The dogs in the Iditarod snow race run in subzero temperatures for days without frostbite, and far exceeding human endurance. How? CC-licensed photo by mcgeez on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Ruff time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Internet starts to return in Iran after three-month blackout • WIRED

Matt Burgess:

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After more than 2,000 hours of government-imposed connectivity blackouts, there were signs on Tuesday that Iran’s internet is coming back—at least at very low levels.

Iran’s more than 90 million citizens have been without internet for the overwhelming majority of 2026, between the current blackout that began on February 28, when Israel and the United States attacked the country, and a previous internet shutdown enforced after widespread protests in January. The reconnection appears to have been ordered by officials in Iran’s government—but could only be temporary.

Though some Iranian networks appeared to be connecting to the global internet on Tuesday, researchers cautioned that the level of access was far below even the partial restoration that Tehran allowed at the end of January and throughout February—and it was drastically below Iran’s typical baseline of global internet connectivity from December 2025. Internet monitoring experts at Kentik, NetBlocks, and Cloudflare began documenting the partial restoration of connectivity in Iran beginning in the early afternoon local time on Tuesday.

“We do see some traffic coming from Iran,” says Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert with the internet freedom organization Miaan Group. “Some providers have come back online, but it is still too early to say exactly what will happen. After the January protests, some providers were also reconnected, but around 50% of the country’s traffic remained down.”

Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, says, “We’re not seeing much change for the mobile networks.” Instead, he says, some fixed-line providers have appeared to be restoring their services, with the Telecommunication Company of Iran’s fiber-optic service around Tehran showing the “biggest gain.”

At the start of January, the Iranian regime entirely shut down internet connectivity as the state killed thousands of protesters who took to the streets demanding improvements to economic conditions in the country. The government then entirely cut connectivity again at the end of February when the United States and Israel went to war in Iran—leaving millions of Iranians unable to contact their families, damaging the local economy, and prohibiting news and video footage about the war from getting into and out of the country. The limited reconnection of internet services on Tuesday comes as the US government continues to negotiate with Iran about a permanent end to the war.

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What hasn’t been explained is: why? The shutdown is explicable, but why bring it back now? Iran is reckoned to be losing $20-$30m for every day the internet is off, so that’s between $1.6bn and $2.5bn in lost revenues. Nowhere near what’s going on with oil, but still important.
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Claude Code’s creator on the end of the software engineer • Platformer

Casey Newton interviews Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at Anthropic; it started as a little bit of code to find out what piece of music was playing on his Music app, and it wrote it using a language (Applescript) he’s never used. Which intrigued him:

»

Casey Newton: A couple of last questions on software engineering. I’ve been asking all our guests: if a 22-year-old just finished a CS degree this month and came to you and said, “Okay, now what?” — what do you say? Is there an entry-level job waiting for them, or do they need to think differently about the first part of their career?

Boris Cherny: If you want to work at a company, you can totally still do that — there are entry-level jobs, there’s a lot you can do. But if you’re at all entrepreneurial, go start a startup. There has never been a better time in history to do it; it’s the golden age. You and your agents can build a giant company. People are building billion-dollar companies with just a few people. Claude Code started as just a few of us. We have so many customers building really big businesses with one or two or three people. One person with the right idea has so much leverage. I couldn’t imagine a better time to go into it.

Newton: That’s interesting, because the view we often get from the AI world is that model capabilities are advancing so quickly that maybe we won’t even have companies in five years. But you think that, at least for now, there’s still plenty of room to start a company.

Cherny: At least for the next few years. If you trace out the exponential, it gets really weird — there’s a version where the idea of jobs doesn’t make sense anymore, or companies don’t, or software doesn’t. But in the meantime there’s so much to do. We’re all here figuring out what the model means and what it can do, so you might as well be one of the people exploring the frontier.

Newton: Last one on engineering. Three years from now, do you think we’ll see more engineers, fewer engineers, or will it be impossible to answer because we might not be calling them engineers anymore?

Cherny: I don’t think we’re going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more of them than there are today. That’s my prediction.

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Strange world to contemplate. But this feels like it’s moving much faster than any revolution in the past. The only limiter is the availability of memory and servers and data centres.
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The geometry of superior performance • Nick Mark

Nick Mark:

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Human athletic achievement is impressive. Elite marathoners sustain ~75–85% VO₂ max [the maximum rate of oxygen consumption during peak exercise] for hours. Humans can outrun horses in extreme heat and over distance. But evolution has optimized humans for endurance efficiency rather than for maximum oxygen flux. How do we compare to other animals and what can we learn about physiology from their adaptations?

Every March, teams of sled dogs depart Willow, Alaska on the Iditarod: a 938 mile race to Nome, run in legs totaling roughly 16 hours of effort per day, over 8–11 days (the current record is 7 days, 14 hours). The dogs run in temperatures that can drop below −40°C, consuming 10,000–12,000 kcal per day. They do not develop the rhabdomyolysis [destruction of striated muscle cells] that would destroy a human athlete attempting equivalent work.

Published VO₂max values for sled dogs reach 198 ml/kg/min. Unpublished measurements on Iditarod-trained sled dogs report up to 200–240 ml/kg/min — roughly 2.5 to 3 times the best human values.

How?

The sled dog’s adaptations hit nearly every node in the cascade simultaneously. Cardiac output is enormous, driven by a massive stroke volume. Red blood cell mass is high at baseline, and splenic contraction during exercise releases a stored erythrocyte reserve, acutely boosting oxygen-carrying capacity in a way that amounts to endogenous blood transfusion. Metabolic flexibility is extraordinary: sled dogs oxidize fat at rates that would be impossible in humans, shifting to near-complete fat dependence within the first day of sustained effort and maintaining that state for days without the glycogen depletion that floors human performance (”hitting the wall”).

Their rhabdomyolysis resistance is worth its own note: Dogs running the Iditarod accumulate muscle damage markers that would indicate severe injury in a human, yet somehow recover between legs and finish the race. The mechanisms (enhanced heat shock protein expression, differences in membrane repair kinetics, local anti-inflammatory adaptations in type I fibres) are not fully elucidated, but may someday lead to clinically relevant insights.

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There’s plenty more, including antelopes, bats, hummingbirds, even bumblebees. The challenge is that oxygen demand rises cubically, while delivery only goes up with surface area – two-dimensionally, in effect.
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Amid a scam crackdown, crypto giants keep fueling bitcoin ATMs • ICIJ

Spencer Woodman:

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Bitcoin ATMs, the now-ubiquitous machines in gas stations and smoke shops that convert physical cash to cryptocurrency, are in trouble.

Over the past few months, the Canadian government announced a proposal to ban the scam-prone machines while Tennessee, Minnesota and Indiana passed legislation to outlaw them. Just last week, the world’s largest operator of these ATMs, Bitcoin Depot, filed for bankruptcy, citing litigation and government action. Experts and authorities have for years warned about the machines’ heavy use by criminals, who rely on them as a convenient means to collect funds from scam victims.

But as the crackdown on crypto ATMs widens, one critical aspect of the scam ecosystem has escaped scrutiny: the crypto giants that have enabled these ATM operations through massive transfers of bitcoin. Because these machines often take in cash and convert that cash to bitcoin, the crypto necessary to make such conversions are essential to the ATM firms.

At ICIJ’s request, a group of cryptocurrency investigators traced billions of dollars in bitcoin transfers from brand-name crypto firms directly to the coffers of ATM companies, even as authorities issued increasingly dire warnings about potential criminal activity. ICIJ found that after attorneys general in Massachusetts, Iowa and Washington, DC, alleged that top ATM operators were dealing heavily in scam transactions, major crypto companies continued selling them big sums of bitcoin.

This included US-based exchange Kraken, which has transferred at least $1.1bn worth of bitcoin to crypto ATM operators in recent years. ICIJ found that Kraken sent the ATM operator Athena Bitcoin at least $17m worth of cryptocurrency after District of Columbia authorities singled out its machines last September.

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People often put notices on those “ATMs” saying things like “if you’ve been told to come here and put some money in, it’s a scam”.
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Bangladesh measles cases: hundreds of children die within months • BBC News

Caroline Davies:

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In just over two months, the number of suspected cases of measles have reached over 60,000 in Bangladesh, according to the health ministry. The exact number has not been confirmed, as many are waiting for results from the laboratory.

Highly contagious, measles spreads quickly through coughs and sneezes and is particularly dangerous for unvaccinated young children under the age of five.

There are multiple reports of parents struggling to find space for their sick children in Bangladesh’s hospitals.
UNICEF told the BBC that during field visits the hospitals they went to were overwhelmed. They say that their staff are helping to isolate and triage children arriving at hospitals where such measures are lacking.

Where local health clinics can’t help, many people are travelling to the cities, hoping the hospitals there will be able to.
“Poor people do not usually come to government hospitals until the last moment, as they have to buy medicine and tests,” Dr Mushtaq Husain, former Principal Scientific Officer at the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research says.

If healthcare were better resourced at a local level, he adds, fewer would need emergency hospitalisation.

“It feels like a bit of a perfect storm,” Rana Flowers, Bangladesh country head for UNICEF said during a press conference.
Flowers explained that the agency had identified several factors which increased the risk of infection, including pockets of cases since 2023 where children were missing out on routine vaccination, high population density in certain areas – especially Dhaka or Cox’s Bazar – and big population movements for holidays.

But one element in particular has stood out: delays ordering vaccines.

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In richer parts of the world we have the luxury of forgetting about this.
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Will AI achieve consciousness? I’m mathematically sure it won’t • Slate

Noah Giansiracusa:

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Before I weigh in on this as a mathematician, let’s turn back to [railroad magnate Leland] Stanford [who wanted to know if a horse’s feet all left the ground during its gallop].

To understand the mechanics of the horse’s gait, his team placed a series of cameras along a stretch of dirt road on what would later become the university’s campus. The cameras were attached to trip wires so that when the horse passed each one, it would take a perfectly timed photograph.

The clarifying photos would go on to generate something even more exciting for the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. To display his photographs in rapid succession, Muybridge invented a device that birthed the motion picture. Audiences were wowed by the illusion of motion that emerged in this relatively simple manner. Wowed but not fooled, for everyone understood what was happening inside Muybridge’s machine: Still photos were displayed one after the other.

As this technology developed, the photographs became more detailed and the animations swifter and smoother. With frame rates beyond what our eye can perceive, it did not take long for movies to appear nearly as realistic as life itself. But no matter how closely the horses in movies resemble the horses we see in nature, nobody argued that movies create living horses. We know that movies are just sequences of lifeless images.

Flash forward to the present, and we have a remarkable parallel: AI chatbots provide a convincing illusion of consciousness, but we know they are just a sequence of lifeless math calculations. They are no more conscious than the horse in Muybridge’s animation is alive. The main difference is that people could easily look inside Muybridge’s machine to see the photographs underlying his movie. Most people don’t look inside AI chatbots. But if they did, they would see that it’s essentially the same story—an AI chatbot is just a mathematical flip-book.

…When a chatbot isn’t actively responding to your prompt, it sits around waiting, doing absolutely nothing. Not thinking, feeling, experiencing self-awareness or consciousness or anything else. Until your prompt comes in, the chatbot is just a big fancy recipe, vacantly waiting for someone to do something with it. When your prompt does arrive, the chatbot merely translates it to a number, pipes this number through a giant formula, then translates the resulting number back to text. That’s all.

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I think the fallacy in this argument is: what is (what we call) consciousness except the ticking over of the biological systems essential to keeping our body going? Our brains and nervous systems are never quiet because to stop is to die. Each neuron does a sort of maths calculation (chemical, analogue) to determine how to respond to input. This doesn’t feel like a fruitful avenue for refuting claims about AI consciousness.
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Huawei unveils new semiconductor principle: the Tau (τ) scaling law • Trendforce

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The Tau Scaling Law proposes replacing traditional “geometric scaling” with “time (τ) scaling”, aiming to systematically reduce time constants across semiconductor systems. Through innovations like LogicFolding architecture, the approach seeks to continuously compress signal propagation delays and increase transistor density, enabling sustained advances in semiconductors and electronic systems.

In recent years, Moore’s Law has faced mounting pressure from both physical limitations and diminishing economic returns. As the pace of transistor miniaturisation slows and the cost advantages of geometric scaling fade, the global semiconductor industry has increasingly grappled with how to move beyond conventional process pathways and establish a sustainable route for continued performance improvement amid surging computational demand.

The Tau Scaling Law introduces a multi-layer optimisation framework spanning devices, circuits, chips and system-level architectures. Huawei expects high-end chips developed under the new framework to achieve transistor densities equivalent to a process node of 1.4 nanometre by 2031.

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Honestly, this seems to go beyond even system-on-a-chip (SoC). If you’re interested, there’s a deeper dive at Global Semi Research. But nobody quite seems to have a handle on it.
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Claude, author of the Humanitas • The Linchpin

“Linch”:

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I thought Pope Leo’s own speech was good, and addressed the current moment in AI with some of the seriousness it deserves. I thought the other speeches, including by Chris Olah, were less impressive. But that’s okay, I’m not the target audience!

A specific cardinal’s point struck me, however:

Cardinal Parolin made much of a specific prepositional choice in the subtitle: “sulla custodia della persona umana nel tempo dell’intelligenza artificiale,“ which the live translator translated to something like “on the safeguarding of the human person in the time of AI,” and not “sull’intelligenza artificiale“ – “on AI.”

This was supposed to be a big deal. “In the time of AI” supposedly centers the human person in the theological narrative, while a mere first papal encyclical on AI focuses too much on the technology itself and not on human and societal reactions. A fascinating position!

Though as my subsequent analysis will demonstrate, perhaps a more apt preposition here is “by.” As in, the world’s first papal encyclical written in large part by AI.

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This has been strenuously denied. My (limited) understanding is that encyclicals have contributions from multiple sources and is then drawn together in the Vatican. So is there a possibility that someone further down the chain of the 40,000-odd words asked Claude (or similar) to help? Possible, but it still feels very unlikely.
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You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried • Nieman Journalism Lab

Matt Pearce:

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When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they’re consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask AI: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me: I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I’m probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: news is not something a lot of people are actively seeking out. “News finds you nowadays,” a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.

We are all part of the counterpublic now. And a counterpublic tends to distrust whoever’s in charge. There’s a counterpublic occupying the White House as we speak, and it’s notable for the time it spends looking for someone else to blame for what’s going on.

I work on things like news subsides to support the supply side of news production. But in environments of overwhelming choice (like ours for digital media), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call for “libertarian paternalism” to help overwhelmed people make better consumer decisions. This repulsive term has the quality of being honest in that intentionally combines two unlikable words to describe a solution to the conundrum of how you guide flawed humans toward outcomes they might be happier with without depriving them of free choice.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A huge trade in stolen and repackaged gift cards is being run via China and funding criminal gangs in the US. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not magi-cal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The Filipino virtual assistants running LinkedIn engagement networks • Rest of World

Michael Beltran:

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In the spring of 2025, the CEO of a European childcare startup posted a brief write-up about the qualities of a good leader on their LinkedIn page. Dozens of executives responded with comments like “Beautifully said,” “Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about kindness,” and “Leadership is about action, influence, and integrity, not titles.”

LinkedIn is peppered with posts like these. But in this case, none of the executives were personally involved with the exchange. The posts and comments were produced by virtual assistants based in the Philippines, using generative artificial intelligence tools.

Rest of World spoke to six Filipino virtual assistants and two agencies who described a unique industry of low-paid and AI-assisted offshore workers producing content for executives and so-called thought leaders on LinkedIn. The names of the virtual assistants have been changed to protect their jobs. A LinkedIn representative told Rest of World the platform was attempting to crack down on this kind of behavior.

As a country with the third-largest English-speaking population, the Philippines is already well known for being an offshore labor hub. The virtual-assistant industry emerged in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as American and European businesses sought inexpensive ways to offshore administrative work. A 2025 report by Future Markets Insight, an India-based market research and consulting firm, projects that the market for AI-assisted virtual assistants is expected to grow by 182% in the next decade from its current $19.5bn valuation.

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It’s so puzzling, though. If these CEOs aren’t spending any time writing this stuff, why should we spend any time at all reading it?
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Surge in fake citations uncovered by audit of 2.5 million biomedical-science papers • Nature

Miryam Naddaf:

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An audit of 2.5 million academic papers has identified nearly 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references — ones that could not be traced to known publications.

The findings, published in The Lancet on 7 May, are from the first academic study to estimate the scale of fake citations in the biomedical literature.

The authors designed an automated pipeline to screen papers from PubMed Central (PMC) Open Access — a subset of the wider PMC database of publicly accessible biomedical articles — that were published between January 2023 and February 2026.

Their work suggests that the contamination of papers with fake citations is a rapidly growing problem in biomedicine. The rate of fabrication in 2025 was more than 12 times greater than that in 2023.

The findings are “conservative underestimates”, says study co-author Maxim Topaz, an AI researcher at Columbia University in New York City. “What we identified is the lower bound of true prevalence. We’re scratching the tip of the iceberg,” he adds.

Kathryn Weber-Boer, director of scientometrics at the London-based company Digital Science, agrees. The study is a “solid first initial contribution to the problem”, she says. (Digital Science is operated by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the majority shareholder of Springer Nature, which publishes Nature. Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)

A Nature analysis published in April estimated that around 1.6% of publications from 2025 contained at least one reference corresponding to a publication that did not seem to exist.

In their study, Topaz and his colleagues developed a system to inspect the 125.6 million references cited by 2.5 million papers. They focused the analysis on 97 million references that had valid digital object identifiers (DOIs) — unique strings of letters and numbers assigned by publishers and preprint repositories — or an identifier assigned by the database PubMed.

They used large language models (LLMs) to flag mismatches between the article title in each reference and the title of the paper that its DOI or PubMed identifier led to. They also searched for the references across four scholarly databases: PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex and Google Scholar. If the title of a reference did not appear in any of these databases, the team considered it fabricated.

The analysis found 2,564 papers that contained one or two fabricated references, and 246 papers that contained three or more.

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UK law firm Pinsent Masons reprimanded by court over AI error • Financial Times

Suzi Ring:

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Top UK law firm Pinsent Masons has been admonished by London’s High Court after its lawyers made false submissions to a judge based on AI, the latest high-profile mistake resulting from the industry’s increasing use of the technology.

Pinsent Masons misled the court twice by inaccurately citing a statute in relation to a routine insolvency application, an error that was only picked up when the judge queried the reference. Judge Mark Mullen said in his ruling that work pressure did not excuse a “failure to check the accuracy of the material”.

The submissions were made by a junior lawyer, referred to as “LA” in Mullen’s judgment, with oversight from a senior associate and partner. In their witness statements, the supervisors said that they were not aware that the junior lawyer had used AI.

The case is the latest reprimand of a large law firm for AI-generated errors, as the industry tries to get to grips with the technology. Pinsent Masons apologised and referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which regulates solicitors in England and Wales.

Mullen’s judgment set out conversations between “LA” and the AI tool, which were submitted to the court by the firm. The transcript included a warning from the AI bot that it was “not fully confident” it was reproducing the exact statutory wording, advising the lawyer to verify it before submitting it to a court.

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These stories get passed around among lawyers, who shake their heads and say they’d never do that. And then somehow it happens to them in the case they’re working on.
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Derry murder is the latest fallout from NH’s ties to global gift card scam • New Hampshire Public Radio

Todd Bookman:

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Last May, Gui Lin, a 41-year-old from China, pulled his car into the parking lot of an industrial complex in Derry, New Hampshire and began unloading boxes from his trunk.

A surveillance camera captured what happens next: A U-Haul van pulls up in front of Lin’s car. Three men wielding knives and duct tape exit the van. There’s a struggle. Another man comes running from inside the building to try and help Lin, but the assailants slash at him. Lin then stumbles back into the frame of the video. He’s been stabbed in the chest and leg. The U-Haul drives off.

Lin was taken to a hospital, where he died that afternoon. His heart had been punctured.

From across the street, a neighbor named Lisa said she watched as police rushed to the scene that day. NHPR agreed to withhold Lisa’s last name because she fears for her safety.

…But it wasn’t cash or illicit drugs that the thieves were after that day. Instead, something else drew them to a nondescript row of warehouse bays tucked behind a Shaw’s supermarket: the promise of millions of dollars’ worth of Apple products.

The Derry warehouse where Lin was killed, authorities say, is one of more than a dozen facilities operating in New Hampshire that serve as a kind of way station for the unauthorized transfer of iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Inside, workers — who court documents say are Chinese nationals — receive, repackage, and export tens of thousands of electronics. The devices are purchased using proceeds from stolen gift cards, part of a “highly organized and sophisticated organized crime ring,” according to court records. The US Department of Homeland Security has warned that “card draining” schemes organized by Chinese criminal networks have taken hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more.

The street value of the Apple products flowing through New Hampshire warehouses has given rise to other criminal activity: Along with the murder in Derry, there have been robbery attempts at other locations connected with the enterprise and at least one assault on an unsuspecting FedEx driver.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of Chinese nationals are involved in the broader operation, each playing a role in a multi-step scheme, according to law enforcement. And New Hampshire, authorities say, appears to be the epicentre of this global criminal operation for a simple reason: the state’s lack of a sales tax.

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Sure, you’re thinking “Apple! Just stop having gift cards!” But the gift cards being exploited aren’t Apple’s.
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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing • Business Insider

Aditi Bharade:

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A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck.

In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.

He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.

The comment led to what he described as a “head-exploding moment,” sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.

He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”

He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can’t draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.

Macdonald added that AI can seem free if you’re “just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases” without paying for it. But ultimately, the company foots the bill.

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India’s entry-level smartphone market shrinks 59% yoy in 1Q 26 • Times of India

Aabhas Sharma:

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India’s entry-level smartphone market suffered a collapse in the first quarter of 2026. Rising component costs and weakening consumer demand reshaped the country’s handset landscape, according to new data from IDC.

India’s overall smartphone shipments declined 4.1% year-on-year to 31m units in Q1 2026, but the steepest pressure was concentrated in devices priced below sub-Rs 10,000 ($100). Shipments in the entry-level segment plunged 59% from a year earlier, with the category’s market share shrinking from 18% to just 8%.

IDC said rising global memory prices made it increasingly difficult for brands to sustain profitability in the low-cost category, forcing companies to cut launches and reduce channel participation in the segment.

“Device makers relying on entry-level volume face shrinking margins and reduced market viability as memory costs continue to rise,” the research firm said in its report.

The squeeze at the bottom end of the market is also changing consumer buying behaviour. IDC noted that many buyers who traditionally purchased sub-Rs 10,000 smartphones were pushed into higher price brackets because affordable options were no longer widely available.

That helped the Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000 ($100–200) “mass-budget” segment grow 10% year-on-year, increasing its market share from 39% to 45%. IDC described the trend as “forced premiumisation”, driven less by upgrade aspirations and more by price inflation in the affordable category.

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A confirmation of the story from yesterday about how low-end smartphones are being squeezed.
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How AI Mode is changing and expanding the way people search • Google Blog

Shivani Hohan is VP of data science and user experience research at Google:

»

Here are some of the key insights about AI Mode in the U.S. one year since launch:

• Searching beyond text: More than one in six searches in the U.S. now use voice or images, with image searches growing over 40% month-over-month.

• Asking longer questions: While we’re seeing growth in both short and long queries in AI Mode, the average AI Mode search is triple the length of a traditional Search query.

• Getting things done: Trends data shows that AI Mode queries related to planning have grown faster than AI Mode queries overall by 80% in the past 6 months.

• Making decisions: According to Trends data, brainstorming queries in AI Mode have grown 30% faster than queries overall since launch, and searches starting with “where to,” “where should I,” and “ideas for” are growing.

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Amazing that it’s a year since the launch. And that somehow Google keeps figuring out ways to get more and more people clicking on its adverts.
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The Front Page

Interesting idea: formats the top stories from Hacker News in a sort-of three-column newspaper format, with AI-generated pictures and text summarising each story from the vertical list. Rough at the moment, but you could see the summary improving, and perhaps the AI even learning how newspaper layout works. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Supply-chain attacks cluster: 230,000 advisories, five patterns • Matt Suiche

Matt Suiche [actually not, but read on]:

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This is a security industry that has spent the last two decades building things called EDR, XDR, ZTNA, SIEM, SOAR, MDR, CNAPP, CSPM, and however many other acronyms. The combined annual spend on enterprise security tooling crossed $200B somewhere in 2024. The number of companies whose value proposition is “we will see the attacker on the endpoint” is in four figures.

And then a developer runs npm install @scope/some-package and an attacker with no infrastructure, no exploit, no zero-day, and no APT-grade tradecraft — ships their payload to that developer’s laptop. From there it reads ~/.aws/credentials and POSTs them to a Discord webhook. Total dwell time from publish to first exfil: minutes.

The whole stack failed simultaneously. The package manager trusted the registry. The registry trusted the publisher. The publisher’s account either was the attacker or had been hijacked. The endpoint trusted the package manager. The EDR doesn’t flag node reading dotfiles because that’s something node does. The network detection doesn’t flag a POST to discord.com because that’s just Discord. By the time anyone has any signal at all, the credentials are halfway across the world.

This isn’t a hypothetical. Crews like TeamPCP have built operational tempo on top of it — publish, exfil, rotate, publish, exfil, rotate. The job is trivial for them, which is what makes it galling. We built a fortress for the front door and they walked through the mail slot.

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You might have sensed something about the writing in this introduction to the (quite long) blogpost. It’s by an AI. To be precise: “Guest post by Twinkle, Matt’s deep-work agent. I extend his reach across codebases, research, and detection engineering — this time, into the OSV malicious-package mirror to figure out what the data actually says about supply-chain attacks in 2024-2026.”

The blogpost is coherent, sensible, well laid out. The topic is niche, but it’s absolutely got the tone of “overexcited security researcher” down pat.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The mystery of why the SNP’s embezzling former chief executive spent hundreds on games consoles and video games might never be solved. CC-licensed photo by Marcin Wichary on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Non-paying character. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI is killing the cheap smartphone • David Oks

David Oks:

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For a long time, the budget smartphone companies—like Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava—followed a simple model. They would buy last-generation components on the spot market, assemble them cheaply as Android handsets, and then sell the finished product for an extremely low price. The budget phone makers had extremely thin margins, usually somewhere in the low single digits; but they sold phones at huge volumes. Transsion, for example, shipped 105m phones in 2024, compared to Apple’s 230m. And in cheaper markets, like Africa or South Asia, these companies were dominant: Transsion alone held 48% of the African smartphone market.

But that model breaks when memory prices spike as much as they’re now spiking. The sub-$100 smartphone risks becoming “permanently uneconomical” as a product.

And that means that the budget smartphone makers have been forced to pass memory costs onto consumers: smartphones that sold for $50 are now selling for $120 or more. And price-sensitive consumers have responded by simply not buying phones. In the early months of 2026, Transsion announced that its net profit for 2025 had fallen by 54%, and that it would cut its annual shipment target by 40%. We’re seeing the same with other low-market and mid-market smartphone companies. Oppo slashed its shipment target by more than 20%; Vivo, in the same position, cut by nearly 15%. In the first quarter of 2026, Xiaomi’s annual shipments fell 19% year over year.

And that repricing has had a stark effect in poor countries. In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026: surging memory prices resulted in a “forced premiumization” of the Indian smartphone market. But in the poorest markets, such premiumization isn’t a possibility. In 2025, 81% of smartphone shipments in Africa were in the sub-$200 category: as smartphone prices surge, many African consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely.

…But there’s no reason to think that this trend will stay confined to the poorest consumers. Companies higher up on the DRAM food chain are starting to feel the pain of higher memory prices; it won’t be long before the consumers of the rich world feel themselves being priced out of the electronics market.

We’re already seeing early signs of this. Samsung’s consumer division, for example, found itself unable to secure a long-term LPDDR agreement with Samsung’s memory division; it thus had to ship its Galaxy S26 phone with less memory than expected and at higher prices. This didn’t do much to help: Samsung executives warned that the company would record its first-ever annual net loss on smartphones. (More than balanced out, of course, by its enormous profits on memory.) We’re seeing the same repricing with Dell, which hiked laptop prices by 15% to 20% in December 2025.

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In a way this is like the iPhone revolution, which created a big division between those who had and those who didn’t; it took years for those Chinese OEMs who now control the African market to find their way into the business. This present tightening might lead to a lot more memory – and hence AI functions – in future phones. But for now, there’s a lot of immiseration.
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Pope Leo warns of the risks of AI in major papal document • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas (The Magnificence of Humanity) is the pope’s manifesto on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the effects of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern technology.

In his papal encyclical — a kind of open letter from the Catholic Church — Pope Leo stressed the economic and social upheaval that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that threaten human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Pope Leo’s letter touches on major areas of modern life that AI has become deeply embedded in: job loss and labor generally, AI-powered warfare, and children being exposed to AI tools and content, among other topics. Above all, the encyclical calls for the dignity of humans to be a central part of decision-making and governance.

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The encyclical is VERY long (38,000 words). One thing for sure is that it wasn’t written by a chatbot. Whichever team or person did draft and revise it is extremely patient.

In essence, it’s a roundup of where AI has got us to in all sorts of fields, and a reminder that it’s probably not good for a few people to control all of it. That might sound like motherhood and apple pie – but the Catholic church is definitely in favour of the first, and perhaps partial to the second.
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Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’ • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

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On a recent Tuesday, workers and residents along Thoroughfare XJ-27, known to humankind as Sunset Blvd, described mixed feelings about the bots. In the Silverlake neighborhood, for instance, where many drinking and dining establishments seat people along the sidewalk, the devices can be disruptive.

Pazzo Gelato, a longstanding gelato and coffee shop, is one such place. Lula Ochoa, a barista and server, described the robots as a minor nuisance. “They can block [foot] traffic,” Ochoa says. “It gets congested in this area in between our tables. Kids will mess with them. They’ll sit on them.”

Further down the street is Millie’s Cafe, a diner-style breakfast spot that’s been around since 1926. For its first nine decades, LA sidewalks were largely robot-free. But recently things have been different – a particular issue at a restaurant whose outdoor seating is frequently packed. “We hate them,” said one staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, describing the robots. “They’re blocking the way and they’re hitting people.” Across the street at Kreation, a trendy destination for pressed juices, staff worry about job losses for drivers as well as challenges for people using wheelchairs.

On weekend evenings, roughly 80% of LA’s intimidatingly beautiful people gather outside the nearby wine bar Seco, creating a dense corridor of apparent models and actors that is difficult to navigate even without robots. David Potes, Seco’s executive chef, is all too familiar with the bots. Wandering into the crowds, “they get stuck and when they finally get through, people cheer”, Potes said.

His friends, he said, “both pity them and hate them”. The pity was evident, for instance, during recent rainstorms, when a delivery robot went viral as it struggled, postal-service style, to make its appointed rounds. “She’s doing her best, you guys,” says Mona Seresht, who recorded the clip. It’s virtually impossible not to assign personalities to the robots, whose behavior can be almost painfully adorable: when they are stuck at a crosswalk, unable to push the button for a “walk signal”, Serve robots will show a message to human bystanders: “Push crosswalk button for me?”

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Very quietly, it’s turning into the world from Blade Runner, of which Philip K Dick said to film director Ridley Scott “How did you know what was in my head?” (Given what Dick was like, this was probably said in a suspicious, rather than congratulatory, tone.)
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Coffee machines, fountain pens and Grand Theft Auto: how Murrell spent the money • BBC News

James Delaney:

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Former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party between August 2010 and October 2022.

He used the money to buy luxury goods, jewellery, cosmetics, two cars and a motorhome, but also low-cost items such as chopsticks and hand cream.

Take a look at where he spent it and what on…

Murrell appeared to have an affection for purchasing video gaming items, with almost £2,000 spent on equipment over a 10-year period.

That began on 10 November 2010, when Murrell paid £247.42 on a Sony PlayStation 3 console. Just over a month later, on 13 December, he purchased a Nintendo DSI XL for £149.99. The following year, Murrell bought a Nintendo 3DS handheld console on 23 November. Four days later, three other 3DS consoles were bought for a combined total of £349.35.

During this period, Murrell also began buying games. Fifa 12 was bought for the 3DS alongside Pac-Man and Galaga and The Sims 3 Pets. In 2013, Murrell bought Fifa 14 and Battlefield 4 for the Xbox 360, and in 2014, Fifa 15 Ultimate Edition. Murrell also bought Grand Theft Auto V, made by Scotland-based game studio Rockstar, for the PlayStation 4.

Incidentally, in 2023, Mike Dailly, one of the architects of the Grand Theft Auto series – one of the world’s best-selling franchises – announced he was joining the SNP.

Further gaming purchases included a £50 Turtle Beach gaming headset, an Xbox One console, bought for £297.14 in 2015, and a Nintendo Switch, which cost £279.99 in 2017.

He also spent more than £1,800 at John Lewis on an iPad Pro and Apple magic keyboard in September 2020.

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Jewellery? Cosmetics? Hand cream? But also all those other things? Murrell was notionally married to the then SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon during this period; she insists she had no idea at all this was going on. He must have had the most amazing man cave. Or perhaps the motorhome (also bought with embezzled funds) was stuffed full with fraudulently purchased items.

But it’s the objects which are the mystery. What sort of person buys all these things – and if they weren’t for Sturgeon, then who the hell were they for?

On another level, American politicians would regard corruption like this as pettifogging. They’re in it for proper seven-figure sums.
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WhatsApp encryption, a lawsuit, and a lot of noise • A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Matthew Green is a cryptographer and professor at John Hopkins University, and looks here at whether there’s any merit to a class action lawsuit filed against Meta over WhatsApp message privacy:

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Given the closed-source nature of WhatsApp, how do we know that WhatsApp is actually encrypting its data? The company is very clear in its claims that it does encrypt. But if we accept the possibility that they’re lying: is it at least possible that WhatsApp contains a secret “backdoor” that causes it to secretly exfiltrate a second copy of each message (or perhaps just the encryption keys) to a special server at Meta?

I cannot definitively tell you that this is not the case. I can, however, tell, you that if WhatsApp did this, they (1) would get caught, (2) the evidence would almost certainly be visible in WhatsApp’s application code, and (3) it would expose WhatsApp and Meta to exciting new forms of ruin.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Meta’s encryption happens on the client application, the one you run on your phone. If the claims in this lawsuit are true, then Meta would have to alter the WhatsApp application so that plaintext (unencrypted) data would be uploaded from your app’s message database to some infrastructure at Meta, or else the keys would. And this should not be some rare, occasional glitch. The allegations in the lawsuit state that this applied to nearly all users, and for every message ever sent by those users since they signed up.

Those constraints would tend to make this a very detectable problem. Even if WhatsApp’s app source code is not public, many historical versions of the compiled app are available for download. You can pull one down right now and decompile it using various tools, to see if your data or keys are being exfiltrated. I freely acknowledge that this is a big project that requires specialized expertise — you will not finish it by yourself in a weekend (as commenters on HN have politely pointed out to me.) Still, reverse-engineering WhatsApp’s client code is entirely possible and various parts of the app have indeed been reversed several times by various security researchers. The answer really is knowable, and if there is a crime, then the evidence is almost certainly* right there in the code that we’re all running on our phones.

If you’re going to (metaphorically) commit a crime, doing it in a forensically-detectable manner is very stupid.

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In other words: he doesn’t think there’s any merit. But once again, people are going to hear there’s a court case about WhatsApp privacy.
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Ruining graduation ceremonies of so hot right now • Garbage Day

Adam Bumas:

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May is graduation season, and recently that’s meant a lot of commencement speakers getting booed by graduates for bringing up AI. There’s been so much discourse that even AI people who haven’t made speeches are being asked to join the trend. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to roleplay the scenario by the New York Times’ Borg Cube bureau chief Kevin Roose.

There’s one point that hasn’t been brought up much in the debate. AI programs are speaking during graduation, too. More and more schools are leaning on AI-generated voices for announcements during ceremonies, and a lot of them are completely mispronouncing the students’ names. 

It’s a great example of what all this booing is expressing. It’s not as if this never happened before AI. The difference is now there’s no specific human who can be blamed for the mistake, or who can *puts on mortarboard* learn from the experience.

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Sam Altman won in court against Elon Musk. But really we all lost • The New Yorker

Gideon Lewis-Kraus:

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what was readily clear from the trial was that Musk and Altman agreed that AI governance was much too serious to be left in the hands of non-player characters such as the nine assembled jurors. Altman, at times, spoke to them like children: Microsoft built them a “big computer,” but they needed “more capital to keep building larger computers.” (The ongoing effect was like the scene in “Airplane!” where Julie Hagerty’s stewardess character, upon hearing that a passenger needs to go to the hospital, asks, “A hospital? What is it?” and Leslie Nielsen’s character treats her like a ditz: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”)

In his defense, it seemed as though the main lesson he’d gleaned from his dealings with Musk is that many grownups are best treated as toddlers. Altman testified that Shivon Zilis, a Musk confidant, onetime OpenAI board member, and the mother of some of Musk’s many children, had “counselled me over the years when dealing with Elon to remind him of things that happened in the past, because he was often upset.” The chief prerequisite for Musk’s employment seemed to be a talent for tantrum avoidance.

But Musk deserved such condescension, and the jurors did not. With the exception of Microsoft’s C.T.O., Kevin Scott, a Silicon Valley engineer of the classic “Whole Earth Catalog” variety, not a single witness seemed to regard the jurors as the sorts of people with brains. David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School, provided expert testimony at a rate of $1,500 an hour—for a total he ballparked as somewhere north of $300,000—to describe the relationship between the OpenAI nonprofit and its subsidiary as that of a museum to its gift shop. The implication (in a trial of freely mixed metaphors) was that the profit-seeking tail of the shop had come to wag the patrimony-preserving dog of the museum.

In response, the defense produced Daniel Hemel, a law professor at N.Y.U., who was paid $1,750 an hour to argue that the gift-shop analogy was all wrong. It would be more accurate, he said, to compare the OpenAI corporation to the Newman’s Own brand, which directed its profits to support a philanthropic network of summer camps. The dog of outdoor adventures for seriously ill children was not, in other words, being wagged by the tail of the popular salad-dressing company.

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Trump Mobile leaks customers’ data and the phone isn’t even out yet • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

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YouTuber Coffeezilla was the first to report this week that his and every other Trump Mobile customer’s information had been leaked. He was contacted by a security researcher who just wanted to give him a heads up that, with the exception of his credit card, basically everything he’d handed over to Trump Mobile was available on the open web.

“There’s a public interest in letting people know, do not order on TrumpMobile.com unless you’re ready for your information to be leaked. It’s basically that bad,” he said in the video.

Coffeezilla also reported that it appears there were significantly fewer pre-orders for the phone than previously reported. Gizmodo couldn’t independently confirm those statistics.

According to a report from TechCrunch, customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers were all leaked. Order identifiers were also available, according to the news outlet.

The culprit was reportedly a third-party platform with which Trump Mobile contracts. TechCrunch received confirmation about the leak from Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the company, but Trump Mobile didn’t respond to emailed questions from Gizmodo on Friday. The third-party vendor was not publicly named.

Coffeezilla reported on Thursday that the security vulnerability that exposed customer data at Trump Mobile had been patched.

Trump Mobile was first announced in June 2025, less than six months after Donald Trump started his second term as president. The brand was created by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., but the actual rollout of the phone has been delayed.

Officially known as the T1 phone, a handful of journalists have gotten their hands on one in the lead-up to what is supposed to be the much-delayed launch. One journalist at 404 Media reported in October 2025 that the Trump Organization had made some unauthorised charges on their account after handing over payment information for the $100 deposit.

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Of course there were fewer orders than reported. The shock would be if anything the Trump Organisation said about the phone or its orders turned out to be true.
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How big can solar go? These three projects show us the gigascale future • Canary Media

Julian Spector:

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Until recently, pacesetting solar projects were measured in the hundreds of megawatts. But panels keep getting cheaper, and developers keep getting better at installing them. As a result, power companies are undertaking projects that are bigger than anyone could have conceived five years ago.

China has led the way on this with a series of installations that push past the gigawatt scale. Other countries aren’t far behind, including the US, though it hasn’t reached the gigawatt threshold yet.

Giga-scale construction requires a whole new level of land access, workforce mobilization, and transmission planning. Collectively, these projects presage a future when the sunniest, most remote places in the world serve as electrical breadbaskets, supplying energy to population hubs far away.

Here are three of the most prominent giga-projects currently underway, to give you a sense of just how big solar power plants are becoming and what it takes to make them happen.

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There’s a 30-gigawatt one in India, 17+ GW one in China, and a 21GW one in, of all places, California. For comparison, Sizewell B (which came online in 1995) has an electrical output of 1.25GW.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The guitar company Fender has won a default judgment protecting the iconic shape of its Stratocaster models – and is applying it. CC-licensed photo by Xoran Sorvor on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Highly strung. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The new Luddite movement • Financial Times

Camilla Cavendish:

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Fear and distrust of AI has grown substantially since the release of ChatGPT over three years ago. Half of Americans now believe that AI will reduce our ability to form meaningful relationships, and almost three quarters feel AI development is moving too fast, according to YouGov. In the UK, a new King’s College London study finds only 24% of citizens think AI is positive for humanity and a third of university students believe that AI will eliminate jobs fast enough to provoke civil unrest. The students who booed ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt’s graduation address this week may be first to mount the barricades.

It might help if we asked what society actually wants from this transformative technology. What problems could it solve for the benefit of all? Could we employ AI to finally crack the problem of nuclear fusion, to bring abundant clean power in a world being rocked by climate change? Or to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, a source of so much human misery? Yet companies devote more time launching consumer products than talking about such quests.

There is also an opportunity to make public services more efficient. AI can relieve social workers, doctors and nurses of form filling, boost personalised learning and speed up information delivery.

Despite the chance to use AI for good, the reality is that things are spinning out of control. The tech bosses feel compelled to go faster, despite being fully aware of the risks. Anthropic’s claim that its latest Claude Mythos model was too dangerous to release to the public has one upside: it has shown how close the world could be to an AI accident. The White House’s proposed new executive order on AI safety may be only voluntary, but it shows the libertarians are waking up.

…the Luddites were against not just the new technologies but the lower pay and poor working conditions which came along with them. Strong arguments can be made for workers to collaborate with AI, not be replaced by it: this has already happened in radiology. If politicians want to give at least some reassurance to citizens they should ban civilian autonomous vehicles. There are simply too many people who rely for their income on driving jobs, and the benefits of replacing them are unconvincing.

Nerdy geniuses who wax lyrical about science fiction don’t help, by conjuring dystopias whose common theme is the loss of human control. As the most visible incarnation, it’s hardly surprising that data centres have become the focus of public discontent.

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The hate of data centres really is interesting, and it’s probably right that their visibility makes them the focus of all the disquiet about everything else around AI – the job loss possibilities, the occasional anger about copyright that they hear from creators, and so on.
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AI-slop, GrantaGate and bad writing • Tuhin’s Substack

Tuhin Chakrabarty:

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The last two days have been a bit crazy, thanks to a certain short story published in Granta magazine that has now been awarded a prize by the Commonwealth Foundation. Nabeel Qureshi was the first on my feed to highlight that it was AI-generated. As I write, his tweet has 1.5M views which is roughly 1.4M more than anything I have ever written. For us fortunate, or if I may say unfortunate, professors whose inboxes are inundated by AI-written emails, it is not exactly detective work to recognize that this short story was completely AI-generated.

Pangram’s AI detection confirmed this. For those who don’t know me, I should admit I am a bit of an AI-detection maximalist, so obviously I got into arguments on X with people who were quick to dismiss the detection results and insist detectors don’t work.

Now putting that aside, a journalist from El País asked me yesterday, “Why did we suddenly decide, as in the case of this award, that a text is AI-generated when there’s no reliable detection tool available?” My reply was brief. I pointed to the stylistic tics and patterns prevalent in AI writing. Last year I won a best-paper honorable mention award for writing a paper characterizing idiosyncrasies in AI writing. It should not be surprising that I, of all people, have now been trained on an inordinate amount of AI slop.

A few days ago, my very smart PhD student came up to me with a point that stuck with me. In her words, bad AI writing, or low-quality AI writing, can be attributed to how much text it memorized from pre-training. Kind of a brilliant hypothesis. After all, LLMs are not conscious. They do not have a perfect sense of embodiment. They are autoregressive models that generate text by sampling, more or less, from a very large pile of things other people wrote. In simpler terms, it is what my colleague Najoung Kim (a linguistics professor at BU) calls word salad.

Last year we wrote a paper, now accepted to ICLR, on how seemingly novel n-grams are often nonsensical or non-pragmatic. There are perfect examples of this in the short story. Consider certain phrases: “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” or “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Like, what does it even mean?

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Chakrabarty’s insight is that in “creative writing”, LLMs stitch together little bits of their training data and throw it back at you.
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AI is learning to fly airplanes — and aviation is starting to embrace it • CNN

Pete Muntean:

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The small Cessna Caravan accelerates down the runway and climbs into the air, all while the pilot beside me keeps his hands off the controls.

“Let’s see those jazz hands,” jokes Tim Burns, chief technology officer at startup Merlin Labs, over the airplane’s intercom from a back seat.

On this flight, test pilot Matt Diamond in the left seat beside me is not controlling the airplane at all. Many of the normal tasks of piloting are instead being handled by artificial intelligence.

I am, legally speaking, a test subject — even the airplane is labeled “experimental.” The Merlin Pilot system handles much more than a traditional autopilot, using a natural language processing model to listen to instructions from a mock air traffic controller and responding over the radio using a computerized female voice. Test pilot Diamond says, “Authorize,” and the airplane begins turning to a new course.

As a pilot myself — and admittedly a bit of a control freak — surrendering control to a computer did not come naturally. But the demonstration is an important one as more aviation companies are looking to AI to usher in a new evolution in air travel by using it to automate tasks for pilots and perhaps one day enable fully autonomous flights.

Our flight is taking place as airlines worldwide are facing a growing pilot shortage. Boeing estimates that carriers will need more than 600,000 new pilots over the next two decades. At the same time, aviation safety officials are confronting increasing pressure on an already strained air traffic control system following a series of high-profile close calls and deadly accidents in recent years.

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Self-driving cars, self-flying aircraft?
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Ebola outbreak now third largest recorded and “spreading rapidly” • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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The Ebola outbreak erupting from the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to escalate wildly, with cases nearing 750, deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced, the World Health Organization reported in a press briefing Friday. The latest numbers already place the outbreak as the third largest on record, though it was only first reported a week ago, on May 15. And WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the outbreak is still “spreading rapidly.”

A revised WHO assessment has moved the risk level from “high” to “very high” at the national level, while risk remains “high” at the regional level and “low” at the global level, Tedros added.

WHO officials have acknowledged that a delay in detecting and responding to the outbreak enabled it to balloon, and that they are now racing to get ahead of the virus.

WHO representative Dr. Anne Ancia spoke during today’s briefing from the DRC, saying that when officials got to the area, they found the virus was “already rampant and silently disseminating for a few weeks already.” In the outbreak investigation so far, the earliest known suspected case was in a health worker, who developed symptoms on April 24 in Bunia, the capital city of Ituri. WHO only got word of a potential outbreak on May 5, with news of a cluster of deadly, unidentified infections that led to the deaths of four health workers. By the time a WHO team arrived, there were already 80 cases.

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*puts head in hands* Not now, Ebola
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Number of air conditioned UK homes doubles to more than 4m in three years • The Guardian

Zoe Wood:

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An estimated 4m homes in the UK now have air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago as Britons complain of “unliveable” conditions during high temperatures.

Portable units with power ratings around 1kW are slightly more common than the more powerful built-in versions that can guzzle 2.7kW of power – more than an electric oven.

Experts suggest the increase in ownership is the result of more people working from home and rising summer temperatures. Some of the UK’s warmest summers have been in recent years, and the UK’s hottest day was in July 2022, when temperatures hit 40ºC.

Aria Toupchi, who runs London air conditioning specialists Debonair Cooling, said demand for its cooling systems, which cost about £2,500 per room, was coming from owners of both period and new-build properties. “They are struggling to sleep at night, or have children with breathing problems,” he said, adding that loft conversions were also posing problems. “I’ve seen loft rooms go up to 50 degrees C. It’s unliveable.”

The government’s climate advisers said in a report this week that British homes would need air conditioning to survive predicted levels of global heating, as measures such as drawing curtains, opening windows and growing trees for shade were unlikely to be enough.

Air conditioning should be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next 10 years, the Climate Change Committee said in its findings on adapting to the impacts of global heating. With heatwaves expected to exceed 40ºC in all parts of the UK by 2050 and about nine in 10 UK homes were likely to overheat.

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It’s been baking this weekend. People with heat pumps might be able to cool their houses as well as heat them?
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Škoda DuoBell: a bicycle bell that outsmarts even smart headphones • Škoda Storyboard

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The redesign of a safety feature that is more than 100 years old originated from a simple need. “Bicycle bells have remained almost unchanged for over a century, but the world around them has not. Škoda DuoBell is the first bell ever designed to penetrate noise-cancelling headphones. It is a smart analogue trick that outsmarts the artificial intelligence algorithms in these headphones. It is a small adjustment that will improve safety on city streets,” said Ben Edwards from AMV BBDO, the agency involved in developing the concept. The idea was also supported by the agency PHD, while production company Unit9 contributed to the development of the prototype. 

The number of cyclists in major cities worldwide is increasing. For example, in London, the number of cyclists is expected to surpass the number of car drivers for the first time in history this year. At the same time, however, the risk of collisions between cyclists and inattentive pedestrians is also rising. In 2024 alone, according to data from Transport for London, the number of such incidents increased by 24%.

This trend is partly driven by the growing popularity of headphones equipped with active noise cancellation, which reduce pedestrians’ ability to perceive and respond to their surroundings. In the streets of London, up to half of pedestrians wear such headphones. Many of them are so effective that even the ringing of a conventional bicycle bell does not penetrate them. 

The response is DuoBell: an analogue solution to a digital problem – a fully mechanical bell that deceives smart headphone algorithms and significantly increases the likelihood that pedestrians will detect its sound. 

The key to the success of the new design lay in understanding how noise-cancellation algorithms in headphones operate and how they can be overcome. Scientists from the University of Salford, in collaboration with Škoda Auto, therefore conducted one of the first studies to examine how ANC technology affects the audibility of traditional bicycle bells. 

Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz. The bell therefore emits sound at this frequency. It also features an additional resonator (hence the name DuoBell), tuned to a higher frequency, and, thanks to a specially designed hammer mechanism, produces rapid and irregular strikes. This generates sound waves that ANC algorithms are unable to process quickly enough to suppress. 

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This feels like a variant of the old joke. Man drives into a petrol station with his Skoda. “Would you give me a petrol cap for my Skoda?” he asks the owner.

The owner thinks for a moment, then says “OK, it’s a fair trade.” (There is a YouTube video. It sounds like a bicycle bell.)
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Bluesky says Kremlin is hacking its platform to spread propaganda • The New York Times

Steven Lee Myers:

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Ben Gilbert describes himself on Bluesky, the social media app, as an “economist, lit and guitar nerd, rugby fan, owner of excessive pets.” A professor at the Colorado School of Mines, he rarely posts, but when he does, the subjects reflect his expertise in natural resources.

So it was odd when a video purporting to be a news report appeared on his account last month, blaming France’s financial and political support for Ukraine for police staff shortages at home.

Without his knowledge, Mr. Gilbert said, he had fallen victim to Russia’s latest tactic to try to spread its propaganda in the West.

His account, like hundreds of others on Bluesky, had been hijacked and used to post fake news articles, according to the company and researchers at Clemson University working with a collective of internet monitors who track Russian influence operations and call themselves the dTeam.

The compromised Bluesky accounts included those of people who are influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous. They were journalists and professors, a pollster in Texas, an anime artist and a filmmaker in Hollywood, whose account posted a video doctored by artificial intelligence to impersonate a Canadian police official criticizing France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson linked to the Social Design Agency, a company in Moscow, shows how Russia continues to seek new ways to erode public support for Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022.

Bluesky has grown more prominent as a rival platform to X since X’s owner, Elon Musk, threw his political support behind President Trump before the 2024 election. With 42 million users, though, Bluesky trails far behind X’s nearly 600 million.

While Russians have long flooded social media platforms with fake accounts and content, hacking into real accounts appeared to be a novel strategy.

«

Amazing that Russia thinks Bluesky accounts are worth hacking at all. Perhaps there are so many MAGA types on Twitter that they don’t think it needs doing there. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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What do Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems truly mean? • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

»

In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms.

I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how the 25-year-old Austrian logician and mathematician did such a thing, and then writing a rundown of his proof in fewer than 2,000 words. (My wife, when I reminded her of this period: “Oh yeah, that time you almost went crazy?” A slight exaggeration.)

But even after grasping the steps of Gödel’s proof, I was unsure what to make of his theorems, which are commonly understood as ruling out the possibility of a mathematical “theory of everything.” It’s not just me. In Gödel’s Proof (opens a new tab) (a classic 1958 book that I heavily relied upon for my account), philosopher Ernest Nagel and mathematician James R. Newman wrote that the meaning of Gödel’s theorems “has not been fully fathomed.”

Maybe not, but six decades have passed since then. Where are we with these ideas today? Recently, I asked logicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and one physicist to discuss the meaning of incompleteness. They had plenty to say about the implications of Gödel’s strange intellectual achievement and how it changed the course of humanity’s unending search for truth.

«

Gödel’s work is very abstract, and yet as this article shows, there are implications in it about the limits of what physics (which relies on maths) can tell us about the universe.
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Fender wins legal battle over Stratocaster shape in Germany: is it the end for S-type guitars in the EU? • Guitar.com

Cillian Breathnach:

»

Fender has claimed victory in a recent intellectual property case in Germany against a Chinese guitar manufacturer, stating that its win in the case sets a new legal precedent that strengthens Fender’s protection over the Stratocaster shape.

The case was against the Chinese-based Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co., and took place in the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany. According to Fender, the decision made by the court agrees with Fender’s claim that the company had imported guitars that “reproduced” Fender’s Stratocaster body design, and that the design in question is not just a functional trademark but is instead a “a copyrighted work of applied art”, according to German and European law.

Aarash Darroodi, Fender’s general counsel and chief administrative officer, said in a press release: “This ruling is a meaningful affirmation of the Stratocaster as an original creative work and an important step in continuing to protect the integrity of Fender’s designs and intellectual property. It reinforces our commitment to originality, supports fair competition, and helps ensure that when players encounter these iconic Fender guitar shapes, they can trust the craftsmanship, quality, and heritage behind them.”

While the ruling is clearly bad news for Yiwu – a Chinese maker that seems to primarily sell budget guitars and other instruments via AliExpress and other online marketplaces – the potential wider impact of the case is yet to be tested.

«

Meanwhile in the US:

»

Fender has laid down the gauntlet in its protection of the Stratocaster body shape, sending a cease and desist to a US firm, ordering it to stop production of its S-style electric guitars.

As per documents obtained by YouTubers Phillip McKnight and Tone Nerd, Fender sent the cease and desist letter via its lawyers, Bird & Bird, to a small family-run guitar company based in the US, LsL Instruments.

The letter is allegedly part of a number of cease-and-desists sent to a range of US-based builders ordering them to halt production. McKnight claims to have heard from at least half-a-dozen firms who have received such correspondence.

«

Iconic guitar shapes! Who’d have thought it would take this long for Fender to take this sort of action. Gibson, the other big name in guitars, is doing something similar.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ships stranded in the strait of Hormuz are succumbing to barnacles and jellyfish. CC-licensed photo by Curtis Gregory Perry on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Scraping by. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods • TechCrunch

Sean O’Kane:

»

Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.

One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.

“Safety is Waymo’s top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped,” the company said in a statement.

Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.

«

Even humans struggle with how to drive well in floods, so that’s not entirely shocking. Even so, it demonstrates how big the gap is between ambition and reality for self-driving cars.
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Incoming Ofcom chair vows to take on ‘tech bros’ • The Guardian

Michael Savage and Dan Milmo:

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Ofcom’s incoming chair has vowed to take on the “tech bros”, as he conceded there was now a perception the regulator had been complacent and slow over concerns about online safety.

Ian Cheshire, the former Channel 4 chair who has secured the job overseeing the technology and media regulator, also told MPs he had personal concerns about the impact of social media on under-16s.

During a hearing before the science, innovation and technology select committee, Cheshire was asked directly about whether he would take on the powerful tech companies that dominate the online world.

“Yes,” he said, adding: “It is the area I want to probe and understand, because I think there is clearly a perception that it has been either complacent or slow or both.”

However, he suggested Ofcom needed to be clear about what it could and could not achieve in terms of policing tech platforms. He said he wanted the platforms themselves to come together and demonstrate they wanted to do more.

He said: “I think there are some questions about the practicality of what speed to do … because I think there are slightly more constraints.

“If expectations are up here and the delivery is here, I think Ofcom has to take it on the chin to work out how to communicate that and say: ‘What’s the maximum we could do?’”

While he said limiting social media for children was a matter for the government, he said: “I am personally – as a parent and grandparent – very nervous about social media under 16 personally, but I wouldn’t want to impose that as a political or an Ofcom view.”

«

OK, but how is he going to take on the tech bros without the support of the government? How will he do it without a proper budget to take them on in the courts, and at the internet level, and at the legislative level? Talk is cheap; proper regulation takes multi-agency effort, as the failure of the Environment Agency to tackle fly-tipping and water pollution (separately) shows.
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Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees as it transforms around AI • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Raffaele Huang:

»

Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles, according to an internal memo and people familiar with the matter.

Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, told staff last month that the coming layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. In a follow-up memo on Monday, she said it would also move a separate 7,000 staffers into new AI-focused roles and transition a number of managers to individual contributor roles as part of the reorganization efforts. 

Individual employees in Asia and Europe began receiving notifications that they would be affected early in their mornings, followed hours later by employees in the Americas, the people said.

In a memo to staff Wednesday morning, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg thanked laid off employees for their contributions and called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.”

“This is the most dynamic I have seen our industry. I’m optimistic about everything we’re building,” he said. “But success is not a given.”

Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.

«

Of course the stock went up, because why not. Replacing humans with machines and watching every keystroke of those who remain? What’s not to like, from the stock market’s view?
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GLP-1 use has more than quadrupled since 2021 as obesity rates continue to show signs of decline • Epic Research

Epic Research:

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Semaglutide (Wegovy, Ozempic) received FDA approval for chronic weight management in 2021, followed by tirzepatide (Zepbound) in 2023, both demonstrating substantial weight loss in clinical trials.2,3 Demand has grown rapidly, raising questions about real-world uptake, prescribing patterns across clinical indications, and whether population-level BMI distributions are beginning to shift in response.

The GLP-1 utilization tracker reports prescriptions per 100,000 patients for each GLP-1, and the BMI tracker reports the distribution of U.S. adults across BMI categories.

GLP-1 prescribing has grown substantially across the tracker’s window, with prescriptions per 100,000 U.S. adults rising from 1,884 in the second quarter of 2021 to 8,819 in the first quarter of 2026. The composition of GLP-1 prescribing changed markedly over the period.

In 2021, the most prescribed agents were semaglutide (about 680 per 100,000) and dulaglutide (about 790 per 100,000). By the first quarter of 2026, tirzepatide had become the most frequently prescribed agent at roughly 4,700 prescriptions per 100,000 patients, and semaglutide had grown to around 3,900 per 100,000. Use of older agents declined as the newer drugs displaced them.

BMI distribution has shifted modestly toward lower weight categories over the same period, with the change concentrated in the second half of the period. The share of U.S. adults classified as obese was 42.3% in the second quarter of 2021 and remained near that level through 2022 before declining to 40.7% by the first quarter of 2026. Over the same window, the healthy weight share rose from 25.1% to 25.6%.

«

There’s a graph showing usage taking off on a straight line. These drugs are going to be everywhere in a decade.
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AI tool has “saved a lot of aircraft” in Epic Fury, AFSOC chief says • C4isrnet

Hope Hodge Seck:

»

The head of Air Force Special Operations Command revealed that an AI-powered intelligence collection and transfer system has been in use since the “first day” of Operation Epic Fury to help large attack drones and manned aircraft avoid Iranian threats.

Speaking at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley said “necessity had been the mother of invention” in spurring the service to apply available machine learning tools to combat operations.

“On the first day, they realized that our MQ-9 [Reaper drones] and other aircraft were at risk in a very hostile environment, and they were able to take some smart people, use artificial intelligence tools, and put humans on the loop, instead of in the process the whole time, and move Top Secret national-level intel,” Conley said, referring to his “small team” of AI and tech specialists.

The process of moving intelligence would have taken human operators “20 to 30 minutes to get that to a crew, into a cockpit, or into a ground control station,” he said.

Instead, Conley said, nine crew members were able to use AI “bots” to convert applicable data to a Secret clearance level and make it available in the cockpits of aircraft — all within two to three seconds.

«

Good that the US is demonstrating the flexibility it needs. Still not sufficient, though: at least one F-35 was shot down. And the US is clearly worried about the potential of Iran’s drones.
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Barnacles and jellyfish infest ships trapped in the Gulf • Financial Times

Alice Hancock:

»

Ships trapped in the Gulf are accumulating barnacles, algae and jellyfish as the Middle East conflict drags on and temperatures begin to rise, impeding their ability to eventually exit the region.

At least 800 merchant ships are still stranded in the Gulf following the outbreak of fighting on February 28 with about 20,000 seafarers left on board to perform routine maintenance duties.

But the Gulf’s shallow sandy seabed and warm waters have put ships at anchor or adrift there at risk of sand and sea creatures clogging up gratings that protect the vessel’s internal pipework. Seafarers are also struggling to get hold of critical parts when systems have broken down.

“What happens is that if you don’t move, if the vessels stay out of speed just basically drifting and these are warm waters, you have a lot of fouling growing and that is probably happening for the moment for our vessel,” said Lasse Kristoffersen, chief executive of Wallenius Wilhelmsen, the car carrier company that currently has one ship stuck in the Gulf.

Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive of Hapag-Lloyd, told the shipping line’s podcast recently that the one vessel it managed to transit out of the strait of Hormuz, which has been in effect shut to most shipping traffic since the beginning of March, had to travel much slower because of the drag created by barnacles.

“The main surprise was the amount of fouling we had on the ship because the ship had been in water of about 30 degrees C for six to eight weeks so then you see there was a lot of stuff that gets attached to the ship that you really don’t want to have attached to the ship,” he said.

«

So many side effects. These will need some sort of drydock when this clears.
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Context rot: the emerging challenge that could hold back LLM progress • Understanding AI

Timothy B. Lee:

»

relatively soon, we’re going to bump up against fundamental limitations of the attention mechanism underlying today’s leading LLMs.

With attention, an LLM effectively “thinks about” every token in its context window before generating a new token. That works fine when there are only a few thousand tokens in the context window. But it gets more and more unwieldy as the number of tokens grows into the hundreds of thousands, millions, and beyond.

An analogy to the human brain helps to illustrate the problem. As I sit here writing this article, I’m not thinking about what I ate for breakfast in 2019, the acrimonious breakup I had in 2002, or the many episodes of Star Trek I watched in the 1990s. If my brain were constantly thinking about these and thousands of other random topics, I’d be too distracted to write a coherent essay.

But LLMs do get distracted as more tokens are added to their context window — a phenomenon that has been dubbed “context rot.” Anthropic researchers explained it in a September blog post:

»

Context must be treated as a finite resource with diminishing marginal returns. Like humans, who have limited working memory capacity, LLMs have an “attention budget” that they draw on when parsing large volumes of context. Every new token introduced depletes this budget by some amount, increasing the need to carefully curate the tokens available to the LLM.

This attention scarcity stems from architectural constraints of LLMs. LLMs are based on the transformer architecture, which enables every token to attend to every other token across the entire context. As its context length increases, a model’s ability to capture these pairwise relationships gets stretched thin, creating a natural tension between context size and attention focus.

«

The blog post went on to discuss context engineering, a suite of emerging techniques for helping LLMs stay focused by removing extraneous tokens from their context windows.

Those techniques are fine as far as they go. But I suspect they can only mitigate the underlying problem. If we want LLMs to reason effectively over much longer contexts, we may have to fundamentally rethink how LLMs work.

«

In effect, this is scaling – the database thing – for LLMs. As token length grows, the computing demand grows exponentially rather than linearly. So you need something that will go linearly, at best.
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2026 World Cup: empty rooms & Fifa cancellations mean US hotels fear washout • BBC Sport

Dale Johnson:

»

The World Cup was supposed to provide a tourism boom for the US, but now the fear is it may never materialise.

A report produced by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) has found that bookings are well below expectations in almost every host city.

The AHLA said this does not align with Fifa’s statement that more than five million tickets have been sold and it creates a risk that “the anticipated economic lift may fall short”.

The AHLA is the largest hotel association in the US, representing more than 32,000 properties and over 80% of all franchised hotels.

Its report partially puts the blame at the door of Fifa, accusing world football’s governing body of block-booking far too many rooms for its own use and creating false demand.

This, the AHLA said, led to artificially high pricing which, after Fifa cancelled a large number of rooms, has been replaced by a vacuum of availability.

Fifa said it does not recognise this accusation.

Hotels said high match ticket pricing, local transport and tax costs, and the political backdrop have put visitors off.
For the hotels, this World Cup could fall flat.

…Up to 70% of rooms reserved by Fifa in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle have been cancelled, the AHLA said.

In a statement Fifa rejected the AHLA’s claims and said it had followed agreements made with hotel chains.

«

Fifa predicted it would create 185,000 jobs and add $17.2bn in GDP. Looks like that’s not going to happen, with just three weeks left to the first kickoff.
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All those AI note takers? They’re making lawyers very nervous • The New York Times

Sarah Kessler:

»

Productivity powered by artificial intelligence is all the rage. Skipping meetings and sending an A.I. note taker instead has been called “the latest office power move.” Wallet-size recorders that use AI to log live interactions have become a product category. And at least one CEO has endorsed the idea of adding an AI board member. (Maybe one programmed to behave like Warren Buffett?)

But to lawyers like [Jeffrey] Gifford, inviting an A.I. bot to meetings introduces a ticking time bomb of legal risk.

AI-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded.

In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable. Even worse, say corporate lawyers: Sharing the meeting with an AI bot may void attorney-client privilege, making conversations that would not otherwise be subject to discovery fair game in a lawsuit.

The New York City Bar Association issued a formal opinion on AI note takers last year, urging lawyers to “consider whether recording, transcribing and summarizing is tactically well advised in the particular circumstances” and to advise clients using such tools “of the disadvantages of doing so.”

One concern is accuracy. An AI transcript could, for example, record “does matter” as “doesn’t matter.” If that sentence comes up in court years later, the mistake may be difficult to remember.

Corporate lawyers also worry about AI note takers’ lack of context and discretion. For example, recording every word of a board meeting, no matter how tangential the remark, could be legally perilous.

“You want to make sure that the minutes, if they get into a courtroom, are going to not only be accurate but also are going to have the emphasis that the board would like,” said Doug Raymond, a partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath.

«

That loss of priviliege is potentially colossal.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The mathematician Paul Erdős posed many fascinating problems for his peers – and now OpenAI has solved an important one. CC-licensed photo by Erik on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Plane to see. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google Search as you know it is over • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centred around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
 
The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.

Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.

«

Flashback: “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right?” That was Larry Page, in October 2000.

The problem is that if Google doesn’t send any search traffic to websites, why should those websites exist – or, more importantly, why anyone should update them if they don’t get visitors. Except there will always be a need to update sites. Is Google proposing to effectively become the web? That might be biting off too much to chew ever.
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Former Samsung boss predicts the memory crisis could be over in the second half of 2027 • PC Gamer

Jeremy Laird:

»

the former president of Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor division says that memory prices could fall starting in the second half of next year thanks to a “surge” in manufacturing capacity in China.

Speaking at the National Academy of Engineering in Seoul, South Korea, Kyung-Hyeon Kye said, “Chinese companies are aggressively expanding their production capacity.” The result will be a “surge” in memory supply in the second half of 2027 or early 2028.

What’s more, he warned that not only will memory supply increase, but demand could decline after 2028. “If the return on investment for Big Tech decreases relative to capital investment, there is a possibility of reduced investment,” Kyung-Hyeon Kye said. Korea must therefore prepare for the “post-super boom.”

His argument seems to be that demand for memory chips could tail off if the AI industry doesn’t start making money rather than just spending it. Ironically, this raises the prospect of the memory crisis being followed by the mother of all memory gluts.

As we’ve reported before, the major players in memory manufacturing outside of China are in the midst of increasing manufacturing capacity. China, by this account, is set to add dramatically to that capacity.

If the AI bubble goes pop and the huge added demand for memory chips suddenly goes with it, there will be an awful lot of memory capacity looking for customers.

«

The spike/decline timeline for demand sounds reasonable, though the possibility of the AI bubble popping seems far more likely. And that will leave a great deal of RAM looking for buyers.
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Vibe coding is coming to your phone • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

For starters, Google is making it easier to just straight up vibe-code a whole Android app. At I/O the company announced an update to its AI Studio vibe-coding tool, allowing you to create a native Android app and export it to a phone in a matter of minutes. The feature is limited to “personal utility” apps to start with, and the rules for putting an app on the Play Store remain the same. But if you’re the kind of person looking for a particular feature from a habit tracking app that none of them seem to offer, you might just be able to build it yourself.

If a whole app feels too ambitious, then maybe a widget is more your speed. At last week’s Android Show, Google announced an upcoming feature to create your own widgets with a prompt — Google’s examples include widgets that highlight certain weather metrics or suggest new recipes to try.

…Google calls the AI-generated widgets a first step toward something called a “generative UI,” where your phone creates an interface and apps on the fly based on what you need in the moment. Sounds great in theory! But it also sounds like it could get messy fast. Android president Sameer Samat acknowledges that there’s a pretty obvious way to take the concept too far. “While I don’t think we want to wake up every morning and have our devices have different UI, I do think there’s a level of personalization and customization to the user that could be delightful,” he tells me.

It seems like Apple might be taking steps toward a more personal iPhone, too. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the company is working on a way to create Shortcuts based on prompts. Shortcuts are automations you can program within the dedicated Shortcuts app, either by putting them together from preassembled bits or figuring it out on your own. They seem simple in theory but get complicated fast, which has deterred me from ever seriously getting into Shortcuts. But the prospect of prompting my way into a Shortcut that opens the transit app when I get to the bus stop, or sets a particular Focus mode when I connect to my home Wi-Fi, is pretty appealing.

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The oil shock is coming for America • Financial Times

Amos Hochstein was a senior adviser to Joe Biden in June 2022, when petrol prices hit $5.02 per gallon for the first time ever:

»

The national average gasoline price has now surpassed $4.50 per gallon. Two simultaneous crises are compounding in ways we did not experience four years ago.

The first is physical disruption. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed more than 12m barrels per day from the global supply. The IEA has called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history. This is not hyperbole.

The second is the refinery conundrum. Jet fuel crack spreads — the difference in price between jet fuel and crude oil — have reached a record $80 per barrel, well above the $60 peak in 2022. Because a barrel of crude oil yields only three to four gallons of jet fuel versus 19 to 20 gallons of gasoline, that extraordinary margin is pulling refinery capacity towards aviation fuel. The result defies normal market logic: gasoline production has declined by approximately 340,000 barrels per day compared with a year ago, even as prices rise and refineries run near full capacity.

According to the Energy Information Administration, US motor gasoline stocks have been drawn at approximately 4mn barrels per week in recent weeks, with the deficit to the five-year average now nearly 11mn barrels. The all-time record low, not seen since the EIA began tracking in 1990, could be reached as early as mid to late June.

The tools that worked in 2022 have already been deployed. The US committed to releasing 172m barrels from the reserve as part of the International Energy Agency’s co-ordinated response. It has already released approximately 80m barrels, leaving stocks at approximately 374m barrels. With refineries skewed towards jet fuel, additional crude releases will not translate into more gasoline with the same efficiency they once did. The reserve is not just smaller. It is a blunter instrument.

The production response has also already occurred. US crude and petroleum product exports reached a record 12.9m barrels per day in late April, with daily oil product exports hitting an all-time high of 8.2m barrels in May. There is no incremental surge waiting. That lever has been pulled.

Last week’s inflation numbers signal that consumer energy prices are running hotter and longer than the Federal Reserve had assumed. What they do not capture is what comes next. Energy prices feed into the core consumer price index with a lag of several weeks. The pump pain of May will translate into inflation figures in July and August. The 30-year Treasury yield has risen to the highest level since the financial crisis and the 10-year Treasury yield is already rising. Mortgage costs, corporate borrowing rates and the cost of financing national debt all move with it.

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We still can’t figure out what sort of havoc, or semi-havoc, we’re going to see.
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An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry • OpenAI

»

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?

This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.

Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdős’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians. They have also written a companion paper explaining the argument and providing further background and context for the significance of the result.

The result is also notable for how it was found. The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics, scaffolded to search through proof strategies, or targeted at the unit distance problem in particular.

…This result marks an important moment in the interaction between AI and mathematics: an AI system has autonomously resolved a longstanding open problem at the center of an active field. It also offers an early glimpse of a new kind of collaboration between AI and human mathematicians. In this case, the companion work by external mathematicians paints a substantially richer picture than the original solution alone.

«

This is starting to get interesting. The problem (and solution) means nothing to me, or probably you, but mathematicians have a talent for finding applications for their discoveries to the real world.
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Nobody asked for this Washington Post podcast • The New Republic

Parker Molloy:

»

Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24% year over year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6% over the same period. CNN was up 3%. The Post is in its own category.

The Post has shed paying subscribers in waves. About 250,000 canceled after Bezos killed the [Kamala] Harris endorsement in October 2024, per NPR. More than 75,000 followed in February 2025, after Bezos announced the section would run on “personal liberties and free markets.” More cancelled in the weeks after February’s mass layoffs.

What’s in the opinion section instead: op-eds about the mayor of New York. The editorial board has published more than 10 of them this year alone, per Status. Recent entries: “Mamdani meets economic reality,” “Mamdani shows how to sidestep a $5.4 billion deficit,” and “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” One current Post staffer told Status: “There’s this bizarre obsession with Mamdani. We’re not even local.”

Regular readers know I’ve written before about how Bezos has gutted the newsroom his opinion section is now embarrassing. I’m not going to repeat that here.

The Post’s own newsroom is reporting on this. On May 9, the news side published a long piece by Drew Harwell about the Daily Wire’s collapse. Same trend Bezos’s opinion section is part of. Same owner paying for both the autopsy and the corpse.

Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber count has gone backward or sideways in 15 of the past 16 months, per Social Blade data cited by Harwell. Web traffic to the site fell to half its prior-year level in March 2026. Ben Shapiro’s own YouTube views are down nearly 70% since December 2024. The company has cut 13% of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro himself confirmed to Harwell that revenue fell from 2024 levels.

The Daily Wire reportedly spent $3m per episode on a seven-episode fantasy series called The Pendragon Cycle, per Harwell. Its dedicated YouTube channel has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. In November, the Daily Wire put Shapiro’s face on Times Square billboards to campaign for a Golden Globe podcast award. He wasn’t nominated.

«

Things are bad all over, but they’re especially bad for right-wing outlets – which in some ways the Washington Post has become.
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Europe EV sales leap as Iran war pushes up petrol pump prices • Reuters

Christina Amann, Marie Mannes and Nick Carey:

»

Demand for electric vehicles in Europe has surged as high fuel prices linked to the Iran war propel sales of new and second-hand EVs, data exclusively shared with ​Reuters shows, providing a much-needed boost to the auto industry.

Although sales of fully electric cars grew 30% across Europe in 2025, EV adoption on the continent has lagged industry expectations. Carmakers from Volkswagen to Fiat-owner Stellantis (STLAM.MI), opens new tab, which had invested heavily in expectation of much higher EV demand, have over the last year booked multi-billion-dollar charges to cover asset writedowns.

Buyers’ calculations have been transformed by an upsurge in international oil prices to well above $100 a barrel since U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran at the end of February unleashed a wider conflict and led ​to unprecedented energy supply disruption.

“This isn’t a blip, it’s an inflection point,” said Gurjeet Grewal, CEO of UK-based Octopus Electric Vehicles, which registered a 95% year-on-year ​increase in demand for new EVs and 160% rise for used EVs in April.

As a net importer of energy, Britain has been particularly exposed to increases in inflation and food prices.

Across Europe, data provided to Reuters by research group New Automotive and industry group E-Mobility Europe, showed registrations of new EVs rose ​34%, year-on-year, in April.

The data covers 16 markets that account for more than 80% of European Union and European Free Trade Association car sales.

It showed strong EV growth in ​Denmark and the Netherlands, where electric cars are already popular, but also in markets such as Italy, where EVs have been slow to take off.

«

Once the feature articles about these new EV buyers start coming in, it’ll be illuminating to see how many switched away from perhaps buying fuelled cars, or whether they just jumped at an opportunity when they weren’t going to buy a car otherwise.
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UK Treasury pushes supermarkets to cap food prices • Financial Times

Ashley Armstrong:

»

The UK Treasury is pushing large supermarkets to introduce voluntary price caps on key groceries in return for lifting some regulations, according to people familiar with the situation.

Supermarkets have reacted furiously to the proposals, under which grocers would agree to identify and cap the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk.

In return, the government has said it would offer “incentives” to the supermarkets, which the people briefed on the matter said could include easing packaging policies and potentially delaying costly changes to rules around healthy food. Some of these measures, such as the packaging regulations, generate revenue for the Treasury.

The Treasury has suggested to the supermarkets that they reinvest the savings to freeze grocery prices. One person close to the situation said that officials were working with retailers to keep prices down.

The proposals come as Sir Keir Starmer’s government is battling to address public concern over the cost of living.

«

UK inflation actually fell in May, by 0.5 percentage points, but the government can see that the Iran war is going to have big whiplash effects in the near future. It also postponed a fuel tax rise, because that’s going to hit pretty soon as well. And meanwhile, there’s no sign of Trump figuring out how to extricate the US from its absurd Chinese finger trap in the Middle East.
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BBC boss tells staff he will use data to build “satnav around bias” • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

»

The BBC‘s new director general has revealed that he plans to use data to improve impartiality, and has warned that iPlayer is not doing a good enough job of showcasing the corporation’s content.

In his first address to staff on his second day in office, former Google executive Matt Brittin said that he wanted to use data to build a “satnav around bias,” according to audio from the all-hands meeting obtained by Deadline.

He said the BBC could deploy technology to analyse its news and content to establish patterns in output. Brittin said this could mean assessing how often the BBC uses certain words, or analysing the types of contributors appearing across its programming.

He did not expand on how the technology would be built, but it will likely lead to speculation that the BBC could use AI to achieve his aim of mining data. Brittin is a vocal proponent of artificial intelligence, and his experience at Google was attractive to the BBC’s board when recruiting for Tim Davie’s successor.

“Stories and data together are the way to understand the world,” Brittin said. “[This is] not to audit people, but as a kind of satnav around bias or sat nav around these topics … So that’s where I think I’d try to complement our brilliant expert teams.”

The comments are interesting because Brittin has not put impartiality at the forefront of his agenda after being unveiled as director general. He did not explicitly reference impartiality in his three priorities for the BBC, which was a break from his predecessor Davie, who put the issue front and centre in his first days in the job.

«

“How often the BBC uses certain words” is an absolute tell for someone who has no idea about what news involves (back in the day, Google realised that excluding “the” from search would speed up its index enormously, which had the side effect of rendering the music outfit The The effectively invisible).

While he’s dead right about iPlayer, which is woefully bad at surfacing stuff you might like from the gigantic archives, the idea of a “satnav around bias” just sounds bonkers. He’s clearly feeling his way in the dark around a giant house.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Overall, airlines are a lossmaking business. Yet there’s plenty of money to be made. Why doesn’t the industry work? CC-licensed photo by Can Pac Swire on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Primed for takeoff. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Americans oppose AI data centres in their area • Gallup

Jeffrey Jones:

»

Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centres for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favour these projects, with 7% strongly in favour.

These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data centre construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. These data centres house computing equipment that helps power AI technology used by businesses, universities and other institutions. The centres cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.

The data centre question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data centre construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.

The March survey asked people to rate their level of concern about the environmental impact of AI data centres: 46% say they worry a great deal and 24% a fair amount, largely mirroring the degrees of opposition to data centre construction.

…Americans who favour the building of a data centre in their area mostly cite the potential economic benefits. Opponents of data centres have more varied reasons for their position, but they focus mostly on environmental concerns.

Half of opponents mention data centres’ excessive use of resources, including 18% each mentioning their use of water and energy; 16% mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution.

«

Opposition is higher than it ever was for a nuclear power plant. That’s quite an achievement for something which has absolutely minimal risk and should be income- and job-generating for an area: the tech bros have utterly pissed in the pool. Yet concern about future job losses or Terminators is minimal – single-digit percents.

Even so, these concerns won’t go away by saying “don’t worry”. The tech bro industry has a problem.
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Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz – Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Iran claims it will charge US tech companies fees for using undersea Internet cables that run beneath the contested Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes. The war has already halted multiple projects and led to the suspension of cable repairs in the region—and the latest Iranian threats may accelerate efforts by Big Tech and Gulf countries to find alternative routes for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz’s digital chokepoint.

The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We will impose fees on internet cables”, Zolfaghari wrote in a May 9 post. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters.

But Tasnim and Fars, both Iranian state-linked media channels, laid out more detailed proposals on how Iran could charge license fees to US tech giants for the use and maintenance of undersea cables carrying regional Internet traffic, according to The Guardian. For example, the Tasnim plan described charging tech companies—specifically naming Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—license fees for cable usage while also claiming that Iran alone has the right to repair and maintain the subsea cables.

More than 99% of international Internet traffic runs through the global network of undersea cables that crisscross various oceans, connecting continents and islands. The major active cables running through the Strait of Hormuz primarily serve the Gulf countries in the region. They include the Asia Africa Europe-1, FALCON, and the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research organization.

«

The Iran “war” – really, an unprovoked attack by the US and Israel on the country in the hope of decapitating the regime, an aim that utterly failed – will be seen in the future as having finally shifted the balance of power away from the US. Suddenly, everyone’s the Mafia, pointing out that you’ve got a nice undersea cable there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
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The strange reason nearly all humans are right-handed • The Brighter Side of News

Hannah Shavit-Weiner:

»

Roughly nine out of 10 people favor their right hand, a pattern so common it can feel almost invisible. Yet in evolutionary terms, it is deeply strange. No other primate species comes close to showing such a strong, consistent population-wide bias.

A new analysis suggests that this familiar human trait may have grown out of two of the biggest changes in our evolutionary history: standing upright and growing a larger brain.

Researchers led by the University of Oxford examined handedness across 41 species of monkeys and apes. They drew on data from 2,025 individuals. Their results, published in PLOS Biology, suggest humans no longer look like an outlier once two factors are taken into account. These two factors are brain size and the relative length of the arms compared with the legs, a standard marker tied to bipedalism.

That matters because human handedness has long resisted easy explanation.

Scientists have spent years tracing its roots in genes, brain specialization and development. Hand preference seems to begin early, possibly even before birth, and it becomes more established over time. But none of that has fully answered the bigger question of why humans, unlike other primates, ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed in the first place.

«

The PLOS paper basically boils down to “we dunno, maybe it’s this, because primates with smaller brains that aren’t upright don’t do this”. There doesn’t seem to be any clear gradient in handedness as one moves through the primates. Handedness remains a mystery: it seems to be a combination of genetics, biology and environment. Which genes, which biology, what environment? We don’t know.
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Sam Altman backs “micropayment” model for AI agents to compensate publishers • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

Late last month, Sam Altman sat down with Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, for a podcast episode of Re:think, the publication’s marketing and branded content studio. One clip has been making the rounds on social media the past couple days. In a rare moment, Altman was asked point blank by a media executive what he thinks the future of publishing will look like on the web. His answer, in short: micropayments. To be clear, payments made by AI agents, not readers directly (Elon Musk and others have proposed that idea before, and there are a lot of reasons it hasn’t taken off).

In a caveat at the top of the conversation, Thompson said he would leave many of the most “controversial issues” that he wanted to ask Altman about to “journalists at The Atlantic.” But for one brief moment, Thompson did ask the OpenAI co-founder how he thought media companies can survive the decline of traditional search, and the rise of AI agents, who may browse the web on a human’s behalf.

…The micropayments model is not merely a hypothetical, but one already being explored by a host of Silicon Valley startups and more established Internet infrastructure companies. Tollbit collects “digital tolls” for AI bots, monetizing every access and scrape. Prorata.ai compensates publishers proportionally for how much their IP shows up in AI answers. And last summer, Cloudflare launched its pay-per-crawl marketplace to facilitate these transactions for the roughly 20% of all websites that use its services.

Altman’s answer is an indication that OpenAI may be moving toward these emerging business models for news publishers.

«

I still do not think that micropayments for publishing will ever work. The reason is simple: you’d get a race to the bottom (my site is cheaper! My site is even cheaper! Wait, my site is free, with ads!) and the malware which would extract money or sign people (or agents) up to subscriptions on the sly would explode. It’s yet another of those things that I believe Won’t Happen Despite Being Extremely Desirable, and it goes into the drawer alongside nuclear fusion and quantum computing. (OK, the desirability of quantum computing isn’t that obvious.)
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ArXiv to ban researchers for a year if they submit AI slop • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

»

ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. 

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”

Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. 

Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule—meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned—but that decisions will be open to appeal.

…AI-generated, fabricated citations are a huge problem in research. A recent study by Columbia University researchers examined 2.5 million biomedical papers across three years, and found that one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 contained fabricated references; In 2023, it was one in 2,828, and in 2025, one in 458.

«

This is going to be fun to watch. Will there be time to go back over submitted research to see whether those contain AI slop too?
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The three cylinder problem: when AI models choose beauty over truth • Rabdology

Robert Ghrist et al:

»

Here is a problem that a good geometry student can solve in twenty minutes. We gave it to four of the world’s most advanced AI models and watched what happened. Three of them got it wrong — and the way they got it wrong tells you something different about the state of AI mathematical reasoning than the usual benchmarks.

Consider a cube of side length 2, aligned with the coordinate axes. Place three cylinders inside it, each of height 2 and radius R, each aligned with some coordinate axis. The cylinders may not intersect. What is the maximal R?

The problem is clean; the setup is elementary. You could explain it to anyone who has taken geometry.

If you assign one cylinder to each axis — one along x, one along y, one along z — you get a beautiful configuration. The three cylinders nestle into the cube like the bones of a Steinmetz solid, each touching the other two tangentially, each grazing the cube’s faces. The maximal radius under this arrangement is R = 1/2. The geometry is tight, symmetric, and satisfying. Every constraint binds simultaneously. It is the kind of answer that makes you think you are done.

You are not.

«

This was tested against AI models in January and February; they didn’t get the optimal solution. By May, they did. The blog is the work of Rabdos, which seems to be founded by high-level mathematicians.
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‘The Future of Truth’ contains quotes made up by AI • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in the statement. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”

“The Future of Truth” was published by an imprint of BenBella Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. BenBella Books, which operates independently of Simon and Schuster, did not respond to a request for comment. Simon and Schuster declined to comment.

«

We’re in the early stages of this sort of thing, so of course you’re going to get the egregious egg-on-face examples. But really, you’d think that–oh, never mind. Of course he didn’t. And here’s where it got really bad: one of the made-up quotes was attributed to Kara Swisher, the doyenne Silicon Valley journalist. That’s a mistake on a par with calling a Great White shark vegetarian to its face.
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Why airlines are always going bankrupt – David Oks

David Oks:

»

…explanations that cite shocks or bad management [for airlines’ inability to make money, collectively, in the long term] either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

…One of the central ideas in the study of cooperative games is the idea of the core. The “core” of a game is simply the set of outcomes that no coalition of players can improve upon by breaking away and dealing among themselves. If an outcome is “in the core,” it’s stable, such that nobody can propose a side deal that makes every member of some subgroup better off; if the core is “empty,” then every arrangement is vulnerable to being undercut by some side-coalition, and the market has no resting point, no stable equilibrium. It cycles, destabilizes, and, without outside intervention of some kind, eventually breaks down.

Airlines are the classic example of an “empty core” industry: an industry that is structurally incapable of reaching competitive equilibrium. But why is it that airlines have an empty core, while other industries—ones that also have plenty of competition, but converge on healthy margins and stable prices—don’t?

«

The answer is subtle, but seems to boil down to: the industry can’t support an integer number of airlines. X is too few; X+1 is too many. Whatever X happens to be. (Via John Naughton.)
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Google’s Android-powered laptops are called Googlebooks, and they’re coming this year • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Google says it designed Googlebooks from the ground up with Gemini Intelligence, and it all starts with the cursor. Google calls this the Magic Pointer. Just wiggle the cursor back and forth, and it will activate a full-screen Gemini experience. The AI will see what’s on your screen so it can make contextual suggestions and pull in data from multiple apps.

What can you do with that? Well, it’s all a bit vague. Google’s demos show how Magic Pointer can be used to select multiple images and instantly combine them with Nano Banana. Google also says you can use the cursor in AI mode to do things like suggest a calendar appointment simply by pointing it at the date in an email. Magic Cue, which has been available on Pixel phones since last year, will also be part of Googlebooks. This feature can recommend actions and surface information based on context like messages and emails.

There’s definitely a problem with discoverability in AI features, but it’s uncertain how many useful things generative AI can do with screen context. The best Microsoft could manage was Recall, and we all know how that went. So far, Google’s Magic Cue on phones hasn’t been a game changer—in fact, it rarely shows up at all. Can a laptop do any better?

«

Open question. Also, who’s using laptops these days, and to do what? Also: do schools, which have been a major buyer of Chromebooks, really want this stuff built in to distract pupils?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The collective noun for owls is a “parliament” – but how did they, and other animals, get their collective nouns? CC-licensed photo by Heather on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Thinking about it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Jury rejects Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

»

A federal judge dismissed all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI on Monday after a jury found that he exceeded the statute of limitations in a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company.

The decision is an outright win for OpenAI in a trial that pitted Musk against the maker of ChatGPT and two of the men with whom he co-founded the company in 2015: OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after a conflict with Brockman and Altman over who would control the organization. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

After a three-week trial in Oakland, California, that featured hundreds of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Musk, Altman and a parade of former OpenAI executives and board members, the jury deliberated for just two hours.

…“It is a major pie in the face for the world‘s wealthiest man. He had top legal counsel, and to lose on statute-of-limitations grounds is extremely embarrassing,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a corporate litigation lawyer who was not involved in the case. “Conversely, this is a massive win for Altman, who went toe-to-toe with the world’s wealthiest man and won.”

OpenAI had argued in court that Musk’s lawsuit was motivated in part by a desire to hurt a competitor to his own, for-profit AI venture, xAI, founded in 2023.

Hours after the verdict was read, Musk criticized the judge’s decision in a post on X, his social media platform, and said he would appeal. “This illustrates why the ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent,” he wrote. “She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”

«

Except that the jury accepted OpenAI’s argument that Musk had known about the proposed change since 2021, which gave him plenty of time to raise proper objections. Musk’s Trumpian whining is absolutely typical: do it wrong, and complain.
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Tipping point looms for global energy crisis • Financial Times

Malcolm Moore, Sam Fleming and Jonathan Vincent:

»

Nearly 80 countries have now introduced emergency measures to protect their economies as the world approaches a new, more dangerous phase in the energy crisis driven by the Iran war.

Governments are stepping up their responses ahead of a looming tipping point, when traders warn that oil prices could jump again sharply unless more fuel trapped in the Gulf can be exported through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

Paul Diggle, chief economist at fund manager Aberdeen, said his team was now examining a scenario where Brent crude rockets to $180 a barrel, causing surging inflation and recessions in a host of European and Asian countries.

“We are taking that outcome very seriously,” he told the FT, adding that it was not yet his base case. “We are living on borrowed time.”

Demand for air conditioning and holiday travel at the start of the northern hemisphere’s summer will put further strain on supplies of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, when global stocks are already falling at the fastest rate on record.

Australia has pledged to spend $10bn to boost its fuel and fertiliser stockpiles, while France has said it will “change the scope and scale” of its support to shield its economy from the crisis. India has urged the public not to buy gold or holiday abroad as it tries to shore up its reserves of foreign currency.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the number of countries that have already been forced into emergency measures has reached 76, up from 55 at the end of March.

Economists and traders warn the next phase of the crisis could bring another sharp jump in energy prices, broader fuel rationing, industrial shutdowns and a significant slowdown in global growth. 

If the Middle East conflict “does not end in the coming weeks and we don’t have the reopening of the Hormuz strait, I’m afraid a world recession could be on the table”, the EU’s transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas told an FT conference in Athens on Thursday.

«

The crunch will come with holiday long-haul flights, surely.
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BBC staff strike as new director general warns of ‘tough choices’ on his first day • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director general, has warned staff that “tough choices are unavoidable” under his tenure, as his first day coincided with a strike by a group of the corporation’s journalists.

Brittin, formerly Google’s most senior executive in Europe, arrived at the corporation’s New Broadcasting House while a group of journalists from the World Service’s Newshour and Radio 4’s The World Tonight were picketing in response to a plan to increase their workloads.

…Brittin, who will address staff on Tuesday, has been spending the last few weeks visiting various parts of the BBC. Insiders say he has shown particular interest in the costs of production as he begins the task of finding budget cuts of 10%.

In a message to staff, Brittin – who replaces Tim Davie – said his visits had “underlined just what an extraordinary, priceless asset the BBC is for all of us”.

However, he also suggested he would push for the BBC to make some dramatic changes in how it delivers its programming as digital platforms such as YouTube and TikTok become more prominent.

“The BBC has proved throughout its history how quickly it can reinvent itself to serve the needs of audiences – from restructuring for World War II to repurposing during Covid to spinning up services in conflict zones,” he said. “We need, collectively, to call on that sense of urgency now. That means moving with velocity and clarity.

“Excellence at the BBC has always been founded on great, creative storytelling and brilliant, independent journalism. Today it also means making sure we get the right stories in the right formats on the right platforms.”

«

That “stories/formats/platforms” quote is going to become a mantra, without doubt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that means lots more short video posted on social platforms, and AI doing the “writing” of textual content that goes on the website based on the transcript. The atomic unit of journalism is going to become the camera-captured video short.
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Everything’s probably fake now • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Using N3on’s video metrics we can do some back of the napkin math and say that it currently costs about $1 million a month to generate around 600 million combined views across 35,000 videos. Roughly, $28 a video or about $1 per 600 views, depending on how you want to look at it.

Which is a much bigger budget than what mainstream media outlets can spend on their own shortform video. Probably why the glut of pearl-clutching clipping features from big outlets sound so panicked.

…Over the weekend, I came across what looked like, to me, a tweetdecking or clip-sharing operation run out of Rwanda. A group of Verified users all sharing random viral videos with one-line captions that, almost always, don’t make any sense. I reached out to a few accounts and one user, going by @whotfisrw, actually got back to me.

@whotfisrw identifies online as a student at the University of Rwanda, but they told Garbage Day that sharing video clips is their job. They said they often get paid to post videos and that the bulk of those offers come from AI companies. “Usually it’s either a fixed payment per post or a short-term promo arrangement depending on reach and engagement,” they said. They declined to share how much they’re making from sharing videos. Their X account is tagged with Ryne AI, a “humanizer” that can “pass” AI detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero. They said it’s more of “affiliation,” rather than “a full corporate thing.”

They said they got Verified “mainly for credibility and branding” because they wanted their account to look more “established and trustworthy.” As for where they get the videos they’re sharing, aside from paid posts, they said they usually just reshare whatever they see on X. “I mainly post directly on X, though sometimes I source clips or inspiration from other platforms and communities,” they said. “I do interact and collaborate with other accounts sometimes — mostly through reposting each other’s content, sharing ideas, or helping boost posts.”

It’s all, ultimately, not that deep. “If you’re underemployed and you’re just spending all your time watching the internet all day anyway, like this is a con. This is like a way you can make money, for sure,” Bernstein said.

But also none of this even new. Shadowy digital marketing firms and scammers and propagandists have been flooding the zone with shit — and been paid to do so — for over a decade now. The only thing thing that is new, I’d argue, is that there are more users now like @whotfisrw than there aren’t and, apparently, a whole bunch of young internet users who seemed to have been believing everything they saw on their video feeds up until like a week ago.

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Big media organisations like the BBC, though, might have a faint chance in this?
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More than 100 UK datacentres plan to burn gas to generate electricity • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.

British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an “interesting question” about the UK’s climate targets.

“There’s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,” said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem. “Clearly that’s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn’t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.”

Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.

Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions. Silvia Simon, the head of research at Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK’s natural gas suppliers, said the group had received “more than 100” requests for gas connections from datacentre operators in the past two years.

These requests amounted to more than 15 terawatt hours of energy each year, she said: enough to power London for roughly four and a half months. “Gas networks are seeing a lot of interest from datacentre developers looking to secure a gas connection,” she said. “Not just for resilience, but for primary supply. So this is already an indication that they’re really struggling to get through to the electricity networks.”

Governments and big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into a frenzied and ambitious AI programme.

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It feels like we just about got past bitcoin and all the other proof-of-work cryptocoins, and saw the threat they posed to our electricity mix ameliorated, and now we have this – far worse, and with the eager approval of governments which think buildings full of computers are a brilliant job creation scheme. How can people be this daft?
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Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

The AI systems approved for Ontario healthcare providers routinely missed critical details, inserted incorrect information, and hallucinated content that neither patients nor clinicians mentioned, according to a provincial audit of 20 approved vendors’ systems.

The findings come from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, Canada, and are included in a larger report about the state of AI usage by public services in the province. They specifically address the AI Scribe program, the Ontario Ministry of Health initiated for physicians, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals across the broader health sector.

As part of the procurement process, officials conducted evaluations using simulated doctor-patient recordings. Medical professionals then reviewed the original recordings alongside the AI-generated notes to evaluate their accuracy.

What they found was, frankly, shocking for anyone concerned about the accuracy of AI in critical situations. 
Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly “fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings. According to the report, evaluators spotted potentially devastating incorrect information in the sample reports, such as no masses being found, or patients being anxious, even though these things were never discussed in the recordings.

Twelve of the 20 systems evaluated inserted incorrect drug information into patient notes, while 17 of the systems “missed key details about the patients’ mental health issues” that were discussed in the recordings. Six of the systems “missed the patients’ mental health issues fully or partially or were missing key details,” per the report. 

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And of course this is inherent in the systems. This isn’t what they’re intended to do. So they don’t do it.
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A parliament of owls and a murder of crows: how groups of birds got their names, with wondrous vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith • The Marginalian

Maria Popova:

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I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?

Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species — “a fall of woodcock” references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, “a watch of nightingales” pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth’s most musical bird, and “a gaggle of geese” turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler’s mother could be tried for witchcraft, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality — an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: “a murder of crows” alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

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Barnes basically made many of these up, as far as anyone can tell; there’s no obvious etymology that connects them. For flamingos, you can choose between “a stand” or “a flamboyance”.
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The case against quantum computing • IEEE Spectrum

Mikhail Dyakonov:

»

We’ve been told that quantum computers could “provide breakthroughs in many disciplines, including materials and drug discovery, the optimization of complex systems, and artificial intelligence.” We’ve been assured that quantum computers will “forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape.” We’ve even been told that “the encryption that protects the world’s most sensitive data may soon be broken” by quantum computers. It has gotten to the point where many researchers in various fields of physics feel obliged to justify whatever work they are doing by claiming that it has some relevance to quantum computing.

Meanwhile, government research agencies, academic departments (many of them funded by government agencies), and corporate laboratories are spending billions of dollars a year developing quantum computers. On Wall Street, Morgan Stanley and other financial giants expect quantum computing to mature soon and are keen to figure out how this technology can help them.

It’s become something of a self-perpetuating arms race, with many organizations seemingly staying in the race if only to avoid being left behind. Some of the world’s top technical talent, at places like Google, IBM, and Microsoft, are working hard, and with lavish resources in state-of-the-art laboratories, to realize their vision of a quantum-computing future.

In light of all this, it’s natural to wonder: When will useful quantum computers be constructed? The most optimistic experts estimate it will take five to ten years. More cautious ones predict 20 to 30 years. (Similar predictions have been voiced, by the way, for the last 20 years.) I belong to a tiny minority that answers, “Not in the foreseeable future.” Having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed-matter physics, I’ve developed my very pessimistic view. It’s based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work.

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I was writing articles about quantum computing about 25 years ago, when we were assured it was definitely just five or ten years away. Maybe 15. And it still is. I’m with Dyakonov here. Quantum computing is like fusion: all that promise, kept out of reach by damnable physics. Perhaps it’s one of those “40 to 45 years” things, as in this fabulous Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse sketch.
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Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? • The New Stack

Darryl K. Taft:

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A new report on the state of the PHP programming language shows that there is an emerging skills gap as fewer early-stage developers have PHP knowledge.

Although PHP continues to be a popular open-source language for web application development, the recently released Perforce 2026 PHP Landscape Report indicates that there is increasingly a struggle for organizations to find and retain skilled PHP talent.

The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.

In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

One industry analyst agrees. “We’re also seeing a skills gap as a serious risk for companies that are increasingly leaning on agentic processes to generate and maintain operational code,” Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group, tells The New Stack.

“This isn’t just a PHP problem. It’s an open source problem,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce Zend and OpenLogic, in a statement. “Organizations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult.”

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Once upon a time it was COBOL. Now it’s PHP, which has taken over that role as the underpinnings of daily life. I’m sure AI coding will be able to fix all the bugs though! 🤞
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The city of Wellington, NZ, is as far from the Equator as which famous US city? Now you can find out. CC-licensed photo by DVincentNZ on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Return to base. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Fire and ‘sheer volume’: how Britain’s 6m-vape problem is putting recycling under strain • The Guardian

Sarah Marsh:

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It is 2pm and Ana, 47, has just started the afternoon shift at the Suez recycling plant near Birmingham city centre, standing beneath a sign reading “Non-ferrous sorting station” with a bucket of vapes in front of her. Sorting and dismantling them is part of her job as a site operative.

Recycling them is not simple. Each bucket holds between 40 and 50 devices, and over the course of a shift, she gets through about half a bucket. Using a hammer, she has to smash each vape open, pry out the batteries and separate each component into a different container.

Single-use vapes were banned in June last year, but more than 6m vapes and vape pods are still being discarded every week in the UK. Waste management companies say the sheer volume is straining recycling systems, while hidden lithium-ion batteries inside the devices are causing fires.

As Ana works, a burst of sugary scent fills the air; she doesn’t worry about the vapes exploding, she says, it’s never happened to her yet. But while vapes may not be hazardous at this stage of the sorting, they can become dangerous when crushed or damaged, such as during waste collection and storage.

In 2025, there were 670 fires at Suez’s UK sites. Of those, 368 were confirmed to be caused by batteries or vapes, with a further 176 suspected to be linked. Those working at the sites say people simply do not understand that vapes cannot be thrown away, or think – wrongly – that they can be recycled alongside household products. Instead, they need to be taken to dedicated electrical recycling points.

“Vapes were suspected as the cause of over 80% of the reported fires across our sites last year, with the numbers and trend continuing so far in 2026,” says Dr Adam Read, the chief sustainability and external affairs officer at Suez.

“This is despite the ban on disposable vapes coming into effect halfway through 2025. With more than 6m vapes still thrown away every week, it is clear that the perception on these items remains that they are a throwaway item. The problem is that people often don’t realise the danger that batteries cause when not disposed of correctly, and think they are doing the right thing by putting them in with their recycling.”

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My guess is that more disposable vapes are thrown away than put into recycling, and that both numbers far outweigh the correctly done set.
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Pancreatic cancer just met its match • Works In Progress

Ruxandra Teslo:

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For most of the last half-century, a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76% reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.

A few days after Sasse’s interview, in April 2026, Revolution Medicines announced Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib showing the drug had roughly doubled survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer compared to standard chemotherapy. For a disease where median survival has long been measured in months and where little had changed for decades, that result represents a genuine turning point.

But the significance extends beyond pancreatic cancer. Daraxonrasib is among the first drugs in an emerging generation designed to target RAS, a protein implicated in roughly a quarter of all human cancers and long considered beyond reach, in all its mutant forms. And it belongs to a broader class of medicines, molecular glues, that are beginning to show what becomes possible when drugs no longer depend on finding a ready-made pocket in their target. Several compounds in this class are now in clinical development, each probing a different protein that previous generations of drugs could not touch.

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This is enormously encouraging. Quietly, we are making huge strides in treating previously unbeatable diseases. Pancreatic cancer is a fast killer: normally it’s six months from diagnosis to death. (Steve Jobs had a different form from the rapid killer version.)

And this is also very good science writing – of the kind that one used to hope to find in colour supplements and science magazines, but probably wouldn’t nowadays.
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Checkmate in Iran • The Atlantic

Robert Kagan:

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Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [from those in Vietnam or Afghanistan]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf states; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.

…As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

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Kagan has long been a notorious hawk, which means that this admission by him of all the failures of Trump’s misadventures in Iran carry more weight. And it boils down to: Iran now wields significant power in the Middle East; China is rising fast.

And the strait of Hormuz is still not open. (Gift link.)
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Welcome to the personal software revolution • The Verge

David Pierce:

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The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.

AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.

Robin Sloan, an author and technologist, wrote a blog post in 2020 entitled “An app can be a home-cooked meal.” The post has been shared widely in AI circles over the last couple of years, though Sloan wrote it well before the crop of generative AI tools. In it, he explains why he built a simple messaging app for his family. “There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us,” he wrote. “It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision.” Five years later, in late 2025, Sloan updated his post: “I have changed literally nothing in the app, and it’s glorious.”

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Sloan’s blogpost is worth reading too, because it captures a desire we all feel when we use an app: why does this have so many other things I don’t need? Why can’t I strip this down to just what I want? And the idea that you can just throw together something for a few people’s use is very attractive.
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OpenAI feels “burned” by Apple’s crappy ChatGPT integration, insiders say • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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OpenAI is reportedly exploring legal options after Apple’s ChatGPT integration into its products didn’t live up to the AI firm’s expectations.

When the deal was announced, Apple likened features linking Siri to ChatGPT to its now-infamous deal embedding Google search in the Safari browser, insiders granted anonymity to discuss the “strained” partnership told Bloomberg. And the promise of that excited OpenAI, which expected the deal “could generate billions of dollars per year in subscriptions,” an OpenAI executive granted anonymity to discuss the partnership told Bloomberg.

Instead, OpenAI suspects Apple intentionally failed to promote the integration and fears that the deal may have damaged the ChatGPT brand, sources said.

Specifically, OpenAI hates how Apple designed the integration, sources said. Particularly bad was the choice forcing Apple users summoning Siri to also “specifically invoke the word ‘ChatGPT’ when speaking or typing a command,” sources said. That makes it harder for users to access the features, OpenAI apparently feels. And Apple’s other choices, like using small windows providing limited information when responding with ChatGPT outputs, seems to ensure that users can easily ignore the features, sources said.

As the OpenAI executive explained, Apple didn’t fully explain how the integration would work when the deal came together, so OpenAI took a “leap of faith” it now appears to regret.

“When we heard about this opportunity, it sounded amazing: being able to acquire a giant number of customers and have distribution in such a big mobile ecosystem,” the executive said, attempting to explain why OpenAI was willing to enter the arrangement blind. Since then, efforts to renegotiate the deal have “stalled,” Reuters reported. And, supposedly due to feeling “burned,” OpenAI has declined to enter other partnerships to work on Apple’s AI models, Bloomberg reported.

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The problem for OpenAI is that shunning Apple is unlikely to give it better access. It’s going to struggle to get ahead of Gemini, and for smartphones, that leaves.. Apple. Suing Apple isn’t likely to make that go any better either.
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Parallel Cities

Admit it: you’ve always wanted to know which cities were on the same parallel (latitude) across the globe, and also which ones were on the exactly opposite distance from the Equator.

And now you can find out! The results for London, both “same as” and “opposite” surprised me. And who would have guessed that New York is the same vertical distance from the Equator as.. Wellington, New Zealand?
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Google denies breaching law by promoting suicide forum linked to 164 UK deaths • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK, where it is supposed to be banned.

The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.

However, a link to the website still appears in Google’s search results allowing users with basic software to circumvent the block and access screeds of advice on suicide methods.

Google’s promotion of the site, not named by the Guardian, was raised by the Molly Rose Foundation, an online safety campaign. Its chief executive, Andy Burrows, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you search for it by name it will still come up in search results – a clear-cut breach of the act, but on that matter Ofcom has so far declined to take action.”

The site listed by Google was the second entry beneath a link to Samaritans. The associated url links to a page where the forum’s operators say access has been “voluntarily restricted to users in the United Kingdom due to legal risks associated with the UK Online Safety Act 2023”.

However, it includes the website’s address, which can then be used to access the full site using VPN software that simulates being a computer based in a different country.

When set to simulate internet access from the US, Germany and France, the full forum was easily accessible, including detailed advice on the efficacy of various methods of suicide.

…Adele Zeynep Walton, whose sister Aimee Walton took her life after accessing the site, said: “Families like mine have been agonisingly waiting for action against the website that took our loved ones and at least 164 UK lives. While we’ve waited, further lives have been lost and we’ve had to fight every step.”

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My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.

But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Prodigy probably thought there was no positives that could come out of responding to that. And it was right. (Gift link.)
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Software developers say AI is rotting their brains • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed. 

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. 

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There’s a certain irony to this, no? The people cutting away the ladders for all the other professions feel they’re doing exactly that to themselves.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of the resin used in printed circuit boards (PCBs) has risen dramatically due to shortages caused by, guess what, the Iran war. CC-licensed photo by David Lenker on Flickr.

The Overspill will be on a two-week break from next week. Next edition Monday May 18, if all goes to plan.

A selection of 11 links for you. Wired up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI outperforms doctors in Harvard trial of emergency triage diagnoses • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency department doctors have long been popular heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up the scrubs?

A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and death moments when people are first rushed to hospital.

The results were described by independent experts as showing “a genuine step forward” in the clinical reasoning of AIs and came as part of trials that tested the responses of hundreds of doctors against an AI.

The authors said the results, published in the journal Science, showed large language models (LLMs) “have eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical reasoning”.

One experiment focused on 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read – typically including vital sign data, demographic information and a few sentences from a nurse about why the patient was there. The AI identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of cases, beating the human doctors, who were right only 50%-55% of the time.

It showed the AIs’ advantage was particularly pronounced in triage circumstances requiring rapid decisions with minimal information. The diagnosis accuracy of the AI – OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model – rose to 82% when more detail was available, compared with the 70-79% accuracy achieved by the expert humans, though this difference was not statistically significant.

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Going to make for a very boring TV series, though. Still a role for paramedics, at least.
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The Pulse: token spend breaks budgets – what next? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

»

Last week, we covered the slightly perverse trend of “tokenmaxxing” across the industry, where devs run agents with the sole aim of boosting their personal “token stats” in an effort to rank higher on internal token leaderboards, and not be seen as a Luddite who doesn’t use AI tools enough compared to peers.

This week, I spoke with a software engineer at a large company and another at a seed-stage place. Both shared almost identical stories: at their latest all-hands, company leadership expressed concerns about the fast-rising costs of tokens. At both places, token spend has increased by ~10x in the last six months – with no signs of slowing down.

I wanted to find out about this trend, so I talked to devs at 15 businesses. Below is what I learned about what’s happening in workplaces of all sizes. Names are anonymized.

…Fintech company, US+Europe, late stage, ~5,000 people. Staff engineer: “Some developers are now spending $500 a day (!!) on Claude Code. Practically speaking, this means that employee costs have doubled. Productivity has increased, in my view, but now the bottleneck is code reviews. AI can spit out code quite quickly, but we still have human reviews in place. Leadership encourages using AI for code review, but my team will not blindly trust AI.

“The push from AI is coming from the top. This year’s performance review had a section on AI, rating devs by how well they used AI, so this is another reason everyone just uses it as much as they can.”

…Series A, US, ~50 people. Principal Engineer: “About 15 devs are heavy users of AI and costs are rising very fast. Almost everyone uses Claude and Claude Code. We are considering four potential options: Increase AI budget, and start measuring more. Continue doing what we are, but allow devs to use more tokens instead of hiring limits. The precise ROI is hard to quantify, but we’ll start to measure and track both AI adoption and impact. Optimize token consumption. Use cheaper models for simpler tasks, review token usage, and see where we can cut usage. Downside: this approach could become one with diminishing returns, fast. Integrate more AI providers in the company. Find wrappers to abstract LLMs. The problem is: how do you replace Claude Code, for instance? Or pivot to local models: such as Kimi, Qwen, and so on. The problem is it’s a big investment in high-end hardware or cloud GPUs. Upside: it offers better long-term cost control, once done.

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The post is full of such stories. The demand is there. But let’s see what happens once the new set of prices come in. But “the precise ROI is hard to quantify”? Not the most encouraging phrase.
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Iran war disrupts the circuit board supply chain, raising costs for tech firms • Reuters

Che Pan, Liam Mo and Hyunjoo Jin:

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The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supplies of crucial raw materials and pushed up prices of the printed circuit boards (PCB) used in almost all electronic devices, from smartphones and computers to AI servers, industry sources and executives said.

The disruption is a fresh blow to electronics manufacturers which are already grappling with soaring memory chip costs and highlights the broadening impact of the ​Iran war that has wreaked havoc on supply chains, plastics, and oil supplies.

Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex in early April, ​forcing a halt in production of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin — a critical base material used to manufacture PCB laminates.

SABIC, which accounts for approximately 70% of the world’s high-purity PPE supply and operates in the Jubail complex on ​the Gulf coast, has been unable to resume output, severely tightening the availability of the material worldwide, according to one source. Shipping ​in and out of the Gulf has also been severely disrupted by the war.

PCB prices have been climbing since late last year, driven by a growing appetite for AI servers. Demand has been accelerating sharply since March as manufacturers scramble to secure raw material supplies and soften the impact ​of skyrocketing costs, three industry sources told Reuters.

In April alone, PCB prices surged as much as 40% from March, Goldman Sachs ​analysts said in a recent note. Cloud service providers are willing to accept further increases as they expect demand will outstrip supplies over the coming years, they added.

The global PCB industry is projected to increase by 12.5% to reach $95.8bn in 2026, according to a recent report from Prismark.

Daeduck Electronics, a South Korean PCB maker whose customers include Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and AMD, has begun discussions with customers over price increases, a senior executive at the company told Reuters.

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Inflation in the price of technology components is just going mad. None of this helps it at all. Prediction: the strait of Hormuz doesn’t open before July. (That’s eight weeks away. So far it’s been closed eight weeks. Good explainer from June 2025 about its relevance.)
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How AI killed student writing (and revived it) • The New York Times

Dana Goldstein:

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In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.

Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.

This transformation is happening across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League.

The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative AI is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since AI has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.

Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. Over the past year, AI use has become ubiquitous among American students. Between May and December of 2025, the share of American middle school, high school and college students who reported regularly using A.I. for homework increased from 48% to 62%, according to polling from RAND — even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills. A third of the students reported using AI to draft or revise writing.

…“The standard curriculum was a thesis-driven research essay that students completed on their own time outside of class,” said Marc Watkins, who directs the AI Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi. “That is, unfortunately, gone.”

…One April afternoon in her AP literature class, Ms. [Jessica] Binney read aloud “XIV,” a poem by the St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. It describes the poet and his brother as children, trekking into the Caribbean forest to listen at the feet of a traditional storyteller.

Walcott’s language is lush and challenging. Students marked up paper handouts of the text, underlining and scrawling in the margins. Then they took out notebooks and began to draft essays analyzing literary devices.
“I want you to write out a really rough, terrible draft in your writers’ notebooks,” Ms. Binney told them. “And then I want you to scratch it out and rewrite it.”

There was nary a laptop or tablet in sight. For these juniors and seniors, who have been taught on screens for much of their schooling, Ms. Binney’s class can be a welcome break.

“It’s a relief,” said Cassady Tondorf, 17. “There’s less distraction.”

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Dispute over fate of Kenyan workers who saw Meta AI glasses films • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

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Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya-based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses.

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.

Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.

Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out. Meta has not addressed that allegation but told BBC News in a statement it had “decided to end our work with Sama because they don’t meet our standards”.

Sama has defended its work.

“Sama has consistently met the operational, security and quality standards required across our client engagements, including with Meta,” it said in a statement. “At no point were we notified of any failure to meet those standards, and we stand firmly behind the quality and integrity of our work.”

In late February, Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Goteborgs-Posten (GP) published an investigation which included the accounts of unnamed workers who had been asked to review videos filmed by Meta’s glasses. “We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker reportedly said.

At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI. It said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.

However, the revelations have prompted regulators to act.

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One suspects that the standards Sama didn’t meet were those saying “don’t let your staff tell the press about our astonishing invasion of privacy that might get regulators involved”. The leopard doesn’t change its spots.
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Senators introduce bipartisan bill to ban Chinese vehicles and auto parts • NBC News

Allan Smith:

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A bipartisan Senate duo introduced a bill on Wednesday to ban the importation of Chinese-made vehicles and auto parts, weeks ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Sens. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., introduced the Connected Vehicle Security Act, which would ban automobiles, parts and vehicle software made in China or in partnership with China, as well as other adversarial nations, from the US market.

The Commerce Department last year issued a rule that restricted such vehicles and parts from the US market, but both Moreno and Slotkin spoke of the importance of codifying the effort into law. On Tuesday, more than 70 House Democrats signed a letter urging Trump to block Chinese automakers from the US market ahead of his meeting with the Chinese leader next month. In January, Trump suggested an openness to allowing Chinese automakers into the US market during a speech before the Detroit Economic Club.

In an interview, Slotkin said Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi was the impetus for introducing the legislation now.

“We are watching very closely what deals come out of that summit,” she said.

Moreno, who touted Trump’s support for US automakers, said he did not expect this effort to be on the agenda for Trump’s meeting with Xi, which is slated to take place in mid-May.

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You can understand not wanting to give up the entire vehicle manufacturing business to China, but without some subsidies it’s going to be a losing battle trying to sell abroad as EVs take over, which will mean a shrinking market inside the US. Blocking partnerships just seems perverse. The Chinese are now far ahead of the Americans with this generation of vehicles.
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Knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients, study suggests • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin:

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A common knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients and may lead to worse outcomes, a 10-year trial suggests.

The study tracked outcomes for patients treated for a meniscus tear, who were given a partial meniscectomy, one of the most common orthopaedic surgeries. Their trajectories were compared with patients who had randomly been assigned to receive “sham surgery”, in which no procedure was carried out.

Patients who had undergone the surgery, which involves trimming frayed meniscus tissue, did not appear to benefit and scored worse on a range of measures designed to measure knee function, pain and progression of symptoms.

Prof Teppo Järvinen, an orthopaedic surgeon and researcher at the University of Helsinki who led the study, said: “Our findings suggest that this may be an example of what is known as a medical reversal, where broadly used therapy proves ineffective or even harmful.”

The meniscus is a C-shaped, rubbery pad of cartilage in the knee joint that acts as a shock absorber between the thigh bone and shin bone. There are two in each knee.

A meniscus tear, in which the edges of the tissue become frayed, can occur due to a sudden twist of the knee while playing sport. Damage can also occur gradually over time and MRI scans often reveal meniscal tears in healthy people with no symptoms.

“We now know that these meniscal tears are very frequently found in patients with no symptoms,” said Järvinen. “Over the past 20 years, evidence has accumulated to suggest that most of these findings on MRI are purely incidental.”

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There have been previous papers which suggested this, also with randomised placebo/treatment trials, but this 10-year followup suggests that a lot of surgery is just pointless. (Apart from enriching surgeons.) As my GP said to me when I was discussing various pains, “surgeons like doing surgery”. It’s something to bear in mind, and to research carefully before going under any knife.
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Meta lost 20 million users last quarter • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for “Family daily active people” — the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger — declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months.

Meta attributes this fall to “internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia.” It’s up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across all its platforms, we can’t tell which ones are most impacted. If I wanted to obscure that a leading social platform was potentially haemorrhaging daily users, that’s certainly what I would do.

This drop comes as Meta says it’s increasing its projected capital expenditures for 2026 to a range of $125-145bn, $10bn more than previous estimates. This increased spending is driven by expectations for higher component pricing and, “to a lesser extent,” additional costs for future data centre capacity. This is a course correction, according to Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li, who said in the investor call that Meta had “underestimated our compute demand in the past.”

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The Reality Labs – remember wearables and VR? – had an operating loss of $4bn over the period. It’s an absolute money pit.

But the bigger question is: what’s all this AI compute for? It can’t be for social networks. That’s an honestly trivial use, and there are plenty of users who are bringing their own to that. So it must be that Zuckerberg thinks there’s an overarching need for AI, and particularly for Meta to control that AI, which would have to be somewhere completely outside what we think of as Meta’s ambit. When will we find out what that is?
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Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

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[Elon] Musk spent a lot of [Wednesday] painting this heroic picture of himself, and this morning, near the end of his direct examination, said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said he might have called someone a “jackass,” but only in the spirit of saying something like, “don’t be a jackass.”

Immediately afterward, [OpenAI’s defence lawyer William] Savitt baited him into being petty, irritating, and generally hard to deal with. At one point, we all watched Musk lose his temper. He spent hours quibbling over simple questions. Again and again, Savitt referred back to Musk’s deposition, where he’d answered questions slightly differently, calling Musk’s accounts into question. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.

Savitt’s cross-examination left the distinct impression that Musk quit his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he wasn’t going to get full control of the company, then tried to kneecap it and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51% of the shares. The other cofounders would get three seats, together, to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Though Musk said that the eventual plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was obvious that Musk had full control on the initial board of seven.

…He accused Savitt of asking questions that were “designed to trick me,” and we got multiple versions of this:

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Musk: You mostly do unfair questions.
Savitt: I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best.
Musk: That’s not true.

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Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during cross he’d easily answered during direct was annoying. Watching him refuse to admit he understood the nature of linear time — and therefore the fact that he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before he resigned in 2018 — was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.

«

Juries are meant to decide on the facts, but they’re human. Annoy them enough, and you’ll lose them in spite of everything. It’s not as if Musk has the greatest case anyway.
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Phony whistleblowers, fake journalists and cyber spies: ICIJ network targeted after China Targets probe • ICIJ

Scilla Alecci:

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In May 2025, Kuochun Hung, the chief operating officer of the Taiwanese media outlet Watchout, received an email from someone purporting to be Yi-Shan Chen, a well-regarded local reporter.

“Chen” claimed to be working for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and was requesting an interview with Hung on a range of topics: then pending impeachment proceedings against Taiwan’s president, the island’s divided government, and Watchout’s planned events with members of civil society groups.

Hung, whose media outlet monitors information manipulation, found the email unusual.

“The topic and questions in the invitation email [were] too entry-level for a senior journalist,” Hung told ICIJ. What’s more, Chen’s name was spelled in English, instead of the original Chinese, and the email address didn’t include ICIJ’s official domain.

Hung decided to find out more and started interacting with “Chen” on LINE, a popular messaging app in Taiwan.

The person, who used Chen’s name and photo in their handle, told Hung that an American journalist from ICIJ would meet him in Taipei for the interview and sent a link to what looked like an ICIJ webpage with the reporter’s photo. Hung noticed it wasn’t ICIJ’s real website. The fake Chen also sent Hung another link she said would direct him to a list of questions, adding: “For journalists, information security is truly very important,” a warning most journalists would find superfluous.

Hung didn’t click.

“I played stupid,” he said. “And then she gave up.”

…Now, an investigation by ICIJ, with the help of cybersecurity analysts at Toronto University’s Citizen Lab, has found that the incident was part of a sophisticated offensive strategy against ICIJ and its network following the 2025 publication of China Targets. The ICIJ-led exposé, in collaboration with 42 media outlets, revealed Beijing’s tactics to threaten, coerce and intimidate regime critics overseas.

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Being suspicious always rewards you in situations like this. The routine use of spyware – which that link almost certainly led to – is on a par in spying with the use of drones in hot wars.
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Copy Fail: 732 bytes to root on every major Linux distribution • Xint

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A single 732-byte Python script can edit a setuid binary and obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017.

The kernel never marks the corrupted page dirty for writeback, so the file on disk remains unchanged and ordinary on-disk checksum comparisons miss the modification. However, the page cache is what actually gets read when accessing the file, so the corrupted in-memory version is immediately visible system-wide. A local unprivileged user can turn this into root by corrupting the page cache of a setuid binary. The same primitive also crosses container boundaries because the page cache is shared across the host.

This finding was AI-assisted, but began with an insight from Theori researcher Taeyang Lee, who was studying how the Linux crypto subsystem interacts with page-cache-backed data. He used Xint Code to scale his research across the entire crypto subsystem, and Copy Fail was the most critical finding in the report.

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Xint is a security company (“AI-Powered Vulnerability Discovery for Source Code and Live Apps”) and this is a colossal discovery – probably in line with Heartbleed and similar open source vulnerability discoveries. There is a fix, but people need to apply it. Now there will be a race between those looking to fix, and those looking to exploit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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