that, largely because of the energy it takes to make a battery. Building a Nissan Leaf generates the equivalent of about 65 grams of CO2 per kilometer (averaged over the vehicle lifetime) compared to 46 for the average European vehicle, according to an examination of the scientific literature by CarbonBrief, a climate science website.

But that number is ultimately misleading. First, manufacturing emissions are predicted to fall as battery manufacturing improves and the industry decarbonizes. Second, it doesn’t matter much in the final accounting.

The vast majority of a car’s emissions come from the fuel the vehicle consumes over its lifetime, not the materials that go into them. When overall emissions are calculated over 150,000 to 200,000 miles, it turns out those from manufacturing are “a really, really small number,” says Jason Quinn, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University who conducts life cycle analyses.

A more honest accounting, by CarbonBrief, shows that driving a Nissan Leaf EV in 2019 generated at least three times fewer lifetime emissions per kilometer compared to an average conventional car.
In the United States, it’s already less polluting — and cheaper — to recharge rather than refill, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The same is the case in most places around the world.

Every year, this argument gets stronger. The United States is now targeting a carbon-free grid by 2035. “EVs are just going to get better because the grid is getting cleaner,” says Quinn.

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I didn’t link to the original Atkinson article (in which he noted he has an electronic engineering degree – yeah, well, join the crowd, matey) because it seemed so in need of rebuttal: the idea that it’s better to keep burning fossil fuels is ridiculous on its face. And so, here we have it.
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This guy on Twitter keeps inventing horrible tech features that no one wants • Digg

Darcy Jimenez:

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Imagine if your DoorDash deliverer could request a few of your fries via the app, or the person you were texting could see your thumb-shaped face in real-time as you typed. If you’ve seen these features doing the rounds on Twitter lately, you might have been fooled into thinking some of them were a reality.

Luckily, these unhinged ideas are all a product of Soren Iverson’s imagination. The product designer, who works at Cash App, has gone viral for his mockups of often nightmarish (and occasionally genius) “improvements” to the apps we use every day.

Iverson told Digg that he started off making “satirical UI” and exploring how AI could be used in “unexpected ways” — then, his shared iPhone alarm idea went viral in January of this year.

“From there I’ve just been making an idea a day, and having fun with it,” he said.

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When I saw the headline, I thought they meant Elon Musk, but Iverson’s ideas are actually weirdly funny and just on the edge of workable (almost always tilting over into the wrong side). The “shared iPhone alarm” (“iOS alarms, but everyone has to wake up”), though, would be absolutely brilliant for a family: school days when you all need to get up, or head off on holiday, or whenever you need to do something in concert. Or when you’re with a team in a location and need coordination.
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Rep. Jim Jordan, GOP allies amplify scrutiny of top disinfo researchers • The Washington Post

Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn:

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Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his allies in Congress are demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech.

Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.
Last week, Jordan threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests.

The university turned over its scholars’ communications with government officials and big social media platforms but is holding back records of some disinformation complaints. Stanford told The Washington Post that it omitted internal records, some filed by students. The university is negotiating for limited interviews.

The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians.

Jordan has argued that content removals urged by some in the government have suppressed legitimate theories on vaccine risks and the Covid-19 origins as well as news stories wrongly suspected of being part of foreign disinformation campaigns.

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This is the downside of the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives: they go on their weird vendettas.
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iOS 17 preview • Apple

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iOS 17 brings new features to enhance the things you do every day.

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Unlike the headset, these (for the most part little) tweaks are actually going to be used by hundreds of millions. Some of them actually look useful too. Seems you can install the Developer Betas without having a developer account for the first time.
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Stefanie Sun deepfake music covers arise from AI voice cloning • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Singaporean Mandopop diva Stefanie Sun is one of the most beloved singers in China. Over the past two decades, she has sold millions of albums and attracted a loyal fan base across the country. But the 44-year-old star has not released a new album since 2017, so fans decided to take on the task themselves.

Zheng, a Xiamen-based coder and dedicated fan, fed more than a 100 of Sun’s original songs into a deepfake voice generator called So-Vits-SVC, training the program to perform any song in Sun’s distinctive, lilting voice.

“I wanted to listen to her sing other songs,” Zheng, who preferred to be identified only by his last name for fear of legal consequences, told Rest of World. He used the model to generate a wide range of deepfake Sun covers — from the folk classic “Five Hundred Miles” to the pop hit “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. “It’s very similar. [Artificial intelligence] performs more consistently than Sun herself,” said Zheng.

The surge of open-source AI programs such as So-Vits-SVC — shared online by Chinese programmers on platforms such as GitHub — has allowed internet users to train and build their own deepfake models that mimic celebrity voices. From Singapore to Spain, people have used these Chinese-made AI programs to resurrect dead artists, parodize politicians, and bulk-produce songs in the voices of Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump.

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This is the future, here right now. I wonder if some unknown artists will start feeding their own content into these systems in order to build up a catalog they can monetise. No copyright issues then.
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Apple Vision • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has tried it:

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The larger Vision Pro opportunity is to move in on the iPad and to become the ultimate consumption device.

The keynote highlighted the movie watching experience of the Vision Pro, and it is excellent and immersive. Of course it isn’t, in the end, that much different than having an excellent TV in a dark room.

What was much more compelling were a series of immersive video experiences that Apple did not show in the keynote. The most striking to me were, unsurprisingly, sports. There was one clip of an NBA basketball game that was incredibly realistic: the game clip was shot from the baseline, and as someone who has had the good fortune to sit courtside, it felt exactly the same, and, it must be said, much more immersive than similar experiences on the Quest.

It turns out that one reason for the immersion is that Apple actually created its own cameras to capture the game using its new Apple Immersive Video Format. The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.

What is fascinating is that such a season pass should, in my estimation, look very different from a traditional TV broadcast, what with its multiple camera angles, announcers, scoreboard slug, etc. I wouldn’t want any of that: if I want to see the score, I can simply look up at the scoreboard as if I’m in the stadium; the sounds are provided by the crowd and PA announcer. To put it another way, the Apple Immersive Video Format, to a far greater extent than I thought possible, truly makes you feel like you are in a different place.

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I wonder if the 3D cameras are going to be sold separately at some stage, because having to wear a camera is substandard, both as an experience and a solution. It would definitely seed sales of the headset.

Thompson’s post is free to read – it’s worth taking the time.
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Hands on with Apple’s Vision Pro: bringing the metaverse to life • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Moving from app to app using the device could hardly be more intuitive thanks to eye- and hand-tracking. Click a button with your right hand, and an iPhone-like home screen appears. Glance at a photo or icon, then pinch your fingers to “double-click”. You can scroll through photos with a swiping gesture, or zoom in as if a giant smartphone were projected in front of your face.

The device can easily move between virtual reality, in which the wearer is fully immersed in a digital world, and “augmented reality,” which overlays images upon the real surroundings. An Apple Watch-like dial allows you to manually fade between these two modes or, in some settings, the effect is automatic: if a person stands beside you, just look at them and their image will slowly appear and become clearer with time.

Among the features Apple could not show in its presentation were the 3D photos and videos that the headset could capture. In my private demo, I could sit around a fire with friends or have a seat at the table as children blew out birthday candles in uncanny depth.

Gene Munster, portfolio manager at Deepwater Asset Management, said this part of the demo blew him away. “3D memories are going to change how we remember things,” he said. “I’m not going to want to take a birthday party video again, unless it’s like that.”

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You say: but it costs $3,500, who can afford to have one of those and children? Related: the analysis company Trendforce reckons Apple will sell 200,000 in the first year despite “concerns around price and battery life”.

I’ll tell you who’ll record those videos of (kids’ and others’) birthday parties: paid flunkeys of the very rich. Think “Succession”, which surely would have used this as a throwaway in some episode had the Vision Pro been available.
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FTX’s big AI bet could help bail out customers • Semafor

Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti:

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FTX’s bankers are quietly shopping what might be the most valuable asset inside the collapsed crypto exchange: a stake in Anthropic, a startup that has ridden the AI craze and is now worth billions of dollars.

Perella Weinberg, the boutique bank sorting out the mess left behind when FTX went bankrupt in November, has been teasing the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of shares in Anthropic to potential investors, people familiar with the matter said. The privately-held company, which created the Claude chatbot that is taking on ChatGPT, has gone from virtually unknown to one of the hottest companies in the AI boom in a matter of months.

FTX appeared to own $500m worth of Anthropic stock when it went bankrupt, though it’s unclear how former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrived at that valuation. The stake is now expected to fetch nine figures, money that would go to former customers.

Bankers are discussing whether to sell the entire stake now or hold some back, on the theory that AI valuations will keep rising. (Bankman-Fried is no longer an investor in Semafor).

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On the gambling premise alone, you’d be crazy to sell it all at once; sell half now, half later if it appreciates in value.
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Linda Yaccarino replaces Elon Musk as Twitter boss • BBC News

Annabelle Liang:

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Linda Yaccarino, the new boss of troubled social media firm Twitter, has started the role earlier than expected.

Ms Yaccarino, 60, was previously head of advertising at NBCUniversal. She joined days after Twitter lost its second head of trust and safety.

Elon Musk had announced on 12 May that his successor would join in six weeks but her start date appears to have been brought forward.

Twitter also announced it had recruited Joe Benarroch from NBCUniversal. Mr Benarroch was senior vice president of communications, advertising and partnerships at the media giant. He also worked for a number of years at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. At Twitter he will focus on business operations.

Mr Musk has said he plans to remain involved with the firm. The billionaire owner of Twitter said last year he would resign as chief executive once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job”.
It followed a Twitter poll when Mr Musk asked people to vote on whether he should resign – 57.5% voted yes.

Ms Yaccarino welcomed her former NBCUniversal co-worker Mr Benarroch to Twitter, which is known for its logo of a bird. She tweeted: “Welcome to the flock @benarroch_joe! From one bird to the next.”

He said: “I am looking forward to bringing my experience to Twitter, and to working with the entire team to build Twitter 2.0 together.”

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And so ends the short period when the Twitter CEO was actually an involved, active user of Twitter, which had never happened before. (Even with Jack Dorsey.) Tagging in Benarroch to keep Musk away from day-to-day operations is smart.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified