When you examine the data, there’s no good reason to visit the dentist every six months, nor fill cavities in milk teeth. CC-licensed photo by .hj barraza on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Drilling down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Ofcom’s aim to ‘reset the net’ to make it safe faces challenges • BBC News
Chris Vallance:
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“A major reset of the internet to make it much safer” is how Ofcom’s Gill Whitehead described the communications watchdog’s child safety announcements to me.
But can it really deliver that kind of a sea-change in the protection of children online?
Turning faulty tech off then on again is a tried and trusted fix, but “resetting the net” is considerably more challenging.
First of all, consider the scale of the task: while the focus is on the largest and riskiest social media firms, over 150,000 services fall under the Online Safety Act, the new law Ofcom must enforce.
According to Ms Whitehead, the big tech firms are already taking action. She pointed to measures by Facebook and Instagram owner Meta to combat grooming, and steps taken by streaming site Twitch, owned by Amazon, to stop underage users seeing “mature” content.
But the problem goes much wider than that.
Internet Matters, which provides advice on online safety, has just published research, external which suggests one in seven teenagers aged 16 and under have experienced a form of image-based sexual abuse, with more than half saying that a young person known to them was to blame.
And it will be the second half of 2025 before the new rules come into force – child safety campaigners say that’s not fast enough, and the measures don’t go far enough.
Remember too that this announcement is of a consultation, which will likely be an exchange between the regulator, tech firms, experts, parents and a range of tenacious activist groups.
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Hmm. Meanwhile, see the next link.
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The nudes internet • The Atlantic
Jane Coaston:
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The problem with the nudes internet is not actually the nudes in my mentions, even though the nudes are incredibly, unspeakably irritating—if I post about the NFL or the Bible, my greatest wish is not to see AI-generated labia in the responses. Rather, the problem is the sexualization of absolutely everything that takes place within the nudes internet, which is now leaking out into the broader internet. You can find it in the comments section on an innocuous Instagram post or YouTube video. You can find it in the diatribes of conservative commentators furious that college students aren’t sexy anymore, or that teens aren’t having sex in the backseat of cars anymore. Or in the left-leaning publications that firmly believe we’d all be hornier if we just had sexier movie stars and mitigated the intervention of the market.
Where did this all come from? Interest in sex—even crass public discussion of sex—is hardly novel. I grew up in the 1990s, when the Clinton impeachment scandal, lad mags, girl power, and evangelical purity culture combined to create an environment in which female sexual availability was simultaneously desired and disgusting. But the nudes internet is different. As culture has moved online, the entrance fee for all kinds of cultural activity has become a kind of performance—not actually having sex, but it is imperative looking like, and sounding like, you could.
Over the past decade, three big changes in internet culture have had a particularly big impact. The first is the rise of OnlyFans. In 2016, the British entrepreneur Timothy Stokely launched the platform that connects creators of content (including sexual content) to people willing to pay to see it and occasionally interact with the creator. While some content creators on OnlyFans are YouTubers, sports figures, and influencers, many do create sexual content for their subscribers. The platform rewarded those content creators for commercializing their social-media interactions—and because they could be literally anyone, brought the marketing of sex into more mainstream spaces.
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Facebook’s AI spam isn’t the ‘dead internet’: it’s the zombie internet • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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Over the last few months, many have proposed that the AI spam taking over Facebook is a great example of the “Dead Internet Theory”, which posits that large portions of the internet are made up of bots talking to bots, filtered through the lens of recommendation and engagement algorithms. Facebook is undeniably cooked, a decaying, depressing hall of horrors full of viral AI-generated content that seemingly gets worse every day.
But I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.
I have spent more time than anyone I know endlessly scrolling through AI spam on Facebook. I have watched the evolution of Facebook’s AI spam go from slightly uncanny modifications of real images to the completely bizarre and obviously fake. I have done this from my own Facebook account, which I have had since 2005, as well as from two burner accounts I created specifically to track how AI-generated content is recommended on the platform and to see whether Facebook would put AI-generated images into my feed organically. I now use Facebook exclusively to see what kinds of bizarre AI content is going viral, and to attempt to figure out who is making it, why they are making it, and who is interacting with it.
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Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs introduce AlphaFold 3 AI model • Google Blog
Google DeepMind AlphaFold team:
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In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.
We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3’s potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients.
Our new model builds on the foundations of AlphaFold 2, which in 2020 made a fundamental breakthrough in protein structure prediction. So far, millions of researchers globally have used AlphaFold 2 to make discoveries in areas including malaria vaccines, cancer treatments and enzyme design.
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Exciting, though don’t forget that a team at Google DeepMind also claimed to have found structures for zillions of crystals.. which other scientists found weren’t any use.
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Global electricity review 2024 • Ember
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Renewables generated a record 30% of global electricity in 2023, driven by growth in solar and wind. With record construction of solar and wind in 2023, a new era of falling fossil generation is imminent. 2023 was likely the pivot point, marking peak emissions in the power sector.
The renewables revolution – led by solar and wind – is breaking records and driving ever-cleaner electricity production. The world is now at a turning point where solar and wind not only slow emissions growth, but actually start to push fossil generation into decline.
Indeed, the expansion of clean capacity would have been enough to deliver a fall in global power sector emissions in 2023. However, drought caused a five-year low in hydropower, which created a shortfall that was met in large part by coal. Nonetheless, the latest forecasts give confidence that 2024 will begin a new era of falling fossil generation, marking 2023 as the likely peak of power sector emissions.
In 2023, growth in solar and wind pushed the world past 30% renewable electricity for the first time. Renewables have expanded from 19% of global electricity in 2000, driven by an increase in solar and wind from 0.2% in 2000 to a record 13.4% in 2023. China was the main contributor in 2023, accounting for 51% of the additional global solar generation and 60% of new global wind generation. Combined with nuclear, the world generated almost 40% of its electricity from low-carbon sources in 2023. As a result, the CO2 intensity of global power generation reached a new record low, 12% lower than its peak in 2007.
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Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content • Simon Willison
Simon Willison was one of the first people to figure out how to hack LLMs via prompts. But here’s he thinking about content:
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I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this:
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Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content
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I’m a big proponent of LLMs as tools for personal productivity, and as software platforms for building interesting applications that can interact with human language.
But I’m increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude.
Slop is the ideal name for this anti-pattern.
Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.
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Why are climate impacts escalating so quickly? • The Climate Brink
Andrew Dessler:
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If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.
In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.
But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.
As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.
Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.
The key to this is recognizing the thresholds that exist in the systems around us. For example, when engineers of the 20th century designed the infrastructure that we live with today (bridges, dams, storm runoff systems), they designed it for the range of climate conditions that existed at the time, adding in a small margin for unforeseen weather extremities. But not too much of a margin — they wanted to keep costs down.
This range and margin together define the design limits of the built world. If we still had the climate of the 20th century, we’d be fine. But the relentless warming of our planet has taken us to the edge and beyond these 20th-century design limits.
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‘Warp drives’ may actually be possible someday, new study suggests • Space
Mike Wall:
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In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed “Alcubierre drive” required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe’s accelerated expansion).
Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement.
Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”
The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.”
This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we’re still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.
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It’ll be fine, probably just needs fusion power to work.
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Do you need a dentist visit every six months? Or that filling? The data is weak • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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The field of dentistry is lagging on adopting evidence-based care and, as such, is rife with overdiagnoses and overtreatments that may align more with the economic pressures of keeping a dental practice afloat than what care patients actually need. At least, that’s according to a trio of health and dental researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom, led by epidemiologist and dentist Paulo Nadanovsky, of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
In a viewpoint published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers point out that many common—nearly unquestioned—practices in dentistry aren’t backed up by solid data. That includes the typical recommendation that everyone should get a dental checkup every six months. The researchers note that two large clinical trials failed to find a benefit of six-month checkups compared with longer intervals that were up to two years.
A 2020 Cochrane review that assessed the two clinical trials concluded that “whether adults see their dentist for a checkup every six months or at personalized intervals based on their dentist’s assessment of their risk of dental disease does not affect tooth decay, gum disease, or quality of life. Longer intervals (up to 24 months) between checkups may not negatively affect these outcomes.” The Cochrane reviewers reported that they were “confident” of little to no difference between six-month and risk-based checkups and were “moderately confident” that going up to 24-month checkups would make little to no difference either.
Likewise, Nadanovsky and his colleagues highlight that there is no evidence supporting the benefit of common scaling and polishing treatments for adults without periodontitis. And for children, cavities in baby teeth are routinely filled, despite evidence from a randomized controlled trial that rates of pain and infections are similar—about 40%—whether the cavities are filled or not.
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And yet in the UK there aren’t enough low-price (NHS) dentists – they struggle to keep their heads above water and go private instead.
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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 