Farmers in Britain say that extreme weather, which has caused flooded fields, is going to push up food prices. CC-licensed photo by Bex Walton on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Not potable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat • The Verge
Josh Dzieza, with fantastic art by Kristen Radtke and lovely photography by Go Takayama:
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heThe world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
…Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a% of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.
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This is a great piece of writing, which finds a great way into the topic. (The above isn’t the start.)
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UK facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather • The Guardian
Helena Horton, Sarah Butler and Jack Simpson:
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The UK faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad.
Record rainfall has meant farmers in many parts of the UK have been unable to plant crops such as potatoes, wheat and vegetables during the key spring season. Crops that have been planted are of poor quality, with some rotting in the ground.
The persistent wet weather has also meant a high mortality rate for lambs on the UK’s hills, while some dairy cows have been unable to be turned out on to grass, meaning they will produce less milk.
Agricultural groups have said the UK will be more reliant on imports, but similarly wet conditions in European countries such as France and Germany, as well as drought in Morocco, could mean there is less food to import. Economists have warned this could cause food inflation to rise, meaning higher prices at supermarkets.
Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, said markets had “collapsed” as farmers fail to produce food in the punishing conditions. He said: “We’re going to be importing a lot more product this year.”
One major retailer said the wholesale price of potatoes was up 60% year on year as much of the crop had rotted in the ground. Supplies of potatoes have also been affected by a 10% reduction in the area planted last year as farmers switched to less weather dependent and more financially secure crops. Industry insiders said they expected a further 5% fall in planting this year.
Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, said: “There is a concern that we won’t ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future.” He said wholesale prices were too low for farmers to generate enough income to cope with high fuel, labour and machinery costs as well as the effects of climate breakdown. “We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable.”
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On AI agents: how are these digital butlers supposed to get paid? • The Future, Now and Then
Dave Karpf:
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Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab folks were insisting that the age of software agents was imminent in the early ‘90s. Douglas Adams wrote and performed Hyperland, a “documentary of the future,” for the BBC in 1990. it featured Tom Baker as the personified software agent, dressed up as a literal butler.
Instead of software agents acting as personalized digital butlers, we ended up with algorithmic feeds and the infinite scroll.
Facebook’s algorithm is personalized, sure, but it is designed to maximize value for Facebook by keeping you within the company’s walled garden. Amazon’s algorithm is optimized to sell you the most products.
These are not digital butlers. They are digital sales associates.
And, with the benefit of hindsight, we can generalize this phenomenon: the trajectory of any new technology bends toward money.
We could have developed software agents 10, 20, 30 years ago. Software engineers were working quite hard on it. They started companies and obtained funding. The technical hurdles were comparatively small. But there was little money in it. And, in a VC-dominated marketplace, we do not get products that would be useful to the end-user unless they hold the promise of phenomenal financial returns to the investors.
We didn’t get free (or cheap) digital-butlers-for-everyone, because there was no money it.
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MKBHDs for everything • Stratechery
Ben Thompson (who started offering subscriptions to his site ten years ago, and has done pretty well from it):
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when I publish something I’m not happy with, I have trouble sleeping. When tech companies or investors or anyone else is mad, I am free to not pay them any attention.
Brownlee, though, is, to Vassallo’s point, something else entirely: 18 million subscribers is an incredible number, even if only — “only” — 3.5 million people have viewed his Humane video. If Humane’s AI Pin wasn’t already dead in the water, it’s fair to say that @levelsio is right [to tweet that MKBHD – Marques Brownlee – just delivered the final blow to the Humane Pin].
Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” [the accusation made by one Twitter user about Brownlee’s absolutely excoriating review] is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.
This is one of the challenges of scale: Brownlee has so many viewers that it is almost easier to pretend like they are some unimportant blob. Brownlee, though, is successful because he remembers his job is not to go easy on individual companies, but inform individual viewers who will make individual decisions about spending $700 on a product that doesn’t work. Thanks to the internet he has absolutely no responsibility or incentive to do anything but that.
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It’s the internet paradox: success comes from having a huge audience who you reach and treat as individuals.
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Oh, the Humanity • Sandofsky
Ben Sandofsky:
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Despite all its quirks, Humane might have worked out it followed a traditional VC startup formula. Instead, they tried to follow The Apple Way, where 1.0 products need to be so insanely polished as to blow everyone people away.
That approach makes sense for Apple. At minimum, they have a reputation to keep up. Sometimes the Apple Way leads to incredible products, like the first iPhone. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, in the case of the Apple Watch, Imran’s final project at the company.
The Apple Watch wasn’t a flop, but it did struggle a bit out of the gate. That’s expected when you try new things. Before you launch, you live in vacuum, and you operate on faith that your theories will pan out. After a launch, you find some of your theories were right (“Apple Watch is a fitness companion”), and some very wrong (“People will spend $10,000 on a solid gold gadget”).
The Apple Way works best when they take an existing product and make it amazing. The best pitch for Apple Watch wasn’t “The Rolex of Tech,” but rather, “A very fancy FitBit.”
It also helps when a product leverages Apple’s existing ecosystem, and the goodwill Apple had earned from customers. The Apple Watch connected to the health app, received messages from your phone, played your favorite music, etc. Apple has a beautiful moat, I’m sure filled with stunning koi fish.
Humane spent five years developing their product in a vacuum. They lacked a FitBit to prove their concept. They had little evidence people want to ditch their phones. They didn’t know what form factors users would tolerate. They didn’t have normal people telling them battery swaps are dumb.
But the most damaging consequence of their delayed launch was missing the chance to strike while the iron was hot. Humane sounded like a decent idea in 2018, but that same year the iPhone launched its “Screen Time,” which has proven a good enough solution for many to curb their screen addiction. In the following years we’ve watched a decline in the use of social media, which gives me a “nature is healing” vibe. Phone addiction is still a thing, but it feels more like pot than fentanyl.
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Taiwan’s semiconductor jobs draw Southeast Asian students • Rest of World
Lam Le and Chong Pooi Koon:
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While the industry worldwide faces a gap in the entire chip supply chain from design to manufacture, the scarcity is more consequential for Taiwan. Its companies produce most of the world’s cutting-edge semiconductor chips that tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm rely on, and the industry contributes to about 15% of the island’s gross domestic product.
“As Taiwanese semiconductor companies like TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] expand their operations, the need for skilled workers has increased,” Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research, told Rest of World. “Without sufficient talent, chip makers in Taiwan could face delays in innovation and production,” he said.
Nearly 23,000 jobs were available in the island’s semiconductor industry every month in the second quarter of 2023, according to Taiwanese recruitment firm 104 Job Bank. Though demand was down by more than a third compared to the previous year’s peak, the talent shortage remains “significant,” the company noted in its latest report.
Taiwan chip makers have long relied on local talent, but that is no longer sufficient because of declining birth rates, lower enrollments in engineering courses, and falling interest in jobs at fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), according to Chih-Huang Lai, associate dean at the College of Semiconductor Research at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU).
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The AI flight attendants of Facebook • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
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Facebook is currently awash in AI spam. Last month, 404 Media covered the bizarre new trend of old people praying to AI images of Shrimp Jesus. But it seems like Shrimp Jesus is out and the hot new Facebook engagement hack being used to terrorize and mystify the platform’s elderly user base is flight attendants praying to Jesus. Here’s what I learned about the pages that are generating these images and my best guess as to why it’s happening.
The search term to use if you want to find this stuff is “beautiful cabin crew,” which seems to be the main way pages are sharing these pictures. You can also use the hashtag #cabincrew to see a bunch more. There are also at least a dozen very, very popular Facebook Groups using some variation of the phrase as their title. Some of these groups are only for AI images of flight attendants, some are for pictures of flight attendants and Jesus, and some are just for sharing softcore pornography — and clearly stolen personal photos and videos — of real human flight attendants. But let’s start with the images that don’t have Jesus in them.
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That’s right – he’ll get on to the AI images of flight attendants that do have Jesus in them later. Factoid I didn’t know: “aviation and flight attendant Facebook has always been huge”. It’s a truly weird story.
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Apple will now let users in the EU download apps through web sites, not just the App Store • TechCrunch
Natasha Lomas:
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Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in — and who meet Apple’s criteria, including app notarization requirements — will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites.
It’s a massive change for a mobile ecosystem that otherwise bars so-called “sideloading.” Apple’s walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past. But, in the EU, that moat is being dismantled as a result of new regulations that apply to the App Store and which the iPhone maker has been expected to comply with since early last month.
In March, Apple announced that a web distribution entitlement would soon be coming to its mobile platform as part of changes aimed at complying with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The pan-EU regulation puts a set of obligations on in-scope tech giants that lawmakers hope will level the competitive playing field for platforms’ business users, as well as protecting consumers from Big Tech throwing its weight around.
Briefing journalists on the latest development to its EU app ecosystem Tuesday, ahead of the official announcement, an Apple representative said developers wanting to distribute iOS apps directly will be able to tap into the entitlement through beta 2 of iOS 17.5.
In order to do so developers will have to opt into Apple’s new EU business terms, which include a new “core technology fee” charged at €0.50 for each first annual install over 1 million in the past 12 months regardless of where apps are distributed. App makers wishing to avoid the fee currently have no choice but to remain on Apple’s old business terms, meaning they are unable to access any of the DMA entitlements.
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That “core technology fee” is something of a gotcha, but I suppose that’s the developer’s problem. The expectation is that this will principally be for crypto junk and porn apps (or combination). Assuming Apple notarises them.
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Democracy dies behind paywalls • The Atlantic
Richard Stengel:
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According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75% of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80% of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.
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Volokh wasn’t wrong, but this piece has been widely dunked on because 1) why should successful news outlets bankrupt themselves 2) The Atlantic has, yes, a paywall. Also, that multitude of free sites tends to feed off the paid-for ones, repeating the stories (a little later) though with their own slant, so that the news does trickle down one way or the other.
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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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