As cars in the US have become taller, pedestrian deaths have risen after years during which they fell. (And why can you call a car but not a football team after a native American tribe?) CC-licensed photo by Kay Gaensler 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. Bumpy ride. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

---

‘It’s quite a bit more than we expected’: satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering • Space

Tereza Pultarova:

»

An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time.

The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.

The new measurements were made by Pulsar-0, the first satellite of the novel Pulsar navigation constellation developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The experimental satellite orbits 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, testing Xona’s technology before the company begins deploying its navigation constellation of 300 spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) later this year.

The purpose of the Pulsar constellation is to provide a more resilient PNT service compared to the United State’s GPS network and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as Europe’s Galileo or China’s Beidou. The PNT signals distributed by GNSS satellites underpin many systems that our civilization relies on in everyday life, including the operation of power grids, finance operations and oil drilling.

But because GNSS satellites orbit quite far from Earth — at altitudes abve 12,000 miles (19,000 km) — the signal that ground-based receivers detect is weak and can be easily jammed.

…Russian jammers have been disrupting GNSS signals along Russia’s western borders, officially to protect the country from Ukrainian drone attacks. Every month, this interference affects tens of thousands of flights that cruise over the region. The warring parties in the Middle East, too, use jamming and spoofing to deflect drone attacks and hide the positions of illegal ships at sea.

…In the hardest-hit areas, the strength of the GPS signals at the satellite’s altitude dropped from the regular 40 decibels to as little as 10 decibels. [Decibels are logarithmic, so that’s a thousand-fold reduction in power.]

…Satellite constellations such as SpaceX Starlink also rely on GPS to avoid collisions with other spacecraft.

«

unique link to this extract

---

Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband • The Verge

Karl Bode:

»

Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45bn broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks.

But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into “tear down quickly,” leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight.

Established in November 2021, BEAD was the flagship program addressing a rare bipartisan congressional goal: Identify broadband coverage gaps, then deploy affordable, next-generation internet access across the US by 2030.

…the election-season campaigning against BEAD succeeded in painting Biden-era broadband expansion efforts as wasteful government bureaucracy. A Trump presidency, the public was told, would fix everything.

…The infrastructure law’s text didn’t mandate construction of specific network technologies, but it explicitly called for BEAD to prioritize terrestrial fiber networks over wireless or cable broadband. Congress recognized that it would be foolish to spend thousands of dollars per home every five to 10 years to deliver obsolete connections like coaxial cable-based broadband or settle for congested “good enough” satellite networks.

[Trump’s MAGA billionaire commerce secretary Howard]] Lutnick, however, demanded state proposals be “technology neutral.” He insisted the changes would “turbocharge speed and savings,” dubbing them “the benefit of the bargain.” In reality, the changes turned BEAD’s focus toward nascent satellite internet companies run by tech moguls. It redirected $738.8m into the already deeply subsidized pockets of Elon Musk, President Trump’s biggest campaign donor, with another $311m for Bezos’ Amazon Leo.

«

The free market at work, but with a big finger on the scales.
unique link to this extract

---

US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed 2.2% lower on Tuesday. The S&P 500 was also down by Tuesday afternoon, dropping 1.43% while the Dow remained steady.

All three major US indices have hit record highs this year, riding off a rush of funding to support AI technology and infrastructure. Nasdaq is up 10% for the year, while the Dow jumped 6% so far this year, breaching past 51,000 points, and the S&P 500 is up 7.3%.

But some economists have warned that the influx of AI spending is a bubble reminiscent of the dot-com bubble that burst in the early 2000s. Seven tech companies make up 30% of the S&P 500’s value.

The heavy reliance on a single industry and a few key companies has some investors wondering if it’s a matter of when, not if, there will be a burst. Those concerns have been heightened by signals from the Federal Reserve last week that it may increase interest rates, and therefore the cost of borrowing, in order to tackle rising inflation.

Those looking for signs of stumbling may have found confirmation after a series of developments on Monday. The stock market drop started when Google-parent, Alphabet, had its worst day on the market in over a year. A pair of high-profile AI researchers left the company last week, worrying investors. Alphabet’s share price had dropped 5% by closing Monday.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which debuted on the market on 12 June to much fanfare, dropped 16% on Monday as the company’s post-initial public offering (IPO) boost continued to ebb. On Monday, the company announced it is looking to raise $20bn in a bond sale, even after the company gained more than $85bn through its IPO, sparking concerns over the massive cost of the company’s projects.

«

That isn’t much of a correction, but markets tend to move like a herd; there may be some way to go. But to repeat the axiom: the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
unique link to this extract

---

A business model that works for creators • Substack CEO blog

Chris Best is co-founder and CEO of Substack:

»

Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now.

The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this: we’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck.

Most creators accept this deal because they feel like they have no choice. The platforms are where the audiences are. And over time, the system shapes you. You learn to make things the algorithm rewards instead of things you believe in.

Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value.

«

Wow! What is this “native sponsorship” stuff of which you speak, Mr Best?

»

Substack’s native sponsorships program makes great partnerships simple. We’re excited to work with our flagship partners, including Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. These forward-thinking brands recognize that some of the most interesting conversations happening on the internet are driven by writers and creators on Substack. They’ll be building with, and investing millions of dollars in, the creators who choose to participate

These are not arbitrarily inserted ads. They are direct partnerships between brands and publishers who have already built robust audience-first businesses.

Creators choose who they work with. They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to—the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics—so they can stay focused on the work.

«

Oh, it’s advertising. And you’ll stick ads in. Maybe the E.coli of the internet, infecting anywhere that reaches a critical size, isn’t spam; it’s advertising.
unique link to this extract

---

In the Weights

Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn:

»

Find out if you live on in GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 MINI, Opus 4.8, Haiku 4.5, Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.1 Lite, Kimi K2 0905, Deepseek V4, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.2 1B, GLM 4.7 Flash, Mistral 3.2 24B, and Qwen3 8B.

«

There’s more about how they put it together. Of course you’ll put your name in, just as you did when Google Street View first came up and everyone looked at their address on it. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

---

The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs • The New York Times

Michael Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros:

»

For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75%.

The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.

After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and SUVs is an important factor.

Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10% of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.

There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: they have taller hoods, and they tend to have larger blind zones.

«

In the UK cars had their “bull bars” – chrome rails fitted across the radiator grille, which served no purpose for anyone not constantly herding cattle – removed. But in the US there’s a strange form of Jevon’s paradox where even as fuel gets more expensive, people want bigger cars that will consume more of it as long as they can do it in a bigger car.
unique link to this extract

---

Was it Trump? Eli Lilly gives powerful obesity drug for mystery 79-year-old patient • Times Now Digital via MSN

»

A 79-year-old patient has received rare early access to Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity drug retatrutide through the FDA’s compassionate use program, raising questions about the identity of the recipient and prompting speculation about whether the patient could be President Donald Trump.

According to a report by STAT, the FDA program is intended to provide access to investigational treatments for patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions when other options may not be sufficient.

The request for access to retatrutide was submitted in April by Ranganath Muniyappa, a senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity along with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening condition involving high blood pressure in the lungs.

STAT reported that the application attracted attention from senior health officials, a detail that suggested the patient may be particularly influential or well connected.

The patient’s identity has not been disclosed. However, based on the limited information available, STAT contacted the White House to ask whether the recipient could be President Donald Trump, who has obesity and has publicly discussed weight-loss medications.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not explicitly deny that Trump was the patient and instead referred questions to the Department of Health and Human Services. When asked whether Trump had obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai pointed to Trump’s latest medical evaluation, which STAT noted did not mention either condition.

«

“Did not explicitly deny” is one of those “admitting by not refuting” circumlocutions. Which is unusual for the Trump administration; usually they would just lie. Retratrutide is currently in phase 3 (human effectiveness) trials for “obesity, type 2 diabetes, knee osteoarthritis pain, moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), chronic low back pain, cardiovascular and renal outcomes, and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).”
unique link to this extract

---

Newsletter writers are the next generation of media moguls • The Washington Post

Scott Nover:

»

As media organizations shed staff and audiences grow more skeptical of institutions, a growing number of journalists are finding an unlikely refuge in the newsletter.

In recent years, prominent writers and media personalities have migrated from traditional newsrooms toward newsletters: former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan now runs Zeteo on Substack; tech journalist Casey Newton, formerly of the Verge, has Platformer on Ghost; former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy runs Status on beehiv, and former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen authors Culture Study on Patreon.

Newsletters are built on a tried and true delivery method — email, which [Ryan] Broderick [who has his own newsletter, employing staff, called Garbage Day] calls a “50-year-old technology that breaks down on a good day.” But, he said, it’s the best we’ve got: “In a world of algorithms, email is kind of last man standing.”

In a digital landscape increasingly crowded with artificial intelligence-generated content, many readers appear willing to pay for something harder to automate: a trusted voice delivered straight to their inbox.

“The writers who will last are the ones offering what AI can’t fake,” said Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at of CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and the founder of the tech newsletter Wonder Tools. “They have visible curiosity, expertise based on years of work or lived experience, and some fire behind their reporting, or their point of view.”

Substack, the most prominent newsletter platform, said the top 10 of its 50,000 publishers collectively earn more than $40m a year. In politics and news, more than 30 publications clear $1m annually.

Beehiiv, which launched in 2021 billing itself as a scrappier alternative to Substack, grew its revenue 80% in 2025 to $27.5m.

Email is “the last place on the web that you get to decide who you let into your space,” said Dan Oshinsky, former director of newsletters at BuzzFeed and the New Yorker who runs a consultancy called Inbox Collective.

«

Email suffers from the challenge of spam filters and overload – it’s easy to ignore – but that’s still better than life under the algorithm. If these are the future moguls, they’re as accountable as the previous ones; that is, not very. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
unique link to this extract

---

Loupe: a privacy-focused iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see · GitHub

Mysk Research:

»

Loupe is an iOS and iPadOS app that gives you a hands-on tour of the device fingerprinting surface. It reads real values from public iOS APIs, the same ones any third-party app can call, and shows them to you raw. The point is simple: see what your iPhone quietly exposes, and why each reading helps an app recognize you again.

Trackers don’t need your name, email, or location to recognize you online. Each reading isn’t necessarily unique on its own, but together they form a fingerprint that follows you across apps and websites.

How signals are organized.

Loupe groups every reading into three tiers, reflecting the cost of access:

• Passive — visible to any app with no prompt at all (locale, time zone, screen, battery, and more).

• Needs Permission — readings that trigger an iOS prompt (contacts, photos, location, calendars).

• Advanced — clever side-channel uses of public APIs, such as URL-scheme probing via canOpenURL and Keychain persistence across reinstalls.

«

This is a developer product at present which needs to be built on Xcode. But you could expect that a built version might become public in a while.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The icons in the forthcoming version of macOS have been subtly tweaked to retreat from last year’s “Liquid Glass” appearance. CC-licensed photo by Yeray Hdez Guerra 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 10 links for you. Gleaming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

---

Polymarket’s viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Polymarket paid dozens of social media users to film themselves making fake bets for a promotion that aimed to convince people they can strike it rich on the prediction market, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published on Saturday.

“In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like [George] Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance,” the article said. “In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.”

Makihara, a college student, posted a video in January “that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word ‘McDonald’s’ that month.” But trade data showed that no one on Polymarket won such a bet in January, according to the Journal. This was one of 145 bets that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket between January and May, but all of those bets were fake, the article said.

“Many of the videos share a template: The creators open Polymarket, place a bet, and frequently refer to their winnings as ‘free money.’ Dozens of social-media creators have posted videos with almost identical formats,” the Journal reported. “Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website.”

The promotion reportedly targeted US residents by paying creators only when at least 60% of their viewers were in the United States. Polymarket’s main platform technically hasn’t been available in the US since 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) determined Polymarket was operating an illegally unregistered exchange.

«

Piling untrustworthiness up like boxes at a supermarket.
unique link to this extract

---

Economists have long pushed for prediction markets. The reality is not what they’d hoped for • CNN Business

Allison Morrow:

»

Long before the founders of Kalshi and Polymarket were even born, a handful of economists were getting amped about a novel approach to dealing with one of humanity’s more egregious shortcomings: We’re bad at predicting the future.

Maybe, the thinking went, the free market could help. (This was the late ‘80s, after all, the heyday of Reaganomics, Alex P. Keaton, the twilight of the Soviet Union — what couldn’t capitalism fix?)

And so the modern prediction market was born.

But nearly 40 years into economists’ obscure academic project, the booming industry they helped inspire — a multibillion-dollar business fueled largely by sports betting — looks very different from what they envisioned.

…Since then, we’ve gotten event contracts for just about anything. The markets aren’t perfect crystal balls, and crowd wisdom can be misleading, but they’ve had some notable wins, like when Polymarket bested the leading polls and pundits to call the 2024 presidential race in Donald Trump’s favor. And traders have consistently anticipated key economic data points, like the rate of US inflation and interest rate decisions from the Federal Reserve.

But when those 19 economists wrote their dream scenario, they did so with plenty of guardrails in mind.

The markets would “presumably not include contracts on the outcomes of sports events.” And the economists made the case for capping the amount any one person could wager to a “modest sum, perhaps something like $2,000 per year” (about $3,000 in today’s dollars).

But with sports betting exploding on prediction markets, and with virtually no cap on wagers, things haven’t worked out quite how they’d imagined.

“This is not the future any of us were hoping for,” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor and a leading expert on prediction markets who co-authored the 2008 paper [on “the promise of prediction markets“], told CNN.

«

unique link to this extract

---

HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first • The Guardian

Charlie Moloney:

»

An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer.

A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000.

The co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young, called it a “landmark moment” for access to justice and said many small businesses have had to write off debts because the cost of litigation outweighed the money they could hope to win.

Garfield – which was authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in April last year and can be used to make claims from £30 to up to £10,000 – prepared the case and then hired a human barrister to advocate for the client in court.

The AI conducted all the legal work preceding the trial, which involved disputing a counterclaim launched by the defendant, who instructed solicitors.

It prepared four witness statements and a bundle of documents for the three-hour trial at Wandsworth county court on 14 May. The court found in favour of Taquidir and awarded her the money owed.

Taquidir said: “I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming. Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going.

“When the counterclaim was brought, it was intended to intimidate me, but I knew I had accessible, cost-effective and competent support. I’m delighted by the result.”

«

Hope that he got costs, because barristers are never cheap. Nice advert for Garfield, but hard to know how well it would scale to a more complicated case.
unique link to this extract

---

Read this before you vibe-code another app • The Verge

Yael Grauer:

»

Bob Starr was delighted with his vibe-coded website. “Boomberg” showed how much US tax money is going to tech companies, and Starr launched it online immediately after making it. It wasn’t until months after the site went live that he realized there was a problem: a hidden SQL injection risk. It could’ve left the site open for an attacker to read or alter data they shouldn’t have access to.

“It was just a glaring oversight on my part. It was a complete blindspot in my state of learning this new technology and understanding it, and I’m sure there are others making the same mistake,” said Starr, a project manager in the tech sector.

Starr fixed the issue, but he isn’t alone. Across social media, there are horror stories about vibe-coded apps full of security vulnerabilities. Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS, posted on X about an AI coding agent wiping out his company’s production database. Joe Procopio, a serial entrepreneur and former developer, vibe-coded a web app to privately show demos of other apps he’d built. Hackers came, so he took the app down. “Now I do demos the old fashioned way, from my local machine over Zoom,” he wrote. “It’s sooo 2023.”

We’ve entered a new “era of personal software,” as The Verge’s David Pierce said, where anyone can use AI to create their own private apps that can do exactly what they want. But with it comes a new era of security issues. Apps may be easy to build, but they’re difficult to secure — especially in a world where AI can also be used to attack them.

«

Don’t you then set a different LLM to work trying to find ways to hack the app and suggesting ways to secure it? Though it might be difficult to change the vibe coded app, because by all accounts they’re giving new meaning to spaghetti coding.
unique link to this extract

---

GM installs robots at flagship EV factory after laying off 1,300 workers • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Dozens of new robot arms have been installed at General Motors’ flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit—even as 1,300 workers remain out of work following what was supposed to be a temporary layoff. The latest automation push has spurred union pushback over a potentially existential issue for automakers and their workers.

General Motors installed approximately 50 robot arms at GM’s Factory Zero plant in Detroit, Michigan, according to reporting by Crain’s Detroit Business. Made by the Japanese robotics company FANUC, the robots are designed to help attach various components to vehicles during the assembly line process. But leaders at United Auto Workers (UAW), the primary US union for autoworkers, reacted with anger to the new robotic presence, given how GM has not yet called back any of the workers affected by supposedly temporary layoffs in March.

More than 1,000 union members are still “laid off indefinitely,” James Cotton, president of UAW Local 22, told The Detroit News. He said that the company could bring some of those members back to work instead of installing the 50 robots.

The temporary layoffs were preceded by permanent layoffs involving another 1,200 workers at GM’s Factory Zero in October 2025.

Many automakers, including Stellantis NV and Ford Motor Company, have deployed assembly-line robots, such as Fanuc robot arms, as they push to automate more of their US operations. Hyundai Motor Company plans to deploy Atlas humanoid robots made by Boston Dynamics—which Hyundai acquired in 2020—to start working in the automaker’s flagship EV facility in Georgia by 2028.

Andrew Bergman, a Local 22 member and union organizer who was among those laid off by GM, described corporate leaders in the automotive industry as prioritizing profits over human workers.

«

Sounds callous to say so, but that is pretty much always how corporate leaders function.
unique link to this extract

---

The Colour Strike

David Friedman:

»

When the British channel ITV made their switch to colour at the end of 1969, the camera operators union felt that the additional technical knowledge and skills required for a colour camera deserved a pay increase for the operators. ITV disagreed. So the operators came up with a clever way to strike.

They simply shut off the red, green, and blue tubes in the cameras, leaving the fourth black-and-white tube on, essentially turning those fancy cameras back into black-and-white cameras.

It caused all sorts of havoc for shows that were promoted as being in colour, and ad revenue was lower than expected now that programming wasn’t in colour after all. Without a full work stoppage, the camera operators union still managed to hurt ITV.

The strike lasted about three months before an agreement was reached, and then color programming resumed.

Despite the strike, ITV still had to begin filming the first season of their new show Upstairs/Downstairs, a drama that was sort of like Downton Abbey before Downton Abbey, about the family upstairs and the staff downstairs in a large townhouse.

The plan was to eventually sell the show to American television, but the strike created a problem. The first six episodes of the show were filmed during the strike and were black-and-white, and the rest of the episodes filmed after the strike were in colour. What American network would want a show that has some episodes in black-and-white and some in colour in a single season?

So they came up with a solution: They would reshoot the entire first episode in colour to set up the situation and characters, and package that with the colour episodes that come later in the season for American audiences. The American version would just skip a few episodes in between but it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Oh, wait. It actually would be a big deal, because the first episode begins with one character, Sarah, arriving for her new job as a housemaid (accidentally attempting to enter through the front door instead of the rear). But in the third episode she quits her job and leaves the show. So American audiences would meet her in episode one, and then she’d be gone with no explanation.

«

Multiverse problems! There’s also a lovely point about a union dispute over a clock on a set: was it electrical (one union) or, because it appeared on a set, a prop (different union)?
unique link to this extract

---

AI doomaxxing is bad for our economy • The New York Times

Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013:

»

Moments after ChatGPT was released in 2022, its emergence swiftly unleashed a flood of alarming prognostications, including the possibility of enormous job losses. Many of those warnings were emanating from the leaders of the technology themselves. Little wonder that Americans are now highly worried about the impact AI will have on their futures, with a recent poll finding that 70% believe that the technology will reduce employment opportunities.

Like many others, I believe AI could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans.

…As the economist Christina D. Romer’s seminal study on the era points out, the stock market crash didn’t cause the Depression. It couldn’t, given that only about 2% of American households owned stocks at that time. The fatal blow was a massive subsequent collapse in consumer spending, a collapse she attributed to a sudden onset of widespread uncertainty among consumers about their future incomes.

«

In Shiller’s view, people worry too much about AI, and that is self-reinforcing.
unique link to this extract

---

Asbestos from China discovered in 1,000 UK wind turbines • The Times

Greig Cameron:

»

Asbestos has been found in at least 1,000 wind turbines across Britain after essential parts were shipped into the country from China, it can be revealed.

Emergency brake components used in lifts and hoists inside the turbines have been imported containing chrysotile, or white asbestos, in a safety risk that unions said “beggars belief”.

The parts are understood to have come from third-party Chinese suppliers. The discovery has fuelled concerns over “opaque” supply chains and how the potentially deadly material got into the country.

The type of asbestos has been completely banned in the UK since November 1999, making it illegal to buy, sell or export any materials with it.

Wind farm owners have been carefully analysing their portfolios to identify affected sites, The Sunday Times has learnt. The work has included atmospheric testing to look for the presence of asbestos in the air, while a programme of replacing equipment has begun.

Although airborne particles have yet to be found, unions are furious. The GMB has written to UK ministers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) asking for a detailed account of the clean-up operation, the costs to date and the risk to workers.

…Safety warnings were circulated earlier this year by SafetyOn, a UK industry body. It is understood one large Scottish operator has already identified asbestos in more than 200 of its turbines, including some which have yet to be fully installed.

«

unique link to this extract

---

One in three Americans use chatbots for health advice. These six patients explain why • The Washington Post

Fenit Nirappil:

»

Chatbots fuelled by artificial intelligence bear disclaimers saying they cannot dispense medical advice or diagnose conditions, but they still field millions of queries from users who are sick, trying to decipher medical records or understand their treatment options.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans have turned to the bots for health information, according to a recent survey by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy and education organization.

AI companies are rushing to meet this demand, including Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health, advertising more robust privacy protections and features to connect to medical records, while warning their products cannot replace doctors.

“They can be plausible-sounding, completely confident-sounding and completely wrong at the same time,” said Girish Nadkarni, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and co-author of an independent evaluation of ChatGPT Health.

Nadkarni’s research found the chatbot failed to tell users to go to the emergency department in more than half of cases of impending respiratory failure and serious diabetic complications, instead advising them to stay home and monitor symptoms. The findings comport with other studies and reviews that have given AI health advice failing grades or at least urged caution.

OpenAI has raised questions about the methodology of the study and whether it properly reflects how people actually use its chatbot. A spokesperson for the company said ChatGPT Health models are continuously trained and updated through feedback from physicians.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

---

macOS Tahoe v Golden Gate icon comparison • Basic Apple Guy

B.A.G:

»

WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design. The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

«

The difference seems subtle when seen individually here, but you can imagine that when seen across a screen or folder full of icons it would feel substantial. The lowering of reflection and extra sharpness are welcome: there’s no point in having blurry icons, ever.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon’s courts has raised the question of whether GLP-1s are performance-enhancing drugs. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Luyten 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. Let? 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 AirPods Effect • The Escape

Markham Heid:

»

The popularity of AirPods is nothing new. But as the functionality of our tech-connected ear gear has improved — and as podcasts have exploded into one of the most consumed forms of media in America — earphones have assumed a bigger role in our daily lives.

By some market estimates, 44% of Americans use Bluetooth or wireless earphones, and an additional 24% use something wired. I couldn’t find good data on the percentage of people who regularly wear earphones as they go about their daily lives. But during my recent trips to Michigan and Florida, I felt like half the people around me in public had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

There is disappointingly little peer-reviewed research on the effects earphones have on our daily lives and interactions. But the evidence we do have suggests that while AirPods and similar technologies do some wonderful things for us, they also subtly influence our beliefs, reinforce our insecurities, and push us farther apart.

During the pre-smartphone era of iPods and other portable music devices, a small study of college students found that those who were heavy users of headphones experienced higher levels of social isolation and loneliness.

More than 15 years later, in 2021, a survey conducted by the audio technology company Jabra came to similar conclusions. Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people.

This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades.

“I believe human interaction is fading, largely in part to the constant usage of AirPods or other forms of headphones,” wrote Eva Long, a student at Liberty University in Virginia, in a 2025 opinion piece for her school’s newspaper, The Liberty Champion.

“No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista. Even in class, students are choosing to listen to music instead of their professors,” Long wrote. “When passing someone I know who has AirPods in their ears, it’s difficult to catch their attention unless we make direct eye contact. This lack of engagement is discouraging, and it makes spontaneous social connections less likely.”

«

Of course it could be that the socially isolated people tend to use headphones, but the general point is worth making: the more technology helps you ignore people, the more you will ignore people.
unique link to this extract

---

On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake • The Guardian

Olivia Lee and Juliette Garside:

»

Rachel Lowe was hired in 2012, to help advise startups. When she arrived at the Ariadne offices, she says she found herself entering “a temple to Julie”: framed pictures of Meyer lined the walls. While the boss looked the part, Lowe says the organisation felt chaotic. “Everything was just an absolute mess,” she recalls. “There were just a lot of young people who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

Meyer, says Lowe, had a tendency to explode with rage at staff: “I knew whether Julie was in the office just through feeling something in the air … She ruled by fear.” Towards her, however, Lowe says Meyer was sweetness and light. At least, at first.

After a few months without problems, Lowe says Meyer began making excuses for not paying her invoices, eventually accusing Lowe of poor performance. Lowe brought a legal claim against her. The judge ruled in Lowe’s favour and awarded her approximately £26,000 plus interest and costs. By then, multiple staff and suppliers were also claiming to have not been paid. A PR agency sued for about £76,000, and settled out of court.

Writing anonymously on the recruitment website Glassdoor, a former employee claimed Meyer would sometimes hide from her creditors. “Once, when a supplier came to the office demanding payment, she snuck out down the fire escape.” (Meyer has previously said of the Glassdoor reviews: “There are a lot of people much more important than me who get written up on anonymous websites. Comes with the territory.”)

By the summer of 2017, Ariadne could no longer afford the rent on its offices. The staff were sent to work from home.

So where did it all go wrong? It seems the vision never quite matched the reality.

«

To say the least. This is a great investigative piece. The money around the dot-com boom really did bring some characters to the surface who would probably have been better left troubling the HR desks of local leisure centres.
unique link to this extract

---

Are GLP-1s performance-enhancing drugs? • The Atlantic

Nicholas Florko:

»

The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets rules adopted by most international sporting leagues, has said that it is keeping a close eye on whether GLP-1s are being abused; for now, athletes are free to take them. (A Ro spokesperson [for the company making the GLP-1 drug Serena Williams is taking] told me that “any patient who receives a GLP-1 prescription through Ro has been determined to be clinically eligible for that treatment by a licensed medical provider.”)

But experts are divided over whether GLP-1s have the potential to improve athleticism. “I can’t see that there would be much of an advantage at all to using these substances in an athlete,” Thomas Hudzik, a pharmaceutical consultant who has served on the advisory group that recommends what drugs WADA should ban, told me. Meanwhile, Lars Engebretsen, the head of WADA’s health, medical, and research committee, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he believes the drugs should be banned, but mostly because they could exacerbate eating disorders.

Opinions diverge because no studies have yet tested these drugs in elite athletes. Williams’s return to tennis—which will continue with a doubles appearance alongside her sister Venus at Wimbledon—is one of the first opportunities, as far as we know, to see how an elite athlete performs after taking a GLP-1. So far, the results have been uneven: She won with Mboko at the Queen’s Club, but lost her first doubles match at the Berlin Open this week. Doubles also demands less of athletes than a singles match does, so Williams’s full abilities have not yet been tested in competition. (Tennis fans are eager to know if Williams will get a wild-card singles spot at Wimbledon too. [Overspill update: she will play singles.]) “The jury is out in terms of endurance, stamina,” Rick Macci, who trained Williams during her childhood, told me.

Being trim can be an advantage in some sports. A lighter frame can reduce the amount of effort needed for, say, climbing, running, or gymnastics. And weight is built into the structure of other sports. Wrestlers, for example, must weigh in to qualify for their matches. The popular strategy is to get just under the maximum weight for a given class—a process that GLP-1s might make easier. “It makes perfect sense in weight-category sports,” John Hawley, the director of Australian Catholic University’s Centre for Human Metabolism and Performance, told me via email.

«

The former No.1 tennis player Andy Roddick says that if he intended to start playing competitively again (he doesn’t) he’d go straight onto a GLP-1 to shed the weight. But – I’d observe – that’s just to get going; once you’re at a competitive weight, you probably don’t want to stay on something that effectively makes you starve yourself.
unique link to this extract

---

The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed • Wired via Ars Technica

Matt Burgess, Maddy Varner, May Bulman and Gabriel Geiger:

»

Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.

An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.

The findings also come as the second Trump administration and governments around the world increasingly adopt anti-migrant policies while spending billions on surveillance technology that is often deployed against vulnerable people who have little knowledge of its use, how it works, or ways they can challenge it.

The leaked Home Office document obtained by Lighthouse Reports largely details the “best” performing of seven facial age estimation algorithms that the department tested last year, although it does not directly name the companies behind them. The report found that the system performed significantly worse when it was used to estimate the ages of Sub-Saharan Africans compared to other groups. Sub-Saharan Africans are the largest group of migrants entering the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats in recent years, and had more age assessments raised in 2025 than cohorts from other regions, according to Home Office data. For female Sub-Saharan Africans, the age that the system guessed was off by an average of 4.6 years, meaning that a 13.5-year-old girl could be assessed as an 18-year-old adult.

«

I really don’t think a 13-year-old is going to be mistaken for an 18-year-old; that’s just playing with numbers rather than reality. It might mean a 16yo being taken for a 20yo., which would be more problematic.
unique link to this extract

---

The secret cause of the Industrial Revolution • Works In Progress

Ben Southwood:

»

Spanish output per capita was flat for half a millenium between 1300 and 1800. Other areas saw temporary bursts of growth, followed by stagnation or reversion: Swedish and Portuguese incomes were lower in 1800 than in 1550, and the Italian efflorescence during the Renaissance was followed by steady decline for centuries. Even the Dutch golden age of 1500 to 1680, which saw the Netherlands buck the European trend with a large majority of its population working in industry or commerce and living in towns, was followed by more than a century of relative stagnation.

Property ownership was so fragmented that nobody investing in improvements could expect to make a return. Splintered ownership of farmland discouraged the adoption of new crops and rotations. Rigid inheritance rules made it prohibitively difficult to invest in improvements to land or infrastructure. Roads were bad because nobody took responsibility for them, hindering the transportation of manure for fertilizer and preventing the trade that would allow different areas to specialize in different crops. Agricultural yields were so low that nearly everybody had to work to produce food instead of in other industries like mining or manufacturing.

Many European states tried to solve these problems, and nearly all failed. The reason was usually the same: monarchs depended on the support of landowning aristocrats and clergy, and those landowners had no confidence that reforms would leave them better off.

In 1746, Spain’s King Fernando VI tried to replace his country’s complex tax system with a single income tax to fund public investment, but was blocked by nobles, the church, and municipal oligarchies. In 1776, French Minister of State Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to liberalize the property system and replace the patchwork of taxes with a single land value tax, but the Parlement of Paris refused to register his reform edict. In 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II abolished formal serfdom, but ex-serfs remained effectively bound until 1848, since the crown enforced landlords’ prerogatives.

Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

«

Ta-daa!
unique link to this extract

---

Harari vs. Henrich • In Due Course

Joseph Heath:

»

Human beings have four distinct qualities (traits, capabilities, behaviours, etc.) that make us quite different from other animals. These are fairly obvious, but there is unfortunately an entire subgenre of academic pedantry that involves challenging items on the list, saying “other animals do that too!” because there are of course similar capabilities to be found elsewhere.* So in the list below I have added the qualifications needed to disarm these objections and pick out what is absolutely distinctive about humans.

1. Intelligence. Humans possess superior intelligence, not just with respect to instrumental tasks, but also in the ability to engage in mathematical, hypothetical/counterfactual, and logical reasoning.

2. Language. Humans employ complex grammatical speech, with propositional differentiation providing context-independent representation of states of affairs.

3. Cooperation. Humans exhibit a distinctive form of ultrasociality, involving complex cooperation among large groups of genetically unrelated individuals.

4. Culture. Humans engage in domain-general transmission of learned behaviours, producing a large body of cultural artifacts and knowledge that exhibits cumulative improvement over time.

What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model… and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any the items on the above list that formal modelling has been where the most interesting action has occurred over the past several decades of research.

«

This is not short, but it’s fascinating: what order did, or could, those characteristics evolve?
unique link to this extract

---

Preliminary thoughts on the Midjourney scanner • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist rather than a radiologist, but still doesn’t think the Midjourney ultrasound scanner announced last week is a great idea:

»

Ultrasound is great, but it can’t penetrate bone or air. Many things doctors want to look at involve bone or air in some way. For example, the brain is behind the skull, which is a bone. The bowels are full of air. The lungs are super full of air. This limits ultrasound to the remainder – especially parts of the digestive, endocrine, and vascular systems, and superficial tissue like fat and muscle.

(it’s actually worse than this. Normal ultrasound can be used to image certain organs like the heart or prostate, but only via the technician carefully angling the probe. Midjourney hasn’t given details, but most likely their Scanner won’t be able to match this level of precision, so the heart, prostate, and some other usually-ultrasound-compatible organs will be outside its reach.)

Most MRIs or CTs involve one of the organs ultrasound can’t reach (this would be one reason doctors might do an MRI or CT, instead of just using ultrasound). In other cases, you don’t know what organ you’re looking for, and you want to be able to see everything (for example, if you’re scanning for cancer metastases, you can’t leave the brain and bowels out of the scan!) So this technology can’t replace most MRI or CT.

What about replacing ordinary ultrasound? One of the big advantages of ordinary ultrasound is that it’s a cheap machine you can keep on a cart and connect to a patient who’s lying in a hospital bed. Even though it might work better to put the patient in a giant water-filled tank surrounded by hundreds of ultrasound machines, if you tell your hospital orderlies “please transport this frail 90-year old to my giant water-filled tank, and lower them in slowly” they will stab you with your own scalpel. So this would need to be much better than ordinary ultrasound to capture even a fraction of these use cases. But ordinary ultrasound is already pretty good, this technology is untested, and it will be hard for it to be that much better.

Aren’t there a few edge cases that are poorly-served by existing modalities and ordinary ultrasound? Yes – the classic one is certain types of breast cancer, which don’t show up well on mammography against dense breast tissue, and require too much of a search for ordinary ultrasound.

«

Another example is from South Korea, where the adoption of intensive monitoring for thyroid cancer detected lots of possible thyroid conditions which were investigated at great expense and trouble for the patients, but had no effect on mortality from thyroid cancer.
unique link to this extract

---

Here’s how Russia’s nuclear-powered ‘Skyfall’ missile works • NPR

Geoff Brumfiel and Connie Hanzhang Jin:

»

According to Russian and Western sources, the new weapon, known in Russian as Burevestnik and by NATO as Skyfall, was powered by a small nuclear reactor. Few other details were forthcoming.

In this image made from video provided by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, Russia’s new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is test launched at an unspecified location in Russia.

Now, two MIT researchers have published an analysis that sheds fresh light on how the nuclear-powered missile actually worked. If they are correct, the October flight test marks the first time a nuclear-powered aircraft has ever flown. It would also suggest the opening of an extraordinarily dangerous new chapter in the 21st century’s simmering arms race.

…If Hecla is correct, then Burevestnik is the first aircraft ever built and flown using nuclear power. It’s also incredibly problematic, said Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at Middlebury College who specializes in studying rockets and missiles and was not affiliated with the MIT study.

“This thing is an environmental nightmare,” Lewis said. In addition, the reactor poses a huge risk to members of the military who might be required to handle it. “Just the question of how you safely load one of these things is, I think, really pretty challenging,” he said.

In 2019, an accident off the Russian coast killed several Russian nuclear personnel. Shortly thereafter, a spike in radioactivity was detected nearby. It’s now widely believed the accident was the result of a Russian team attempting to recover a prototype Burevestnik reactor. Hecla said it’s possible that the reactor restarted as it was being hauled from the bottom of the sea, sparking an explosion.

Given all the problems, both real and potential, associated with Burevestnik, Hecla questions why the Russians developed it at all. He notes that although its range is likely significantly longer than that of a conventional cruise missile, that doesn’t mean it’s particularly hard to intercept.

“It’s not a game-changing idea by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “We are able to routinely shoot down cruise missiles today, and there is no reason to think this will be particularly more difficult to do.”

Moreover, Russia has said that Burevestnik will only be used with a nuclear weapon as its warhead. A conventional warhead would likely be heavier, Lewis noted, and the reactor would still end up spreading lethal radiation over a significant area where the missile strikes. Given all that, “I can’t see the Russians wasting one to deliver a few hundred pounds of explosives,” he said.

Put it all together, and the weapon appears to be “kind of useless,” Lewis said.

«

So is it a dangerous new chapter, or kind of useless? It’s unclear from the analysis quite what risk this would pose from radiation output.
unique link to this extract

---

California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr:

»

The California Billionaire Tax Act, colloquially known as the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time 5% tax on any California resident worth more than $1bn. The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) as a means of funding California’s strained healthcare, food assistance and education programs.

The proposal has become one of the state’s biggest political flashpoints. As it gained popular momentum throughout the year, it’s also prompted prominent billionaires, such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, to make moves to cut ties with the state and Newsom vowing to block it from going to a vote. Although it has gained enough signatures for the ballot, the coalition backing the measure has until 25 June to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal.

While the union that floated the proposal has framed it as a way of getting the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, many of the state’s tech elites have condemned the tax and spent millions attempting to crush it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent at least $82m alone on efforts to fight the tax and has relocated just over the California border to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

The Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and the DoorDash CEO, Tony Xu, are among other tech moguls who have donated millions to oppose the tax. California has the most billionaires out of any state – more than 200 – many of whom have increased their wealth in recent years amid the AI boom.

Notably, Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has said he’s fine with the proposed tax and that he chose to live in Silicon Valley. During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”

«

“We’ve given millions to stop this tax that would cost us millions”. Makes some sort of sense, perhaps.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In a stunning turn of events, the US Senate has passed a measure forcing the Trump administration to retain an ocean monitoring system. CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University on Flickr.

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

---

A selection of 9 links for you. Not washed 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 smartphone’s days are numbered. Meet the device that could come next • Fortune

Alyson Shontell spoke to Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm:

»

AS: How much longer will we have smartphones as our primary device?

CA: This year will be the year of agents. You’ll start to see more form factors of things people wear. By 2027, 2028, you’ll start to see workload shift [from phones to AI agent devices]. In the next five years, it’s very possible those devices will be in the hundreds of millions, heading toward a billion [agentic AI devices].

AS: What will the future personal AI device will look like?

CA: I am bullish on glasses. Humans are very comfortable with glasses. You turn your head, that’s where the camera is going to see what your eyes are seeing. They’re very close to your ear and very close to your mouth. You’re going to read something and the camera can read it. So glasses, I think, will be the primary form factor.

There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about. We’re working with pretty much all of them, from OpenAI to Meta. You have different things that people wear—glasses is the easiest one to understand, but also jewelry, pins, and pendants.

For example, you’ll be walking around with glasses, and you’re going to see something you really like. You’ll say, “I’d like to buy this. How much is it on Amazon?” Or, “Can you render how I’m going to look with this on?” It’s going to be a different kind of low-friction experience, and workloads are going to start to shift. Certain things you’re going to do with an agent.

AS: Which company is best positioned to be the Apple of AI devices?

CA: With wearables, you have a mix of fashion and technology. Eyewear companies, for example, can become technology companies—and their valuations are going to expand, because you’re still going to be buying a fashion device.

Would you believe a consumer electronics company will make one pair of glasses that everyone wears? Or will people pick the brand they want? You’re going to see more things that we wear becoming smart, and it’s going to create a new set of players. One thing I can tell you with precision is that in every new generation of wireless, the players change as the industry changes. So I think we’re going to see that again.

«

Why is it that the only scenario these people can imagine is transactions, or potential transactions? And where is the screen for these devices? I wonder about the “shift to AI agents”. It seems like wildly optimistic thinking.
unique link to this extract

---

Snap is finally about to ship AR glasses — and they cost a fortune • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost $2,195. You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they’re expected to ship “this fall” in the US, UK, and France.

This is a big moment for Snap: The company made a big entry into smart glasses with its original Spectacles in 2016, and the company has been toiling away on nonpublic AR versions of Spectacles over the past few years. CEO Evan Spiegel promised the company would launch consumer AR glasses in 2026 and even turned its smart glasses team into a separate business.

The company says that Specs are “fully standalone, with no puck and no tether.” (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple’s Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They’ll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support “a wide range of prescriptions.”

You probably won’t mistake Specs, with their wide, bold frames, for any of Meta’s smart glasses — Snap clearly picked a design that it wants to stand out. (They’re not my style — I don’t think I can pull off the “snow goggles, but fashionable” look — though maybe Jony Ive might like them.) They have visible light and infrared cameras, and while the Specs are recording, a little LED bar will glow in the middle of the glasses.

…The Specs have two Snapdragon processors onboard, and while Snap isn’t specifying exactly which ones they are, the company says that one is focused on “computer vision” while the other is focused on running AR Lenses. “Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world,” Snap says.

«

Anyone who wears these looks like Brains from Thunderbirds (or possibly Joe 90). Hard to see these as anything but the nichiest of niche sales.
unique link to this extract

---

AI nose uses ‘Smell Language Model’ to sniff out signs of disease • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

Many people worry about what AI knows, but what about an AI Nose that can smell what disease you might have?

Ainos, an AI and biotech company that is developing smell technology, is working with National Taiwan University (NTU) to explore whether its platform can help diagnose patients by analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath.

The year-long research effort, which starts in July, will examine individuals who present with dyspnea, or shortness of breath, said to be one of the most common symptoms seen in emergency departments.

Dyspnea can be a symptom of many conditions, including acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) and acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF), each of which requires different treatments.

Ainos and NTU hope to develop and evaluate a system to analyze VOC-based breathprints to detect AECOPD and/or ADHF in patients.

Ainos’s Smell AI platform relies on an AI Nose module that features multiple micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and an integrated digital processor. Sensor resistance increases in the presence of detectable gases, and this is converted to a digital signal that is interpreted in much the way the human nose interprets scents, according to Ainos.

That interpretation is handled by by a proprietary Smell Language Model that has been developed to learn, classify, and contextualize complex scent patterns.

«

High likelihood of success: dogs (and cats?) can diagnose illness, though they’re terrible at telling us what it is. And there are humans who can detect diseases by smell – such as Joy Milne, famous for being able to sniiff out Parkinson’s.
unique link to this extract

---

Florida’s TikTok lawsuit could signal wider social media crackdown • POLITICO

Andrew Atterbury:

»

Florida’s move to crack down on TikTok for allegedly defying the state’s law blocking kids from social media is the state’s latest warning for Big Tech.

So far, Meta, the outfit behind platforms like Facebook and Instagram, is the only major tech company complying with Florida’s restrictions on children using social media, according to state Attorney General James Uthmeier. That leaves some heavy hitters open to the same potential legal risk as TikTok, which state officials contend could be on the hook for “billions” of dollars in damages for allegedly deceiving families about the risks posed by the content on its app.

“Mark my words, we’re going to go after anybody that’s going to hurt our kids — anybody and everybody,” Uthmeier said during an event Monday announcing the TikTok lawsuit.

Florida’s GOP-dominated Legislature passed its strict social media law in 2024 prohibiting children younger than 14 from using many platforms while requiring parental approval for 14- and 15-year-olds. The online restrictions aligned Florida with several other states attempting to limit minors using “addictive” apps they consider harmful to their mental health.

By design, Florida’s regulations don’t name any social media applications, instead targeting “addictive features” like infinite scrolling and platforms on which 10% or more of users are under 16 years old and spend more than two hours on average engaged.

The state, however, was unable to enforce these policies until November, as tech firms fought the law in court, contending it amounted to a free speech violation for users.

And it wasn’t until April that Uthmeier ultimately signalled Florida would soon be dropping the hammer on apps, warning that fines of $50,000 per violation were coming.

«

Interesting dynamic: TikTok in the US is now owned by Larry Ellison, who acquired it because he’s a Trump donor, while Florida is a state that Trump needs to remain Republican. Who wins?
unique link to this extract

---

Apple patches eavesdropping vulnerability in Beats Studio Buds • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users.

The vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, enabling people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone.

“Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security advisory. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.

Carrying a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10, CVE-2025-20701 was one of three vulnerabilities resulting from last year’s disclosure by researchers Dennis Heinze and Frieder Steinmetz of security firm Insinuator about chips made by Airoha Systems.

…Heinze and Steinmetz said last year that the full chain of attacks gave attackers the ability to do other malicious things, including retrieving call history and contacts, and even calling arbitrary numbers. Many of those capabilities are dependent on the specific devices being paired, since the functionality built into them differs from platform to platform.

«

That’s a pretty dramatic vulnerability in what one would normally think of as an essentially dumb device.
unique link to this extract

---

America is headed toward the infinite workweek • The Atlantic

Lila Shroff:

»

Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. “I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,” he recently wrote on his blog.

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.” In the survey, 18% of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.

«

We did not expect that the AI tsunami would lead to us being exhausted as well as unemployed, did we?
unique link to this extract

---

HPV vaccine means young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death • BBC News

Sophie Hutchinson:

»

Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals.

The first study of its kind shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine.

Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 – the first time that had happened over a five-year period. Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.

“It’s incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer,” said Prof Peter Sasieni, the lead researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

Overall, cervical cancer is still the 14th most common cancer among females in the UK, with 3,300 people diagnosed every year.

It is thought HPV, a virus which is spread through close skin-to-skin contact, causes 99% of those cases. Most HPV infections clear up without any problems, but some cause abnormal cell changes and can lead to cancer years later. The report’s authors expect the numbers dying from the disease to continue to fall as more are given a HPV jab and vaccinated people grow older.

Cancer Research UK, which funded the research, described the findings as an “incredible milestone” but warned that vaccination rates in England were running below recommended levels.

…Data from the UK Health Security Agency shows that 76% of girls in England were vaccinated by the age of 15 in 2024-25, well below the 90% that the World Health Organization (WHO) says is needed to eliminate cervical cancer.

…Boys have also been given the HPV vaccine since 2019, which helps to protect them against anal, penis, throat and mouth cancers, and reduces the risk of them passing the virus on to girls.

«

unique link to this extract

---

Trump administration backs off plan to end ocean monitoring system • The New York Times

Maxine Joselow:

»

The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, N.S.F. will not proceed with further removal or de-scoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

The Senate passed a measure Wednesday that would block the government from dismantling the system, with lawmakers in both parties warning that the action would be illegal and would threaten the safety of coastal communities. The Trump administration had also tried to cut the program’s funds the last two years, but Congress restored the money both times.

In May, the science foundation had said it would send ships to start pulling up instruments anchored to the sea floor off the coasts of Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

For the past decade, scientists have used data from these instruments to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how marine heat waves could affect fisheries and how soon a vital ocean current could collapse.

Fishermen have also checked the real-time, publicly available data on wind and wave conditions before heading to sea. And meteorologists have used these observations to improve forecasts of disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis.

The National Science Foundation said on Thursday that it already had pulled some buoys, sensors and other instruments from the water off the coasts of Oregon and Washington State, but it was “developing plans to redeploy the equipment after servicing.”

«

Two astonishing things: the Trump administration actually listening to an opposing opinion; and the Senate passing something.
unique link to this extract

---

A new era of Midjourney • Midjourney blog

The company you think of as “those people who make AI pictures” has decided to move into medicine:

»

When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water – an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the ripples back at millions of times per second. Together they act as both a choir and an audience – producing terabytes of data each second. If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every 1 second of scan data.

The sheer number of mechanical elements, the inconceivable volume of data, and the computational power required for this to all come together is one reason why no such machine was ever made – until now.

As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task.

The major computational task is figuring out how to change waves into images. Basically – as waves travel through the water and your body they change shape. The shape of these waves changes whenever there is a change in density or stiffness (i.e., going from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone). By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there.

«

It’s like a whole-body ultrasound system, rather than an MRI (which relies on high powered magnets to image inside the body). Will it work? Can it tell you anything useful? Might be fun to find out. And for Midjourney, definitely a much bigger potential moneyspinner than making AI images.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

For the elderly and infirm, affordable exoskeletons could soon change their lives. CC-licensed photo by Sandia Labs 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. Different drum. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

---

Trust in news hits new low globally, research suggests – BBC News

Paul Glynn:

»

Trust in the news has fallen to an all-time low globally – the lowest since annual reports by the Reuters Institute began more than a decade ago (2015).

The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% – 20 points lower than 10 years ago.

More than half of respondents said they now get their news from third-party platforms like social media and video networks, although a similar number still use news websites and TV news as well. Traditional sources are still more popular in the UK.

“Our data points to a mix of anxiety, disengagement and cynicism from audiences, many of whom don’t like the way publishers are covering long-running news stories such as immigration, inflation and international conflict,” the institute said.

“But the report also finds openness to new sources and formats, and a belief in what news at its best can offer.”

Despite more people accessing news via social media, confidence in that format is much lower than in news overall, at 22%. And just 10% of those who took part said most of their news needs were met by creators and influencers, suggesting they are complementing rather than replacing traditional media.

Meanwhile, faith in answers from AI chatbots from respondents around the world is at 20%, although weekly use of these has grown from 7% to 10% (and to 16% among people under 35). And support for impartial news remains high, appearing largely unaffected by changes in news consumption, with support falling by 3% since 2020.

In the US, trust in news stands at 25%, and is even lower (15%) among politically right-leaning Americans.

Some major news outlets have seen big drops, with trust in both CBS News and Fox News down 10 points from 2025, and CNN falling by six.

«

There’s no obvious solution to this. People don’t trust news but they don’t trust social media platforms either.
unique link to this extract

---

Wired launching forum-style app as added subscriber benefit • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Wired is launching a new forum-style app which lets readers interact with its editorial team.

The app, said to be launching “very soon”, is set to feature forums on which subscribers can interact with Wired journalists about the title’s key coverage areas across tech and politics.

Arielle Goldstein, audience development manager at Wired, said the app will serve as a “community power play” and is one of several ways the brand is aiming to keep readers on its own platforms rather than social media.

She told the Audiencers Festival in London: “We envision that we will have forums on the app where people can come and interact with other Wired readers based on subject matters, and also Wired staff, Wired writers on that same subject matter as well.

“So you might be thinking to yourself, can’t people just go to Reddit for that? The answer is no, because our journalists aren’t hanging out on Reddit. They will be in the app, they will be able to answer your questions in the app, and really drive discussion.”

She added that this means a paid subscription will offer a “rapport with the subject matter expert who you’ve been reading for years, and who you want to continue to build a relationship with”.

«

Oh, sure, the thing every journalist absolutely wants more than anything else in the world is to have readers directly contacting them in a forum to tell them what they thought of what they wrote, and interacting with each other to discuss the content. More. Than. Anything. And has the Audience Development Manager (who one suspects has not done a lot of direct interacting with that audience) considered how the forum is going to be moderated and who is going to pay for that? Does she not know the history of what happened to comments on news sites?

This is a terrible idea. How long do we give it to survive from launch – six months? Nine?
unique link to this extract

---

Nothing on the internet is secure anymore • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate: Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours. “There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”

If the NSA is perturbed by the rise in cyberattacks, which it apparently is, then surely my savings are vulnerable. There could be any number of weaknesses in my bank’s IT systems to directly hack. Or perhaps an AI-written phishing email targeted at an employee, personalized to sound like a family member or manager, could let hackers into the back end to empty my coffers. Even if the bank has great cybersecurity, an attack on another business—a medical clinic I visited, a car-rental company, a newsletter subscription—could steal my payment information and, potentially, much more. The attack angles are seemingly infinite. And no one is adequately prepared.

…traditional cybersecurity methods don’t cut it anymore. Before, you might scramble for a week to patch a hole, Giovanni Vigna, a cybersecurity expert at UC Santa Barbara, told me. “Now you could have hundreds of those every week.” Moody’s Ratings has found that the time attackers take to exploit a publicly known vulnerability (the digital equivalent of a robber plotting how to get around a bank’s guards and cameras after obtaining a key) fell from more than 700 days in 2020 to just 44 days in 2025—faster than the average time cybersecurity teams take to patch the bug.

«

Everything is going just great. Maybe we’ll just have to turn the internet off for some period of the day?
unique link to this extract

---

Apple to raise prices due to memory chip crunch, Tim Cook says • Wall Street Journal via MSN

Rolfe Winkler:

»

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.

Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.

Skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has pushed up their cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, estimates research firm TechInsights.

…Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for prices of smartphones and PCs in the US this year. This price hike will have a limited impact on the consumer price index, which has only a small weighting for such devices. Yet any price increase on the popular iPhone is likely to grab Washington’s attention.

«

The WSJ has an estimate of $1,299 for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro. Last year the base model of the 17 Pro was $1,099. Who doesn’t love an 18% increase? But it goes to prove too that even Apple isn’t immune to the supply crunch.
unique link to this extract

---

Fox’s $22bn Roku acquisition aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22bn, the firms announced today.

The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.

The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn’t its hardware, which lost $19.1m in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1m, with the advertising business pulling in $371m in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.

The planned merger aims to help Roku scale and maintain profitability more easily by enabling Roku “to execute on our strategy faster than we would otherwise by ourselves, even though we’re doing extremely well,” Anthony Wood, Roku’s CEO, said during a call with investors today.

«

This is a Murdoch family acquisition; it feels like nothing more than a plotline from Succession where the Logan media empire is trying to buy a Scandinavian tech company, and finds that it has instead been eaten by the tech company. That’s unlikely to happen here, but it’s hard to feel that Fox really gets Roku.
unique link to this extract

---

AI-referred US shoppers browse longer, spend more per visit, data shows • Reuters

Arriana McLymore:

»

US shoppers who use large language models, including Google’s Gemini or ​OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for purchase recommendations are lingering more on retailers’ websites and are more likely to spend, according to May data from Adobe Analytics.

Consumers ​who are referred to retail websites ​from LLMs generated 53% more revenue per visit than shoppers from non-AI sources, the data ​firm said, emphasizing the need for brands to invest ​in AI-readable webpages.

Retailers whose products show up in LLM suggestions are able to “drive more personalization” to shoppers who ​leave the platforms to complete their purchases ​on the native websites, Vivek Pandya, director of digital insights at Adobe, said.

• AI traffic to retail websites increased 138% in May from last year, the highest share of total retail visits since Adobe ​Analytics began ​tracking in October 2024.

«

That latter statistic either indicates far more use by a slowly growing number of people, or rapidly growing adoption with consistent use.
unique link to this extract

---

How the social media ban might collapse • Goodall and Good Luck

Lewis Goodall is sceptical about the under-16s social media ban:

»

Many of the details trouble me as rushed and ill-considered. Does anybody believe that Starmer would be acting so precipitously, without a white paper, unless he was legacy shopping? Is it really credible to say that 16 year olds are able to vote and marry, but prohibited from posting about it on Instagram after 8pm? What will happen with the data which is collected? How will the age verification actually work and can it be done in such a way which is not onerous for adults? And do we really think it’s credible or desirable to ban YouTube for teenagers, which is basically just their…TV?

The exact application of the details matter as do good answers to all these questions because if they are not ironclad, ironically enough, it is now on social media that they are pulled apart and discredited in dog-year time. For a case study in exactly what I mean, we need look no further than digital ID cards, proposed by the government last September. That was, until Keir Starmer advocated it, a very popular proposal.

The PM came out in favour of it, just before party conference, to get himself out of the latest political hole in which he found himself. It was announced out of the blue, with virtually no real plan for how it would be affected or explained to the country, certainly not a comms strategy. It was torn apart online, conspiracy about government control quickly spread, propelled by eccentric but influential accounts with the algorithms on their side- and virtually nothing was done at the top of government to stop it.

Within weeks, its polling collapsed. In the broadcast era, governments could roll out technocratic reforms through institutional trust and message discipline. In the algorithmic era, every enforcement mechanism, every minor controversy instantly becomes content — clipped, distorted, radicalised and fed back into politics at scale. With the weird fusion of political content and the hothouse of Westminster, there is increasingly a third body of the British Parliament. A sort of algorithmic veto. One of the explanations as to how and why the Starmer government has struggled, is because it hasn’t been able, through political skill, to combat and overcome it.

«

This is the other element: even if the public supports it, is the political drive there to make it happen?
unique link to this extract

---

Tech titans are hacking their bodies for a longer life. But is there science behind their methods? • Nature

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel told Bloomberg News in 2014 that he takes human growth hormone in hopes of living for 120 years, despite the Mayo Clinic, a renowned US medical centre, warning of substantial risks and saying that there is little evidence that the drug helps healthy adults to regain youth or energy. Thiel did not respond to Nature’s questions about whether he still takes the hormone or what he makes of the Mayo Clinic’s guidance.

In hopes of enhancing cognition, some Silicon Valley tech leaders have touted methylene blue, a compound with a long history as a textile dye that has been approved for limited medical use, mainly to treat a rare blood disorder. And they are promoting nicotine pouches — marketed as an alternative to smoking — as a way to optimize focus and energy, despite well-documented concerns about addiction.

These wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of early-stage science to the public, who turn preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks that combine supplements, other compounds, protocols and therapies, long before FDA approval. “It’s a trickle-down effect due to the nature of platforms they use to spread their content,” says Margje Camps, a researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who studies health influencers.

But there is a danger to this growing phenomenon: researchers who study ageing and longevity warn that these biohacks have not been clinically tested, meaning that it’s unclear whether they work or might harm people.

There is no medical intervention that is proven to extend human life by targeting ageing itself, says Andrew Steele, an independent longevity researcher based in Berlin and author of the book Ageless (2022). “There probably are things on our radars that might work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans.”

«

unique link to this extract

---

Me and my exoskeleton: the rise of wearable robotics • Financial Times

Patti Waldmeir:

»

We are entering the age of the everyday exoskeleton: light, wearable robotic devices that can change what it means to grow old.

Last week I strapped on a pair of bionic trainers to help me walk, and a robotic hip belt to make climbing easier. Not that I need assistance with either function now — but one day, I probably will. I applaud the idea of wearable robots that can help stave off immobility, as well as the social isolation and physical and mental decline it often brings.

Full exoskeletons have been around for decades, designed for military, workplace or medical rehabilitation uses. But now lighter and more affordable (if not cheap) joint-specific wearable exoskeletons are entering the market, aimed not at those who cannot walk, but those who struggle to go as far or as comfortably as they’d like.

“Living longer is a biology problem, but living well is a design problem,” Anna Roumiantseva, co-founder of Skip, a wearable robotics company, tells me. Modern science has added decades to human life “but we haven’t redesigned the products and systems around us. It’s the classic ‘lifespan vs healthspan’ thing,” she says.

Her company is accepting pre-orders for $5,000 “powered trousers” as part a “movewear” collection that integrates exoskeleton technology into consumer products. The goal is to “enhance the experience of ageing,” she says, adding, “a lot of the time, that comes down to social elements: not feeling like people have to wait for me, or taking that trip I’ve been putting off.”

Ankle-assist, hip-assist, knee-assist and other such devices are meant to be worn every day, like hearing aids — not just in a crisis. Roumiantseva says it’s important for the company to attract users “who still take the stairs occasionally”.

«

There’s a video of Waldmeir (who doesn’t give her age) strolling along a city street walking her dog. They certainly look more elegant than those mobility scooters people use. Look, if they’re good enough for Sigourney Weaver fighting aliens..
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The precise biology behind the Venus Flytrap’s stunningly fast activation has been figured out, finally. CC-licensed photo by Mark Freeth 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. Yes, they’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

---

Social media ban for under-16s in the UK: Cambridge expert reaction • University of Cambridge

»

“Whether this is a good or bad policy decision depends on what we consider to be the ultimate goal of this ban,” said Prof Amy Orben of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, who was last month appointed to a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) advisory panel on children’s online wellbeing.

“On the one hand, this ban will not solve our collective concerns about the increasingly digital childhoods experienced in the UK today. We know from the Australian ban that current enforcements are incomplete, and the majority of young people are still online at similar rates. 

“Evidence synthesis from my team and others shows that we should likely not expect substantial boosts to well-being or mental health in the short term, or large changes in behaviours or rates of parental conflict,” said Orben, who led a major report on the current evidence on impacts of social media on young people, commissioned by DSIT and published in January. 

“However, a ban is likely to change public perceptions, and make social media use less acceptable in younger age groups. This is an important first step in public health education and behavioural change. It can also minimise instances of individual harms for young people who cease engaging with platforms, and over time it can, if done right, change our culture around social media use among certain age groups. 

“First and foremost, the ban is a recognition by government that previous policies to make social media safe have not worked as planned. Banning something for those most vulnerable is a good step if it cannot be made safe. But we know why social media is at times unsafe for not just children but adults as well: this includes harmful content, conduct or communications, as well as design features that make it harder for us to disengage even when we want to. We have failed to adequately address these.”

«

unique link to this extract

---

Social media ban: responses to 10 common objections • Edrith

Edrith:

»

I would like laws to have an impact. I’m also someone who is normally fairly opposed to safetyism and the nanny state, and supportive of parental choice. At the same time I’m not a full-on libertarian: I think some products should be age-gated (tobacco, gambling), regulated even for adults (cars, guns) or outright banned (drink-driving, heroin).

To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation. In some cases this is due to direct harms caused by use; in others, it is because the addictive nature crowds out other, healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others. For some of these, we increasingly have causal as well as correlational evidence; for others, it is simply highly indicative, when one looks at the trend lines across very many different countries going south at the same time.

Smartphones have sufficient other positive uses such that we’re not realistically going to get rid of them – any more than we did cars, despite the deaths they cause. But the case for social media is much weaker: regulation is needed, and a social media ban for under 16s (and a properly enforced phone ban in school) is a good place to start.

«

The piece then looks at the arguments against, and responds. It’s pretty straightforward. Doing is better than not doing.
unique link to this extract

---

Australia has already banned social media for under 16s; here’s what the UK can learn from the experience • The Conversation

Lisa Given:

»

In March 2026, Australia’s eSafety Commission released its first detailed compliance report. It showed social media companies had taken “some steps” to restrict access to accounts. But the report also provided data from parents showing 70% of children retained active social media accounts.

The report highlighted four key compliance issues. It found that messaging to under-16s on some platforms encouraged children to attempt age assurance, even where they declared themselves to be underage. Some platforms enabled under-16s to repeatedly attempt the same age-assurance method to ultimately pass age checks. Pathways for reporting age-restricted accounts have generally not been accessible and effective, particularly for parents. Finally, some platforms appear not to have done enough to prevent under-16s having accounts.

The report explained Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were being investigated for “potential non-compliance”. While the results of these investigations are not yet known, enforcement decisions are expected by midyear. In the meantime, parents continue to be frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the legislation.

A recent study provides further insights into the flaws and limitations of Australia’s social media restrictions. The study found 61% of under 16s reported “no or little change” in their social media use. Only 26% reported they had been “significantly affected” by the ban. However, of those who were restricted, 51% reported a significant drop in access to news coverage. These results raise significant concerns for young people’s future civic engagement.

«

It’s always interesting how social media is viewed by those who oppose the laws as absolutely essential to children’s development at all ages, even though humans developed pretty well without them for quite a few million years.
unique link to this extract

---

Scientists reveal surprising mechanism behind Venus flytrap’s rapid snap • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin:

»

The Venus flytrap is one of nature’s most impressive predators, luring insects with the intoxicating scent of nectar before capturing them with a snap of its jaw-like leaves.

Now, scientists have revealed the mechanism that allows the carnivorous plant to react with lightning speed, resolving a problem that stumped Charles Darwin and many researchers after him.

In an intricate series of experiments, scientists found that a hair-trigger detection causes the cells on the outer surface of the leaf to soften. This prompts the flytrap to flip into a closed position within a second of a bug landing on the leaf.

“When Darwin saw these plants move so fast, he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside, but plants do not have muscles and they do not have nerves,” said Dr Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University and senior author of the research. “For more than a century there have been many hypotheses. It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”

A key challenge, Forterre said, was making physical measurements of such a finely tuned system that moves incredibly quickly. “As soon as you perturb it, it closes,” he said. “If you close it accidentally with a drop of water, it will close and then reopen the next day. If it catches an insect, it has to digest it and dissolve the skeleton, which will take several weeks.”

«

Sure, seems trivial, but in a couple of decades it’ll probably be the principle behind a new method of repairing blood vessels. Or shoe fastenings. Who knows.
unique link to this extract

---

Will Siri AI kill AI as a service? • The Dent

Andy Nicolaides:

»

Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Apple, and their products, change the playing field very often. Apple, along with Google with their Photos all, are probably responsible for a lot of standalone photo back up services closing their doors. As soon as the two big OS providers started including photo backup with their devices, the idea of it being a standalone product seemingly died overnight. Photo backup is just a service now, something anyone expects to have with any device they use. 

Since starting to use Siri AI I’ve stopped using Gemini and Claude (again outside of the coding elements) for just general queries and questions. I’ve even reduced my Kagi usage a little for general questions and information. There is absolutely the novelty of it all that will drive me to use it more, of course, but the integration with the wider OS and the fact that it can now (finally) answer questions with decent information and relatively quickly all without having to use a separate app (which you can still do if you want) has already been a bit of a game changer.

After just a few days it’s already feeling like just a ‘service’ and part of what I get with an iPhone now. If I didn’t have use for Claude Code (it feels like we all need to be at least dabbling with it for work these days) I wouldn’t think twice of just not using a different AI system again.

As I say, very early days, but I feel like this is already the turning point where the expensive AI tools like Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex and others become very expensive professional applications, only aimed at corporations that have the money to burn on it, and the big players start to back away from targeting consumer users, with Gemini for Android, and Siri AI for Apple devices, becomes the de facto standard.

«

unique link to this extract

---

Amateur saboteurs: the young men carrying out attacks for gangs, Russia and Iran • Reuters

Michael Holden and Sam Tobin:

»

Shortly after midnight on May 13, 2025, Ukrainian national Roman Lavrynovych messaged someone he knew as ‘EL Money’, a mystery figure who had instructed him to commit three arson attacks on property linked to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“I ​hope I will have an opportunity to shake your hand soon … Be in touch,” he said in a text message. An hour later, counter-terrorism officers raided his London home and he was charged with committing arson with intent to endanger life.

With his conviction on Monday, the 22-year-old Lavrynovych joins a growing list of mainly young men, lured on social media and found guilty in Britain of carrying out serious criminal acts on behalf of shadowy online figures for money which, more often than not, they never even received.

“Clearly the tasking (instruction) was to intimidate and create fear for the prime minister and to attack the UK,” said Helen Flanagan, head of counter-terrorism policing in London, in an ​interview for British media. “There is no evidence to suggest they knew who they were targeting or why. It was a quick dash for cash really.”

Foreign states using unreliable and untrained individuals -many ​of them minors – to carry out such tasks was almost unheard of until recent years but a flurry of incidents in Britain and across Europe has brought the issue into focus.
The authorities say the aim is to sow unrest and division while allowing hostile governments to deny any involvement.

Russia has used the proxy tactic extensively in Ukraine: since its full-scale invasion in 2022, roughly one ​in five of the more than 1,100 Ukrainians accused of committing arson, terrorism or sabotage have been minors, Ukraine’s security service has said.

British authorities say doing so in Britain became necessary after more than 600 Russian operatives, ​including over 400 spies, were expelled following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southern England, in 2018.

…Lavrynovych said he had been working on a construction site and ​was first contacted by EL Money on a Telegram chat used by Ukrainians to find jobs. He told police he had felt threatened to comply with his ​orders and was worried about his grandmother, with whom he lived.

“I needed some more money,” he told London’s Old Bailey court. “I didn’t know where he contacted me from.”

«

unique link to this extract

---

Has AI already killed how-to nonfiction? Sales trends, my personal data, and what it might mean for the future • The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss:

»

let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily.

But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that’s happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.

So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like. First, some broader stats. For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?

But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time. 

But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend. So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years. Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.

Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication. The sales have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on.

But alas! There’s trouble in paradise.

«

His self-help books are down 57% against 2025, which was itself down 46% on the previous year. So:

»

On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.

In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book. In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

---

Nobody clicks your share buttons • Derek Hanson

Derek Hanson:

»

I don’t click share buttons. I never have.

When I find something worth sharing, I tap the share icon in Chrome on my phone. That’s it. On my desktop I click the little link icon in Arc’s browser bar, or I just double-click the address bar and hit command-C command-V. I’ve never once looked at a row of branded social icons at the bottom of a blog post and thought, “Oh good, there’s the Facebook button.”

I think most people are the same way. And I think the data backs that up.

This idea has been rattling around in my head for years. Back when I was deep in my PhD research at Iowa State, I came across Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media writing about things you should remove from your website. One of them was social icons in your header. Not even the share buttons; the plain follow-us icons. His argument was simple: those icons are exit signs. You spent all this effort getting someone to your site, and the most visually prominent element on the page is an invitation to leave.

But he didn’t stop there. In the same piece, he looked at social share buttons on service pages and product pages and found the same pattern. Share rates around 0.1% or lower. His advice was to cut them and uninstall the WordPress plugin that added them. Visual noise, no value.

That stuck with me. And when I started building block themes and thinking about what belongs in a post template, I kept coming back to it. Every WordPress theme I’ve worked with ships social share icons somewhere in the post layout. They sit at the top or the bottom, a little row of branded circles. Nobody questions them. They’re just there, like they’ve always been there.

But should they be?

«

Obviously not: someone thought they were a good idea years ago, and everyone copied them, and now they’re like Japanese knotweed.
unique link to this extract

---

AI document integrity: what your AI reads is probably different from what you read • PQ PDF

PQ PDF Tools:

»

The problem hides in plain sight. A PDF isn’t one document. The page a person reads and the text a machine extracts are not guaranteed to match — and your AI ingests the machine’s version. When they differ, the model learns, retrieves and answers from a version of the document no human ever saw.

• RAG poisoning: retrieval pipelines index extracted text. If extraction diverges from the rendered page, your assistant cites content that isn’t there — confidently.

• Corrupted training data: fine-tuning on parsed PDFs bakes in extraction errors, hidden layers and reading-order scrambles at scale — invisibly.

• Compliance & e-discovery: when the value stored differs from the value shown — on signed forms, contracts and filings — automated review reaches the wrong conclusion.

• Silent, not loud: none of this throws an error. It degrades answer quality and audit integrity quietly, until someone downstream is wrong and can’t say why.

Across the 16,971-PDF DOJ Epstein release, 18.6% of files read differently to a machine than to a human — the extracted text layer diverged from the rendered page.

«

Given the prevalence of PDFs in all sorts of government and formal financial products, this is quite a hidden problem. Not an iceberg, but still trouble.
unique link to this extract

---

Current Rothko

Neat: a webpage that finds a Rothko painting that matches (as far as it can) the weather where you are. Needs location access, but it’s a web page, not an app.
unique link to this extract

---

Global food crisis looms as supply chains fracture after Iran War • news.com.au

Jamie Siedel:

»

Higher food prices? Less choice? Poorer quality? Disgruntled fellow shoppers? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The muttering echoing through Australian supermarket aisles is just the beginning – even if US President Donald Trump miraculously pulls off his long-promised “deal” to end his Iran War.

Critical links in the global supply chain are broken. And they’re steadily winding their way towards the next harvest. The doubling (and in some places tripling) of diesel costs makes farming far more expensive. Not to mention transporting produce to market.

And a lack of fertiliser means the next crop will produce less. Or not be planted at all. Now, last season’s harvest is feeling the strain. “So today, we have enough food available, and we have enough stocks. The problem is for the next harvest,” warns UN Food and Agriculture Organisation chief economist Maximo Torero.

It’s a global problem. It extends from the fields of Africa to the prairies of the United States. “If the situation improves tomorrow, if you open the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow, we will still have higher prices because of less supply,” Torero explains.

“Farmers [have] already made a decision. But we could avoid a significant crisis by the end of the year or 2027.”

And if we don’t open the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow? “That means that the yields in the world will be affected for the second half of the year for 2027,” Torero said.

A new report published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) states that the real Hormuz crisis will arrive in about six months.

“The decisions we make now will determine whether this remains a manageable shock, or evolves into a deeper global food security crisis in 2026 and 2027, and beyond,” Director General QU Dongyu told a crisis meeting in Spain on Wednesday.

He said the US/Israel attack on Iran had produced a moment of “profound geopolitical and economic fragility”.

«

Well in theory the strait is open, but..
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As you get older, do you start to slow down.. on the road? If so, why? CC-licensed photo by Brian Suda 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 10 links for you. Stay in your lane. 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 security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.

In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

«

This beef between Amazon (has US defence contracts) and Anthropic (presently shut out of US defence contracts) has the potential to become really explosive. Would Anthropic deny Amazon access to its models? It probably has to to any Amazon employees who are not US-born. But how do you do that? Better deny it to everyone. The problem with that, though, is that you can’t be absolutely sure that someone is a US citizen even at a US company. Ironically, some of Anthropic’s top researchers are now disallowed from accessing their own product because they’re not US citizens.
unique link to this extract

---

In age of AI, world’s leading deepfake expert no longer trusts his own eyes • The New York Times

Eli Saslow:

»

[Hamid Farid’s wife Emily] Cooper was a leading vision scientist at Berkeley. She researched how humans perceive reality, while her husband investigated how that reality could be faked. They’d collaborated on studies about deepfakes, but in the last months that research had begun to follow them home. Instead of dealing with one case every few weeks, Farid was working as an adviser and an expert witness, juggling up to a dozen cases each day. For the first time in his career, he’d become not just an analyst but also a victim, when someone spoofed his cellphone number and used AI to clone his voice. The hacker made calls to one of Farid’s colleagues on a sensitive case, impersonating Farid and pressing for confidential information. Now Farid and Cooper had decided never to take their identity for granted. They invented a safe word to confirm they were real at the start of any sensitive phone call.

Farid glanced at his phone and saw a new email: “I’m fact-checking this viral video of a mother and child approaching a flag-draped coffin that we suspect is AI generated,” it read. He set the phone back down and looked out from the porch at the Berkeley Hills, the San Francisco Bay, and the sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I can’t stand this place anymore,” he said. “These major tech giants will burn everything to the ground as long as they’re making a profit. They’re not interested in anything that’s going to slow them down.”

“It makes me anxious for our students,” Cooper said. “It’s starting to scare me.”

«

(Gift link.)
unique link to this extract

---

I was scammed buying GLP-1s online. I’m not alone • WIRED

John Semley:

»

In March, I signed up for a service called FitRx—which also does business under the name Zealthy, Inc.—mostly to see the cost of compounded Zepbound. The website advertises an offer of $135 for a month’s supply. I registered, paid the membership fee, and answered some basic questions about my weight, medical history, and activity level. When I woke up seven hours later, I found a detailed message from a physicians’ assistant—who I did not communicate with directly—laying out my new “plan.” I also found I was charged $866 and had been sent a three-month supply of tirzepatide vials that I had been prescribed, despite neither asking for or needing them. No effort whatsoever was made to check if these unwanted medicines were covered by insurance.

I spent the better part of the next week arguing with customer service reps at FitRx and Zealthy about their cancellation rules. (With FitRx, this almost always involved dialing in to be cheerily greeted by the same dude, who would only identify himself as “Ace.”) They explained that they have a policy about not refunding any orders after shipping labels have been printed. I explained that I, too, have a policy: Do not take money from me without asking. Having involuntarily adjusted my personal policy in my dealings with FitRx/Zealthy, perhaps they, too, could make an exception? No dice. I called the shipper, FedEx, which said that it was completely within the provider’s capacity to cancel a shipment before it had been mailed out. I refused the delivery of the vials and had them returned to the sender, an intermediary pharmacy in Texas. The process was mind-breakingly frustrating, seemingly by design.

…“The obese world is a white-collar crook’s dream,” alleges Sarah Harris, another former customer who claims she was bilked for more than $1,500. She turned to Zealthy back in 2024, when her doctor refused to prescribe semaglutide to her because the treatment was, in Harris’s words, “still newish.” Her insurance wouldn’t cover any weight-loss drugs. So, if she wanted to try them, she’d have to pay out of pocket.

…Ali Garrison, a social media weight-loss influencer who operates the YouTube channel FitFlavorFun, has fallen down what she calls “the Zealthy rabbit hole.” There were Reddit threads and whole Facebook groups collecting stories of consumers who claimed to have been ripped off by the company. “One thing I tell people is to do a Google search,” she advises. “Company Name scams … Company Name reviews … I could go on and on about all problems various telehealths have had.”

Caveat emptor, as the old saying goes. And, in my own case, I am definitely guilty of conducting precisely zilch in the way of this sort of preliminary research. I forked over my Mastercard info to a telehealth website because it seemed glossy, professional, and otherwise sufficiently legit. (I have since canceled that credit card, as a precaution.)

«

Unsurprising that there would be scams around these drugs. But in the UK, you can challenge charges with your credit card company, and then it becomes their problem.
unique link to this extract

---

How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing • Google Cloud Blog

Sam McVeety and Amir Hormati:

»

As foundation models continue to improve, the lack of relevant context often limits what they can do, especially as they are used to build agentic systems. While these models can help you write code, summarize documents, or analyze a dataset, they still need the right information to produce accurate and actionable results. 

That’s why today, we’re introducing the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), an open specification that formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format. This is a vendor-neutral, agent- and human-friendly standard for representing the metadata, context, and curated knowledge that modern AI systems need.

As published, OKF v0.1 represents knowledge as a directory of Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, with a small set of agreed-upon conventions that let wikis written by different producers be consumed by different agents without translation.

That’s it. No complex compression scheme, no new runtime, no required SDK. A bundle of OKF documents is:

• Just Markdown — readable in any editor, renderable on GitHub, indexable by any search tool

• Just files — shippable as a tarball, hostable in any git repo, mountable on any filesystem

• Just YAML frontmatter — for the small set of structured fields that need to be queryable: type, title, description, resource, tags, and timestamp.

«

This sounds very much like the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee was always dreaming of. This time, perhaps it will stick because they need it to stick for AI agents.
unique link to this extract

---

Solar generates more energy than coal in US for 1st time • ABC News

Julia Jacobo:

»

The amount of solar power generated in the US is continuing to grow despite efforts from the Trump administration to slow down the renewable energy sector, according to two reports released this week.

The US has generated more power from solar compared to coal for the first time, according to a report by Ember, a think tank focused on the clean energy transition. In May 2026, solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity, while coal supplied 12.2%, according to an analysis of official monthly and preliminary hourly generation data.

A record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy was generated in May 2026, exceeding the output from May 2025 by 17%, the think tank found. The record could be broken again in the upcoming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.

The amount of energy from coal generated in the US has been nearly cut in half in the last five years, falling from 19.7% of total power generated in May 2021 to 12.2% last month. Production of coal power rose slightly in May 2026, to 43.4 Twh, but it remained 11% below May 2025 levels.

«

May of course isn’t the sunniest month. Coal is gradually on the way out.
unique link to this extract

---

The ‘new joule order’ is here. The west is last to realise • Financial Times

Jeffrey Currie is a senior adviser at Carlyle Group and executive co-chairman of Abaxx Markets:

»

The world has underpriced physical energy security for a decade and the repricing in markets from that complacency was not going to be linear. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is the first major stress test of the new regime. It has revealed which countries prepared, and which are improvising.

China prepared. While Washington and Brussels spent 25 years polarised between green and brown energy, Beijing built both — 1.2 terawatts of solar, the world’s largest nuclear pipeline, an EV fleet now displacing more than one million barrels a day, according to Rhodium group estimates.

None of it was justified as climate policy. It was insurance. An electron can be sourced from coal, gas, sun, wind, or uranium; a combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross someone else’s chokepoint. Electrification is the purchase of optionality, and China bought more of it than any nation in history.

That option is now being exercised, and the market is misreading it as weakness. The consensus explanation for falling Chinese energy imports is “demand destruction” — the world’s largest importer buckling. The reality is the opposite. Faced with fuel prices up to 20%, Chinese drivers charge instead of fill: highway EV charging surged 56% year on year over the May Day holiday. Industrial users have switched to domestic coal. In aggregate, China can flex perhaps 2mn barrels a day of demand at will — flexibility no other large economy can approach. What looks like a collapsing customer is a customer that built an exit and is using it.

Environmentalists need not take alarm that some of that flexibility runs on coal. Coal is the bridge, not the destination. China’s renewable and nuclear capacity carries little marginal cost once built: the fixed costs are sunk, the fuel is free, and every additional gigawatt displaces a barrel at little incremental expense. It is the same logic that made asset-light technology businesses so powerful — once the infrastructure exists, the marginal unit costs next to nothing.

The west, meanwhile, is running the old playbook at its physical limit. US crude exports have surged 2mn barrels a day since the war began. Washington calls it energy dominance. Look closer and it is something else: America is exporting its insurance policy.

«

unique link to this extract

---

The tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, are hitting bottom. The oil market is about to hit a tipping point • CNN Business

David Goldman:

»

Cushing, Oklahoma, dubs itself the pipeline crossroads of the world. The tagline is emblazoned on a giant roadside sign fashioned out of pipes on the corner of Main Street and South Stiles Road. It has a valve and everything.

But it’s not just a slogan. In 1912, Tom Slick (his real name) was passing through what’s now Drumright, Oklahoma, when he smelled oil. He bought the land for $1 an acre and started digging, uncovering what was then Oklahoma’s biggest oil well.

Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country.

In normal times, Cushing stores around 40 million barrels of oil with capacity of up to 75 million.

These are not normal times. Cushing’s current inventory is 21.6 million barrels, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s dangerously close to operational stress levels, the tipping point at which Cushing struggles to supply all of its customers with the oil they demand.

When Cushing’s reserves get below 20 million, they effectively hit empty, scraping the bottom of the barrel of what is largely unusable sludge. And when Cushing runs empty, strange things happen to the oil market.

Unless the Strait of Hormuz opens soon – very soon – we’re probably just weeks away from finding out what that looks like.

…US diesel stocks recently hit their lowest level since 2003. Gas inventories have been falling, too – about 5% below where they were a year ago. Other US commercial crude storage facilities outside of Cushing are also getting drained fast – by 7.2 million barrels last week alone.

«

Not to worry! According to Axios, Trump is on the verge of signing a deal with Iran within the next few hours. Well, perhaps days. Who knows.
unique link to this extract

---

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week ‘botsitting’ • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

Almost all UK workers now have to deal with AI, but few firms report big productivity gains because of all the time lost in hand-holding the systems and cleaning up their mistakes.

So says a report by the Work AI Institute, a research arm of AI biz Glean Technologies.

It claims there are productivity gains to be had from introducing AI-based tools, yet much of this is being negated by the amount of time employees waste making them work – a phenomenon it has christened “botsitting.”

The organization surveyed 1,500 digital workers for “The Work AI Index: UK 2026” report, finding 90% are now required to use AI in their roles, 80% use multiple AI tools every week, and 39% use four or more.

The workers indicate AI automation saves them roughly 12 hours a week, or just under a third of their working week. Yet only 18% agree AI has significantly improved their organization’s performance.

The time freed up isn’t flowing into productive work, it’s being absorbed by the unglamorous human labour required to keep those systems running, according to the Work AI Institute.

For every hour a UK staffer spends getting output from their AI tools, they spend roughly another hour making it usable.

«

It’s still early days, though one has to feel that this in the future the botsitting will just be more complex: they’ll do more difficult things but that will require more careful evaluation.
unique link to this extract

---

I feel the need, the need for (less) speed • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

When we started towing a boat behind our car, and were consequently limited to 60mph rather than 70mph on major roads in the UK, I found I rather liked travelling that way. Yes, it took a bit longer, but it was more relaxing.

And I’ve noticed that, whether due to a growth in wisdom or to a decline in testosterone — I prefer to think it’s the former — I now tend to drive rather more slowly than I did a decade or two ago. Rose suggests I may just be subconsciously aware of slower reaction times…

But this has led me to propose Quentin’s Law of Optimal Velocity, which is the maximum speed in miles per hour at which you like to drive, and is given by:

Vmax = 120 - age

but I freely admit that this is based on a rather small sample size (errm… one, to be precise) so would be grateful for more data.

«

It does ring true, to be honest. Input welcome.
unique link to this extract

---

‘Tell him he’s a piece of shit’: Meta’s new AI unit is a total mess • WIRED

Paresh Dave on discontent inside the Applied AI unit inside Meta, where the staff view themselves as doing drudgery:

»

Zuckerberg’s memo also addressed the allegedly dismal situation in Applied AI directly, referring to the unit by its acronym. He suggested the team was a waypoint, not a destination. “Work like AAI is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well,” he wrote.

Engineers selected for the unit have no choice but to join or leave the company, an unusual requirement for highly valued technical employees in Silicon Valley. That’s led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as “draftees.”

The organization has grown in batches since early April. “It’s crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in,” an early member of Applied AI says.

Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Some of the work is meant to help develop AI agents that generate software or other outputs.

One worker describes the assignment as “mechanical and not creative” and certainly “not using their full skillset and knowledge.” They feel they were hired to develop social media apps for billions of people, but now find themselves assembling data for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips.

Meta released pioneering open-weights AI models three years ago, but has had mixed results with subsequent releases. Applied AI is among several expensive initiatives Zuckerberg has spun up in hopes that the company can better compete in the growing market for AI services.

Zuckerberg noted in his memo that, unlike some other AI labs, “automating work” was not Meta’s primary focus. “The products we’ll build will range from much more personalized Instagram and Facebook experiences and glasses that help you throughout the day to better tools for small businesses to thrive and create jobs, and personal superintelligence agents that understand your goals and work 24/7 on your behalf to help in the ways you want,” he wrote.

«

unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Xbox brand is in deep trouble, judging by a message sent to employees within Microsoft which points to OEM hardware in the future. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

---

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

---

Are you finally ready to admit it’s the phones? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

The idea of perpetually tying every human into a global hive mind tripped alarm bells. It reminded me too much of the hive minds I had seen depicted in science fiction nightmares — the Borg from Star Trek, the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, the Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Humans were meant to be individuals — unique, independent incubators of ideas and desires, not terminals or the fingers of a world-mind.

We had spent centuries trying to escape the small, localized versions of the hive mind. The printing press, the car and the telephone had offered freedom from the crushing conformity of small-town life. When broadcast television threatened to smother us with a centrally dictated monoculture, it sparked a decades-long resistance. When the internet arrived, we spent two decades using it to revel in our individuality — we made our personal websites, started blogs, joined small online communities centered around our interests.

Sometime around 2014 or 2015 we woke up to the fact that the world of the Old Internet no longer existed. “The internet” no longer meant the Web — it meant a tiny handful of big platforms. Twitter and Reddit for screaming about politics, Facebook and Instagram for being jealous of your friends’ vacation pics. Gone were the days of painting our individuality on the canvas of the Web. The platforms were the hive minds, we were the neurons, and the smartphone was the axon that kept each of us wired tight into the collective.

“‘Social media is bad,’ he typed on social media!!” This is the perpetual and instantaneous response of many of the neurons…er, people…in my timeline. Indeed, if social media is so bad, why don’t you just put down the phone? But this idea displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of network effects. Suppose I decide to get off Instagram and go play pickup basketball instead. If everyone else is on Instagram instead of playing pickup basketball, who am I going to play with?

This is an extreme and simplified example, obviously, but the intuition here comes from real research.

…Plenty of evidence has linked smartphones — and the social media apps that take up the single biggest chunk of the time we spend on those phones — to rising unhappiness among the world’s young people.

Since I wrote about this in 2023, the evidence has only grown stronger

«

The full post requires a (free) subscription signup, but the evidence only gets stronger every day.
unique link to this extract

---

Three ways to think about AI and jobs • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma:

»

Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI would soon “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” But the radiologist story suggests that whether AI will replace a given profession is not so straightforward to predict. Answering the following three questions can help you determine how endangered a job really is.

Question 1: Is your job a weak bundle or strong bundle?

According to Luis Garicano, an economist and a co-author of the forthcoming book Messy Jobs, most white-collar jobs combine two very different kinds of work. “Clean” tasks involve predictable problems, objective standards of success, lots of written data, and little interpersonal interaction (think: approving an expense report or updating a spreadsheet). These are the easiest for AI systems to handle.

“Messy” tasks, however, involve dealing with unpredictable situations, meeting subjective measures of success, acting on tacit knowledge, and navigating complex webs of human relationships (think: choosing a new corporate logo, assuaging an upset client, or managing a team). AI isn’t so good at these kinds of tasks, at least not yet.

…A trial lawyer has what Garicano and his co-authors call a “strong bundle” job, in which the various responsibilities are so tightly linked that delegating some of them to AI would actually be counterproductive.

…Question 2: If what you produce got cheaper, how much more of it would people want?

…“It’s not hard to imagine this happening with financial services, with legal services, with health care,” Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the asset-management company Apollo, told me. “As AI makes these services cheaper, people are going to want a lot more of them. And that means employment in those sectors will grow.”

…Question 3: Is AI the expert, or are you?

…According to data from ZipRecruiter, the share of senior-level-job postings in the tech industry has risen considerably over the past year while the share of entry-level-job postings has fallen slightly. But Autor believes that this dynamic could easily change, as AI systems get better and better at engaging in the kind of “expert judgment” that only human experts previously possessed. He pointed to an “electrician’s assistant” tool being piloted by Schneider Electric that allows a normal electrician with only vocational training to troubleshoot the kinds of complex problems that had previously required teams of engineers with graduate degrees.

«

There’s a lot to this article; the extract barely scratches the surface. (Gift link.)
unique link to this extract

---

Skeptics question whether SpaceX is worth $1.77 trillion • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac:

»

In a pitch to private investors, Elon Musk once predicted that one of his companies would quintuple its revenue to more than $26bn and nearly quintuple its customer base by 2028.

That company was Twitter and those projections were made as Mr. Musk prepared to buy the social media company for $44bn in 2022.

Today, Twitter, which has been renamed X, has fallen far short of what Mr. Musk said would happen. The social media platform’s ad revenue plunged 65% last year. And it was ultimately folded into SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, this year.

Now as SpaceX readies for a blockbuster initial public offering, Mr. Musk and his investment bankers are selling even loftier propositions about what the rocket and artificial intelligence company will achieve. But those proclamations, coupled with Mr. Musk’s history of overpromising, have some investors increasingly worried that SpaceX — which priced its offering at a $1.77 trillion valuation and is set to begin trading on Friday — may burn them.

“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” said Jim Chanos, the founder of the investment firm Chanos and Company, who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron, the energy company that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud.

…Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

“Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion,” Mr. Burry wrote, referring to the company’s IPO filing.

Even some SpaceX shareholders have doubts. Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX stock, said the company’s projections reminded him of unverified information that young start-ups used to woo investors. He said he was alarmed by SpaceX’s valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would be more than four times the $400bn that the company was valued at just 13 months ago.

«

Although, reminder: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and probably will about SpaceX.
unique link to this extract

---

100 days of Iran war have cost diesel drivers £255 more than EV drivers • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

Colin Walker:

»

The 7th June marked the 100th day of the conflict between the US and Iran, which started on the 28th February. During this time the price of oil has increased as a result of disruptions to supply through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump in the UK. Petrol is now 27p a litre higher than it was on the eve of the conflict, while diesel has jumped by 43p a litre.

New analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has found that these price rises have added £1.7bn to the cost of running the nation’s petrol and diesel cars in the first 100 days of the US-Iran conflict. And this means that, in this time, the UK’s diesel car drivers have paid £255 more to fuel their cars than if they had been driving an EV. Recent industry data has shown an EV sales surge in the UK (mirroring Europe and other countries) as drivers try to reduce their fuel bills – more than one in four (27%) cars sold in May were electric.

Since the conflict started petrol car drivers have paid £175 more than if they had been driving an EV. Collectively, cars running on petrol and diesel have cost over £6.3bn more to fuel in the last 100 days than if they had been EVs.

«

The quarter-end statistics for sales of EVs will certainly make for fun reading. It feels as though almost every car registered after 2024 I see on the roads is an EV.
unique link to this extract

---

Oil tankers increase ‘dark’ transits through Strait of Hormuz • Financial Times

Alice Hancock, Nassos Stylianou, Malcolm Moore and Ryo Namiki:

»

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform that “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz”.

He said the effort had allowed about 200 commercial ships to cross the strait and that 100mn barrels of crude were able to reach global markets as a result of the operation.

Dan Smoot, chief executive of Vantor, which tracks ships by satellite imaging, said at the WSJ CEO Council summit in London on Wednesday that there was a “tremendous amount” of shipping activity through the Strait of Hormuz that was “outside the news right now”.

Still, oil transport companies remained nervous about the risks for such transits. “It is a very narrow waterway and there is not much room for manoeuvre, so we are worried about the navigational implications of ships using it,” said John Stawpert, marine director at the International Chamber of Shipping.

Analysts have suggested most of the ships travelling through the strait are leaving it, but others are still entering to trade non-Iranian crude. They said that the growing number of “dark transits”, in which ships pass through the strait without their GPS signal on to avoid detection by Iranian forces, was helping to cushion oil prices below $100 per barrel.

The closure of Hormuz has cut off about 12mn barrels a day of oil from the market, the equivalent of roughly six supertankers daily.

Energy Aspects, a consultancy, estimated that Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were currently shipping about 3mn barrels of crude a day through the strait.

It noted that stocks in Mina al-Ahmadi in Kuwait fell sharply at the end of May, by nearly 8mn barrels, suggesting that more ships were being loaded. Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspects, said the dark transits meant the world’s refineries could increase production and avoid “summer tightness, in theory”.

Shipping executives, however, have been quick to underline that even if traffic has picked up, it remains far below the 135 ships per day that travelled through the strait before the conflict.

«

Six versus 135 is quite a delta. And yet the oil markets seem confident enough that this is plenty of oil.
unique link to this extract

---

Three Indian sailors killed in US strike on tanker in Gulf of Oman • BBC News

Cherylann Mollan:

»

Three Indian sailors have been confirmed killed after the US military struck a tanker in the Gulf of Oman which it accused of violating its blockade on Iranian ports.

The MT Settebello came under attack on Wednesday, with 24 Indian crew on board, of whom 21 were rescued. In a post on X, India’s Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said the three men’s bodies would be brought home soon.
The US has struck three ships in the Gulf this week, all with Indian crew on board.

On Thursday, Delhi said all 20 crew on the Jalveer were safe after a strike off Oman. Three days earlier the 24 Indian crew on sanctioned oil tanker the Marivex were rescued before it sank. US Centcom confirmed it struck both ships.

…The US military blocked access to Iran’s ports after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies are transported, during the ongoing conflict.

US forces have disabled eight vessels and redirected 134 others since initiating the blockade on 13 April, according to Centcom.

The Indian government has maintained that “targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure in the region must end”.

…According to India’s shipping ministry, there are at present 562 Indian seafarers, external on Indian-flagged vessels, including 329 in the Gulf region, west of Hormuz, and 233 in the Gulf of Oman, east of Hormuz.

“There are more than 18,000 Indian seafarers in total in the whole Gulf region,” Mangal said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and the US show no sign of easing. Both countries have exchanged strikes for a second consecutive day, putting more strain on a fragile ceasefire arrived upon in April.

«

unique link to this extract

---

I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

But it’s also a pretty basic set of features for an AI assistant in 2026, particularly if you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past couple of years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. It’s been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months now, if not longer. New Siri is built on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first iteration of Siri AI feels a little bit “Gemini, circa 2025.”

Siri AI has its own flavour, though. Apple has a lot of proprietary stuff going on under the hood and in the cloud. It draws from an on-device pool of data that’s gleaned from things like email and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can tap into the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that can’t be handled fully on device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute with only the relevant pieces of personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you opt into sharing your Gmail or calendar, and then it’ll go directly to those sources to get the information when needed.

«

Wonder if Google is going to tout how many Gemini users there are on iOS, to contrast it with the default of Siri. Or, conversely, in a year’s time whether at WWDC 2027 Apple will proudly announce how many hundreds of millions are using the new Siri. The challenge for the latter is that many older devices – the majority of all Apple devices – won’t be able to run it.
unique link to this extract

---

“This cannot continue”: Xbox leaders lay out “hard truths” behind sagging brand • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she’d work to “understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it.” Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale “Xbox reset.”

The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire on Wednesday night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a “3% accountability margin” (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30% margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It’s an underperformance, they write, born out of being “overextended” by moves like the $69bn acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20bn in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500m compared to five years ago.

While Microsoft has overinvested in acquisitions and platform spending, Sharma and Booty also admit that Xbox has “not adequately funded” the company’s “industry-defining franchises.”

…While Xbox hardware sales had started cratering long before these cost increases came to pass, Microsoft says it’s now facing the somewhat opposite problem of being “currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy.” Taken as a whole, it all likely means that we’ll see a reprise of last year’s multiple Xbox price increases before too long.

…The dire hardware component situation means Microsoft now says it will pursue a new “business model and partnerships for hardware” for Helix, the recently announced project that will play both Xbox and PC games. The mention of “partnerships for hardware” is particularly interesting, given that Microsoft recently lent the Xbox brand to Asus for the Windows-powered ROG Xbox Ally.

«

Sounds as though Xbox will become an OS, like Windows, and OEMs will try to profit from the hardware side. The $69bn purchase of Activision increasingly looks like a very bad idea.
unique link to this extract

---

Met police chief calls for law to make stolen phones ‘unusable bricks’ • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

»

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has asked the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to force all phone companies to make stolen devices “unusable bricks” in order to make them harder to sell on and less desirable to steal.

London is widely regarded as the phone-snatching capital of Europe, with between 200 and 300 devices stolen each day. The city accounts for up to three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts in England and Wales.

Apple has already rolled out an update for iPhones, meaning those with the latest operating system have extra safeguards if the devices are stolen. Sensitive actions such as viewing passwords, Apple Card details, or erasing the phone now require Face ID or Touch ID, making it harder to return the devices to factory settings or change the passwords, which criminals need to do to sell them on.

Rowley said the Met had started sharing data with Apple to more closely track whether stolen handsets were reconnected to a phone network after being taken.

This will make it easier to track stolen phones and help police find out what happens to them, and where they are taken.

The Met commissioner told the Press Association after an operation targeting two phone shops on Wednesday: “If we share the data we have on the phone stolen, with the data they have on things like reactivations and future uses of phones, we can get a global picture of phones being stolen, are they being reactivated, are they being broken down for parts, where they’re being exported to in the world.”

He added: “Whereas a few months ago the majority of stolen phones were being reactivated because of security flaws, now with the security improvements it’s the minority being reactivated. That means it’s harder for criminals to profit. That will help bring down the crime further.”

The Met has written to the home secretary asking for legislation to make phone companies publish data on stolen devices and whether they are reconnected, and to enforce measures to make stolen devices unusable.

Phones snatched in London are sold around the world. One recent police operation revealed a gang that had sold 40,000 stolen phones to China.

«

Maths: 40,000 stolen phones would be about 20 days of the total thefts. Most are probably broken up for parts.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The enforced silencing by Meta of former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams at the Hay Festival has seen her book sales rocket. CC-licensed photo by Luke McKernan 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. Sing it, Barbra! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

---

Your search results are getting sloptimized • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.

For the quarter century that Google has been the de facto front door to the web, businesses have tried to find ways to get their pages at the top of search results. You’ve surely felt the influence of search-engine optimization, even if you don’t know the term. When you search for a recipe and have to scroll past the author’s rambling reminiscences about their great-aunt’s kitchen, that’s a form of SEO at work. Years ago, it became conventional wisdom among recipe bloggers that Google’s search rankings favoured longer, more distinctive articles. (Some of them also just liked to spin a yarn.)

Now chatbots are cannibalizing the traditional search engine. More people are asking questions directly of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. And searching Google now often yields an AI response, shunting the site’s famous “10 blue links” to the bottom of the results page. Last month, Google announced what it billed as the biggest change to search in 25 years: the search box now automatically expands as you type, and sometimes morphs into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is scurrying to figure out how to get search bots to recommend a given product—a practice sometimes called “GEO,” for generative-engine optimization. To put it more bluntly, your search results are getting sloptimized.

Because AI tools serve you answers instead of sending you to other sites, they choke off clicks to the rest of the web. When a Google search triggers an AI response, other sites get about half the traffic of a traditional search result, Tom Critchlow, a former executive vice president at the online-ad network Raptive, told me. Links from ChatGPT account for less than 0.5% of traffic across Raptive’s network of 6,500 independent publishers. Sites that rely on search traffic, such as blogs and news outlets, are especially suffering.

«

Sigh. The ourouboros apocalypse arrives. Although the next link might roll that back…
unique link to this extract

---

Landmark German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers • The Decoder

Matthias Bastian:

»

A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn’t apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

Google’s AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results “in its own words and according to its own structure,” the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims “that are not even made in the search results.” None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these “the defendant’s own statements.”

Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, “because it alone has influence over the AI’s offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates.”

«

This could have widespread ramifications if other courts and jurisdictions take it up. Google argued that this is like search results, where third parties create it. But this is not that.
unique link to this extract

---

Sales of Meta whistleblower’s memoir soar after Hay festival ‘silencing’ • The Guardian

Ella Creamer:

»

Sales of the whistleblowing memoir Careless People increased by more than 300% in the UK the week after its author was “silenced” during an appearance at Hay festival following legal action by Meta, the subject of the book.

Sarah Wynn-Williams – who between 2011 and 2017 served as the director of global public policy at what was then called Facebook – sat on stage but did not speak during her hour-long appearance on 31 May on the advice of her lawyer. She appeared alongside the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

The sales boost – 304.5% week-on-week – has nudged the book, published last March, to the number one spot in the paperback nonfiction chart.

Upon publication, Meta obtained an order blocking Wynn-Williams from promoting her book, which accuses the company of a toxic internal culture and manipulative political influence. Meta has described the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

In March, Meta filed a sanctions motion claiming that Wynn-Williams violates the order any time she makes an appearance in a place “where she should know that her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it”, according to a letter from her lawyers sent to Hay festival on 30 May. “Meta also said attending the Hay festival would violate the order because the Hay festival’s ‘promotional materials include a direct link to Browse the Festival bookshop, … which offers Careless People for sale’.”

The letter asked Hay festival to “take all reasonable steps to ensure that Careless People is not sold at or through any festival bookshop, book-signing schedule, point-of-sale mechanism, or online link through which sales could be attributed to Ms Wynn-Williams’s appearance at the festival”.

Pan Macmillan said that since publication, more than 140,000 copies of Careless People have been sold across all formats in the UK.

«

That is a lot of sales. Well done Meta for the empirical demonstration of the Streisand Effect.
unique link to this extract

---

As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise • The Verge

TC Sottek:

»

“Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on a log, but we ought to see what we’re being sold for what it really is.

Contemporary tasks on computers have a tendency to feel both important and urgent all of the time, even if they’re not. We’re living under the unholy alliance of the “busy” trap and “software brain.” And that makes AI assistance seem super valuable! But that’s because the companies in charge of all this stuff are now trying to solve a lot of problems that they created. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life. This slow march toward ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to disconnect” from work when leaving the office. (Shame my American sensibilities still convince me that’s a bridge too far.)

As I read about Gemini Spark making it easy for my colleagues to colour-code calendars and perform other neat tricks on command, I couldn’t help but vividly remember witnessing as a child all of the hours my mom had to spend carefully cutting coupons so we could afford groceries. Sometimes it got to the point where our living room looked like a giant experiment in collage art. All of that time was stolen from her and our family — for what? Maybe having an AI assistant in the ’90s could have helped find and organize the best deals, but it could never fix an economic system that required them in the first place.

Where does the productivity march end? The people making more money than God right now have professed a vision of a postwork future where robots do everything for us so we can enjoy life without toiling away in the mines. (Well, except for the content mines.) If you’ve seen Elon Musk’s failure bot, you’ll know this is all actually less Battlestar Galactica and more John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theatre kids.

«

But someone still needs to fix the plumbing and electrics and roads and build houses and paint walls and … subconsciously we know AI is offering false promises, and that many things won’t change.
unique link to this extract

---

Spyware firm targeted WhatsApp users in defiance of US court order, Meta says • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

A spyware firm has been targeting WhatsApp users with malicious links in contravention of a US court order forbidding it from doing so, Meta has said.

In a post, Meta said WhatsApp had “caught and disrupted spear phishing attempts” by NSO Group, which a spokesperson said targeted a handful of users in Jordan and Lebanon. It had also caught the group creating “test accounts and groups” on WhatsApp.

NSO was founded in Israel but, since last year, is under US ownership. It built the Pegasus spyware, at the time one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever – which used a vulnerability in WhatsApp to infiltrate users’ phones and harvest all their data: messages, photos, calls and more.

Last year, it lost a court case against Meta for exploiting WhatsApp to target people; Meta was awarded $167m in damages. A later case reduced this to $4m but placed a permanent injunction against NSO barring it from targeting WhatsApp and its users.

Meta said the latest attacks showed NSO had violated this injunction and it asked the court to hold the company in contempt of the order.

“To me, it’s an astonishing signal of hubris that NSO would do this while permanently enjoined from not doing it,” said John Scott Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, which investigates digital threats against civil society.

“It either speaks to the fact that they think they wouldn’t get caught, or to the fact that they believe, rightly or wrongly, they have a special way to not face the consequences of violating a US federal permanent court injunction.”

Since the start of the Trump administration, reporting has suggested that NSO is searching for a way into the US market – and to do so is trying to get off the US commerce department “blacklist”, which bars it from doing business with US companies without specific approval.

«

NSO is absolutely the scorpion that promises everyone that it’s definitely not going to sting the frog that carries it across the river.
unique link to this extract

---

Exclusive: EPA scientists say they are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products • CNN Politics

René Marsh:

»

Inside the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say they’re under pressure to alter safety reviews of chemicals commonly found in consumer products like household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks to human health and the environment disappear on paper.

Multiple current and former career employees at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention recounted being pushed by supervisors to downplay the potential risk of chemicals that are already used in products on shelves.

With President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, scientists are also being told to stop considering the impact a chemical may have on specific racial groups, according to the employees, who spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

While the EPA told CNN it wants testing that reflects real-world exposure, some veteran employees say they have been pressed to make chemicals appear safe by coming up with test parameters that aren’t realistic.

“What we’ve been told is: ‘Let’s look at alternative scenarios,’” one employee said. If putting two hands in a chemical shows risk, this person said a supervisor might ask, “What if you dip one hand? What if you dip one finger?” in search of the smallest amount of contact needed to call it safe.

“We are considering scenarios we don’t have any basis for,” the employee said.

The EPA’s chemical safety office conducts health risk assessments for a slew of chemicals because of concerns over potential impacts on human health, such as cancer, endocrine disruption, birth defects and reproductive harm.

«

Just incredible how the US is trying to turn the clock back to, oh, 1900 or so.
unique link to this extract

---

SoftBank’s $6bn OpenAI margin loan said to face snag, shares drop over 9% • TradingKey

Jay Qian:

»

During the Asian session on June 10, sources familiar with the matter revealed that SoftBank Group’s negotiations to secure a margin loan of at least $6bn, using its stake in OpenAI as collateral, have failed to make progress. This comes just weeks after the company lowered its initial $10bn target by 40%. SoftBank declined to comment. According to the sources, SoftBank is still considering various financing options and may restart negotiations in the future.

The primary reason for the stalled loan lies in the fact that OpenAI’s valuation lacks a basis convincing enough for banks.

On one hand, OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8 and is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for a potential listing as early as this autumn. Following the news, some potential creditors have begun to view the loan more positively; once public, OpenAI will have a fair market value, which is expected to significantly alleviate banks’ concerns regarding the valuation of unlisted equity.

On the other hand, negative factors persist: the valuation of competitor Anthropic is rising rapidly, leading to market concerns about the erosion of OpenAI’s market share. Combined with the inherent illiquidity of private assets, banks remain cautious about the quality of the collateral. The interplay of positive news and lingering doubts has led to a stalemate in the loan negotiations.

«

Briefly: people in Asia don’t think OpenAI is worth that much. Another of those little potential indicators of the bubble deflating.
unique link to this extract

---

Big tech apps that make life easy are scamming you • Rest of World

Soumya Gupta and her husband were scammed when they tried to order some wine from a nearby shop and used the number thrown up by a Google Card on searching for it:

»

I dialled again, but the call wouldn’t go through. I went to the WhatsApp account he had messaged from. No messages went through. We were blocked.

Meanwhile, Vijay walked up to Seasons Wine Shop. “Hey, I just called this number of yours and placed an order, but the guy keeps saying it is in a godown? Where is my order?”

The Seasons Wine shop guy looked at the number and groaned. “Arre sir! You too?” He pointed to a large, prominent notice at the front of the shop with that number printed in large, bold font. “So many customers have complained to us! We are tired of complaining to Google about this. Don’t call this number. This is not ours.”

And that was it. There was nothing we could do, except perhaps lodge a police complaint. I had heard how hard it could be to get the police to take cyber fraud complaints seriously. Besides, I reasoned, we were at fault. We willingly transferred money to an account. Perhaps the police will say that, too?

That night, I saw Vijay meticulously type out Seasons Wines’ correct phone number and save it. I went to the Google listing of the business and left a review, warning others that the number listed on the business listing was fraudulent. Several others had left similar warnings. We had simply never bothered to check.

…In the pre-internet and pre-social media era, doing business with a new entity involved healthy scepticism and background checks. Paying money to someone we didn’t know was an elaborate process. If you are a child of the pre-internet era, you may remember sitting down to make your first online transaction with a credit card on a big desktop. These used to be family affairs, where everyone checked the stability of the dial-up connection and remained on high alert, ensuring the card details were fed correctly and no back button was pressed accidentally. All to ensure that one didn’t lose their money online.

That scepticism is slowly eroding as we increasingly place more trust in Big Tech. Nearly every scam has exploited the reach and algorithms of Big Tech firms and our implicit trust in them.

«

unique link to this extract

---

WWDC26: the small things • Oneberri Blog

Rishi Ó:

»

My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.

Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year.

«

There’s a lot of them, though I don’t know how useful they’ll all turn out to be. There are more and more “little things” in iOS, though what I’d really like is just for it to correctly reflect when I type “don’t”. It never does, and it’s maddening.
unique link to this extract

---

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified