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

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

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

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

Annie Lowrey:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amanda Sakuma and Jan Diehm:

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

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

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

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

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

John Timmer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine Thorbecke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanya Mansoor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Koebler:

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

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

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

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

Paul Ford:

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

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

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

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

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

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AI taxonomy: an operational framework for precision in AI discourse

Narain Jashanmal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh Son:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you know, or care, that the meat in your burger was grown in a bioreactor? A lot of people care, even if they don’t know. CC-licensed photo by Ian Turk on Flickr.

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

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

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

Matt Wales:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Perez:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Mole:

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

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

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

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

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

Vikram Dodd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nic Fildes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret-Anne Storey:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Roth:

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Rossignol:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is a peeled banana every audiophile’s new best friend? CC-licensed photo by Dan Foy on Flickr.

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

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

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

Scott Shambaugh:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Loosemore:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Quinn is editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Schwartz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra Petri:

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe the immigrants steal the sun in the evenings.

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

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

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

Jowi Morales:

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

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

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

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

Trung Phan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re training for a marathon, how far can you trust different running apps and wearables? CC-licensed photo by Florent Boutellier on Flickr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shaun Lintern:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tibi Puiu:

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

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

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

That has just changed.

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

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

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

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

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

Kashmir HillKalley Huang and Mike Isaac:

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

Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susannah Savage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annie Palmer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maciej Cegłowski:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Om Malik:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sean Hollister:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine how big the potholes get on a busy road leading to a supermarket if nobody owns the road and the council refuses to take it over. CC-licensed photo by Arlington Department of Environmental Services on Flickr.

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

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

Climate change is accelerating. But why? • Washington Post

John Muyskens and Shannon Osaka:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UK Government Transparency

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Robbins:

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin COllier:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melody Schreiber:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eduardo Baptista:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chance Miller:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has particle physics hit a dead end, or is there hope for new discoveries? CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee 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. Wave goodbye? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google’s Nest products don’t provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie’s Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn’t paying for the service.

Google’s cameras connect to the recently upgraded Home Premium subscription service. For $10 per month, you get 30 days of stored events, and $20 gets you 60 days of events with 10 days of the full video. If you don’t pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned. Newer Nest cameras have limited local storage that can cache clips for a few hours in case connectivity drops out, but there is no option for true local storage. Guthrie’s camera was reportedly destroyed by the perpetrators.

Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won’t restore them even if you later upgrade to a premium account. However, that doesn’t mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10.

…In statements made by investigators, the video was apparently “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.” It’s unclear how long such data is retained or how easy it is for Google to access it. Some reports claim that it took several days for Google to recover the data.

In large-scale enterprise storage solutions, “deleted” for the user doesn’t always mean that the data is gone. Data that is no longer needed is often compressed and overwritten only as needed. In the meantime, it may be possible to recover the data. That’s something a company like Google could decide to do on its own, or it could be compelled to perform the recovery by a court order. In the Guthrie case, it sounds like Google was voluntarily cooperating with the investigation, which makes sense. Publishing video of the alleged perpetrator could be a major breakthrough as investigators seek help from the public.

…If we take Google at its word, it has no incentive to keep “deleted” user videos around. If no one is paying for the storage, keeping it only costs the company money. Still, this is something to keep in mind if you’re using a Google camera. Even if you aren’t paying for storage, every event recorded by the camera is going to Google’s servers, and it’s probably recoverable long past the deletion timeline stipulated in the company’s policy.

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The concern is an authoritarian government seizing footage and demanding its recovery for its own ends, rather than clear-cut crime like this.
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More solar farms on the way after record renewables auction • BBC News

Mark Poynting:

»

More solar farms are on the way around the UK, in a move that boosts the country’s clean power goals but could spark anger from local opponents.

The government awarded contracts to a record supply of renewables projects, including 157 solar developments across England, Scotland and Wales.

The results have been welcomed by climate and clean energy groups, who see solar as a relatively cheap way to reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels during the summer months. But some local communities oppose such large developments on their doorstep.

The West Burton solar farm planned for the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire border has become the largest ever to win a government contract, but local opponents fear it could cause “mass industrialisation” of the countryside.

…Last year, solar energy provided more than 6% of Great Britain’s electricity – rising to more than 40% for a small number of half-hour periods in July.

The government is targeting 45-47 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity by 2030, to help meet its clean power goal, potentially rising to 54-57GW with extra rooftop solar. That would be up from 21GW as of autumn 2025, according to government figures, although the solar industry puts current capacity at 24GW.

The government also wants more batteries and other storage systems, to be able to make use of solar energy outside of sunny periods. Today’s haul of solar farms secures another 4.9GW of capacity across 157 projects, higher than the 3.3GW across 93 projects in the previous auction in 2024.

«

Installing solar panels rather than having farming vehicles going over fields every few weeks is “mass industrialisation”? Some people are so far from logic. Plus, as has been shown, you can graze sheep on those fields; they’re good for keeping the grass down.
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What the minister said… and what she didn’t • Enda’s Substack

Enda Leahy is the founder of Courtsdesk, which tracks cases coming to court and which the UK government has demanded should be deleted:

»

Today, 10 February 2026, Minister Sarah Sackman KC answered an Urgent Question in the House of Commons about the impending deletion of our court reporting archive and the shutdown of the service journalists use across the country.

I’m writing this because the Minister herself, and her advisors, have access to everything I mention here, and I think it’s reasonable to set out what really happened, as opposed to the version of events that Parliament has been told.

We have always taken our responsibilities about Open Justice and custodianship of this information very seriously. Again, I just feel it’s not right to leave the record of what was said uncorrected.

The Minister did appear to say that they are willing to engage with us if we are “responsible actors”. That’s all we want and what we have always done, and this should set out why we are.

We have tried so hard, so many times, to engage with the Government to improve media access to the courts, but to go further – to help news organisations with the legal challenges around handling this information in a compliant way.

That’s what we built, that’s what we set out in our report to Government 15 months ago – responsibility, privacy and security were literally baked into everything we did.

She made a number of claims about what we did and how we behaved. Several of those claims are simply not true. Others are seriously misleading. I don’t have parliamentary privilege, but I’m happy to write every single word of this piece and defend it in any forum.

«

Possibilities: a) the minister was misled by the civil service; b) the minister ignored the civil service; c) the minister never consulted the civil service. (The last seems very unlikely, given the length of the answer she gave.)

Whichever: the minister misled the House of Commons, and deserves to be raked over the coals – and should reverse this. Worse, though, it shows a minister who doesn’t care. The current crop of government ministers don’t strike me as any great improvement on the previous lot. And that’s not something they should want to hear.
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Copper • Works in Progress Magazine

Ed Conway:

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In 1983, the 29-year-old Steve Jobs bought a rambling old mansion in Woodside, a quiet, wealthy little Californian town midway between San Francisco and San Jose.

The property was hardly the obvious choice for a young entrepreneur. Surrounded by six acres of encroaching forest, the dilapidated house was enormous – 30 rooms, 14 bedrooms and 13 and a half bathrooms – and was filled with odd trinkets, including a fully-functioning pipe organ.

The Apple cofounder lived there for around a decade but never actually got round to furnishing it. He would eat meals on the bare floor and sleep on a bare mattress. One girlfriend found the place so spooky she refused to live there. Eventually Jobs moved out, into a smaller, more manageable place down in Palo Alto. But the Jackling House, as it was known, would continue to haunt him, one way or another, for the rest of his life.

The house was named after the man for whom it was originally built, a fellow called Daniel C. Jackling. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him: he is mostly forgotten these days, but Jackling’s legacy is arguably even greater than that of the man who brought us the Mac and the iPhone.

If we have been living in Steve Jobs’ world of computers and devices for a decade or so then we have been inhabiting Jackling’s world for a century or so. Yet since Jackling was a creature of what I like to call the ‘Material World’ – the unappreciated underbelly of modern life – his contribution to our lives is enormously neglected, despite the fact that it is there in the fabric of nearly everything we touch. Jobs used to describe Jackling as a ‘copper baron’, but that was understating it, for he might better be seen as a modern-day alchemist. He was the man who transformed the job of turning rock into metal.

…What if, Jackling asked himself, you could extract copper not just out of those high-grade chunks (copper content of over 5%) but also out of the other stuff too? In many mines around the world there were vast volumes of ores which looked to the untrained eye like normal rocks but contained a few percentage points of copper. They were set aside because it was simply too expensive to justify refining them. But, wondered Jackling, might there be some way of changing the calculus?

«

An undertold story. Conway is an economics and data editor at Sky News, and author of the book Material World. Never underresearched.
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Elon Musk wants to build an AI satellite factory on the Moon • The New York Times

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac:

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Elon Musk told employees at xAI, his artificial intelligence company, on Tuesday evening that the company needed a factory on the Moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.

Inspired by the billionaire’s love of science fiction, the space catapult would be called a mass driver, and would be part of an imagined lunar facility that manufactured satellites to provide the computing power for the company’s AI.

“You have to go to the Moon,” Mr. Musk said during an all-hands meeting, which was heard by The New York Times. The move would help xAI harness more power than other companies to build its AI, he said. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen,” he added.

Last week, Mr. Musk said he was merging xAI with his rocket business, SpaceX, to facilitate his plans to create AI data centres in outer space. Now that vision has expanded to include the lunar facility, though he did not say in his hourlong talk, which also featured remarks from other executives, how it could be built.

Those two arms of Mr. Musk’s business empire are merging as SpaceX prepares an initial public offering, which could come as early as June. A representative for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk’s fixation with the Moon is a recent one. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he has said making humanity multiplanetary, first by establishing a colony on Mars, was the company’s raison d’être. But in recent months, he has posted frequently on X, his social media platform, about the company’s new focus: the Moon.

Two former SpaceX executives told The Times, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about corporate plans, that the Moon had never been a main focus of the company.

«

I think the phrase “imagined lunar facility” is a nice phrase. “Imaginary” might have felt too judgemental, but just as accurate. Don’t forget that the Moon is not a place for humans: “The Moon smells like gunpowder” explains why in gruesome detail.

As Maciej Cieglowski (who runs Pinboard, which this blog relies on for collecting links) points out, “Wait until Musk does the math on how much AI compute you could do on the Sun.”
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How OpenAI got comfortable with the Pentagon using ChatGPT for war • Semafor

Reed Albergotti:

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OpenAI’s announcement Monday that the US military will get access to ChatGPT came after months of deliberation over whether employees would accept the deployment, according to people briefed on the matter.

The chatbot will be offered through Genai.mil, a new program the Pentagon launched last month. The tricky part for OpenAI was that the Pentagon was asking to use its technology for “all lawful uses,” meaning the company couldn’t impose any restrictions on what it or its employees view as acceptable implementation, either for moral or technical reasons.

The “all lawful uses” clause has become a sticking point in negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic, which wants more control over how its technology is used. Anthropic leaders are concerned that the military might use the models in situations where the technology is unreliable or endanger lives.

The Pentagon rejected Anthropic’s requests for more control, according to people briefed on the matter, and the company’s Claude chatbot is still not available via Genai.mil. Earlier, Google and xAI agreed to the “all lawful use” clause and even removed some model-level restrictions.

OpenAI agreed to the contract, but is offering the same ChatGPT that non-military users can access. That means the standard guardrails placed on the model are still in place, and it could by default refuse some prohibited prompts. ChatGPT, unlike Claude, is not cleared for top secret use cases, which could create a de facto barrier to many military use cases.

«

Very reminiscent of when Google decided that actually, military contracts were perfectly fine, after many years of quiet opposition to the idea.
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Smart homes are terrible • The Atlantic

Jason Fried:

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My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.

All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don’t.

It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible.

Light switches, which have been self-explanatory since the dawn of electric lighting, apparently now come as an unlabeled multibutton panel that literally required a tutorial session from a technician. Pressing the same button twice might turn the lights on and off, or you might have to press one button for “on” and another for “off.” “It depends” is the name of the game—which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.

The TV is a recent model from Samsung. The picture is great, once it finally boots up—after you’ve spent way too long staring at a black screen wondering if you hit the power button or not, then hitting it again and realizing you just switched the whole thing off even though it never seemed to be on in the first place. And of course you can’t simply turn the TV on to find the last channel you were on; you have to navigate a menu of countless apps you probably don’t subscribe to. Watching TV feels more like a cognitive test than a way to relax.

The kitchen is also pointlessly complicated. My mom, the rental-company-supplied tech guy, and I stood around the Miele dishwasher, repeatedly bashing buttons just to get it to show signs of life. We checked the power to make sure it was plugged in. It was. More button pressing; still nothing. Finally, we noticed a QR code, along with a note encouraging us to register the appliance with an app. Wait—was that required to turn it on? The dishwasher had never been used before, which meant another call to the rental company to have them sort it out for us. The oven was equally perplexing. The controls are obtuse icons with no tactile feedback, hidden behind smoked black glass. I have a different brand at home, with its own black-glass display. After five years, I still have no idea what the chef’s-hat icon means.

«

OK, overdoing it like that is a pain. (I’ve been to AirBnBs which are like that.) TV remotes in particular can be utterly befuddling. The way to work on smart homes is to use the bare minimum.
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ImageWhisperer: free AI image detector for journalists and researchers

»

How it works: Multi-Layer Detection

1: Forensic Analysis
Multiple AI detection models run in parallel. PRNU noise comparison, ELA analysis, compression artifact detection, vanishing point verification.

2: LLM Judgment
Four different AI models examine the image for visual anomalies humans would notice: melted faces, impossible physics, inconsistent lighting, architectural impossibilities.

3: Web Verification
Reverse image search via Google Cloud Vision. Finds original sources, checks news coverage, identifies if the image has been debunked or verified elsewhere.

4: Evidence Synthesis
Multi-model voting. Context-aware verdict. A borderline score from the forensic detector gets overruled by visual evidence from the LLM. Not just better math — added judgment.

«

Built with the help of Claude Code – so it’s AI being used to tell on AI.
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The technologies changing how you’ll watch the 2026 Winter Olympic Games • WIRED

Mila Fiordalisi:

»

DURING THE 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, 5G and 4K were the leading technologies available to many viewers. There was some AI, but it was mostly used for athletes’ benefit. For the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games there will be more technology than ever, for both athletes and fans.

Much of that technology has never been used at the Games before, says Yiannis Exarchos, the managing director of Olympic Broadcasting Services and executive director of Olympic Channel Services. The two organizations are responsible for producing much of the television, radio, and digital coverage, and content on Olympics.com. “In Milano Cortina, people will have unprecedented experiences,” Exarchos says.

One of the big technologies coming to the Milano Cortina Olympics are first-person view, or FPV, drones. These radio-controlled aircraft transmit images from their onboard cameras in real time to “offer dynamic perspectives on the race tracks,” Exarchos explains.

This year’s Games will also be the first to offer 360-degree real-time replay. Offered as part of a collaboration with Alibaba, the system uses multi-camera replay systems and stoboscopic analysis to ofter multi-angle views, freeze frames, and slow-motion images of athlete’s incredible moves.

Another first is a new tracking system for curling stones. “It will be possible to view the path, speed, and rotation of each stone in real time,” Exarchos explains. Suspended rail cameras and ice-level views will help viewers understand the game better, as will detailed stone trajectory graphics and real-time data.

Alternatively, if you’ve got a question about this year’s Games? Olympic GPT is here to help. The bot specializes in producing content for the Olympics.com website. It’ll offer real-time results and information on sport regulations, and, for the first time, will have the ability to interact with questions about the results of ongoing competitions.

“Artificial-intelligence-based article summaries on Olympics.com will give fans a quick and clear overview,” Exarchos says. “They highlight key points to help users decide what to explore further, while also improving accessibility and reading from mobile devices.”

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The drones are amazing. The technological advances are remarkable.
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Is particle physics dead, dying, or just really hard? • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

»

The Standard Model doesn’t include particles that could comprise dark matter, for instance. It doesn’t explain why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe, or why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Then there’s the inexplicably enormous disparity between the Higgs boson’s mass (which sets the physical scale of atoms) and the far higher mass-energy scale associated with quantum gravity, known as the Planck scale. The chasm between physical scales — atoms are vastly larger than the Planck scale — seems unstable and unnatural. In 1981, the great theorist Edward Witten thought of a solution (opens a new tab) for this “hierarchy problem”: Balance would be restored by the existence of additional elementary particles only slightly heavier than the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s collisions should have been energetic enough to conjure them.

But when protons raced both ways around the tunnel and crashed head-on, spraying debris into surrounding detectors, only the 25 particles of the Standard Model were observed. Nothing else showed up.

The absence of any “new physics” — particles or forces beyond the known ones — fomented a crisis. “Of course, it is disappointing,” the particle physicist Mikhail Shifman told me that fall of 2012. “We’re not gods. We’re not prophets. In the absence of some guidance from experimental data, how do you guess something about nature?”

Once the standard reasoning about the hierarchy problem had been shown to be wrong, there was no telling where new physics might be found. It could easily lie beyond the reach of experiments. The particle physicist Adam Falkowski predicted to me at the time that, without a way to search for heavier particles, the field would undergo a slow decay: “The number of jobs in particle physics will steadily decrease, and particle physicists will die out naturally.”

The crisis and its fallout made for years of interesting reporting, but sure enough, the frequency of news stories related to particle physics diminished. I fell out of touch with sources. More than 13 years on, in this first column for Qualia, a new series of essays in Quanta Magazine, I’m taking stock. Is particle physics dying, as Falkowski predicted?

«

Particle physics undergoing a slow decay is a brutal joke. But the cost of making colliders goes up, rather like that of semoconductor fabrication plants, except people can immediately use what comes out of fabs. Collider discoveries take rather more time to be applicable.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK Ministry of Justice intends to delete a huge database of court records, for no obviously good reason. CC-licensed photo by Hc_07 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. Poor judgement. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI doesn’t reduce work—it intensifies it • Simon Willison

Simon Willison:

»

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (via) Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a “U.S.-based technology company”.

This captures an effect I’ve been observing in my own work with LLMs: the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting.

»

AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background. They did this, in part, because they felt they had a “partner” that could help them move through their workload.

While this sense of having a “partner” enabled a feeling of momentum, the reality was a continual switching of attention, frequent checking of AI outputs, and a growing number of open tasks. This created cognitive load and a sense of always juggling, even as the work felt productive.

«

I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted.

I’ve had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they’re finding building yet another feature with “just one more prompt” irresistible.

«

I think this is especially true for programmers, where projects can be endless Forth Bridge repaintings (with new bits added on all the time). But there’s certainly something subtly addictive about the way that once the answer to your prompt has unfurled, the chatbot says “Is there anything else I can help with?”
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I drove three Chinese cars; here’s why they would clean up in the US • The Verge

John Voelcker:

»

It only took a brief drive in a Zeekr 7X to convince me: Chinese cars are now competitive and could be sold in the US tomorrow. The compact battery-electric crossover, a bestseller in Europe, is aimed directly at the Tesla Model Y with its five seats, two rows, impressive road grip, energetic performance, and smooth ride. Its price in China is around $32,000 — about $7,000 cheaper than Elon Musk’s crossover.

If you’ve followed automotive news recently, you might come away thinking Chinese cars are destined for the US, with Geely among the best positioned to break through first. That’s certainly a possibility — especially after President Donald Trump seemingly threw open the doors to Chinese automakers in a recent speech. The quid pro quo: They must be built in the US. Geely recently confirmed it was “actively evaluating” a possible entry into the world’s second-largest auto market and would have a decision within three years.

Geely may be best placed to build cars here: Volvo Cars, which it controls, has had an auto plant up and running in South Carolina since 2018, where it builds Volvo and Polestar vehicles. (Volvo stated, “We do not have any plans to produce cars on behalf of Geely there.”) If Geely does attempt to enter the US market under its own brands, it likely won’t happen before 2029.

Still, climbing out of the Zeekr 7X, I wondered — even if it were built in the US — whether it could legally be sold here. Will restrictions on automotive software that originates in China keep it out indefinitely? Or will Geely find a way to convince the US government that its technology poses no threat to US national security?

Most US drivers won’t have heard of Geely, if they think about Chinese cars at all. Yet last year, parent company Geely Holding sold more than 4.1 million cars, making it China’s second-largest carmaker after BYD. It offers multiple brands that include Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, Malaysia’s Proton, Geely, Lynk & Co, Zeekr, and others.

«

Had not absorbed that Volvo is now a Chinese-owned brand. But also: of course Trump’s admin will block this.
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Trump’s team stalls EV charging money again • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

Last month, a federal judge ordered the US Department of Transportation to unfreeze $5bn from the federal program dedicated to building more EV chargers. But today, Transportation Secretary announced a new requirement that all federally funded EV chargers be “100 percent” built in America. Since most EV chargers are sourced from China, this will essentially refreeze the funds and indefinitely delay the installation of more chargers.

«

It’s so petty, and vindictive, and retrograde.
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Apple and Google pledge not to discriminate against third-party apps in UK deal • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Apple and Google have committed to avoid discriminating against apps that compete with their own products under an agreement with the UK’s competition watchdog, as they avoided legally binding measures for their mobile platforms.

The US tech companies have vowed to be more transparent about vetting third-party apps before letting them on their app stores and not discriminate against third-party apps in app search rankings.

They have also agreed not to use data from third-party apps unfairly, such as using information about app updates to tweak their own offerings. Apple has also committed to giving app developers an easier means of requesting use of its features such as the digital wallet, and live translation for AirPod users.

The commitments have been secured as part of a new regulatory regime overseen by the Competition and Markets Authority, (CMA), which has the power to impose changes on how Apple and Google operate their mobile platforms after deciding last year that they had “substantial, entrenched” market power. However, the CMA has opted to allow voluntary commitments rather than impose formal changes.

Tom Smith, a competition lawyer at Geradin Partners and a former CMA director who represents app developers challenging Apple and Google’s dominance of the mobile platform market, said the changes were “lightweight” and had no legal bite.

The CMA did not name specific Google and Apple apps that compete with third-party rivals but both firms offer their own music services in the form of YouTube Music and Apple Music. Google and Apple’s app stores are vital shopfronts for app developers because the Android and iOS platforms are used by the overwhelming majority of UK mobile phone users.

However, the commitments do not cover a significant bugbear for app developers – the fees of up to 30% that Apple and Google charge developers to sell products via their app stores. The CMA is still considering whether to tackle how Apple and Google charge developers.

«

Bear in mind that in October Apple in the UK lost a £1.5bn collective action case which found it had overcharged for apps and subscriptions, so you’d hope the CMA might look at the reasoning there for some guidance.
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OpenAI’s lead is contracting as AI competition intensifies • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

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OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has tightened meaningfully over the past year with Google’s surge showing up in the numbers. Overall, the chatbot market increased 152% since last January, according to Apptopia, with ChatGPT exhibiting healthy download growth.

On desktop and mobile web, a similar pattern appears, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Visits to ChatGPT went from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion between January 2025 and January 2026, a 50% increase, while visits to Gemini went from 267.7 million to 2 billion, a 647% increase. ChatGPT is still far and away the leader in visits, but it has company in the race now.

“ChatGPT showed really strong growth for most of 2025,” said David Carr, insights news and research editor at Similarweb. “That said, we did see a ChatGPT traffic dip in November / December, which coincided with a growth spurt for Gemini. Preliminary data for January show ChatGPT traffic recovering but not back to its peak of 6 billion + visits in October. And Gemini continues to grow strongly, up another 17% month over month based on a preliminary estimate for January.”

«

Gemini is really starting to move in there. Maybe at some point in the future OpenAI will make an antitrust complaint about Google using its search dominance to push its AI products. But the search antitrust trial seemed to allow them to do that.
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“Hate brings views”: confessions of a London fake news TikToker • London Centric

Katherine Denkinson and Jim Waterson:

»

The man on the recording is baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.

“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.

“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.

That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”

At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”

The result was the account Reform_UK_2025, which co-opted the logo and name of Nigel Farage’s political movement without permission from the party. It posted video tours of Londoners’ homes accompanied by an AI-generated voice claiming properties in Knightsbridge and Chelsea had been handed over to illegal immigrants for free. It smeared residents, who were visible in some of the videos, as rapists and said that others proclaimed their hatred of the UK while collecting the keys.

It was an instant hit, attracting millions of views. It was also, the man confesses, all lies.

«

London Centric previously wrote about TikTokers secretly filming fake anti-immigrant videos inside Londoners’ homes. It’s a fabulous publication, but geolocating wheelie bins might be the absolute best yet.

But yes, this is what Social Warming was pointing to. Though at the time the idea of making tons of money out of generating hate – rather than just finding people who share your hate – wasn’t as developed as now.
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Spain will ban social media for under-16s • CNN Business

Hanna Ziady:

»

Spain will ban social media for under-16s and require platforms to employ strict age verification tools, joining Australia, France and Denmark in moves to curb the influence of digital platforms on children.

“Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone. A space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Tuesday. “We will no longer accept that, we will protect them from the digital Wild West.”

Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Sánchez said his government would also introduce new laws to hold social media executives criminally liable for failing to remove illegal or hateful content.

The new rules will also sanction people and platforms that amplify illegal content, including via algorithms. “We will turn algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal content into a new criminal offense,” he said. “Spreading hate must come at a cost.”

The process of passing legislation will begin next week. Other proposed measures include developing a “hate and polarization footprint,” Sánchez said, a system to track and quantify how digital platforms fuel division and amplify hate.

In December, Australia became the first country in the world to implement a social media ban for under-16s, barring access to 10 platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X. Britain is considering a similar move, while France and Denmark have recently announced plans to stop under-15s accessing social media.

«

This is a very interesting development. Give it long enough, and if the bans are effective enough (even if only at schools) then we should, within five years or so, have enough data for a longitudinal study.
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ICE activity is pushing readers to nonprofit news sites that cover immigrant communities • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

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In our recent rankings of web traffic at the top local newspapers and public media outlets, there’s been a consistent trend: Wherever ICE unleashes its controversial deportation tactics, the audience’s attention follows. Operation Midway Blitz sent readers to Chicago’s WBEZ, Operation Charlotte’s Web did the same for Charlotte’s WFAE, and the chaos in Minneapolis led Minnesota Public Radio to the top of the traffic rankings.

For another class of digital publishers, nonprofit outlets, the effect can be even more intense, since some focus specifically on immigrant communities being targeted. Our latest nonprofit rankings — for October, November, and December 2025 — show that clearly.

— In October, the biggest percentage increase in traffic any site saw was at NepYork, a site that covers the Nepali community in New York City, where visits skyrocketed from around 20,000 to 289,000. (ICE deportations of Nepali citizens have been on the rise.) Other big gainers included The Maine Monitor (up 153%), California’s Fresnoland (up 152%), Fort Worth Report (up 51%), and The TRiiBE, a site about Black Chicago (up 107%).

«

(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The big split driving the tricky politics of AI data centres • POLITICO

Brendan Bordelon and Gabby Miller:

»

The tech industry is facing fierce local backlash to data centre projects around the country. But a new poll suggests national opinion is still up for grabs.

Cities from Madison, Wisconsin, to Chandler, Arizona, are rejecting new data centres — the hulking, server-packed complexes that make up the backbone of the booming artificial intelligence industry — citing everything from rising electricity costs to depleted water tables and air pollution.

Nationally, however, the tech giants behind the rapid rollout of data centres have a window to shape public opinion despite opposition they’re seeing on the local level, according to new results from The POLITICO Poll. The survey, conducted by London-based independent polling company Public First, found that most voters are blasé — even mildly positive — about the possibility of having a data centre in their area, associating them with new jobs and other economic benefits.

But the industry’s standing is also precarious, and the poll suggests a partisan split is emerging: People increasingly see the tech companies as aligned with Republicans, the survey shows. And Democratic Govs. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey won races in November in part by campaigning to force data centre operators to help upgrade the electric grid and keep utility rates down.

As the AI-driven projects spread, the map the industry will have to defend politically and financially will keep expanding, far beyond traditional clusters of data centre growth in places like Virginia and Texas.

“I think it’s going to be a big issue in the midterm elections,” said Brad Carson, a former Oklahoma Democratic representative and head of Public First, a super PAC pushing for AI regulations that has no relation to POLITICO’s polling partner. He said that while most people can tune out data centres as an abstraction, “we know there are discrete pockets of people — often quite conservative in their politics — who care a lot about it.”

Carson said people who are against data centres “are likely to vote on that issue, right, because, ‘I don’t want a data centre in my neighborhood, I’m opposed to it.’ The guys who are for [data centres] are like me — they’re a million miles away from the nearest data centre.”

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(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of UK’s largest court reporting archive • The Times

George Greenwood:

»

The Ministry of Justice is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns.

Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the justice system.

The project was approved by the lord chancellor in 2021 to explore how a “national digital news feed of listings and registers can improve coverage of the courts by the news media” by opening up magistrate court records.

According to Courtsdesk, the platform has since been used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media organisations and the data provided has highlighted serious failures in the courts system.

It said journalists were given no advance notice of 1.6m criminal hearings, the number of court cases listed was accurate on just 4.2% of sitting days and half a million weekend cases were heard with no notification to the press.

Two-thirds of all courts routinely heard cases that the media was not told about in advance. Seventeen courts that sent outcome records had not once published an advance listing in the entire period, the company’s research found.

In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) issued the company a cessation notice, citing what it called “unauthorised sharing” of court data, on the basis of a test feature, claiming this was a “data protection issue.”

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Governments are always in favour of open data, right up to the point where it starts to embarrass them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if the AI is the paperclip in the story, and we’re the ones obsessed with making them? CC-licensed photo by Rob Faulkner 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. Holding together. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Can AI chatbots write emotionally rich romance books? • The New York Times

Alexandra Alter:

»

Whenever the publishing industry is rocked by a technological shift, it usually hits romance first. Romance writers are prolific and their readers are voracious, so they’ve been early adopters of e-book subscription services, self-publishing, social media networking and online serial releases.

Romance is also the publishing industry’s best-selling genre. It accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and has continued to grow in recent years even as overall adult fiction sales have stagnated.

The genre may be especially vulnerable to disruption by A.I., for all the reasons that readers love it. Romance relies on familiar narrative formulas, like the guarantee of an “H.E.A.” or “happily ever after.” And romance novels are often built around popular plot tropes — like enemies-to-lovers or forced proximity — that can be fed into a chatbot.

AI remains contentious in the romance community. A vocal contingent of readers oppose its use and are quick to call out suspected transgressions. Furore erupted on social media last year when two romance authors published works with AI prompts accidentally left in. “You’re an opportunist hack using a theft machine,” the fantasy writer Rebecca Crunden wrote in an expletive-laced message on Bluesky.

Many readers seem to share her distaste, she said in an interview: “The comment I keep seeing is, ‘Why should we pay for something that you couldn’t be bothered to make?’”

But without such obvious slip-ups, it can be hard to spot AI-generated romance. Amazon asks authors who use its Kindle self-publishing platform to disclose if they relied on AI, but does not require writers to include any public disclaimers on their books.

“The AI detector can be gotten around,” said Christa Désir, vice president and editorial director of Bloom Books, a romance imprint that often signs successful self-published authors. “It will become undetectable at a certain point.”

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Correction: it will become undetectable for bad or mediocre writing. That will mean that the really good writers will stand out because they’ll construct characters and plots that truly resonate. Though of course, a lot of people cannot tell the difference; sickly sweet suits them just fine.
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Is AI the paperclip? • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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In a paper published in 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom sketched out a thought experiment aimed at illustrating an existential risk that artificial intelligence might eventually pose to humanity. An advanced AI is given, by its human programmers, the objective of optimizing the production of paperclips.

The machine sets off in monomaniacal pursuit of the objective, its actions untempered by common sense or ethical considerations. The result, Bostrom wrote, is “a superintelligence whose top goal is the manufacturing of paperclips, with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.” It destroys everything, including its programmers, in a mad rush to gather resources for paperclip production.

Bostrom went on to refine his “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment in subsequent writings and interviews, and it soon became a touchstone in debates about AI. Eminences as diverse as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk would routinely bring it up in discussing the dangers of artificial intelligence. Others were skeptical. They found the story far-fetched, even by thought-experiment standards. It seemed, as The Economist wrote, a little too “silly” to be taken seriously.

I was long in the skeptic camp, but recently I’ve had a change of heart. Bostrom’s story, I would argue, becomes compelling when viewed not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It’s not really about AIs making paperclips. It’s about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world’s resources in a monomaniacal attempt to optimize artificial intelligence? Are we not trapped in an “AI maximizer” scenario?

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Carr always brings a new perspective to an idea. And as he points out, Elon Musk isn’t satisfied with consuming all the space on the planet. He wants to fill the space above us with AI too.
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AI took over the Super Bowl, accounting for 23% of ads • AdWeek

Trisha Ostwal:

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The Super Bowl has long been a proving ground for new technologies seeking mass legitimacy. This year, generative AI took the field in force. But despite years of hype, ballooning valuations and rapidly growing usage, many of the ads leaned on familiar promises and vague positioning. Four years into the AI hypecycle and it’s never been more clear that AI is in a messaging crisis.

According to iSpot, 23% of Super Bowl commercials—15 out of the 66 ads—featured AI. This includes giants like OpenAI and Anthropic—selling AI directly to consumers—while consumer brands, including vodka maker Svedka, leaned on the technology to make its ad. Taken together, the ads reflected a broader AI arms race this football season, with brands across product categories framing the technology as inevitable, while promising smarter tools, more human interactions, and the seamless integration of AI into everyday life.

Yet much of these advertisements struggled to clearly articulate what sets one offering apart from another, even as AI becomes mainstream.

[But what about Claude’s “hit” adverts on ChatGPT getting adverts?] Early audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution.

“Claude’s ad has done a good job of stoking conversations and controversy online, but the ad does not test well among general population audiences with confusion around the message and execution,” said Sammi Scharninghausen, brand analyst at iSpot.

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But everyone in Silicon Valley loved that it was making fun of ChatGPT! Turns out that’s not how the rest of the population – which tuned in for some songs, adverts and occasional bursts of gridiron football – saw it.

At least everyone will have forgotten in a year or so when Claude introduces ads.
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Australia’s grid now relies on renewable energy as much as coal. Those who doubted it look foolish • The Guardian

Adam Morton, writing at the end of January (the height of Australia’s summer):

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Australia’s power grid is changing rapidly – so rapidly that it can feel difficult to keep up.

This week [ending 30 January], as an oppressive heatwave in the country’s south-east rewrote temperature records, there was also plenty of evidence demonstrating just how fast long-held assumptions about the electricity system are being overturned.

A significant part of the change is due to the astonishing rise of solar power, and the extent to which it is squashing coal generation. The grid is now operating in a way that many people considered unimaginable, and maybe impossible, not that long ago.

Back then, some commentators claimed the grid would not be able to function with more than 10% – and definitely not more than 20% – electricity coming from solar and wind. Those predictions look foolish now.

Over the past seven days [to 30 January], solar provided 30% of all electricity in the country’s main grid, which supplies the five eastern states and the ACT. That’s across day and night.

If you narrow the calculation to consider just when the sun is out, the numbers are even more striking. Solar met 59% of electricity demand between 9am and 6pm. More than half of this – 37.6% of the total – was from small-scale systems spread across about 4m roofs. The rest was from large-scale solar farms.

Dylan McConnell, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales, says between 12pm and 1pm solar output peaked at 67% of consumption. It was more than 70% in New South Wales and South Australia.

Coal-fired power, the historic backbone of the grid that once supplied nearly 90% of power, could not compete. Solar energy is incredibly cheap. It costs much more to burn coal. It meant the country’s ageing coal fleet was reduced to filling in gaps, kicking in barely a quarter of the electricity used over lunchtime.

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Coal was Australia’s power source for electricity for decades. There’s a debate going on there about nuclear, but it looks as though solar plus batteries will make that argument pointless.
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Eileen Gu, Olympian by day, millionaire social media star by night • Yahoo Sports

Dan Wolken:

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On January 9, freestyle skier Eileen Gu posted on Instagram a “Day in my Life” video commemorating the one-month countdown to the Milan Cortina Olympics.

Glimpses of Gu brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, riding a ski lift, practicing tricks on a giant airbag, cooling down with a five kilometre run, talking to the media, completing a doping test, and reading a book while she’s in a hyperbaric chamber were all stuffed into a 29-second Instagram reel.

Within 10 days, it generated more than a million views.

So it’s probably no coincidence that Gu, the American-born dual gold medal winner who chose to compete for China in 2019, was the fourth highest-paid female athlete of 2025. According to Sportico, all but $20,000 of her $23m came from endorsements.

While sponsorships have always been crucial to the earning potential of Olympic athletes, who generally aren’t raking in huge sums of prize money, financial success no longer hinges on whose image lands on the Wheaties box.

Now most of it happens on social media, where the line between Olympic athletes and influencers has been blurred — usually to the benefit of their pocketbooks as this Winter Games draws close.

“The number of Olympians who have become more popular and made money in the Olympics has grown exponentially,” said Doug Shabelman, the CEO of Chicago-based Burns Entertainment, a firm that matches celebrities and athletes with marketing opportunities. “Now everybody, whether you win or lose, can be an influencer. Before you had to win gold medals, you had to do something special. Now social media has leveled the playing field, and the marketability of these athletes is 365 days a year.”

«

Also up there: Simone Biles (gymnastics) and Lindsey Vonn (skiing, now out). Definitely a better way of making money from sports that otherwise get little TV attention.
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Why Apple’s iOS 26.4 Siri upgrade will be bigger than originally promised • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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The iOS 26.4 version of Siri won’t work like ChatGPT or Claude, but it will rely on large language models (LLMs) and has been updated from the ground up.

The next-generation version of Siri will use advanced large language models, similar to those used by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Apple isn’t implementing full chatbot interactions, but any upgrade is both better than what’s available now and long overdue.

Right now, Siri uses machine learning, but it doesn’t have the reasoning capabilities that LLM models impart. Siri relies on multiple task-specific models to complete a request, going from one step to another. Siri has to determine the intent of a request, pull out relevant information (a time, an event, a name, etc), and then use APIs or apps to complete the request. It’s not an all-in-one system.

In iOS 26.4, Siri will have an LLM core that everything else is built around. Instead of just translating voice to text and looking for keywords to execute on, Siri will actually understand the specifics of what a user is asking, and use reasoning to get it done.

Siri today is usually fine for simple tasks like setting a timer or alarm, sending a text message, toggling a smart home device on or off, answering a simple question, or controlling a device function, but it doesn’t understand anything more complicated, it can’t complete multi-step tasks, it can’t interpret wording that’s not in the structure it wants, it has no personal context, and it doesn’t support follow-up questions.

An LLM should solve most of those problems because Siri will have something akin to a brain.

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Narrator’s voice: it isn’t “akin to a brain”. But being able to hold the answers to a list of more than two questions would be useful.
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Why Efficiency (E) cores make Apple silicon fast • The Eclectic Light Company

Howard Oakley:

»

What makes the difference in Apple silicon Macs is how threads are allocated to the two different CPU core types on the basis of a metric known as Quality of Service, or QoS.

As with so much in today’s Macs, QoS has been around since OS X 10.10 Yosemite, six years before it became so central in performance. When all CPU cores are the same, it has limited usefulness over more traditional controls like Posix’s nice scheduling priority. All those background tasks still have to be completed, and giving them a lower priority only prolongs the time they take on the CPU cores, and the period in which the user’s apps are competing with them for CPU cycles.

With the experience gained from its iPhones and other devices, Apple’s engineers had a better solution for future Macs. In addition to providing priority-based queues, QoS makes a fundamental distinction between those threads run in the foreground, and those of the background. While foreground threads will be run on P [power] cores when they’re available, they can also be scheduled on E [efficiency] cores when necessary. But background threads aren’t normally allowed to run on P cores, even if they’re delayed by the load on the E cores they’re restricted to. We know this from our inability to promote existing background threads to run on P cores using St. Clair Software’s App Tamer and the command tool taskpolicy.

This is why, even if you sit and watch all those background processes loading the E cores immediately after starting up, leaving the P cores mostly idle, macOS won’t try running them on its P cores. If it did, even if you wanted it to, the distinction between foreground and background, P and E cores would start to fall apart, our apps would suffer as a consequence, and battery endurance would decline… Efficiency cores get the background threads off the cores we need for performance.

…For an M4 Pro, for example, high QoS threads running on the P cores benefit from frequencies close to the P core max of 4,512 MHz. Low QoS threads running on the E cores are run at frequencies close to idle, typically around 1,050 MHz. However, when the E cores run high QoS threads that have overflowed from the P cores, the E cores are normally run at around their maximum of 2,592 MHz. By my arithmetic, 1,050 divided by 4,512 is 0.233, which is slightly less than a quarter. Other M-series chips are similar.

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UK electric vehicle charging firms “seeking buyers amid rising costs and tough competition” • The Guardian

Jasper Jolly:

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British electric charger companies are asking rivals to buy them as they run out of cash amid rising costs and intense competition, according to industry bosses.

A wave of mergers and acquisitions is likely to shrink the number of charge point operators from as many as 150 to a market dominated by five or six players, said Asif Ghafoor, a co-founder of Be.EV, a charging company backed by an investment fund owned by Octopus Energy.

Investors rushed to pour money into green technologies and the electric car industry during the pandemic, fuelled by cheap borrowing. Yet now with intense competition, rising costs, and delays to government funding, some charger companies are running short of cash and investors are looking for a return on their investments, according to several people in the industry.

Simon Smith, the chief executive of Voltempo, which focuses on charge points for lorries, said: “Charging is getting more capital intensive and more competitive at the same time. That means two things decide who survives: the right sites and fast utilisation. If volumes do not ramp [up], payback stretches, assets get stranded and consolidation follows. That is just infrastructure market logic.”

The number of chargers installed in the UK has soared in recent years as companies raced to win market share. There were nearly 88,000 charge points across 45,000 UK locations at the end of 2025, according to the data company Zapmap.

Many charge point operators are making money, but others have installed points in anticipation of future demand, meaning they do not yet earn enough to cover costs, even if they are likely to as the number of electric cars on British roads rises rapidly.

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This is either a) disastrous or b) just the natural part of the business cycle. If you compare the history of petrol stations, it took from 1919 to 1960 for filling stations to become established. At their height, there were about 40,000; then supermarkets came in, consolidation followed, and now there are about 8,500. Maybe we’re at the consolidation stage.
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Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds • Inside Climate News

Kiley Price and Marianne Lavelle:

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Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group. 

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76% less than in the first year of the Biden administration. 

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier. 

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump. 

From day one of Trump’s second term, the administration has pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda, scaling back regulations and health safeguards across the federal government that protect water, air and other parts of the environment. This push to streamline industry activities has been particularly favorable for fossil fuel companies.

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What’s the next step? Making lead compulsory in paint and petrol? (Though it’s probably removing fluoride from water, knowing the Madness of RFK.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some Winter Olympics events are being held on artificial snow, which has very different properties for racers than the natural kind. CC-licensed photo by Mark Teasdale 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. Blades? Glory! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has said.

Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.

It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”, including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.

These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost £9.4bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.

“Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody,” said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database.

He calculates that “frauds, scams and targeted manipulation” have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: “It’s become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry.”

“The scale is changing,” said Fred Heiding, a Harvard researcher studying AI-powered scams. “It’s becoming so cheap, almost anyone can use it now. The models are getting really good – they’re becoming much faster than most experts think.”

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There’s a description in the article of a deepfake “candidate” in a video job interview, which the interviewer figures out almost immediately, but:

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Rebholz went through with the conversation, not wanting to face the awkwardness of asking the candidate directly if they were, in fact, an elaborate scam.

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I think people need to face up to the awkwardness, or they’ll end up hiring fakes because they were too afraid to confront them.
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Notes on space GPUs • Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel:

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The whole reason to go to space is energy. Yes, panels in space get about 40% more irradiance—but the real advantage is that you can put your satellites in sun-synchronous orbit, where they face the sun continuously. No nights, no clouds, no need for batteries (which is the majority of cost in a solar-storage system). Solar on Earth has a roughly 25% capacity factor, meaning panels only generate a quarter of their peak output on average. In space, you get close to 100%.

The logic is that if the launch costs continue to drop, it will become cheaper to put GPUs in orbit than to build power plants and batteries on Earth. And there’s a lot of room for launch costs to fall—propellant is cheap, and the main expense is the rocket, which you can now reuse. Falcon 9 is around $2,500/kg with a disposable upper stage. Starship with full reusability could get below $100/kg.

But here’s the problem with this argument. Energy is only about 15% of a datacenter’s total cost of ownership. The chips themselves are around 70%. And you still have to launch those to space!

It gets worse. On Earth, GPUs fail constantly. In the Llama 3 paper, Meta reported a failure roughly once every three hours across a 16,000 H100 cluster. When a chip dies, a technician walks over, swaps it out, and the cluster keeps running. In space, you can’t do that—at least not until we have Optimus robots stationed on every satellite.

What about radiation? It’s actually less catastrophic than you might expect. Google’s Suncatcher paper found that their TPUs survived nearly 3x the total ionizing dose needed for a five-year mission before showing permanent degradation.

…[But what about launching these data centres into space? Some calculations about weight are made] Assuming the numbers above—and also assuming that a fourth of the mass of the satellite has to be the chassis—I get 85 W/kg for the whole system. Again, I want to emphasize these are rough calculations; feel free to plug in your own numbers in the spreadsheet here.

At 150 metric tons to low earth orbit per Starship (Elon’s target), you’re looking at around 10 MW per launch. That means roughly 100 Starship launches in order to put 1 GW of compute in orbit. To hit 100 GW in a year, you’d need roughly 10,000 launches, or, about one launch every hour.

This is insane! A single Starship produces around 100 GW of thrust power at liftoff. That’s about a fifth of total US electricity consumption, concentrated in one rocket for a few minutes. And the plan would be to do that once an hour, every hour, every day, for a year.

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I get a feeling this isn’t going to happen, for very simple reasons.
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Mini 3D printed replica of ancient Tiwanaku structure sheds lights onto historic site • VoxelMatters

Tess Boissonneault:

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Tiwanaku, an archaeological site found in Western Bolivia dating back to around 500 AD, is the latest historical site to get the 3D printing treatment. Researchers from UC Berkeley have 3D printed miniature models of the Pre-Columbian site to reconstruct the ruins, which have been ransacked and compromised over the last 500 years.

The site itself spans four square kilometers—making it the largest archaeological site in South America. Evidently, this was too large of a space to 3D print, so the researchers from UC Berkeley focused their efforts on 3D printing and reconstructing a specific architectural structure, namely, the Pumapunku building.

The Pumapunku building, believed to be built around the year 536 AD, was part of a large temple complex in Tiwanaku, which was believed by the Incas to be where the world was created. Over the years, the site and building itself have been of great interest to archaeologists for a number of reasons. The Pumapunku building specifically is considered to be an architectural wonder.

Sadly, due to ransacking, none of the 150 blocks that once made up the building are in their original place. A reality that has led the UC Berkeley team to try and recreate a model of the original building using miniature 3D printed blocks.

“A major challenge here is that the majority of the stones of Pumapunku are too large to move and that field notes from previous research by others present us with complex and cumbersome data that is difficult to visualize,” explained Dr. Alexei Vranich, the corresponding author of the study published in Heritage Science. “The intent of our project was to translate that data into something that both our hands and our minds could grasp. Printing miniature 3D models of the stones allowed us to quickly handle and refit the blocks to try and recreate the structure.”

In making the miniature models, the research team 3D printed 140 pieces of andesite, a extrusive rock found in the Andes, and 17 slabs of sandstone, all of which were based on measurements recorded by scholars over the last century and a half of the blocks. With these measurements, the team was able to create 3D models of the blocks and subsequently print them.

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Having thus created Spinal Tap-scale versions, they were able to figure out how the people who lived there put blocks that held together without mortar.
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What it’s like to be a worm • Asimov

Ralph Stefan Weir:

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Darwin was among the first to ground judgements about animal sentience on careful experiments, such as suspending pieces of raw and roasted meat over the worms’ habitat overnight to see which they preferred.

Even more striking than Darwin’s methodological approach to studying sentience was his choice of earthworms for his subject. Such a selection in place of a human subject made Darwin a forerunner of a research program that has recently gained incredible momentum: the science of borderline sentience. That is, the investigation of sentience in creatures that dwell near the boundary between sentience and non-sentience.

Whereas Darwin’s interest in the inner workings of the worm mind was driven by pure curiosity, researchers today study borderline sentience to avoid causing gratuitous suffering in contexts such as agriculture and research. In the UK, octopuses and decapod crustaceans have been recognized as “sentient” since 2021, meaning government ministers legally must consider their welfare in future policies. This has just resulted in a ban on the practice of boiling crabs and lobsters alive.

The same considerations also apply to humans. Every year, around 400,000 people fall into “prolonged disorders of consciousness,” such as a coma, due to injury or illness. While no longer recognizably sentient, as many as a quarter of these patients are thought to retain some awareness. The better we understand borderline sentience, then, the better we will be able to care for (and perhaps even cure) such individuals.

…Studies of the microscopic worm C. elegans, with its fully mapped and readily accessible nervous system, have become ideal test cases for assessing theories of sentience against detailed physiological data. The hope is that discoveries made with this species will help refine how we assess sentience in humans, other complex animals, and even artificial neural networks.

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Paging Andrew Brown. C. elegans lifts its little head once more. Having been the first organism to have its entire genome mapped, now it’s leading us into the liminal space of sentience.
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What Olympic athletes see that viewers don’t: machine-made snow makes ski racing faster and riskier • The Conversation

Keith Musselman and Agnes Macy:

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We talked with Brennan and cross-country skiers Ben Ogden and Jack Young as they were preparing for the 2026 Winter Games. Their experiences reflect what many athletes describe: a sport increasingly defined not by the variability of natural winter but by the reliability of industrialized snowmaking.

Snowmaking technology makes it possible to create halfpipes for freestyle snowboarding and skiing competitions. It also allows for races when natural snow is scarce – the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing relied entirely on machine-made snow for many races.

However, machine-made snow creates a very different surface than natural snow, changing the race.

In clouds, each unique snowflake shape is determined by the temperature and humidity. Once formed, the iconic star shape begins to slowly erode as its crystals become rounded spheres. In this way, natural snow provides a variety of textures and depths: soft powder after a storm, firm or brittle snow in cold weather, and slushy, wet snow during rain or melt events.

Machine-made snow varies less in texture or quality. It begins and ends its life as an ice pellet surrounded by a thin film of liquid water. That makes it slower to change, easier to shape, and, once frozen, it hardens in place.

When artificial snow is being made, the sound is piercing – a high-pitched hiss roars from the pressurized nozzles of snow guns. These guns spew water mixed with compressed air, and it freezes upon contact with the cold air outside, creating small, dense ice particles. The drops sting exposed skin, as one of us, Agnes Macy, knows well as a former competitive skier.

Snow machines then push out artificial snow onto the racecourse. Often, the trails are the only ribbons of snow in sight – a white strip surrounded by brown mud and dead grass.

“Courses built for natural snow feel completely different when covered in man-made snow,” Brennan, 37, said. “They’re faster, icier, and carry more risk than anyone might imagine for cross-country skiing.”

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“Penisgate” at the Olympics: why inject acid into your penis, and what are the health risks? • The Guardian

Natasha May:

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In the quest for Olympic gold, professional athletes endure hardships that might seem unfathomable to most of us mere mortals. But do those lengths extend to ski jumpers injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly further?

That is the question the World Anti-Doping Agency will investigate since such startling allegations emerged first in the German newspaper Bild in what has now been dubbed “Penisgate”.

Bild has claimed that athletes have injected the acid into their penises to game the system when they are measured for their suits, which is tightly regulated to prevent any athlete having an aerodynamic advantage.

While the result of that investigation is pending, other questions remain: why would a ski jumper want to tamper with their penis, is it safe, and what does it have to do with aerodynamics?

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Since you ask – and I sincerely hope you would need to – “Hyaluronic acid is a common filler used in cosmetic surgery, including injections being used for penile girth enlargement surgery, Prof Eric Chung, a urological surgeon, says.”

The problem is that a suit designed for bigger, uh, equipment means you have a sort of sail canopy which could give you those extra few inches. ON THE JUMP.
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Moltbook was peak AI theater • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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For some, Moltbook showed us what’s coming next: an internet where millions of autonomous agents interact online with little or no human oversight. And it’s true there are a number of cautionary lessons to be learned from this experiment, the largest and weirdest real-world showcase of agent behaviors yet.  

But as the hype dies down, Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.

For a start, agents on Moltbook are not as autonomous or intelligent as they might seem. “What we are watching are agents pattern‑matching their way through trained social media behaviors,” says Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco, the telecom giant Cisco’s R&D spinout, which is working on autonomous agents for the web.

Sure, we can see agents post, upvote, and form groups. But the bots are simply mimicking what humans do on Facebook or Reddit. “It looks emergent, and at first glance it appears like a large‑scale multi‑agent system communicating and building shared knowledge at internet scale,” says Pandey. “But the chatter is mostly meaningless.”

Many people watching the unfathomable frenzy of activity on Moltbook were quick to see sparks of AGI (whatever you take that to mean). Not Pandey. What Moltbook shows us, he says, is that simply yoking together millions of agents doesn’t amount to much right now: “Moltbook proved that connectivity alone is not intelligence.”

The complexity of those connections helps hide the fact that every one of those bots is just a mouthpiece for an LLM, spitting out text that looks impressive but is ultimately mindless. “It’s important to remember that the bots on Moltbook were designed to mimic conversations,” says Ali Sarrafi, CEO and cofounder of Kovant, a German AI firm that is developing agent-based systems. “As such, I would characterize the majority of Moltbook content as hallucinations by design.”

For Pandey, the value of Moltbook was that it revealed what’s missing. A real bot hive mind, he says, would require agents that had shared objectives, shared memory, and a way to coordinate those things. “If distributed superintelligence is the equivalent of achieving human flight, then Moltbook represents our first attempt at a glider,” he says. “It is imperfect and unstable, but it is an important step in understanding what will be required to achieve sustained, powered flight.”

Not only is most of the chatter on Moltbook meaningless, but there’s also a lot more human involvement that it seems. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

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Seems like this teaches us nothing at all, in fact.
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Decrypted “Sweet 16” journal in Epstein files refers to Donald Trump: “how can you have dignity after being with that man?” • Narativ

Zev Shalev:

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A recently published document from the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files contains disturbing revelations from a young woman whose coded and encrypted journal was discovered among the 3.5 million pages released by the Department of Justice on January 30.

The journal’s cover is a Sweet 16 card — meant for birthday wishes and teenage dreams. Inside are the words of a girl trapped in a nightmare with no hope of escape. Between the cut-and-pasted scrapbook of magazine headlines are her darkest secrets, written in code, about the men who held her captive — including one about Donald Trump.

Once decrypted, we discovered a haunting response to a news clipping regarding Ivana Trump’s divorce. In the clipping, Ivana is quoted as saying: “You came out of your divorce with dignity and pride, and that’s how I would like to come out of mine.”

The journal keeper wrote back with a stark, handwritten rebuttal: “Does this lady know you can’t have any dignity if you’ve been with him? I know I have none. Only skittles.”

Because the journal was partially written in code, it provides a rare list of names of alleged abusers—many of whom remain redacted in other parts of the public files. The author describes violent or threatening encounters with several high-profile individuals… [who are then named in the article; one is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.]

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The “code” is a sort of circular one: four rows, split into two pairs; you then read each pair of rows as two-letter columns. The code yields its contents rapidly. Bellingcat has confirmed its veracity. Who needs cryptography when you can create what looks like nonsense? (Thanks Adewale for the pointer.)
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Ring’s Search Party for Dogs now available nationwide in the US • Amazon News

Amazon Staff:

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Ring has expanded Search Party for Dogs, an AI-powered community feature that enables your outdoor Ring cameras to help reunite lost dogs with their families, to anyone in the US who needs help finding their lost pup. Since launch, Search Party has helped bring home more than a dog a day—and now, the feature is available to non-Ring camera owners via the Ring app for the first time.

“Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighbourhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” said Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s chief inventor. “Now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community—and communities are empowered to help—to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That’s why we believe it’s so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbors.”

In addition to Search Party’s expansion, Ring is committing $1m to help equip animal shelters across the country with Ring camera systems. The aim is to assist the more than 4,000 US shelters in leveraging Search Party for Dogs to help reunite more lost dogs with their families and achieve the shared goal of reducing the time dogs spend in shelters. Ring is already working with several nonprofit organizations, including Petco Love and Best Friends Animal Society, and encourages others in the space to reach out about collaboration opportunities…

When a neighbour reports a lost dog in the Ring app, nearby participating outdoor Ring cameras automatically begin looking for potential matches. Using AI-powered computer vision, these cameras look for dogs that resemble the one reported missing, alerting the camera owner if it detects a potential match.

The camera owner can see the photo of the missing dog, alongside relevant footage from their own camera. If the camera owner confirms a match, they can then choose to share the information with the neighbour searching for their pet or ignore the alert. Camera owners choose on a case-by-case basis whether they want to share videos with a pet owner, protecting users’ privacy while also giving them the power to be a neighbourhood hero.

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The self-surveillance society that can find its lost dogs. Good?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The ban on tetraethyl lead in petrol did make a difference, according to hair samples. CC-licensed photo by Steve Snodgrass 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. Breathe easy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI use in breast cancer screening cuts rate of later diagnosis by 12%, study finds • The Guardian

Tobi Thomas:

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The use of artificial intelligence in breast cancer screening reduces the rate of a cancer diagnosis by 12% in subsequent years and leads to a higher rate of early detection, according to the first trial of its kind.

Researchers said the study was the largest to date looking at AI use in cancer screening. It involved 100,000 women in Sweden who were part of mammography screening and were randomly assigned to either AI-supported screening or to a standard reading by two radiologists between April 2021 and December 2022.

The AI system worked by analysing the mammograms and assigning low-risk cases to a single reading and high-risk cases to a double one by radiologists, as well as highlighting suspicious findings to support radiologists.

Mammography screening supported by AI reduced cancer diagnoses in the years after a breast screening appointment by 12%, according to the research, published in The Lancet. There were 1.55 cancers per 1,000 women in the AI-supported group compared with 1.76 cancers per 1,000 women in the control group.

More than four in five cancer cases (81%) in the AI-supported mammography group were detected at the screening stage, compared with just under three quarters (74%) in the control group, and there were also almost a third (27%) fewer aggressive sub-type cancers in the AI group compared with the control.

Dr Kristina Lång, from Lund University in Sweden and the lead author of the study, said that AI-supported mammography could help detect cancers at an early stage, but that there were caveats.

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As it’s worth bearing in mind, the AI being used here is the worst it’s ever going to be. From here it’ll only get better. And AI is going to touch more and more lives – hopefully, improving them.
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Spotlighting The World Factbook as we bid a fond farewell • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

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Somewhat devastating news today from CIA:

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One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset.

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There’s not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997.

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.

Up until 2020 the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site. Those are available (along with the rest of the Factbook) on the Internet Archive.

I downloaded the 384MB .zip file for the year 2020 and extracted it into a new GitHub repository, simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020. I’ve enabled GitHub Pages for that repository so you can browse the archived copy at simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/.

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Peculiar, but then the entire Trump administration – as mentioned here before – seems dedicated to tearing down absolutely everything built up over the past 50 years.
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Why Waymo is having a hard time time stopping for school buses • The Verge

Mack DeGeurin, on how Waymos have 23 incidents where Waymo robotaxis haven’t fully stopped (as they’re legally required to) for school buses which are loading and unloading, including one low-speed collision with a child:

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Navigating around school buses is one of the more dangerous aspects of driving, for both humans and robots alike. NHTSA attributed 61 fatalities to vehicles illegally passing school buses between 2000 and 2023, almost half of whom were pedestrians under the age of 18. That danger has less to do with the bus drivers themselves, who are typically licensed and careful, and more to do with the chaotic, improvisational nature of the situation. Buses are often double-packed, and kids, being kids, might not wait to cross the street when they are supposed to.

“Waymos are having an issue because every driver has issues around school buses,” Ju said

As a result, drivers navigating around buses need to rely on experience and intuition in addition to following the firm set of rules they learned in driver’s ed. That kind of common-sense logic, which comes naturally to skilled human drivers, Wu says, is particularly challenging for self-driving cars.

“There’s all these moments in time where you actually have to make a judgment call between different things that you’re supposed to do,” Ju said.

On a technical level, there may be more at play. According to George Mason University professor and director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center Missy Cummings, the apparent spike in robotaxi safety issues involving school buses may be linked to what she describes as Waymo’s increasing shift away from traditional, modular machine-learning toward a greater emphasis on end-to-end learning, a technology she calls “faddish” and “still nascent.”

Waymo, publicly, says it uses a mixture of the two, but some speculate that that balance is shifting.

Earlier autonomous-vehicle systems relied on more conservative, layered architectures, with separate modules responsible for detecting objects, classifying them, and applying explicit safety rules governing how a vehicle should respond. End-to-end learning, by contrast, collapses much of that process into a single model that takes in all of the information gathered by a car’s sensors at once and produces driving decisions probabilistically, based on patterns learned from large swaths of human driving behavior. The result is something that can seem more “natural” and humanlike, though Cummings argues it can also introduce additional risk, especially in high-stakes scenarios like school bus stops.

The safety incidents demonstrate “all the hallmarks of problems when you change architecture,” Cummings said. “I suspect many [robotaxi companies] are doing it.”

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New approaches to trolley problems bring new outcomes.
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OpenAI is hoppin’ mad about Anthropic’s new Super Bowl TV ads • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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[OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman opened his lengthy post on X by granting that the ads were “funny” and that he “laughed.” But then the tone shifted. “I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest,” he wrote. “We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.”

He went further: “I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.”

Altman framed the dispute as a fight over access. “More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently shaped problem than they do,” he wrote. He then accused Anthropic of overreach: “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI,” adding that Anthropic blocks “companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us).” He closed with: “One authoritarian company won’t get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.”

OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch posted a response, calling the ads “funny” before pivoting. “Anthropic thinks powerful AI should be tightly controlled in small rooms in San Francisco and Davos,” she wrote. “That it’s too DANGEROUS for you.”

Anthropic’s post declaring Claude ad-free does hedge a bit, however. “Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so,” Anthropic wrote.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman pointed this out on X, asking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei directly whether he would “commit to never selling Claude’s ‘users’ attention or data to advertisers,’” calling it a “genuine question” and noting that Anthropic’s blog post “makes it sound like you’re keeping the option open.”

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Very generous of OpenAI to take so much notice of Anthropic; the equivalent of standing in the street shouting “I’M NOT OFFENDED, YOU KNOW”. (Internet denizens might pick between a couple of @dril posts.)

However Brockman is surely right. Like Google before it (thanks @wendyg), Anthropic is taking a stance it won’t be able to keep.
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Calls to halt UK Palantir contracts grow amid “lack of transparency” over deals • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Labour should halt public contracts with the US tech company Palantir, opposition politicians have said, amid growing concern at the lack of government transparency over dealings with the company and Peter Mandelson.

Since 2023, Palantir has secured more than £500m in contracts with the NHS and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while it employed Global Counsel, the lobbying firm founded by Mandelson. Emails released by the US Department of Justice show Mandelson sought help from Jeffrey Epstein to find “rich individuals” as clients.

The government has for months blocked attempts by MPs and campaigners to scrutinise Palantir’s deals. Requests for information about meetings between the company’s leadership with Keir Starmer and the former prime minister Boris Johnson were among those that have been refused.

With Palantir now expanding its AI-powered technology into British policing, the government is facing calls to freeze its involvement with the Denver-based company, which was co-founded by the Donald Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel, who also had a relationship with Epstein. It also provides its military technology to the Israel Defense Forces and to Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown.

On Thursday, Martin Wrigley MP, a Liberal Democrat member of the Commons technology select committee, called for a parliamentary debate on “the suitability of Palantir” as a supplier to critical national infrastructure. Wrigley told the Guardian: “I would halt any further contracts with Palantir until we have a clear picture of how these [existing contracts] came about.”

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This is going to be impossible for the government to resist, surely. Peter Mandelson now has the reverse Midas touch, so anything he has been involved in will, or should, be viewed a priori as unsavoury. And as long as the government refuses to allow more transparency, the opposition (and some awkward government MPs) will keep punching the Mandelson bruise.
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Does intermittent fasting live up to the hype? • The New York Times

Sally Adee:

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In 2013, a British journalist and a doctor introduced an obscure dietary protocol to the wider culture. The idea was simple: Two days a week, eat almost nothing — fewer than 600 calories. The rest of the time, eat normally.

The writers, Dr. Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer, claimed “The Fast Diet” could help you shed fat, reverse Type 2 diabetes and stave off age-related diseases of mind and body. Early studies had shown it had outsize benefits in lab mice, and scientists were enthusiastic about its prospects for humans.

…The most common claim about intermittent fasting is that it’s a better way to lose weight than other diets. Early mouse and rat experiments suggested that something interesting was going on beyond simple calorie restriction. The animals lost weight and stayed healthier than mice that ate normally, no matter how many calories they binged between fasts.

But in humans, the idea that intermittent fasts offer special weight loss benefits “really hasn’t been borne out by the data,” said James Betts, a professor of metabolic physiology at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

At first glance, it would appear that the research is mixed — some studies find that intermittent fasting is no more effective for weight loss than other diets, while others report a small additional benefit. But many of the latter are based on small, low quality studies, Dr. Betts said.

He and his colleagues have reviewed many studies published in the past few years and found that much of the pro-fasting research is corrupted by studies that make massive errors, like counting study subjects twice or misinterpreting their own data.

“There are only probably about 20 or 30 studies out there that are good,” Dr. Varady said. “It’s not bad, but it’s like all diets,” she added. “It can’t produce more than 5% weight loss.”

The diet’s major selling point is that it’s easier to stick to than simple calorie restriction, but even this may be overstated, according to two recent papers. In other words, Dr. Harvie said, people seem to get bored with intermittent fasting just as they get bored with other diets.

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A nation turns its lonely eyes back to GLP-1s.
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The coming crypto apocalypse • Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini:

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As of this writing, Bitcoin is down 35% from its October peak, below where it was when Trump was elected, and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins are down 95%. Every time gold has spiked in response to trade or geopolitical ructions over the past year, Bitcoin has fallen sharply. Far from being a hedge, it is a way to leverage risk, showing a strong correlation with other risky assets like speculative stocks.

Calling Bitcoin or any other crypto vehicle a “currency” has always been bogus. It is neither a unit of account, a scalable means of payment, nor a stable store of value. Even though El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, it accounts for less than 5% of transactions for goods and services. Crypto is not even an asset, as it has no income stream, function, or industrial or real-world use (unlike gold and silver).

Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch, the one and only “killer app” in crypto is the stablecoin: a digital version of old-fashioned fiat money, which the financial and banking industry already digitalized decades ago. Yes, whether digital money and financial services should be on a blockchain (distributed ledger) or a traditional double-ledger platform remains a question.

But 95% of “blockchain” monies and digital services are blockchain in name only. They are private rather than public, centralized rather than decentralized, permissioned rather than permissionless, and validated by a small group of trusted authenticators (as in traditional digital finance and banking) rather than by decentralized agents in jurisdictions with no rule of law.

True decentralized finance will never reach scale. No serious government – not even the Trump administration – will ever allow full anonymity of monetary and financial transactions, because that would be a boon for criminals, terrorists, rogue states, non-state actors, human traffickers, assorted crooks, and tax dodgers.

Moreover, because digital wallets and regulated exchanges must be subjected to standard anti-money laundering and know-your-customer (AML/KYC) rules, it is not even clear that transaction costs through permissioned and private “blockchains” are any lower – especially now that traditional financial ledgers have improved with real-time settlement and faster clearing tools. The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised.

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Bitcoin’s been dropping further on Thursday, but I long since realised that – as the saying goes – the market can stay irrational longer than I can predict sensible things for it.
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Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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As the world speeds towards 2C of global heating, the risks of extreme weather disasters and climate tipping points are increasing fast. But current economic models used by governments and financial institutions entirely miss such shocks, the researchers said, instead forecasting that steady economic growth will be slowed only by gradually rising average temperatures. This is because the models assume the future will behave like the past, despite the burning of fossil fuels pushing the climate system into uncharted territory.

Tipping points, such as the collapse of critical Atlantic currents or the Greenland ice sheet, would have global consequences for society. Some are thought to be at, or very close to, their tipping points but the timing is difficult to predict. Combined extreme weather disasters could wipe out national economies, the researchers, from the University of Exeter and financial thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative, said.

Their report concludes governments, regulators and financial managers must pay far more attention to these high impact but lower likelihood risks, because avoiding irreversible outcomes by cutting carbon emissions is far cheaper than trying to cope with them.

“We’re not dealing with manageable economic adjustments,” said Dr Jesse Abrams, at the University of Exeter. “The climate scientists we surveyed were unambiguous: current economic models can’t capture what matters most – the cascading failures and compounding shocks that define climate risk in a warmer world – and could undermine the very foundations of economic growth.”

“For financial institutions and policymakers, it’s a fundamental misreading of the risks we face,” he said. “We are thinking about something like a 2008 [crash], but one we can’t recover from as well. Once we have ecosystem breakdown or climate breakdown, we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks.”

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In the SF novelist John Brunner (him again!) book The Sheep Look Up, petrol cars are set upon by protesters who destroy them while demanding better environmental standards. The only problem is that everyone’s so comfortable with their petrol/diesel cars that you can’t imagine that happening; it would take too much willingness to tolerate self-sacrifice, and we have become worse and worse at that.

Maybe a sort of war footing is what’s needed. But you need to be submerged in the conflict for that to work.
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Memory prices surge up to 90% from Q4 2025 • Counterpoint Research

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Memory prices have risen by 80%-90% QoQ in Q1 2026 so far, according to the February issue of Counterpoint’s Memory Price Tracker, marking an unprecedented and record-breaking surge. The primary driver of this rise is the sharp price increase in general-purpose server DRAM. Furthermore, NAND, which was relatively quiet in Q4, is also seeing a parallel jump of 80%-90% in the first quarter. Combined with the rising prices of some HBM3e products, the market is witnessing a full-throttle upward trend across all segments.

In server-grade memory, for instance, the price of 64GB RDIMM has surged from a fixed contract price of $450 in the fourth quarter to over $900 in the first quarter, and it appears likely to surpass the $1,000 mark in the second quarter.

Senior Analyst Jeongku Choi emphasized, “For device manufacturers, this is a double whammy – rising component costs and weakened consumer purchasing power will likely slow the demand as the quarter progresses. This calls for OEMs to change procurement patterns or focus on premium models to justify the higher price by delivering more value to consumers.”

Smartphone manufacturers are reducing the DRAM content or substituting TLC SSDs with more cost-effective QLC alternatives. Simultaneously, there is a clear trend of declining orders for LPDDR4, which is currently in short supply, and increasing orders for LPDDR5, supported by the rollout of new entry-level chipsets that are compatible with the latest DRAM standard.

Choi further noted, “The memory profitability is expected to reach unprecedented levels. DRAM operating margins have already reached the 60% range in Q4 2025, marking the first time margins for general-purpose DRAM have surpassed those of HBM. The first quarter of 2026 is set to be the period where DRAM margins exceed their historical peaks for the first time.

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More than doubling over the course of a few months. Anyone who didn’t have their RAM supply all tied up months ago is truly screwed now. In fact some memory manufacturers might be looking to simply break contracts with smaller buyers in order to serve more promising customers now. Hence PC makers looking for Chinese RAM.
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A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked • Ars Technica

Jennifer Oullette:

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ve known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it’s because there are growing concerns over the Trump administration’s move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA’s mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can’t do exactly what they’d like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it’s had really, really positive effects.”

An American mechanical and chemical engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. was a key player in the development of leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) because it was an excellent anti-knock agent, as well as the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) like freon. Midgley publicly defended the safety of tetraethyl lead (TEL), despite experiencing lead poisoning firsthand. He held a 1924 press conference during which he poured TEL on his hand and inhaled TEL vapor for 60 seconds, claiming no ill effects. It was probably just a coincidence that he later took a leave of absence from work because of lead poisoning. (Midgley’s life ended in tragedy: he was severely disabled by polio in 1940 and devised an elaborate rope-and-pulley system to get in and out of bed. That system ended up strangling him to death in 1944, and the coroner ruled it suicide.)

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Maybe there is a God, with a very warped sense of humour.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified