Countries around Europe are going to see exceedingly high temperatures during July due to the ‘Cerberus’ anticyclone. CC-licensed photo by Jeremy Casey on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Hollywood studios proposed AI contract that would give them likeness rights ‘for the rest of eternity’ • The Verge
Andrew Webster:
»
During today’s press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode.
In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”
When asked about the proposal during the press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said that “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”
The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations between the two sides (it’s also a major issue behind the writers strike), and in her opening statement of the press conference, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”
«
The Black Mirror episode in question, Joan Is Awful, is from the latest series on Netflix: actors’ CGI versions are made to act out the events of ordinary peoples’ lives, and have little or no recourse, even when the events are gross. It’s an excellent episode. And for all those people who keep saying “how far ahead of real life is Black Mirror?”, well…
unique link to this extract
Farmers Insurance pulls out of Florida, affecting 100,000 policyholders • CNN Business
Jordan Valinsky:
»
Farmers Insurance will stop offering its policies in Florida, including home, auto and umbrella policies, in a change that will force thousands of people to change their insurance provider.
The company said in a statement that its decision to get out of Florida was a business decision necessary to manage its risk exposure in the hurricane-prone state. Farmers serves 100,000 customers in Florida but said there will be no impact to customers who use Farmers’ owned subsidiaries like Foremost Signature and Bristol West.
“Such policies will continue to be available to serve the insurance needs of Floridians,” Farmers Insurance spokesperson Trevor Chapman said in a statement. “Affected customers will receive notifications detailing when their coverage will end and will be advised of options for replacement coverage.”
National insurers don’t have a major presence in Florida, including Farmers, which has barely a 2% share of the state’s insurance market. Florida requires affected policyholders to receive a 120-day notice that their policies aren’t being renewed.
“Over the past 18 months in Florida, 15 home insurers have placed moratoriums on writing new business, four carriers have announced plans to voluntarily withdraw from the market and seven companies have been declared insolvent,” Mark Friedlander, a spokesperson for Insurance Information Institute, told CNN. “Currently, there are 18 Florida residential insurers on the state regulator’s watch list due to concerns over their financial health.”
«
In June CNN had a story about how insurance rates for homeowners in Florida are four times higher than the national average, as much as anything because of fraudulent claims. But in a hurricane-prone state, you stand to lose everything if insurers withdraw. (And don’t forget the tower block that collapsed because of seawater intrusion just over two years ago.)
unique link to this extract
Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky arrested and charged with fraud • Financial Times
Stefania Palma in Washington, Scott Chipolina in London, and Mark Vandevelde and Joe Miller in New York:
»
Alex Mashinsky, the founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, has been arrested by US authorities and charged with fraud and market manipulation.
Prosecutors allege that Mashinsky misled investors into ploughing billions of dollars into Celsius, portraying it “as a modern day bank, where customers could safely deposit crypto assets and earn interest”.
An indictment unsealed shortly after Mashinsky’s arrest on Thursday said that by contrast the cryptocurrency platform had operated “as a risky investment fund” that was far less profitable than Celsius had led investors to believe.
The criminal case, brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, added that Celsius also used some customers’ money to manipulate the market for a cryptocurrency token called CEL. This, they said, allowed Celsius to sell its own holdings of the token at prices that exceeded its market value.
Celsius, which is now being run by a team of restructuring professionals led by former JPMorgan Chase banker Chris Ferraro, has accepted responsibility for its part in the alleged scheme, according to a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice also unveiled on Thursday.
«
Well now. It seems like all the crypto bros are being rounded up. This story is notable too for the cast of thousands around the globe who assembled it – I left the datelines in on purpose. Usually they don’t mean much, but–Washington, London, and New York? That’s quite the assembly.
unique link to this extract
Various conservative grievances and hyperfixations • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
»
While it’s doubtful that real human people are watching [ex-Fox personality Tucker] Carlson’s terrible bad show with any actual active interest, it is fascinating from a content standpoint to watch him seemingly blindly try and figure out how to recapture what he was doing at Fox. I assumed Carlson was much more cynical and self-aware, but after watching this new show, I’m beginning to think he didn’t actually understand what his role was within the larger right-wing media infrastructure.
Carlson’s Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, basically served one function from 2016-2023, which, aside from providing background noise for Texas airport food courts, was to give legitimacy to deranged right-wing internet ramblings. That was the whole deal. It was the conservative equivalent of, idk, Mindy Kaling’s Velma reboot. The novelty with these kinds of shows is that they say things you half-remember seeing on the internet a few months ago. And I assume that novelty is heightened for Carlson’s viewers, who, if they use the internet at all, are definitely not coherently following its various macro conversations.
But now that Carlson isn’t on TV and doesn’t have an army of producers crawling subreddits for 4chan screenshots to spin up into story ideas, he now has two choices: Go full internet native and start making content at the speed of other right-wing influencers in formats preferred by algorithmic platforms or try and just simply pretend his show can still effectively launder various conservative grievances and hyperfixations like it used to. Even though it has a fraction of the audience and budget. He seems to be choosing the second option. For example, it appears he went to Romania to interview Tate and yet no one on his team suggested filming it as a travel vlog or even as a dramatic intro to the episode, which makes me think there’s no one around him who actually understands how to make content.
«
Love it: “background noise for Texas airport food courts”. Broderick has a novelist’s eye and ear.
unique link to this extract
The Barbie-Oppenheimer double feature is really happening, data shows • Bloomberg via The Straits Times
Sarah Rappaport:
»
Barbenheimer isn’t just a meme. There’s plenty of evidence that people around the globe are making plans to see two of the most-anticipated movies of the summer–which happen to be stark contrasts of each other – on the same day.
UK cinema chain Vue says that as of Tuesday, 19% of people who booked tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer also bought tickets for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
“We’ve put on as many screenings as possible of both films to accommodate high demand,” says Rob Lea, head of screen content for UK & Ireland at Vue, one of the UK’s largest cinema chains with more than 870 screens.
AMC, the world’s largest movie chain, says more than 20,000 of its AMC stubs members have already booked Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.
“The growing online conversation around seeing both of these incredible films is turning into ticket sales,” Elizabeth Frank, executive vice president of worldwide programming and chief content officer at AMC Theatres, said in a statement. More sales are likely ahead of the July 21 releases, she said.
Barbie is tracking to sell more tickets overall, with low-end estimates from Box Office Pro showing at least a US$85m (S$113.8m) opening weekend for the pop delight, compared with US$45m for Oppenheimer.
«
Save time, just go to the double-header below. (Though in passing, those opening weekend predictions are pretty modest compared to the past. Filmgoing has changed.) Better enjoy it: the writers’ strike plus the actors’ strike means the movie companies are going to struggle to have anything next year.
unique link to this extract
Global foldable smartphone market continues to expand • Counterpoint Research
Jene Park:
»
According to the Counterpoint Research Foldable Tracker and Foldable Insight Report, the global foldable smartphone market increased 64% YoY in Q1 2023, based on sell-in volume, to reach 2.5 million units. This is quite significant because the foldable market rose amid a 14.2% year-on-year decline in the overall global smartphone market during the same period. Foldable smartphone markets in almost all major regions, including China, North America and Western Europe, displayed strong growth in Q1 2023.
The robust growth in the global foldable market was largely driven by the growth in the Chinese foldable market. Although the Chinese smartphone market declined by about 8% YoY in Q1 2023, the domestic foldable market continued to grow, surging 117% YoY to 1.08 million units.
Commenting on this phenomenon, Research Analyst Woojin Son said, “In China, new foldable products such as the OPPO N2 and N2 Flip had grand releases. These big launch events constantly pique the market’s interest. Consequently, Chinese consumers have become more familiar with foldable products compared to other regions.”
«
That’s 2 POINT 5 million units: two and a half million. Out of a market that’s how big? 280 million units, according to Counterpoint. That makes the foldable market, kicked off by Samsung in September 2019, nearly four years old. True, it’s a difficult product to make in volume, but there just doesn’t seem to be an appetite for foldables in the way there was for large-screened phones when Samsung came out with those early in the smartphone wars.
unique link to this extract
Europe braces for sweltering July • European Space Agency
»
Temperatures are sizzling across Europe this week amid an intense and prolonged period of heat. And it’s only just begun. Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland are all facing a major heatwave with temperatures expected to climb to 48°C on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia – potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.
An anticyclone – a high-pressure area – named Cerberus (named after the monster from Dante’s Inferno) coming from the south will cause temperatures to rise above 40°C across much of Italy. This comes after a spring and early summer full of storms and floods.
The highest temperature in European history was broken on 11 August 2021, when a temperature of 48.8°C was recorded in Floridia, an Italian town in the Sicilian province of Syracuse. That record may be broken again in the coming days.
The animation below uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature across Italy between 9 and 10 July. As the image clearly shows, in some cities the surface of the land exceeded 45°C, including Rome, Naples, Taranto and Foggia. Along the east slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, many temperatures were recorded as over 50°C.
«
These press releases are often dressed up in jolly language – sizzling, record-breaking – but that belies the truth, which is that excess heat leads to premature deaths; and not only among older people. Climate change is becoming attritional.
More detail of the effect on humans in this BBC story; and a dramatic map showing how heat kills orders of magnitude more people than cold in Europe between 1990 and 2016.
unique link to this extract
Revisiting the Long Boom • kottke.org
Jason Kottke:
»
In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:
»
The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place — all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different — particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom.
«
«
The scenario spoilers that they chose are all pretty reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that when Kottke checked in on them he found that 7 of the 10 had happened, which is part of why the Long Boom shuddered to a stop in 2007-8 (but was stuttering even before then). The ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era wasn’t so much a boom as a running-on-fumes coda.
unique link to this extract
Anthropic’s Claude is competing with ChatGPT. Even its builders fear AI • The New York Times
Kevin Roose:
»
Just a few years ago, worrying about an A.I. uprising was considered a fringe idea, and one many experts dismissed as wildly unrealistic, given how far the technology was from human intelligence. (One A.I. researcher memorably compared worrying about killer robots to worrying about “overpopulation on Mars.”)
But A.I. panic is having a moment right now. Since ChatGPT’s splashy debut last year, tech leaders and A.I. experts have been warning that large language models — the A.I. systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude — are getting too powerful. Regulators are racing to clamp down on the industry, and hundreds of A.I. experts recently signed an open letter comparing A.I. to pandemics and nuclear weapons.
At Anthropic, the doom factor is turned up to 11.
A few months ago, after I had a scary run-in with an A.I. chatbot, the company invited me to embed inside its headquarters as it geared up to release the new version of Claude, Claude 2.
I spent weeks interviewing Anthropic executives, talking to engineers and researchers, and sitting in on meetings with product teams ahead of Claude 2’s launch. And while I initially thought I might be shown a sunny, optimistic vision of A.I.’s potential — a world where polite chatbots tutor students, make office workers more productive and help scientists cure diseases — I soon learned that rose-colored glasses weren’t Anthropic’s thing.
They were more interested in scaring me.
In a series of long, candid conversations, Anthropic employees told me about the harms they worried future A.I. systems could unleash, and some compared themselves to modern-day Robert Oppenheimers, weighing moral choices about powerful new technology that could profoundly alter the course of history.
«
Everyone, of course, wants to think they’re the modern-day Oppenheimer: an iconic figure labouring to control a new way to wield power and dominate the world. Or you might just be someone at a tech company which slurps up Reddit threads and writes sonnets in the style of Kanye.
unique link to this extract
| • 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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
I can’t be the first person to have made this observation, but:
Being an AI doomer is a humblebrag (for people working in AI).
There is something extremely weird about where AI doomerism seems to be coming from in the political landscape. As in, for every technical advance, there’s inevitable reactions. There’s the people who fear losing their jobs. There’s activists talking about how it could make social problems worse – nowadays, racism, sexism, etc. There’s humanities types bemoaning it as a crime against proper living. There used to be a religious faction of basically There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, but they seem to be gone (or at least marginalized into obscurity). But the doomers in tech itself are coming from an odd place, of proclaiming negatives of things they themselves are working on. And I think the indulgent way they are being treated by institutional power is a big clue that it’s not considered a real threat.