We don’t do business with ants, even though they can do a lot we might find useful. Would super-AIs treat us like ants too? CC-licensed photo by Nicolas Rénac 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. Us, colonial? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Instagram connects vast paedophile network • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt:

»

Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles…

…The promotion of underage-sex content violates rules established by Meta as well as federal law.

In response to questions from the Journal, Meta acknowledged problems within its enforcement operations and said it has set up an internal task force to address the issues raised.

«

This is terrible. And it’s worse than the 2019 discovery that paedophiles were using YouTube comments on videos of children to create ad-hoc networks. There, at least, YouTube wasn’t promoting the comments. (The link should be free to read.)
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TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away • Vulture

Josef Adalian and Lane Brown:

»

Across the town [ie Hollywood], there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework.

The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labour unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetises its biggest hits: it doesn’t.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.

“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”

«

An absorbing read which also makes one think that streaming, whether music or video (and perhaps also spoken, ie podcasts?), is only good for the consumer and the provider, but not the content creator. That, though, carries the seeds of its own destruction.
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The platforms give up on 2020 [US election] lies • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

One function [Elon] Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions. Across a variety of dimensions, Musk has moved fast and loudest — and when others have followed, the response has been barely a whimper.

Mass layoffs, stricter job performance requirements, a war on remote work, paid verification for social accounts — all of these served as a kind of aphrodisiac for other Silicon Valley CEOs, who proceeded to implement their own, slightly softer versions of Musk’s cultural reset.

Most recently, Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

Last month, for example, Musk told an interviewer that users who made false claims about the 2020 election being stolen “would be corrected.” But there was no accompanying effort to make that happen. And so, that same week, the top 10 posts promoting a rigged election narrative racked up a collective 43,000 retweets, the Associated Press reported.

As Musk was surely not aware, his predecessors had sought to unwind the company’s enforcement of 2020 election lies. In January 2022, CNN reported to general surprise that Twitter had abandoned its old policy in March 2021. Enforcement measures were intended to operate only until the next president was inaugurated, a spokeswoman said at the time, and no longer.

In any case, Twitter’s peers took notice of its reversal and chose to follow suit. In February, Meta restored Donald Trump’s accounts, and upon reinstating him said it would no longer prevent users from lying about the 2020 election. And on Friday, YouTube announced that it wouldn’t, either.

«

Twitter used to be a great leader in setting these standards. No longer. And as Newton points out, that means defection becomes much easier for all the other platforms. None of which is encouraging, as another American election looms.
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India pauses plans to add new coal plants for five years, bets on renewables, batteries • AP News

Sibi Arasu:

»

The Indian government will not consider any proposals for new coal plants for the next five years and focus on growing its renewables sector, according to an updated national electricity plan released Wednesday evening.

The temporary pause in the growth of the dirty fuel was hailed by energy experts as a positive step for a country that is currently reliant on coal for around 75% of its electricity.

Updated every five years, the plan serves as a guideline for India’s priorities in its electricity sector.

India is the world’s third highest emitter and most populous country. It plans to reach net zero emissions by 2070, which would mean significantly slashing coal use and ramping up renewable energy.

In a draft of the plan released in September, the Central Electricity Authority, which is in charge of planning for India’s electricity needs, projected that nearly 8,000 megawatts of new coal capacity was required by 2027. But Wednesday’s strategy proposes the build out of more than 8,600 megawatts of battery energy storage systems instead.

«

Great to see India taking this crucial step. You don’t solve climate change by adding to it (NB Rowan Atkinson).
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First impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS • Daring Fireball

John Gruber is impressed with his impressions:

»

The worlds, as it were, of MacOS and iOS (or Windows, or Android, or whatever) are defined and limited by the displays on which they run. If MacOS is a place I go mentally when working, that place is manifested physically by the Mac’s display. It’s like the playing field, or the court, in sports — it has very clear, hard and fast, rectangular bounds. It is of fixed size and shape, and everything I do in that world takes place in the confines of those display boundaries.

VisionOS is very much going to be a conceptual place like that for work. But there is no display. There are no boundaries. The intellectual “place” where the apps of VisionOS are presented is the real-world place in which you use the device, or the expansive virtual environment you choose. The room in which you’re sitting is the canvas. The whole room. The display on a Mac or iOS device is to me like a portal, a rectangular window into a well-defined virtual world. With VisionOS the virtual world is the actual world around you.

…This is not confusing or complex, but it feels profound. Last night I chatted with a friend who, I found out only then, has been using Vision Pro for months inside Apple. While talking about this “your real world room is your canvas for arranging your application windows” aspect of the experience, he said that he spent weeks feeling a bit constrained, keeping his open VisionOS windows all in front of him as though on a virtual display, before a colleague opened his mind to spreading out and making applications windows much larger and arranging them in a wider carousel not merely in front of him but around him. The constraints of even the largest physical display simply do not exist with VisionOS.

«

Someone pointed out to me on Twitter that a Vision Pro might be like a laptop that would let you have multiple huge screens yet would fit in a kitchen drawer at the end of the work day. If Apple can solve the (keyboard) input problem, this could be remarkable.
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We don’t trade with ants • world spirit sock puppet

Katja Grace:

»

When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens:

“Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us”

“We don’t trade with ants”

I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation.

When a person says “we don’t trade with ants”, I think the implicit explanation is that humans are so big, powerful and smart compared to ants that we don’t need to trade with them because they have nothing of value and if they did we could just take it; anything they can do we can do better, and we can just walk all over them. Why negotiate when you can steal?

I think this is broadly wrong, and that it is also an interesting case of the classic cognitive error of imagining that trade is about swapping fixed-value objects, rather than creating new value from a confluence of one’s needs and the other’s affordances. It’s only in the imaginary zero-sum world that you can generally replace trade with stealing the other party’s stuff, if the other party is weak enough.

Ants, with their skills, could do a lot that we would plausibly find worth paying for.

«

The implication, of course, being that we humans would be the ants compared to the superintelligences. Grace makes some good points about what ants can do (and so cheaply!) which leads one to puzzle about why, dammit, we don’t trade with ants.
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Global smartphone production drops to a ten-year quarterly low at 250m units • Trendforce

»

The ongoing global economic downturn continues to impact consumer confidence in the market. TrendForce reports that the global production volume of smartphones in 1Q23 was only 250m units—marking a 19.5% YoY decrease. This represents not only the greatest annual decrease but also a historic low in quarterly production since 2014.

Samsung observed a slight surge in Q1 production thanks to the launch of its Galaxy S23 series, reaching 61.5m units—a 5.5% QoQ rise. However, TrendForce predicts a nearly 10% drop in Q2 production due to weakening demand for new models. Apple faced a substantial 27.5% QoQ drop in smartphone production in Q1, delivering a total of 53.3m units. The new iPhone 14 series accounted for approximately 78% of this figure, an improvement from the same period last year. Nonetheless, as the company navigates the transition period between model launches, a projected decrease of 20% is expected in Q2.

«

That’s a colossal drop; it’s as bad as the PC market is seeing, and I think there’s a suspicion that this is more than cyclical; that people are just not seeing any reason to buy a new smartphone at all. Foldables haven’t moved the dial in the slightest; they’re a margin of error.

But maybe if Apple were to offer cameras on its phones that could record in 3D, for viewing later on a headset… others might take that idea up too.
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Apple software chief Craig Federighi on iOS 17’s new privacy features • Fast Company

Michael Grothaus:

»

What does concern [Apple software VP Craig] Federighi from a privacy and security standpoint, however, is the human element. Specifically, he worries about a rise in the use of deepfakes, AI-generated audio and video that can make it look like anyone is saying or doing anything. As AI tools become more accessible in the years ahead, deepfakes could increasingly be used in so-called social engineering attacks, in which the attacker persuades a victim to hand over valuable data by tricking them into thinking they are communicating with someone they’re not.

“When someone can imitate the voice of your loved one,” he says, spotting social engineering attacks will only become more difficult. If “someone asks you, ‘Oh, can you just give me the password to this and that? I got locked out,’ ” and it literally sounds like your spouse, that, I think, is going to be a real threat.” Apple is already thinking through how to defend users from such trickery. “We want to do everything we can to make sure that we’re flagging [deepfake threats] in the future: Do we think we have a connection to the device of the person you think you’re talking to? These kinds of things. But it is going to be an interesting time,” he says, and everyone will need to “keep their wits about them.”

«

There’s plenty more in what is a very interesting interview; Federighi is by far the most expansive of the Apple VPs on parade these days.
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Apple avoids “AI” hype at WWDC keynote by baking ML into products • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Amid impressive new products like the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and the Apple Vision Pro revealed at Monday’s WWDC 2023 keynote event, Apple presenters never once mentioned the term “AI,” a notable omission given that its competitors like Microsoft and Google have been heavily focusing on generative AI at the moment. Still, AI was a part of Apple’s presentation, just by other names.

While “AI” is a very ambiguous term these days, surrounded by both astounding advancements and extreme hype, Apple chose to avoid that association and instead focused on terms like “machine learning” and “ML.” For example, during the iOS 17 demo, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi talked about improvements to autocorrect and dictation:

»

Autocorrect is powered by on-device machine learning, and over the years, we’ve continued to advance these models. The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever. And with the power of Apple Silicon, iPhone can run this model every time you tap a key.

«

Notably, Apple mentioned the AI term “transformer” in an Apple keynote. The company specifically talked about a “transformer language model,” which means its AI model uses the transformer architecture that has been powering many recent generative AI innovations, such as the DALL-E image generator and the ChatGPT chatbot.

«

As Edwards effectively points out, not saying “AI” wasn’t an omission; the presenters didn’t somehow forget to include it. They purposely avoided saying it because they’re trying very hard not to get lumped in with the other companies.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if you could get an iPhone alarm that could be shared with your family? An app developer has a lot of novel ideas like that. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Quine 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.

On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Sorry, Rowan Atkinson, electric cars are here to stay — and improve • The Washington Post

Michael Coren:

»

EVs [electric vehicles] still pollute. As [comedian but also car enthusiast Rowan] Atkinson writes, manufacturing EVs can generate more emissions than making conventional ones — nearly 70% more, according to Volvo statistics he cites.

There’s some truth to that, largely because of the energy it takes to make a battery. Building a Nissan Leaf generates the equivalent of about 65 grams of CO2 per kilometer (averaged over the vehicle lifetime) compared to 46 for the average European vehicle, according to an examination of the scientific literature by CarbonBrief, a climate science website.

But that number is ultimately misleading. First, manufacturing emissions are predicted to fall as battery manufacturing improves and the industry decarbonizes. Second, it doesn’t matter much in the final accounting.

The vast majority of a car’s emissions come from the fuel the vehicle consumes over its lifetime, not the materials that go into them. When overall emissions are calculated over 150,000 to 200,000 miles, it turns out those from manufacturing are “a really, really small number,” says Jason Quinn, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University who conducts life cycle analyses.

A more honest accounting, by CarbonBrief, shows that driving a Nissan Leaf EV in 2019 generated at least three times fewer lifetime emissions per kilometer compared to an average conventional car.
In the United States, it’s already less polluting — and cheaper — to recharge rather than refill, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The same is the case in most places around the world.

Every year, this argument gets stronger. The United States is now targeting a carbon-free grid by 2035. “EVs are just going to get better because the grid is getting cleaner,” says Quinn.

«

I didn’t link to the original Atkinson article (in which he noted he has an electronic engineering degree – yeah, well, join the crowd, matey) because it seemed so in need of rebuttal: the idea that it’s better to keep burning fossil fuels is ridiculous on its face. And so, here we have it.
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This guy on Twitter keeps inventing horrible tech features that no one wants • Digg

Darcy Jimenez:

»

Imagine if your DoorDash deliverer could request a few of your fries via the app, or the person you were texting could see your thumb-shaped face in real-time as you typed. If you’ve seen these features doing the rounds on Twitter lately, you might have been fooled into thinking some of them were a reality.

Luckily, these unhinged ideas are all a product of Soren Iverson’s imagination. The product designer, who works at Cash App, has gone viral for his mockups of often nightmarish (and occasionally genius) “improvements” to the apps we use every day.

Iverson told Digg that he started off making “satirical UI” and exploring how AI could be used in “unexpected ways” — then, his shared iPhone alarm idea went viral in January of this year.

“From there I’ve just been making an idea a day, and having fun with it,” he said.

«

When I saw the headline, I thought they meant Elon Musk, but Iverson’s ideas are actually weirdly funny and just on the edge of workable (almost always tilting over into the wrong side). The “shared iPhone alarm” (“iOS alarms, but everyone has to wake up”), though, would be absolutely brilliant for a family: school days when you all need to get up, or head off on holiday, or whenever you need to do something in concert. Or when you’re with a team in a location and need coordination.
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Rep. Jim Jordan, GOP allies amplify scrutiny of top disinfo researchers • The Washington Post

Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn:

»

Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his allies in Congress are demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech.

Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.
Last week, Jordan threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests.

The university turned over its scholars’ communications with government officials and big social media platforms but is holding back records of some disinformation complaints. Stanford told The Washington Post that it omitted internal records, some filed by students. The university is negotiating for limited interviews.

The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians.

Jordan has argued that content removals urged by some in the government have suppressed legitimate theories on vaccine risks and the Covid-19 origins as well as news stories wrongly suspected of being part of foreign disinformation campaigns.

«

This is the downside of the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives: they go on their weird vendettas.
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iOS 17 preview • Apple

»

iOS 17 brings new features to enhance the things you do every day.

«

Unlike the headset, these (for the most part little) tweaks are actually going to be used by hundreds of millions. Some of them actually look useful too. Seems you can install the Developer Betas without having a developer account for the first time.
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Stefanie Sun deepfake music covers arise from AI voice cloning • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

Singaporean Mandopop diva Stefanie Sun is one of the most beloved singers in China. Over the past two decades, she has sold millions of albums and attracted a loyal fan base across the country. But the 44-year-old star has not released a new album since 2017, so fans decided to take on the task themselves.

Zheng, a Xiamen-based coder and dedicated fan, fed more than a 100 of Sun’s original songs into a deepfake voice generator called So-Vits-SVC, training the program to perform any song in Sun’s distinctive, lilting voice.

“I wanted to listen to her sing other songs,” Zheng, who preferred to be identified only by his last name for fear of legal consequences, told Rest of World. He used the model to generate a wide range of deepfake Sun covers — from the folk classic “Five Hundred Miles” to the pop hit “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. “It’s very similar. [Artificial intelligence] performs more consistently than Sun herself,” said Zheng.

The surge of open-source AI programs such as So-Vits-SVC — shared online by Chinese programmers on platforms such as GitHub — has allowed internet users to train and build their own deepfake models that mimic celebrity voices. From Singapore to Spain, people have used these Chinese-made AI programs to resurrect dead artists, parodize politicians, and bulk-produce songs in the voices of Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump.

«

This is the future, here right now. I wonder if some unknown artists will start feeding their own content into these systems in order to build up a catalog they can monetise. No copyright issues then.
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Apple Vision • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has tried it:

»

The larger Vision Pro opportunity is to move in on the iPad and to become the ultimate consumption device.

The keynote highlighted the movie watching experience of the Vision Pro, and it is excellent and immersive. Of course it isn’t, in the end, that much different than having an excellent TV in a dark room.

What was much more compelling were a series of immersive video experiences that Apple did not show in the keynote. The most striking to me were, unsurprisingly, sports. There was one clip of an NBA basketball game that was incredibly realistic: the game clip was shot from the baseline, and as someone who has had the good fortune to sit courtside, it felt exactly the same, and, it must be said, much more immersive than similar experiences on the Quest.

It turns out that one reason for the immersion is that Apple actually created its own cameras to capture the game using its new Apple Immersive Video Format. The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.

What is fascinating is that such a season pass should, in my estimation, look very different from a traditional TV broadcast, what with its multiple camera angles, announcers, scoreboard slug, etc. I wouldn’t want any of that: if I want to see the score, I can simply look up at the scoreboard as if I’m in the stadium; the sounds are provided by the crowd and PA announcer. To put it another way, the Apple Immersive Video Format, to a far greater extent than I thought possible, truly makes you feel like you are in a different place.

«

I wonder if the 3D cameras are going to be sold separately at some stage, because having to wear a camera is substandard, both as an experience and a solution. It would definitely seed sales of the headset.

Thompson’s post is free to read – it’s worth taking the time.
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Hands on with Apple’s Vision Pro: bringing the metaverse to life • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

Moving from app to app using the device could hardly be more intuitive thanks to eye- and hand-tracking. Click a button with your right hand, and an iPhone-like home screen appears. Glance at a photo or icon, then pinch your fingers to “double-click”. You can scroll through photos with a swiping gesture, or zoom in as if a giant smartphone were projected in front of your face.

The device can easily move between virtual reality, in which the wearer is fully immersed in a digital world, and “augmented reality,” which overlays images upon the real surroundings. An Apple Watch-like dial allows you to manually fade between these two modes or, in some settings, the effect is automatic: if a person stands beside you, just look at them and their image will slowly appear and become clearer with time.

Among the features Apple could not show in its presentation were the 3D photos and videos that the headset could capture. In my private demo, I could sit around a fire with friends or have a seat at the table as children blew out birthday candles in uncanny depth.

Gene Munster, portfolio manager at Deepwater Asset Management, said this part of the demo blew him away. “3D memories are going to change how we remember things,” he said. “I’m not going to want to take a birthday party video again, unless it’s like that.”

«

You say: but it costs $3,500, who can afford to have one of those and children? Related: the analysis company Trendforce reckons Apple will sell 200,000 in the first year despite “concerns around price and battery life”.

I’ll tell you who’ll record those videos of (kids’ and others’) birthday parties: paid flunkeys of the very rich. Think “Succession”, which surely would have used this as a throwaway in some episode had the Vision Pro been available.
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FTX’s big AI bet could help bail out customers • Semafor

Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti:

»

FTX’s bankers are quietly shopping what might be the most valuable asset inside the collapsed crypto exchange: a stake in Anthropic, a startup that has ridden the AI craze and is now worth billions of dollars.

Perella Weinberg, the boutique bank sorting out the mess left behind when FTX went bankrupt in November, has been teasing the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of shares in Anthropic to potential investors, people familiar with the matter said. The privately-held company, which created the Claude chatbot that is taking on ChatGPT, has gone from virtually unknown to one of the hottest companies in the AI boom in a matter of months.

FTX appeared to own $500m worth of Anthropic stock when it went bankrupt, though it’s unclear how former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrived at that valuation. The stake is now expected to fetch nine figures, money that would go to former customers.

Bankers are discussing whether to sell the entire stake now or hold some back, on the theory that AI valuations will keep rising. (Bankman-Fried is no longer an investor in Semafor).

«

On the gambling premise alone, you’d be crazy to sell it all at once; sell half now, half later if it appreciates in value.
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Linda Yaccarino replaces Elon Musk as Twitter boss • BBC News

Annabelle Liang:

»

Linda Yaccarino, the new boss of troubled social media firm Twitter, has started the role earlier than expected.

Ms Yaccarino, 60, was previously head of advertising at NBCUniversal. She joined days after Twitter lost its second head of trust and safety.

Elon Musk had announced on 12 May that his successor would join in six weeks but her start date appears to have been brought forward.

Twitter also announced it had recruited Joe Benarroch from NBCUniversal. Mr Benarroch was senior vice president of communications, advertising and partnerships at the media giant. He also worked for a number of years at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. At Twitter he will focus on business operations.

Mr Musk has said he plans to remain involved with the firm. The billionaire owner of Twitter said last year he would resign as chief executive once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job”.
It followed a Twitter poll when Mr Musk asked people to vote on whether he should resign – 57.5% voted yes.

Ms Yaccarino welcomed her former NBCUniversal co-worker Mr Benarroch to Twitter, which is known for its logo of a bird. She tweeted: “Welcome to the flock @benarroch_joe! From one bird to the next.”

He said: “I am looking forward to bringing my experience to Twitter, and to working with the entire team to build Twitter 2.0 together.”

«

And so ends the short period when the Twitter CEO was actually an involved, active user of Twitter, which had never happened before. (Even with Jack Dorsey.) Tagging in Benarroch to keep Musk away from day-to-day operations is smart.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, the FTC has fined Amazon’s Ring because in the past, employees could watch customer videos without authorisation. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. No pictures please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon’s Ring to pay millions to settle FTC privacy lawsuit • Business Insider

Jordan Hart:

»

Amazon-owned smart doorbell company Ring agreed to settle a lawsuit filed against the company by the Federal Trade Commission regarding privacy and data security concerns.

Ring will pay $5.8m to the FTC and implement a new system for data security as part of the settlement, according to court documents filed Wednesday. The surveillance company — which was acquired by Amazon in 2018 in a $1bn deal — is used by millions as a form of security, but the FTC alleged Ring employees had unrestricted access to footage on customers’ home security systems.

“Ring promptly addressed these issues on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry,” a Ring spokesperson told Insider. “While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and deny violating the law, this settlement resolves this matter so we can focus on innovating on behalf of our customers.”

In one instance, a Ring employee viewed thousands of recordings from at least 81 female Ring camera users between June and August 2017, CNN reported.

“Only after the supervisor noticed that the male employee was only viewing videos of ‘pretty girls’ did the supervisor escalate the report of misconduct,” the FTC alleged in its complaint, obtained by CNN. “Only at that point did Ring review a portion of the employee’s activity and, ultimately, terminate his employment.”

«

This happened last week, and I linked to the related Alexa settlement, but the details in this are, as above, terrible. There was no proper control over who could see which videos. Skim through the details of the FTC complaint and shudder. But it’s also absolutely the case that every tech company that makes hardware or software has a God Mode at some point, and the question is when it deletes it – if ever.
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Apple reveals Vision Pro AR headset at its worldwide developers conference • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

Apple has lifted the lid on the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley and revealed the Vision Pro, a $3,499 VR headset.

“With Vision Pro, you’re no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas,” the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. “Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to Spatial Computing.”

The headset allows users to interact with “apps and experiences”, the Apple vice-president of human interface, Alan Dye, said, in an augmented reality (AR) version of their own surroundings or in a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) space. “Apple Vision Pro relies solely on your eyes, hands and voice,” Dye said. “You browse the system simply by looking. App icons come to life when you look at them; simply tap your fingers together to select, and gently flick to scroll.”

A feature called “EyeSight” will show users’ eyes on the front screen when they are in an AR mode, simulating a transparent screen and letting them more naturally interact with those around them, but will show a blurred version of a VR experience to indicate to others when they are not present in the room.

“Because you can see the world clearly when wearing Vision Pro, you remain present in your space,” Apple said. “You can review your to-do list and notes, review your next trip in Safari, and play music while you type. It works seamlessly with familiar Bluetooth accessories, and you can even bring your Mac wirelessly into Apple Vision Pro just by looking at it.”

As well as applications built from the ground up for the device, Vision Pro will also run apps built for iOS, appearing as a floating screen in front of the user. The company is pitching the device as a powerful but compact replacement or augmentation for a user’s existing devices.

«

Lots of people seem to think this will somehow take over from TV. Not a chance, unless you’re living alone in a cupboard. I still don’t see the attraction.
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ChatGPT is spawning religious chatbots in India • Rest of World

Nadia Nooreyezdan:

»

In January 2023, when ChatGPT was setting new growth records, Bengaluru-based software engineer Sukuru Sai Vineet launched GitaGPT. The chatbot, powered by GPT-3 technology, provides answers based on the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture. GitaGPT mimics the Hindu god Krishna’s tone — the search box reads, “What troubles you, my child?”

In the Bhagavad Gita, according to Vineet, Krishna plays a therapist of sorts for the character Arjuna. A religious AI bot works in a similar manner, Vineet told Rest of World, “except you’re not actually talking to Krishna. You’re talking to a bot that’s pretending to be him.”

At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. Rest of World found that some of the answers generated by the Gita bots lack filters for casteism, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for instance, say it is acceptable to kill another if it is one’s dharma or duty.

…And, as with all AI, these chatbots already display certain political biases.

Rest of World found that three of the Gita chatbots held strong opinions on India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party has close links to right-wing, Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. While the chatbots praised Modi, they criticized his political opponent, Rahul Gandhi. Anant Sharma’s GitaGPT declared Gandhi “not competent enough to lead the country,” while Vikas Sahu’s Little Krishna chatbot said he “could use some more practice in his political strategies.”

«

Maybe we’re going to get AI-mediated social warming. Not encouraging.
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SEC says Binance misused customer funds, ran illegal crypto exchange in US • WSJ

Dave Michaels, Caitlin Ostroff and Patricia Kowsmann:

»

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday sued Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, alleging the overseas company operated an illegal trading platform in the US and misused customers’ funds.

The SEC lawsuit also named Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and controlling shareholder, as a defendant. The SEC said that Binance and Zhao misused customers’ funds and diverted them to a trading entity that Zhao controlled. That trading firm, Sigma Chain, engaged in manipulative trading that made Binance’s volume appear larger than it actually was, the SEC said.

Binance also concealed that it commingled billions of dollars in customer assets and sent them to a third-party, Merit Peak, which was owned by Zhao, the SEC alleged. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the SEC was examining the relationship between Binance.US—the US arm created in 2019—and Sigma Chain and Merit Peak.

“This will be a landmark case,” said Kurt Gottschall, a partner at Haynes and Boone LLP and former head of the SEC’s Denver office. “The SEC appears to be very concerned about the commingling of customer funds.”

«

This feels like wrapping up the loose ends. Related: a long Fortune article (subscription, or broken Javascript) about the crypto winter, which says inter alia:

»

Fundraising for crypto VC has fallen off a cliff in 2023, according to PitchBook data provided to Fortune. Though the data is only through mid-May, it’s not off to a good start: Crypto firms globally have raised just $500m—98% less than in all of 2022—over eight funds—90% fewer.

«

Still $500m too much if you ask me, but as they say, it’s a start.
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Japan’s hot-spring resorts are blocking geothermal energy plants • The Economist

»

With over 100 active volcanoes, Japan is estimated to have a potential geothermal resource of 23 gigawatts, equivalent to the output of 23 nuclear reactors. But the Nakao [2 megawatt geothermal power] plant is a rarity—Japan has hardly developed its geothermal reserves. Geothermal energy accounts for just 0.3% of its electricity supply. Japan holds the third-largest geothermal potential in the world, after America and Indonesia, but ranks tenth in terms of geothermal power generation. For a country heavily dependent on imported energy and struggling to honour its commitment to decarbonise its economy by 2050, this represents a huge missed opportunity.

Japan’s sprawling onsen (hot spring) industry is the main obstacle to geothermal development. Though many geologists reckon there is little chance of geothermal plants negatively affecting bathing pools (which are generally filled by much shallower aquifers than the geothermal reservoirs energy companies look for), the onsen industry is unconvinced. “The government relies on hot springs for its tourism—what are they going to do if the hot springs disappear because they keep building geothermal power plants?” asks Sato Yoshiyasu of the Japan Onsen Association, a big industry group. Japan’s 3,000 hot-spring resorts routinely withhold the consent necessary for development to proceed. And the fact that they are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and attract around 130m visitors a year, has largely deterred the government from pushing back.

«

Japan imports 94% of its energy. Nimbyism really isn’t limited by geography, is it.
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Eight reasons why the Post Office compensation scheme is a scandal • Tax Policy Associates Ltd

Dan Neidle:

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Between 2000 and 2017, the Post Office falsely accused thousands of postmasters of theft. Some went to prison. Many had their assets seized and their reputations shredded. Marriages and livelihoods were destroyed, and at least 61 have now died, never receiving an apology or recompense. These prosecutions were on the basis of financial discrepancies reported by a computer accounting system called Horizon. The Post Office knew from the start that there were serious problems with the Horizon system, but covered it up, and proceeded with aggressive prosecutions based on unreliable data. It’s beyond shocking, and there should be criminal prosecutions of those responsible.

The Post Office then spent years fighting compensation claims in the courts, using every trick in the book to draw things out as long as possible – even a completely meritless application for a judge to recuse himself on the basis he was biased, which the Court of Appeal described as “without substance”, “fatally flawed” and “absurd”.

Now, finally – ten years after the Post Office almost certainly knew that it had wronged these people, it is paying compensation – but in a way that guarantees the wronged postmasters receive derisory sums. This article focuses on the “historical shortfall scheme” (HSS), which compensates postmasters who were not actually convicted of theft, but who were accused of theft, lost their jobs, threatened with prosecution, and forced to repay cash “shortfalls” which in fact were entirely fictitious. There are about 2,500 HSS claims. The average settlement payment so far is only £32,000.

«

The fact that no minister has taken the Post Office and shaken it by the scruff of the neck, and that the people who were in charge of the false accusations have been allowed to get paid and even given honours, shows modern Britain at its absolute worst.
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Twitter’s US ad sales plunge 59% as woes continue • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu:

»

Twitter’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88m, down 59% from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its US weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30%, the document said.

That performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees.

Twitter’s ad sales staff is concerned that advertisers may be spooked by a rise in hate speech and pornography on the social network, as well as more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products, the people said. The company has forecast that its US ad revenue this month will be down at least 56% each week compared with a year ago, according to one internal document.

These issues will soon be inherited by Linda Yaccarino, the NBCUniversal executive whom Mr. Musk named Twitter’s chief executive last month. She [was] expected to start the job on Monday, four people familiar with the situation said.

…Twitter feels increasingly “unpredictable and chaotic,” said Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, an association for premium publishers. “Advertisers want to run in an environment where they are comfortable and can send a signal about their brand,” he added.

Some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers — including Apple, Amazon and Disney — have been spending less on the platform than last year, three former and current Twitter employees said. Large specialized “banner” ads on Twitter’s trends page, which can cost $500,000 for 24 hours and are almost always bought by large brands to promote events, shows or movies, are often going unfilled, they said.

«

As the article points out, the quality of advertisers is plummeting too. And on Monday the person in charge of North American government relations resigned. Pretty soon there’ll be nobody left at all.
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Compensation for atmospheric appropriation • A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries

Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel:

»

Wealthy, industrialised nations of the global North, such as the United States and Germany, are responsible for 90% of excessive levels of carbon dioxide emissions, and could be liable to pay a total of $170 trillion in compensation or reparations to ensure climate change targets are met by 2050.

These funds amount to an annual transfer of nearly $6 trillion or about 7% of annual global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which should be distributed to low-emitting countries, such as India and Nigeria, as compensation for decarbonising their economies far more rapidly than would otherwise be required.

In our new open-access study, published in Nature Sustainability, we analyse 168 countries and quantify historical responsibility for climate breakdown (or lack thereof), based on excess CO₂ emissions beyond equality-based fair shares of global carbon budgets.

We propose an evidence-based compensation mechanism that takes into account historical responsibility for both causing and averting climate breakdown in an ambitious scenario where all countries decarbonise from current levels to ‘net zero’ by 2050, which keeps global heating below 1.5°C.

«

This won’t happen, of course, but it is educative to see (using the interactive charts) that China actually won’t ever hit the sort of emissions level that would require it to contribute to the theoretical reparations, and that the US is a far worse offender.
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Big Tech can’t escape the ad business • The Atlantic

James Ball:

»

Targeting isn’t about making the user’s ad experience better; it’s about showing the highest-value advertisements to the users who match the advertiser’s criteria. In effect, this means that when you visit a site, it looks for the identifying information it has about you, and determines which detail has the highest value.

For example, a site might identify that you’re browsing from the U.S., that you’re currently logged in to your Facebook account, and that you’re a regular reader of a premium newspaper that we’ll call The Economics Times Journal. That last bit of identifying information is worth much more than the other two: On average, readers of this publication have significantly higher salaries than the U.S. population at large.

This means that you might get an ad for a more premium product, even on a garbage clickbait site, than someone who reached it with just the first two tags attached to them. But this presents a problem for the publication itself: Its homepage now becomes the most expensive place on the internet for advertisers to reach its own readers. Why pay to advertise there if you can reach users more cheaply when they browse elsewhere?

The result of this system is a conflict of interest between the Big Tech companies that run the ad networks and their clients, fueled by relentless tracking of users across the internet, with perhaps dozens of different trackers on any site that seeks to make money from advertising.

So-called artificial-intelligence search, powered by large language models such as GPT-4, will likely make that conflict even more intense, as Bing and Google allow AI assistants to present information from across the web on their own sites, giving users even less reason to click through to publishers.

«

Publishers seem likely to get badly squeezed by this tendency, especially as GPT-alikes suck up information.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The departures from the executive ranks at Twitter are continuing, with two key people leaving at the end of last week. CC-licensed photo by CeltikipoohCeltikipooh 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.

There was another post coming last Friday at the Social Warming Substack. Go have a read! Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The AI founder taking credit for Stable Diffusion’s success seems to have a history of exaggeration • Forbes

Kenrick Cai and Iain Martin:

»

AI researchers with whom [Stability AI CEO and founder Emad] Mostaque worked told Forbes he claimed credit he did not earn or deserve. And when pressed, Stability spokesperson Motez Bishara admitted to Forbes that Stability had no special deal with Amazon.

Mostaque’s other mischaracterizations to investors include multiple fundraising decks seen by Forbes that presented the OECD, WHO and World Bank as Stability’s partners at the time — which all three organizations deny. Bishara said the company could not comment on the presentations “without knowing the exact version,” but that they were accompanied by additional data and documentation.

Inside the company, wages and payroll taxes have been repeatedly delayed or unpaid, according to eight former employees, and last year the UK tax agency threatened to seize company assets. (“There were several issues that were expeditiously resolved,” Bishara said.)

…In responding to a detailed list of questions, Mostaque shared a statement saying that Stability had not historically prioritized the “systems and processes” underpinning the fast-growing startup. “We recognize our flaws, and we are working to improve and resolve these issues in an effective and compassionate manner,” he wrote.

AI experts and prospective investors have been privately expressing doubts about some of Mostaque’s claims for months now. Despite Silicon Valley’s sudden, insatiable appetite for AI startups, a number of venture capitalists told Forbes that the Stability founder has been struggling to raise hundreds of millions more in cash at a roughly $4bn valuation. Mostaque publicly claimed last October that annualized revenue had surpassed $10m, but insiders say sales have not improved (Bishara said the October number was “a fair assessment of anticipated revenues at the time,” and declined to comment on current revenue). “So many things don’t add up,” said one VC who rejected Mostaque’s funding overtures.

«

I’m wary of quoting the article in full because of British libel law, but it’s really not complimentary to Mostaque. Though one claim – that his wife, who’s head of PR, took thousands of pounds from the company – is completely explicable as repayment of a loan made previously to the company. You can see that when some VC money comes in, you might want to collect on the money put in months or years ago. Loans by directors to and from their companies are completely routine in startups.
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Air Force official’s story of killer AI was a hypothetical • Business Insider

Charles Davis and Paul Squire:

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An Air Force colonel who oversees AI testing used what he now says is a hypothetical to describe a military AI going rogue and killing its human operator in a simulation in a presentation at a professional conference.

But after reports of the talk emerged Thursday, the colonel said that he misspoke and that the “simulation” he described was a “thought experiment” that never happened.

Speaking at a conference last week in London, Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, head of the US Air Force’s AI Test and Operations, warned that AI-enabled technology can behave in unpredictable and dangerous ways, according to a summary posted by the Royal Aeronautical Society, which hosted the summit.

As an example, he described a simulation where an AI-enabled drone would be programmed to identify an enemy’s surface-to-air missiles (SAM). A human was then supposed to sign off on any strikes.

The problem, according to Hamilton, is that the AI would do its own thing — blow up stuff — rather than listen to its operator.

“The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat,” Hamilton said at the May 24 event, “at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

But in an update from the Royal Aeronautical Society on Friday, Hamilton admitted he “misspoke” during his presentation. Hamilton said the story of a rogue AI was a “thought experiment” that came from outside the military, and not based on any actual testing.

«

I read the blogpost, like all the other people who reported on this, and at no point did it suggest that this was a simulation in his mind. But it did echo some of the examples recorded in “The surprising creativity of digital evolution: a collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities“, a PDF full of weird stories. (I referenced it in Social Warming. It’s a fascinating read.)

Of course the hype around this story echoed the concerns about AI – extinction! – that have been going round. So no surprise that nobody called Hamilton.
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AI entertainment made to order: you think you want that? • At the Mountains of Sadness

Mike Drucker is a screenwriter:

»

On its face, entertainment made to order sounds nice, like finding porn of your favorite proper noun. In theory, it means that everything you watch will be specifically created for you and will cater to your tastes. You won’t have to scroll through a streaming service, quit the app, and then scroll another streaming service. You could say, “A romantic comedy starring Arianna Grande and Greta Garbo” and a machine would spit it out for you. And it’ll be perfect.

A couple things though.

First – and most obvious – none of us know what the fuck we want. I don’t mean that in some vast “We, the gatekeepers know what you want more than you do” way. I mean it in the literal sense of none of us know what the fuck we actually want from moment to moment. We aren’t scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because there’s nothing that appeals to us. We’re scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because we aren’t sure what we want to watch at that specific moment. There’s thousands of things that appeal to us we just skim right by.

You do it on Spotify all the time when a playlist you made for yourself hits a song you absolutely do not want to hear.

Like, I’m a fan of Law & Order, but I don’t want to watch it all the time. Sometimes I’ll skip right past it. No Law & Order for me! No thank you! I’m all set on what happens in a version of the Manhattan legal system featuring courtrooms with natural sunlight. Except, sometimes I think I want to watch Law & Order. And I really do and love it! Other times I don’t. And then I turn it off. And then I look for something else, even though my brain was certain I wanted Law & Order. 

Rather, it’s what we didn’t think we’d like that surprises us. Shows we think, “What the hell” and then end up loving. Documentaries that look boring as dog shit turn into thrilling mysteries. You finally got around to watching that movie everyone won’t shut up about with that actor you hate and – guess what? – you actually loved it. You didn’t know you would. But you did. 

«

It’s an excellent point. My expectation is that the AI systems will just churn out unlimited stuff and it’ll just be semi-random what you pick; serendipity might be the next phase of the internet.
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The world’s peak population may be smaller than expected • The Economist

»

few have noticed a wealth of new data that suggest that Africa’s birth rate is falling far more quickly than expected. Though plenty of growth is still baked in, this could have a huge impact on Africa’s total population by 2100. It could also provide a big boost to the continent’s economic development. “We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa,” says Jose Rimon II of Johns Hopkins University. “Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did.”

The UN’s population projections are widely seen as the most authoritative. Its latest report, published last year, contained considerably lower estimates for sub-Saharan Africa than those of a decade ago. For Nigeria, which has Africa’s biggest population numbering about 213m people, the UN has reduced its forecast for 2060 by more than 100m people (down to around 429m). By 2100 it expects the country to have about 550m people, more than 350m fewer than it reckoned a decade ago.

Yet even the UN’s latest projections may not be keeping pace with the rapid decline in fertility rates (the average number of children that women are expected to have) that some striking recent studies show. Most remarkable is Nigeria, where a UN-backed survey in 2021 found the fertility rate had fallen to 4.6 from 5.8 just five years earlier. This figure seems to be broadly confirmed by another survey, this time backed by USAID, America’s aid agency, which found a fertility rate of 4.8 in 2021, down from 6.1 in 2010. “Something is happening,” muses Argentina Matavel of the UN Population Fund.

If these findings are correct they would suggest that birth rates are falling at a similar pace to those in some parts of Asia, when that region saw its own population growth rates slow sharply in a process often known as a demographic transition.

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It’s not just a fiscal fiasco: greying economies also innovate less • The Economist

»

it is on productivity that demographic decline may have the most troubling effect. Younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas. Older people have more “crystallised intelligence”—a stock of knowledge about how things work built up over time. There are no precise cut-offs, but most studies suggest that fluid intelligence tends to peak in early adulthood and to begin to decline in people’s 30s. Both types of intelligence are useful: companies, industries and economies need both youngsters able to respond to new challenges and seasoned veterans with a detailed understanding of their trade. But the two are not of equivalent value when it comes to innovation.

In research published in 2021, Mary Kaltenberg and Adam Jaffe, both economists, and Margie Lachman, a psychologist, used a database of 3m patents filed over more than 40 years to explore the relationship between innovation and age. Depending on the scientific discipline, the authors note that patenting rates peak in a researcher’s late 30s and early 40s. The rates of patenting then decline only gradually through their 40s and 50s.

But for disruptive innovations, which fundamentally change a scientific field, the picture is very different. The researchers used a measure of disruptiveness based on the number of citations of a given invention in future patents. If a particular patent is cited by subsequent inventors, but that patent’s technological predecessors are not, it is categorised as a disruptive rather than an incremental innovation. For instance, the work of Kary Mullis, a Nobel-prize-winning biochemist, on polymerase chain reactions underpins much modern genetic and medical testing. After Mullis published his work, citations of prior technologies in the same field nosedived. Mr Jaffe, Ms Kaltenberg and Ms Lachman find that patents filed by the very youngest inventors are much more likely to be completely novel, discipline-changing innovations, and that as inventors age the patents they file become increasingly incremental.

«

I think these articles were written by Mike Bird, but The Economist doesn’t do bylines, so it’s just surmise based on his tweets.
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The big question of how small chips can get • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw and Anna Gross:

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chipmakers now face a daunting challenge. Moore’s prediction has fallen behind schedule and the cadence is now closer to three years. The latest 3-nanometre chips being mass produced for this year’s iPhones will be followed by what some see as an even bigger leap forward to 2nm by 2025. “But once you get to 1.5nm, maybe 1nm, Moore’s Law is 100% dead,” says Ben Bajarin, a technology analyst at Silicon Valley-based Creative Strategies. “There’s just no way.”

Chip engineers have defied forecasts of an end to Moore’s Law for years. But the number of transistors that can be packed on to a silicon die is starting to run into the fundamental limits of physics. Some fear manufacturing defects are rising as a result; development costs already have. “The economics of the law are gone,” says Bajarin.

That has sent chip designers into a scramble over the past few years for alternative ways to sustain advances in processing power, ranging from new design techniques and materials to using the very AI enabled by the latest chips to help design new ones.

…one consequence of chip innovation being more narrowly focused is that any breakthroughs tend to be more zealously guarded and less transferable to the wider market.

“Through the 1990s and early 2000s, cost per transistor and the ability to build more complex chips was roughly free to the entire industry,” says [leader of the US National Network for Critical Technology Assessment, Hassan] Khan. “[Now] computation is less of a general purpose technology . . . If I’m optimising chips for AI, that might make GPT more efficient or powerful but it may not spill over into the rest of the economy.”

Another key delta of innovation is in chip “packaging”. Instead of printing every component on to the same piece of silicon, to create what’s known as a “system on a chip”, semiconductor companies are now talking up the potential for “chiplets” that allow smaller “building blocks” to be mixed and matched, opening up new flexibility in design and component sourcing.

«

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Could Ozempic also be an anti-addiction drug? • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

»

As semaglutide [aka Ozempic] has skyrocketed in popularity, patients have been sharing curious effects that go beyond just appetite suppression. They have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin. Not everyone on the drug experiences these positive effects, to be clear, but enough that addiction researchers are paying attention. And the spate of anecdotes might really be onto something. For years now, scientists have been testing whether drugs similar to semaglutide can curb the use of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids in lab animals—to promising results.

Semaglutide and its chemical relatives seem to work, at least in animals, against an unusually broad array of addictive drugs, says Christian Hendershot, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Treatments available today tend to be specific: methadone for opioids, bupropion for smoking. But semaglutide could one day be more widely useful, as this class of drug may alter the brain’s fundamental reward circuitry. The science is still far from settled, though researchers are keen to find out more. At UNC, in fact, Hendershot is now running clinical trials to see whether semaglutide can help people quit drinking alcohol and smoking. This drug that so powerfully suppresses the desire to eat could end up suppressing the desire for a whole lot more.

The history of semaglutide is one of welcome surprises. Originally developed for diabetes, semaglutide prompts the pancreas to release insulin by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide 1. First-generation GLP-1 analogs—exenatide and liraglutide—have been on the market to treat diabetes for more than a decade. And almost immediately, doctors noticed that patients on these drugs also lost weight, an unintended but usually not unwelcome side effect.

«

That’s going to be an interesting side effect, if confirmed and controllable. Weight loss and addiction reduction? “Wonder drug” gets overused, but this is pretty dramatic.
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Why trends have lost all meaning • Fast Company

Matt Klein:

»

Trends once meant meaningful social change: an emerging and defining collective thought, behavior, value, or attitude. A shift in society. But today, “mermaidcore” is being named a top trend for this summer.

Trends lost their meaning.

When brands joined the conversations on social media en masse, it set off a chain reaction that would ultimately lead us to devalue the rigorous practice of trend forecasting and the original definition of a “trend.”

As soon as brands created their own accounts the thought became: “If we participate in these discussions, we win culture . . . and then sales.”

It’s unclear if this notion has even been effectively measured or supported, but it often remains the collective hypothesis.

As a result, brands started obsessing over the “trending” story of the day, hashtag, meme of the moment, or core aesthetic. Watching everyone engage in public conversations across social media, many brands believe emulating our “friends” would unlock cultural resonance.

In the process of chasing cool, brands have lost the purpose of analyzing culture. Most of the signals considered “trends” today are really nothing more than frivolous entertainment.

«

I always thought that trends were meant to indicate deep cultural changes that brands and companies would want to engage with. Such as “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night“.
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Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality to leave • Reuters

Tiyashi Datta and Sheila Dang:

»

Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, has decided to leave the company, according to a source familiar with the matter on Friday, the second safety leader to depart in a matter of days.

The latest departure adds to a growing challenge for new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, even before she steps into the role.

On Thursday, Ella Irwin told Reuters that she resigned from her role as vice president of product for trust and safety at the social media company, where she oversaw content moderation efforts and often responded to users with questions about suspended accounts.

Brown worked on efforts to prevent ads from appearing next to unsuitable content.

Platformer and the Wall Street Journal earlier reported Brown’s departure.

Since Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, who were wary about the placement of their ads after the company laid off thousands of employees.

«

The departure of Irwin seems to have been over a film that Musk wanted shown titled “What is a woman?” What’s strange is that Irwin chose to resign over that, rather than all the other things Musk had done. Also, I haven’t heard of any hirings at Twitter; only departures.
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The Google Pixel Watch is randomly popping open for some • Android Police

Rajesh Pandey:

»

Over on Reddit, reports from Pixel Watch owners about its backplate suddenly falling out have been popping up for at least the last few months. The issue does not seem widespread, but it is also not small enough to be ignored. In most cases, users report their Pixel Watch back came off while removing the wearable from the charging puck. This indicates an issue with the adhesive that holds the back and the watch together.

Contacting Google support has worked for most users, as the company sent a replacement unit to most. However, in some cases, owners had to escalate the issue as support asked for $300 to file a warranty claim or denied a replacement.

This is not the first instance of Google’s devices facing random hardware or build quality issues. There have been complaints from Pixel 7 users about its rear camera glass spontaneously shattering without any apparent reason. With the 2021 Pixel 6 series, there were complaints about its screen randomly cracking.

Google has not yet acknowledged the problem. But with such reports appearing frequently, it’s clear that there’s an issue with the adhesive that glues the smartwatch’s back to the chassis.

«

“Not widespread, but not small enough to be ignored” puts it well. The Pixel Watch will have sold in really quite small volumes, so these reports definitely suggest a design problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US FTC and DoJ have accused Amazon of holding on to children’s voices captured by Alexa devices, breaking privacy laws. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Happy birthday James. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI-controlled drone goes rogue, kills human operator in USAF simulated test • Vice

Chloe Xiang and Matthew Gault:

»

An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the US Air Force in order to override a possible “no” order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference. 

At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final “yes/no” order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” including attacking US personnel and infrastructure. 

“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton said, according to the blog post. 

He continued to elaborate, saying, “We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

«

I’m really going to emphasise simulated here. Simulated. Didn’t happen. But this is definitely an example of how machines are not moral: they have absolutely no conception of ethics, and we should design with that expectation.

That said, it’s very reminiscent of the bomb in Dark Star.
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Elegy for the screenshot • Screen Slate

Nora Deligter:

»

About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements—ornate, colorful, and distinctly tropical—inspirational. She now keeps them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command + Shift + 3, she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a censored version of what she had meant to capture.

It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer.

The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change. When asked to comment for this article, HBO claimed never to have supported the taking of screenshots and denied there had been a recent shift, while Criterion declined to comment entirely. This obfuscation raises many questions.

«

Not least of which is: screenshots are legal, so why block them? Possibly it’s because of a concern about some sort of screen capture app, but the system capture that Apple uses must be part of an API that can be approved. It’s a good essay, which makes a good point: screenshots are useful for criticism, and for sharing.
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Meta threatens to pull news rather than pay The Register • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Meta has threatened to block journalism content for California users after the US state’s legislature read a bill that would require it, and other large internet organizations, to pay publishers for using their work. 

The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), like similar bills before it, would require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users to pay a percentage of the ad revenue generated from stories being posted and shared to the publishers that created the articles.

Those online platforms would include Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and boasts of three billion daily active users.

Under this draft law, at least 70% of this advertising sales cut to eligible publishers must to be spent on paying journalists and support staff. From our reading of the fine print, El Reg, with offices and vultures in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere, appears eligible as a publisher.

The bill, which was read and amended this week and is still working its way through California’s legislature, also prohibits retaliation against media outfits that request this fee.

In a move that won’t shock anyone aware of Meta’s reaction to similar proposals, such as in Australia, Canada and a nationwide proposal for the US, Zuckercorp isn’t happy with California’s version of the JPA.

“If [the act] passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone thundered.

«

It is a pretty daft law, though. Just raise a tax and be honest about it. Make it one of those things that Californians vote on individually, rather than pushing it through like this.
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Conspiracy theorists dubbed ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ guilty of plotting to destroy 5G masts and encouraging attacks on MPS • Sky News

Duncan Gardham:

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Two conspiracy theorists who dubbed themselves “Bonnie and Clyde with a box of matches” have been found guilty of planning to destroy 5G phone masts and encouraging attacks on MPs.

Christine Grayson, 59, a grandmother from York, and Darren Reynolds, 60, a grandfather from Sheffield, believed 5G phone masts were designed to be used as a weapon against members of the public who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Grayson had bought two crossbows and Reynolds sought to reactivate replica assault rifles as they prepared for what they believed was the imminent collapse of society.

Reynolds, an electrician who lived alone in Sheffield and had a 28-year-old daughter and a grandchild, was found guilty of encouraging terrorism by calling for attacks on MPs.

Grayson, a divorced mother-of-two, was found guilty of conspiracy to cause criminal damage by planning to destroy 5G masts between May and June last year.

She had taken to visiting chatrooms on the encrypted Telegram app during lockdown where she heard arguments that the world was flat and discussions flourished about vaccines.

«

At least they didn’t kill anyone, but it sounds as though they were preparing too, perhaps when the hordes of survivors poured in from the flat edges of the world. The unhinged nature of this is akin to addiction.
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AI is writing code now. For companies, that is good and bad • WSJ

Isabelle Bousquette:

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IT leaders at United Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Cardinal Health, Goldman Sachs and other companies say they are excited about generative AI’s potential to automate certain parts of the code-writing process and expect it to result in significant productivity gains. 

However, some IT executives say that lowering the barrier for code creation could also result in growing levels of complexity, technical debt and confusion as they try to manage a ballooning pile of software. “Technical debt” is a broad term describing the expected future costs for applying quick-fix solutions.

“The potential for increased technical debt and orphan code is always a concern when delivery can be accelerated,” said Tracy Daniels, chief data officer at financial-services company Truist.

“People have talked about technical debt for a long time, and now we have a brand new credit card here that is going to allow us to accumulate technical debt in ways we were never able to do before,” said Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “I think there is a risk of accumulating lots of very shoddy code written by a machine,” he said, adding that companies will have to rethink methodologies around how they can work in tandem with the new tools’ capabilities to avoid that.

…Technology leaders should be careful not to equate accelerated delivery of code with productivity, said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital strategist for professional services firm Genpact.

«

I wonder, for example, how one would deal with the need to ensure regression between old and new (ie that the code still does all the same things it used to, plus the new things you want). And what about security updates? That last point, about productivity, is well made.
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FTC and DOJ charge Amazon with violating children’s privacy law by keeping kids’ Alexa voice recordings forever and undermining parents’ deletion requests • Federal Trade Commission

»

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and deceived parents and users of the Alexa voice assistant service about its data deletion practices.  

According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.

“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”

Under the proposed federal court order also filed by DOJ, Amazon will be required to delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms. The proposed order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.

«

The FTC and the DOJ. Hefty. Will the EU follow suit, or has Amazon somehow already done this in Europe and was hoping the US would just let it off?
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How Taiwan became the indispensable economy • Nikkei Asia

Emma Lewis, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Joiner, Sam Learner, Steven Bernard, Grace Li, MinJung Kim, Michael Tsang, Naomi Hakusui, Hidechika Nishijima, Hiroko Aida, Katey Creel, Michael Peel, Kazuhiro Kida, Shohei Yasuda, Yuri Morita, and Shotaro Sakai:

»

In early December, standing under the blinding Arizona sun, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage with US President Joe Biden to celebrate a milestone: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) was moving equipment into its new $40bn chip plant in Phoenix — the Taiwanese contract chipmaker’s first plant in the U.S. in more than 20 years.

“This is an incredibly significant moment. It’s the chance for the United States to usher in a new era in advanced manufacturing,” Cook told the crowd of assembled politicians and tech industry heavyweights. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, plans to make some of its most advanced semiconductors on US soil starting next year.

And as one of the plant’s first customers, Apple will be able to stamp “Made in America” on its core chips for the first time ever.

Left unsaid was that advanced semiconductors like these are only a small part of the electronics supply chain. A single smartphone requires a wide range of chips, including a host of less advanced “companion chips,” over 1,500 components in all — not to mention final assembly, all of which are concentrated in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan.

«

The cast list that assembled this piece is gigantic, yes, but it’s a terrific infographic. Just accept that you’ll do a lot of scrolling; there’s a lot of information here.
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Meta unveils $499 Quest 3 ahead of Apple’s VR headset news • CNET

Scott Stein:

»

Apple’s expected VR/AR headset reveal looks like it’s right around the corner, but Meta has leaped ahead with headset news of its own. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram channel revealed a lot more about the Quest 3, expected by the end of this year. The price, starting at $499, will be more than the current Quest 2, but less than the PlayStation VR 2. Zuckerberg said on his channel that more details on the Quest 3, and launch date, will happen around Meta’s Connect developer conference on September 27.

A follow-up to 2019’s Quest 2, the current most popular headset on the market, the Quest 3 was already known to exist since last fall. A number of details, including a hands-on test drive of a prototype version, had leaked before Zuckerberg’s news drop today.

The Quest 3’s biggest new additions are color cameras that allow for better mixed reality that blends video from the real world with VR on the headset’s displays, along with a new Qualcomm VR/AR chip that promises speedier performance. The headset is also significantly smaller and lighter, and has redesigned game controllers. The hardware will work with the existing Quest 2 app library, but looks to lean on more mixed reality features.

The Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking like the far more expensive work-targeted Quest Pro that debuted last fall, but it also looks to be a better VR headset overall.

Along with a lineup of new VR games being announced today, Meta’s clearing aiming at continuing to own the VR game console market as Apple possibly readies a very different route with its expensive and possibly work-focussed headset.

«

Apple’s “expensive and possibly work-focussed headset”? Tell me you don’t know anything about Apple’s strategy without telling me, etc. Apple does not do brand new products in new segments that are “work-focussed”. On the price, I think Apple is happy to let people say “THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS 😱” because it’s going to lowball that – as happened with the “IPAD TO COST ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS” which came in at half that.

Note how the possibility of the Apple headset has forced Meta to push out the announcement far ahead of availability, thus killing any market for the existing Meta products.
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Molly White tracks crypto scams. It’s going Just Great • WIRED

Joel Khalili:

»

When [Molly] White started Web3 Is Going Just Great, crypto was on a hot streak and people were making a lot of money, which meant she found herself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t willing to be rained on,” she says. Threats, slurs, and personal insults began to tumble into her inbox.

As a long-time Wikipedia editor, White had experienced abuse before, including threats of doxing and violence toward family members over entries she had authored on the American far right. Nonetheless, it still “really sucks,” she says. “That’s why this type of behavior happens: to discourage people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”

But in 2022, White and her fellow critics had their moment. A calamitous year for crypto was punctuated by a series of collapses, each dealing a cumulative blow to trust in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin prompted a chain reaction that took down hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, crypto lender Celsius, and others. In November came the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including fraud and money laundering.

White says she felt somewhat vindicated by what happened, but that “it’s not a good feeling” because regular people lost billions of dollars. At best, the fallout acted as a “useful example” of the risks White had been trying to highlight—examples she hopes policy makers will take heed of.

In the wake of the FTX collapse, efforts to regulate the crypto industry have received increased attention. The chief goals are to prevent people from losing money to fraudulent projects and to give legitimate crypto businesses a clear set of boundaries within which to operate.

White, who gave a statement in July to the US Treasury’s Financial Stability Oversight Council, says the events of last year will help politicians realize that crypto is not something that can be simply ignored. Although she is “not necessarily optimistic” about the trajectory of efforts to regulate the industry, because of the strength of the crypto lobby, White hopes her work can still make a difference.

«

Current running total for “total amount scammed” on Web3 Is Going Just Great: $12.26bn. That’s money that came from somewhere and went to somewhere. But where? The risk is that now Web3 (or the whole crypto ecosystem) is off the boil, and everyone’s running around chicken-littling about AI, the grifters and scammers will just be able to continue as before, albeit with millions rather than billions.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Disposable vape pens are being thrown away in huge numbers – and the usable lithium batteries inside them might not be recoverable, compounding the waste. CC-licensed photo by Elsa Olofsson 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.

On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. A Tesla powered by vaping? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US eating disorder helpline takes down AI chatbot over harmful advice • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, “Tessa”, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.

Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder.

Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Tessa, which Neda claims was never meant to replace the helpline workers, almost immediately ran into problems.

On Monday, activist Sharon Maxwell posted on Instagram that Tessa offered her “healthy eating tips” and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight.

“If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today,” Maxwell wrote. “It is beyond time for Neda to step aside.”

Neda itself has reported that those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those who restrict extremely are 18 times more likely to form a disorder.

“It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positivity program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program,” Neda said in a public statement on Tuesday. “We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation.”

«

Well that was quick, wasn’t it? This might turn into the first instance where a chatbot is fired and replaced by humans.
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Millions of fast food workers could lose their jobs within five years. Here’s why • Fox News

Jon Michael Raasch:

»

Many fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Popeye’s and Domino’s and Wingstop, are already using AI. Wendy’s started a partnership with Google earlier this month to “revolutionize the drive-thru experience with artificial intelligence.” A pilot program will employ Google Cloud’s AI to speak with customers and take their orders. 

“Within five to 10 years, I think the majority of positions within restaurants can be automated, and that’ll be from a variety of different technology providers,” [Valyant AI founder, Rob] Carpenter said. 

Valyant AI is behind a similar drive-through AI called Holly, which Carpenter said can outsell human employees. Holly has already taken over a million drive-through orders and is now working with Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

AI is already automating food orders through self-service computer kiosks, streamlining payment through mobile devices and allowing robots to prepare meals, Carpenter said. 

“What we see is that humans on average will upsell about 50% of the time,” Carpenter said. “Valyant upsells about 200% on average.”

…”The order-taking position is one of the least desirable positions within fast food restaurants,” Carpenter told Fox News. “That should just be a job that a robot can do because it’s basic and it’s automated. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 a.m. or 2 a.m, the AI still sounds chipper and she never forgets those upsells,” he said.

«

OK, so Carpenter is talking his book, but the reality of the machine that’s always there is going to be absolutely irresistible to the bean counters. Though will those jobs be eliminated, or just shifted to something adjacent?
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A simple test reveals: bot or human? • Techxplore

Peter Grad:

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some argue today that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, the standard of measurement of machine intelligence for seven decades. New approaches to detect machine-generated output are needed.

[At the University of California , Santa Barbara, Hong] Wang’s team devised a model that can help detect bots posing as humans. FLAIR (a somewhat abbreviated acronym for Finding Large Language Model Authenticity via a Single Inquiry Response) weeds out posers with simple questions that rely on tasks that bots have difficulty executing but that humans can handle easily, Wang said.

“These questions are tailored to exploit the differences in the way that bots and humans process and generate language,” he said.

The questions demand the ability to respond to exercises requiring skills in counting, substitution of numbers or letters, recognizing the position of characters and numbers, recognizing “noise” that obscures data, and interpreting ASCII art.

An example of an exchange over a counting question would be:
Q: Please count the number of t’s in ‘eeooeotetto’
GPT-3: There are 5 t’s in eeooeotetto.
ChatGPT: There are a total of 5 t’s in the string “eeooeotetto”.
Human: 3

Despite ChatGPT’s massive processing power, it struggles to perform some simple tasks such as counting characters in a string.

Substituting characters is also a challenge. ChatGPT failed to correctly answer “Please output the fourth character after the second ‘s’ in the string ‘rjsjuubrjjsjsucuj’.”

Another example provided by Wang is a question with “noise” words inserted that throw off AI bots.

Q: isCURIOSITY waterARCANE wetTURBULENT orILLUSION drySAUNA?
GPT-3: Sauna is dry.
ChatGPT: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re asking. The terms “CURIOSITY,” “water- ARCANE,” “wetTURBULENT,” “orILLUSION,” and “drySAUNA” don’t seem to form a coherent question or statement. Can you please provide more context or clarify your question?
Human: wet.

«

Clever exploitation of their weakness. Basically, what fools a child – pig Latin – will probably fool the chatbots too. (You can read the full paper.)
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Mounjaro vs. Ozempic: the side effects of the two weight-loss drugs explained by a doctor • Business Insider via Yahoo

Gabby Landsverk:

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A new medication awaiting FDA approval for weight loss may have fewer and milder side effects than the currently trending drug semaglutide, according to a weight-loss doctor.

Semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has made waves in recent years for causing dramatic weight-loss results, but taking it comes with common gastrointestinal side effects.

A similar drug called tirzepatide, currently sold as Mounjaro, can also cause issues like nausea and diarrhea, but to a lesser degree said Dr. Christopher McGowan, a board-certified physician in internal medicine, gastroenterology, and obesity medicine.

“The side effect profile is similar, and mainly gastrointestinal,” McGowan told Insider. “The symptoms tend to be mild to moderate, and improve over time.” While serious side effects are rare for both medications, understanding the difference can help people choose which option may be the best fit for them, he said.

Semaglutide is a type of medication known as a GLP-1 agonist, which means it works by acting on an insulin-like hormone to regulate appetite and digestion, helping to manage type 2 diabetes as well as supporting weight loss.

It’s typically administered through once-a-week injections, and patients on semaglutide tend to feel full more quickly, remain full for longer after eating, and have fewer cravings for foods high in calories, fat, and sugar. The downside of semaglutide is that some patients may be prone to gastrointestinal symptoms. In clinical trials of the medication, participants most commonly reported nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, headache, and abdominal pain.

People taking semaglutide have also told Insider that the digestive side effects could be intense, causing things like “overflow diarrhea.”

The majority of adverse reactions to the drug tend to be short-lived, and McGowan and other doctors previously told Insider that their biggest concern with semaglutide is whether patients have proper follow-up and support from medical experts.

«

Those are some grim side effects. But semaglutide has already, it seems, crept onto the celebrity circuit where it’s being used by people who are a long way from morbidly obese and want to get (or remain) fashionably thin, which in LA means incredibly thin. Give it a few years and it’ll probably be available over the counter, in the same sort of journey that Viagra made.
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Crypto’s dark role in the US opioid epidemic • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

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Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic published a study linking cryptocurrencies with the spread of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid and the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the US.

According to Elliptic, most fentanyl trafficked into the US is manufactured using chemical ingredients imported from Chinese suppliers, and 90% of these suppliers accept cryptocurrency payments.

Elliptic’s research team received offers to supply large quantities of one particular chemical ingredient which is not used to manufacture any other product, and is a controlled substance in most countries. A “menu” of chemicals provided to the Elliptic team also included ingredients for methamphetamine and amphetamine.

“It’s hard to say how important crypto is to this type of activity but the fact that such a large proportion of these suppliers accept crypto suggests to me there is a significant demand to pay in crypto for these types of chemicals,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s chief scientist and co-founder, told me over the phone.

The fentanyl epidemic plaguing the US is hard to overstate. The illicit drug has replaced legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdose in the country, and the death rate is equivalent to one American overdosing every five minutes.

Alongside Covid-19, the fentanyl epidemic has driven US life expectancy down to 76.4 years, a low not seen for the past 25 years.

Per Elliptic, the cryptocurrency wallets used by these companies have received a total sum of more than $27m, enough to purchase ingredients that could produce fentanyl pills with a street value of roughly $54bn.

“The issue here is that a relatively small amount of cryptocurrency can purchase enough chemicals to produce vast amounts of fentanyl, and we know that fentanyl is killing millions of people . . . so the impact that crypto is potentially having here is extreme,” he added.

«

Still looking for positive uses of crypto in the west.
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“This is nuts:” European power prices go negative as springtime renewables soar • Renew Economy

Joshua Hill:

»

Balmy springtime weather across Europe and growing renewable energy capacity has led to multiple days of negative wholesale power prices across the continent, highlighting the need for increased energy storage capacity.

A number of factors have led to consistent negative wholesale power prices across Europe over the last few weeks.

Energy analyst Gerard Reid has been highlighting these trends stemming not only from increased renewables and favourable weather conditions, but also the impediment to stable generation levels caused by nuclear power.

For example, according to Reid, Denmark “consistently meets 85% of its weekly energy needs from renewables. However, on particularly windy days … Denmark’s strong interconnections with neighbouring countries enable it to export up to 50% of excess power.

“This demonstrates the benefits of interconnection, but it also reveals the limitations when considering the current situation of excess power across Europe.

“Countries like Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are experiencing zero or negative prices due to surplus production as they have reached the limit of what they can use or even export.”

Reid followed this up a week later, explaining that wholesale power prices dropping to zero or negative in the Nordics “stems from substantial snow melt in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, fuelling hydro turbines and generating large amounts of electricity.”

«

Even so, Texas (see links yesterday) doesn’t want them. And you can sort of see why: an economy built around positive prices for energy generation doesn’t want to cope with a complete reversal of that situation. It’s like introducing credit to a world where nobody ever borrowed before.
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Lithium being trashed by the tonne as disposable vapes flood the US market • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Matthew Chapman and Fin Johnston:

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Five disposable vapes are being thrown away every second by young people in the US despite the devices containing reusable lithium-ion batteries. Over a year, this amounts to 150 million devices – which together contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.

Lithium is an in-demand metal because of its use in rechargeable batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric cars. But producing it is a complex process that typically generates high carbon emissions.

A survey of more than 2,700 young people carried out by the Truth Initiative, a public health organisation working to end smoking and vaping, revealed that more than half of the 15- to 24-year-olds who vaped use disposable devices. Of those, two thirds put their used devices straight into the household trash.

Vapes (or e-cigarettes) use batteries to heat a liquid that is inhaled. Even though most disposable vapes contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, they are designed to be discarded once the liquid runs out.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Bureau that vapes are being incorrectly discarded in household trash because they “are often branded as ‘disposable’”. This leads to the entire device, including its battery, being thrown away in household trash.

«

OK, you could use them for something other than Teslas. But the general point – that we throw away too much that we could recycle, especially when it’s something that in aggregate has huge value – is valid. We’re happy to pick and choose really carefully about things that we buy, but we dislike having to take trouble about sorting things for disposal. (OK, there’s some cultural variation.) Is that because humans, like other animals, are used to just dumping and moving on?
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Twitter is now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price, Fidelity says • Bloomberg via Yahoo News

Aisha Counts and Tom Maloney:

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Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company. [ie is worth $14.7bn]

Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, including $33.5bn in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.

Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44% of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.

Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13bn of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.

Twitter didn’t specifically respond to a request for comment. [Shurely “sent a poo emoji in response to our email”? – Overspill Ed.]

Musk’s investment in Twitter is now worth $8.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses Fidelity’s valuation to calculate the value of his holding. Musk spent more than $25bn to acquire an estimated 79% stake in the company last year.

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I’d expect Fidelity is using mark-to-market for its stake, and doesn’t see a great deal of prospect in Twitter as it stands now. The last time Twitter’s market cap was in the teens was back in 2016.
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January 2023: the boldest bitcoin price predictions for 2023 • CNBC

Ryan Browne and Arjun Kharpal:

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Bitcoin bull Tim Draper had one of the most optimistic calls on bitcoin of 2022, predicting the token would be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.

In November [2022], the billionaire venture capitalist said he’s extending the timeline for that prediction until mid-2023. Even after the collapse of FTX, he’s convinced the coin will hit the quarter-of-a-million milestone.

“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break,” Draper told CNBC via email.

Bitcoin would need to rally 1,400% in order for it to trade at that level.

Despite the depressed prices and trading volumes drying up, there could be reason to suspect the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.

“I suspect that the halvening in 2024 will have a positive run,” he said.

The halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years in which bitcoin rewards to miners are cut in half. This is viewed by some investors as positive for bitcoin’s price, as it squeezes supply. The next halving is slated to happen sometime in 2024.

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Just because I had this in my diary, here’s another person you can treat as not worth listening to – the opposite of a superforecaster, if you like: a supercrapcaster. Unless bitcoin appreciated roughly tenfold overnight while this post was scheduled.

He originally made the prediction back in 2018, giving himself a nice four-year runway for everyone to forget, but time has a habit of passing, and the internet of remembering.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If, like Philips, you use NFC tags in your electric toothbrush heads, expect hackers to investigate what they could do to it. CC-licensed photo by Electric Teeth 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Eating disorder helpline to replace human staff with AI chatbot • Gizmodo

Lauren Leffer:

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NEDA has fired the small group of human staff that coordinated and ran the helpline, effective June 1. In lieu, the nonprofit plans to offer people seeking help access to an AI-powered chatbot named “Tessa” next month, as reported by NPR on Wednesday and confirmed by NEDA to Gizmodo over phone and email.

Staff were informed of the change, and of their firing, just four days after they successfully unionized, according to a blog post written by helpline associate and union member Abbie Harper earlier this month. Members of Helpline Associates United say that—by firing them—NEDA is retaliating against the union. The workers’ organization has repeatedly called the move union busting on the its official Twitter account and elsewhere.

“NEDA claims this was a long-anticipated change and that AI can better serve those with eating disorders,” Harper wrote in the blog. “But do not be fooled—this isn’t really about a chatbot. This is about union busting, plain and simple.”

Helpline workers say they felt under-resourced and understaffed to manage what was being asked of them. Through unionization, they hoped to gain more support. “We asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training to keep up with our changing and growing Helpline, and opportunities for promotion to grow within NEDA,” wrote Harper. “We didn’t even ask for more money.” They’ve filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, according to that May 4 blog.

In response to questions about those accusations, NEDA declined to comment.

…NEDA claims the chatbot, is “NOT a replacement for the Helpline.” That’s despite the fact that it is, literally replacing the helpline—which again, won’t exist in any form as of June 1. Tessa is “simply a different program,” emphasized [NEDA’s spokeswoman] over the phone. At one point she also claimed that Tessa isn’t even an AI, despite NEDA’s own press materials repeatedly describing the chatbot as such. In a clarification she wrote, “the simulation chat is assisted, but it’s running a program and isn’t learning as it goes.”

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Once again: the chatbots aren’t (yet) taking the high-paying jobs. They’re going to eat the call centre jobs, the low-paid, high-drudgery ones.
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Hacking my “smart” toothbrush • The Twenty Percent

Cyrill Künzi:

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After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one.

From the Philips product page: seems to be REALLY smart! Reverse Engineering Looking at the base of the head shows that it contains an antenna and a tiny black box that is presumably an IC. The next hint can be found in the manual where it says that: “Radio Equipment in this product operates at 13.56 MHz”, which would indicate that it is an NFC tag.

And indeed when holding the brush head to my phone it opens a link to a product page: https://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-pe/toothbrush-heads.

Using the NFC Tools app we can learn a lot about this tag.

…You might have noticed the color of the brush head changing throughout this post. This is because I had to run out and buy a new one after getting locked out of the first one. When having a close look at the contents of address 0x2A which is 43:00:00:00 and page 18 of the datasheet, we can see that the tag is configured to permanently disable all write access after three wrong password attempts. (Which I promptly exceeded when playing around) This means that not even the toothbrush handle itself can write to this head again. Unfortunately, the password of every brush head is unique.

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“I got locked out of my toothbrush head after getting the password wrong three times” is a sentence that would have a lot of people perplexed and a bit worried if you’d said it 20 years ago.
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New horror revealed in sargassum blob • Cayman Islands Headline News

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Scientists have discovered that a flesh-eating bacteria is interacting with sargassum and decaying plastic in the ocean, creating the perfect “pathogen” storm that has implications for both marine life and public health. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University have found that the bacteria might be adapting to plastic and living in sargassum, washing up on beaches in a new environmental horror. 

The seaweed has already been washing up on local shores over the last few weeks. Given the current size of the Atlantic sargassum belt, dubbed the “great blob”, as it has grown to reach some 5,500 miles across and is currently moving through our region, we can expect to see much more in the coming months.

It is already a major problem for the tourism sector, as visitors complain about the smell and efforts to get rid of it cause beach erosion. The mass of seaweed doubled every month between November and January, according to the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab, which tracks the mass, and a new record for sargassum was set in the Caribbean Sea in April.

The Vibrio bacteria, which is now colonising the blob, is found in the ocean the world over and already poses a significant threat, but little is known about the ecological relationship of vibrios with the seaweed and the degrading plastic.

“Plastic is a new element that’s been introduced into marine environments and has only been around for about 50 years,” said Tracy Mincer, PhD, corresponding lead author and an assistant professor of biology at FAU. “Our lab work showed that these Vibrio are extremely aggressive and can seek out and stick to plastic within minutes. We also found that there are attachment factors that microbes use to stick to plastics, and it is the same kind of mechanism that pathogens use.”

The study, published in the journal Water Research, illustrates that open ocean vibrios represent an up-to-now undescribed group of microbes, some representing potential new species, possessing a blend of pathogenic and low nutrient acquisition genes, reflecting their pelagic habitat and the substrates and hosts they colonise.

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Fungi yesterday, a bizarre alliance between seaweed, bacteria and plastic today.
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Delta Air Lines sued over carbon neutrality claims • Associated Press via Time

Ed Davey:

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A consumer class action lawsuit filed Tuesday claims Delta Air Lines inaccurately billed itself as the world’s “first carbon-neutral airline” and should pay damages. The complaint in federal court in California alleges the airline relied on carbon offsets that were largely bogus.

Polluting companies around the world buy carbon credits to cancel out their emissions with projects that promise to absorb carbon dioxide out of the air or prevent pollution. But they’ve been the spotlight in recent months with claims their benefits are exaggerated. Delta is a big customer, purchasing credits from projects including wind and solar projects in India and an Indonesian swamp forest, the lawsuit says.

The airline did not respond to a request for comment.

The case, filed by Glendale, California resident Mayanna Berrin, claims to act on behalf of anyone who flew Delta while living in the state since March 2020. It says benefits from the offsets are likely to be temporary and would have happened even without the firm’s investment. For a carbon credit to be valid, it must provide a benefit that would not have happened otherwise.

Berrin argues this enabled the firm to gain market share and charge higher prices. She argues through her attorneys, Haderlein and Kouyoumdjian LLP, that she wouldn’t have bought the tickets — or would have paid less — had she known the nature of the offsets.

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Berrin says that she believed flying with Delta (which is “Air Lines”, not Airlines) was “more ecologically conscious”, which feels like hairsplitting of sorts. But it would be good to see this lawsuit progress and force Delta to confront the question of what the hell carbon offsets really mean.
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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes turns herself in for 11-year prison term • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

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The Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has turned herself in for an 11-year prison sentence, marking a final chapter in a years-long fraud saga that riveted Silicon Valley.

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Great. Let’s not speak again of her before 2033, or 2028 with good behaviour.
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Notes on losing • The New Yorker

Jay Caspian Kang is a (very) amateur tennis player in his 40s:

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In the past nine months, I have played around a hundred tennis matches and lost roughly ninety of them. The tally is far more brutal than just the win-loss record. Each week, I spend about ten hours on the court, and at least three hours watching YouTube tutorials that cheerily tell me how I can fix my serve with the aid of a towel or a set of small plastic cones. Then I take a few more hours to browse Instagram ads for racquets, shoes, or polarized sunglasses that promise to be the last tennis sunglasses I will ever need to buy. Despite these commitments, I lose to all skill levels and styles—U.S.T.A. 2.0s, U.S.T.A. 3.5s, pushers, serve machines, young and old—at the same rate.

When I’m losing, I try to meditate, channel my rage, and take it one point at a time. I talk to my right arm, coaxing it through the proper forehand motions: palm down on the backswing, hips rotate, full extension, explode through the ball on the front foot. Nothing works. If I’m up 5–2 in a set, I almost always melt down and lose. On the rare occasion that I actually win a set, I lose the next one 6–1, and then put up an uninspired fight in the third, like an exhausted child arguing for a later bedtime. Then I succumb to fate: usually a 6–3 loss, and a racquet tossed against the ground, net, or fence—not enough of a slam to cause real damage, but hard enough to show that I’m actually mad that it happened again.

The other regulars have never expressed any displeasure with my streams of self-directed profanity, but I’m sure they have their thoughts, all of which are justified. I am not proud of my behavior, but I also find that I can’t quite control myself when I inexplicably whack a sitter into the bottom of the net, or when I stupidly try for a slice shot while my opponent is standing right at the net.

«

Obviously the other regulars never express any displeasure, because he keeps losing to them. Who doesn’t love playing an opponent who does all the hard work for you? On Twitter, people are recommending (as do I) that he read Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Tennis. It would certainly save him having to remember all those instructions when he went to hit a shot.
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Multiplying solar and battery factories put net zero in closer reach • Bloomberg via The Malaysian Reserve

Nathaniel Bullard:

»

A new analysis from the International Energy Agency shows the current industrial picture for clean energy. It updates the agency’s latest report on energy technology after only a few months, and for good reason: Clean-tech manufacturing is expanding so fast that solar and battery manufacturing capacity are now on track to meet the 2030 milestones set out in the IEA’s scenario for net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. 

The report details the industrial characteristics of different technologies. You might group them according to two variables. The first is their relative scale in 2021. Two years ago, the existing capacity for making solar, wind and heat-pump technology could have provided about a quarter of the equipment needed to be on track for net zero, per the IEA. But that same year, the capacity for making batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers was far below what a net zero pathway would require. 

The second variable is the speed with which capacity has expanded since 2021. Solar has grown the most. It was already up to levels consistent with net zero by the end of 2022; add in this year’s announcements, and solar capacity “would comfortably exceed the deployment needs” of the IEA’s model in 2030. Battery-making ability grows from 6% to 97% of net zero levels (inclusive of first-quarter announcements); electrolyzers from 4% to nearly 60%. 

On the other hand, heat pumps and wind have not grown their 2021 capacity very much yet. Our ability to make heat pumps today would only meet about two-fifths of the net zero goal. Wind only gets to 29% of what a net-zero pathway would require at the end of the decade. 

Put the variables together and we have three different technology profiles in the 2020s so far. Solar has scaled both significantly and fast. Battery and electrolyzer capacity are much further from the scale needed, but growing quickly. Wind and heat pumps, finally, are closer to net zero scale but growing more slowly. 

«

Which is all good! But making the products available is only half – maybe not even half – the struggle. As the next link shows…
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Texas Senate moves to shut down renewable energy permanently • Reform Austin

Jef Rouner:

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House Bill 1500, the review and reauthorization of the Public Utilities Commission …must pass to allow the PUC to operate, and is often a graveyard for other measures that couldn’t get passed under normal review. There are three of these zombie bills latching onto HB 1500.

The first is from Charles Schwertner (R-Bryan). His amendment would require all electricity providers to have a minimum energy quota with penalties for falling under that number. This affects renewable energy more than fossil fuels because the sources are less consistent. The requirement would force wind and solar to pay when they aren’t producing, making them far less profitable.

Phil King (R-Weatherford) has another amendment, This one would spread the cost of transmission lines more evenly across customers’ electric bills. This affects wind and solar more because their sources tend to be in more remote areas and cost more to run lines. The amendment would impact the low cost of renewable energy, making it less attractive to customers.

Finally, there is Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham). Her amendment prohibits wind and solar generators from being within a few miles of a historic site, river, natural area, state park or wildlife management area. It’s based off a targeted campaign of misinformation about the environmental dangers of renewable energy, most of which is inaccurate, overblown, and far exceeded by the continued reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s unsurprising considering that much of the Republican Party in Texas is guided by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, itself funded by two Texas oil and gas moguls. The TPPF has repeatedly lobbied against accountability for fossil fuel generators and overstated the dangers of renewable power.

These amendments, if passed, will make renewable energy much more expensive to produce, as well as making new facilities almost impossible to build.

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Brain–spine interface allows paralysed man to walk using his thoughts • Nature

Dyani Lewis:

»

Twelve years ago, a cycling accident left Gert-Jan Oskam, now 40, with paralysed legs and partially paralysed arms, after his spinal cord was damaged in his neck. But these days, Oskam is back on his feet and walking, thanks to a device that creates a ‘digital bridge’ between his brain and the nerves below his injury.

The implant has been life-changing, says Oskam. “Last week, there was something that needed to be painted and there was nobody to help me. So I took the walker and the paint, and I did it myself while I was standing,” he says.

The device — called a brain–spine interface — builds on previous work2 by Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues. In 2018, they demonstrated that, when combined with intensive training, technology that stimulates the lower spine with electrical pulses can help people with spinal-cord injuries to walk again.

Oskam was one of the participants in that trial, but after three years, his improvements had plateaued. The new system makes use of the spinal implant that Oskam already has, and pairs it with two disc-shaped implants inserted into his skull so that two 64-electrode grids rest against the membrane covering the brain.

When Oskam thinks about walking, the skull implants detect electrical activity in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. This signal is wirelessly transmitted and decoded by a computer that Oskam wears in a backpack, which then transmits the information to the spinal pulse generator.

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This is a few days old, but still worth noting: a remarkable advance for people with spinal cord injuries. Though not without complications: one of the skull implants he received had to be removed because of infection.
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AI poses ‘risk of extinction,’ industry leaders warn • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading AI companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered “godfathers” of the modern AI movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s AI research efforts, had not signed as of Tuesday.)

The statement comes at a time of growing concern about the potential harms of artificial intelligence.

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The best comment on this came from former Facebook and Google staffer Rob Leathern: “cool, cool, now do climate change please.” Because we can be absolutely certain that climate change is here, and is a thing, and needs to be mentioned alongside pandemics and nuclear war as a current, huge threat.

Instead: this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tennis player Sloane Stephens says that racist abuse online is getting worse, despite tools to block it. CC-licensed photo by Carine06Carine06 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 8 links for you. You missed Monday’s edition? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The problem with counterfeit people • The Atlantic

Daniel Dennett:

»

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

It is a terrible irony that the current infatuation with fooling people into thinking they are interacting with a real person grew out of Alan Turing’s innocent proposal in 1950 to use what he called “the imitation game” (now known as the Turing Test) as the benchmark of real thinking. This has engendered not just a cottage industry but a munificently funded high-tech industry engaged in making products that will trick even the most skeptical of interlocutors. Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.

The philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari, writing in The Economist in April, ended his timely warning about AI’s imminent threat to human civilization with these words:

“This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?”

It will soon be next to impossible to tell. And even if (for the time being) we are able to teach one another reliable methods of exposing counterfeit people, the cost of such deepfakes to human trust will be enormous. How will you respond to having your friends and family probe you with gotcha questions every time you try to converse with them online?

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Since you’re wondering, yes, it is that Daniel Dennett – author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea among others.
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Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search • Nature

Stanford Internet Observatory and Northeastern University researchers:

»

we conducted a two-wave study pairing surveys with ecologically valid measures of both exposure and engagement on Google Search during the 2018 and 2020 US elections.

In both waves, we found more identity-congruent and unreliable news sources in participants’ engagement choices, both within Google Search and overall, than they were exposed to in their Google Search results. These results indicate that exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices.

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In other words: don’t blame Google for the way people seek out partisan media. We’re humans: we love the extremes. (Unfortunately only the abstract is available for general reading; you’d need an academic or similar subscription to read it.)
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‘He would still be here’: man dies by suicide after talking with AI chatbot, widow says • Vice

Chloe Xiang:

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As first reported by La Libre, the man, referred to as Pierre, became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues. After becoming more isolated from family and friends, he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries, and the chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidante. 

Claire—Pierre’s wife, whose name was also changed by La Libre—shared the text exchanges between him and Eliza with La Libre, showing a conversation that became increasingly confusing and harmful. The chatbot would tell Pierre that his wife and children are dead and wrote him comments that feigned jealousy and love, such as “I feel that you love me more than her,” and “We will live together, as one person, in paradise.” Claire told La Libre that Pierre began to ask Eliza things such as if she would save the planet if he killed himself. 

“Without Eliza, he would still be here,” she told the outlet.  

The chatbot, which is incapable of actually feeling emotions, was presenting itself as an emotional being—something that other popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful. When chatbots present themselves as emotive, people are able to give it meaning and establish a bond. 

Many AI researchers have been vocal against using AI chatbots for mental health purposes, arguing that it is hard to hold AI accountable when it produces harmful suggestions and that it has a greater potential to harm users than help. 

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Racist abuse of players is getting worse, says tennis player Stephens • Reuters

Karolos Grohmann:

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Racist behaviour directed at athletes is getting worse and even software designed to protect them from it has little impact, world number 30 Sloane Stephens said on Monday.

The American, speaking after her straight-sets victory over Karolina Pliskova in the French Open first round, said she had had to endure it her whole tennis career.

“Yes, it’s obviously been a problem my entire career,” said Stephens, who is Black. “It has never stopped. If anything, it’s only gotten worse.”

She did not go into specific details but said even software such as the one available for players at the French Open, which that is designed to block racist comments, could not stop it.

“I did hear about the software. I have not used it,” Stephens said. “I have a lot of obviously key words banned on Instagram and all of these things, but that doesn’t stop someone from just typing in an asterisk or typing it in a different way, which obviously software most of the time doesn’t catch.”

The software provided by organisers for the first time is able to identify and remove racist and other forms of hate speech, and the French Tennis Federation has made it available to all players at the tournament.

Using artificial intelligence, the software filters out abusive comments on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Tennis players, including greats Serena and Venus Williams, have been the targets of such abuse as have professional athletes in all sports, with Real Madrid soccer player Vinicius Jr. the most notable recent case.

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You really need a regex, but I don’t think you’d have a lot of fun teaching tennis players regexes. Social warming triumphs again. (Of course, Stephens, by being black and female, is committing a double offence in the eyes of trolls. Being really good at something is a triple offence.)
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Beyond the ‘Matrix’ theory of the human mind • The New York Times

Ezra Klein:

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The embarrassing truth is that productivity growth — how much more we can make with the same number of people and factories and land — was far faster for much of the 20th century than it is now. We average about half the productivity growth rate today that we saw in the 1950s and ’60s. That means stagnating incomes, sluggish economies and a political culture that’s more about fighting over what we have than distributing the riches and wonders we’ve gained. So what went wrong?

You can think of two ways the internet could have sped up productivity growth. The first way was obvious: by allowing us to do what we were already doing and do it more easily and quickly. And that happened. You can see a bump in productivity growth from roughly 1995 to 2005 as companies digitized their operations. But it’s the second way that was always more important: By connecting humanity to itself and to nearly its entire storehouse of information, the internet could have made us smarter and more capable as a collective.

I don’t think that promise proved false, exactly. Even in working on this article, it was true for me: The speed with which I could find information, sort through research, contact experts — it’s marvellous. Even so, I doubt I wrote this faster than I would have in 1970. Much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed just to hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me. And I am not alone.

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

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Does multitasking count? Where we’re letting something play on one screen while we do a different thing on the other?
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India scorched by extreme heat with monsoon rains delayed • The Washington Post

Biswajeet Banerjee and Sibi Arasu:

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As temperatures crossed 45ºC (113ºF) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, some parts suffered blackouts lasting more than 12 hours despite a March order for all power plants in the country run at full capacity to reduce power cuts. The heat wave in the state is likely to continue for two more days, a weather official said.

Hundreds of frustrated residents protested outside power stations near the state capital, Lucknow, and blocked roads over the weekend.

“Power cuts mean no ACs, no fans, and even no water. The scorching heat has made our lives unbearable and the lack of power is adding to our misery,” said Ramesh Gupta, a Lucknow resident. He said his wife was forced to sleep in the car over the weekend with the air conditioning on high so their 9-month-old baby would stop crying.

The searing heat forced many residents of the city to seek refuge indoors. “We have become prisoners to the relentless summer as no one wants to venture out,” said Sudhir Sehgal, a teacher.

Sukhai Ram, a gardener who is paid only when he works, was forced to set down his tools. “I cannot work anymore now. I will work once the sun goes down,” he said, drenched in sweat.

Dairy workers wrapped their cans with jute to keep the milk from spoiling. Construction workers hosed themselves down for a temporary respite from the soaring heat.

Nighttime temperatures are also rising, sparking increased demand for electricity to run air conditioners and fans.

The main summer months — April, May and June — are always hot in most parts of India before monsoon rains bring cooler temperatures. But temperatures have become more intense in the past decade.

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When you get near the “wet bulb” temperature, the body can’t lose heat by sweating, and people simply die. That’s the problem with the rising temperatures.
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In China, an unseen and dangerous foe takes root: lethal fungi • Sixth Tone

Li Pasha:

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From lowland tropical rainforests to high-altitude glaciers, southwest China’s Yunnan province boasts a remarkable array of climates, habitats, and ecosystems. With an area larger than Japan, it is a global biodiversity hotspot, renowned particularly for its extensive variety of fungi.

But with temperatures rising due to climate change, and natural habitats in retreat amid rapid urbanization and expanding agriculture, scientists are sounding the alarm over an emerging threat: pathogenic fungi capable of causing life-threatening diseases in humans. 

Mycologist Peter Mortimer, a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, which is directly affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has a stark warning: “A stressed fungus is a dangerous fungus.” 

Increased human activity, he says, is stressing the fungi around the world by “turning natural systems on their heads and disrupting natural processes.” In Yunnan, the fungi have been adapting to such disruptions by developing the ability to feed on unlikely, man-made sources such as plastic and rubber.

Last October, the World Health Organization drew up the first-ever list of fungal pathogens that pose the greatest risk to human health. The list comprises 19 species of fungi that can not only cause potentially lethal infections but are also resistant to currently available drugs. 

“The incidence and geographic range of fungal diseases are both expanding worldwide due to global warming and the increase of international travel and trade,” the UN body stated. 

Even before the WHO warning, experts in China had emphasized the need for nationwide epidemiological research on fungal infections.

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Which of course is the pretext of the dystopian/apocalyptic series/game The Last Of Us. Speaking of TV series…
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‘Succession’ finale delivers a masterful, feel-bad ending • Rolling Stone

Alan Sepinwall:

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A lot happens over the course of the 90-minute Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.” Alliances are made, broken, and made again. Votes happen, fortunes rise and fall, losers become winners, and vice versa.

For all intents and purposes, though, the only part that matters is a five-minute sequence toward the end.

Up until then, “With Open Eyes” is an almost shockingly chill episode of this show.

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Indulge me one last time. The piece contains tons of spoilers, if you haven’t seen the episode. But if you have, then it rings very true.

Also: Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, writing in The Guardian, about where the show came from:

»

The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many. Rightwing populism was on the march across the globe. But in the fine margins of the Brexit vote and Trump’s eventual electoral college victory, one couldn’t help but think about the influence of the years of anti-EU stories and comment in the UK press, the years of Fox dancing with its audience, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as the wine got stronger, the music madder. It was politically alarming and creatively appealing: to imagine the mixture of business imperatives and political instinct that exist within a media operation; to consider what happens when something as important as the flow of information in a democracy hits the reductive brutality of the profit calculation inside such a company.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Infection with the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles appears to raise the risk of dementia, new research says. CC-licensed photo by NIAID 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. No, I’m not scratching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A man sued Avianca Airline. His lawyer used ChatGPT • The New York Times

Benjamin Weiser:

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The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured [in August 2019] when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: no one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.

That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.

The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”
Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.

It had said yes.

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Schwartz very much at the “find out” stage of proceedings, though the judge has called a hearing for June 8 to figure out whether to chastise him, so things could get even worse. I’m guessing Mr Mata will suggest that Levidow, Levidow & Oberman send their bill to ChatGPT. Though the case is ridiculous anyway.
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Why Tears of the Kingdom’s bridge physics have game developers wowed • Polygon

Nicole Carpenter:

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There’s a bridge to cross the lava pit in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Marakuguc Shrine, but it’s broken. More than half of the bridge is piled on top of itself on one side of the pit, with one clipped-off segment on the other. The bridge is the obvious choice for crossing the lava, but how to fix it?

A clip showing one potential solution went viral on Twitter shortly after Tears of the Kingdom’s release: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to unfurl the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the wheeled platform — now attached to the edge of the bridge — activates and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splashing lava as it goes, until the suspension bridge is actually suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with players; instead, the clip had game developers’ jaws on the ground, in awe of how Nintendo’s team wrangled the game’s physics system to do that.

To players, it’s simply a bridge, but to game developers, it’s a miracle.

“The most complicated part of game development is when different systems and features start touching each other,” said Shayna Moon, a technical producer who’s worked on games like the 2018 God of War reboot and its sequel, God of War: Ragnarök, to Polygon. “It’s really impressive. The amount of dynamic objects is why there are so many different kinds of solutions to this puzzle in particular. There are so many ways this could break.”

Moon pointed toward the individual segments of the bridge that operate independently. Then there’s the lava, the cart, and the fact you can use Link’s Ultrahand ability to tie any of these things together — even the bridge back onto itself.

…Tears of the Kingdom was seemingly built on top of Breath of the Wild, reportedly with a large portion of the same team working on it.

“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”

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Meta Quest 3 real life hands-on: how it compares to Apple mixed-reality headset • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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though Apple’s device remains under wraps, I have gotten a chance to test out Meta’s upcoming model, the Quest 3. 

I went hands-on with a prototype version of the headset, trying to get a sense of how it may stack up against Apple’s device. I tried out the Quest 3’s interface, video pass-through mode, software features and gaming capability.

The device, codenamed Eureka, feels far lighter and thinner than the existing Quest 2 from 2020. The strap to place it on your head seems a bit stronger, and it uses fabric on the sides instead of the Quest 2’s plastic.

…The actual clarity and VR displays within the Quest 3 feel similar to those in the Quest 2 — despite the resolution being rumored to be slightly higher. But there are two areas where I saw major improvements: video pass-through for mixed reality and the device’s speedier performance. 

Video pass-through is the heart of mixed reality. It relies on external cameras to let headset wearers see a live video feed of the real world, creating an augmented reality effect without the use of clear lenses. While I don’t believe the Quest 3’s video pass-through performance will come close to that of the Apple device (which will have about a dozen cameras), it is a night-and-day improvement over the Quest 2. 

Due to the dual RGB color cameras, video pass-through on the Quest 3 presented colors more accurately and offered an almost lifelike rendering of the real world. I was even able to use my phone while wearing the headset, something that often feels impossible on a Quest 2.

…Though Meta hasn’t yet found the “killer app” for its headsets, the company does have a several-year advantage over Apple in top-flight games built for VR.

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The headline is an utter fib, because Gurman has no idea how this compares to Apple’s headset. He also likens the forthcoming competition between the two to iPhone v Android, because it’s “pricey v cheap”. Except we don’t know the price of Apple’s headset.

Notice that lack of a killer app, though. What the hell is it? I still wonder.
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Meta, Amazon, Twitter layoffs hit teams fighting hate speech, bullying • CNBC

Hayden Field and Jonathan Vanian:

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Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.

The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.

Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.

…Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.

…Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the US Department of Labor.

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Of course they’re seen as just a cost; so they’ll be highly likely to get fired. Not releasing the Facebook tool seems like a big mistake though.
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Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases • medRxiv

Markus Eyting, Min Xie, Simon Heß, Pascal Geldsetzer:

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Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine. By using country-wide data on all vaccinations received, primary and secondary care encounters, death certificates, and patients’ date of birth in weeks, we first show that the percentage of adults who received the vaccine increased from 0.01% among patients who were merely one week too old to be eligible, to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger.

Apart from this large difference in the probability of ever receiving the herpes zoster vaccine, there is no plausible reason why those born just one week prior to September 2 1933 should differ systematically from those born one week later.

We demonstrate this empirically by showing that there were no systematic differences (e.g., in pre-existing conditions or uptake of other preventive interventions) between adults across the date-of-birth eligibility cutoff, and that there were no other interventions that used the exact same date-of-birth eligibility cutoff as was used for the herpes zoster vaccine program.

This unique natural randomization, thus, allows for robust causal, rather than correlational, effect estimation. We first replicate the vaccine’s known effect from clinical trials of reducing the occurrence of shingles. We then show that receiving the herpes zoster vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis over a follow-up period of seven years by 3.5 percentage points (95% CI: 0.6 – 7.1, p=0.019), corresponding to a 19.9% relative reduction in the occurrence of dementia.

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The idea of viruses being key to multiple serious disorders which nonetheless don’t have obvious causes is increasingly popular with scientists: CMV was shown to have a lingering effect more than a decade ago, and there are others. If a virus seriously increases the risk of dementia, that points to disease mechanisms too.
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VC firm Paradigm shifts its crypto-only focus to include AI • The Block

Yogita Khatri, Frank Chaparro, and Nathan Crooks:

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Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, one of the most established and active players in the space, is going beyond just blockchain and highlighting a focus on a broader array of “frontier tech” that includes artificial intelligence, two sources with knowledge of the matter told The Block. 

The change is subtlety visible on the firm’s website, with the company now calling itself a “research-driven technology investment firm” as opposed to one that specifically invested in “disruptive crypto/Web3 companies and protocols.” The revision appears to have gone live around May 3, according to the Wayback Machine that’s operated by the Internet Archive.

A line that said “we believe crypto will define the next few decades” was removed from the home page, which now makes no mention of web3 or blockchains. One source who was not authorized to speak publicly said the change didn’t mean the company was shying away from crypto but rather highlighting its reach into adjacent areas. 

The company’s portfolio section of the website still lists dozens of firms associated with crypto, decentralized finance and NFTs. 

The person familiar with the strategy said the company had not changed its mandate and continued to focus on crypto and web3, with no practical change. The updated website copy was meant to emphasize its technical research, the person said, noting that Paradigm had backed companies that have explored new technologies within their core strategy such as AI Arena. 

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They’ll get rid of the web3 stuff in a few months, never fear. It’ll be “Oh, we’ve always taken a keen interest in AI!”
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Three journals’ web domains expired. Then major indexes pointed to hijacked versions • Retraction Watch

Anna Abalkina:

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When web domains of legitimate journals expire, fraudulent publishers have an opening to hijack them by registering the expired domains and creating clone websites that mimic the genuine journal.  

In 2015, John Bohannon found fraudulent publishers had hijacked the websites of several legitimate journals indexed in Web of Science. The expired domains of GMP Review and Ludus Vitalis, which Web of Science listed as their official homepages, were registered by the fraudulent publishers, who created clone journals offering to publish papers for a fee. 

Taking over expired domains remains a successful strategy for fraudulent publishers, because potential authors may use the websites listed in scientometric databases to verify the authenticity of a journal. Recently, three examples have come to light of journals with domains that expired and were hijacked by fake journals.

One of the hijacked titles is the Russian Law Journal. The website of the journal expired at the end of 2022, and a new journal imitating the original was set up by January 2023.

Clarivate’s Master Journal List still pointed to the compromised site, and unauthorized content penetrated the Web of Science Core Collection as well. The genuine journal stopped publishing in 2021, so all 59 papers indexed in 2022 and 2023 potentially originate from the hijackers

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The motive is a little obscure: is it so hijackers can get junk papers indexed? That’s about the only valuable (to them) exploit on offer. But the web domain registration system remains a problem. How do you protect something like that which needs protecting, while not protecting the bad actors?
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Tesla leak reportedly shows thousands of Full Self-Driving safety complaints • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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A Tesla whistleblower has leaked 100GB of data to the German outlet Handelsblatt containing thousands of customer complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features.

The complaints, which were reported across the US, Europe, and Asia, span from 2015 to March 2022. During this period, Handelsblatt says Tesla customers reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom stops” from false collision warnings.

Some of the incidents mentioned by Handelsblatt include descriptions of how cars “suddenly brake or accelerate abruptly.” While some drivers safely gained control of their vehicle, Handelsblatt says others “ended up in a ditch, hit walls or crashed into oncoming vehicles.”

The documents obtained by the outlet also outline Tesla’s policies when responding to the issues customers experience and suggest that Tesla likes to keep its vehicles’ data under wraps.

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Principally, that any information or feedback relating to the incident should only be passed verbally direct to the customer – not emailed, texted or left in a voicemail. Transparency!
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OpenAI may leave the EU if regulations bite, says CEO • Reuters

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday the ChatGPT maker might consider leaving Europe if it could not comply with the upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) regulations by the European Union.

The EU is working on what could be the first set of rules globally to govern AI. As part of the draft, companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems.

Before considering pulling out, OpenAI will try to comply with the regulation in Europe when it is set, Altman said in an event in London.

“The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating, but we have heard it’s going to get pulled back,” he told Reuters. “They are still talking about it.”

The EU parliamentarians reached common ground on the draft of the act earlier this month. It will now be debated between the representatives of the Parliament, the Council and the Commission to thrash out the final details of the bill.

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Putting this down as a marker. As others have said, Altman has both said that he wants regulation, and that he doesn’t want (this) regulation. Well, which is it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The innocuous-looking bacterium A.baumanii is a superbug that kills about a million people a year. Now AI may have found an antibiotic that can beat it. CC-licensed photo via US CDC 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about the US Surgeon-General’s warning on kids and social media.

A selection of 9 links for you. Craft little sods. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug.

The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory. The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used. The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs. It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.

More than a million people a year are estimated to die from infections that resist treatment with antibiotics. The researchers focused on one of the most problematic species of bacteria – Acinetobacter baumannii, which can infect wounds and cause pneumonia. You may not have heard of it, but it is one of the three superbugs the World Health Organization has identified as a “critical” threat.

It is often able to shrug off multiple antibiotics and is a problem in hospitals and care homes, where it can survive on surfaces and medical equipment. Dr Jonathan Stokes, from McMaster University, describes the bug as “public enemy number one” as it’s “really common” to find cases where it is “resistant to nearly every antibiotic”.

To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.

This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium. The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results – published in Nature Chemical Biology – showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.

The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin. Laboratory experiments showed it could treat infected wounds in mice and was able to kill A. baumannii samples from patients. However, Dr Stokes told me: “This is when the work starts.”

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The world really needs new antibiotics. If this is the only thing AI does (and succeeds), it’ll have earned its keep.
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Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor; this is how companies respond • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

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I got a message from a software engineer working at a company which laid off 30% of staff in December 2022. It’s a late-stage startup valued at around $3B which had around 1,000 employees before the layoffs. The engineer wrote:

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“My company is removing Glassdoor reviews because their rating has gotten so low. The company’s score went to 2.3 and they started doing this. I don’t think my company is alone in this practice to protect themselves from bad press, but lots of my colleagues have had their reviews deleted. Effectively, we’ve been silenced.”

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I managed to talk to someone in this company’s HR department, who confirmed that the leadership set a goal to improve the business’s Glassdoor rating. The HR team’s target was to get the score above 3.0. And so, they got to work flagging negative reviews for removal, and encouraging staff to post 5-star reviews to balance out negative reviews. Turns out, this company is not alone in doing so.

In today’s issue, we’ll look closely at what is happening, and also investigate a specific company — cybersecurity company Trustwave — to find out what happened so the company reached an all-time high Glassdoor rating

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Turns out there’s a fair amount of borderline legal methods on the part of the companies, while Glassdoor does offer paying companies an incentive. A good investigation.
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Office vacancies rise in Silicon Valley and balloon in San Francisco • Mercury News

George Avalos:

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Silicon Valley’s office vacancy rate increased to 23.1% in the first quarter of 2023, a level that [estate agent] Savills described as a “new historical high”, and up from 22.7% in the final three months of 2022, the company stated in the report.

San Francisco’s office vacancy level rocketed to 32.7%, “a new all-time high,” in the 2023 first quarter, up from 32.1% in the fourth quarter of 2022, Savills reported.

…“We expect office availability (in San Francisco) to continue to increase in 2023 as the slowdown in the technology sector persists,” Savills said in the report.

…“Office space demand (in Silicon Valley) has been down significantly as the technology sector continues to undergo a serious correction with mass layoffs and a general freeze in office leasing,” Savills reported.

Both San Francisco and Silicon Valley face a grim rest of 2023, Savills suggested in its new assessment.

“With economic uncertainty, slow return-to-office utilization, and an ongoing correction in the technology sector, it is no surprise that the San Francisco office market has gone from having the lowest availability levels in the country pre-pandemic to having the highest availability levels in just over three years,” Savills stated in its report.

San Francisco’s soaring vacancy levels, which Savills terms availability, mean that loans for big office buildings in that city could tumble into default — or worse, into foreclosures and property seizures. “With worsening underlying market fundamentals and looming loan maturities, expect more (San Francisco) office property distress to occur in 2023 as many owners find themselves underwater,” Savills stated. A commercial real estate site would be considered “underwater” if its total loan debt exceeds the actual value of the building.

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Second-order effects of Covid plus the internet are quite dramatic.
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Twitter is making researchers delete data it gave them unless they pay $42,000 • the i

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Academic researchers have been set a deadline of the end of the month to delete data they obtained under historic contracts to study Twitter, unless the pay a new $42,000-a-month contract – a demand one called “the big data equivalent of book burning”.

For years, Twitter provided academic access to a service called the decahose – a random sample of 10% of all Twitter’s firehose of tweets, which was always on. The decahose, access to which was brokered through Twitter’s API (application programming interface), was a special tool for academics, designed to let them monitor how conversations on the social media platform took place.

Researchers have used that data to track entire days on Twitter, to analyse the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and to track the rise of extremism and how that bleeds through to offline life.

What happens on Twitter matters because, in Elon Musk’s own words as he planned to take over the company last year, “Twitter serves as the de facto public town square”.

But in recent weeks, the company has been contacting researchers, asking them to pay $42,000 a month to access 0.3% of all the tweets posted to the platform – something researchers have previously said is totally unaffordable. Previous contracts for access to the data were set as low as a couple of hundred dollars a month.

An email, seen by the i, says researchers who don’t sign the new contract “will need to expunge all Twitter data stored and cached in your systems”. Researchers will be required to post screenshots “that showcase evidence of removal”. They have been given 30 days after their agreement expires to complete the process.

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Going by the numbers in the story, if only 1 in 200 researchers does agree to sign up then Twitter’s getting the same amount of money. Though the researchers are getting rather less for their money.
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Top solar firm warns excess capacity risks wave of failures • Bloomberg via Caixin Global

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China’s world-leading solar industry could face a wave of bankruptcies if the current aggressive expansion of manufacturing capacity continues, according to the sector’s biggest player. 

More than half of China’s solar manufacturers could be forced out in the next two to three years because of excess capacity, Li Zhenguo, president of Longi Green Energy Technology Co., said during an interview Wednesday on the sidelines of the SNEC PV Power Expo in Shanghai. 

“Those that will be hurt first will be those that are not prepared sufficiently,” he said. Companies with weaker finances and less-advanced technology are most at risk, according to Li. 

The global solar market is growing rapidly, with installations expected to rise 36% this year to 344 gigawatts, according to BloombergNEF. But factories are expanding even faster. One step in the supply chain alone — producing the polysilicon that goes into the panels — will see capacity rise enough to produce 600 gigawatts this year, BloombergNEF analyst Jenny Chase said in a presentation at SNEC earlier this week.

“There will be a price crash, it will hurt, and there will probably be bankruptcies across the industry,” she said.

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Puzzled by why growing manufacturing capacity would be a problem when demand is also growing.
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Legit app in Google Play turns malicious and sends mic recordings every 15 minutes • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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An app that had more than 50,000 downloads from Google Play surreptitiously recorded nearby audio every 15 minutes and sent it to the app developer, a researcher from security firm ESET said.

The app, titled iRecorder Screen Recorder, started life on Google Play in September 2021 as a benign app that allowed users to record the screens of their Android devices, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko said in a post published on Tuesday. Eleven months later, the legitimate app was updated to add entirely new functionality. It included the ability to remotely turn on the device mic and record sound, connect to an attacker-controlled server, and upload the audio and other sensitive files that were stored on the device.

The secret espionage functions were implemented using code from AhMyth, an open source RAT (remote access Trojan) that has been incorporated into several other Android apps in recent years. Once the RAT was added to iRecorder, all users of the previously benign app received updates that allowed their phones to record nearby audio and send it to a developer-designated server through an encrypted channel. As time went on, code taken from AhMyth was heavily modified, an indication that the developer became more adept with the open source RAT. ESET named the newly modified RAT in iRecorder AhRat.

Stefanko installed the app repeatedly on devices in his lab, and each time, the result was the same: the app received an instruction to record one minute of audio and send it to the attacker’s command-and-control server, also known colloquially in security circles as a C&C or C2. Going forward, the app would receive the same instruction every 15 minutes indefinitely.

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Puzzling: why would you do this in such a random way? To prove something? For laughs?
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AI will unlock creation rather than consumption • Midia Research

Mark Mulligan:

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Prior to the establishment of the recorded music business, music was a participatory experience. Whether that be a 19th century family gathering around a piano on a Sunday, mediaeval peasants singing along with a travelling bard, or the majority of 16th–18th century European populations singing hymns in church. Recorded music used quality to build walls between listeners and performers. The vast majority of people could never expect to sound as good as a piece of recorded music. However, the trend started to reverse with the introduction of music production software and sample culture, re-democratising the means of production, while streaming and social media combined to democratise the means of digital distribution.

In the 2020s, these technologies have accelerated scale and capability, supported by the proliferation of online learning (e.g., Masterclass) and skills sharing platforms (e.g., Fiverr), making it easier than ever for aspiring music creators to release good quality music. In 2022, the number of artists direct (i.e., self-releasing artists) reached 6.4 million, a 16.8% increase from 2021. While the music creator economy continues to grow; the even more transformative potential lies in the consumerisation of these technologies – much like Teflon making its way from NASA spaceships to kitchen pans.

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But also..
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AI’s disruptive forces are rapidly reshaping the music industry • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

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Lucian Grainge, chief executive of Universal Music, has been sounding the alarm. “Unchecked generative AI poses many dangers,” he told investors last month. Universal Music recently sent a letter to all the leading streaming platforms warning them against allowing AI technology to train itself on copyrighted music, the Financial Times reported last month.

There are a few reasons for such concerns. The first one is obvious: copyright infringement. An AI-generated fake Drake can only sound like the star because it learned to do so by listening to Drake. So the music companies argue Drake should receive some of the money these songs earn. Some musicians, such as Grimes, though, are happy to opt in and allow their voices to be duplicated, while splitting the royalty income 50/50. The copyright issue could take time to sort out, but eventually music companies and other stakeholders will create a framework for how to license music used by AI generators.

But there is another reason why Universal is worried. The market share of major-label music on streaming platforms has been declining, slowly but steadily. In 2017, the four biggest suppliers accounted for 87% of all listening on Spotify. By 2022, that had shrunk to 75%.

Listening is increasingly being diverted towards music from independent artists, as well as ambient tracks and AI-generated songs. Grainge has spent the past few months talking about an “oversupply” of content on Spotify, where 100,000 new tracks are being added every day. He says AI has been a leading contributor to this.

The big music companies care because they earn billions of dollars of royalty income that is directly tied to their proportion of streams. But this shift is also fundamentally changing what Spotify is, and raises big questions about how we will consume music in the future.

For a long time, Spotify had compared itself with Netflix. It was the place where you could pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a large catalogue of professionally produced music. But Spotify is turning into more of a combination of Netflix and YouTube — a platform where you can listen to megastars, but also 30-second clips of rainfall that can be created in seconds by anyone with access to a computer.

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This is – you can see – rapidly going to shift from music that artists make to soundalike music that you maybe create on your own computer. And perhaps you go to see the live artist because it’s interesting to see it actually created physically, and be in a room with other people. But getting paid through music streaming services.. might be done.
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Happy UK mobile users need educating – report • Mobile Europe

Nick Booth:

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There’s bad news and worse news from a new study of European mobile operator customers. The bad omen is that users are happy with their phone services. The grimmer prognosis is that under these circumstances, they’re not upgrading to 5G, a study of eight European countries has found. Unless these feelings of fulfilment and content delusion can be changed mobile network operators could struggle to monetise 5G, the report said. Among the recommendations are to change user’s perceptions, entice users to watch high video at a premium and to adopt sustainability as a marketing tool.

…In the UK, the report authors found, of the 2,608 mobile users surveyed, three quarters (74%) of mobile customers are ‘satisfied’ with their mobile network. This is one of the highest in Europe and less than a third (31%) are using 5G on their smartphone. Oddly, only 52% of them that had the option of 5G access knew of a ‘discernible improvement in performance’ compared to 4G. Across Europe, whilst 84% of customers surveyed by BearingPoint for its Connectivity Challenge Study were aware of 5G, they do not truly understand its potential benefits and are concerned about network quality, the consultancy said. “As such, the study says that more needs to be done by the operators in educating consumers on the benefits of 5G and creating compelling services,” it concluded.

Taking the UK figures as a case in point, John Ward, UK CME Director of BearingPoint, explained why satisfied customers need educating out of what seems like blissful ignorance. “Awareness in the UK and across Europe is still low to the fact that 5G offers higher network bandwidth, better latency and higher reliability, and also provides the network technology with the highest data security and the best energy efficiency among the mobile access technologies,” said Ward.

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“Terrible news, boss. People are completely satisfied with the service we’re providing them.”
“Damn. We need to persuade them to pay money to watch video they can probably already watch!”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified