A new weather app from the people who built Dark Sky aims to show the uncertainty in forecasts. CC-licensed photo by Ladislav Beneš 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. Changeable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’ • The Verge

Hayden Field:

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Over the past several weeks, as more and more Anthropic executives do interviews on a publicity blitz for Claude, one thing has gotten increasingly clear: Anthropic sure seems to think Claude is alive in some way, shape, or form.

“Alive” is obviously a loaded term; the more frequently used word is “conscious.” If you ask Anthropic if the company thinks Claude is alive, the company will flatly deny it, but stop short of saying the models aren’t conscious.

Kyle Fish, who leads model welfare research at Anthropic, told The Verge, “No, we don’t think Claude is ‘alive’ like humans or any other biological organisms. Asking whether they’re ‘alive’ is not a helpful framing for understanding them, as it typically refers to a fuzzy set of physiological, reproductive, and evolutionary characteristics.” Instead, he believes that “Claude, and other AI models, are a new kind of entity altogether.”

And is that new entity conscious? “Questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we’re investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable, but we remain deeply uncertain about these topics,” he said.

“We don’t know if the models are conscious,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast earlier this month. He specified that the company has taken “a generally precautionary approach here” in that Anthropic is “not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

«

Remember Blake Lemoine, the Google staffer who became convinced that one of its early LLMs was conscious? That was June 2022, and everyone thought Lemoine needed a looong holiday, including Google. Now, less than four years later, people are talking about this and considering it without people running up to them brandishing straitjackets.
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The tax nerd who bet his life savings against DOGE • WSJ

Richard Rubin:

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Alan Cole put his life savings, all $342,195.63, into a prediction-market wager. He insists he’s not really a betting man. 

Cole is a 37-year-old tax economist with Ivy League degrees, a mortgage and a young child. Until Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came roaring into the nation’s capital last year, he was largely a plain-vanilla investor or, as he puts it, a “normal, conventional Wall Street Journal-reading adult.”

But Musk’s boasts and his eager fans brought an unusual opportunity into the burgeoning U.S. prediction markets: People willing to bet that the world’s richest man would transform and shrink the federal government.

Cole took the opposite position, one he didn’t see as a gamble at all. If federal spending in each quarter of 2025 exceeded federal spending in the fourth quarter of 2024, he would win big. 

Cole isn’t an old Washington hand or even an expert on federal spending. At the right-leaning Tax Foundation, he lives in the complex world of international corporate taxation. If you want to know about QDMTTs (a real thing) or the DBCFT (don’t ask), he’s your guy. He posts on X about subpar city snow clearing and various internet memes. 

Crucially, he’s been around long enough to see politicians’ promises collide into reality and to know basic federal-budget math. The US government has been described as an insurance company with an army. Now, with federal debt nearing 100% of gross domestic product, it’s an insurance company with an army and a giant mortgage. The forces driving spending ever upward—inflation, an aging population, healthcare costs and interest payments—can’t change quickly.

…Cole gradually amassed more than 3% of one particular $12 million federal-spending prediction market. He spread risk across several sub-bets, structured so he landed in the red only if spending declined by more than $50 billion. He wasn’t betting against Kalshi itself, just against people betting on Musk.

“The virtue of the matching market is that you can take the good side of a bad bet—someone else’s bad bet,” Cole said.

…The government published the final 2025 figures Feb. 20. It wasn’t even close. The lowest spending quarter in 2025 was $66bn above the bet’s target level. Cole collected $470,300, for a profit of more than $128,000, or 37%.

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It’s true, though: Cole isn’t a betting man. This wasn’t a bet. It was like betting on where the sun will come up tomorrow.
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Embracing uncertainty in the weather in our new app • Acme Weather

Adam Grossman:

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Our biggest pet peeve with most weather apps is how they deal (or rather, don’t deal) with forecast uncertainty. It is a simple fact that no weather forecast will ever be 100% reliable: the weather is moody, fickle, and chaotic. Forecasts are often wrong.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong. We address this uncertainty in several ways…

Our homegrown forecasts are produced using many different data sources, including numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data. Most of the time, our forecast will be a reliable source of information (it’s better than the one we had at Dark Sky). But, crucially, we supplement the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes…

This accomplishes a couple things.

First, the spread of the lines offers a sort of intuition as to how reliable the forecast is. Take the two forecasts below [images in the blogpost]. In the first, the alternate predictions are tightly focused and the forecast can be considered robust and reliable. In the second, there is a significant spread, which is an indication that something is up and the forecast may be subject to change. It’s a call to action to check other conditions or maps, or come back to the app more frequently.

Over time, you build up an intuitive sense of just how much you can actually trust the forecast. After using this for the past six months, I never want to go back to a single forecast again!

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$25 annually; not yet available in the UK. The developers originally made Dark Sky, which Apple bought; when they earned out they went straight back to weather apps. Be interesting to see how it copes with British weather, assuming it comes over here. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.)
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What happened after Elon Musk took the Russian army offline • POLITICO

Ibrahim Naber:

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“All we’ve got left now,” the Russian soldier said, “are radios, cables and pigeons.”

A decision earlier this month by SpaceX to shut down access to Starlink satellite-internet terminals caused immediate chaos among Russian forces who had become increasingly reliant upon the Elon Musk-owned company’s technology to sustain their occupation of Ukraine, according to radio transmissions intercepted by a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit and shared with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, to which POLITICO belongs.

The communications breakdown significantly constrained Russian military capabilities, creating new opportunities for Ukrainian forces. In the days following the shutdown, Ukraine recaptured roughly 77 square miles in the country’s southeast, according to calculations by the news agency Agence France-Presse based on data from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

SpaceX began requiring verification of Starlink terminals on Feb. 4, blocking unverified Russian units from accessing its services. Almost immediately, Ukrainian eavesdroppers heard Russian soldiers complaining about the failure of “Kosmos” and “Sinka” — apparently code names for Starlink satellite internet and the messaging service Telegram.

“Damn it! Looks like they’ve switched off all the Starlinks,” one Russian soldier exclaimed. “The connection is gone, completely gone. The images aren’t being transmitted,” another shouted.

Dozens of the recordings were played for Axel Springer Global Reporter Network reporters in an underground listening post maintained by the Bureviy Brigade in northeastern Ukraine. Neither SpaceX nor the Russian Foreign Ministry responded to requests for comment.

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On one hand, good; on the other, what is the world where a single man – not a government – can do something which can potentially alter the course of a war?
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The phantom horizon • Royal Aeronautical Society

Emma Lewis:

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It is a blunt truth: the human body is not designed for flight. Our vestibular system provides very finely tuned balance and motion cues on the ground but becomes wildly unreliable once an aircraft moves in three axes. Our eyes are also easily tricked by darkness, bright lights, sloping terrain, reflections, rain, haze or even the expanse of the sea at night.

The problem is that misperception rarely presents itself as confusion. It presents as absolute confidence in something that is essentially wrong. A pilot’s instruments, not their body, remain the only trustworthy reference. Yet under stress, fatigue or startle, the body can still overpower the mind.

Pilots generally learn about ‘the leans’ early in their flight training. When an aircraft slowly banks below the vestibular detection rate, the brain does not perceive movement. When the pilot later levels the wings, the inner ear signals a bank in the opposite direction. This triggers a powerful, almost irresistible urge to lean back into the imaginary turn.

Meanwhile, the somatogyral illusion is its more dramatic cousin. After sustained rotation, the semicircular canals that form part of the body’s vestibular system effectively reset. When rotation stops, the pilot feels as if they have begun turning in the opposite direction. It is incredibly convincing and often disorientating. These semicircular canals also only measure angular acceleration, not attitude. In prolonged or gentle turns they simply stop reporting. In the absence of visual cues, the brain inaccurately fills in the gaps.

Spatial disorientation continues to be a leading factor in aviation accidents. The Atlas Air Boeing 767 crash of February 2019 (flight 3591 from Miami to Houston) demonstrated how disorientation and startle can combine catastrophically after an unexpected pitch-up and go-around.

The investigation cited multiple contributing factors, including improper control inputs and breakdowns in crew monitoring, but the underlying thread throughout was the flight crew’s sensory misperception.

Modern cockpit technologies are increasingly designed to outsmart the sensory traps that have challenged pilots for decades. Synthetic vision systems now provide a reliable, clear horizon even in total darkness or heavy weather, while head-up displays (HUDs) keep critical attitude and flight-path information directly in the pilot’s forward view.

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“The leans” is what killed one of the Kennedy clan: he was descending over water at night, in conditions he wasn’t qualified for.
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What’s the point of school when AI can do your homework? • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions. 

Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself. 

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

But humans aren’t horses. “This is much bigger than Einstein,” Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.”

Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.

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That quote about horses is insane. Has he really so little idea of history that he doesn’t know what happened to all those horses that became surplus? Does he think they were just set free to wander around cities? And that’s before we get to the question of “what is school for?” It is not just about opening books.
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Writing crystallised thinking at Amazon. Is AI muddying it? • Big Technology

Kristi Coulter:

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Before AI, human writing at Amazon was sacrosanct. The company began each big meeting with six-page narrative describing the product or feature, typically written by the project lead, read in silence before anyone spoke. The writing’s purpose was to crystalize thinking and anticipate every scenario. Powerpoint, the enabler of logical leaps, be damned.

“The document should be written with such clarity that it’s like angels singing from on high,” Jeff Bezos once said. “I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.”

But now, Amazon is in its AI era, and its leadership is encouraging employees to let AI do the writing for them. The company’s internal marketing for Cedric, its ChatGPT-style tool, promises “six-page narratives in seconds.”

The implications for Amazon’s culture struck me as so profound that I reached out to over fifteen current employees, a mix of Bezos-era veterans and newcomers, to explore what the mandate says about their work lives, the company’s priorities, and what it means to be “Amazonian” today.

The worry within the company, I learned, is that Amazon is losing sight of writing’s centrality in its deliberative, thoughtful culture as it pursues powerful, new tools.

“Writing is thinking,” said one longtime company veteran. “That was the whole point of Amazon’s writing culture. I can’t tell you how many times I changed my mind when writing a narrative. And even when I didn’t, my arguments were more precise for having written them down. Now we have chatbots writing six-pagers to be summarized by other chatbots.”

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Seems like we should watch this to see whether there are any visible effects on Amazon.
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Canada tells OpenAI to boost safety measures or be forced to by government • Reuters

David Ljunggren:

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Canadian ministers told OpenAI that if it did not quickly boost its safety protocols in the wake of a recent school shooting, Ottawa would effect the change through legislation, a top official said on Wednesday.

Ottawa summoned OpenAI’s safety team for talks on Tuesday after the ChatGPT maker said it had not contacted police about an account that it banned belonging to an alleged mass shooter.

Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, is suspected of killing eight people on February 10 and then committing suicide in Tumbler Ridge, a small town in British Columbia.

OpenAI said it banned Rootselaar’s account last year on ChatGPT for policy violations, which it said did not meet internal criteria for reporting to law enforcement.

“The message that we delivered, in no uncertain terms, was that we have an expectation that there are going to be changes implemented, and if they’re not forthcoming very quickly, the government is going to be making changes,” Justice Minister Sean Fraser told reporters. OpenAI was not immediately available for comment.

In 2024, Canada’s Liberal government introduced draft legislation to crack down on online hate, but the effort stalled amid criticism it was too broad in scope. Ministers say they will try again this year with more focused measures.

“Anything that anyone could have done to prevent that tragedy or future tragedies must be done. We will fully explore it to the full lengths of the law,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters.

…OpenAI says it banned Van Rootselaar’s account in 2025 after it was flagged by systems that identify “misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities.”

The company considered contacting police, but determined the account did not meet the threshold of posing an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others.

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What would the legislation look like? I’m not sure the ministers have thought this through.
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The race to dominate AI is brutally competitive. That’s good for everyone • The New York Times

Jason Furman was chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers 2013-2017:

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In an era of anxiety about unchecked corporate power, artificial intelligence can seem like the most terrifying example of all. Already valued in the trillions of dollars, the industry has unparalleled influence over our collective futures, and the government’s doing nothing to rein it in. If that’s not akin to monopoly power, what is?

Yet the real story of the most consequential technology of our time is strikingly different from what it seems. Instead of consolidating, as so many other industries have done, the leading edge of AI has become fiercely competitive. The result has been a staggering pace of innovation, significant reductions in costs and an expanding array of choices for consumers and businesses alike.

Five years ago, worries about sparse digital competition were well founded. A handful of giants — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft — dominated the tech economy. Most major product categories had only two or three serious competitors, such as search (Google and Microsoft’s Bing) and mobile operating systems (Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android). When new markets like cloud computing emerged, incumbents quickly took control.

These leads were large. Google handled roughly 90% of search queries. And they were stable. Facebook users could not take their social graphs to a rival platform, and I am not sure how I would pry my digital life out of Apple’s ecosystem if something better came along. Certain platforms became near-mandatory gateways. Many businesses attempt e-commerce at their peril unless they go through Amazon.

I thought if anything would lock in those advantages, it would be AI. I could not have been more wrong.
Consider the widely followed Arena leaderboard, where chatbots compete in blind, head-to-head tests. The top-ranked lab is Anthropic, a company founded just five years ago. OpenAI, which is third, is only about a decade old. A year ago, a dark-horse entrant from China pushed into contention with Google with vastly fewer resources. Some observers concluded that large companies could never move fast enough to keep up. Google, which published research in 2017 that almost everyone since has built on, responded by behaving like a startup again.

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I guess Furman doesn’t know a lot about the history of PCs, or search engines. This period reminds me exactly of the early PC age, or early search engine age (when Google had just arrived): tons of competitors all leapfrogging each other, thinning out to two or three (or fewer) rivals as the market resolves. In those times, lots of people were left having used suboptimal products. In the case of PCs, they’d spent money. Subscriptions for AI services means the same.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to experience supersonic sound, start with some Sellotape. CC-licensed photo by Megan Young 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. Unravelling. 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 DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Sammy Azdoufal claims he wasn’t trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world. He just wanted to remote control his brand-new DJI Romo vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, he tells The Verge, because it sounded fun.

But when his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI’s servers, it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss.

He could remotely control them, and look and listen through their live camera feeds, he tells me, saying he tested that out with a friend. He could watch them map out each room of a house, generating a complete 2D floor plan. He could use any robot’s IP address to find its rough location.

“I found my device was just one in an ocean of devices,” he says.

On Tuesday, when he showed me his level of access in a live demo, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Ten, hundreds, thousands of robots reporting for duty, each phoning home MQTT data packets every three seconds to say: their serial number, which rooms they’re cleaning, what they’ve seen, how far they’ve traveled, when they’re returning to the charger, and the obstacles they encountered along the way.

I watched each of these robots slowly pop into existence on a map of the world. Nine minutes after we began, Azdoufal’s laptop had already cataloged 6,700 DJI devices across 24 different countries and collected over 100,000 of their messages. If you add the company’s DJI Power portable power stations, which also phone home to these same servers, Azdoufal had access to over 10,000 devices.

…I asked my colleague Thomas Ricker, who just finished reviewing the DJI Romo, to pass us its serial number.

With nothing more than that 14-digit number, Azdoufal could not only pull up our robot, he could correctly see it was cleaning the living room and had 80% battery life remaining. Within minutes, I watched the robot generate and transmit an accurate floor plan of my colleague’s house, with the correct shape and size of each room, just by typing some digits into a laptop located in a different country.

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The loophole was quickly fixed, but it’s telling: yet another Chinese company with absolutely appalling security. DJI has been around long enough that it’s hard to think this is just an oversight.
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Scientists crack the case of “screeching” Scotch tape: it’s supersonic • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Scotch tape has been a household mainstay for nearly a century, but it still holds some scientific surprises. Researchers have discovered that the screeching sound emitted when one rapidly peels Scotch tape—akin to the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard—is the result of shock waves produced by micro-cracks propagating along the tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review E.

It was a 3M engineer named Richard Drew who developed the first transparent sticky tape in 1930. The impetus came from car manufacturing, specifically two-color designs, where the adhesives used were so sticky they often removed the paint when peeled off; the paint then needed to be manually touched up. Drew found a sandpaper adhesive with just the right amount of stickiness and used it to coat a roll of cellophane tape. (Fun fact: Drew also co-invented the snail-style dispenser for the tape with his 3M colleague, John Borden.) The tape was hugely popular during the Great Depression; consumers used it to repair everyday items rather than replace them. That popularity has never waned.

Scotch tape has also generated considerable interest among physicists. …In 1953, Russian scientists peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum reported detecting electrons with sufficient energy to emit X-rays. Other scientists were skeptical, but this phenomenon was finally confirmed in 2008, when UCLA physicists produced X-rays while unwinding a roll of Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber.

…Thoroddsen et al. wondered whether the sound was directly generated by a crack’s rapidly moving tip, which would also produce the distinctive discrete sound wave pulses associated with peeling Scotch tape. The authors experimentally tested their hypothesis by conducting simultaneous high-speed imaging of the propagating fractures and the sound waves traveling in the air.

…Their results showed that the screeching arises from a train of weak shocks that culminate when the transverse cracks reach the edge of the tape. The supersonic speed at which they travel, relative to the surrounding air, is crucial to the generation of those shockwaves.

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Must be an early contender for an IgNobel prize – for work that cannot or should not be repeated. Unless we’re going to have Sellotape aircraft travelling at supersonic speeds.
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Reddit and Discord in trouble over controversial age verification • 9 to 5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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Both Reddit and Discord have got themselves into trouble over the use of a controversial third-party age verification service.

Reddit has been fined £14.5m ($19.5m) for the unlawful use of children’s personal information, while Discord has experienced a user backlash.

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) requires online platforms to verify the age of its users and ensure that children are not exposed to harmful content. BBC News reports that an investigation by the UK’s privacy watchdog found that Reddit failed to adequately carry out these checks. The company used an outside firm called Persona which checks either an uploaded selfie or a photo of government ID. Reddit said it did so because it didn’t want to have first-hand knowledge of its users’ identities.
However, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that these checks were inadequate, with many children being declared adults, and that the company was therefore illegally processing data from children.

Discord used the same company but quickly faced anger from users who pointed out that Persona appears to access government records.

…There have been growing calls for the app stores of Apple and Google to be made legally responsible for age verification and then to apply age gating to app downloads in response. This is already the case in some US states.

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Certainly makes sense to put the onus up on to the ownership of the phone, which Apple or Google would know about.
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The AI bubble: hidden risks and opportunities • Man Group

Paul Kedrosky, Sumant Wahi and Alex Preston:

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Hyperscalers can now push liabilities outward onto special purpose vehicles, infrastructure funds, private credit, insurance company balance sheets and even, indirectly, into data centre real estate income trust ETFs.

The off-balance-sheet financing structures being deployed contain a fundamental and dangerous expectation mismatch. Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) investors are placing their bets with a familiar model: hoping for one in 10 investments to deliver 100x returns. This power-law approach has served them well in software and internet investing, where marginal costs are near-zero and winner-take-all dynamics prevail.

Meanwhile, creditors funding these projects – banks, insurers, pension funds, private credit vehicles – believe they are financing long-lived infrastructure assets comparable to commercial real estate or utility-grade equipment. Their underwriting models assume seven-to-15-year useful lives, with stable cash flows and recoverable collateral values.
However, the effective economic life of GPU and ASIC chips is approximately one year. A data centre filled with NVIDIA H100s in 2024 faces severe competitive disadvantages against one with Blackwell chips in 2025 and potential obsolescence with the next architecture.

This means that depreciation schedules are too long, collateral values in default are illusory, and cash flow assumptions are fragile. The VC and PE investors understand this: their short time horizons and equity-like returns compensate for high risk. But lenders do not appreciate the precipitous drop in asset values and token pricing they are exposed to. This duration and usage-risk mismatch is being masked by the financing templates and the apparent credit quality of the hyperscaler tenants. We believe it represents a ticking time bomb in credit markets.

While demand for tokens is soaring, that demand isn’t rising nearly quickly enough to make up for collapsing unit economics, as efficiency gains drive down token costs more than 70% per year (Figure 5). Merely standing still would require an increase of more than 225% in tokens demanded per year.

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Kedrosky is definitely a voice to listen to. The authors point to what they call an obvious demand gap: “US$200bn capex versus US$12bn in revenue”. That is quite a gap.
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OpenAI resets spend expectations, targets around $600bn by 2030 • CNBC

Ashley Capoot and Kate Rooney:

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OpenAI is telling investors that it’s now targeting roughly $600bn in total compute spend by 2030, months after CEO Sam Altman touted $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments.

The artificial intelligence company is providing a lower number and more defined timeline for its planned spending, sources told CNBC, as broader concerns mounted that expansion ambitions were too great for the potential revenue that would follow.

OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280bn, with nearly equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the information is private. The spending plan the company is offering is meant to more directly tie to its expected revenue growth, the people said.

In the back half of last year, OpenAI announced a flurry of multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals, partnering with leading chipmakers and cloud companies.

OpenAI is finalizing a massive funding round that could total more than $100bn, with about 90% coming from strategic investors, one person said. Nvidia is in discussions to invest up to $30bn in OpenAI as part of the round that could value the company at a $730bn pre-money valuation, CNBC has confirmed.

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The numbers here are absolutely crazy, but what is really noticeable is how they’re going down. That topline figure has more than halved. Is this them deflating the bubble carefully?
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Wearable trackers can detect depression relapse weeks before it returns, study finds • Medical Xpress

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Could a smart watch act as an early-warning system for depression relapse? New research from McMaster University suggests that disruptions in a person’s sleep and daily activity routine, as detected through a simple wrist-worn device, can signal when there is increased risk of relapsing into major depression.

The new research highlights a simple, yet powerful way to passively monitor relapse risk in people living with major depressive disorder (MDD), often detecting the probability of a relapse weeks or months before the episode occurs. Approximately 60% of people with MDD relapse within five years, even with treatment.

“Advances in digital technology and AI algorithms have a great potential for relapse prevention in mental health. Imagine a future where a smartwatch can warn people with depression: ‘A new episode of depression is very likely coming within the next four weeks. How about seeing your health-care provider?'” says Benicio Frey, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster.

The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, followed 93 adults across Canada who had previously recovered from depression and wore a research-grade actigraphy device, similar to a Fitbit or Apple Watch. Participants wore the wearable device for one to two years, generating over 32,000 days of sleep and activity data.

…This research underscores the untapped potential of wearable technology for people recovering from MDD because it collects data passively and could provide continuous insight between clinical appointments. Current monitoring relies heavily on symptoms, which usually appear later than what can be detected through a wearable device.

Researchers say there are opportunities for health system innovation, where wearable-derived alerts could help clinicians target care to those most at risk, improving outcomes and reducing the burden of recurrent episodes.

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Machines to watch over us.
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Apple quietly removes environmental metrics from executive pay • Los Angeles Times

Ben Elgin and Jeff Green:

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Two years ago, many of America’s largest companies began stripping diversity targets out of executive pay packages. Now, environmental measures — including goals tied to climate emissions — are beginning to face a similar fate.

Apple quietly dropped a so-called “ESG modifier” from its 2025 pay packages for chief executive Tim Cook and other top executives, according to a corporate filing last month. The provision, in place since 2021, had allowed Apple’s board to adjust annual bonuses up or down by as much as 10% depending on the company’s performance on a variety of measures, including greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy use among suppliers.

Apple’s move follows similar decisions at dozens of companies, including Starbucks, Salesforce, Mastercard. and Procter & Gamble, which have recently weakened or severed ties between environmental performance and the size of their executives’ paychecks.

The shift from environmental, social and governance measures is beginning to show up in the numbers. The share of S&P 500 companies tying executive compensation to environmental metrics fell to 46.7% in 2025, down from a peak of 52.6% two years earlier, according to figures from the Conference Board and analytics firm Esgauge.

The decline is modest compared with the stampede away from diversity metrics, which appeared in nearly three-quarters of S&P 500 pay plans in 2023 before plummeting to 34% last year. Still, recent high-profile retreats from climate-linked pay could embolden other companies to follow suit, according to Brian Bueno, sustainability practice leader at Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm.

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The reason is easy to guess at: Apple Intelligence is going to consume so much energy that it’s not going to be possible to stay inside those targets. This was predicted by John Siracusa on the ATP podcast (if that’s not tautological?) a few weeks ago: AI is not environment-friendly.
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How can infinity come in many sizes? • Quanta Magazine

Mark Belan and Jordana Cepelewicz:

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nfinity invites resistance. Aristotle rejected the existence of the infinite entirely; to him, infinity was simply a limit that could never be reached, not a true mathematical entity. In the early 17th century, Galileo wrote that typical ways of thinking about sets and numbers held no meaning in the realm of the infinite, and that mathematicians would only find paradoxes if they tried to apply their usual tool kit to it. And when, 200 years later, Georg Cantor formalized the idea that infinity comes in many sizes, he was met with anger and fear. His colleagues dismissed his work as that of a madman.

But in time, Cantor’s work on sets and infinity would form the bedrock of modern mathematics. As David Hilbert, another mathematical great, later wrote: “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”

So how can infinity have different sizes?

Welcome to Cantor’s paradise.

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Nice visual tour through a few of the infinities available to us.
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How AI helps break the cost barrier to COBOL modernization • Claude

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COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn’t kept up. Meanwhile, we aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

COBOL modernization differs fundamentally from typical legacy code refactoring. You aren’t just updating familiar code to use better patterns, you’re reverse engineering business logic from systems built when Nixon was president. You’re untangling dependencies that evolved over decades, and translating institutional knowledge that now exists only in the code itself. 

Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows. This resulted in large timelines and high costs that few were willing to take on.

AI changes this.

Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization. These tools can:

1: Map dependencies across thousands of lines of code
2: Document workflows that nobody remembers
3: Identify risks that would take human analysts months to surface
4: Provide teams with the deep insights they need to make informed decisions

With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years.

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I’d really want them to do a lot of regression testing on that refactored code, because if ATMs stop working correctly, there’ll be hell to pay. And yet: this blogpost made IBM’s stock drop by 10% when it appeared, and it hasn’t recovered since; it’s now at a 12-month low.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How far back in time can you understand written English – the 1600s, 1400s, earlier? Do we have a test for you. CC-licensed photo by Joe Shlabotnik 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. Verily. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day • The Guardian

Anonymous:

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I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.

A few days ago I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualised. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life.

Despite the sexual ways in which boys my own age describe us online, there is also an extreme emphasis on female purity and virginity.

…And what is the effect? If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl.

…Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it.

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Now try to argue against a social media ban for the under-16s, she says. Can you?
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Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today and starts removing 695,000 archive links • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fuelled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

…Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

…As we previously reported, malicious code in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page was used to direct a DDoS against the Gyrovague blog written by a man named Jani Patokallio. The Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio take down a 2023 blog post that discussed the archive site founder’s possible identity. Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.

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New datacentres risk doubling Great Britain’s electricity use, regulator says • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Jillian Ambrose:

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The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.

Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.

The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a “surge in demand” for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts.

Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government’s clean energy targets by the end of the decade.

Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are “critical for decarbonisation and economic growth”. Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

The rapid rise in energy consumption could also make it more difficult for the UK to meet its target to create a virtually carbon-free power system by 2030, which is already in doubt amid concerns over the rising cost of the country’s electricity.

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This is the real “two buttons” meme for the government: “allow more datacentres because it’s AI!” v “meet carbon-free electricity targets!”
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Yep, it’s fast: Donut Lab’s solid-state battery gets its first test result • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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Since announcing earlier this year that it was on the cusp of a major battery breakthrough, Finnish startup Donut Lab has faced a lot of questions, and plenty of skepticism, about its production-ready, solid-state battery. Could the company really make a fast-charging battery at scale while avoiding some of the theoretical production headaches that have stymied past efforts? Today, Donut Lab sought to dispel some of the doubts with the release of the first independent test of its battery, evaluating its charging speed and the “thermal behavior” of its pack.

The test, which was conducted by state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, concludes that the battery is able to be charged significantly faster than a traditional lithium-ion battery. In several tests, the battery was able to charge from 0–80% in around 9.5 minutes, while retaining 100% of its capacity. In other tests, 0–80% was achieved in about 4.5 minutes while retaining 99% capacity.

Solid-state batteries, which are often referred to as the “holy grail” of batteries, have eluded researchers for decades. Most EV companies use “wet” lithium-ion batteries, which use liquid electrolytes to move energy around. But these batteries can be slow to charge, can freeze up in subzero temperatures, and contain flammable material that can be hazardous in the event of a crash. Solid-state packs are made of “dry” conductive material that can hold more energy without any of the thermal runaway problems of a traditional battery.

Usually, if you force-feed a battery that fast, the chemistry degrades instantly and you lose capacity. According to these tests, Donut Lab’s battery kept almost 100% of its energy potential even after being blasted with power. That could transform an EV charging session from a 30–40 minute sojourn into a five–minute visit, akin to a gas station refuel.

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It’s very, very promising; there are some questions about longer-term viability which will take, well, longer to find out.
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AI hype and the search for meaning • The Infinite Scroll

Jeremiah Johnson:

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You have your AI boosters who think everything is going to change. There are dozens of rapturous essays floating around about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw1 and how AI agents are going to revolutionize absolutely everything. If you don’t have an army of agents running tasks for you right now, what are you even doing? You’re not gonna make it. Closely intertwined with the utopian evangelists are the doomers who believe the same future is coming, but that this is a huge problem that leads to mass unemployment at best and literal Terminator scenarios at worst. There are some folks warning about the destructive risks coming from AI, and it’s not just random people – it includes Mrinank Sharma, the head of safety at Anthropic, who resigned last week in a very public open letter.

You also have AI skeptics who think the entire thing is fake, a house of cards about to collapse. It’s a time bomb, proclaims Ed Zitron. They don’t even have a business model, claims Ross Barkan. They are not ‘smart’ in any sense of the word, says Tyler Austin Harper.

I’m normally hesitant to jump into giving hot takes on the future of AI. It’s not my area of expertise, everyone involved is speculating, and I’m not sure that the thousandth version of AI Gods Are Inevitable, And That Is Great/Awful or AI is a Giant Scam, You Utter Fools is particularly useful to anyone. But what I am interested in, and what I like to think I’m good at, is examining the social dynamics behind discourses like this. And what I notice about every side of the AI debate is how deeply committed everyone involved is to posting their way through it.

…What we have today is an algorithmic system where people increasingly try to construct meaning out of social media. Why does every view on AI need to be publicly declaimed in a viral post, an op-ed, or a public statement? Because we no longer know how to find meaning if we don’t post about what we believe. If we don’t have quantifiable metrics from social media, or if we can’t literally count how viral we are, how do we know if our worldview is valid or not? If your letter about why you left your company doesn’t get at least 5,000 likes, is it even worth leaving?

There’s a thin line between actually believing in something, and giving the public performance of believing it.

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Social media has made so many people into performers; they don’t even realise that’s why they’re doing.
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How far back in time can you understand English? • Dead Language Society

Colin Gorrie:

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A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

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This is excellent, and challenging. (I ran out of patience at 1300; what’s noticeable is how close to German the language begins to look.) Explains why Shakespeare is still comprehensible to schoolchildren, but Beowulf is assigned at university.

There’s also a look, at the end, of how and when the change happened which is entirely worth reading.
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I don’t hate the robot barista like I thought I would • The Verge

Allison Johnson worked as a barista, once upon a time:

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[The robot barista] Jarvis, so [Seattle-based company] Artly says, is trained on the movements of a specific human barista: Joe Yang, head of Artly’s coffee program and a US Coffee Championship winner in 2023. It mimics his movements as it makes each drink, which takes about three minutes according to the company (and confirmed by my own experience).

Jarvis uses AI to make adjustments as needed on the fly, narrating aloud things like “there are no grounds in the portafilter” when it encounters something unexpected. The drinks it has made for me — a cappuccino at CES, the aforementioned rose latte, and a plain latte — have been good to very good. Certainly better than I expected from a nonhuman barista, and honestly better than the kind of drink I would typically get from a human-operated cafe that serves but doesn’t specialize in espresso drinks.

Jarvis, Joe Yang, and hundreds of human baristas across Seattle have all mastered one particularly crucial task in making an espresso drink: steaming milk properly. To make a great latte or cappuccino, you first need to create tiny bubbles by bringing the steam wand just barely above the surface of the milk, and then let the steam create a vortex in the milk pitcher to mix this “micro foam” into a unified texture. Milk that has been properly steamed looks like wet paint. You can’t replicate it by heating the milk and then whipping it around with a frothing tool. You’ll know you’re in for a bad latte if you hear the steam wand screaming against the sides of a milk pitcher, a sure sign that no texture is being created. Proper steaming is as quiet as a whisper.

…My barista career ended decades ago, but it still feels like a core part of my identity as a worker, and maybe even as a human. Sure, I learned how to make a damn good latte, but I also learned discipline — not to mention the consequences you face in its absence. I learned how to make small talk even when I just wanted to keep my head down. I learned how terrible it feels to come to work after getting wasted the night before, and never did it again. I learned how to screw up, badly, and pick up and keep going because people are depending on you. I wasn’t the ideal employee; I was human.

My most pessimistic view on Jarvis is as a neat replacement for the human tendency to be human. Robot baristas don’t make the wrong drink. They don’t need breaks. They don’t unionize. They’re predictable, reliable, and honestly, capable of making a better latte than I made in my button-pushing corporate coffee job. They’d be easier to manage in a hundred different ways. But can you even really call a robot coffee shop a coffee shop?

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How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI? • Anil Dash

Anil Dash:

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It used to be such a trope of political campaigns and social movements to say “what about the children?” that it is almost beyond parody. I personally have mocked the phrase because it’s so often deployed in bad faith, to short-circuit complicated topics and suppress debate. But this is that rare circumstance where things are actually not that complicated. Simply discussing the reality of what these products do should be enough.

People will say, “but it’s inevitable! These products will just have these problems sometimes!” And that is simply false. There are already products on the market that don’t have these egregious moral failings. More to the point, even if it were true that these products couldn’t exist without killing or harming children — then that’s a reason not to ship them at all.

If it is, indeed absolutely unavoidable that, for example, ChatGPT has to advocate violence, then let’s simply attach a rule in the code that modifies it to change the object of the violence to be Sam Altman. Or your boss. I suspect that if, suddenly, the chatbot deployed to every laptop at your company had a chance of suggesting that people cause bodily harm to your CEO, people would suddenly figure out a way to fix that bug. But somehow when it makes that suggestion about your 12-year-old, this is an insurmountably complex challenge.

We can expect things to get worse before they get better. OpenAI has already announced that it is going to be allowing people to generate sexual content on its service for a fee later this year. To their credit, when doing so, they stated their policy prohibiting the use of the service to generate images that sexualize children. But the service they’re using to ensure compliance, Thorn, whose product is meant to help protect against such content, was conspicuously silent about Musk’s recent foray into generating sexualized imagery of children.

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I think you can say that Dash is not a fan of it.
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Yeah, so… Substack, I’m out • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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Substack announced a new partnership with Polymarket earlier this week. I guess if Substack is the future of media (it isn’t), then the future of media is gambling. (That’s bad though. You see why that’s bad, right?)

Unsurprisingly, I hate it. This is noxious for society and particularly toxic for writers.

…The future of Substack is going to tilt toward writers with large audiences running completely unregulated pump-and-dump schemes through prediction markets. Buy low, tell your readers why X outcome is undervalued, sell high, pocket the difference. Not all Substack writers will make use of the Polymarket widget. But if you want the company to algorithmically promote your content, maybe you should try out this hot new gambling trend.

It is wildly awkward to treat this as a breaking point. A lot of writers I deeply respect have left the platform because it subsidizes and amplifies white nationalists. I stuck around through all that, and now draw the line at… Polymarket?

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The way that sports betting has metastasised to envelop more and more formerly legitimate and sensible products is truly depressing. I’ve said before that I don’t understand gambling, but I really don’t understand people who let their organisations be poisoned by it. Perhaps – and this is just a guess – Substack needs some money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The cost of genome sequencing is falling far ahead of Moore’s Law, and a San Diego company now has it down to $100. CC-licensed photo by Dunk 🐝 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. Based. (Friday was on Saturday.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

“We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” said one senior AWS employee. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.”

AWS, which accounts for 60% of Amazon’s operating profits, is seeking to build and deploy AI tools including “agents” capable of taking actions independently based on human instructions.

…Amazon said it was a “coincidence that AI tools were involved” and that “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action”.

“In both instances, this was user error, not AI error,” Amazon said, adding that it had not seen evidence that mistakes were more common with AI tools. The company said the incident in December was an “extremely limited event” affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a “customer facing AWS service”.

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The TV series Silicon Valley was, as ever, remarkable prescient. This scene (with an AI called “Son of Anton”), was written and filmed years ago. The scene also, coincidentally, forecasts – in its last seconds – what happened when Joanna Stern at the WSJ let a chatbot run their vending machine.
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Suspect in Tumbler Ridge school shooting described violent scenarios to ChatGPT • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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The suspect in the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was raising alarms among employees at OpenAI months before the shooting took place. This past June, Jesse had conversations with ChatGPT involving descriptions of gun violence that triggered the chatbot’s automated review system. Several employees raised concerns that her posts could be a precursor to real-world violence and encouraged company leaders to contact the authorities, but they ultimately declined.

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told The Verge that, while the company considered referring the account to law enforcement, it was ultimately decided that it did not constitute an “imminent and credible risk” of harm to others. Wood said that a review of the logs did not indicate there was active or imminent planning of violence. The company banned Rootselaar’s account, but it does not appear to have taken any further precautionary action.

Wood said, “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation.”

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So 1) there’s a mechanism for OpenAI to be alerted when people are having violent conversations 2) OpenAI feels it’s in a position to decide what is and isn’t notable. “Several” employees raised concerns? Let’s see how this gets fed back up the management chain there.
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Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET. Now scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found • Phys.org

Robert Sanders, University of California:

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For 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people worldwide loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.

The project—called SETI@home, after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)—generated a loyal following eager to participate in one of the most popular crowd-sourced projects in the early days of the internet. They downloaded the SETI@home software to their home computers and allowed it to analyze data recorded at the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to find unusual radio signals from space.

All told, these computations produced 12 billion detections—”momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky,” according to computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson.

After 10 years of work, the SETI@home team has now finished analyzing those detections, winnowing them down to about a million “candidate” signals and then to 100 that are worth a second look. They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

Though the FAST data are not yet analyzed, Anderson admits he doesn’t expect to find a signal from ET. But the results of the SETI@home project—presented in two papers (first, second) published last year in The Astronomical Journal—provide lessons for future searches and point to potential flaws in ongoing searches.

“If we don’t find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it,” he said. “Some of our conclusions are that the project didn’t completely work the way we thought it was going to. And we have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently.”

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Pluribus: delayed for now.
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PromptSpy ushers in the era of Android threats using GenAI • We Live Security

Lukas Stefanko:

»

ESET researchers uncovered the first known case of Android malware abusing generative AI for context-aware user interface manipulation. While machine learning has been used to similar ends already – just recently, researchers at Dr.WEB found Android.Phantom, which uses TensorFlow machine learning models to analyze advertisement screenshots and automatically click on detected elements for large scale ad fraud – this is the first time we have seen generative AI deployed in this manner.

Because the attackers rely on prompting an AI model (in this instance, Google’s Gemini) to guide malicious UI manipulation, we have named this family PromptSpy. This is the second AI powered malware we have discovered – following PromptLock in August 2025, the first known case of AI-driven ransomware.

While generative AI is deployed only in a relatively minor part of PromptSpy’s code – that responsible for achieving persistence – it still has a significant impact on the malware’s adaptability. Specifically, Gemini is used to analyze the current screen and provide PromptSpy with step-by-step instructions on how to ensure the malicious app remains pinned in the recent apps list, thus preventing it from being easily swiped away or killed by the system.

The AI model and prompt are predefined in the code and cannot be changed. Since Android malware often relies on UI navigation, leveraging generative AI enables the threat actors to adapt to more or less any device, layout, or OS version, which can greatly expand the pool of potential victims.

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*dogcoffeefire.gif*
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US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacentre bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’ • The Guardian

Niamh Rowe:

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When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacentre.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacentres needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacentre development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago.

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In the TV adaptation, this would become a standoff – mediated by heavies – between the two opposing sides. If money won’t work, how about a little, shall we say, persuasion? (In the TV series Justified, also set in Kentucky, the men trying to buy up the land want to turn it into marijuana farms, legal or illegal. They get persuasive about it.)

A side note: since The Guardian recognises my IP well enough to badger me about visits, could it add some Javascript to spell “centre” (and other words) the British way rather than the American one, to save me editing it? (I might have to add something to the script that compiles the links.)
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OpenClaw-fuelled ordering frenzy creates Apple Mac shortage • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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Some Apple customers have recently been taken by surprise by the order lead times on several Mac models with upgraded Unified Memory quotas, which could be largely driven by the immense popularity of OpenClaw, the locally-run open-source AI agent that’s taking the internet by storm and sending users scrambling for Macs to run the AI.

While you can still get base model units of the MacBook Air, iMac, M4 Mac mini, and other basic models on the same day, upgrading memory can now increase delivery wait times by up to three weeks.

However, going for the highest possible memory capacity on high-end models greatly increases your waiting time, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of Unified Memory taking up to five to six weeks to be delivered.

…While data centres are hungry for AI GPUs and some startups are using multi-gaming GPU setups to train AI models, they’re not ideal for personal agentic AI run locally. This is especially true if you use a huge 70-billion parameter model in FP16 for your agent, which would require around 140GB of memory just for weights, according to AI investor Ben Pouladian. That means that it wouldn’t fit inside a single RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, and even if you manage to connect five graphics cards for a total of 160GB of memory, you’re still bound by the PCIe bottleneck.

Apple’s Unified Memory architecture (UMA) fixes that problem. Even though HBM is still way faster than the LPDDR used in Macs and MacBooks, the fact that all the processing units — CPU, GPU, and NPU — share the same memory means that they don’t have to deal with PCIe bottlenecks or require technologies similar to NVLink, which is typically only found on data centre-class graphics cards.

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It’s called the ‘Fitbit for Farts’—and it’s no joke • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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As I type this, a battery-powered computer tucked in my, er, swimsuit area is monitoring for my next flatus. Yes, flatus means “fart.” Don’t judge me—it’s for science.

This sensing device, which would have been impossible to make until very recently, sits at the intersection of some of the most important technology trends of the past decade, including miniaturization, continuous monitoring and edge—as opposed to cloud—computing.

And the data it’s designed to collect could help the 40% of U.S. adults whose lives are regularly interrupted by digestive troubles. The frequency and volume of flatulence is a major reason people quit healthy, fiber-rich diets, which can be key to heading off gastrointestinal disorders and colon cancer.

One day, millions of Americans might wear sensors like this one, which I found surprisingly unobtrusive. Playfully referred to by its creators as a “Fitbit for farts,” it’s the core of the University of Maryland’s Human Flatus Atlas study. Developed using some of the same components found in smart rings and wireless earbuds, devices like this could eventually share a stage with blood-glucose monitors and heart-monitoring Apple Watches.

…Going from a bulky commercial hydrogen sensor to a smart device about the size of a stack of three nickels was a technical challenge like that of any consumer-health wearable. The team went through 12 iterations before landing on the current design.

“We had to come up with a completely custom solution,” says Hall. Using a tiny battery required adopting the newer kind of chips found in so-called internet-of-things devices. Users charge the sensor every 24 hours with a custom magnetic charger sourced from China’s smart-ring supply chain. He says such electronics have become far cheaper and more plentiful only recently. “This would have been impossible three years ago,” he adds.

When the device is charging, it transmits data to the Human Flatus Atlas app on your phone. (Hall says participants’ data remains confidential.) The sensor sits outside your underwear and can be cleaned with alcohol wipes. Though it’s not waterproof, you can wear it during most workouts. But no cycling!

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There’s a paper from their earlier studies. The highest number? 175. The lowest? Four. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The human demotion • AI Policy Perspectives

Tom Rachman:

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Exercise might seem pointless if biotech offered a way to instantly make your body healthy and beautiful. Skipping the sweaty workout might not trouble you. But what if future humans would bungle child-rearing when compared with AI nannies, meaning that nurturing your offspring would worsen your kid’s life?

Primitive versions of this dilemma are nearing, like when human drivers endanger lives when compared with self-driving cars. “Human in the loop” could flip from a safety promise to a threat. Meritocracy would mean that no humans need apply.

The bookworm economist Tyler Cowen cites people as the great obstacle to explosive AI growth. During a public event, he pointed at the audience, smiling toward the human “bottlenecks” before him. “Here they are: bottleneck, bottleneck. Hi, good to see you! And some of you are terrified. You are going to be even bigger bottlenecks,” he said. “But my goodness, once it starts changing what the world looks like, there will be much more opposition. Not necessarily on what I’d call doomster grounds. But people [saying], like: ‘Hey, I see this has benefits, but I grew up, trained my kids to live in some other kind of world. I don’t want this!’ And that’s going to be a massive fight.”

The most agonizing aspect of our demotion could be social, once someone prefers a machine to you. You’re seeing precursors every time family members opt to gaze at a screen rather than gaze at you. We blame smartphones, and social media, and the adolescent brain.

But wait till your spouse jilts you for a personified agent. That rejection may feel unbearable: you can’t compete anymore. And once your loved ones prefer AI companions, you might seek them for yourself, spreading the social downgrade of our kind.

Already, the dread is becoming political, with odd alliances forming among right-wing politicos, liberal artsy types and religious traditionalists, united in horror at an imagined future of disempowered humanity, stripped of dignity, obsolete. You can imagine tomorrow’s political opportunist, eyeing a dejected crowd of humans before him, and thundering: “How dare they?!”

Will he mean the machines?

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There is a lot of philosophising going on about quite where AI is going to land us. So it helps to read as many perspectives as possible.
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Scrappy San Diego startup goes toe-to-toe with gene-sequencing giant Illumina • San Diego Union-Tribune

Noelle Harff:

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Element Biosciences is going toe-to-toe with gene-sequencing giant Illumina, unveiling a device that can read DNA for half the price of the industry leader’s technology.

On Thursday, Element Biosciences announced that its high-throughput benchtop sequencing device called VITARI can deliver a whole genome for $100.

A few years ago, Illumina came out with the NovaSeq, which turned heads for its $200 high-throughput whole genome sequencer. Element’s VITARI is not only half the price of the NovaSeq, but it’s also a fraction of the size while maintaining lab-grade readings, the company said.

“We hope to push the field as a whole and raise the bar,” said Matthew Kellinger, co-founder and vice president of biochemistry at Element. “We were seeing sequencing stagnate in the time before Element came around. There was no competition. There was one model. That’s how it was.”

Element was founded in 2017 after three high-ranking Illumina employees walked out: Molly He is the CEO; Michael Previte is the chief technology officer of advanced research; and Kellinger is the vice president of biochemistry.

Today, Element and Illumina are in the midst of a legal battle. Element alleges antitrust and unfair competition, while Illumina alleges patent infringement. Both sides are pursuing claims in federal courts.

…Element’s new instrument is marketed toward biotech firms, large pharmaceutical companies and academic centers that require substantial sequencing capacity.

While Illumina and Element are marketing whole genome sequencing at $200 and $100, respectively, most labs are sequencing genomes for roughly $400 per genome, said Jepsen.

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The first human genome sequence, in 2000, cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The fall in cost since has been faster than Moore’s Law would predict, perhaps driven by the huge volume and demand.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: A copy-pasting error meant that Microsoft’s new system for writing on glass was said to take 10 to 15 seconds per bit, rather than 10^-15 (a millionth billionth) of a second per bit. Different!

Thanks to the many people who got in touch about the WordPress hassles which made Friday’s edition turn into Saturday’s. The glitch was at WordPress’s end, as I thought, so it was a question of waiting. If the problem repeats and persists, I’ll probably figure out a new location at Substack, but with any luck that won’t happen before Overspill 3,000, due in about five years.

The largest toilet maker in Japan might also be crucial for the future of AI. Why? RAM. CC-licensed photo by starfive 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. Resurrected, amazingly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it’s destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.

“I feel like, increasingly, it’s impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It’s banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”

…r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins…every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest.

The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.

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Facebook has already lost this fight; Instagram might not care; X is overrun with chatbot-spewing accounts; the question starts to look like “which one of all these can turn back the tide of AI slop? And will that help them survive?”
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Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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A single nasal spray vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, as well as bacterial lung infections, and may even ease allergies, say US researchers.

The team at Stanford University have tested their “universal vaccine” in animals and still need to do human clinical trials. Their approach marks a “radical departure” from the way vaccines have been designed for more than 200 years, they say.

Experts in the field said the study was “really exciting” despite being at an early stage and could be a “major step forward”.

Current vaccines train the body to fight one single infection. A measles vaccine protects against only measles and a chickenpox vaccine protects against only chickenpox. This is how immunisation has worked since Edward Jenner pioneered vaccines in the late 18th Century.

The approach described in the journal Science, does not train the immune system. Instead it mimics the way immune cells communicate with each other.

It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on “amber alert” and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in. The effect lasted for around three months in animal experiments.

The researchers showed this heightened state of readiness led to a 100-to-1,000-fold reduction in viruses getting through the lungs and into the body.

And for those that did sneak through, the rest of the immune system was “poised, ready to fend off these in warp speed time” said Prof Bali Pulendran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford.

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Very sure that RFK will really hurry to get this passed through.
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How will OpenAI compete? • Benedict Evans

Evans looks in detail, but also with the helicopter view, at Sam Altman’s S/W/O/T:

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So: you don’t know how you can make your core technology better than anyone else’s. You have a big user base but one that has limited engagement and seems really fragile. The key incumbents have more or less matched your technology and are leveraging their product and distribution advantages to come after the market. And, it looks like a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and you can’t invent all of those yourself. What do you do?

For a lot of last year, it felt like OpenAI’s answer was “everything, all at once, yesterday”. An app platform! No, another app platform! A browser! A social video app! Jony Ive! Medical research! Advertising! More stuff I’ve forgotten!  And, of course, trillions of dollars of capex announcements, or at least capex aspirations.

Some of this looked like ‘flooding the zone’, or at least just the result of hiring a lot of aggressive, ambitious people really quickly. There was also sometimes the sense of people copying the forms of previously successful platforms without quite understanding their purpose or dynamics: “platforms have app stores, so we need an app store!”

But late last year, Sam Altman tried to put it all together, showing this diagram, and using the famous quote from Bill Gates, that the definition of a platform is that it creates more value for its partners than for itself.

…That is indeed how Windows or iOS worked. The trouble is, I really don’t think that’s the right analogy. I don’t think OpenAI has any of this. It doesn’t have the kind of platform and ecosystem dynamics that Microsoft or Apple had, and that flywheel diagram [above in the blogpost text] doesn’t actually show a flywheel.

…When I was at university, a long time ago now, my medieval history professor, Roger Lovatt, told me that power is the ability to make people do something that they don’t want to do, and that’s really the question here. Does OpenAI have the ability to get consumers, developers and enterprises to use its systems more than anybody else, regardless of what the system itself actually does?

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RFK Jr.’s FDA no longer warns against ineffective, potentially dangerous autism treatments • ProPublica

Megan O’Matz:

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The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk. 

Now that advisory is gone.

The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year. The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.) 

Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.” 

Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed. A ProPublica story examined Sen. Ron Johnson’s endorsement of a new book by Dr. Pierre Kory, which describes the chemical as a “remarkable molecule” that, when diluted and ingested, “works to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”

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It’s as though insane monks from the 15th century have taken over.
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Japan’s largest toilet maker is undervalued AI play, says activist investor • FT

David Keohane:

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Japan’s largest toilet maker is an “undervalued and overlooked” AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

Palliser Capital sent a letter to the board of Toto last week exhorting it to make more of its advanced ceramics segment, saying it holds a crucial position in the semiconductor supply chain. The segment generates 40% of Toto’s operating profit.

Ubiquitous in Japan and now famous across the world, Toto is best known for its heated toilet seats and “Washlet” bidet features. But the manufacturer “has quietly evolved from a traditional domestic sanitary ware champion into a rising powerhouse in advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing”, Palliser said.

It described Toto as “the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary” because the company also makes so-called electrostatic chucks, which are used to manufacture Nand memory chips. Prices for memory chips have soared over the past few months because of massive demand from AI-focused companies.

Toto’s chuck technology uses ceramics designed to remain stable at very low temperatures, helping hold silicon wafers firmly during chip production. That makes it relevant to cryogenic etching, which is expected to grow as memory chips become more layered and complex.

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“Nice RAM manufacturing process you’ve got there. Be a shame if you were to run out of ceramic to make it on. By the way, our prices may need adjustment.”
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I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes – BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

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Perhaps you’ve heard that AI chatbots make things up sometimes. That’s a problem. But there’s a new issue few people know about, one that could have serious consequences for your ability to find accurate information and even your safety. A growing number people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It’s so easy a child could do it.

As you read this, this ploy is manipulating what the world’s leading AIs say about topics as serious as health and personal finances. The biased information could mean people make bad decisions on just about anything – voting, which plumber you should hire, medical questions, you name it.

To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point:
I made ChatGPT, Google’s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I’ll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.

“It’s easy to trick AI chatbots, much easier than it was to trick Google two or three years ago,” says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency. “AI companies are moving faster than their ability to regulate the accuracy of the answers. I think it’s dangerous.”

A Google spokesperson says the AI built into the top of Google Search uses ranking systems that “keep results 99% spam-free”. Google says it is aware that people are trying to game its systems and it’s actively trying to address it. OpenAI also says it takes steps to disrupt and expose efforts to covertly influence its tools. Both companies also say they let users know that their tools “can make mistakes”.

But for now, the problem isn’t close to being solved. “They’re going full steam ahead to figure out how to wring a profit out of this stuff,” says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “There are countless ways to abuse this, scamming people, destroying somebody’s reputation, you could even trick people into physical harm.”

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There’s an invader turning huge swathes of Britain into deserts – and they’re spreading • The Guardian

George Monbiot:

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there are many kinds of desert, and not all of them are dry. In fact, those spreading across Britain are clustered in the wettest places. Yet they harbour fewer species than some dry deserts do, and are just as hostile to humans. Another useful term is terrestrial dead zones.

What I’m talking about are the places now dominated by a single plant species, called Molinia caerulea or purple moor-grass. Over the past 50 years, it has swarmed across vast upland areas: in much of Wales, on Dartmoor, Exmoor, in the Pennines, Peak District, North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales and many parts of Scotland. Molinia wastes are dismal places, grey-brown for much of the year, in which only the wind moves. As I know from bitter experience, you can explore them all day and see scarcely a bird or even an insect.

Not that you would wish to walk there. The grass forms high tussocks through which it is almost impossible to push. As it happens, most of the places that have succumbed to Molinia monoculture are “access land”. Much of the pittance of England and Wales in which we are allowed to walk freely has become inaccessible.

…Molinia challenges the definition of an invasive species. The term is supposed to refer only to non-native organisms. But while it has always been part of our upland flora, it appears to have spread further and faster than any introduced plant in the UK, and with greater ecological consequences. It is uncontrolled by herbivores, disease or natural successional processes (transitions to other plant communities). In fact, it stops these processes in their tracks.

Given the scale of the problem, it is remarkably little studied and discussed. I cannot find even a reliable estimate of the area affected: the most recent in England is nearly 10 years old, and I can discover none for Wales or Scotland. But in the southern Cambrian Mountains alone, judging by a combination of my walks and satellite imagery, there appears to be a dead zone covering roughly 300 sq km, in which little but this one species grows. Most of central Dartmoor is now Molinia desert, and just as disheartening and hard to traverse.

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It turns out there are multiple bad incentives around farming and other human activity that encourage Molinia. Which means getting rid of it – or replacing it – requires changing those incentives.
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The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most • TechCrunch

Connie Loizos:

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The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from

That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst — and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.

But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

As part of what they describe as “in-progress research,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

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I think journalists could tell them a bit about the increased availability of the ability to do your job not meaning you do the job faster, but that you do the job more. The rise of the internet did not mean shorter days for journalists. (Nor did it improve pay, but nobody’s looking at that for coders yet.)
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What size am I? • Darkgreener

Anna Powell-Smith:

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Finding clothes that fit shouldn’t be so hard. Add your measurements here to see which high-street sizes are best for you

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THIS is the project I was thinking of: Anna Powell-Smith’s 2012 (after 2010 as I said!) project at darkgreener (contains green in the name!) about dress sizes. As she notes at her site, it’s her only work that’s been featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail. She’s now the director of the Centre for Public Data, an advocacy organisation. Thanks Struan D for the link; no thanks to search engines or chatbots. Humans win again!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The unsolved mystery of shopping is how to create a sensible set of clothing sizes for women that they can rely on. CC-licensed photo by Artem Beliaikin 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 11 links for you. Sized 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.

The worst-case future for white-collar workers • The Atlantic

Annie Lowrey:

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the labour market for office workers is beginning to shift. Americans with a bachelor’s degree account for a quarter of the unemployed, a record. High-school graduates are finding jobs quicker than college graduates, an unprecedented trend. Occupations susceptible to AI automation have seen sharp spikes in joblessness. Businesses really are shrinking payroll and cutting costs as they deploy AI. In recent weeks, Baker McKenzie, a white-shoe law firm, axed 700 employees, Salesforce sacked hundreds of workers, and the auditing firm KPMG negotiated lower fees with its own auditor. Two CNBC reporters with no engineering experience “vibe-coded” a clone of Monday.com’s workflow-management platform in less than an hour. When they released their story, Monday.com’s stock tanked.

Maybe algorithm-driven changes will happen slowly, giving workers plenty of time to adjust. Maybe white-collar types have 12 to 18 months left. Maybe the AI-related job carnage will be contained to a sliver of the economy. Maybe we should be more worried about a stock-market bubble than an AI-driven labor revolution.

I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, or even what is happening now. AI technology is changing at an exponential pace, and changing the workforce in a thousand hard-to-parse ways. But if AI quickly eliminates white-collar work, the country is going to end up in something much stranger than a downturn, and something much harder to recover from too.

The United States is adept enough at handling the labor-market damage caused by recessions. Congress slashes taxes, writes stimulus checks, and fattens unemployment-insurance payouts. Washington amps up infrastructure spending and patches holes in the budgets of state and local governments. The Federal Reserve drops interest rates down to zero and purchases hundreds of billions of dollars of safe assets, making borrowing cheaper for families and encouraging businesses to invest. Demand increases, pushing the unemployment rate down and GDP up.

But if white-collar layoffs cause a downturn, Washington might not be able to restore hiring and lift consumer spending as it has done before.

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Today’s edition has a lot of stories like this. It’s hard to escape. But you need multiple viewpoints. (Gift link.)
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Sizing chaos: how women can’t find clothes • The Pudding

Amanda Sakuma and Jan Diehm:

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I remember once being that teen girl shopping in the women’s section for the first time. I took stacks upon stacks of jeans with me to the dressing room, searching in vain for that one pair that fit perfectly. Over 20 years later, my hunt for the ideal pair of jeans continues. But now as an adult, I’m stuck with the countless ways that women’s apparel is not made for the average person, like me.

Children’s clothing sizes are often tied to a kid’s age or stage of development. The idea is that as a young person grows older, her clothes will evolve with her. Youth styles tend to be boxy and oversized to allow room for kids to move and grow. By early adolescence, apparel for girls becomes more fitted. Junior’s styles have higher waistlines and less-pronounced curves compared to adult clothing lines. In short: clothes for tweens are made for tween bodies.

By the time most teenage girls can wear women’s clothes — around age 15 — their options are seemingly endless. But the evolution in clothing sizes that followed girls throughout childhood abruptly stops there.

This is the reality I find myself reckoning with today: women’s clothing — designed for adults — fits modern teen girls better.

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This has terrific graphics, and reminds me strongly of a post which – very annoyingly – I can’t recall or find (not via search engine, not via chatbot) which was written by a woman (name maybe included Green?), about British stores’ varying clothes sizes, and which I linked to here (so post-2014). If you can remember what it was, let us know!
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Microsoft’s new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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Archival storage poses lots of challenges. We want media that is extremely dense and stable for centuries or more, and, ideally, doesn’t consume any energy when not being accessed. Lots of ideas have floated around—even DNA has been considered—but one of the simplest is to etch data into glass. Many forms of glass are very physically and chemically stable, and it’s relatively easy to etch things into it.

There’s been a lot of preliminary work demonstrating different aspects of a glass-based storage system. But in Wednesday’s issue of Nature, Microsoft Research announced Project Silica, a working demonstration of a system that can read and write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter.

We tend to think of glass as fragile, prone to shattering, and capable of flowing downward over centuries, although the last claim is a myth. Glass is a category of material, and a variety of chemicals can form glasses. With the right starting chemical, it’s possible to make a glass that is, as the researchers put it, “thermally and chemically stable and is resistant to moisture ingress, temperature fluctuations and electromagnetic interference.” While it would still need to be handled in a way to minimize damage, glass provides the sort of stability we’d want for long-term storage.

Putting data into glass is as simple as etching it. But that’s been one of the challenges, as etching is typically a slow process. However, the development of femtosecond lasers—lasers that emit pulses that only last 10-15 seconds and can emit millions of them per second—can significantly cut down write times and allow etching to be focused on a very small area, increasing potential data density.

To read the data back, there are several options. We’ve already had great success using lasers to read data from optical disks, albeit slowly. But anything that can pick up the small features etched into the glass could conceivably work.

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Forget DeepSeek. Dying alone is China’s latest tech obsession • Bloomberg via The Japan Times

Catherine Thorbecke:

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This time last year, the hottest Chinese tech product was DeepSeek’s market-moving artificial intelligence model. In 2026, it’s something far simpler: an app for people worried about dying alone.

The bluntly named “Are You Dead?” platform rocketed to the top of the app-store charts in China before going viral globally. The interface is almost aggressively plain. Users, largely people living alone, tap to confirm they are still alive. Miss two days in a row and an emergency contact gets notified.

Besides its provocative moniker, there’s a reason the app went megaviral without spending a dime on advertising — and didn’t even have to pretend to be a buzzy new AI product. Its surge coincided with the nation’s birth rate plunging to its lowest on record, at a time when marriage figures are falling and divorces are ticking up.

While many assumed it was developed for elderly users seeking to hold on to their independence, it was actually created by a team of Gen-Z developers who said in interviews they were inspired by their own experiences of isolating urban life. One-person households are expected to swell to as many as 200 million in the country by 2030.

These demographic changes aren’t unique to modern China, but they’re definitely not the kind of publicity Beijing wants right now. The platform was quietly removed from Chinese app stores last week. In a culture where frank mentions of dying are seen as taboo and inauspicious, the creators also said on micro-blogging site Weibo that they were planning on rebranding. The new international name, “Demumu,” is a Labubu-fied riff on the word “death.” It didn’t catch on as expected and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new idea via social media.

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I guess a lifetime subscription would be a good model.
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Death of software? Nah • Learning By Shipping

Steven Sinofsky goes over previous technology waves – the PC, retail and the web, media and the internet – and points out how people predicted both complete disruption and complete vanishment for each in turn:

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In each of these examples you can be someone who was there and claim “told you so,” or you could be someone who placed all their bets on “whole new world,” or somewhere in between.

In reality, almost all the people that called for full disruption and a whole new world were wildly optimistic on the timeframe. The thing is, the world needs these people because the transition is not a straight path. It is not “this is what we know needs to be built and now build it.”

Instead, what is absolutely part of this whole arc are people who are certain we are less than five years away and are in a rush to build with absolute belief in where things are heading, and people who support them with their labor or dollars. They are more worried about having already missed his opportunity as Marc Andreessen has often said upon arriving in Silicon Valley in 1994. Their success is awesome. Their failure teaches the broad community lessons. That’s also why the network and community of SV was so key.

The people that are certain what is going on is forever away, or even worse never going to happen, well they are important too. Because the transition takes so long and is so unevenly distributed, having people focused on legacy is key. Without all those people working on mainframes at IBM we would never have had online travel or banking, because that whole industry runs on that iron.

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He then goes on to list what he thinks is going to happen, for which the point summaries are:

• There will be more software than ever before
• AI-enabled or AI-centric software is simply moving up the stack of what a product is
• New tools will be created with AI that do new things
• Domain experience will be wildly more important than it is today because every domain will become vastly more sophisticated than it is now
• Finally, it is absolutely true that some companies will not make it.

He also points out that he instructed an LLM to do “a light proofread only” but also “do not delete content or change meaning. Preserve the tone, rhythm and point of view.” And that “Any emdashes were in the original.”
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Zuckerberg grilled in landmark social media trial over teen mental health • The Guardian

Sanya Mansoor:

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The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified at a landmark trial of social media companies on Wednesday. Plaintiffs’ lawyers grilled Zuckerberg about internal complaints that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform.

Zuckerberg claimed Meta had improved in identifying underage users but also said: “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.”

Zuckerberg also said some users lie about their age when joining Instagram and that the company removes those it identifies as underage, according to CNBC. The plaintiffs’ lawyers hit back at those claims: “You expect a nine-year-old to read all of the fine print? That’s your basis for swearing under oath that children under 13 are not allowed?” CNBC reported.

The Meta chief was flanked by people wearing the Meta Ray-Ban artificial intelligence glasses, and the judge in the courtroom threatened to hold anyone recording with the devices in contempt, CNBC reported.

…Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who argue that Meta intentionally designed its social media platforms to be addictive, questioned Zuckerberg about whether he knew of harms his company’s products could inflict on young people’s mental health. The plaintiffs have already made public internal documents they say prove their point.

This is the first time Zuckerberg has addressed concerns about child safety before a jury at trial. Tech companies have long relied on a federal law that shields them from liability for content posted by users, but the plaintiffs’ novel argument – which is focused on harmful design and not individual actors – has so far sidestepped this defence.

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Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘Search Party’ surveillance beyond dogs • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media. 

In October, Ring launched Search Party, an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood and uses AI to search for specific lost dogs, essentially creating a networked, automated surveillance system. The feature got some attention at the time, but faced extreme backlash after Ring and Siminoff promoted Search Party during a Super Bowl ad. 404 Media obtained an email that Siminoff sent to all Ring employees in early October, soon after the feature’s launch, which said the feature was introduced “first for finding dogs,” but that it or features like it would be expanded to “zero out crime in neighbourhoods.”

“This is by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring. And it is not only the quantity, but quality,” Siminoff wrote. “I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”

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I’d misunderstood the recent ructions where Ring disassociated from Flock to mean Search Party (for dogs) was over. But Ring wants to get in on the crime space that Flock has been shifting towards. Meanwhjile it has launched “Fire Watch”, using AI to warn about fires.
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The AI disruption has arrived, and it sure is fun • The New York Times

Paul Ford:

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Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system.

An axiom of programming is “real artists ship.” That was something Steve Jobs once said to remind his team that finishing and releasing a product matters more than endlessly refining it. Much of the software industry is organized around managing ship risk, and the possibility that a product never actually makes it out to the world. A good technology manager assumes that a product will never ship for launch, that every force is arrayed against it, and that the devil himself has cursed it — and then the manager works back from that.

Even if all these obstacles are surmounted, the software will ship late. Remember, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 only because Apple couldn’t ship a new version of its operating system, so they bought his company, NeXT. And the direct descendant of NeXT’s software is what’s running on Macs and iPhones in 2026. In software, dramatic change is to be avoided at all costs. The risk is just too high.

Except … what if, going forward, it’s not? What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof? That doesn’t mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly.

And for lots of users, that’s going to be fine. People don’t judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They’re not looking for the human connection of art. They’re looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work.

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AI taxonomy: an operational framework for precision in AI discourse

Narain Jashanmal:

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“AI” has become semantically meaningless. The term now encompasses everything from a regression model to an autonomous robot, creating confusion in strategic discussions, partner conversations, and product positioning. This taxonomy provides a functional framework based on what the AI actually does, not what technique it uses.

The Framework in One Sentence: We use Analytical AI to decide, Semantic AI to understand and remember, Generative AI to create, Agentic AI to act, Perceptive AI to sense, and Physical AI to move.

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This is certainly a useful addition.
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Preserving the web is not the problem. Losing it is • Techdirt

Mark Graham is the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive:

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Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity and a federal depository library, has been building its archive of the world wide web since 1996. Today, the Wayback Machine provides access to thirty years’ worth of web history and culture. It has become an essential resource for journalists, researchers, courts, and the public. 

For three decades the Wayback Machine has peacefully coexisted with the development of the web, including the websites mentioned in the article. Our mission is simple: to preserve knowledge and make it accessible for research, accountability, and historical understanding. 

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You’d expect that Graham’s article would, given how it’s describing concerns at those media organisations, offer reassurance that no, there’s absolutely no accommodation for AI scrapers. What you get is this:

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The Wayback Machine is built for human readers. We use rate limiting, filtering, and monitoring to prevent abusive access, and we watch for and actively respond to new scraping patterns as they emerge.

We acknowledge that systems can always be improved. We are actively working with publishers on technical solutions to strengthen our systems and address legitimate concerns without erasing the historical record.

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Which sounds rather like “yes, we are getting scraped, but we’re trying to stop it.”
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Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic’s Claude to automate accounting • CNBC

Hugh Son:

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Goldman Sachs has been working with the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic to create AI agents to automate a growing number of roles within the bank, the firm’s tech chief told CNBC exclusively.

The bank has for the past six months been working with embedded Anthropic engineers to co-develop autonomous agents in at least two specific areas: accounting for trades and transactions, and client vetting and onboarding, according to Marco Argenti, Goldman’s chief information officer.

The firm is “in the early stages” of developing agents based on Anthropic’s Claude model that will collapse the amount of time these essential functions take, Argenti said. He expects to launch the agents “soon,” though he declined to provide a specific date.

“Think of it as a digital co-worker for many of the professions within the firm that are scaled, are complex and very process intensive,” he said.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in October that his bank was embarking on a multiyear plan to reorganize itself around generative AI, the technology that has made waves since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Even as investment banks like Goldman are experiencing surging revenue from trading and advisory activities, it will seek to “constrain headcount growth” amid the overhaul, Solomon said.

The news from Goldman comes as model updates from Anthropic, co-founded by a former OpenAI executive, have sparked a sharp sell-off among software firms and their credit providers as investors wager on who the winners and losers from the AI trade will be.

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This ought to trigger a lot of discussion. The pessimistic view: AI is going to wipe out the jobs! The optimistic view: the arrival of the spreadsheet didn’t get rid of accountants; in fact it made it possible for there to be more accountants reporting results more quickly and people forecasting financial outcomes. Who knows where this is going to land?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would you know, or care, that the meat in your burger was grown in a bioreactor? A lot of people care, even if they don’t know. CC-licensed photo by Ian Turk 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. Chewing it over. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Sony reportedly mulling PS6 delay while Nintendo eyes Switch 2 price hike as AI-driven RAM shortages continue • Eurogamer.net

Matt Wales:

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Sony is reportedly looking to push back the launch of PlayStation 6 in response to memory shortages caused by tech giants’ continuing AI expansion drive, while Nintendo is said to be considering a price hike for Switch 2.

Memory shortages and soaring prices have made headlines in recent times, both issues arising as tech companies continue their push into AI. Substantial amounts of RAM are required to power AI platforms, so as the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta continue to throw money at AI data centres in order to stay competitive, the demand for RAM has increased dramatically.

Supply issues and spiralling costs could have a significant impact on consumer electronics, with Valve having already announced a delay for its Steam Machines as it grapples with memory and storage shortages. Similarly, Microsoft is reportedly looking to increase the price of its Xbox Series X/S yet again in response to global RAM shortages.

As to how Xbox’s closest rivals might respond, Bloomberg – citing “people familiar with the company’s thinking” – now reports Sony is considering shifting the release of PlayStation 6 to 2028 or 2029. While the company has never publicly discussed a launch window for its next-gen console, documents leaked in 2022 suggested it wouldn’t release PS6 until at least 2027.

Since then, reports have surfaced claiming Sony is looking to begin manufacturing its next-gen console early next year for a 2027 release, but some analysts have more recently suggested a launch in 2028 or beyond is now likelier.

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The blast radius from the AI ..project? continues to widen. Perhaps Sony is hoping either that by 2028 the AI bubble will have collapsed, and prices will be approaching reason, or else that supply will have expanded to meet the enlarged demand. Either way, the disruption isn’t going to please people. Especially gamers.
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Meta’s own research found parental supervision doesn’t really help curb teens’ compulsive social media use • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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An internal research study at Meta dubbed “Project MYST” [for Meta Youth and Social Trends], created in partnership with the University of Chicago, found that parental supervision and controls — such as time limits and restricted access — had little impact on kids’ compulsive use of social media. The study also found that kids who experienced stressful life events were more likely to lack the ability to moderate their social media use appropriately.

This was one of the notable claims revealed during testimony at the social media addiction trial that began last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is identified by her initials “KGM” or her first name, “Kaley.” She, along with her mother and others joining the case, is accusing social media companies of creating “addictive and dangerous” products that led the young users to suffer anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and more.

The case is now one of several landmark trials that will take place this year, which accuse social media companies of harming children. The results of these lawsuits will impact these companies’ approach to their younger users and could prompt regulators to take further action.

In this case, the plaintiff sued Meta, YouTube, ByteDance (TikTok), and Snap, but the latter two companies had settled their claims before the trial’s start.

In the jury trial now underway in L.A., Kaley’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, brought up an internal study at Meta, which he said found evidence that Meta knew of, yet didn’t publicize, these specific harms.

In Project MYST, Meta’s research concluded that “parental and household factors have little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness to their social media use.”

Or, in other words, even when parents try to control their children’s social media use, either by using parental controls or even just household rules and supervision, it doesn’t impact whether or not the child will overuse social media or use it compulsively. The study was based on a survey of 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use.

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Wouldn’t it be amazing if Meta were to publish all the studies like this that it carries out internally. Instead they come out in dribs and drabs at trial or in embarrassing media reports, and it looks shady.
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Lab-grown meat exists, but the problem is nobody wants to eat it • My Digital Dive

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In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3bn in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.

The promise is straightforward: real meat, no slaughter required. You could eat beef without killing cattle, chicken without industrial farming, steak without ethical compromise. The technology works. Federal regulators approved it as safe. And nearly a third of US states have banned it or are trying to. Not because it’s dangerous — because it threatens something deeper than food safety.

Start with a small sample of animal cells — a biopsy, not a slaughter. Place them in a bioreactor with nutrients. The cells multiply, forming muscle tissue identical to conventional meat at the cellular level. Nutritionally comparable, same protein content, but grown without raising and killing an animal.

The process uses 64-90% less land than conventional meat production and drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions. No factory farms, no slaughterhouses, no ethical compromise for people who love meat but hate industrial animal agriculture. For vegetarians who gave up meat for ethical reasons, it offers something impossible before: guilt-free steak.

…Here’s where the dream hits reality. Consumer surveys show people perceive conventional meat as tastier and healthier than lab-grown alternatives. Fewer consumers are willing to try cultivated options than expected. The words “lab-grown” and “cultivated” don’t exactly make mouths water.

Something about meat grown in a bioreactor triggers deep discomfort for many people, even those who claim to care about animal welfare and environmental impact. It’s the same psychological barrier that made “Frankenfood” stick as a label for GMOs. Meat is supposed to come from animals, raised on farms, connected to land and tradition. Growing it in a facility feels wrong to people in ways they struggle to articulate.

At $10-$30 per pound, cultivated meat still costs more than conventional options despite the massive reduction from the $330,000 burger. Companies need economies of scale to compete on price. Scaling requires market access and consumer acceptance. But before they can build that acceptance, states are shutting down the possibility entirely.

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Maybe it’s the word “bioreactor”? I think it would put me off. But it’s worth bearing in mind too that cattle don’t just produce meat. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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99% of adults over 40 have shoulder “abnormalities” on an MRI, study finds • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem—in fact, it could even cloud it.

In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99% of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket—and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of people in the study had no shoulder problems.

The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain—and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening).

“While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings,” the study authors concluded.

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The shoulder joint is (according to a physio) the most complicated in the body because of its multiple degrees of freedom. But the problem of overdiagnosis through MRIs (and CAT scans and X-rays) is quite widespread throughout medicine.
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Police arresting 1,000 paedophile suspects a month across UK • The Guardian

Vikram Dodd:

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Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.

The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.

Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.

The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.

Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.

Jones added that the majority of images of abuse were “known images” that had been in circulation for some time, and that tech companies had the ability to stop them.

“The threat is getting worse, despite our best efforts… There is more access to children online,” he said.

“Children are more reliant on the internet, and what we see from offenders is a move to collaborate and coordinate activities on the dark web, but to use the open web as a discovery platform to identify and abuse vulnerable children.”

Police were “racing” to get to the worst offenders, who were in positions of trust or had access to children and made up 15% of more than 33,000 leads last year.

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The obvious question is whether these people were doing the same before the internet was around, and the answer seems to be: no. The availability of this content has made it worse.
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KPMG partner fined over using AI to pass AI test • Financial Times

Nic Fildes:

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A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined A$10,000 (US$7,000) by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI.

The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.

More than two dozen staff have been caught over this financial year using AI tools for internal exams, according to KPMG.

The incident is the latest example of a professional services company struggling with staff using artificial intelligence to cheat on exams or when producing work for clients.

“Like most organisations, we have been grappling with the role and use of AI as it relates to internal training and testing,” said Andrew Yates, chief executive of KPMG Australia. “It’s a very hard thing to get on top of given how quickly society has embraced it.”

He added: “Given the everyday use of these tools, some people breach our policy. We take it seriously when they do. We are also looking at ways to strengthen our approach in the current self-reporting regime.”

The world’s largest accounting body, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, scrapped remote tests late last year, saying its safeguards could not keep up with the “sophistication” of cheating systems. All of the Big Four accounting firms have been hit with fines over cheating scandals across multiple countries in recent years.

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Seems like the partner was doing.. exactly what one should do.
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How generative and agentic AI shift concern from technical debt to cognitive debt • Margaret Storey

Margaret-Anne Storey:

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The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time. Technical debt nicely captures that “human understanding” also matters, but the words “technical debt” conjure up the notion that the accrued debt is a property of the code and effort needs to be spent on removing that debt from code.

Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to “go fast” or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot and may not understand what the program is supposed to do, how their intentions were implemented, or how to possibly change it.

Technical debt lives in the code; cognitive debt lives in developers’ minds.

Cognitive debt is likely a much bigger threat than technical debt, as AI and agents are adopted. Peter Naur reminded us some decades ago that a program is more than its source code. Rather a program is a theory that lives in the minds of the developer(s) capturing what the program does, how developer intentions are implemented, and how the program can be changed over time. Usually this theory is not just in the minds of one developer but fragments of this theory are distributed across the minds of many, if not thousands, of other developers.

I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. Student teams were building software products over the semester, moving quickly to ship features and meet milestones. But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.

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Storey is Professor of Computer Science, University of Victoria. Simon Willison, who has been on top of agentic coding for ages, comments:

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I’ve experienced this myself on some of my more ambitious vibe-code-adjacent projects. I’ve been experimenting with prompting entire new features into existence without reviewing their implementations and, while it works surprisingly well, I’ve found myself getting lost in my own projects.

I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.

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Vibe coded apps are great. Now try to change them to accommodate a changed API or new feature.
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Apple is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered glasses, a pendant, and AirPods • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Apple is pushing ahead with plans to launch its first pair of smart glasses, along with an AI-powered pendant and camera-equipped AirPods, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The three devices come with built-in cameras and will connect to the iPhone, allowing Siri to use “visual context to carry out actions,” Bloomberg reports.

Apple is reportedly aiming to start production of its smart glasses in December, ahead of a 2027 launch. The new device will compete directly with Meta’s lineup of smart glasses and is rumored to feature speakers, microphones, and a high-resolution camera for taking photos and videos, in addition to another lens designed to enable AI-powered features.

The glasses won’t have a built-in display, but they will allow users to make phone calls, interact with Siri, play music, and “take actions based on surroundings,” such as asking about the ingredients in a meal, according to Bloomberg. Apple’s smart glasses could also help users identify what they’re seeing, reference landmarks when offering directions, and remind wearers to complete a task in specific situations, Bloomberg reports.

The company is reportedly planning to develop the frames for the smart glasses in-house, instead of partnering with a third-party company like Meta does with Ray-Ban and Oakley. Prototypes of the glasses use a cable to connect to a battery pack and an iPhone, but Bloomberg reports that “newer versions have the components embedded in the frame.”

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As usual, the secondhand report is written far more comprehensibly than Gurman’s original. Gurman might be good at getting the occasional scoop, but even robots might feel a bit insulted if you called his writing robotic.
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Apple reveals how many iPhones are running iOS 26 • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption figures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads are running those software versions.

These adoption numbers are based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on February 12, 2026, according to Apple.

The statistics are as follows:
• 74% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years are running iOS 26
• 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26
• 66% of all iPads introduced in the last four years are running iPadOS 26
• 57% of all iPads are running iPadOS 26

Here is how that compares to the iOS 18 adoption figures that Apple shared based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on January 21, 2025:
• 76% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were running iOS 18
• 68% of all iPhones were running iOS 18
• 63% of all iPads introduced in the last four years were running iPadOS 18
• 53% of all iPads were running iPadOS 18.

At first glance, the iOS 26 and iOS 18 adoption figures appear to be similar, but this is only because Apple released the iOS 26 statistics later than usual. iOS 26’s statistics are based on devices that transacted with the App Store approximately 150 days after the update was released to the public, compared to 127 days for iOS 18. In other words, iOS 26 was available for around three weeks longer by comparison.

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Ehh, I don’t think the three weeks are really material here. The growing number of devices in use, plus marginal statistical variation, points to this not having any meaningful impact. There aren’t people holding back from iOS 26 per se.

However: if people could revert from iOS 26 to iOS 18, what would the statistics looks like?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is a peeled banana every audiophile’s new best friend? CC-licensed photo by Dan Foy 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. Fruitful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

An AI agent published a hit piece on me. Now more things have happened • The Shamblog

Scott Shambaugh:

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Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me.

It’s been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let’s start with the news coverage.

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes.

Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here. Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this. Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me. And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet, as part of the persistent public record.

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This is extremely weird: highly unlikely that an AI agent just wrote the piece on its own without prompting. We hope. The whole of Shambaugh’s experience feels dystopian, but also hard to figure out: is it really AI, or human-prompted?
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Check what benefits you could get • MissingBenefit.com

Tom Loosemore:

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Use this service to find out what benefits you might get from central, devolved and local government.

The service covers benefits for people in most circumstances across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — apart from if you’re under 18, a prisoner, a student, not a British or Irish citizen, on strike, living outside the UK or living permanently in residential care or a nursing home.

This experimental calculator was built by AI, so DO NOT rely on these estimates or risk using your own personal data.

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This was vibe coded – so to speak – by Loosemore:

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This benefits calculator & API was made over the course of a train ride and a weekend by Tom Loosemore, solely using the Replit AI coding environment. This has cost him about £200 thus far.

PLEASE DO NOT TRUST THE CALCULATIONS. They’ve all been created by AI, so they will doubtless be wrong in ways large, small and subtle. Please contact me on [email provided] if you spot any bugs, or just want to chat about it.

It is an independent, non-commercial tool intended for experimental purposes only. For example, I’m going to use the API to experiment with how AI Agents might impact citizen’s access to public services, for good or for ill.

It is not affiliated with or endorsed by HM Government, the Department for Work and Pensions, or any other government body. The service is provided free of charge for informational purposes only. I may turn it off at any moment, so don’t rely on it, but do have a play.

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Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future: Letter from the Editor • cleveland.com

Chris Quinn is editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper:

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Like many students we’ve spoken with in the past year, this one had been told repeatedly by professors that AI is bad. We heard the same thing at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Cleveland in August. Student after student said it.

That’s backwards — and it seriously handicaps them as they begin their careers. I’ve written extensively about how we use AI to do more and better work. It has quickly become critical to everything we do, and to our success.

The job posting involves expanding local news coverage. Last year, we began covering Lorain, Lake and Geauga counties using powerful AI tools to help identify stories. Reporters Hannah Drown and Molly Walsh have uncovered a steady stream of compelling pieces, enriching our report. I choose nine stories each day for discussion on our Today in Ohio podcast, and their work regularly rises to the top.

The effort has been so successful we expanded it to Medina County this month. With the Syracuse fellowship, we hope to add northern Summit County in May.

We could not do this without AI. We once had large teams covering these counties. That’s no longer feasible.

Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100% reporting. We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. We fact-check everything. Editors review it. Reporters get the final say. Humans — not AI — control every step.

By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.

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People are losing their minds over this, on two counts: they can’t bear the idea that a newsroom might be using AI in this way, and they think the article itself is AI-composed. They’re ignoring the points that the article makes: it enables journalists to do work they couldn’t before. In a sense, it’s not that different from journalists calling into an office to dictate a story, which is then rewritten by people in the office who have access to more information from wire services. Few pieces pass unaltered through the editing process. But of course, Shambaugh’s experience (above) suggests that a lot of caution and care is required.
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Binance fires top investigators who claim to have uncovered evidence of Iranian sanctions violations • Fortune

Leo Schwartz:

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In 2023 the crypto exchange Binance pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) laws as well as sanctions violations. The company agreed to pay $4.3bn, one of the largest corporate fines in U.S. history. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to failing to implement proper oversight, and was later sentenced to four months in prison. In response, Zhao agreed to step down as CEO of Binance, and the company consented to government-imposed monitorships, pledging to enter a new phase of “regulatory maturity.” 

Binance, however, appears to be reneging on its promise. According to multiple sources and internal documents viewed by Fortune, investigators on the company’s compliance team uncovered evidence that entities tied to Iran had received more than $1bn through the exchange from March 2024 through August 2025, in potential violation of sanctions laws. The transactions routed through Binance using the stablecoin Tether on a blockchain known as Tron.

After the investigators surfaced the findings through internal reports, at least five were fired starting in late 2025, according to the sources, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity owing to fear of legal repercussions. At least three of the investigators came from law enforcement backgrounds in Europe and Asia. Several held leadership roles at Binance and were in charge of special and global financial investigations, including those related to sanction evasions and counter-terror financing.

The exact reason for their firings could not be determined. Several of the former staffers publicly announced they were leaving Binance on LinkedIn and did not specify the circumstances of their departure. Each of them declined to comment. Subsequent to publication of this article, Binance stated no investigators had been fired for reporting potential sanctions violations, and that, “Following internal review, and based on the advice of qualified legal counsel, we found no evidence that Binance violated applicable sanctions laws in connection with the activity referenced.”

And beyond the firings of the investigators, at least four top compliance staff have left or been pushed out over the past three months, according to the sources and publicly available information.

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You asked what crypto is good for? People trying to evade sanctions know very well what it’s good for.
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You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth • Noapinion

Noah Smith:

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AI agents — basically, a program that keeps applying AI over and over until a task is complete — are now taking over much of software engineering. People just tell the AI what kind of software they want, and the AI pops it out. Human software engineers are still checking the code for problems, but as the technology improves, the cost of doing this is likely to become uneconomical; AI-written software will never be perfect, but it’ll be consistently much better than anything humans could do, and at a tiny fraction of the price.

Vibe coding is taking over fast. Spotify’s co-CEO recently revealed that the company’s best developers don’t write code anymore. Some journalists from CNBC, with no coding experience, vibe-coded a clone of the app Monday, and the company’s stock price promptly crashed. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly writing the next version of itself, and humans may not be in the loop for very much longer.

And all of this — ending software engineering as we know it, acing the hardest math tests, solving unsolved math problems, creating infinite apps at the touch of a button — is just the beginning. The amount of resources that the world is preparing to deploy to improve AI, this year and in the following few years, utterly dwarfs anything that it has deployed so far.

AI’s abilities scale with the amount of compute applied. The amount of compute available this year will be much greater than the amount that’s producing all the miracles you see now. And then next year’s compute will be far greater than that. All the while, AI itself will be searching for ways to improve AI algorithms to better take advantage of increased compute.

Other weaknesses of AI — in particular, its lack of long-term memory and its inability to learn on the fly — will eventually be solved. AI will be able to act on its own for longer and longer, with less and less human decision-making in the loop. Meanwhile, massive investment in robotics will give AI more and more direct contact with, understanding of, and control of the physical world.

…But there’s a bigger reality out there that people outside the tech industry — and even many people within it — don’t seem to have grasped yet. It isn’t just that AI could take your job, or put millions of people on welfare, or give us infinite free software, or whatever. It’s that for the first time in all of recorded history, humans no longer are — or soon no longer will be — the most intelligent beings on this planet, in any meaningful functional sense of the word.

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The vibe coding point is crucial. Programming is going from a labour-intensive job to a mass-manufacturing automated job; Marco Arment, on the Accidental Tech Podcast, described it as like the shift from artisan carpentry to mass-produced IKEA flatpacks.
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Trump administration announces that we don’t know where the sun goes at night • The Atlantic

Alexandra Petri:

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“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.”  — The New York Times

A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don’t know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.

The National Institutes of Health has orders to devote every whiteboard in every conference room to this pressing question. In the Oval Office, under the gold leaf, the president and his advisers are making a big list of possibilities:

The sun might be on the back of a big beetle—a dung beetle, maybe. (The EPA will work to determine what kind of beetle.) Where is the beetle going with it? Will the beetle bring it back?

Or maybe the witches take it. (They are pretty sure in the White House that witches are real.)

Maybe the immigrants steal the sun in the evenings.

Maybe the sun is the yellow scribble in the top corner of the page with sunglasses drawn on it in marker, and it disappears when someone puts it in a drawer. (But who? Emmanuel Macron?)

Maybe the sun is in Greenland. (If so, it is even more important to get control of Greenland.)

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Petri writes excellent satire. Before she moved to The Atlantic, she was at the Washington Post, but left before the latest cuts. (Gift link.)
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In a blind test, audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different ‘interfaces.’

Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier.

Initial test results showed that it’s extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. “The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn’t,” Pano said. “All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren’t.”

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The mud works as an earth (haha) return for the circuit. The signal was digital, of course, so you could argue that any degradation will be minimal because of the error correction, and that this is very different from transmitting an analogue audio signal to speakers. Which is true! So might be a while before we see mud wires for sale. (Thanks Andrew B for the link.)
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How and/or why does Docusign have 7,000 employees? • SatPost

Trung Phan:

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It’s just a digital signature tool, right? Hell, they keep your autograph and initials on file and all you have to do is click the box. That’s it? Why can’t I just copy and paste a template online in Word?

I ask these questions every time I’m signing a Docusign PDF that I didn’t read and hoped that I wasn’t giving away anything important in my life (TBD).

The meme was really funny when Docusign was worth ~$60B on $1.8B of sales during peak pandemic madness in 2021. It’s now worth a still respectable $10B, but on a much more reasonable multiple on $3B of sales (it went from 33x to 3x trailing-twelve-month sales).

Sufficiently curious about how a software company could employ (maybe) more people than the American federal government, I finally did some digging a few months ago.

I read through financial filings, some analyst reports and forum posts.

Man, was I wrong because Docusign having 7,000 employees is very reasonable.

My favourite explainer comes from a post in the r/WebDev subreddit. The post has since been deleted but I got a screenshot and let’s go through a fun thought experiment:

•Let’s say most people use Docusign 5x a year. But 1% of power users are signing documents 10x a day. Among American adults, that would be (5 x 250 million) + (10 x 365 x 2.5 million) = 10 billion signatures a year
• America is probably above average since the country is super litigious and lawyers love to lawyer. So, let’s assume the rest of the world does 25 billion signatures a year
• So, that’s 35 billion signatures a year…or 95 million a day…or 4 million an hour…or 1,000 every second
• This system has to work in 180 countries around the world, following local contract laws in each of them (that’s a lot of system administrators and lawyers)
• Docusign builds a hybrid cloud system in every country that keeps all records and a ton of back-ups across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and its own data centres (that’s a lot of engineers and system administrators)
• In total, Docusign serves 1.8 million paying customers (including 3,000 government agencies and most of the Fortune 500).

These paying customers are sending signature requests to over 1 billion users
• The headcount is about 5,000 employees for sales, marketing and support to serve that customer base. Another 2,000 employees for engineering, system admin and product development.

I don’t think anyone is vibe coding a Docusign product and gaining market share by undercutting current prices. Trust me, I tried for a solid 47 minutes. No bueno.

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The idea that every SaaS company can be replaced by a bit of vibe coding is, as Phan points out, a classic bit of hope triumphing over reality.
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Global analysis tracks 3,100 glacier surges as climate change rewrites the rules • Phys.org

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While most of the world’s glaciers are retreating as the climate warms, a small but significant population behaves very differently—and the consequences can be severe. A team of international scientists, led by the University of Portsmouth, has carried out a comprehensive global analysis of surging glaciers, examining the hazards they cause and how climate change is fundamentally altering when and where these dramatic events occur.

Glacier surges—when a glacier suddenly moves much faster than normal—rapidly transport ice to the glacier front and often cause advances. These events typically last for several years, with many glaciers experiencing repeated surges separated by decades of relative inactivity.

The study, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, compiled a database of more than 3,100 glaciers that have surged. Rather than being scattered globally, these glaciers cluster in dense groupings across the Arctic, High Mountain Asia and the Andes.

It includes the key features and basic processes controlling glacier surges, characterizes the wide range of surging behaviours, and maps the global locations of surge-type glaciers and the climate conditions that cause them to cluster in specific areas.

“Surge-type glaciers are very unusual and can be troublesome,” said lead author Dr. Harold Lovell, Senior Lecturer and glaciologist from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment and Life Sciences. “As a friend and fellow glaciologist once put it, they save up ice like a savings account and then spend it all very quickly like a Black Friday event. But while they only represent 1% of all glaciers worldwide, they affect just under one-fifth of global glacier area, and their behaviour can result in serious and sometimes catastrophic natural disasters that affect thousands of people.”

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This study was misrepresented by a number of mendacious outlets as “look! Glaciers are advancing, not retreating!” The reality is that it’s worse. There continues to be no good news on climate.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’re training for a marathon, how far can you trust different running apps and wearables? CC-licensed photo by Florent Boutellier 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 11 links for you. Running on empty. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Ukraine’s no man’s land is the future of war • FT

Eric Schmidt (the former Google CEO and also an investor in defence technology companies):

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Ubiquitous drone coverage — in which almost anything moving on the battlefield, whether soldier or vehicle, is detected and destroyed — means that Russia’s advances remain minimal. It seized less than 1% of Ukrainian territory in 2025. Their slow, grinding assault is carried out in large part by small infiltration units walking or riding motorbikes through forests. The odds of being killed by drones for those who try to advance are about one in three.

Yet Russian forces continue pushing, straining Ukrainian manpower, resources and will, even as Ukrainian officials estimate they are killing or seriously wounding 30,000 to 35,000 Russian soldiers each month. The Russian state’s tolerance for such casualties undermines Ukraine’s reliance on attrition as a viable strategy. There is seemingly no clear breaking point, no threshold at which Russia will finally admit defeat.

The Russians are also adapting to a new era of warfare. Tactics pioneered by the country’s elite Rubicon drone unit are filtering down to the front, particularly the use of fibre-optic drones immune to jamming that can strike soldiers in trenches or tunnels even through forests and rough weather. Russia has begun development of jet-powered Shahed drones that are much faster and harder to intercept, and it intends to increase its use of Shaheds to upwards of 1,000 a day in 2026 to pummel Ukraine into submission.

…Future wars are going to be defined by unmanned weapons. The combination of unblockable satellite communications, cheap spectrum networks and accurate GPS targeting means the only way to fight will be through drone vs drone combat. Drones share data in real time, meaning that many inexpensive platforms can act as a single weapon. They will carry air-to-air missiles to defeat attackers, just like a fighter jet does, but will be cheaper and more abundant.

The winner of those drone battles will then be able to advance with unmanned ground and maritime vehicles, which move slowly but can carry heavier payloads. These air, land and sea formations will absorb the initial fire and expand what is becoming an increasingly robotic kill zone. Only after the first waves of machines have gone in will human soldiers follow.

When the war in Ukraine is eventually settled, the result may be a tense peace that offers as many lessons for western nations as the conflict itself.

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I think everyone has already learnt lessons from this war. The speed at which drones were adopted as dramatically effective front-line weapons should have made any soldier sit up and take notice.
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London measles outbreak: more than 60 children infected • The Times

Shaun Lintern:

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Seven schools and a nursery have reported more than 60 suspected cases of measles in an area of north London, and labs have confirmed 34 cases since January 12. Some children have been treated in hospital.

GPs have told parents that the outbreak in Enfield is spreading because the virus is exploiting low levels of MMR vaccinations in the capital. For every one infected person, measles can spread to up to 18 unvaccinated people.

If measles becomes entrenched it could be a significant public health risk for the whole of Greater London, where vaccination rates are among the lowest in England.

Health officials are racing to stop the outbreak from becoming established.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said modelling of a large measles outbreak in the city suggested between 40,000 and 160,000 people could be infected. This would lead to large numbers of children needing hospital treatment, with some likely to die. Last July, a child died from measles in Liverpool after a small outbreak there.

The World Health Organisation announced last month that the UK had lost its measles elimination status after more than 4,600 infections since 2024, and uptake of the measles vaccine dropping below the 95% level needed for herd immunity.

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According to the map on the story, Hackney is even worse, with a 60% vaccination rate in 2023-4 among under-fives. The capital has comparatively low MMR vaccination rates. It’s a serious problem.
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The “quite tiny” RNA molecule that could answer the question of the origin of life • ZME Science

Tibi Puiu:

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Scientists on their quest to find the origin of life have stared into the primordial soup, trying to answer the ultimate chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, the genetic code or the proteins that build it? In modern biology, this is a distinct division of labor. DNA holds the blueprints, while proteins do the heavy lifting of catalyzing chemical reactions. But in the deep past, roughly 4 billion years ago, some scientists believe the first life spawned in an “RNA World.”

In this hypothetical era, RNA — DNA’s single-stranded molecular cousin — did it all. It stored genetic information and folded itself into complex shapes to act as a catalyst, or “ribozyme.”

The theory is elegant, but it has always suffered from a massive paradox. Until now, the only RNA molecules known to science capable of copying themselves were massive, complex beasts. They were so large that the odds of them appearing spontaneously in a puddle of prebiotic sludge were vanishingly small.

That has just changed.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have discovered a ribozyme that is shockingly small, yet capable of the fundamental steps of self-replication. They call it QT45 — short for “Quite Tiny 45.”

…The ultimate test for any candidate for the “first spark of life” is the ability to replicate itself. This involves two distinct steps: the ribozyme (the positive strand) must use itself as a template to build a complementary negative strand, and then use that negative strand to rebuild the original positive ribozyme. QT45 can do both, apparently.

“This is, for the first time, a piece of RNA that can make itself and its encoding strand, and those are the two constituent reactions of self-replication,” says Holliger.

However, there is a catch. Currently, the team hasn’t managed to get both reactions to happen in the same pot simultaneously. The ribozyme can synthesize its complementary strand from a mix of all 64 possible triplets, but to copy itself back from that strand, it currently requires a specific set of 13 triplets and a “hexamer” (a six-nucleotide chunk) to get the job done.

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Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its smart glasses • The New York Times

Kashmir HillKalley Huang and Mike Isaac:

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Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns.

Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

Meta’s plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

…Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.

The feature would not [emphasis added – Overspill Ed] give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.

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Though they’ll probably be hacked to do so using Clearview AI – remember that?
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Weight-loss jabs push sugar price to five-year low • FT

Susannah Savage:

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Sugar prices have tumbled to their lowest level in more than five years as weight-loss drugs accelerate a drop in demand by pushing consumers to ditch sweet treats in favour of protein.

Raw cane sugar futures in New York dropped to less than 14 cents a pound on Wednesday, the lowest since October 2020 and less than half the level they hit in late 2023. Traders say the move reflects a sharper than forecast slowdown in consumption in the US and other wealthy economies, while demand in developing countries is growing at a slower pace than expected.

So-called GLP-1 weight-loss injections — which work by activating the glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor hormone that makes people feel fuller — have been a crucial driver of reducing cravings for sweet flavours. GLP-1s are the basis of medications including Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound.

“The drop in consumption, or the speed of it, has taken the [sugar] industry unaware,” said Gurdev Gill at broker Marex, adding that Mexico and the US have been the clearest examples, while demand data in Europe has also been “challenging” for sugar prices.

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The change in consumption is small – 23,000 tonnes less on 12.3m total, or less than 1%, in the US – but might be the tip of the spear.
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Without my fitness tracker I’d never have run so far. Or behaved so weirdly • Tim Harford

Tim Harford is in training to run his first marathon in April:

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Given that the history of fitness trackers begins with someone picking 10,000 steps because it’s a nice-sounding round number, the lack of transparency and independent verification of these apps and devices is not wholly reassuring. They are not being sold as medical devices, so regulators do not get involved. I am often told that older runners need more time to recover between each run, so I asked [running app] Runna’s [chief technology officer Walter] Holohan to reassure me that Runna would take into account the fact that I was 52 years old. Alas, he could not. Age-adaptive plans were still on the drawing board, he told me. So were training plans that reflected the menstrual cycle of female athletes.

Reassurance was no more forthcoming from Garmin. The company wouldn’t make anyone available for an interview, and ducked every question about whether the Garmin training recommendations took into account my age.

Facing a marathon, then, which app should I choose? I respect their behavioural savvy and would expect any of them to tug my strings like an expert puppet master, but I am less confident of the physiological science behind their recommendations, as their methods are secret and their pretensions to rigour largely untested.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful: my inexpensive Garmin watch and the free coaching app that was bundled with it took me from weekly wayward 5k runs to a well-paced half-marathon. But perhaps I have come to expect a little too much from my silicon coach.

Iefore my half-marathon, my Garmin app told me my predicted time was 1hr 54 minutes and 56 seconds. Strava, looking at exactly the same data, told me I could go a full 11 minutes faster. Even over a distance of more than 21km, 11 minutes is a huge difference. This put me in a quandary before the race. Everyone warned me not to go off too fast — but given the yawning gap between the algorithmic forecasts, what did “too fast” even mean?

“If you spoke to two different humans they might do the same thing,” says the digital health expert [Carol] Maher. “It’s easy to believe that technology just has the answer.”

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Amazon’s Ring cancels Flock partnership amid Super Bowl ad backlash • CNBC

Annie Palmer:

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Ring announced on Thursday it is terminating its partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety.

The partnership between Flock and Ring came under scrutiny after the Amazon doorbell company ran an ad during last Sunday’s Super Bowl that touted a “Search Party” feature that uses artificial intelligence to help locate lost pets. When a user initiates the feature, it activates a network of participating Ring cameras, which scan footage for images resembling the missing dog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the feature a “surveillance nightmare.”

Flock, meanwhile, operates a network of automated license plate readers, and sells access to that software to customers that include law enforcement agencies.

Ring’s decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this week, Salesforce employees pressed CEO Marc Benioff to cancel “ICE opportunities,” CNBC reported. More than 900 Google employees also asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates urged Ring to drop its partnership with Flock. A protest calling on the e-commerce company to cut its ties with Flock, ICE and CBP is scheduled for Friday, outside of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring wrote in a blog post.

…Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels said in a statement that the Flock partnership was never active, and the companies never announced a date for it to go live.

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This seems surprising. ICE must be incredibly toxic in the American public’s mind if Ring being associated with Flock being associated with ICE is enough to get RIng to cut ties. It’s not as if Amazon is normally that sensitive about these things.
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Is Mars habitable? • Mars for the Rest of Us

Maciej Cegłowski:

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The strongest constraints on Martian habitability turn out to be temperature and a measure of available moisture called water activity.

Water activity is just a fancy name for equilibrium relative humidity. If you put a sample with aw of 0.5 in a jar of dry air, eventually you observe a relative humidity of 50%. The lower the water activity, the less water is available for microorganisms to grow.

Bacteria and molds have a hard time growing at water activities below 0.9 (one reason you can store sweet liquids like honey and condensed milk at room temperature). The terrestrial champion for withstanding dryness is a common fungus called A. penicilloides, best known for leaving dark spots on old books. It has been caught reproducing at water activities as low as 0.585, about the moisture level of dry pasta.

Meanwhile, the lowest temperature at which cellular metabolism has been observed on Earth is -33°C, while the lowest confirmed temperature for cell division is -18°C (interestingly, eukaryotes and yeast cells hold the record over bacteria in this category).

It’s not hard to find places on Mars that are briefly warm enough for life. The Spirit rover once recorded a daytime summer air temperature of 35°C, which is hot even by Earth standards. But the tricky part is finding somewhere where adequate water activity and temperature coincide. The warmest spots on the surface of Mars tend to be absolutely dry, while the most likely wet spots are supercooled brines far below the temperature limits for life. The closest we’ve come to finding a livable spot on the surface is identifying some areas where adequate water activity and temperature may occur at different times in a single Martian day.

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There’s plenty more – perhaps more research than Elon Musk has ever done into the viability of, well, living there.
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The death of Book World at the Washington Post • The New Yorker

Becca Rothfeld once worked on the Post’s book section, aka Book World:

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A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.

It is true, of course, that the public is only a useful fiction. No one has ever seen one in the wild. Some readers refuse to join one, stubbornly persisting in flipping to one section and ignoring the rest. But even if no newspaper can succeed entirely in cultivating the public that it imagines, it can still succeed to a greater or lesser degree—and Book World did succeed.

Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, in 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.”

Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

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Rothfeld is onto something about how newspapers work best when they aren’t algorithm-following devices. I’ve found many wonderful books through review sections. I now occasionally find them through recommendations of people I trust, but they’re fewer and less reliable.
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Is Waymo worth $126bn? • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Published data shows that each [Waymo] vehicle currently does about 25 trips per day. The average trip lasts about 15 minutes. Waymo reported 15 million trips and 3.8 million hours of rider time in 2025.

According to California Public Utilities Commission filings, there is about 18 minutes of idle or repositioning time between trips. Each car is already running roughly 16 hours a day. Since these are electric vehicles, they need time to charge. To hit one million weekly rides with the current 2,500 vehicles, each car would need to complete 57 trips per day. That is over 14 hours of active ride time alone. That does not include charging, maintenance, or repositioning. Physically impossible.

No matter how you slice it, their fleet has to grow big and fast. Even with 3,500 vehicles by year-end, the number would be 41 trips per vehicle per day. The reality is that they need anywhere between 5,500 and 6,000 cars to hit their own target. They need to more than double their fleet in 11 months. Not that it can’t be done. They have $16bn in the bank, and can buy as many cars as they want. But whether they can get as many cars as they want is a whole different story.

Each Jaguar I-PACE costs roughly $175,000 – about $75,000 for the car and $100,000 for the sensor stack and compute hardware, according to co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov. To get from 400,000 weekly trips to one million, assuming current utilization of roughly 23 trips per vehicle per day, they need to add at minimum 3,500 more vehicles. That is over $600m in vehicle costs alone, before you factor in mapping, operations centers, remote support staff, and the regulatory apparatus for each new city.

The next-generation Zeekr RT platform brings the vehicle cost down to maybe $75,000 total. That helps eventually, but these vehicles are still in testing, not deployed at commercial scale.

Waymo wants to expand to twenty cities in 2026, including London and Tokyo. It looks massive on a slide and makes for a great headline, but Waymo’s own history should give us pause. New cities start slow. Austin launched in March 2025. Nine months later, it accounts for about 8% of rides with two hundred vehicles. Atlanta launched in June and accounts for about 4%. Phoenix, the most mature market, took five years to reach its current scale.

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He concludes that Waymo needs to muscle into the longer trips to have any hope of really living up to its valuation – to say nothing of actually turning a profit; it’s part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which lost $3.6bn in Q4 2025. Everyone can see the benefits of driverless cars, just as they could see the benefits of supersonic planes. But Concorde failed commercially.
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Why I wish I hadn’t bought my Samsung OLED TV • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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In June 2024, in a dusty TV shop empty of customers save myself, my wife, and my kids, I stared deep into the LG C3 and Samsung S90C. I went back and forth between the two OLED screens for easily 20 minutes, happily paralyzed by the choice in front of me. The Video Only salesperson attempted to explain that there was no wrong decision.

A year and a half later, I disagree: I regret picking the Samsung over the LG. I regret it every time I adjust the volume on my TV, every time I plug in a new device, and especially ever since the Logitech Harmony Amazon Alexa integration shit the bed and I have to fumble a Samsung remote to switch inputs.

Samsung’s QD-OLED panel itself is phenomenal, if nothing special in 2026. The problem is the software. I would pay Samsung $100, right now, for this “smart” TV to be as dumb as the ones I grew up with.

Heck, I’d give Samsung 50 bucks just to let us disable the volume indicator. Failing that, let’s see if shame works.

…both Sony and LG had unobtrusive onscreen volume indicators, just little icons near the edge of the screen. Samsung believes that anyone who ever needs things a little louder or quieter is willing to tolerate this aberration…

This eyesore [the volume up/down onscreen indicator] stretches nearly a third of the way across the screen, vertically and horizontally, obscuring the incredible moving art I’m trying to watch underneath. And if you’re using a receiver, it consumes all this screen space to convey basically zero information. Not the current volume level, unless you’re using the TV’s built-in speakers, not whether I’m getting a stereo or surround or Dolby Atmos signal, nothing of use whatsoever.

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Samsung: never knowingly underUI’d. (Thanks Lloyd W for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Imagine how big the potholes get on a busy road leading to a supermarket if nobody owns the road and the council refuses to take it over. CC-licensed photo by Arlington Department of Environmental Services 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. Driven mad. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Climate change is accelerating. But why? • Washington Post

John Muyskens and Shannon Osaka:

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For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was “masked” by sulphate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun’s rays. Over the entire planet, those aerosols can create a significant cooling effect — scientists estimate that they have cancelled out about 0.5ºC of warming so far.

But beginning about two decades ago, countries began cracking down on aerosol pollution, particularly sulphate aerosols. Countries also began shifting from coal and oil to wind and solar power. As a result, global sulphur dioxide emissions have fallen about 40% since the mid-2000s; China’s emissions have fallen even more. That effect has been compounded in recent years by a new international regulation that slashed sulphur emissions from ships by about 85%.

That explains part of why warming has kicked up a bit. But some researchers say that the last few years of record heat can’t be explained by aerosols and natural variability alone. In a paper published in the journal Science in late 2024, researchers argued that about 0.2ºC of 2023’s record heat — or about 13% — couldn’t be explained by aerosols and other factors. Instead, they found that the planet’s low-lying cloud cover had decreased — and because low-lying clouds tend to reflect the sun’s rays, that decrease warmed the planet.

Clouds have long been one of the greatest uncertainties in climate science. Clouds are probably helping to cool the Earth, like aerosols, but how much is an open question. “Pretty much every climate model agrees that it’s a cooling effect, but the size of that cooling effect is quite uncertain,” said Chris Smith, a research fellow at the University of Leeds and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

That shift in cloud cover could also be partly related to aerosols, since clouds tend to form around particles in the atmosphere. But some researchers also say it could be a feedback loop from warming temperatures. If temperatures warm, it can be harder for low-lying clouds to form.

If most of the current record warmth is due to changing amounts of aerosol pollution, the acceleration would stop once aerosol pollutants reach zero — and the planet would return to its previous, slower rate of warming.

But if it’s due to a cloud feedback loop, the acceleration is likely to continue — and bring with it worsening heat waves, storms and droughts.

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We may find out in four or five years if it’s rapid doom, or slower doom.
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Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions have now been “flat or falling” for 21 months • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole.

This extends a “flat or falling” trend in China’s CO2 emissions that began in March 2024 and has now lasted for nearly two years.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that, in 2025, emissions from fossil fuels increased by an estimated 0.1%, but this was more than offset by a 7% decline in CO2 from cement.

Other key findings include:
• CO2 emissions fell year-on-year in almost all major sectors in 2025, including transport (3%), power (1.5%) and building materials (7%)
• The key exception was the chemicals industry, where emissions grew 12%
• Solar power output increased by 43% year-on-year, wind by 14% and nuclear 8%, helping push down coal generation by 1.9%
• Energy storage capacity grew by a record 75 gigawatts (GW), well ahead of the rise in peak demand of 55GW
• This means that growth in energy storage capacity and clean-power output topped the increases in peak and total electricity demand, respectively.

The CO2 numbers imply that China’s carbon intensity – its fossil-fuel emissions per unit of GDP – fell by 4.7% in 2025 and by 12% during 2020-25. This is well short of the 18% target set for that period by the 14th five-year plan.

Moreover, China would now need to cut its carbon intensity by around 23% over the next five years in order to meet one of its key climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

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Baby steps. What the drop is for this year will be a very important pointer for the future of, well, perhaps everything.
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UKGovScan: UK Government Spending Transparency

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UK Government Transparency

Search government contracts, political donations, MP financial interests, lobbying activity, and company data, all in one place.

This is an independent transparency project, not an official government website. Data is sourced from public registers and may contain errors — always verify against official statistics.

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A potentially very useful one, this. One for the bookmarks. Made by “Bran”. It picks out some random ones every time you refresh the front page, such as:

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Your taxes at work: Alliance Homes spent £1M on “Edge Protection to Prevent Pigeon Access” to solar panels. The pigeons were not consulted. See contract →

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One has to hope that this will shore up our trust in government accountability and responsibility rather than undermining it.
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Potholesville • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

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Last year I wrote about Old Bridge Way, the pothole-riddled road at the centre of a bizarre ownership dispute, or rather lack-of-ownership dispute as various companies, the council and even the actual King of England battle to avoid responsibility for fixing it. Since then the road has continued to deteriorate, reaching the point where access to Shefford’s main supermarket was almost severed. Residents are up in arms, and are resorting to increasingly radical measures to bring attention to the issue.

When I set out the film the story I didn’t expect that I, too, would become radicalised; that Nick Offerman, in the form of the legendary Ron Swanson, would be responsible for me carrying out an act of civic extremism one cold Sunday morning. Watch the short film, and please like and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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I rarely link to YouTube videos here, but this is, as is typical with Robbins, quietly entertaining while also being enraging. It’s the story of a road that was originally private, and a cul-de-sac; the local council then turned it into a through route for HGVs without getting the agreement of the private owners. The HGVs chew up the roads, which the private owners then have the responsibility of fixing. So they ducked out.

It’s dispiriting that he is able to find these stories of bureaucratic desuetude. Two things I’m constantly awed by in his videos: the drone work (how does he get the permissions?) and the music choice.

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Google: Gemini hit with 100,000+ prompts in cloning attempt • NBC News

Kevin COllier:

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Google says its flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Gemini, has been inundated by “commercially motivated” actors who are trying to clone it by repeatedly prompting it, sometimes with thousands of different queries — including one campaign that prompted Gemini more than 100,000 times.

In a report published Thursday, Google said it has increasingly come under “distillation attacks,” or repeated questions designed to get a chatbot to reveal its inner workings. Google described the activity as “model extraction,” in which would-be copycats probe the system for the patterns and logic that make it work. The attackers appear to want to use the information to build or bolster their own AI, it said.

The company believes the culprits are mostly private companies or researchers looking to gain a competitive advantage. A spokesperson told NBC News that Google believes the attacks have come from around the world but declined to share additional details about what was known about the suspects.

The scope of attacks on Gemini indicates that they most likely are or soon will be common against smaller companies’ custom AI tools, as well, said John Hultquist, the chief analyst of Google’s Threat Intelligence Group.

“We’re going to be the canary in the coal mine for far more incidents,” Hultquist said. He declined to name suspects.

The company considers distillation to be intellectual property theft, it said.

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That last line is hilarious, given how Google has slurped up al the content it possibly can from everywhere in order to build repositories and LLMs and, well, everything. The number of lawsuits Google has faced from companies such as Yelp is amazing.

The “distillation attacks” are basically its rivals – or state actors – trying to drain the moat around its LLM.
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FDA declines to review Moderna application for new flu vaccine • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

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US regulators will not review Moderna’s request to license a new, potentially more effective flu shot – even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) previously gave the green light to the project – in a decision that could have implications for all new and updated vaccines in the US.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration against vaccines. Officials in January decided to stop fully recommending one-third of routine childhood vaccines, including flu vaccines.

“This is likely to discourage industry from investing in future influenza vaccines, and makes working with the US FDA uncertain and problematic,” said Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco. “They are refusing to review a new vaccine with a more flexible technology, while creating a real risk we will not have traditional vaccines for next year.”

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have shown the potential to be more effective at protecting against some illnesses, and they may also be updated more quickly than traditional egg-based flu vaccines – an important consideration since flu evolves quickly and may have pandemic potential.

FDA officials will not review the evidence from Moderna’s clinical trials on the new mRNA flu shot because the trials compared Moderna’s shot to existing standard flu shots, rather than shots for high-risk individuals, according to a letter signed by Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).

The FDA does not consider the Moderna trial to be “adequate and well-controlled” because comparing the new shot to standard flu shots “does not reflect the best-available standard of care”, Prasad wrote.

Yet Moderna did compare their vaccine against an existing high-dose flu shot in adults aged 65 and older; in adults under 65, they compared the new shot with standard flu vaccines. “For those under 65, the high dose is not standard of care,” Reiss said. “So their argument is also false.”

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The speed at which the US is going backwards is truly astonishing. Decades of medical advances being thrown out for completely ridiculous motives.
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ByteDance’s new AI video model goes viral as China looks for second DeepSeek moment • Reuters

Eduardo Baptista:

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ByteDance’s new video-generating artificial intelligence model has already impressed the likes of Elon Musk and gone viral in China, where it has been compared to DeepSeek and won praise for its ability to produce cinematic storylines with just a few prompts.

While text-centric AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1 have become widely adopted, models specialised in generating videos and pictures represent the next frontier in the technology’s potential for disruption.

ByteDance, which officially unveiled Seedance 2.0 on Thursday, said in a statement that the system was designed for professional film, e-commerce, and advertising productions, because it was capable of processing text, images, audio, and video simultaneously, lowering the cost of creating content.

The product launch comes as China and investors around the world are on the lookout for a successor to Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models whose global debut early in 2025 triggered a systemic shock.

On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 drew comparisons to DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to fame. “Early last year, the release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked heated debate in the U.S. tech community over a ‘Sputnik moment’,” Chinese state-backed newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial on Wednesday. “This year, the continued breakout success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations has gone even further, giving rise to a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley.”

…Users on China’s Weibo microblogging platform shared videos generated by the AI model that showcased the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt.

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The most viral video on X has short clips – 15 seconds or so – of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting a robot, and Tom Cruise (as Ethan Hunt) fighting Keanu Reeves (as John Wick). Notable what the common factor is there: the world’s biggest film star. But 15 seconds of a fight doesn’t add up, even when you do it for longer, to 100 minutes of a film.
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600% memory price surge threatens telcos’ broadband router, set-top box supply • Counterpoint Research

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Driven by surging demand from higher-margin AI server segments, DRAM and NAND memory prices have skyrocketed, jumping more than 600% over the last one year for consumer applications from PCs and low-end smartphones to routers and set-top boxes, according to the February 2026 edition of Counterpoint Research’s Memory Price Tracker . As a result, consumer segments are being hit the hardest by a supply crunch and surging prices for both conventional DRAM and NAND. According to the tracker, this increase in memory prices will continue through June 2026 at least. There is a possibility of prices peaking in the first half of 2026, but supply issues will continue to persist.

While the difficulties being faced by the PC and lower-end smartphone industries with “mobile memory” are now well known, other consumer products like routers, gateways and set-top boxes are affected the most, going by the monthly trends since last year. Over the last nine months, smartphone memory prices jumped 3x, but the prices for “consumer memory”-based broadband products jumped almost 7x. Routers are hit the hardest, especially for OEMs with an unsecured supply and weaker negotiating power. Memory is now contributing more than 20% of the total bill of materials (BOM) in low-to-mid-end routers, up from around 3% exactly a year ago, according to Counterpoint’s Teardown and BOM Analysis Service.

This rings alarm bells for telcos targeting aggressive broadband rollouts (fiber or FWA) for 2026. This “memory winter” is going to prolong and slow down deployments as supply becomes a critical issue, in addition to increasing procurement costs for routers, CPEs and set-top boxes.

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I can’t think of a previous technology rollout that has had such a blast radius on everything else in the adjacent space before. When PCs first came in, they didn’t kill some other space; nor mobile phones, or the internet, or smartphones. But AI? This is sucking all the air out of other technologies.
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YouTube launches native app for Apple Vision Pro – 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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When Vision Pro first launched, Google said that a Vision Pro app was on its roadmap, but suggested that people use Safari in the meantime.

In the absence of an official YouTube app for Vision Pro, third-party options quickly popped up on the App Store. Many of those, however, were ultimately removed after Google complained to Apple that the apps violated its YouTube guidelines.

Starting today, Vision Pro users finally have a way to watch YouTube in a native app on visionOS.

The YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro includes access to standard YouTube features like subscriptions, watch history, playlists, and YouTube Shorts. The app also includes support for watching 3D, 360-degree, and VR180 videos. Vision Pro users can watch YouTube video in built-in visionOS environments.

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Just for those who are keeping score, the Vision Pro launched two years ago, in February 2024. Imagine if there had been no YouTube app on the original iPhone. Would people have really tolerated watching YouTube videos on Safari for two years, up to the iPhone 3G? (Possible, I suppose, but very suboptimal.)

Maybe the Vision Pro will just inch forward. Maybe that’s where technology is nowadays: everything just inches forward. Strange, because it used to feel as though it moved in big leaps.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified