The subtleties of flavouring crisps, and choosing how to name the same flavours in different countries, are all part of the snack business. CC-licensed photo by Leonard J Matthews on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Tasty? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It’ll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.
CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you’ll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it’s true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven’t materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren’t bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up — including our wallets.
If there’s a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it’s Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021’s FCC license auction — almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don’t have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they’ll see a return — they asked point blank in the company’s most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases “having the right offers for our customers” and “generating the bottom line for ourselves,” while nodding to “price adjustments” that also “included new value” for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.
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This is very reminiscent of the 3G bidding wars in the UK in 2000, which raised £22.5bn for five licences – and then saw huge writedowns by the licence holders a few years later. But they then did recoup it once the phones arrived that could make use of 3G. But that took until about 2010 for substantial penetration and adoption.
On that basis, it might be some time in the 2030s before we see 5G really making a mark.
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USING AI to search for case law and make submissions: it makes cases up – it really does • Civil Litigation Brief
Gordon Exall:
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If ever there was a judgment where the clue is in the name, it is Harber v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (INCOME TAX – penalties for failure to notify liability to CGT – appellant relied on case law which could not be found on any legal website – whether cases generated by artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT) [2023] UKFTT 1007.
This is a case that exemplifies the danger of relying on “Artificial Intelligence” to make legal submissions. In this case the appellant cited cases that do not exist. “Having considered all the points set out above, we find as a fact that the cases in the Response are not genuine FTT judgments but have been generated by an AI system such as ChatGPT.”
The appellant appealed to the First Tier Tax Tribunal in relation to a penalty arising from capital gains tax. The procedure involved her filing a Response. That Response set out a number of previous decisions that appeared to assist the appellant. However there was no citation and, upon close examination, it was clear that the cases did not in fact exist. The Tribunal concluded that this was because the Response had been generated by an AI system.
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The linked judgment did, I confess, make me laugh out loud. This is the first paragraph:
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Mrs Harber disposed of a property and failed to notify her liability to capital gains tax (“CGT”). HMRC issued her with a “failure to notify” penalty of £3,265.11. Mrs Harber appealed the penalty on the basis that she had a reasonable excuse, because of her mental health condition and/or because it was reasonable for her to be ignorant of the law.
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“It was reasonable for her to be ignorant of the law”?? A core principle of the law is that “ignorance is no excuse.” Secondly, this is an appeal, which means some costs have already been racked up. And all over a demand for three thousand pounds from a property sale? This surely has cost Mrs Harber a lot more than that. Plus an embarrassing place in British legal history as the first known attempt to win a case via AI-generated case law.
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Early impressions of Google’s Gemini aren’t great • TechCrunch
Kyle Wiggers:
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A “lite” version of Gemini, Gemini Pro, began rolling out to Bard yesterday, and it didn’t take long before users began voicing their frustrations with it on X (formerly Twitter).
The model fails to get basic facts right, like 2023 Oscar winners. Note that Gemini Pro claims incorrectly that Brendan Gleeson won Best Actor last year, not Brendan Fraser — the actual winner.
I tried asking the model the same question and, bizarrely, it gave a different wrong answer.
“Navalny,” not “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” won Best Documentary Feature last year; “All Quiet on the Western Front” won Best International Film; “Women Talking” won Best Adapted Screenplay; and “Pinocchio” won Best Animated Feature Film. That’s a lot of mistakes. [It also offers a link to “the official Oscars website” which is not the official Oscars website oscars.org.]
Science fiction author Charlie Stross found many more examples of confabulation in a recent blog post. (Among other mistruths, Gemini Pro said that Stross contributed to the Linux kernel; he never has.)
Translation doesn’t appear to be Gemini Pro’s strong suit, either. It struggles to give a six-letter word in French [it suggested “amour” to one Twitter user]. When I ran the same prompt through Bard (“Can you give me a 6-letters word in French?”), Gemini Pro responded with a seven-letter word instead of a five-letter one — which gives some credence to the reports about Gemini’s poor multilingual performance.
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This is about as unimpressive as you can get. As with anything, fast and unreliable is not preferable over slow and reliable. Plus: Google’s video showing it off was heavily edited (which isn’t that surprising, to be honest).
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‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours • The Guardian
Amelia Tait:
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Reuben and Peggy’s jobs are not top secret in the way top secret jobs usually are. They don’t have guns, for example – and the grey conference table they sit at is much the same as you’d find in any office in the UK. They even have LinkedIn profiles that tell you their job titles. But this is where things get odd: search the name of the company they work for – a name I have agreed not to print – and you’ll find little information about the work Reuben and Peggy do. You could click through every page on their company’s website and leave with no idea that it creates the most beloved crisp flavours in the world.
Reuben and Peggy are not their real names. Reuben is a snacks development manager and Peggy is a marketer, and they work for a “seasoning house”, a company that manufactures flavourings for crisps.
I meet the pair on Zoom, hoping they can answer a question that has consumed me for years. In January 2019, I was visiting Thailand when I came across a pink packet of Walkers with layered pasta, tomato sauce and cheese pictured on the front. Lasagne flavour, the pack said. You can’t get lasagne Walkers – or Lay’s, as they are known in most of the world – in Italy. Relatively speaking, Italians have a small selection of Lay’s – paprika, bacon, barbecue, salted and Ricetta Campagnola, a “country recipe” flavour featuring tomato, paprika, parsley and onion. I’ve sampled Hawaii-style Poké Bowl crisps in Hungary and chocolate-coated potato snacks in Finland; I have turned away from Sweet Mayo Cheese Pringles in South Korea. So why can you get lasagne flavour Lay’s in Thailand but not in Italy, home of the dish? Who figures out which country gets which crisps?
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This is wonderful. It was referred to by Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe, who do the RadMac show on BBC 6 Music on weekend mornings, because they do the amazing “Crisps on the radio” segment in which a listener sends in a packet of crisps – the weirder and more obscure the flavour the better – and they have to try to work out what it is from a live taste test. It’s as strange and wonderful as it sounds.
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Podcasters took up her sister’s murder investigation. Then they turned on her • The New York Times
Sarah Viren:
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[Liz] Flatt was at a crossroads in what she had taken to calling her journey, a path embarked on after a prayer-born decision five years earlier to try and find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975. It was now 2021. Flatt was middle-aged and coming out of one of the darkest moments of her life. Her mother had died, quite suddenly, two years earlier, and the grief from her death almost destroyed Flatt. Her father was gone, too — dead from a heart attack after years of fighting for the police to reinvestigate Debbie’s killing — and her older brother, Ricky, who was once a suspect in the murder, took his own life five years before that.
She had come to Austin [in Texas] for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that Flatt began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime, a genre as old as storytelling but one that adapts quickly to new technologies, from the printing press to social media. The gathering was smaller in 2021 because of the pandemic, but Nancy Grace, queen of true crime’s TV era, still showed up, as did Dr. Phil. On “Podcast Row,” Flatt wandered among booths for “Cults, Crimes & Cabernet” and “Murderish,” for “True Crime Garage” and “Die-alogue,” less a fan of the genre, which she never liked that much, than a scout on a search.
She ran into a podcaster who covered Debbie’s story a couple of years before, a man who goes by the name Vincent Strange, and she commiserated with a woman whose mother’s murder also remained unsolved. Then, at another booth, Flatt met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year: George Jared and Jennifer Bucholtz. They were podcasters, but Jared was also a journalist and Bucholtz an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the for-profit American Military University. Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebekah Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime: crowdsourcing.
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Crowdsourcing, however, means Facebook, and a group of people trying to “solve” a crime on Facebook means you have a tiger by the tail.
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COP28 so far: a cheat sheet • Heatmap News
Jessica Hullinger:
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• The loss and damage fund: On day one of the conference, world leaders reached a landmark deal to help vulnerable nations deal with the costly effects of climate change. The early accomplishment set an optimistic tone for the summit — although The Guardian notes that wealthy countries have so far pledged $700m to the fund, “far short of what is needed.” In total, countries have announced $57bn of various funding pledges at the conference.
• Methane cuts: About 50 oil and gas companies pledged to slash their methane leaks by 2030. Critics cry greenwashing, but as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo points out, recent technological advances in methane monitoring – including satellites, drones, and handheld detectors – could help in the international effort to hold these companies accountable. A planned $40m infusion from billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg will bolster the cause, too.
• A renewables pledge: At least 120 countries backed a pledge to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030. That goal made it into an early draft of the global stocktake report, the summit’s final deliverable, but that’s no guarantee it will be formally adopted.
• A nuclear energy declaration: More than 20 countries including the US, Canada, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates, pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
• Growing support for a fossil phase-out: The number of countries pledging to voluntarily end oil and gas extraction and exploration grew to 24 when Spain, Kenya, and Samoa joined the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance
• A global cooling pledge: More than 60 countries pledged to reduce their cooling-related emissions by at least 68% by 2050.
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That last one puzzled me, so I looked it up: it’s about emissions caused by air conditioning and similar. Heatmap News is an interesting new media site covering climate and related issues. Worth a look.
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iPad Air 12.9-inch and MacBook Air with M3 expected in March 2024 • Apple Insider
Mike Wuerthele:
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The end of the winter may herald hardware refreshes for Apple, with a new report from the industry’s most prolific leaker predicting the long-rumoured larger iPad Air and refreshed MacBook Air models will hit store shelves by the end of March 2024.
To combat sales doldrums for Mac and iPad, Apple is rumored to be prepping many new releases before the first calendar quarter of 2024 ends. On tap are allegedly a larger iPad Air, new iPad Pros with OLED screens, and a New MacBook Air model, presumably with M3 processor.
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The OLED iPad Pros should do well – deeper blacks and wider colours is attractive. Apparently there are new keyboards for the iPads coming too.
I linked to this rather than Mark Gurman’s original report at Bloomberg because 1) this version avoids the strangulated “people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified” formulation for “my sources in the supply chain” 2) it also avoids the struggling construction that Apple’s doing this “to combat [a] sales slump”. Nope, it’s just doing this because it refreshes products. Sales go up and down, and – iPhones apart – it’s unusual to make a big difference.
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23andMe is updating its TOS to force binding arbitration with a limited opt-out window • Stackdiary
Alex Ivanovs:
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23andMe, the personal genomics and biotechnology company, has been trying to contain a security breach that was first disclosed on October 6th. On October 19th, 23andMe disclosed another security breach by the same hacker who had initially claimed responsibility. The hacker said he had access to more than 4 million genetic profile records this time. And on December 4th, 23andMe confirmed that the total scope of the breach was 6.9 million users in total.
The fallout of this disclosure, which started in October, was swift. By October 14th, several individuals had already filed lawsuits against 23andMe for negligence, as Stack Diary reported. Likewise, the general consensus of 23andMe users has been that the company handled the situation very poorly.
To add insult to injury, Stack Diary can reveal that 23andMe is now rolling out an update to its Terms of Service. This change will force its users into binding arbitration, which is a means to resolve disputes (such as a cybersecurity breach leaking your DNA data) outside of court.
In this process, both parties in a disagreement present their cases to an arbitrator, who is a neutral third party. The arbitrator listens to both sides, reviews the evidence, and decides. The key aspect of binding arbitration is that the arbitrator’s decision is final and legally enforceable, meaning both parties must accept it and cannot appeal to a regular court.
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Users get 30 days to opt out of these terms which Stack Diary says “significantly reduce their rights”, adding
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The email doesn’t mention that you must email the “arbitrationoptout@23andme.com” address to opt out of forced arbitration, as outlined in the updated Terms of Service
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I’d call that fundamentally sneaky, but the news is going to get around pretty quickly.
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‘Signs of life’: Sycamore Gap tree will live on, experts say • NPR
Bill Chappell:
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The tree occupied a magical spot in the landscape of Northumberland, England, and in the hearts of people who visited it. So the news that efforts to propagate the ancient tree will likely succeed is being welcomed now, after the tree was felled in September.
“[We] are encouraged by positive signs of life, and are hopeful that over 30% of the mature seeds and half of the cuttings (scions) will be viable,” said Andy Jasper, the National Trust’s director of gardens and parklands, in a statement sent to NPR.
“Over the next year, we’ll be doing all we can to nurture the seeds and cuttings, in the hope that some will grow into strong, sturdy saplings,” Jasper said, “providing a new future for this much-loved tree.”
The sycamore’s trunk might also regrow, Jasper said, but it could be several years before it’s known whether that will bear out.
…A 16-year-old boy was arrested shortly after the tree was cut down, in what police said was an act of deliberate vandalism. But Northumbria Police recently said the teen “will now face no further action by police.” Instead, their focus is on three men — two in their 30s and one in his 60s — who were arrested in the weeks since the incident.
Police haven’t divulged many details about the three remaining suspects, but media reports have suggested at least one of them is a former lumberjack who was in possession of a large chainsaw.
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Pah, just circumstantial. Did you take the tree’s DNA, copper? Did ya? Oh… really, you did?
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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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