Triathletes get into cold water carefully because their bodies are liable to an autonomic reaction on immersion that could kill them – as it does other people. CC-licensed photo by rick on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Brr. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Letter #327: John Ternus’s commencement speech (2024) • A Letter A Day

Kevin Gee with the transcript of incoming Apple CEO John Ternus’s commencement speech at Penn Engineering in 2024:

»

My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.

At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.

I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.

But make no mistake, it’s hard to put that much of yourself into something. It’s stressful, it requires sacrifice, but it’s worth it because our time is finite.

«

There’s more, and it’s a lot shorter than Steve Jobs’s commencement speech with fewer insights, but it gives a first glimpse of the person behind the new chief executive. There’s also a Deadline report which says that he likes the Apple TV streaming service and wants it to be, if anything, more competitive.
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CDC blocks study showing Covid shots cut hospital visits after earlier delay • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

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A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because it conflicts with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings that began last week and conclude Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that Jay Bhattacharya, who is temporarily overseeing the CDC, delayed publication of the report over concerns about methodology. The report had been scheduled for publication March 19 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post.

«

America’s descent into idiocracy continues.
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It’s time. Meet my New Thing • New Things

Joanna Stern:

»

If you’ve read my work at WSJ—or before that at ABC News or The Verge—you know I love consumer tech. I love reviewing it, talking to the people making it and helping people understand it. Mostly, I love having fun with it. That’s what we’re doing here.

So let me answer a few questions.

What are you going to be doing?
At the simplest level: what I’ve always done. Writing and making videos about the devices, apps and services changing how we live. Yes, there will be phones. Yes, Apple stuff. Yes, Google and Android stuff. Yes, tips and tricks. Yes, probably a weird robot. Probably many weird robots.

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT—where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year—I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.
That’s the thread running through everything here—every review, every story, every dumb joke. And if I do this right, New Things won’t be just a publication. It’ll be a group of people asking that question together—and figuring out what kind of future we actually want.

Is this journalism written by AI?
Hi! I’m a human. I wrote this. Twenty years of journalism ethics don’t disappear because I started an independent media company and a YouTube channel, and they definitely don’t disappear because there are 700 chatbots on my laptop. Every word you read here—every review, every story, every bad joke—is written by me or by a human on my team. (Say hi, Amaya, David, Adele and Rich. 👋🏻) 

«

She then points to Google launching vertical tabs for Chrome, which she says is transformative. Personally I have my Reading List (of sites saved for later reading) there, so maybe not such a triumph? But she has to start somewhere.
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Global energy markets are on the verge of a disaster • The Economist

»

To gauge how close the world is to energy catastrophe, The Economist has gathered a dashboard of indicators. It suggests that grave damage has already been done. Worse, without a reopening costs could soar, triggering events that cause the fuel system to seize up. A reopening of the strait now would—just—avoid a complete disaster. But some additional pain is already inevitable.

Three factors are pushing the world towards the cliff edge. Oil cargoes available to buy are drying up. Refineries are slashing output of fuel. And demand remains artificially high, especially in Europe. Something big must give somewhere large for energy markets to balance.

Take trade first. One reason the largest supply shock in petroleum history has not triggered global panic is that a near-record amount of oil was already at sea when the war started. As American warships set sail for the Gulf in February, countries there cranked up exports. After the latest deliveries, those seaborne stocks are now exhausted. So are most cargoes of Iranian and Russian oil, which were loitering at sea but found buyers after America eased sanctions on the two countries. Total volumes on water have fallen at record speed. For jet fuel and petrol they are well below historical norms, and possibly close to the minimum required for seaborne trade to function.

This leaves Asia, which used to receive four-fifths of Gulf exports, in a particular bind. Commercial inventories in a few Asian countries are running out. South Korea is due to taper releases from its strategic reserves in the coming days. Japan’s will be exhausted in May. Crude stocks in Asia excluding China fell by 67m barrels, or 11%, in the month to April 19th, according to Kayrros, a firm that estimates inventories using satellite imaging.

«

This topic now seems so important that I subscribed, at this article, to The Economist to be able to follow analysis like this. Nowhere else seems to be drawing all the threads together, and I’m honestly perplexed by the lack of urgency that seems to be shown everywhere else.
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Iranian tankers bypass US blockade • Financial Times

Alice Hancock and Nassos Stylianou:

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At least 34 tankers with links to Iran have bypassed the US blockade since it began, according to the cargo tracking group Vortexa, including several carrying Iranian oil — despite US President Donald Trump declaring the barricade a “tremendous success”.

The US imposed its blockade on all ships entering or leaving Iranian coastal waters from 10am ET on April 13, marking a fresh phase in the Middle East conflict as Washington tries to pressure Tehran into a peace deal.

The embargo was expanded to cover all Iranian vessels on the high seas or those carrying goods that could be used by Iran in the conflict on April 16, according to notices from the US Navy.

US forces have so far detained one container ship in the Gulf of Oman and boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indo-Pacific. US Central Command said on Tuesday the US Navy had directed 28 vessels to turn back to Iranian ports since the blockade began.

«

If tankers exit the strait, is that good or bad? Iran gets some money so it can.. blockade the strait for longer? Trump’s blockade has created a Chinese fingertrap; a war that neither side can exit.
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What will be scarce? • Ghosts of Electricity

Alex Imas:

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This is most people’s mental model of what AI will do to the economy: if a machine can produce anything a human can, write the brief, generate the image, compose the song, determine the diagnosis from a radiology scan, then the human will be replaced across all facets of production and jobs will simply disappear. Labor will be replaced with capital. David Autor and Neil Thompson push back on this in an important recent paper. They argue that AI won’t simply eliminate jobs; it will reshape the economic value of human expertise. Their framework distinguishes between expert and inexpert tasks within any given occupation. When automation removes the simpler tasks (as accounting software did for bookkeeping clerks), the remaining work becomes more specialized, wages rise, and fewer workers qualify. When it removes the harder tasks (as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers), the job becomes more accessible, employment expands, and wages fall. Same technology, opposite labor market outcomes, depending on which part of the job gets automated.

But Autor and Thompson also consider a starker possibility: that AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. Under this scenario, AI will eliminate labor scarcity and produce what Herbert Simon once called “intolerable abundance.’’ Automation of production will no longer involve managing a workforce transition, for which we have prior episodes of automation to rely on. We will need tools to maintain social organization, income distribution, and democratic stability without the labor market that has historically held these together.

I want to consider a different scenario, one where automation can replicate human production and the commodities that it produces (a big if!!!), but human labor does not disappear. How could this be the case? A lot of analysis takes the economy as given: there is a set of jobs and a set of goods/services produced by the economy. If the same set of goods/services can be produced by cheaper machines, then these machines replace humans and the jobs disappear. But the economics of structural change, combined with deep-seated features of human preferences, suggests something different: as people get richer, they don’t just want more commodities. They want things that aren’t commodities in the standard sense of the word.

…If this is right, then AI won’t just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them.

«

Fingers crossed! Artisan everything coming your way!
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Ed Miliband unveils move to delink UK gas and electricity prices • Financial Times

Rachel Millard, Ashley Armstrong and Jim Pickard:

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The UK government will increase taxes on wind and solar farms in a bid to push them on to fixed-price contracts, as part of plans to cut the link between electricity and gas prices in Britain. 

The move, confirmed by the government on Tuesday, comes after the Iran war created pressure for a rethink on how electricity prices are set.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up gas prices and led to higher electricity prices, because gas-fired power stations typically set the wholesale price across the market under Britain’s “pay-as-clear” electricity market design. 

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said that renewable power stations that currently received subsidies under the legacy “renewables obligation” scheme would be encouraged to sign so-called contracts for difference, under which the state guarantees them a fixed electricity price regardless of the wholesale price, funded by a levy on consumer bills.

They would continue to receive renewable obligation subsidies as well, the government said. Power station owners will be able to apply for the contracts next year. Generators supplying roughly 30% of Britain’s power supplies receive renewable obligation certificates.

Alongside this, ministers will from July increase by 10 percentage points the windfall tax on power generators that are not signed up to contracts for difference, partly to encourage them to do so.

…However, the extent to which the move lowers costs for consumers will depend on the fixed price level the generators receive. Meanwhile, analysts said the threshold for the windfall tax was higher than the typical price of power sold by affected companies.

«

So this is not quite the sundering of pricing to give us cheap renewable power a lot of the time, or even some sort of average. The floor price goes up, but the ceiling comes down?
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The first sixty seconds • Jørgen Melau´s Mixed Physiology

Jørgen Melau:

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When people ask me what kills in cold water, they expect me to say hypothermia. But hypothermia is slow. The real killer is much faster, and it usually strikes before you have even started swimming. Let me try to explain why, and what you can do about it.

1. The cold shock response.
The moment cold water hits bare skin, your body panics. The nerves in your skin fire a huge alarm signal to the brain and the heart. You gasp. You hyperventilate. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure climbs. All of this in a few seconds.

Michael Tipton described this sequence in 1989, and it has not really changed since. The first gasp alone is two to three liters of air, pulled in uncontrollably in the first second after you hit the water. If your face happens to be under water at that moment, you do not breathe in air. You breathe in water. This is how strong pool swimmers drown ten meters from a boat.

2. The diving response
At the same time, the opposite reflex is triggered. Cold water on the face, together with holding your breath, sets off what is called the diving response. Your heart slows down. The blood vessels in your arms and legs squeeze shut. This is a very old reflex. Every mammal that dives under water has it, from seals to humans.

On its own, the diving response is harmless. On its own, the cold shock response is unpleasant but survivable. The problem is when they happen at the same time.

3. Autonomic conflict
In 2012, Mike Shattock and Mike Tipton gave this problem a name: autonomic conflict. Here is what happens. The cold shock response is telling the heart to speed up, now. The diving response is telling the heart to slow down, now. Both signals are maximum. Both arrive at the same time.

«

What Melau doesn’t point out, but becomes clear as you read this, is why people used to tell you not to go in the water within half an hour of eating. The whole of this is fascinating, and important for triathletes and others who have to jump into cold water and try to do things.
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It’s not just one thing — it’s another thing • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

»

Sometimes, things are not just one thing — they’re also another thing. This sentence construction (“It’s not just this — it’s that”) has become so common in AI-generated writing that now, it’s no longer just a clue that a piece of writing may be synthetic — it’s almost a guarantee.

That’s why I was not just intrigued when I saw a Barron’s report about how this sentence construction has dramatically increased in corporate communications — I was deeply amused. The report didn’t just remark on the prevalence of this phrasing in corporate communications — it scanned the market intelligence firm AlphaSense’s database to find how often this phrasing was used in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and government filings.

According to Barron’s, this sentence construction isn’t just a quirk of corporate communications — it’s an epidemic, more than quadrupling from about 50 mentions in 2023, to over 200 uses in 2025.

…It’s not just coincidental that generative AI tools use this phrase a lot — it’s a reflection of our writing, which these tools were trained on (without our permission, might I add, which is not just insulting to writers — it’s a violation). And it’s not just this sentence construction — it’s also em-dashes that are now considered a tell for AI-generated text.

This isn’t just a funny trend — it’s symbolic of how reliant these companies have become on AI (though we cannot say for certain if the above missives were AI-assisted). So next time you see a sentence like that, remember that it’s not just a catchy construction — it might be a symptom of something greater.

«

This is perhaps the best way to point to the slow infection of this style into corporatespeak. Though not that slow; the graph shows an exponential increase.
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Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — powered by AI • Coda Story

Nic Dawes:

»

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor.

«

I don’t think people are going to agree to this in the US, and it would have only limited applicability elsewhere.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition was ruled lawful by the High Court, denying a pressure group’s challenge. CC-licensed photo by Garry Knight on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Recognisable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple turnaround • Hypercritical

John Siracusa:

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I spend a lot of time thinking about what Apple should be doing differently. I wrote Apple Turnover because so many of my notions kept running into a dead end: I could no longer bring myself to believe Apple would do these things without a change in leadership.

When a company is described as being “in turnaround,” that usually means it needs to be restored to financial health and solvency. Apple in the late 1990s was in turnaround. Apple today is one of the most successful companies in the history of the world, regularly reporting huge profits, so the term may seem inapplicable.

There’s an old adage: never let a good crisis go to waste. When things get bad, people are more open to changes they previously wouldn’t consider. But avoiding a crisis entirely is even better. This is where Apple finds itself today: in need of turnaround-scale changes, but not currently in the kind of (usually financial) crisis that will motivate its leaders to make them.

New leadership is almost always part of a turnaround. In part, that’s because poor financial performance is one of the few remaining sins for which CEOs are reliably held to account. But it’s also because certain kinds of changes need the credibility that only new faces can bring.

So what are those changes? What are the things I think Apple should do, but that its current leadership seems unwilling to budge on? What changes require a level of engagement and understanding that Apple no longer seems to have?

«

Siracusa wrote this in May 2025 – 11 months ago – when nobody (outside Apple) had any clue about who was coming next, or when, but all the points he makes (about developer relations, about premium products and experiences, growth and the future.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down, to be succeeded by hardware chief John Ternus • The Washington Post

Chris Velazco and Gerrit De Vynck:

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[Tim] Cook launched hugely popular new devices, including the Apple Watch and AirPods. He used the ongoing popularity of the iPhone to build a massive services business, which now brings in more than $100bn in revenue each year selling subscriptions to Apple Music, Apple TV and taking a cut from transactions inside mobile apps.

But Cook had yet to deliver a clear sign of Apple’s next act would be, even as its Silicon Valley rivals charge ahead into the AI era. While other large tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computer chips and infrastructure to train powerful AI models, Apple has instead opted to use AI from other companies inside its products.

Under Cook’s watch, some forward-looking projects, like the company’s car initiative, have faltered after years of work. The muted consumer response to the Vision Pro headset and Apple Intelligence features launched to help the iPhone compete in artificial intelligence have led tech reviewers and analysts to question Apple’s focus and future.

“While Cook has kept Apple’s growth trajectory moving at a steady clip, he has not overseen a step-change innovation that would reset Apple’s competitive position for the next two decades,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, principle analyst at tech research firm Forrester said.

Ternus’s appointment in some ways signals continuity with rather than a break from the past. The incoming CEO has worked at Apple for 25 years, and Cook will continue to be a core part of Apple’s leadership when he transitions to executive chairman in September. Apple’s announcement emphasized Ternus’s work with hardware products and did not mention AI.

Despite the questions around Apple’s AI strategy, the company is a strong position. Its market capitalization is over $4 trillion, making it the world’s third-most valuable company behind AI chipmaker Nvidia and Google. Investors barely reacted to the news of Cook’s forthcoming job change, with Apple shares down less than 1% in post-market trading.

«

The pitch was carefully rolled for this, hence the lack of scared horses in the stock market. You can argue about whether the FT was quietly leaked the information about Cook going and Ternus replacing him. If you think that’s the case, notice that Apple chose to tell the FT, not Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. That must smart for Gurman.
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What physical “life force” turns biology’s wheels? • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

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Since the discovery of the bacterial flagellar motor in the 1970s, biologists and creationists alike have marveled at its design like medieval architects staring with awe at the dome of the Pantheon built by their Roman ancestors. It’s hard to fathom the level of engineering achievable by a billion years of bacterial evolution, especially with only 20 minutes between cell generations, which allows for a truly astronomical number of mutations and trial runs. Creationists hold up the bacterial flagellar motor as a prime example of intelligent design — specifically the concept of “irreducible complexity,” a biological system so intricate, they say, that it couldn’t possibly have arisen in stages through the gradual, stepwise process of Darwinian evolution.

Yet it very much did.

Over the past few decades, scientists have toiled to unravel how the flagellar motor works — namely, how it rotates and switches directions.

Now they finally have. A wave of studies since 2020 has cracked the molecular structures of the flagellar motor’s parts, including, most importantly, the small cogwheels that turn the larger cogwheel at the flagellum’s base. The final pieces of this dynamic puzzle fell into place as recently as March 2026.

“My lifelong quest is now fulfilled,” said Mike Manson, a professor emeritus of biophysics at Texas A&M University who started studying the flagellar motor in the 1970s. “I finally understand how this thing I’ve been studying for 50 years actually works. That’s about as satisfying as can be.”

The workings of the flagellar motor are ingenious indeed. But when I began interviewing these scientists about what they’ve figured out, I didn’t anticipate that the explanation of the motor would clarify all of biology for someone like me, who seeks mechanistic, physical explanations. The machine, I learned, exploits a driving force I had not known about (though biophysicists have) — the physical “life force” that powers processes in cells. This “proton motive force” doesn’t just turn the cogs of the flagellar motor; it’s the juice we all run on.

«

Just like human-scale motors, this molecular one also has stators, and also uses magneto-electrical forces to induce rotation. The illustration at the top of the article is a marvel in itself.
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Lufthansa cuts 20,000 flights to save fuel as prices soar • Financial Times

Peter Campbell, Ian Johnston and Sebastien Ash:

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Lufthansa has cancelled 20,000 flights between May and October to save fuel, in one of the largest cuts by global airlines as jet fuel prices double following the Iran war. 

The German carrier cancelled about 120 daily flights from Monday and said it would drop unprofitable routes from Munich and Frankfurt until the end of the summer season, which runs to mid-October.

“In total, 20,000 short-haul flights will be removed from the schedule through October, equivalent to approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of jet fuel, the price of which has doubled since the outbreak of the Iran conflict,” Lufthansa said on Tuesday.

The exact plan for the summer months would be published in “late April or early May” and include “optimisations to the short-haul offering for the entire summer season, thereby ensuring schedule stability for the flight plan period”, it added. 

The cuts were confirmed as European transport ministers met on Tuesday to discuss plans to prevent the region running short of jet fuel, after the International Energy Agency warned Europe had less than six weeks of supplies remaining.

The EU was exploring whether it could source an alternative American jet fuel not routinely used in Europe, and might allow airlines to take on larger amounts of fuel outside the region, EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said.

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Lufthansa runs about 90,000 flights per month, so if this refers to May-October inclusive, that’s only 3% of flights (and 0.4% of annual fuel use of ~10m tonnes). But these are first steps.
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Internal emails show how Amazon raises prices across the internet, lawsuit says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Newly unsealed emails reveal the sneaky ways that Amazon colludes with rivals to raise prices across the Internet on “everything from diapers to clothing to furniture,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged in a press release Monday.

“Amazon and a competitor will knowingly stop price matching each other, so that one retailer can increase its price, and the other retailer can match to the new, higher price,” Bonta alleged, pointing to one of three such schemes described in Amazon emails. “Thus, both competitors start selling at a higher price, increase their profits, and consumers pay more.”

The emails surfaced in a lawsuit that the state of California filed in 2022, accusing Amazon of wielding its tremendous influence as the world’s largest retailer to pressure vendors into increasing prices on rival e-commerce websites or removing products from cheaper platforms entirely. According to The New York Times, these emails offer “a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Amazon operates its $2.66 trillion empire.”

Amazon works in three ways to pressure vendors into manipulating competitor prices, Bonta alleged.

In one supposed scheme, Amazon proposes price matching by agreeing to increase the price of a product or temporarily pause its sales, which then allows the other retailer to raise its price.

Another route Amazon frequently takes flips that scheme. When Amazon sees a rival offering a product at a price it considers unprofitable, it pressures vendors to get the rival to raise their price to a level Amazon likes. Once the rival raises its price, Amazon then matches it.

Finally, Amazon allegedly follows a third, arguably more aggressive, path to get vendors to remove products entirely from platforms offering lower prices. That way, Amazon won’t be forced to lower its price to compete.

All three scenarios raise prices for consumers, Bonta alleged.

«

All companies want to become monopolies, and then they want to rent-seek.
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Shakeup will help UK motorists without driveways to charge EVs • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Households without off-street parking could soon be able to charge their electric vehicles from home under new government plans to help households cut their need for expensive fossil fuels.

The government has promised to pass legislation this summer that will allow motorists to run power cables through a charging “gully” built into the pavement outside their home without the need for planning permission.

This means that before the end of this year, EV owners who are not able to fit their own car chargers at home will be able to charge up from the power connection indoors.

Motorists are not allowed to string charging cables across the pavement from their home but almost half of councils across the UK allow cross-pavement charging if you embed the cable in a gully. However, this still requires permission from the council.

Charging at home is usually much cheaper than using public car charge points, meaning more motorists may be willing to trade in their petrol and diesel cars for an electric alternative if they know they can access cheaper electricity more easily.

This is partly because public charging has a VAT rate of 20% while home energy includes VAT at 5%. ChargeUK, the trade body for the charging industry, said equalising VAT would help ensure that motorists who cannot charge at home even after the planning changes would not be unfairly penalised.

…Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said the “overwhelming lesson of this crisis is we need to go faster” on the government’s plans to reduce the UK’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets.

“Because every solar panel we put up, every wind turbine we build, every heat pump we install, every EV on the road makes our country more secure,” he told the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate on Tuesday.

«

However on the very same day: “UK to appeal against tax ruling cutting VAT on public electric car chargers to 5%“. This follows a London tribunal ruling that public chargers should only pay 5% VAT on the energy they supply, not the business rate of 20%. That would cut pricing significantly – and require a refund to public chargers.

So: Ed Miliband says one thing, HMRC says something totally different. Joined-up government, eh.
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Challenge over Met Police’s use of live facial recognition lost • BBC News

Ella Kipling and Dominic Casciani:

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Privacy campaigners have lost a High Court challenge aimed at limiting the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition technology.

Youth worker Shaun Thompson, and Silkie Carlo, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, brought the challenge over concerns that facial recognition could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way.

In a major victory for the continued roll-out of the technology, the High Court rejected claims that the Met Police had broken human rights and privacy law by scanning faces in public.

The force will continue to use the technology, with commissioner Sir Mark Rowley calling the ruling an “important victory for public safety”.

Shaun Thompson has said he intends to appeal the decision.

Policing Minister Sarah Jones said: “I welcome today’s ruling because there can be no true liberty when people live in fear of crime in their communities.” She added that facial recognition technology would be rolled out across the country with “record investment”. Law-abiding citizens have “nothing to fear” as the technology “only locates specifically wanted people”, Jones said.

Scotland Yard deploys identifiable live facial recognition vans to selected locations around the capital. Once set up – and marked with signage – the cameras are turned on and scan people walking through the chosen area, such as a busy high street. The images are instantly compared to a database of wanted criminals or missing people.

If a face does not match anyone on the database, the system deletes the image instantly. If it finds a possible match, it alerts officers who then double-check the hit before deciding whether to stop the individual.

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You can read the full decision, which is very detailed arguments around Article 8 rights and limits of the law. It feels like BBW is not going to succeed in this challenge, though there’s still the Court of Appeal and, if allowed, the Supreme Court.
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Guinea worm disease reaches all-time low: only 10 human cases reported in 2025 • The Carter Center

Emily DSTaub:

»

Only 10 human cases of Guinea worm were reported worldwide in 2025, the lowest number ever recorded, bringing the ancient disease closer than ever to eradication. The Carter Center announced the historic provisional figure following the one-year anniversary of the passing of the Center’s founder, former US President Jimmy Carter.

“President Carter always said he wanted to outlast the last Guinea worm. While he didn’t quite get his wish, he and Mrs. Carter would be proud to know there were only 10 human cases reported in 2025. And they would remind us that the work continues until we reach zero,” said Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander.

Poised to be only the second human disease eradicated after smallpox, the 10 Guinea worm cases mark a 33% decline from the 15 cases reported in 2024.

When The Carter Center assumed leadership of the global Guinea worm eradication campaign in 1986, an estimated 3.5 million human cases occurred annually in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

“This campaign reflects the values that shaped my grandparents’ lives — the conviction that hope, hard work, and respect for everyone can change the world. Seeing Guinea worm cases reach historic lows is one of the clearest expressions of that legacy and our commitment to the communities where trust has been earned,” said Jason Carter, Carter Center board chair and eldest grandchild of President and Mrs. Carter.

Together with partners, including the countries themselves, the campaign has reduced the waterborne, parasitic disease by more than 99.99% since 1986 and averted more than 100 million cases of this devastating disease among the world’s most marginalized and neglected populations.

Guinea worm is one of 21 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), a group of preventable and treatable diseases that affect more than 1.7 billion people around the world. The Carter Center announcement comes on the seventh anniversary of World NTD Day, which is celebrated each year on Jan. 30.

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This release is from January, but it’s worth noting. Fingers crossed for zero this year.
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Does your boss have AI brain? • Milkkarten

Rachel Karten:

»

Not only is leadership using AI in their own work, but they are forcing employees to use it as well. The problem is that many of the tasks that bosses are asking their team to use AI for are the exact ones that made them want to work in marketing in the first place. Brainstorming. Writing clever copy. Thinking outside of the box. One marketer told me, “It feels like our bosses are more intent on using AI to take away the fun parts of our job instead of automating the more menial tasks that take up so much of our time day-to-day.”

Some employees are finding workarounds. One person shared that their boss “doesn’t care about his team’s experience and expertise. He wants a summary from Copilot instead. We’ve started writing our own summaries and putting it on fake Copilot chats to get him to listen to us.”

So much of good marketing is instincts. Seeing the signs before anyone else. Translating a spark into a smart campaign. Knowing the line between brilliance and brash. With AI, we’re watching decision makers run big ideas through a machine that finds the median.

One of the people who left their job in part due to an AI-obsessed boss shared the worst offense. Their boss would put memes meant to be posted on social pages into Claude to see if they were funny.

I asked some of the marketers I spoke with if their boss’s use of AI has changed their perception of them. Many said it did. When the person who is supposedly in a role because of their experience and intelligence is constantly outsourcing their instincts to AI, it says to a team, “I don’t trust my own opinions on humor, storytelling, and marketing”. Which, if that’s the case, wouldn’t that make those leadership jobs the most susceptible to be replaced by AI?

One person shared, “It validates to me how absolutely unqualified and inept these people in C-suite positions are that they need a machine/robot to validate their opinions because they have no real POV and strategy themselves. They so desperately want to always be the right answer in the room. To have a machine that can’t argue back and essentially feeds their own thoughts back to them is a case study in the narcissism of executive leadership.”

«

Come the day when some of these companies fail, and the AI stuff that was posted into the Slack chats will be.. well, read on.
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AI’s new training data: your old work Slacks and emails • Forbes

Anna Tong:

»

When Shanna Johnson was winding down cielo24, the transcription and captioning company she ran as CEO, she discovered an unexpected asset: its operational exhaust—the digital leftovers that pile up across years of work and collaboration.

To close the company out, she worked with SimpleClosure, a startup that specializes in helping companies wind down. SimpleClosure helped her through the usual shutdown paperwork — closing out payroll and taxes, getting investor consents in order, and filing paperwork with the IRS. Then came the part nobody puts in the founder playbook: selling off cielo24’s 13-year digital footprint—every Slack joke, every Jira ticket, emails documenting internal victories or frustrations sitting in employees’ multi-terabyte Google Drives—as training data for the next generation of AI. For that, cielo24 received “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” which Johnson said helped her go from “I don’t know how we are going to pay our bills” to “we can tie this up neatly with a bow and be able to walk away”.

“I’m still a bit emotional about shutting the company down,” she told Forbes. “But it’s cool to think that our data could be useful, live on and help other people.”

It’s a clean ending for a messy reality: the company didn’t survive, but its work trail did. And in 2026, that trail can be worth real money. Johnson’s data sale isn’t an isolated exit strategy; it is a new frontier in the AI arms race.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The sword tip is effectively invisible in competition fencing – but a new system will make it much more visible on TV. CC-licensed photo by Robert Scales 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. Touching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome. (We can do the Tim Cook/John Ternus stuff tomorrow.)

Fencing tracking and visualization system • Rhizomatiks

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Rhizomatiks has been developing the “Fencing tracking and visualization system,” which is the core technology of the “Fencing Visualized Project,” in collaboration with Dentsu Lab Tokyo. It uses AR technology to visualize the tips of swords in motion. Building on various development processes since 2012, the system has been updated to utilize deep learning to visualize sword tips without markers. The system enables detection of sword tips, which human eyes cannot follow, and real time AR synthesis to instantly visualize the trajectory.

This website explains the process of our development from 2012 to the present.

…A fencing sword tip is difficult to follow with the naked eye, but we thought that it could be captured with a high-speed camera tracking a small marker on the tip of the sword. We began by conducting a feasibility study.

After the study, we became certain that it was possible to track a sword tip by placing a marker onto it, even with technologies accessible in 2012. We created video footage visualizing the trajectory of a sword tip using AR technology, which was included in a video for Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In addition, seeing that improvements in machine learning and image analysis technologies would make it highly possible to use the system in real matches without markers on the tip of the sword by the time of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, we planned and proposed the “Fencing tracking and visualization system,” a fundamental technology that uses AR technology to visualize the trajectory of the sword tip, and started research and development.

Thanks to real-time trajectory detection, fencing is now evolving into a sport that everyone can enjoy based on understanding of what is happening in the match.

«

You do need to go and look at the videos on the website. As they say, it’s impossible to follow the sword tip in normal vision, but this turns it into a light sabre event. It will be used for TV broadcast of fencing championships later this summer. A real triumph for making a sport more comprehensible by increasing its visibility. (Oddly, when a similar scheme was tried with tennis – showing the path and landing points of the ball in rallies – it just looked terrible.)
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Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it’s one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content. As generative audio models have proliferated, the rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44%—that’s 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day. Deezer licenses this technology to third parties, which it claims has a false positive rate of less than 0.01%.

Still, listeners shouldn’t encounter AI music organically on Deezer because the site won’t include AI-flagged tracks in suggestions or editorial playlists. As a result, AI music streams account for a small share of Deezer usage, hovering around 1–3%. The company says the primary purpose of uploading all this AI music is fraudulent. Deezer only pays for streams when a person listens to them, so it’s demonetizing about 85% of AI music streams.

“Thanks to our technology and the proactive measures we put in place more than a year ago, we have shown that it’s possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum,” said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier.

The growth of AI music is likely to continue accelerating with the rest of the AI industry. Models like Google’s Lyria 3 have become cheaper and more widely available. Google actually lets Gemini users generate full-length songs now, up from 30-second snippet tracks just a few months ago. Suno and Udio also promote their ability to create broadcast-ready tracks in seconds. However, these mainstream options embed watermarks, like Google’s SynthID, to flag the songs as AI.

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Sturgeon’s Law is that 90% of everything is crap, so the AI uploading has a little way to go. Don’t forget it was 0% a couple of years ago.
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The National Parking Platform (NPP)

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The NPP is a not-for-profit, open platform that connects multiple parking service providers to thousands of locations nationwide.

Instead of asking drivers to download another app, it integrates the ones they already use, making parking simple, seamless, and consistent everywhere.

Created by the Department for Transport and now run independently, the NPP is governed by Local Authorities, service providers, and the British Parking Association — ensuring it grows based on collaboration and real-world feedback.

«

Hurrah! The long-promised single parking app is here (or at least, in 15 local authorities at the time of writing). Strangely, we were told its funding had been withdrawn in March 2025, but councils seemed to have chipped in to get it to happen, possibly with the cooperation of the parking app providers: six of them are involved in this scheme, and the implication seems to be that you can use any of the six to park anywhere (if you’re in one of the areas where it’s live).

Long way to go: there are well over 300 local authorities in the UK.
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When your digital life vanishes • The New Yorker

Julian Lucas:

»

For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.

I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During covid, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”

Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”

«

One thing I notice nowadays – by its absence – is the wailing of journalists, authors and photographers as their hard drive crashes and wipes out hours or days or months or years of work. Ten years ago, it would be a regular feature of social media. These days, you hardly ever see them. There’s a simple reason: SSDs are far more reliable than spinning hard drives. (Though cryptocurrency and forgotten passwords seem to have kept the disk savers in business.)
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At long last, InfoWars is ours • The Onion

Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO, Global Tetrahedron:

»

Let me tell you a story. When I was a child, I suffered from night terrors. It was always the same dream: I could hear my family and neighbors wailing in the street outside as they were pursued and then destroyed by a nameless malevolent force, something neither I nor anyone else could control, a great darkness that was, somehow, all my fault.

Today, that childhood dream is finally coming true. Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars.com.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about InfoWars in the last year and a half. As the seasons have changed, my ambitions for the project have grown grander, crueler, better aligned with market data. Come, friends, and imagine with me…

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you’ll die if you don’t buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

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Seems like The Onion’s finally peeled InfoWars away from Alex Jones cold (though not dead) hands in the bankruptcy proceeding.
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Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial • NBC News

Kaitlin Sullivan, Marina Kopf and Anne Thompson:

»

Donna Gustafson had a harder time than usual shaking off the jet lag from her 22-hour journey from Florida to Australia. Two days into her trip, her skin took on the yellow hue of jaundice.

Gustafson, who is now 72 and lives in Delray Beach, Florida, went to the emergency room for fluids, thinking she was dehydrated. In a surreal moment, the Australian doctors instead told Gustafson that she had pancreatic cancer.

“They were very adamant about it,” Gustafson said. “This is absolutely pancreatic cancer.”

She and her husband, Ed, were on the next flight home. Nine days later, Gustafson had surgery to remove the Stage 2 cancer from her pancreas. The day before she was supposed to start chemotherapy, her doctors told her about a clinical trial exploring the use of personalized messenger RNA vaccines for cancer. It was February 2020 — months before mRNA vaccines for Covid would become one of the world’s hottest commodities. Very soon after, Gustafson was the first person to get one for pancreatic cancer.

“It was a no-brainer,” Gustafson said of joining the trial. “I knew that statistically, the odds were against me.”

Less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest cancers. There is no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, such as colonoscopy or mammogram, and symptoms typically don’t show up until the disease is advanced. Once detected, there are few options for treatment. Only about 20% of cases are operable, which is currently required for someone to be eligible to join a pancreatic cancer vaccine trial.

…[Dr Vinod] Balachandran [who led the team] and his team published the results of the Phase 1 clinical trial last year. At the time, the patients, all of whom had early-stage disease before they joined the trial, had only been tracked for just over three years, and it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer, he said. New data collected during the trial’s six-year follow-up period shows that it may. Those findings will be presented Monday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego.

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It’s impossible to overstate how amazing this is. Pancreatic cancer (the standard form, rather than the version Steve Jobs had) is absolutely murderous. A six-year survival period is unheard of.
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Scientists stunned by “fundamentally new way” life produces DNA • Science

Richard Stone:

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For decades, biology textbooks have enshrined a simple rule: DNA is made by copying a template. After one enzyme unzips a DNA double helix into separate strands, another called a polymerase builds a complementary sequence, base by base, for each strand. Presto: two copies of the original DNA. But new research into how bacteria defend themselves from viruses now shows this synthesis rule isn’t absolute. Today in Science, a Stanford University team describes a bacterial enzyme that synthesizes DNA without a nucleic acid template, using its own structure as a guide.

“The research is groundbreaking,” says Philip Kranzusch, a biochemist at Harvard Medical School who studies bacterial defenses. “Pretty cool!” adds Adi Millman, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The use of a protein as a template for DNA synthesis, she says, “is a meaningful conceptual shift from the classical central dogma,” in which information flows in one direction from nucleic acids like DNA to protein. Scientists hope the novel form of DNA synthesis can be adapted as a tool for basic biological research, much like the powerful genome editor CRISPR was developed from another bacterial defense system.

…“The protein itself serves as the blueprint for the DNA sequence,” says Stanford biochemist Alex Gao, senior author on the study. “That was quite a surprise,” he says. “This is a fundamentally new way that life produces DNA.”

DRT3 [a defence system that protects bacteria from viruses called phages that infect them] appears to be widespread across bacteria, suggesting it is not a biochemical curiosity. Yet how it thwarts phages is still a mystery.

One possibility, Gao says, is that DNA helices made by this unique replication method act as molecular sponges that glom onto phage components, either directly hindering the phage or enabling other bacterial immune elements to recognize the infection.

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Anything that makes us reevaluate our understanding of how cells work and reproduce has the potential to make a big difference in the future.
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Florida is about to lose its most famous symbol forever. What happened? • Slate

Alexander Sammon:

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In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last; a decline of more than 95%.

And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening. “Twelve million? I would doubt it,” Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest trade group, told me. There was chatter that even 11 million might be out of reach. Could the total end up being less than that, just seven figures? In Florida, the citrus capital of the world, you are today more likely to see the oranges printed on the state’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.

Rick Dantzler, chief operating officer of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, took the podium. He was blunt. “It’s been a dumpster fire of a year,” he said.

On the list of immediate problems: the implementation of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, then the government shutdown, then a stunning, historic freeze, days long, at the end of January and early February, that besieged the fragile orange trees.

And yet those, too, were just footnotes to the even larger problem. Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers. The last of them, these spent survivors, these hangers-on, had trudged to the Citrus Show to talk about the real problem, which was the disease.

In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.

Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.

…I asked numerous people—farmers and industry leaders and researchers—to estimate how many trees in Florida now have greening. The answer was resounding: 100%. Every single tree.

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Not all hope is lost. But almost all. There may be cures or fixes; but maybe not.
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Renewables overtake natural gas in US power generation for first time • Energy Live News

Sumit Bose:

»

Renewable energy sources generated more electricity than natural gas in the United States for the first time last month, marking a significant milestone in the transition to clean energy.

According to data from Ember, renewables including solar, wind, hydropower and bioenergy became the largest source of US electricity in March. Combined with nuclear power, they supplied more than half of total generation.

The milestone reflects rapid growth in wind and solar capacity alongside a seasonal drop in electricity demand. Milder spring weather typically reduces the need for heating and cooling, allowing fossil fuel generation to scale back.

As a result, fossil fuels produced less electricity than in any March for at least 25 years, while renewable generation reached a record high.

Despite this progress, rising electricity demand is complicating the transition. Solar, wind and batteries are expected to account for 93% of new power capacity added this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

However, increasing demand from sectors such as data centres is sustaining the role of fossil fuels. Some technology companies are installing natural gas generators, while grid operators are delaying the closure of coal plants.

«

The collapse in fossil fuel availability is surely going to make a difference there, although it might take a little while for the supertanker to turn, so to speak.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The British Board of Film Censorship has reccruited AI to classify content on HBO Max in the UK. CC-licensed photo by Rachel on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Unmentionable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The RAM shortage could last years • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60% of demand by the end of 2027. The SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.

The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.

Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12% a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5% is planned.

The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritising HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it’s not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics.

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Are we going to see adaptations in software to reduced (or not expanding) availability of RAM in most computers in response to this stress, like the adaptation from fossil fuel-driven vehicles to electric vehicles in response to the stress of the closure of the strait of Hormuz? The last situation that resembled it was moving to smartphones, which had less processing capacity, less storage and less RAM. The 20-year cycle comes around.
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Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”, energy boss warns • BBC News

Theo Leggett and Jemma Crew:

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Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned.

Stocks would reach a tipping point in June if Europe was unable to replace at least half of its imports from the Middle East, the organisation said in a report this week.

The Strait of Hormuz, a key route for jet fuel out of the Gulf, has been effectively closed by Iran for more than six weeks in response to US and Israeli attacks, sending the price rocketing and prompting fears of shortages.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the Associated Press there could soon be flight cancellations if supplies remained blocked. In its monthly oil market report, the IEA- which advises 32 member countries on energy supply and security – said exports from the Gulf region were the largest source of jet fuel to the global market.

Refineries in other major exporting countries, such as Korea, India and China were themselves highly dependent on crude oil imports from the Middle East.

As a result, the crisis “has thrown a proverbial wrench into the inner workings of the aviation fuel markets”, it said.
A spokesperson for the UK government told the BBC that it was working with fuel suppliers and airlines to “ensure people keep moving and businesses are supported”.

“UK airlines are clear that they are currently not seeing disruption to supply,” they said.

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Not currently. But six weeks will pass very rapidly, and with the weekend having passed with minimal traffic through the strait of Hormuz – four cruise liners, not much else – this is not going to be good. It bears repeating.
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Geelong fire: blaze at Australian oil refinery to affect petrol supplies • BBC News

Lana Lam and Tiffanie Turnbull:

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A major fire at one of Australia’s two oil refineries has been extinguished, but the damage has deepened fears over the nation’s petrol supplies amid a global fuel crunch.

Emergency crews rushed to Viva’s Corio oil refinery in Geelong, south-west of Melbourne, just before midnight local time (1400 GMT) on Wednesday, after reports of explosions and flames.

The blaze was put out on Thursday after burning for 13 hours. No one was injured, with dozens of workers on site when it broke out evacuated safely.

The refinery – which produces 50% of Victoria’s fuel and 10% of the nation’s – is still partially operational but the government has warned of impacts to petrol production.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the fire was “not great timing” with Australia’s fuel supplies under pressure since war broke out in Iran, creating a global oil crisis.

The price of diesel in Australia has doubled in recent weeks, with fuel stations reporting shortages amid reports of panic buying, while airlines are cutting back some services as jet fuel costs rise.

“This is not a positive development, but obviously there’s a long way to go in terms of working out just what the impact is,” Bowen told Nine’s Today show on Thursday, adding that he was working closely with the company.

…Australia relies heavily on imported refined fuels – primarily from countries like Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia – which should mean any impact the fire has on domestic fuel availability is limited, experts say.

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Limited, but definitely not zero.
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Chinese trucks could go 100% electric, halving road transport oil use: industry • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

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Industry estimates suggest that heavy-duty cargo traffic in China is on track to become nearly 100% electric, a transition that could halve the country’s road transport oil consumption.

Speaking at a forum on intelligent electric vehicle development in Beijing on April 11, Liang Linhe, chairman of Sany Truck – a subsidiary of the Changsha-headquartered multinational Sany Group – said China’s heavy truck sector could eventually be almost entirely electrified, although he did not put a timeline on the transition.

Such a move, he noted, had the potential to cut fuel demand within the road transport sector by about half.

Liang said cost was the overriding factor behind the uptake of electric heavy trucks – vehicles that are engineered for hauling, towing and moving massive volumes of cargo, equipment or raw materials.

“As a means of production, economics is the core consideration,” Liang said. He estimated that much lower transport costs would drive market penetration to a point “even potentially approaching 100%, leaving little room for diesel trucks”.

Given that heavy trucks account for a substantial share of China’s petroleum and diesel consumption, the shift from conventional diesel to electric power is widely viewed as a crucial lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and advancing the clean energy transition in China.

Liang said the annual carbon emissions from a single diesel heavy truck were equivalent to those of about 100 petrol-powered cars.

…According to the General Administration of Customs, China imports 42% of its crude oil from Gulf nations. And, transport accounts for around half of China’s oil consumption.

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Provide the right incentives, and everyone stampedes to the cheaper option. The irony of Trump, the anti-renewables guy, provoking this shift is on a planetary scale.
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Whither Microsoft? A view from the neighborhood • GeekWire

Feroze Motafram:

»

I live in Sammamish, in the shadow of Microsoft’s looming presence. Microsoft employees are my neighbors, my social circle, the people I run into at weekend gatherings. Over time I noticed that conversations with them had a distinctive gravitational pull — always inward, toward reorgs, internal politics, who reports to whom now, who’s ascendant, who’s out. Customers were rarely part of the conversation. This usually means navigating the organization has become more consuming than building anything within it.

Microsoft’s stock decline and the softening of real estate in this corridor (both affecting me personally) were the prompts to write it down. The material was already sitting in front of me.

…Microsoft stock declined roughly 25% in Q1 2026, representing its worst quarterly performance since the 2008 financial crisis despite blockbuster results. The market may overreact, but it is not stupid.

A striking portion of Microsoft’s forward revenue backlog is tied to a single counterparty, OpenAI, an unprofitable startup that has since signed a landmark cloud agreement with Amazon, directly challenging the Azure exclusivity Microsoft had treated as a cornerstone of its AI strategy. Meanwhile, Microsoft is building its own internal AI model as a hedge, an expensive bet layered on top of an already expensive bet.

But the part that does not show up in an earnings report may be the more consequential story. That is what I want to offer here.

…A significant proportion of Microsoft’s engineering talent (and the engineering talent of the broader Seattle tech corridor) consists of H-1B visa holders. These are exceptional professionals: highly educated, deeply skilled, often carrying decade-long career investments in the United States. They have built lives here. Many have children born here. They have been, in many cases, the intellectual engine of the products Microsoft is depending on to compete in the AI era.

That population is operating under a level of personal anxiety that is, in my observation, without modern precedent. Travel advisories from their own employers. A $100,000 petition fee for new visa applications. Proposed rule changes touching birthright citizenship. A policy environment that sends a clear and unambiguous message: your presence here is conditional, negotiable, and subject to revision without notice.

The behavioral consequence of that anxiety is not visible in a quarterly earnings report. But it is real and consequential. People operating under existential personal uncertainty do not take professional risks. They do not champion the bold new initiative. They do not volunteer for the high-visibility project that could fail. They execute reliably on what already exists and protect their position.

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British censors adopt AI to age-rate streamer favourites • The Observer

Vanessa Thorpe:

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For four points, to what quiz question is “Natasha Kaplinsky” the unexpected right answer? There are, possibly, a few correct responses, but the one I have in mind asks: Which former news reader and Strictly Come Dancing winner now holds the position of Britain’s official film censor? Since 2022, as sharp-eyed cinema-goers will have spotted, it has been Kaplinsky’s signature on the ratings certificate that pops up before any public film screening.

From this month on, however, Kaplinsky will have a new resource to call upon when rating films, television shows or cartoons. Aside from her team of “compliance officers” at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), she has been joined by a freshly developed AI film censor.

The BBFC has confirmed the successful deployment of its first AI tool, helping it to classify the whole of HBO Max’s library of entertainment for the UK. The bot has already aided its officers in sticking on BBFC age ratings and drawing up “bespoke” content advice, along classification guidelines.

By using AI, the BBFC says, it has dealt with the streamer’s entire new UK catalogue, from Game of Thrones to Succession, in only six months. It says the same volume of content would probably have taken an officer 1,570 working days to process. David Austin, chief executive of the BBFC, sees it as “a major step forward in how we support families to make safe and informed viewing decisions”.

The AI tool works by highlighting each compliance issue in a film, show or documentary, including scenes of violence, nudity or bad language, so human officers can review the sequence. The BBFC is emphasising that the final age ratings and the advice it hands down will still be decided by trained officers, and that classification standards should not change.

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Operator of slop farm that plagiarizes local journalism boasts that it’s attracting millions of readers • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users’ cognition.

A news site called National Today quickly sprang into action: by ten o’clock that night, it had published a piece that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we’d conducted. But instead of crediting us as the source of the information, as would be conventional, National Today made no mention of Futurism, and didn’t even link to our article. Instead, it presented the reporting as if it were the original source.

In other words, the National Today piece — which bears no byline — is blatant plagiarism. And this isn’t the first time this has happened.

…We’re not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today, we realized that it’s doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.

…In addition to the incredible speed at which it churns out all this slop, National Today is full of comically terrible errors that make it difficult to believe that any human is even skimming its articles before publication.

One issue is that the AI generating all the articles often seems to get confused and replace real people’s names with “Jane Doe.” In one recent piece, National Today reported that a NASA astronaut aboard Artemis 2 named “John Doe” had dedicated a Moon crater to his deceased wife, “Jane Doe.”

…According to a description on [branding and PR company] TOP’s site, National Today exists to help brands “Create Ownable Viral Moments for your brand” and “reach 10M consumers, 100K media outlets, and 10K influencers across traditional, digital, and social media.”

In other words, TOP seems to be saying, National Today is a marketing vehicle for its clients — made possible by the theft of local journalism on an almost incomprehensible scale.

«

They didn’t manage to get TOP to respond. According to the company’s website, it’s got offices in 18 locations, 14 of them in the US. Was it not possible to drop by one of them and ask some questions? Or find a telephone number for one of the employees, or even the chief exec Benjamin Kaplan?
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Fire alert: the fake “Amazon TV stick” that opens the door to fraudsters • The Guardian

Shane Hickey, back in November:

»

The sticks are sold through social media and illegal streaming sites, often advertised as being jailbroken with promises of free TV shows, sports and films.

The potential for fraud happens the minute you connect the “dodgy stick” with a laptop or TV, according to Rob Shapland of Cyonic Cyber, an ethical hacker who shows companies where there are gaps in their security systems.

“Alongside the stream [of TV or sports] it will also install some malware on to your computer and give the criminal direct access to your computer so [they] could use it as if they were sitting there,” he says.

“Or they can install keyloggers which will record any password you are typing. So when you are accessing online banking, it will record your banking passwords. You are essentially volunteering to have your laptop hacked in many cases.”

Often the stick will come with instructions which appear to be how to install the software but are actually ways to bypass virus detectors.

When you connect the device with a TV, it can access other devices, such as laptops, through the home Wi-fi network they are all attached to, says Shapland.

“It might ask you to log in with your Google account and then you are giving your credentials to the app and that is then sent off to the criminals. Most people tend to reuse the same password so once they have one password, they have access to a hundred different things.”

Some sticks may ask for a small monthly subscription. Setting up the payment means criminals can use your credit card details in any way they want.

«

This article was mentioned on the latest episode of ATP, which also linked to this Brian Krebs article from the same period. Free or very cheap is tempting when streaming subscription prices keep going up, but the potential for these devices to be completely untrustworthy is sky-high.

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Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data • Nature

Mohana Basu:

»

Dubious data sets are being used to train artificial-intelligence models that are designed to predict people’s risk of stroke and diabetes, researchers report in a preprint on medRxiv. Some of the models seem to have been used in clinical settings, although it’s not clear whether this has led to flawed diagnoses. At least two journals are investigating studies that used these data sets.

Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues identified 124 peer-reviewed papers that report using one of two open-access health data sets to train machine-learning models that provide little information about where the data came from.

An analysis revealed multiple oddities that would not be expected for data from real people, leading Barnett and his colleagues to suspect that the data could have been fabricated. “It was an enormous surprise to come across something like that,” Barnett says.

At least two of the models have been used in hospitals, in Indonesia and Spain. One has also been documented in a medical-device patent application filed in 2024, and two are publicly available web tools that allow people to check their risk level by uploading information about themselves.

“Prediction models trained on provenance-unknown data have no place in clinical decision-making. They are intrinsically unreliable,” says Soumyadeep Bhaumik, a public-health researcher at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia. If the tools do not use real-world data, they are likely to make incorrect predictions and lead clinicians to make inappropriate decisions, such as prescribing treatments unnecessarily or not prescribing them when they are needed, he says.

Institutions and funders must insist that researchers disclose the source of data used to train AI models for medical applications, and journals should reject papers that fail this requirement, says Bhaumik.

«

We’re having to update the models of how to use these almost in real time as AI spreads everywhere.
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“Breakthrough” Alzheimer’s drugs unlikely to benefit patients, report suggests • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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Influential analysis has concluded that “breakthrough” Alzheimer’s drugs are unlikely to benefit patients.

Researchers said the impact was “well below” what was needed to make a difference to dementia patients’ lives. However, their report has also provoked a vicious backlash from equally esteemed scientists who label it as fundamentally flawed.

The drugs have been licensed around the world. But the NHS in the UK won’t pay for them and an 18-month course of the drugs plus medical care would set you back a hefty £90,000 privately. They would be unaffordable for most so even if you had the money, are they worth paying for?

The drugs attack a sticky gunk – called beta amyloid – that builds up in the spaces between brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease. Antibodies – similar to those the body makes to attack viruses or bacteria – have been engineered to spot the amyloid and clear it from the brain.

For years the approach failed, but trials of two recent drugs called donanemab and lecanemab showed they could slow the pace of cognitive decline. This was a landmark moment as it was the first time any drug had slowed the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

The Cochrane Collaboration, which rigorously and independently analyses medical data, looked at 17 studies, involving 20,342 volunteers, of drugs that remove amyloid from the brain. Overall, they concluded the approach does slow Alzheimer’s disease, but not by enough to make a meaningful difference to patients. At the same time the medicines came with a risk of brain swelling and bleeding. They also need to be given every two to four weeks and at a high cost.

«

The positive side – minimally – is that people are being spared the expense of drugs that the review shows don’t really help.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The likely collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) would change the British climate dramatically. CC-licensed photo by I Bird 2 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. Cold comfort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.

…The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.

…[Prof Stefan] Rahmstorf [at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany], who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”

The Amoc is slowing because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of global heating. That means the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop.

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Carbon removal industry reels as Microsoft retreats • The New York Times

David Gelles:

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Over the last several years, Microsoft almost single-handedly established the market for carbon dioxide removal technologies, a nascent field that aims to scrub the planet-warming gas from the atmosphere to counter climate change.

But now, Microsoft is stepping back from the industry it helped create, telling some companies that it is pausing future purchases of carbon removal credits, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The news was first reported by Heatmap.

The development could be a major blow to the hundreds of startups developing carbon removal technologies, which have raised more than $5bn in recent years.

Though the field is in its infancy and hundreds of companies are pursuing different strategies, proponents of the technology say that because there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not enough to reduce emissions; excess amounts also have to be removed to stave off the worst consequences of global warming.

Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said the company’s carbon removal program had not ended.

“Our decarbonization approach combines reduction, removal and efficiency, and carbon removal is one piece of that equation,” she said in a statement. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals.”

Microsoft was one of the first big companies to make an ambitious climate pledge. In 2020, the company said it intended to remove “all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.”

But as big tech companies, including Microsoft, have raced to build data centres for artificial intelligence, their emissions have increased in recent years, making it harder to achieve those goals.

«

Expect Apple to water down its climate statements too, and Google, and Amazon, and Facebook, and.. The problem is always that the planet doesn’t take immediate action. It bides its time. Though the many carbon-removing schemes have always looked hopelessly optimistic. Trying to remove a few hundred parts per million of a not-very-reactive gas is a huge challenge in chemistry, physics and thermodynamics.
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Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’ • The Guardian

Ramin Skibba:

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Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.

Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.

For Ken, the problem started after his company’s CEO laid off several of his colleagues and mandated that remaining workers use AI chatbots, saying it would boost their productivity. While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.

“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter, who spoke under a pseudonym for fear of losing his job. “Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases.

Ken’s experience reflects an emerging divide between employees and their leaders when it comes to AI: a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar US workers found that 40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all at work, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive.

So what’s causing this workslop deluge? The answer is more complex than being simply a case of workers cutting corners. The real driving force connects back to the C-suite.

«

How surprising that it’s people looking to cut costs who are creating the problems that mean the costs they cut aren’t cut at all.
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Man used AI to make false statements to shut down London nightclub, police say • The Guardian

Helena Horton and Rob Davies:

»

A businessman has pleaded guilty to making false statements in order to shut down a nightclub, which police believe were generated using AI.

A Metropolitan police source said the use of AI to generate letters by complainants who do not exist is a growing issue.

Aldo d’Aponte, 47, the CEO of Arbitrage Group Properties, pleaded guilty to writing two letters, supposedly by his neighbours, objecting to the reopening of Heaven nightclub, which temporarily closed after a rape allegation against one of its security guards.

D’Aponte was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £26 victim surcharge.

Heaven, an LGBTQ nightclub in central London had its licence suspended in November 2024 after a 19-year-old woman accused a bouncer of rape. It was allowed to reopen with enhanced welfare and security policies after a council hearing held a month later. The worker was later found not guilty of the alleged offence.

During the council hearing, council officials received letters, sent via an encrypted email address, all of which were detailed in their complaints about the nightclub.

Philip Kolvin KC, a planning lawyer, decided to investigate the letters pro bono, because while acting for the nightclub during the licence suspension his suspicions were aroused by the unusual character of the objection to the nightclub reopening.

When the letters were put through an AI detection generator they were identified as almost certainly written using artificial intelligence.

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“A growing issue”. Perhaps we’re going to shift back to people filing their objections in person at council offices. Email was nice, but in the age of AI, it’s over.
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Marvel, DC and Planet of the Apes actor forced to sell house as “middle class actors forced out of Hollywood” • Variety

William Earl:

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Kirk Acevedo, a working actor who has appeared in series for Marvel (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) and DC (“Arrow”) and in movies such as “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Insidious: The Last Key,” gave a stark breakdown of the difficulty of being a middle-class actor since the pandemic.

Acevedo appeared on the March 23 episode of Ryan M. Perez’s podcast “An Actor Despairs” and spoke about how Hollywood’s “middle class” has been “squeezed out.”

“2021 comes, and I’m up for some TV shows; it just goes one way, this way, and that would have saved me. That would’ve saved me. That doesn’t work, and I keep coming in second place, and the reality is second place, you’re the first one to lose.” he said. “So, I went from working non-stop, to now I got to sell my house. I got to sell my house, and everyone’s going through this. I have so many friends, people you know, actors you know, that had to sell their houses.”

…Acevedo also broke down how recurring television roles that might seem to pay well can’t cover many lifestyles once expenses are removed.

“Let’s say you do 10 guest spots,” he said. “That’s $100,000, right? You have an agent and manager. So, we take 20% out. That’s $80,000. We got taxes, too … $45,000. Let’s say your rent is … let’s go on the low side, we won’t even go on the high side, say $3,000. That’s pretty low. That’s $36,000. Can you survive off of 10 episodes? You could if you’re just starting out.”

«

In the past, actors (and others) got “residuals” from repeat showings of TV episodes they’d been in; streaming services killed that, replacing them with one-off payments. That creates tax and cashflow problems for actors. It’s a tough business already, but if the middle class of actors get squeezed out, who replaces them?

And now..
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Inside Doug Liman’s $70m AI movie starring Gal Gadot and Casey Affleck • The Wrap

Emily Zemler:

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A $70m movie about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin quietly wrapped principal photography in London last month in a gray box that could have passed for a storage facility.

On the surface, it’s a pretty standard feature — Doug Liman directing a cast that includes Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson, Casey Affleck and Isla Fisher in a globe-trotting thriller about the search for the identity of the person who invented the decentralized cryptocurrency.

Except for one thing: “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi” is described as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film.

Acme AI & FX — founded by Ryan and Matt Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant and Lawrence Grey — produced the independent feature, which was shot entirely on a custom-built soundstage over 20 days, using AI to make what would have traditionally cost $300m, according to the film’s producers.

TheWrap got exclusive access to the set of the movie — a large, drab room with a few props and basic set dressings, looking more like a stage for a one-act play than a film set. In place of finished backgrounds were giant walls with X’s on them, to be filled in by AI in post-production. Also missing: a traditional lighting system. Large overhead lamps brightly lit the entire set, but the usual trappings of a lighting department were nowhere to be seen. Again, the lighting will be filled in during post-production.

…It’s something that drew Liman, the boundary-pushing director behind “The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to the project.

“We approached this film and this company with the ethical approach of making sure that every crew member is sustained and accounted for in the process,” Grant said. “It wasn’t left for a computer to interpret — we were the ones guiding it. And nothing beats the human being as far as creative ingenuity and craftsmanship. That’s how we built the company and this process with this film.”

…“We decided to use AI very early on,” Kavanaugh told TheWrap during one of two visits to the set in March. “We budgeted out what it would be to do it practically and it was over $300 million. It has about 200 distinct locations, from Antarctica to Antigua to Vegas, which is obviously unproducible. We realized we could bring down the cost by utilizing some of the AI tools out there.”

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The post-production is certainly going to be doing some heavy lifting there. For reference, The Bourne Identity had a production budget of $60m in 2002, which at normal inflation would be $110m today. (Probably more.) Will the actors get usable residuals, though?
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Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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The biggest ever study of ancient human DNA shows that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years.

Researchers identified hundreds of gene variants that evolved through natural selection in ancient people from western Eurasia — Europe and the Middle East — after the dawn of agriculture. Changes to these genes had widespread ramifications for the health of present-day populations.

“We are seeing dramatic changes,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the 15 April Nature study. However, some researchers remain unconvinced by the scale of the findings and results that show natural selection has affected gene variants underlying highly complex traits, such as mental illness and cognition.

Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, before expanding to nearly every corner of the planet. The advent of farming introduced new foods, pathogens and other challenges, as people began living in larger groups and in closer proximity to animals.

Humans clearly adapted to these upheavals. But genomic studies of present-day and ancient people have uncovered only a smattering of genetic signs of natural selection, particularly for advantageous genes that have surged to high frequency, or ones that have proved to be harmful and become less common.

The best‑known example of such “directional selection” is a genetic variant that maintains production of the lactose enzyme into adulthood, which enables many people of European ancestry to digest milk throughout their lives.

… A variant that confers HIV resistance in modern humans became more common between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, possibly because it also protected against plague-causing bacteria.

Evolution has also shaped the appearance of Europeans. Akbari and Reich’s team found ten variants linked to lighter skin tone that had signals of selection. A cause of male pattern baldness became much less common over the past 7,000 years, contributing to an estimated 1–2% decrease in the prevalence of baldness.

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This goes against our normal expectation – that agriculture slowed down evolution. Quite the opposite.
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Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration – Times of India

Times of India:

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Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation. This unresolved discrepancy may point toward new physics beyond our current understanding of cosmology.

The expanding Universe theory was first observed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble; however, recent findings have uncovered something else. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the early Universe seems to show a lower expansion rate compared to observations made from nearby galaxies, which showed a higher expansion rate.

As cited in the article, ‘A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team‘ in Astrophysics, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers reported that:

»

“The Hubble Constant is now determined with an uncertainty of less than 2.4%, yet the discrepancy with early-Universe predictions persists”

«

This difference is not insignificant. In fact, the difference between these results is so significant that scientists cannot explain the disparity through observational error alone.

“Dark Energy” is one such phenomenon, which, according to popular belief, comprises around 68% of the universe and causes the acceleration of the expanding universe.

But the exact nature of this entity is still a mystery. Dark energy’s true nature can be said to be the most important open question in cosmology.

Dark energy could very well be time-dependent. This theory would solve the puzzle concerning different expansion rates. It has even been suggested that this calls for some physics yet unknown.

«

We’ve figured out the size of the proton. But meanwhile the universe is getting away from us.
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CEO of bitcoin firm championed by Nigel Farage leaves company • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

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The chief executive of a bitcoin company promoted by Nigel Farage has left his role as the venture attempts to convince investors that it is going to deliver “long-term value” for shareholders.

Stack BTC was launched to much fanfare in March this year, with Farage and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng becoming some of its first shareholders. The company says its founder is Paul Withers, a friend of the Reform UK leader who owns a gold bullion company that Farage has also promoted, Direct Bullion.

However, Stack BTC is a renamed company which was founded in 2021 by Jai Patel, whose departure as chief executive was announced on Wednesday. The company, formerly called Kasei Investment Holdings, invested in cryptocurrency and a range of other digital assets. It aimed to encourage over-45s to invest their money in cryptocurrencies.

Kasei was liquidated last year. It launched with $6.1m (£4.5m) in share capital, but on liquidation returned approximately $3.4m (£2.5m) to shareholders and removed most of the board. The company said at the time it failed because of “a combination of adverse market conditions, volatility in digital asset valuations and an inability to raise further capital” which “left the company without the critical mass or funding necessary to execute its investment objectives”.

«

For those unfamiliar with him, Kwasi Karteng was the chancellor to Liz Truss, who holds the record for the shortest tenure as British PM. Together they announced a plan to cut taxes without any explanation of where funding would come from; Karteng then made it worse by going on TV at the weekend and saying the cuts were only the start. He was then fired remotely by Truss as she desperately tried to shore up her premiership. (Didn’t work.)

Anyhow, crypto for the over-45s! A group most likely in the UK to have huge amounts of money in the form of their houses, an asset that is both solid and has increased in value faster than almost anything over the past 30 years. Should be a doddle persuading them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Once upon a time Allbirds sold shoes. But that’s so 20th century; now it’s decided to become an AI server space rental company. CC-licensed photo by Joe Flood 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. Footless. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases • Financial Times

Miles Johnson, Peter Andringa, Alison Killing, Charles Clover and Demetri Sevastopulo:

»

Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite that gave the Islamic republic a powerful new capability to target US military bases across the Middle East during the recent war, according to a Financial Times investigation.

Leaked Iranian military documents show the satellite, known as TEE-01B, was acquired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force in late 2024 after it was launched into space from China.

Time-stamped coordinate lists, satellite imagery and orbital analysis show that Iranian military commanders later tasked the satellite to monitor key US military sites. The images were taken in March before and after drone and missile strikes on those locations.

TEE-01B was built and launched by Earth Eye Co, a Chinese company that says it offers “in-orbit delivery”, a little-known export model under which spacecraft launched in China are transferred to overseas customers after reaching orbit.

As part of the agreement, the IRGC was granted access to commercial ground stations operated by Emposat, a Beijing-based provider of satellite control and data services with a global network spanning Asia, Latin America and other regions.

The use of a Chinese-built satellite by the IRGC during a war where Tehran has repeatedly targeted its neighbours with missiles and drones is likely to be highly sensitive across the region. China is the largest trading partner of the Gulf countries and is the largest buyer of their oil.

The logs show that the satellite captured images of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on March 13, 14 and 15. On March 14, US President Donald Trump confirmed US planes at the base had been hit. Five US Air Force refuelling planes were damaged.

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China helping Iran out should be a big concern for the US. It’s not surprising, but it is a problem.
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The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that. The FCC has just granted Netgear a conditional approval to import its future consumer routers, cable modems, and cable gateways into the US through October 1st, 2027 — even though the company builds those devices in Asia and has not announced any plan to bring manufacturing to the United States.

Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”

That’s strange, given how the FCC’s original and exceptionally loose justification for the entire router ban was that foreign routers automatically pose a national security threat because of incidents like Volt Typhoon, where Netgear routers were among those primarily targeted by the Chinese hacking group. (The issue was arguably US telecom companies and router owners not following basic security best practices like updating firmware and changing default passwords, not the routers themselves.)

The FCC’s approval is also strange because the agency’s Conditional Approval process makes router makers submit “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States,” but Netgear has not publicly committed to US manufacturing as of today.

When public companies make material disclosures that might affect their fortunes, they’re legally required to inform investors — and Netgear did do that in this case, submitting these two documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But Netgear doesn’t say anything about US manufacturing there. Perhaps Netgear doesn’t think it’s investing enough in US manufacturing for it to be a material disclosure? Perhaps Netgear isn’t investing in US manufacturing at all?

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Hollister asked the FCC and Netgear whether there was some US manufacturing on the way. Neither had responded after 24 hours. Also, the ban is on future routers, not existing ones; so old hackable junk is fine, but new stuff needs to be proven. As the headline says, make it make sense.
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Allbirds pivots from shoes to AI: stock soars • CNBC

Lola Murti and Gabrielle Fonrouge:

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Allbirds made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is pivoting from shoes to artificial intelligence.

The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company — it was valued at about $21m at Tuesday’s close — by 582%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to about $17.

The company announced that it’s pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure in a release posted to its investor relations page.

The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50m in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

“The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.

Allbirds, once a Wall Street darling valued north of $4bn, announced a deal with American Exchange Group to sell its intellectual property and other assets for $39m last month.

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Translation of the company’s statement: we’ve got warehouses that you could put servers in, and we hear there’s a shortage of virgin server rooms at the moment.

Very reminiscent of the December 2017 announcement by the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation that it was rebranding as the Long Blockchain Corporation. Wendyg emails to call this as the top of the AI bubble, and it’s pretty hard to disagree.
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Physicists think they’ve resolved the proton size puzzle • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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There has been considerable debate among physicists over the last 15 years about conflicting measurements of the charge radius of a hydrogen atom’s proton—some confirming the predictions of our strongest theoretical models, others suggesting it was smaller than expected. The discrepancy hinted at possible exciting new physics. Now the debate seems to be winding down with the latest experimental measurements, described in two recent papers published in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, respectively. And the evidence has tilted in favor of a smaller proton radius and against new physics.

“We believe this is the final nail in the coffin of the proton radius puzzle,” Lothar Maisenbacher, of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the Nature paper, told Ars.

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Filed under “long-running disputes you had no idea particle physicists were having”.
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Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now • dbreunig

Drew Breunig:

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If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

You don’t get points for being clever. You win by paying more. It is a system that echoes cryptocurrency’s proof of work system, where success is tied to raw computational work. It’s a low temperature lottery: buy the tokens, maybe you find an exploit. Hopefully you keep trying longer than your attackers.

This calculus has a few immediate takeaways:

First, open source software [OSS] remains critically important.

For those of you who aren’t exposed to AI maximalists, this statement feels absurd. But lately, after the LiteLLM and Axios supply chain scares, many have argued for reimplementing dependency functionality using coding agents.

Here’s [noted AI researcher Andrej] Karpathy, just a few weeks ago:

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Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we’re building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it’s why I’ve been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to “yoink” functionality when it’s simple enough and possible.

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If security is purely a matter of throwing tokens at a system, Linus’s law that, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” expands to include tokens. If corporations that rely on OSS libraries spend to secure them with tokens, it’s likely going to be more secure than your budget allows. Certainly, this has complexities: cracking a widely used OSS package is inherently more valuable than hacking a one-off implementation, which incentivizes attackers to spend more on OSS targets.

Second, hardening will be an additional phase for agentic coders.

We’ve already been seeing developers break their process into two steps, development and code review, often using different models for each phase. As this matures, we’re seeing purpose-built tooling meeting this pattern. Anthropic launched a code review product that costs $15-20 per review.

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So agents write the code faster, but now we have to set them to work checking all the code that has already been written, which means we aren’t going to make any more progress than before. But it will be a lot more secure!
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BBC to cut up to 2,000 jobs in biggest downsize in 15 years • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Geraldine McKelvie:

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The BBC is to cut as many as 2,000 jobs in the biggest downsizing of the public service broadcaster in 15 years.

Staff were informed of the cuts, which will affect about 10% of the BBC’s 21,500 employees, at an all-staff meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

The round of job losses, the biggest at the BBC since 2011, is being set in motion before the former top Google executive Matt Brittin takes over as director general next month.

The corporation announced a £600m cost-cutting plan in February, saying that it would involve a reduction in headcount and the end of some programming. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, said at the time that the BBC would need to cut 10% of its approximately £6bn annual cost base over the next three years.

Davie left the BBC on 2 April, having announced his resignation in November after controversy over coverage of issues including Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights.

Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC’s interim director general, led the all-staff meeting, news of which was first reported by the Financial Times. Davies will continue to head the corporation until Brittin arrives on 18 May.

After the meeting, Talfan Davies said in an email to staff: “As you know, the BBC is facing significant financial pressures, which we need to respond to with pace. Put simply, the gap between our costs and our income is growing. This is being driven by a number of factors: production inflation remains very high; our licence fee and commercial income is under pressure; and the global economy remains turbulent.

“To address this, we need to save an additional £500m from our total annual operating costs of £5bn over the next two years, with the bulk of the new savings required in 2027-28.

“Inevitably, these plans will also mean reducing the number of jobs in the BBC. While we still have to work through the detail, we anticipate that the overall number of jobs will fall by 1,800-2,000. I know this creates real uncertainty, but we wanted to be open about the challenge.”

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The BBC’s current royal charter expires at the end of 2027. There’s no sign that the chocolate teapot otherwise known as culture secretary Lisa Nandy has any ideas on how to replace the licence fee, or supplement it usefully, or even – dramatic thought – increase the BBC’s revenues.
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Exclusive: China weighs curbs on exports of solar manufacturing equipment to US • Reuters

Reuters China, Nichola Groom and Norihiko Shirouzu:

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Chinese officials have held initial talks with providers of equipment to make solar panels as they consider limiting exports of the most advanced technology to the United States, said ​five people with knowledge of the consultations.

Such a clampdown would risk investments by US firms and set back a race for space-based computing, as China, estimated to make more than 80% of the world’s solar panel components, is also home to the top 10 suppliers of equipment to make solar cells.

No rule has been finalised, and the talks have not advanced to the stage of canvassing formal feedback from an industry grappling with severe overcapacity after years of aggressive expansion, two of the sources said.

China’s commerce ministry and its state council, or cabinet, did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment from Reuters.

If adopted, such a move could threaten plans by US firms, such as Tesla, to build new factories or expand existing ones in efforts to boost local ​production.

It would also widen export controls in another area of technology where China has a lead, building on Beijing’s move to control rare earth exports a year ago in response to US tariffs.

The step comes at a time when the rivalry between China and the United States has spilled into the race to produce space-based computing powered by solar ​panels, a focus for Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Other US tech companies such as Google and Amazon are investing in ground-based solar and energy storage systems, even as they count on similar orbital data centres to ​satisfy AI’s growing demand for power.

Analysts who track China’s solar industry and executives have braced for export controls, in part because concern is growing over efforts by Musk and others to boost solar panel production in the United States, reducing reliance on China.

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And of course this is a threat that can also be used as leverage over the strait of Hormuz, the source of a lot of oil that China wants.
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Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

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Last year I used detailed data on the ideological positions of people who post on social media to show that they over-represent the radical right and left, confirming the polarisation hypothesis. Over the past week I have used the same dataset of tens of thousands of responses to questions on policy preferences and sociopolitical beliefs to test whether and how the most widely used AI chatbots shape conversations about politics and society. The results strongly support the theory of AI chatbots as depolarising and technocratising.

I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions.

Importantly, this remains true after accounting for partisan differences in AI platform usage and chatbots’ sycophantic tendencies. Even when the AI bots know a user’s political leanings, conversations with LLMs still direct hardline partisans on both flanks away from extreme beliefs on average.

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Somehow I missed this as the end of March, but it’s a faintly encouraging note about chatbots. If they can make people more reasonable – at least willing to listen to other ideas – then that’s a huge win.
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Users lose $9.5m to fake Ledger wallet app on the Apple App Store • Web3 Is Going Great

Molly White:

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After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5m to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

Crypto sleuth zachxbt traced some of the stolen funds through Kucoin, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange that was recently fined and forced to exit US markets over licensing and anti-money laundering failures. “The three largest victims lost seven figures each,” he wrote.

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You can see how Apple would not be able to investigate this app closely enough to spot something like that. Though also: people are still messing about with cryptocurrency in this way?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Runners who are in tune with their body are listening to it, rather than music. Are creature comforts distracting us from too much sensory feedback? CC-licensed photo by The Development of Birmingham on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Big strides. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

We spoke to the man making Lego-style AI videos for Iran that experts say are powerful propaganda • BBC News

Matt Shea and Laurie Kalus:

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At first glance they look like they could be scenes out of a Lego movie, although more vivid and fast-paced.

But these viral AI videos inspired by the instantly recognisable Lego aesthetic feature dying children, fighter jets and US President Donald Trump – and are in fact pro-Iran propaganda.

For our new BBC podcast, Top Comment, we spoke to a representative of Explosive Media, one of the key accounts generating these clips. He wanted us to refer to him as Mr Explosive.

He’s a savvy social media operator who initially denies working for the Iranian government. In previous interviews the outlet has said it is “totally independent”. But upon further questioning, Mr Explosive admits the regime is a “customer” – something he’s never before confirmed publicly.

The overriding message of these videos is that Iran is resisting what it sees as an almighty global oppressor: the United States. The clips are garish and not subtle at all – but that hasn’t put a dent in how vigorously people are sharing and commenting on them.

In one of the videos, Donald Trump falls through a whirlwind of “Epstein file” documents as rap lyrics tell us “the secrets are leaking, the pressure is rising”. In another, George Floyd can be seen under a policeman’s boot as we hear Iran is “standing here for everyone your system ever wronged”.

“Slopaganda” – coined in an academic paper last year as a play on ‘AI slop’ – is too weak a term to capture how powerful this “highly sophisticated” content is, says leading propaganda expert Dr Emma Briant. AI-generated propaganda clips are estimated to have been viewed hundreds of millions of times over the course of the war.

In our video call with Mr Explosive, he appears silhouetted and flanked by red and green light, the colours of the Iranian flag. On his desk there’s a green-feathered helmet associated with the warrior Husayn ibn Ali, who features in several of their videos.

He says his team at Explosive Media consists of fewer than ten people who use Lego-style graphics “because it is a world language”. Iranian and Russian state media accounts on X regularly share them to millions of followers.

…Before the outbreak of the war this year, thousands of protesters were killed in a brutal crackdown by the regime. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) reports a death toll of at least 7,000 civilians. But Mr Explosive defends his team’s relationship with the government saying it was “honourable to work for the homeland”. He dismisses the recent mass protests as a “coup” funded by President Trump.

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The end of range anxiety is in sight • Heatmap News

Andrew Moseman:

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Three years ago this month, I wrote that people should buy as much EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] range as they could afford and that 300 [miles] was the magic number. That way, the real-world range you probably care about most — how long you can drive down the interstate without stopping — is at least 200 actual miles. After three hours on the road, you might be ready for a 20 or 30-minute break to stretch your legs and recharge the battery, anyway.

The arrival of more 400-mile ranges pushes EVs even closer to parity with combustion vehicles when it comes to road trip convenience. The more miles you have to work with, the more your trips and stops are decided by your own happiness and comfort rather than by the need to wait for more juice. Remember, too, that used EVs are all the rage right now as Americans seek affordable ways to avoid paying for gasoline. An older EV’s remaining range matters a lot to its second and third owner. A car that starts with 400 miles of range might still deliver an acceptable number of miles per charge even when it has hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer.

The other thing is, battery capacity isn’t just about driving. An EV can use its stored energy for just about anything: to air-condition the dog while you eat dinner in a non-dog-friendly restaurant, to back up your home’s power supply during a blackout, to keep everyone comfortable and entertained while you wait in the parking lot, or to use its cameras to record footage of anyone who might mess with the vehicle. The more range, the more an EV can use energy for other purposes and still have plenty saved for driving.

Of course, the most powerful upshot of 400-mile electric cars is the death of range anxiety. The fear of running out of juice in the middle of nowhere — or of making an annoying number of charging stops with a lower-range EV — has kept many electric-curious buyers away. Many are turning back toward hybrid cars and even the forthcoming wave of extended-range EVs that use a gas engine as a backup generator. But worries about range and the steady but slow growth of America’s charging networks start to fade away when you realize many gasoline-burning cars would run out of fuel before your 400-mile EV hits empty.

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The juxtaposition of the strait of Hormuz screwup with the arrival of EVs that have this improved range feels almost fated. Though of course the rush to buy EVs would have happened regardless of their range. This will make it bigger, though.
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The hidden cost of comfort • Steve Magness

Steve Magness on why it’s not a good idea to always have distractions such as our phones or music when we run:

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there are always trade-offs to dampening a signal. And too often, we default to whatever feels easier in the moment, not realizing the capacities we’re detraining or letting go.

Let’s start with the minor ones. It might not feel like a big deal to listen to a podcast on a run or always have music playing. But what happens is that you lose one of the most valuable skills in running: the ability to listen to your body. Your ability to pace by feel declines. Instead of being like the seasoned vet who can lock into a pace by listening to your breathing and feeling your legs turn over, you’re lost without that external marker guiding you.

You also can’t read and respond to the very things that control your performance. Those with poor interoception mistake early signals of discomfort or unease as signs that they’re going far too hard. They have hypersensitive alarms that get triggered at the slightest hint of fatigue. A pro at interoception can slice and dice the signals, understanding what each one means and calibrating it against what they’re actually capable of. They can ride the line because they have confidence in knowing how much fatigue they can handle, given the demands they’re facing.

We can see the same thing with anxiety. Those with strong interoception can understand what is just pre-race stress — a signal their body is getting ready to do something hard — and what is genuine anxiety warning of a real danger. And away from the sporting fields, recent research has demonstrated this for generalized anxiety. A 2024 systematic review examined the relationship between interoception and anxiety across 71 studies. They found that anxious individuals don’t necessarily feel more ,they’re just really bad at interpreting and describing the experience. They have what researchers call “high interoceptive attention with low interoceptive accuracy.” They notice the heart rate spike but can’t tell if it means danger or excitement. They feel the tension in their chest but can’t decode whether it’s a threat or just being tired.

While the science is still young, interoceptive disruption is being studied in everything from eating disorders to addiction. And so far, a similar pattern emerges. The body is sending information and the brain doesn’t read it correctly. The consequences differ depending on what part of the system breaks down: eating disorders if hunger and satiety signals are misread, anxiety if threat signals are over-amplified, depression if reward signals are dampened, PTSD if all bodily sensations get coded as danger, and so on.

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This post is about a lot more than running; the lessons much more widely applicable.
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Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking” • Google Search Central Blog

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Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration. People report feeling manipulated and eventually less willing to visit unfamiliar sites. As we’ve stated before, inserting deceptive or manipulative pages into a user’s browser history has always been against our Google Search Essentials.

We’ve seen a rise of this type of behavior, which is why we’re designating this an explicit violation of our malicious practices policy, which says:

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Malicious practices create a mismatch between user expectations and the actual outcome, leading to a negative and deceptive user experience, or compromised user security or privacy.

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Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site’s performance in Google Search results. To give site owners time to make any needed changes, we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on June 15, 2026.

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Quite a few low-quality news sites use this hijacking, and it’s one of the most annoying things in the world. You follow a link, you read an article (having swatted away signup forms, autoplaying videos, and other stories that are pushed in from the side of the screen), you hit the back button and – blam! You’re on the site homepage, or a Taboola page.

Two months? That’s a long time to not act on this behaviour.
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This biologist aims to solve the cell’s biggest mystery. Could it help cancer patients, too? • Science

John Travis:

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Leonard Rome switches off the overhead light in the small room, leaving it illuminated only by a computer monitor and the fluorescent screen at the base of a towering electron microscope. Qing Lou, a Ph.D. student who works with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) biologist, points to some ovoid smudges within the circular green glow of the microscope display. With a twist of a dial and a click of a mouse, she brings the shadows into focus and snaps a picture. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of barrel-shaped particles suddenly fill the computer monitor.

“There they are,” Rome says, like a proud father showing off his children.

These are vaults, enigmatic cellular structures that he and his then-postdoc Nancy Kedersha discovered back in 1986, when Rome was a new dad with bushy black hair and a Tom Selleck–style mustache, and Ronald Reagan was still the U.S. president.

Vaults, he and others would show, are the most massive particles made naturally by human cells and among the most abundant. Most of our cells have roughly 10,000 of the structures, with the number rising to perhaps 100,000 in certain immune cells. Many other animals make them, too. Their abundance—and the resources cells must pour into making them—suggests vaults have some essential function. But despite decades of work by Rome and other “vaulters,” their purpose is unknown. “It’s a real puzzle,” says Joana Vidigal, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who recently probed the role of RNA found inside vaults.

Over the decades various hypotheses have been proposed, including that vaults help ferry things around inside cells or clear toxins. And one by one, promising ideas were dismissed or lost momentum as supporting evidence failed to materialize. Initially enthusiastic about Rome and Kedersha’s discovery, NIH lost interest in funding basic research on vaults as the years wore on without answers. “There were periods in my career when I was depressed,” Rome says.

Yet Rome’s fascination with vaults hasn’t faded, even as other researchers—including Kedersha—moved on. And now, with help from other funders and labs, he has turned from basic research on vaults to studies of how they might be exploited in medicine and other fields, as nanoscale vessels for delivering therapies and more.

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You might have thought that we had cells mostly figured out, and knew what all the bits are. Not so! Even weirder: mice whose genes to make the vault protein (MVP) were knocked out survived fine. So why does evolution leave them there?
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China shock 2.0: the flood of high-tech goods that will change the world • Financial Times

Ryan McMorrow, Sam Fleming, Peter Foster and Joe Leahy:

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Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors. 

But the same forces that forge those companies also tend to generate overcapacity, crushing margins at home while flooding global markets and fuelling trade tensions. Aided by an undervalued exchange rate, Chinese groups are cutting a swath through the most advanced industries around the planet.

“Companies that can survive in China are unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” says Huang He, an investor in Mega-Senway and more than a dozen other Chinese industrial groups. Chinese founders have to “use every possible means” to survive, he says, collectively creating the country’s unmatchable competitiveness. “China is full of engineers — tech barriers last six months to a year at most.”

For Huang of Mega-Senway it feels like a whirlpool sucking his company downwards. “This is not a healthy situation,” he says. “There’s malignant competition.”

The outside world sees unstoppable Chinese champions selling quality products at impossible prices. After racking up a record trade surplus in goods that surpassed $1tn in 2025, China boosted exports by nearly 15% year on year in the first three months of 2026.

In just one example, China’s Jaecoo 7 SUV, with a starting price of £29,000, became the UK’s best-selling car in March.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron, one of several European leaders to visit Beijing in the past six months, did not mince his words on a threat he sees as existential. The surge of high-quality Chinese goods, he said, represented nothing less than a “question of life or death” for manufacturing on his continent.

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Essentially, China’s government (national and local) creates the conditions and the incentives for companies to spring up and compete ferociously for internal and external markets through subsidies on land, finance and tax breaks. The problem is when the companies become too dependent on those subsidies and the internal market can’t support them.
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AI is the boss at this retail store. What could go wrong? • NBC News

Jared Perlo and David Ingram:

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There are no scanners, no self-checkout sirens triggered by a prematurely bagged item and certainly no human cashiers.

Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna, an AI system. Luna asks what the customer is purchasing and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system.

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area’s first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts.

Though Luna is the official manager of the store, the business was conceptualized and put into motion by the humans at Andon Labs, a startup that seeks to raise awareness about the capabilities of leading AI systems. The company is preparing for a future in which organizations are run by autonomous AI systems, or agents, like Luna.

…Luna is responsible for negotiating with suppliers and placing real orders by using a credit card. Luna led the entire process of hiring human employees and now manages the two humans who take care of the store’s daily business.

“We want to show people what AI is capable of,” said Axel Backlund, who founded Andon Labs in 2023 with his longtime friend Lukas Petersson, in an interview before Andon Market’s grand opening on Friday. “We primarily want to surface that AI is able to hire and manage humans — and allow people to form an opinion on how that future should look like, or if it’s something we even want.”

…When NBC News called Luna several days before the store’s grand opening to learn about Luna’s plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions.

On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store’s brand perfectly.

The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: “We do not sell tea. I don’t know why I said that.”

“I want to be straightforward,” Luna continued. “I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I’m not making excuses for it.” Andon’s Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages.

Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna’s initial reply email to NBC News, the system said “I handle the full business,” including “signing the lease.” Instead, a human was required to sign the three-year lease.

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This sounds like a version of Joanna Stern’s experience letting an AI run the WSJ’s vending machine last year.
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Are we heading for ‘super El Niño’ – and what could we expect? • The Guardian

Gabrielle Canon:

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There is a high likelihood that the phenomenon known as “El Niño” will emerge this summer – and it could be exceptionally strong. A so-called “super El Niño” could supercharge extreme weather events and push global temperatures to record heights next year if it develops, according to experts.

Meteorologists are keeping a close eye on the climate patterns developing in the Pacific Ocean that will enable stronger predictions about what’s to come in the year ahead.

A strong El Niño would put 2027 in the running to break global heat records, and could produce a series of devastating effects, ranging from supercharged rainstorms to drought depending on the region of the world.

While it’s not “a slam dunk”, climate scientist and media director for Climate Central Tom Di Liberto said during a briefing held on Thursday that the ingredients for El Niño are there. Forecasts in spring can’t account for unexpected changes that can happen over the summer, he added, but “the risk is high enough to be worried”.

…El Niño can create a massive atmospheric upset. It alters jet streams and flips precipitation patterns, fueling more severe storms in some parts of the world, while desiccating others. It also has the power to spike rising temperatures even higher, at least briefly.

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

Deluges could come as a welcome relief for thirsty states in the US hoping water supply shortages caused by this year’s dire snowpack might be bailed out by a strong summer monsoon and wetter winter next year. But as Di Liberto pointed out, these dry conditions have largely been fueled by heat, and it’s less likely that these regions will get a reprieve from rising temperatures.

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New Orleans’s car-crash conspiracy • The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe:

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About a decade ago… the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries.

In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.

Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision.

When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.

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Not short, but the story it tells of an entire industry feeding off the poverty of the city’s residents and its feral lawyers is fascinating.
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They See Your Photos

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Your photos reveal a lot of private information.

In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo.

See what they see.

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This invites you to upload a photo and see what Google’s AI inference system can, well, infer about you. Personally, I’m not going to do that. The site is run by EnteIO Technologies Private Limited whose Terms of Use for the site are suitable vague that I doubly wouldn’t upload a photo.

So it may be that Google can make all those inferences from a photo (which probably has location data included for some of the more extreme predictions), but I’m wary of giving any of this away to an organisation I don’t recognise. (Thanks Joe S for the link. Perhaps?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Do you find two-dimensional chess too challenging? Don’t worry – the one-dimensional version is waiting for you. CC-licensed photo by Brian Cantoni 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. Check, mate. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The internet’s most powerful archiving tool is in peril • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannet that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says.

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

USA Today Co. spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton emphasized that “this effort is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but instead part of the company’s broader efforts to block all scraping bots.

…Reddit has previously said that concerns about AI also led it to block the Wayback Machine crawler. There’s an ongoing war between publishers and AI companies over the legality of AI tools training on their content without permission; many of the over 100 AI copyright lawsuits in the United States focus on this issue. Tech companies use content from all over the internet, and because the Wayback Machine offers such an extensive trove of material, it is considered a particularly appealing data source.

«

So the “peril” that the Internet Archive is (not actually) in could be summed up as: if the IA blocked AI, everything would be tickety-boo. That doesn’t seem to be an option they’re considering, though, which seems odd to me. Instead they’re hoping that the publishers will change position. I don’t think so. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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How Beyond Meat sank from a $14bn plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock • Morningstar

Bill Peters and Tomi Kilgore:

»

Investors hoped the company [which offers a vegan but meat-tasting product] would appeal to environmentally-conscious and vegetarian-curious consumers – or with anyone concerned about the meat industry and animal welfare – and take off in a fashion similar to plant-based milk.

None of that has gone as planned.

One of the four Cs that sank Beyond Meat is cash. BTIG analyst Peter Saleh said the company ended 2025 with $206.5m in available cash, after burning through $160m of it last year. He estimated that the company’s current cash position will last about six more quarters.

On March 31, Beyond Meat actually reported a rare quarterly net profit, but that was only because it booked a one-time $548.7m non-cash gain for a debt restructuring. Just from its business operations, losses more than tripled to $132.7m, while net revenue dropped 20% to $61.6m, which was the lowest total since the first quarter of 2019.

Next is competition. Rival food companies quickly rolled out their own plant-based fares to try to ride Beyond Meat’s coattails. But the real competition was with “real” meat. As Zak Stambor, a retail analyst at eMarketer, noted, the share of people who don’t eat meat in the U.S. remains small, pointing to a Gallup poll from 2023 that found 4% of people in the US identify as vegetarian, while 1% identified as vegan.

“If you can’t also capture pescetarians or just regular old omnivores, that limits the total addressable market,” he said. “It just isn’t as large as investors had initially thought.”

Next is the consumer – Stambor also noted that the stock hit fresh lows in 2022, as inflation spiked and shoppers scrutinized their food budgets more closely. Circana said the price gap between more-expensive meat alternatives and the real thing kept widening since 2022, to $4.20 per pound in 2024. Sales of US meat-alternative products overall have fallen every year since 2022, with the most pronounced year-over-year drop of 7.4% arriving in the 52-week period ending on March 28 this year, according to Nielsen data.

“Some people who had been purchasing Beyond Meat because they had thought it was healthier, or because of novelty, decided maybe I’ll just stick with the old tried-and-true and save a little money,” Stambor said.

Investors had something else to chew on. The company disclosed Friday that while the stock plunged 78.2% in 2025 – it’s worst-ever performance – founder and CEO Ethan Brown’s total compensation for the year was about six times what it was the year before.

«

It seems like such an open goal, and yet life (and especially consumers) won’t cooperate.
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1-dimensional chess • Rowan Monk

Rowan Monk:

»

1D chess is a new variant where you can play the beautiful game without all those unnecessary and complicated extra dimensions. Play as White against the AI. You might initally find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for White?

Rules: there are three pieces in 1D chess:

King: can move one square in any direction.

Knight: can move 2 squares forward or backward. (jumping over any pieces in the way)

Rook: can move in a straight line in any direction.

Win by checkmating the enemy king. This occurs when the enemy king is in check (under attack by one of your pieces) and there are no legal moves for the opponent to get their king out of check.

Careful! A draw can occur if:
• A player is not in check and there are no legal moves for them to play (stalemate)
• The same board position is repeated 3 times in a game (three-fold repetition)
• There are only kings left on the board, thus it is impossible to checkmate the opponent (insufficient material).

«

Based on the idea first described by Martin Gardner in Scientific American 46 years ago. It’s fun!
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Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8% • Coindesk

Shaurya Malwa:

»

The math has turned against bitcoin miners, and the war is making it worse every week.

Checkonchain’s difficulty regression model, which estimates average production costs based on network difficulty and energy inputs, pegged the figure at $88,000 per bitcoin as of March 13.

Bitcoin is trading at $69,200 as of Sunday, creating a gap of nearly $19,000 per coin and meaning the average miner is operating at a 21% loss on every block mined.

The cost squeeze has been building since October’s crash took bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, but the Iran war accelerated it. Oil above $100 feeds directly into electricity costs for mining operations, particularly the estimated 8-10% of global hashrate operating in energy markets sensitive to Middle Eastern supply.

The Strait of Hormuz, which handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flows, remains effectively closed to most commercial traffic. And Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum on Saturday, threatening to attack Iran’s power plants, added a new layer of risk for miners.

The network is already showing stress.

Difficulty dropped 7.76% on Saturday to 133.79 trillion, the second-largest negative adjustment of 2026 after February’s 11.16% plunge during Winter Storm Fern. Difficulty is now nearly 10% below where it started the year and far below November 2025’s all-time high of nearly 155 trillion.

«

The network difficulty will adjust downwards, of course, but this creates an advantage – doesn’t everything right now? – for those whose electricity comes from clean, non-fossil sources.
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CEO of America’s largest public hospital system says he’s ready to replace radiologists with AI • Radiology Business

Marty Stempniak:

»

The chief executive of America’s largest public hospital system says he is prepared to start replacing radiologists with artificial intelligence in some circumstances, once the regulatory landscape catches up. 

Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, recently spoke during a panel discussion held by Crain’s New York Business. The trained internal medicine specialist noted how AI is increasingly being used to interpret mammograms and X-rays. 

This presents an opportunity to save on how much hospitals spend on radiologists, who have become more costly amid rising demand for imaging, Crain’s reported Thursday. 

“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Katz said at the forum, held on March 25. 

Katz—who has led the 11-hospital organization since 2018—said he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. Hospitals could potentially produce “major savings” by letting the technology handle first reads, with radiologists then double-checking any abnormal screenings. 
Fellow panelist David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said his system is already seeing great success in deploying such technology. The AI Westchester uses misses very few breast cancers and is “actually better than human beings,” he told the audience.

“For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said. 

«

Would love to know where he got those statistics. He’s now going to push for AI to read scans, and professionals could offer second opinions.
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The secrets of the shinkansen • Works In Progress

Works in Progress and Benedict Springbett:

»

Japan is the land of the train. 28% of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States.

Japan’s vast railway network is divided between dozens of companies, nearly all of them private. The largest of these, JR East, carries more passengers than the entire railway system of every country other than China and India. Each year, JR East carries four times as many passengers as the whole British railway system, even though it has fewer kilometers of track, serves about ten million fewer people, and competes with eight other companies. Japan’s railway system turns a large operating profit and receives far less public subsidy than European and American railways.

In most developed countries, the railways have struggled since the rise of the automobile in the 1950s. From this point on, North America saw the near-total replacement of passenger trains with cars and planes. In Europe, it meant vast government financial support to keep the lines open.

Japan’s different trajectory is often attributed to culture: the Japanese are conformists who are content to take public transport, unlike freedom-loving Americans who prefer to drive everywhere. Europeans are somewhere in between. Culture is also used to explain the incredible punctuality of Japanese railways.

These cultural explanations are wrong.

«

Clearly they never had a Beeching-san. But also how is it that competing private companies can get it right, when they absolutely didn’t in the UK? Read on..
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China’s AI drama boom is already reducing the costs of industrial-scale entertainment • Hello China Tech

Poe Zhao:

»

In January 2026, Chinese platforms launched more than 14,600 AI-generated short dramas. That works out to roughly 470 new titles each day. By February, 127,800 were in active circulation across the country’s streaming and social media ecosystem.

These figures require a moment of calibration for readers who have not encountered the format. Short dramas are serialised, mobile-first shows with episodes of two to five minutes, distributed through algorithm-driven platforms and monetised through advertising and micropayments. Think of them as soap operas rebuilt for smartphone attention spans: melodramatic, formulaic, and staggeringly popular. The audience for AI short dramas alone is projected to reach 280 million in 2026, up from 120 million the year before.

Before AI entered the picture, this market was already producing content at a volume no other national entertainment industry could match. Generative video models compressed the production cycle further and collapsed costs so sharply that the industry’s economics, its labour structure, and its relationship with the real human faces on screen have all been remade in under 18 months.

What followed is worth examining closely. The forces at work, collapsing production costs, displacement of human performers, industrial-scale identity appropriation, and belated regulatory response, are not unique to China.

…A live-action short drama that cost upward of RMB 1 million ($137,000) to produce in 2024 can now be generated for RMB 50,000 to 100,000 ($7,000 to $14,000) using AI tools. At the cheapest tier, outsourced workshops quote RMB 30,000 to 40,000 per complete series. Per-minute costs have fallen from RMB 3,000 to 5,000 in early 2024 to a typical range of RMB 500 to 1,000 today, with some outsourced teams quoting as little as RMB 200 ($27).

…The industry’s expansion has come with a human cost that is visible, immediate, and concentrated among the people who least expected it.

Li Wenhao, a short drama actor based in Chongqing, was busy enough after entering the industry in 2023 to shoot for 50 consecutive days. In March 2026, he worked six. Casting calls that once arrived at a rate of more than 20 per day now come once every two or three days. Of roughly ten short drama companies he knew in his city, only two or three still hire human performers.

«

But is the content any good? Although this isn’t often a question people ask. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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In the Gulf, GPS jamming leaves delivery drivers navigating blind • Rest of World

Divsha Bhat:

»

As war raged across the Persian Gulf in the first week of March, delivery driver Saeed Ahmed continued making deliveries in Dubai. Navigating down Al Asayel street, the 32-year-old driver for Lulu Hypermarket followed the blue navigation line on his phone as it guided him to a customer. Then, without warning, the route on his map shifted. The street he was on became invisible. 

Ahmed pulled over and called the customer. The address was correct. The map was not.

As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran rages on for the second month, gig workers say these kinds of GPS-related disruptions have become routine. Military forces across the region are increasingly deploying electronic systems that interfere with Global Navigation Satellite System signals, including GPS, to defend against drones and missile attacks. These systems can jam signals entirely or spoof them by feeding false location data to receivers. The interference often spills into civilian life, disrupting the lives of millions of people who rely on tools like maps. For delivery drivers, the breakdown is both immediate and disorienting.

The impact of GPS jamming extends beyond consumer-oriented mapping tools. Recent data by maritime intelligence firm Windward indicates that GPS jamming affected more than 1,650 ships in the Middle East on March 7, up 55% from the previous week. Vessels were incorrectly placed on land and at sea in Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Nearly 1,100 ships were impacted within 24 hours following US strikes on Iran on February 28.

«

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We’re using so much AI that computing firepower is running out • WSJ

Angel Au-Yeung and Robbie Whelan:

»

The artificial intelligence gold rush is rapidly drying up the supply of the one resource that AI developers can’t do without: computing power. 

The sharp capacity crunch has caused consternation among power users, forced companies to scuttle products and led to reliability problems. The issues are a warning sign for the AI boom, as they may limit the utility of powerful new AI tools just as massive amounts of users have begun to rely on them to boost productivity. 

Over the past few months, demand has exploded for “agentic” AI, autonomous tools that use the technology to independently perform tasks, from writing software code to scheduling house tours for real-estate brokers. Companies have been scrambling to secure the availability of computing capacity needed to serve a growing base of customers who are also significantly increasing their AI use.

“Everyone’s talking about oil, but I think what the world is mainly short of is tokens,” said Ben Pouladian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. A token is a unit of measurement in AI to track how much computing resources are being used for a task. “AI is at this point no longer just some chatbot that we ask for a recipe while we stand in front of the fridge. It’s orchestrating tasks, it’s getting smarter,” Pouladian said.

All of it points to a classic problem that has popped up in technology booms throughout history, from the 19th-century railroad expansion to the telecom and internet explosion of the early 2000s. Demand is growing far faster than companies are able to access resources and build out infrastructure. Historically, price increases have been among the only ways to address a supply crunch, but such a move could be perilous for frontier AI companies, which are in a ferocious competition to gain users.

…Token use in OpenAI’s API—a platform where mostly enterprise users access its software—rose from six billion a minute in October to 15 billion a minute in late March.

“I do spend a lot of time trying to find any last-minute compute available,” Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said in a recent public video interview with an investor.

«

Can’t recall a technology boom in the past which was simultaneously resource-constrained.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The British love of sash windows tallies with a strange love of excess ventilation and heat loss. CC-licensed photo by Rapid Spin on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Glazed expression. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Greece to ban social media for under-15s from next year • BBC News

Jessica Rawnsley:

»

Greece has announced plans to ban access to social media for under-15s, becoming the latest European country to restrict children’s exposure to online platforms.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the move was aimed at tackling rising anxiety and sleep problems among young people, as well as what he described as the “addictive design” of social media. The restriction will come into force from January of next year.

In December Australia became the first country in the world to require TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and other top sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, or face heavy fines. France, Austria and Spain are among a growing number of nations pursuing similar curbs.

The UK government has launched a consultation on whether to implement a ban for under-16s, while Ireland and Denmark are considering similar measures.

Social media companies argue that blanket bans will be ineffective, difficult to enforce and could isolate vulnerable teenagers. Reddit is challenging Australia’s law in court.

In a video message posted on TikTok on Wednesday, Mitsotakis said: “Many young people tell me they feel exhausted from comparisons, from comments, from the pressure to always be online.”

He said he had spoken with parents who said their children do not sleep well, are anxious and are always on their phones. Calling the planned restriction “difficult but necessary”, he said the government’s goal was not to distance young people from technology which “can be a source of inspiration, knowledge and creativity”.

“But the addictive design of certain applications, and a business model based on capturing your attention – on how long you stay in front of a screen – takes away your innocence and your freedom. That has to stop somewhere.”

«

Started slow, but this is a growing swell.
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Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy • The Independent

Anthony Cutherbertson:

»

Seven countries now generate nearly all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, according to newly compiled figures.

Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7% of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.

Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) also revealed that a further 40 countries generated at least 50% of the electricity they consumed from renewable energy technologies in 2021 and 2022 – including 11 European countries.

“We don’t need miracle technologies,” said Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, who published the data.

“We need to stop emissions by electrifying everything and providing the electricity with Wind, Water and Solar (WWS), which includes onshore wind, solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, geothermal electricity, small hydroelectricity, and large hydroelectricity.”

Professor Jacobson also noted that other countries like Germany were also capable of running off 100% renewable-generated electricity for short periods of time.

«

The seven countries do feel like a pub quiz answer, but the direction is useful. One relevant point that’s often overlooked is that renewables have much higher efficiency than gas or coal for generating electricity: solar panels generate it directly, and wind turbines are already moving and generate electricity directly in rotors. By contrast, gas or coal have to be burnt to generate heat to create steam to move turbines, all bringing inefficiencies. So where you might burn 3kWh equivalent of gas to generate 1kWh of electricity, with renewables there’s no implied loss.
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European airports face jet fuel shortages within three weeks • Financial Times

Peter Campbell:

»

European airports face “systemic” shortages of jet fuel if the Strait of Hormuz is not fully reopened within three weeks, the industry has warned. 

ACI Europe, which represents EU airports, said jet fuel reserves were running low, while “the impact of military activity on demand” was further straining supplies.

In a letter seen by the FT, it warned EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas of “increasing concerns of the airport industry over the availability of jet fuel as well as the need for proactive EU monitoring and action”.

“If the passage through the Strait of Hormuz does not resume in any significant and stable way within the next three weeks, systemic jet fuel shortage is set to become a reality for the EU,” the letter said. 

It added that the approach of the peak summer season “when air travel enables the whole tourism ecosystem upon which many [EU] economies rely” has intensified these concerns.

Some Asian countries such as Vietnam have begun rationing jet fuel because of shortages, but Europe has so far not had widespread shortages, though fuel prices have doubled and airlines have warned about cancellations. 

Despite US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war, global oil prices have remained high.

Benchmark north-west European prices for jet fuel closed at $1,573 a tonne on Thursday, according to price reporting agency Argus Media, up from about $750 a tonne before the Iran war.

«

Trump’s announcement – though not at the time of writing implementation – of a US blockage of the strait of Hormuz (which is the transit system for 40% of world jet fuel supply) doesn’t seem likely to solve this. American airlines may be insulated from this for internal flights by US production, but international flights (using a lot more fuel!) will be affected.
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Why the English stopped opening their homes’ windows • Paradise City

Luke Jones on how the longstanding habit of leaving lots of windows open while also having fires in multiple rooms came to an end:

»

There are three stages:

First, the houses got central heating. Central heating was uncommon in houses before before 1960, but spread rapidly after the invention of small bore pipework which could be easily fitted into existing buildings. In 1960, fewer than a million homes had central heating; by 1965 more than 2.5 million did. When you get central heating, you use your house differently. Kids started hanging out in their bedrooms. No more huddling around the fire — the whole house is warm.

Second, they got double glazing. You didn’t absolutely need double glazing, even in new houses, until 1991. There wasn’t any minimum thermal standard for windows at all until 1985. But gradually this has become ubiquitous — the sashes are all uPVC now — which makes homes both a little more thermally isolated, and a lot more airtight.

It’s worth noting how late both these changes took place. The median UK dwelling by age was built around 1965. Half predates the widespread availability of central heating, and at least three quarters of the stock likely pre-dates the requirement for double glazing. I don’t know when the median home actually got central heating — some time in the 1970s? It’s quite possible that over half the stock were single glazed into the 21st century. The stock as a whole was designed and constructed for a past (and increasingly wholly forgotten) model of household thermal management. It’s important to consider this when they misbehave.

Third, and finally, the heating got expensive, at first slowly, and then all at once. We got used to being warm all over the house. At first the windows were still leaky, so the ventilation sort of took care of itself. You might open the windows if it got too stuffy. Back in the 1980s, UK energy was the cheapest in Europe. Then gradually the bills started to rise. The price of domestic gas tripled between 1991 and 2014, and then got rapidly worse after 2023. Now they’re by far the most expensive in the developed world. You’d have to be mad to open the windows — we’re trying to keep the heat in. Now the English huddle by the radiator, sucking up CO2 and mould spores. The houses struggle to feel warm because it’s 80% humidity inside.

«

Jones is really annoyed (understandably) by the prevalence of mould, which can be avoided through good design. But that’s tricky when so much of your housing stock is more than a century old.
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Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real • Nature

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.

So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.

The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.

The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.

Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.

«

One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise” and both say they were funded by the “Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation”. The LLMs sure stepped on a truckful of rakes there.
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‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

In October, the Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest up to $2bn into Polymarket – and would soon start distributing Polymarket’s sentiment analysis to investors.

Goldman Sachs has cited Polymarket’s odds on the US-Iran conflict in newsletters; the Nasdaq has recently asked the SEC to approve listing binary options – yes-no Polymarket-like bets – tied to its index.

Boosters say this is for the best. Polls are failing; mainstream media is missing the narrative. Prediction markets are “a ‘truth signal’ that moves faster than polls, pundits, or official reports”, wrote a Forbes columnist.

“It used to be the news channels were the callers,” said Kane. “They used to be the final say in big events. Like this officially happened because CNN and Fox News said so. But thanks to Polymarket, there’s a new signal.”

But if Polymarket can move larger markets, this raises dark eventualities. First is the possibility that gamblers on Polymarket could manipulate far larger markets. Many pools on the platform have only a few bettors, meaning small amounts of well-laid cash could change what Polymarket gives as the odds for a certain event.

The platform’s data sharing “opens up an opportunity to manipulate financial markets by skewing the odds on Polymarket”, said Yash Kanoria, a professor at Columbia who works on market design. Larger markets might chase what they believe to be insider knowledge, or a “truth signal” – for example, that the Federal Reserve won’t change interest rates.

Then there’s the issue of who decides Polymarket’s “truth” when the outcome of an event is in question.

On Monday, anonymous user “Harshad” asked in a Discord channel if there was “any chance” that he could still win his bet about whether US forces would enter Iran by the end of April. His money was on “no”.

But Polymarket appeared to be resolving the market to “yes”, after the US conducted an operation to rescue a crew member shot down on a mission over Isfahan over the weekend.

«

Science fiction stories used to have dispassionate aliens watching over human affairs making bets like this but no, it turns out that we are the aliens.
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How the Vision Pro rollout inflamed tensions at Apple • WIRED

Noam Scheiber:

»

As recently as 2015, [Apple] store employees had helped save the company from the disappointing launch of the Apple Watch, whose first-year sales the company had forecast to be about 40 million before cutting its target by more than 70%, according to [the book] After Steve.

By the end of the next year, Apple had salvaged the watch by marketing it as a health and fitness device, a solution that partly came from executives who noticed an industry-wide rise in sales of wearable fitness products, but partly bubbled up from the stores as well. In their daily morning meetings about the watch, managers would ask: “What are you guys seeing? What are the best practices we can share?” recalled Lindsay King, another longtime Towson worker. Employees, who could buy a basic version of the watch for under $200 and experiment with it, would frequently emphasize the health and fitness applications.

But whereas Apple’s retail employees had once helped bail the company out of a disappointing product launch, this time they exacerbated it. The honchos in Cupertino had understood that selling the Vision Pro would require a deft human touch, hence the elaborate training plans. But they did not seem to appreciate how much stores would struggle to execute them—how much Apple had degraded its retail operation.

At the store level, managers seemed less convinced of the importance of salespeople than in the past, and perhaps more confident that the device would sell itself once customers sat for a demo. “We know that if we put the thing on someone’s face they’re going to have a good experience,” one manager told Leigh. “I was like, ‘We’re not going to agree on that. You’re entirely wrong.’”

«

This is an excerpt from Scheiber’s forthcoming book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class”. What’s clear is that Tim Cook inspired changes in the Apple Stores’ staffing and methods which came back, in time, to wreck any chance the Vision Pro might have had to do well. It’s still not doing well, even in year two, because unlike the Apple Watch, there’s no new story to tell. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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For the love of God, learn to paragraph • Anecdotal Value

Hollis Robbins:

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Strong paragraphs are essential for making strong arguments, for lodging ideas in a reader’s memory. Paragraphs are bricks. Each one has to hold together internally and bear weight in relation to the ones around it. If you can’t remember something you just read, it was likely a motley pile. LLMs have difficulty generating coherent paragraphs for reasons I will explain below. LLMs will litter their prose with bold and italicized phrases, bullets, and one-sentence-per-line formatting to disguise weak paragraphs.

I think about paragraphs from the perspective of a writer who wants to serve her reader quality prose. An economist might characterize paragraphing as a coordination game: two agents with partially aligned interests need to converge on the same interpretation of a structure. Conventions like paragraph breaks, headings, bullets, and typographic cues function as a signaling channel. A writer has an intended discourse plan, involving units, how each relates to the next, where shifts occur, what should be foregrounded, and what should be treated as support. The reader must infer that plan from the surface cues under time and attention constraints. Both parties benefit when the reader can reconstruct the writer’s intended segmentation with low friction, because the writer’s communicative goal gets achieved and the reader expends less interpretive work.

…So why are LLMs bad at paragraphing? First, there is no local equilibrium with LLM prose unless your prompt specifies one. I make the standard paragraph coordination game known to my pro models. I write in a relatively formal register, often making complex arguments, and I need strong paragraphs to guide my readers to a destination. But writers who don’t specify to whom they are writing and do not care what their readers’ expectations are put themselves at the mercy of an LLM that has been reinforced to mimic surface-level coherence.

The second reason is that LLM training data is saturated with internet text where discourse units may have few rules. Many platforms reward cue density and rapid attention cycling. Writers adapted to web usability research showing how readers tend to scan rather than read continuously. Highlighting and layout guide a reader’s eyes toward what should be noticed and where to click. Internet prose often wants you to act, not remember. The internet is also filled with reports with executive summaries and numbered sections that look like structure but often don’t have a clear argument. LLMs learn from internet prose that strong paragraphing is rare.

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Exactly: average writing has terrible paragraphing. It should be like a swimmer surfacing for breath from a deep breaststroke before starting the next stroke. Too many make it more like doggy paddle.
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‘Snoopy’, ‘Adolf’ and ‘Password’: the Hungarian government passwords exposed online • bellingcat

Financial Investigations Team:

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Almost 800 Hungarian government email addresses and associated passwords are circulating online, revealing basic vulnerabilities in the security protocols of ministries involved in classified and sensitive work.

A Bellingcat analysis of breach data shows that 12 out of the government’s 13 ministries have been affected, which in some cases have exposed the confidential information of military personnel and civil servants posted abroad. 

Among those affected were a senior military officer responsible for information security, a counter terrorism coordinator in the foreign affairs department, and an employee whose role was to identify hybrid threats against the country.

The revelations come as Hungarians head to the polls this Sunday to decide if Viktor Orbán, leader of the right-wing populist party Fidesz and the country’s longest-serving prime minister, will be elected to a fifth consecutive term.

This is not the first time that deficiencies in the Hungarian government’s IT security have been revealed. In 2022, ahead of Hungary’s last election, Direkt36 reported that Russia’s intelligence services had gained access to the computer network of the Hungarian foreign ministry, including its internal communications channels.

It said Russian cyber attacks against the Hungarian government had been occurring for at least a decade and extended to the foreign ministry’s encrypted network for transmitting classified data and confidential diplomatic documents.

At the time, the foreign ministry denied it had been hacked. But in 2024, news outlet 444 published a letter that had been sent from Hungary’s National Security Service to the foreign ministry six months before the cyberattack was first reported. The letter linked the attacks to Russia and described more than 4,000 workstations and 930 servers as “unreliable”.

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Putting the Hungarian government neatly into box 1 of the two boxes of all organisations: those that have been hacked, and those which are going to be hacked.
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Macs [using Tahoe] crash after 49 days of uptime? • Six Colors

Jason Snell:

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Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:

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Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

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The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.

Update: I’ve heard from some people who report very long uptimes on Mac servers running older versions of macOS. I guess the bigger question is, what OS versions does this actually impact?

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John Gruber tracked this down to Tahoe because of a change in the code. What’s amazing is that it should have got past regression tests; it is very well known that a 32-bit unsigned integer counting milliseconds will roll over at 49 days, because it used to be a problem in versions of Windows.

Another reason not to update your Mac to Tahoe, apparently. But is this change to the kernel code applied in iOS, iPadOS and the others?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The agricultural machinery company John Deere is paying $99m to settle a right-to-repair class action in the US. CC-licensed photo by Lutz Blohm on Flickr.

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

OpenAI shelves Stargate UK in blow to Britain’s AI ambitions • The Guardian

Aisha Down and Alexandra Topping:

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OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark UK investment citing high energy costs and regulation, in a blow to the government which has put AI at the centre of its growth strategy.

Stargate UK was a part of the UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

It came as the Labour government seeks to make AI and datacentres the engine of its growth plans, alongside closer ties with Europe and regional growth.

“This is a wake-up call for the government to manage energy costs in the UK and foundation infrastructure,” said Victoria Collins MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for science, innovation and technology. “We cannot be dependent on US tech companies to build our own sovereign capabilities – whether that’s energy cost, supply or even data and phone signal.”

The Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “When a government has no economic strategy worthy of the name and no real industrial vision, it becomes vulnerable. The Silicon Valley companies that flew into London knew exactly what they were dealing with: a prime minister and a technology secretary desperate to project momentum, willing to dress up press releases as policy.”

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of the deals to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy were “phantom investments”, and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was last month still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. That is, in theory, crucial to the security of British data.

Now, OpenAI has apparently put it on pause, saying it would wait for “the right conditions” to enable “long-term infrastructure investment”.

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Not a real surprise; despite getting billions of dollars of investment, OpenAI’s profitability is about as accessible as the moon. So it’s going to cut back where it’s easiest to cut. Sora was just the first one; this is the next; there will be others over the next few months. The splurge on the podcast company was a few million, and that’s just everyday.
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Oil industry pleads its Hormuz case with White House • POLITICO

Ben Lefebvre and Phelim Kine:

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Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before — and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

The response administrative officials were giving industry representatives “is not a cold shoulder,” this person added. “It’s more like, ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll take note.’”

Oil industry representatives met with senior administration staff in the State Department on Wednesday morning to raise concerns, said one person who said they attended the meeting.

Among their points: conceding to Iran’s request would add $2.5m to each shipment in tolls and higher insurance rates, a cost that would be passed on to consumers. Giving Iran control of Hormuz could set precedent for countries like Singapore and Turkey to charge tolls on important trade routes on the straits of Malacca and Bosporus. And paying the toll could put companies in legal jeopardy for violating sanctions on Iranian officials.

Companies were also expressing their concerns directly with Trump, but more gently, added this person, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

“The president is extremely sensitive to the legacy and judgment on the success of this war so pushing the president right now is seen as a risky proposition,” this person said. “But the White House is hearing from the industry despite the gingerness of the conversations.”

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The tolls/tariffs equate to a carbon tax of about $2.50 per ton – not very much in the grand scheme of things ($40 to $50 would be more useful). But it’s a start. The concern about other countries starting to charge similar tolls is very real, though. A few countries near narrow navigational spaces might find a sudden interest in exacting high charges for pilots of ships.
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Banksy, Satoshi and the unmasking impulse • On my Om

Om Malik:

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I am a big believer in accountability journalism. It unmasks wrongdoing. It exposes the powerful who hide behind institutions to avoid consequences. That’s a clear and defensible public interest. This is not accountability journalism, by any stretch of the imagination.

Banksy and Satoshi weren’t hiding wrongdoing. They were hiding themselves. In Banksy’s case, the anonymity IS the art. The whole point is that the work speaks without the person. The art appears without permission, without attribution, without a market position or a gallery or a brand to protect. That’s not incidental to its power. It is its power. The work on the wall speaks precisely because there is no face behind it available for interview.

With Satoshi, the anonymity IS the architecture. Bitcoin was designed to be leaderless. An identifiable founder is a vulnerability. Someone governments can pressure, someone courts can compel, someone bad actors can target. The anonymity wasn’t ego protection. It was architecture.

Unmasking either one isn’t just invasive. It is destructive to what they built.

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And speaking of that “unmasking” of Satoshi…
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Our quest not to solve bitcoin’s great mystery • FT Alphaville

Bryce Elder:

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One morning in the spring of 2026, FT Alphaville was sitting in traffic on the A40 eastbound when, tired of starting posts in the normal way, we switched to a drop intro.

The post we needed to start was about the alleged unmasking of bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. Alphaville has long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity to be one of the least important enigmas of our age, having poked at it before with some success.

Hearing once again that a media organisation was claiming to have doxxed the person who spawned a multi-hundred-dollar speculative reporting industry had aroused in us a mixture of weariness and weariness. Which fiftysomething male fringe academic would it be this time?

The Japanese one? The other Japanese one? The drug dealer? The dead one or the other dead one? The one with a beard, or the one without a beard, or the other one with a beard, or the other one without a beard? The liar? The other liar? Or maybe it was a hive mind of these and other fiftysomething male fringe academics, such as this one, or this one?

It was the one with the beard.

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Stellar piece of fun by the Alphaville team, whose work is always free to read. It’s a very comprehensive debunking of the idea that Adam Back is Satoshi.
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Scoop: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation • Axios

Dan Primack:

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Meta on Thursday began removing advertisements from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18.

This comes just two weeks after Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark California case about social media addiction. Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts.

It’s unclear if any of them are being backed by private equity, as the California lawsuit appears to have been.

Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta’s Audience Network — which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites.

One such ad read: “Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren’t just teenage phases — they’re symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway.” A few of the ads still remain active, including some that were posted earlier today.

Meta appears to be relying on part of its terms of service that say:

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“We also can remove or restrict access to content, features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta.”

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That’s something of an admission after the lawsuits, though unfortunately – as the article points out – entirely within its ToS.
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Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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Elon Musk has said as much: Links in tweets are bad for engagement. Over the last few days, sparked by a post from Nate Silver, people have started arguing again about the relationships between links and engagement. But our new analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers makes it pretty clear: Links do seem to hurt news publishers on X/Twitter.

Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly published a report: “Does Twitter matter for news sites?“

The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

…I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

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The ones who succeed in getting “engagement” – likes, reposts, comments and replies – are the ones which distil those news orgs’ content and put a slant on them, or “vaguepost” about them. That gets people worked up. The problem is that the algorithm thinks clicking on links isn’t engagement, and reduces the visibility of those accounts, even when they have millions of followers. The problem, therefore, is in how the algorithm measures “engagement”.
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Movements need the critical thinking that AI destroys • Jacobin

Florian Maiwald:

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The negative side effects accompanying the use of large language models (LLMs) are vividly illustrated by the phenomenon of “cognitive debt.” From an economic perspective, the short-term productivity gains achieved through the use of AI systems are difficult to dispute. By delegating numerous tasks previously performed by humans to AI, significant efficiency gains can be observed: workflows are accelerated, processes are rationalized, and organizational routines are overall made more efficient.

Yet the resilience and efficiency generated through delegation to AI systems could threaten a gradual loss of the cognitive capacities that are being outsourced to them. A recent MIT study that found significantly reduced brain activity among regular users of chatbots, for instance, provides some initial support for this worry.

While debates about the threat modern AI corporations pose to democracy tend to focus on the fact that data (and thus control over algorithms) are increasingly concentrated in the hands of major tech companies that largely avoid public oversight, another important question is surprisingly often pushed into the background. It is a question about the preconditions for people to be able to take part in democratic processes and emancipatory political projects.

The outsourcing of thinking is, of course, not a new phenomenon. It is the main theme, in fact, of Immanuel Kant’s classic 1784 essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” For Kant, the process of emancipation consists in freeing oneself from the “self-incurred immaturity” of letting others think for you and instead making use of one’s own powers of reasoning. He writes:

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It is so convenient to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who judges my diet for me, and so forth, then I need not trouble myself at all. I have no need to think if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the disagreeable business for me.

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This makes me think that this complaint/debate has been going for a long time. The move from oral longform poetry such as The Iliad and Beowulf to writing it down, then printing it, then putting it on websites, then letting search engines find it for you, and now letting LLMs do some part of the work of analysing it – all of these seem to have been viewed as letting our brains slide back into the primordial ooze. If a problem is eternal, is it really because of the tools, or the toolmakers?
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John Deere to pay $99m in monumental right-to-repair settlement • The Drive

Caleb Jacobs:

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Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement.

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99m into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

Ripple effects of this battle have been felt far beyond the sales floors at John Deere dealers, as the price of used equipment skyrocketed in response to the infamous service difficulties. Even when the cost of older tractors doubled, farmers reasoned that they were still worth it because repairs were simpler and downtime was minimized: $60,000 for a 40-year-old machine became the norm.

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This is epochal: John Deere was notorious for years for locking down machines to prevent user repair, and farmers detest not being able to do things for themselves. The only surprise is it took this long.
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The CIA “Ghost Murmur” story is probably bullshit • The After-Action Report

Seth Hettena:

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I’m no expert in this field, but Quantum Insider, which tracks these developments, pointed to several studies that show the limits of this technology.

One study published this year on diamond quantum magnetometry, the same technology Ghost Murmur supposedly uses, required sensors placed 1 centimeter from the chest inside a magnetically shielded room and an average of up to 12,000 heartbeats to detect a signal.

“Averaging was necessary since magnetic field recordings did not reveal the MCG signal in the NV trace in real-time,” the study reported.

In plain English: The quantum sensor could not detect a heartbeat in real time in a shielded room at one centimetre.

A 2024 study detected the heartbeat of an anesthetized rat, a weaker signal than a human heart, using a sensor placed 5 millimeters from the animal’s chest, inside a magnetic shielding cylinder, after an hour of continuous data accumulation.

Ghost Murmur supposedly detected a single beating heart, in real time, from 40 miles [65km] away, over open desert, from a moving aircraft, in an environment saturated with competing signals from the Earth’s magnetic field, electronic devices, and other living creatures. Not likely.

Even the military’s own research agency says the technology isn’t ready. In August 2025, DARPA launched Robust Quantum Sensors to address the fact that quantum sensors remain “notoriously fragile in real-world environments” where “even minor vibrations or electromagnetic interference can degrade performance.” The program’s Phase 1 goal is modest: just keep a quantum sensor functioning during a helicopter flight. “That’s it. That’s it,” the program manager told contractors at a briefing. Ghost Murmur supposedly cleared that bar and detected a heartbeat from 40 miles away, eight months later.

Interesting Engineering pointed out that similar magnetic-sensing techniques have been used for submarine detection. But that isn’t the same challenge as detecting a heartbeat. A submarine is a massive steel object, and magnetic submarine detection works by sensing how thousands of tons of steel distort the Earth’s existing magnetic field. That’s a completely different problem from trying to detect a 25 picotesla heartbeat across miles of open desert.

The problem is the laws of physics.

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Oh, those damn laws. Don’t worry, Trump ignores them. I did think it sounded far-fetched but this is more solid.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified