The ubiquitous Microsoft Word has changed the use of the English language, and subtly changed our use of grammar and spelling. CC-licensed photo by Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Begone, wiggly red lines. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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The patent fight that could take Apple Watches off the market • The New York Times

Peter Coy, on a US International Trade Commission ruling which agrees that the Series 6 (and on) Apple Watch infringes patents owned by Masimo and Cercacor :

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It’s agreed by both sides that Apple sought a meeting with Masimo when it was exploring adding pulse oximetry to the Apple Watch. Apple signed a confidentiality agreement. A meeting was held in 2013. At this point, stories differ. Joe Kiani, the electrical engineer who founded Masimo in 1989 and remains its chief executive officer, told me on Friday that Apple decided that rather than pay for licenses to use the technology, do a joint venture, or buy Masimo, Cercacor or both, it decided to do “strategic hiring” of key employees. Apple says it concluded that Masimo’s technology wasn’t suited for a consumer device, so it went in a different direction. (Although of course it did hire those key Masimo employees.)

Apple finally introduced its first watch with pulse oximetry, the Series 6, in 2020. It has incorporated pulse oximetry into all of its smart watches since then, with the exception of the cheaper Apple Watch SE. That means Apple will have to stop selling all its watches except the SE model starting on Christmas Day unless something happens before then: Either the companies cut a deal, the U.S. trade representative’s office recommends to Biden that he reverse the ruling, or Apple persuades the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction while it considers an appeal.

The I.T.C. case is only one front in the battle between Masimo and Apple. In 2020, Masimo sued Apple in Federal District Court in California, alleging theft of trade secrets. The suit ended in a mistrial in May when the jury deadlocked. The case is being retried. Last year, Apple sued Masimo in federal court in Delaware, charging that Masimo was the one doing the illegal copying and was trying to knock Apple out of the market to make way for its own watch.

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My guess is that Biden won’t overrule, and so Apple will cough up, and the Watch will continue to be on sale. Let’s see how it goes! (Thanks G for the link.)
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WeWork plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week • WSJ

Alexander Gladstone, Akiko Matsuda and Andrew Scurria:

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WeWork is planning to file for bankruptcy as early as next week, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would mark a stunning reversal for the flexible-office-space venture that was once valued at $47bn. 

New York-based WeWork is considering filing a chapter 11 petition in New Jersey, the people said. 

WeWork missed interest payments owed to its bondholders on Oct. 2, kicking off a 30-day grace period in which it needs to make the payments. Failing to do so would be considered an event of default. On Tuesday, the company said it has struck an agreement with the bondholders to allow it another seven days to negotiate with the stakeholders before a default is triggered. 

WeWork declined to comment on what a spokesperson called “speculation.” The spokesperson also pointed to a securities filing early Tuesday that “the forbearance agreement provides time to continue in the positive conversations with our key financial stakeholders and engage with them to implement our ongoing strategic efforts to enhance our capital structure.”

In August, the company shook up its board after three directors resigned due to a material disagreement regarding board governance and the company’s strategic direction, according to a securities filing. WeWork appointed four new directors with expertise in large, complex financial restructurings. Those directors have been negotiating with WeWork’s creditors over the past several months about a restructuring plan as they prepare for the bankruptcy.

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Icarus, fireworks, balloons: all the usual metaphors apply. But it was also a ridiculous valuation for a company with no moat. Softbank’s predilection for splashing cash around would make drunken sailors pause.
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Google disables live traffic conditions on Maps in Israel and Gaza • CNBC

Melina Khan:

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Google is disabling live traffic conditions in Israel and Gaza on its Maps and Waze apps, a spokesperson said Tuesday. The move comes as Israel is widely anticipated to embark on a ground invasion into Gaza.

“As we have done previously in conflict situations and in response to the evolving situation in the region, we have temporarily disabled the ability to see live traffic conditions and busyness information out of consideration for the safety of local communities,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Anyone navigating to a specific place will still get routes and ETAs that take current traffic conditions into account.”

The spokesperson said Google is working with local authorities as part of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.

The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to comment about whether it requested the restriction.

Google similarly disabled Maps live traffic data in Ukraine last year at the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, according to Reuters.

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What happens when Amazon and Meta ads generate themselves? • NY Mag Intelligencer

John Herrman:

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If you step an inch outside the weird and specific context of the relationship between Amazon and its millions of sellers, the company’s pitch for automated product photos sounds sort of insane. It’s a tool for faking product photos! It’s the sort of thing an e-commerce site might make a rule against using, and with good reason. Take the product photos in Amazon’s video, for example.

At first glance — which, for a thumbnail in an ad on Amazon, might be what matters most — things look good. We see a toaster in the middle of a sunlit kitchen, another on the edge of a stone table, another on some planks, and then on a counter again, except, hold on, this counter appears to extend all the way back to some drawers and might also be … the floor? I can see how such photos might result in better click-through rates for an ad, since they mimic certain popular aesthetics and imply a level of polish and care. What I can’t see is how big this toaster is. These photos somehow offer less information than the customary floating-in-white-space Amazon product shot. They don’t add context. They subtract it. This toaster has been banished to four different locations in the uncanny valley, none of which are anywhere near an electrical outlet.

Next, we see images created with the prompt “product in a kitchen, used in meal preparation.” Once more, regarding probably the main question that real-world product shots can help answer: how large is this appliance? On the top left, staged in a pizza-oven crematorium, the device sits next to a bowl of the statistical average of all slow-cooked meals, a few inches (or feet?) away from a rare leafy bell pepper, in front of some towering greens in a utensil holder, and looks like a miniature; on the bottom right, in the middle of a butcher block, it looks fairly large, except for some confoundingly scaled [robot voice] STARCH and MEAT on the plate.

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These are very good points. And very well spotted. Unrelated grammar/style note: Americans capitalise the word that comes after a colon (I edit them to lowercase), but not a semi-colon. Why not? Or, why?
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Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t ask where the $8bn went • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

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Let’s say I am the owner of a hedge fund, and one fine June day, my employees come to me and say, “Hey, Liz, we have an accounting problem. We are missing several billion dollars.” How would I react?

I have been wondering this since Danielle Sassoon walked Sam Bankman-Fried through his reaction to the FTX software bug fixed by Adam Yedidia. In my case, there would probably be shouting? Like, a lot of shouting. I would also probably have my assistant figure out which law enforcement agency to call immediately. Misplacing $900m is a five-alarm fire even for Citibank; misplacing several billion is kicking over a lantern in Chicago in 1871.

Obviously, this is not how Bankman-Fried reacted to the software bug that overestimated the amount Alameda owed to FTX by about $8bn. Nor is it how he reacted to finding out that even after fixing the bug, Alameda still owed FTX about $8bn. Instead, Bankman-Fried directed alleged co-conspirator Caroline Ellison to repay third-party loans and went on making investments. 

Bankman-Fried said that he found out about the fiat@ftx account — that’s the one that tracked how much Alameda owed FTX — in June 2022 while his senior staff was focused on fixing the software bug. He did not, however, discover what the account was for until October. I know this sounds unbelievable, but this is his actual testimony. 

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Lopatto is reporting on the FTX trial, at which SBF is testifying – a word one uses loosely, because keeping him focused on answering the question seems to be a Sisyphean task.
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OpenAI debates when to release its AI-generated image detector • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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OpenAI has “discussed and debated quite extensively” when to release a tool that can determine whether an image was made with DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s generative AI art model, or not. But the startup isn’t close to making a decision anytime soon.

That’s according to Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, who spoke with TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. She said that, while the classifier tool’s accuracy is “really good” — at least by her estimation — it hasn’t met OpenAI’s threshold for quality.

“There’s this question of putting out a tool that’s somewhat unreliable, given that decisions it could make could significantly affect photos, like whether a work is viewed as painted by an artist or inauthentic and misleading,” Agarwal said.

OpenAI’s targeted accuracy for the tool appears to be extraordinarily high. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, said this week at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference that the classifier is “99%” reliable at determining if an unmodified photo was generated using DALL-E 3. Perhaps the goal is 100%; Agarwal wouldn’t say.

A draft OpenAI blog post shared with TechCrunch revealed this interesting tidbit:

“[The classifier] remains over 95% accurate when [an] image has been subject to common types of modifications, such as cropping, resizing, JPEG compression, or when text or cutouts from real images are superimposed onto small portions of the generated image.”

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That’s pretty accurate! Except it has been scared off by the the fact that its AI-text-generated detector wasn’t very good, but which they did release.
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The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language • BBC Future

Victoria Woollaston:

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“Word templates led people to use the same formatting in communications, and eventually, this has become instantiated as a norm,” says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she studies human-computer interaction. If you work in finance, there’s a specific way reports are expected to be laid out. Letters follow a set pattern, memos are largely formatted in the same way. “Users know where to find information in these standardised documents; they don’t need to spend time trying to find what they need.”

If you take this idea of professional conformity a step further, Word has also been significant in helping establish English as the global language of business. While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft’s mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance.

“Word primarily operates in English,” says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. “As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation.”

Word’s spell-checker and grammar features have become subtle arbiters of language, too. Although seemingly trivial, these tools “promote a sense of consistency and correctness”, says Wolf, and this uniformity comes at the cost of writing diversity.  “Writers, when prompted by the software’s automated norms, might unintentionally forsake their unique voices and expressions.”

This becomes even more invasive when you look at the role and impact of autocorrect and predictive text. Today, when typing on Word, the software can automatically correct your spelling, and make suggestions for what to write next. These suggestions aren’t (yet) based on your personal writing style and tone – they’re rule-based. The suggestions you see will be the same as millions of others. Again, this may feel innocuous but it’s another example of how Word standardises language by loosely guiding everyone down the same path. 

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As with the AirPod-wearing social interaction yesterday: we shape our tools, then they shape us. Word’s ubiquity really has given its defaults the opportunity to shape everything written we do on a screen.
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Hertz is scaling back its EV ambitions because its Teslas keep getting damaged • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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Rental car company Hertz once envisioned itself as the ultimate EV broker, doling out battery-powered vehicles to business travelers, ridehail drivers, and tech newbies in an ambitious plan to grease the wheels for the EV revolution. The company inked agreements with Tesla and Polestar to buy nearly 200,000 EVs. Tesla’s valuation topped $1 trillion on the news.

But like many other aspects of the EV switch, that plan is running into some headwinds. This week, Hertz said it was tapping the brakes on its EV rollout, citing the plummeting resale value of its EVs and the high cost of repair.

Tesla has been slashing prices to spark sales as it finds itself wrestling with softening demand and more competition. And repair costs are about double what the company spends on gas car fixes, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told Bloomberg.

Part of the problem is linked to Hertz’s plans to rent EVs to ridehail drivers. Of the 100,000 Tesla acquired by Hertz, half were to be allocated to Uber drivers as part of a deal with the ridehail company. And drivers said they loved the Teslas! But Uber drivers also tend to drive their vehicles into the ground. This higher rate of utilization can lead to a lot of damage — certainly more than Hertz was anticipating.

Hertz said it tried to mitigate “higher incidents of damage among EV rideshare drivers” by siphoning some of its fleet into its leisure segment. But that didn’t work out as well as the company hoped.

…Bloomberg says that factoring out its EV costs, Hertz probably would have met Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter. The company’s stock dropped about 15% in the past five days.

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Things aren’t quite going right for Tesla.
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Apple admits to BMW wireless charging issue with iPhone 15 lineup, promises fix later this year • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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In an internal memo shared with Apple Authorized Service Providers, Apple said charging an iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max with a “small number” of wireless phone chargers built into certain recent BMW and Toyota Supra models may temporarily disable the NFC capabilities of the device. The memo does not provide a specific reason for the issue, which we first reported earlier this month.

In an iPhone, the NFC chip powers features like Apple Pay and digital car keys. Users affected by this issue may receive a “Could Not Set Up Apple Pay” error message in the Wallet app, even if they have already set up Apple Pay.

Apple said the issue will be addressed in a software update coming later this year. Given the memo was put out hours after iOS 17.1 was released today, it appears the update will require a subsequent update, such as iOS 17.1.1 or iOS 17.2. In the meantime, Apple advises affected customers to stop using in-car wireless charging.

There are some complaints about this issue across the MacRumors Forums and X, formerly known as Twitter, but it is unclear how widespread the problem is. Affected customers said the iPhone goes into a data recovery mode with a white screen, and the NFC chip is no longer functional after the device reboots. There is no way for customers to fix the problem, so a trip to an Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider is required.

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That’s quite the gotcha: you get your phone at the Apple Shop, set it up, go off on a drive and stick it into the wireless charger in your BMW. You’re living the high life! But wait, something is badly wrong. It’s quite puzzling what it can be, though: how is wireless charging screwing up the NFC chip?
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Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI extinction danger • Australian Financial Review

John Davidson:

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Andrew Ng, a professor at Stanford University who taught machine learning to the likes of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, and who himself co-founded Google Brain and was chief scientist at Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group, said that the “bad idea that AI could make us go extinct” was merging with the “bad idea that a good way to make AI safer is to impose burdensome licensing requirements” on the AI industry.

“When you put those two bad ideas together, you get the massively, colossally dumb idea [of] policy proposals that try to require licensing of AI,” Professor Ng told The Australian Financial Review in an interview. “It would crush innovation,” he said.

“There are definitely large tech companies that would rather not have to try to compete with open source [AI], so they’re creating fear of AI leading to human extinction. It’s been a weapon for lobbyists to argue for legislation that would be very damaging to the open-source community,” he said.

In May, OpenAI CEO and co-founder Altman co-signed a letter saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”, and in March, more than 1100 industry leaders including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called for a six-month moratorium on training powerful AI models.

“Sam [Altman] was one of my students at Stanford. He interned with me. I don’t want to talk about him specifically because I can’t read his mind, but …I feel like there are many large companies that would find it convenient to not have to compete with open-sourced large language models,” he said.

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Getting regulation put in place is certainly a great way to embed the existing leadership and make entry far more difficult. Though how exactly do you regulate open source AI, which could be loaded onto people’s phones or PCs without oversight.
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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