The art of “coin clipping” was rife in the 17th century in Britain. Then a new king came to power, and things went a bit wild. CC-licensed photo by Portable Antiquities Scheme 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.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Just the right weight. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Laurie Anderson on making an AI chatbot of Lou Reed: ‘I’m totally, 100%, sadly addicted’ • The Guardian

Walter Marsh:

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There’s a 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young widow played by Hayley Atwell signs up to an online service that scrapes a person’s entire digital footprint to create a virtual simulation. She soon starts chatting online with her late husband (Domhnall Gleeson), before things inevitably get Black Mirror-y.

Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker, hasn’t seen the episode but, in the last few years, has lived a version of it: growing hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013.

“People are like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient; I didn’t even know what you were talking about back then’,” she says on a video call from New York.

A new Anderson exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has just opened in Adelaide, where Anderson will be doing an In Conversation event via live stream on Wednesday 6 March. The last time Anderson was in Australia, in March 2020, she spent a week working with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Before the pandemic forced her to catch one of the last flights home, they had been exploring language-based AI models and their artistic possibilities, drawing on Anderson’s body of written work.

In one experiment, they fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse.

…“I mean, I really do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”

The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

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Oh, super, man. (They always struck me as the most unlikely rock pairing; but were utterly devoted. One must remember that people are not their music.)
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Apple orders ‘Neuromancer’ series based on William Gibson novel • Variety

Joe Otterson:

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Apple TV+ has ordered a series adaptation of the William Gibson novel “Neuromancer,” Variety has learned.

The 10-episode series hails from co-creators Graham Roland and JD Dillard. Roland will also serve as showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot. Skydance Television will co-produce with [production company] Anonymous Content.

Per the official logline, the series “will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”

“We’re incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+,” said Roland and Dillard in a joint statement. “Since we became friends nearly ten years ago, we’ve looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that’s come after it and we’re looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson’s definitive ‘cyberpunk’ world.”

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That’s either going to be amazing or terrible – it’s such a beloved novel (even though lots of people now just pay it lip service; there’s a consensual illusion of having read it) that the discourse will make or break it. Will have to do well to compete with Amazon’s excellent adaptation of The Peripheral, another Gibson novel.
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The Great Recoinage Of 1696 • The Britannia Coin Company

Edward Robertson:

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Today, the coins in circulation in Britain are simply a token of value, but our coins used to contain their value in silver or gold. In fact, it was once possible to take a file to your coins and take shavings of these precious metals – and many people did just that. 

‘Clippers’, as they were called, made great profits from this often highly organised crime. Coins were worn down with general use, so it wasn’t easy to identify a coin that had been purposely clipped.  

The practice left our coins in a terrible condition. In fact, back in the 17th century, Britain’s currency was in a state of emergency.  Various monarchs had made moves to solve Britain’s currency crisis. Having sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV, the last remaining piece of France that Britain owned, Charles II used some of the funds to demonetise the Commonwealth coins of 1649-60 and introduce new milled coins. 

But many of the old hammered coins, ripe for clipping, were still in circulation, and the new coins weren’t enough to deal with the nationwide problem. By the latter half of the 17th century, the state of Britain’s coinage was wreaking havoc all across the country.  

With the country’s coinage worth their original weight in precious metal, clipping entirely undermined Britain’s currency. Clipped currency was naturally disliked by merchants, while “heavy money”, coins that weighed as much as they should, was prized. Merchants would hoard heavy money and pass clipped coins along. Foreign merchants would only accept heavy money. Soon enough, almost all coins that circulated in Britain were clipped and there were few worthwhile coins left. 

There were serious punishments in place for clipping: the death penalty and branding with hot irons, to name a few. Many did indeed get condemned to these sentences. But the allure of clipping was simply too strong – some clippers managed to earn tantalising fortunes from the illegal practice. 

In 1689, King William III came to power. This was to be the king under whom the state of Britain’s coinage was entirely reformed. 

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You can guess what William ordered: proper milled coins (which would show any clipping). But you won’t guess how that led to outbreaks of serious diseases such as cholera and typhus. (Includes a cameo by, of course, Isaac Newton.)
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The business of winding down startups is booming • PitchBook

Rosie Bradbury:

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On the phone with a founder who recently wound down his seed-stage software startup, I asked him what his plan was next.

Having laid off all of his employees in autumn of last year, he was the last man standing: tasked with the thankless job of shutting down the company, returning capital, and dealing with tax documents.

“I suspect I’ll start another company again, but not for a while. I need a break,” he told me.

To handle the bureaucracy, the founder used Sunset, one of the companies that sprung up last year to respond to the burgeoning industry of failed startups.

In a sign of the times, such wind-down startups are growing rapidly. Sunset saw 9x quarter-over-quarter revenue growth and a 65% monthly customer growth rate between November 2023 and January 2024.

Competitor SimpleClosure, which closed a $4m seed round this month led by Infinity Ventures, has passed the $1m mark in annualized revenue and also recorded a monthly growth rate of over 50% in the same period. Since its public launch in September, the startup’s revenue has increased more than 14x.

Even larger startups are interested in the additional help. “We’ve now had multiple companies that have become customers that have raised tens of millions [in venture funding],” said Dori Yona, co-founder and CEO of SimpleClosure.

In early February, equity management platform Carta joined the bandwagon: CEO Henry Ward announced in a blog post a new startup shutdown service, Carta Conclusions. “[T]he work of dissolving a company is exceptionally unpleasant. It is also, by definition, zero-value to the founder, the company, and the world,” Ward wrote.

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Though logically once startups are going through a boom period again, these folk will be having a thin time of it. Will they eat themselves, or each other?
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A new media company is here – and ready to make some noise • Zeteo

Mehdi Hasan has gone solo (possibly not of his own accord) after time at various UK and US broadcasters, most recently MSNBC:

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To be clear: racism has been mainstreamed and normalized across the West. Donald Trump is about to usher in a new era of fascism in the United States. And the highest court in the world has said it is “plausible” that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Nevertheless, most news organizations won’t touch the R-word, the F-word, or the G-word. They hide behind euphemisms and ‘both sides’ coverage. Far too many journalists hold back from speaking the truth because they don’t want to offend conservatives, or ‘sound biased,’ or risk losing their connections to the people in power. We have reached a point where I can’t help but be reminded of this line, often misattributed to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I hope that Zeteo will be revolutionary in that sense, a vanguard of a new media movement. One which prioritizes speaking truth to power over securing access to power. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have spent more than two decades working at some of the biggest media organizations in the West – the BBC, Sky News, and NBC, among them – and I will forever be grateful for the opportunities, and the platforms that they gave me. There are hundreds of outstanding journalists still employed at those corporations. 

But the corporate media itself is in crisis. The business models are failing, audiences are declining, and public trust is in freefall. Countless crimes and abuses are being committed in plain sight, both at home and abroad, while countless news outlets distract us with fluff, gossip, and nonsense. 

Zeteo will be a new online platform for the kind of tough interviews and deep-dive monologues that I have become known for in recent years, but it will also be a home to new podcasts, newsletters, and social videos. We won’t hide our opinions – or our biases. But we will always tell you the truth.

And our business model is simple: you pay a little to get and support a lot. Six bucks a month for a paid subscription, via Substack, if you sign up for an annual plan.

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Straightforward enough. And it’s not like he’s trying to hire a bazillion people.
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Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky, Wes Moss sue to keep stake in company • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit Wednesday, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The case could complicate a long-delayed bid by Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of the social network Truth Social, to merge with a special purpose acquisition company called Digital World Acquisition and become a publicly traded company.

That merger deal, which could value Trump’s stake in the company at more than $3bn, would offer the former president a financial lifeline at a time when he is facing more than $454m in penalties from a civil fraud judgment this month in New York.

The case is one of three lawsuits filed this week that detail bitter recriminations among people key to the Trump company’s earliest days. The filings will probably serve as the opening salvo in what could be all-out legal warfare ahead of the March 22 shareholder vote on whether to go ahead with the merger.

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Another of those legal cases where you quietly wish that everyone could lose.
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Court orders maker of Pegasus spyware to hand over code to WhatsApp • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

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NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.

The decision by Judge Phyllis Hamilton is a major legal victory for WhatsApp, the Meta-owned communication app which has been embroiled in a lawsuit against NSO since 2019, when it alleged that the Israeli company’s spyware had been used against 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period.

NSO’s Pegasus code, and code for other surveillance products it sells, is seen as a closely and highly sought state secret. NSO is closely regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, which must review and approve the sale of all licences to foreign governments.

In reaching her decision, Hamilton considered a plea by NSO to excuse it of all its discovery obligations in the case due to “various US and Israeli restrictions”.

Ultimately, however, she sided with WhatsApp in ordering the company to produce “all relevant spyware” for a period of one year before and after the two weeks in which WhatsApp users were allegedly attacked: from 29 April 2018 to 10 May 2020. NSO must also give WhatsApp information “concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware”.

Hamilton did, however, decide in NSO’s favor on a different matter: the company will not be forced at this time to divulge the names of its clients or information regarding its server architecture.

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Significant. Though will examination of the code just show that there’s a flaw in iOS which was exploited? Will it be the current code, or the code that was used in 2019?
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Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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A year after flexing its R&D muscles with a rollable laptop that expanded its screen with a simple button push, Lenovo is back at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with another somehow even more sci-fi concept device. This is the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop, a 17.3in notebook with a screen you can peer straight through.

The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3in MicroLED display, which offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you’re looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.

Although the appeal of transparent screens in sci-fi films and TV shows is obvious (opaque screens are boring, actor’s faces are interesting), it’s a lot harder to put your finger on their practical uses in real life. How often do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting?

One of Lenovo’s big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop’s screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later). “I am not a good artist,” Lenovo’s executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product, Tom Butler, admits to me in an interview, “but I can bring something behind and I can trace it.” In the room we’re sitting in, that means pulling a bunch of sunflowers behind the laptop screen, but Butler pitches the idea of an architect being able to sit on location and sketch a building without taking their eyes off the environment in front of them. He even goes as far as to call the transparent laptop display a form of augmented reality.

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I take it from this that Butler has never met or spoken to an architect. Lenovo keeps on throwing out concept products – it’s a laptop with a keyboard that’s a tablet! It’s a see-through laptop! – but there’s no sign it has the faintest idea of who would want them. Complete the sentence: “I want a see-through screen because I–” And don’t make the thing until you can.
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Apple to ‘break new ground’ on AI, says CEO Tim Cook • 9to5 Mac

Zac Hall:

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has a message for Wall Street. He believes Apple will “break new ground” on generative AI this year. Cook’s latest AI hype comments came during Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.

During the meeting, a shareholder proposal to release a report on AI and ethics was voted down as expected.

This marks the Apple CEO’s second tease for major AI news out of the company so far this month. A few weeks ago, Cook promised Apple AI announcements coming later this year — likely WWDC in June. That’s when iOS 18 will be unveiled, which Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has frequently reported will focus on AI features.

Last autumn, Apple briefly mentioned generative AI when it introduced new autocorrect and text prediction features across its platforms.

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I’m not going to hold my breath for whatever Cook is being coy about. The autocorrect in iOS 17 is better than its predecessor, but the (default setting) desire to guess what your next typed word will be is maddening.
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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: your e-bike is not going to give you more exercise than a bike bike. The Electrek article interpreted the studies wrongly. Apologies: should have checked when my spidey sense tingled. Thanks to those who pointed this out.