The Williams Formula 1 team is tearing itself away from using Excel (yes, Excel) to track the thousands of parts it needs for its cars. CC-licensed photo by Paul Beattie on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US DOJ reportedly will file antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple as soon as Thursday • MarketWatch
Jon Swartz:
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The Justice Department could file its long-rumored antitrust lawsuit against Apple Inc. as soon as Thursday, according to a report late Wednesday.
The suit, expected to be filed in federal court, would accuse the tech giant of blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features of its iPhone, Bloomberg News reported.
It is the latest, and perhaps boldest, move yet by the Biden administration to attempt to rein in Big Tech. The Justice Department is already suing Alphabet Inc.’s Google for monopolization of its search and online-ad businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission is pursuing antitrust cases against Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
Apple and the Justice Department were not immediately available for comment.
The Justice Department has sued Apple for antitrust violations twice in the past 14 years, but this marks the first case claiming Apple illegally maintained its dominant position.
The Justice Department opened its latest case vs. Apple in June 2019 under former President Donald Trump, though it initially emphasized its cases against Google.
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Weirdly, Apple actually does have a dominant position in the US: it’s got a market share of installed smartphones of around 50% (certainly more than 40%), so that element of the case is a shoo-in for the DOJ.
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Superconductor scientist engaged in research misconduct, probe finds • WSJ
Nidhi Subbaraman:
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A physicist who shot to fame with claims of the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor engaged in research misconduct, a committee tapped to examine his work has concluded after a monthslong investigation.
Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, has had at least four papers he co-wrote, including three involving superconductivity, retracted in the past 18 months by the journals that published them. A committee of outside experts tapped by the university “identified data-reliability concerns in those papers,” a Rochester spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.
“The committee concluded, in accordance with university policy and federal regulations, that Dias engaged in research misconduct,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Rochester declined to provide the report. Dias didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The work in the papers was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private organization that funds scientific research.
The Moore foundation discontinued its grant late last year, the organization said. Of the $1.6m award, about $285,000 was spent. The university refunded the rest.
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So many wonderful ideas turn out to be scientifically out of reach. Fusion (hard to fake.. though there was cold fusion), and room temperature superconductivity to name but two.
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Google balks at $270m fine after training AI on French news sites’ content • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Google has agreed to pay €250m (about $273m) to settle a dispute in France after breaching years-old commitments to inform and pay French news publishers when referencing and displaying content in both search results and when training Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.
According to France’s competition watchdog, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), Google dodged many commitments to deal with publishers fairly. Most recently, it never notified publishers or the ADLC before training Gemini (initially launched as Bard) on publishers’ content or displaying content in Gemini outputs. Google also waited until September 28, 2023, to introduce easy options for publishers to opt out, which made it impossible for publishers to negotiate fair deals for that content, the ADLC found.
“Until this date, press agencies and publishers wanting to opt out of this use had to insert an instruction opposing any crawling of their content by Google, including on the Search, Discover and Google News services,” the ADLC noted, warning that “in the future, the Autorité will be particularly attentive as regards the effectiveness of opt-out systems implemented by Google.”
To address breaches of four out of seven commitments in France—which the ADLC imposed in 2022 for a period of five years to “benefit” publishers by ensuring Google’s ongoing negotiations with them were “balanced”—Google has agreed to “a series of corrective measures,” the ADLC said.
Google is not happy with the fine, which it described as “not proportionate” partly because the fine “doesn’t sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised—in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.”
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The ADLC is very quick to act, and very firm. One gets the feeling that part of Google’s discomfort is that its usual “seek forgiveness not permission” strategy didn’t get time to kick into gear before the ADLC came down on it.
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OpenAI’s chatbot store is filling up with spam • TechCrunch
Kyle Wiggers:
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When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI’s generative AI models, onstage at the company’s first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to “accomplish all sorts of tasks” — from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers.
“Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, they can be more helpful to you,” Altman said. “You can build a GPT … for almost anything.”
He wasn’t kidding about the anything part.
TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, but serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, and advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.
…There are several GPTs ripped from popular movie, TV and video game franchises in the GPT Store — GPTs not created or authorized (to TechCrunch’s knowledge) by those franchises’ owners. One GPT creates monsters in the style of “Monsters, Inc.,” the Pixar movie, while another promises text-based adventures set in the “Star Wars” universe.
These GPTs — along with the GPTs in the GPT Store that let users speak with trademarked characters like Wario and Aang from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” — set the stage for copyright drama.
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But that’s not all! There’s also promises to get you around academic fake detection, impersonation and (ChatGPT) jailbreaking.
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46ºC summer days and ‘supercell’ storms are Britain’s future – and now is our last chance to prepare • The Guardian
Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London:
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It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40ºC for eight days running: they peaked at 46ºC, and remain above 30ºC in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.
No, this isn’t the beginning of a dystopian drama, but a snapshot of a mid-century heatwave unless we prepare for the increasingly extreme weather that will be driven by climate breakdown. To say that the government has no credible plan for this, as the UK Climate Change Committee did last week, is – if anything – an understatement. Britain is woefully underprepared for extreme weather, and in a number of key areas we are going backwards. About one in 15 of England’s most important flood defences were in a poor or very poor condition in 2022, up from roughly one in 25 just four years previously. The government’s Great British insulation scheme is operating at such a slow pace that it would take nearly 200 years to upgrade the country’s housing stock, while Labour has rowed back on its ambitious plans to insulate 19m homes within a decade.
It seems that neither of the major parties are especially bothered by the meteorological mayhem that awaits us. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods.
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Google unveils AI model that can predict extreme floods five days in advance • BusinessGreen News
Amber Rolt:
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most flood prediction systems currently provide only a day or two of warning, limiting the ability of governments, businesses, and communities to respond. In contrast, Google claims its new open-source AI system can provide warnings up to five days’ ahead with a level of reliability that is “as good or better” than current systems.
Google said improving access to reliable flood forecasting for developing regions which do not have monitoring stations was “especially critical”.
Current forecasting methods are often limited by their reliance on stream gauges – or monitoring stations along rivers – which are not evenly distributed across the globe, meaning ungauged rivers are harder to forecast, Google explained.
“For years, accurate flood forecasting at scale was not possible due to the complexity of the problem and lack of resources and data,” said Yossi Matias, Google’s vice president of engineering and research. “Given that only a small percentage of the world’s rivers are equipped with streamflow gauges, this provided an extra barrier to safety for people in developing countries as well as in undeserved and vulnerable communities.”
The new AI model was trained using 5,680 existing gauges to predict daily streamflow in ungauged watersheds over a seven-day forecast period. These were then tested against the leading global software for predicting floods – the Global Food Awareness System (GloFAS) – for both short-term and long-term scenarios.
In addition to advanced flood forecasting, Google said the new AI technology had also enabled its FloodHub system to provide real-time river forecasts up to seven days in advance, covering river reaches across 80 countries, where more than 460 million people live.
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Google has been busy lately. First corner kicks, now this. The ideal commercial application must lie in predicting whether football pitches will be flooded.
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Once more with feeling: banning TikTok is unconstitutional and won’t deal with any actual threats • Techdirt
Mike Masnick disagrees with my position expressed on the Social Warming Substack last Friday:
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I stand by the point we’ve been making for multiple years now: banning TikTok is a stupid, performative, unconstitutional, authoritarian move that doesn’t do even the slightest bit to stop China from (1) getting data on Americans or (2) using propaganda to try to influence people (which are the two issues most frequently used to justify a ban).
Banning TikTok, rather than passing comprehensive federal privacy legislation, is nothing but xenophobic theater. China can (and does) already buy a ton of data on Americans because we refuse to pass any regulation regarding data brokers who make this data available (contrary to popular opinion, Facebook and Google don’t actually sell your data, but data brokers who collect it from lots of other sources do).
Meanwhile, there’s little to no evidence that China is “manipulating” sentiment with TikTok, and there’s even less evidence that it would be effective if they were trying to do so. Public sentiment in the US regarding China is reaching record lows, with the vast majority of Americans reasonably concerned about China’s role in the world. So if China is using TikTok to propagandize to Americans, it’s doing a shitty job of it.
The US has dealt with foreign propaganda for ages. And we don’t ban it. Part of free speech is that you have to deal with the fact that nonsense propaganda and disinformation exists. There are ways to deal with it and respond to it that don’t involve banning speech. It’s astounding to me how quickly people give up their principles out of a weird, xenophobic fear that somehow China has magic pixie dust hidden within TikTok to turn Americans’ brains to mush.
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A TikToker’s story about her experience at a Chicago bar went viral. Now it’s the subject of a legal dispute • NBC News
Daysia Tolentino:
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A TikTok user’s negative experience at a Chicago bar has become the subject of scrutiny online after the business sued the patron and shared security video to dispute her account.
In a now-deleted video, Julia Reel said a security guard at Hubbard Inn was “grabbing” and “manhandling” her and a friend while escorting them off the premises on March 10. She also said a guard pushed her, sending her “flying down the staircase” of the bar. (NBC News reviewed Reel’s video, which others have reposted on TikTok after it was removed.)
The owners of Hubbard Inn filed a defamation lawsuit against Reel on Monday.
Reel’s viral videos resulted in “damages to the business, staff and reputation,” as well as “considerable negative reviews and messages,” the bar said in a TikTok video on March 13. The bar’s owners echoed a similar claim in the lawsuit, a copy of which has been reviewed by NBC News, saying they lost $30,000 in business because of Reel’s video.
The bar posted its video on TikTok attempting to dispute Reel’s account by sharing security video of two women, who the business claims are Reel and her friend, being led out of the bar by a security guard who does not appear to be touching either of them. The video, which received over 3 million views on TikTok, also shows the women walking down the bar’s staircase with the guard.
…The differing accounts have sent the internet into a speculation frenzy — with many sharing their unconfirmed theories online in an attempt to decipher what happened. Some questioned Reel’s story because of the video released by Hubbard Inn. Others cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions about the dispute.
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Good grief. The footage is absolutely unequivocal (I’ve seen it): she walks calmly down the stairs under her own steam. She’s simply lying, motive unknown. Ironic for a TikToker not to be aware that she might be under surveillance. And for more about people who are just doing things on social media for attention…
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How Kate body-double conspiracy theory spread on social media • BBC News
Marianna Spring:
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I found that in under 24 hours the false claims about a body-double had racked up more than 12 million views on X and more than 11 million on TikTok, according to the social media sites’ own data.
Which users were sharing it? On X, the accounts were often based in the US – and dedicated to posting about the Princess of Wales on an almost hourly basis. Several had blue ticks. These checkmarks used to be given to verified accounts. Now they can be purchased in exchange for your content getting more prominence on the social media site.
I messaged dozens of TikTokers posting these videos throughout the world, many of whom were zooming in and analysing the Princess of Wales’s facial features, and comparing them with those in pictures of the lookalike.
One TikToker posting from the US called Esmerelda reached 2.9 million people with her body-double video. She told me how she hadn’t posted about the Royal Family before but was motivated by “real public concern”.
“I usually try to respond to people who are making claims, and summarise what’s being said in general – whether I agree with the same theory or not,” she told me. “If I find out a specific theory [that] people had was definitely way off, then I never have an issue with making another video and saying: ‘Hey, this theory has now been debunked and this is why.'”
Carry, a user in Germany who shared the same conspiracy theory, told me she doesn’t “feel guilty” about her TikTok posts. “In my view, the greatest good is freedom of expression, and this should also be allowed to be represented on social media.”
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Basically, people feel free to post any old junk if they think it will get noticed. And there’s no penalty (from the algorithm) for doing so, even when shown to be wrong. Maybe Twitter could tweak its algorithm so that tweets which get Community Noted are downranked
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The shocking details behind an F1 team’s painful revolution • The Race
Scott Mitchell-Malm:
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[Williams F1 team principal James] Vowles reckons that if Williams had stuck with its usual processes and committed to a simple evolution of the 2023 car, things would have been fine.
But the impact of the big change he wanted to commit to was compounded by terrible systems that he had already seen have a negative impact on the team’s only real in-season upgrade of 2023 – resulting in what he calls an “extraordinary” cost, one “higher than I anticipated.
It is not an exaggeration to say that up to and including at least the initial work on the 2024 Williams, its car builds were handled using Microsoft Excel, with a list of around 20,000 individual components and parts.
Unsurprisingly, ex-Mercedes man Vowles – someone used to class-leading operations and systems – had a damning verdict for that: “The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.”
Managing a car build is not just about listing all the components needed. There wasn’t data on the cost of components, how long they took to build, how many were in the system to be built.
“Take a front wing,” says Vowles. “A front wing is about 400 different bits. And when you say I would like one front wing, what you need to kick off is the metallic bits and the carbon bits that make up that single front wing. You need to go into the system, and they need to be ordered. Is a front wing more important than a front wishbone in that circumstance? When do they go through, when is the inspection?
“When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless. You need to know where each one of those independent components are, how long it will take before it’s complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there’s been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again.
“And once you start putting that level of complexity in which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are.
“There is more structure and system in our processes now. But they are nowhere near good enough. Nowhere near.”
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Amazing, really, that Williams has been able to put cars together this long if it’s been relying on Excel. Though on the other hand, it shows that you really can do just about anything with it.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 