Data from millions of MOTs shows that EVs are more reliable in the long term than fuel-powered cars. CC-licensed photo by gato-gato-gato 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. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta keeps apologizing for Muse. Its explanations miss the point entirely • Inc

Jason Aten:

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Meta built Muse as a dedicated Linux virtual machine in the cloud, gave it memory, storage, and an agent capable of using a browser. Then, it made the whole thing available through an app anyone can use. It’s remarkably capable.

That’s genuinely impressive. Meta deserves credit for taking something that has mostly been used by developers and early adopters and turning it into a product accessible to millions of regular people. In fact, Muse has already been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, according to Sensor Tower data.

The problem is, it’s also kind of a nightmare. It isn’t clear if it’s an actual nightmare, or if it just feels like it’s doing nightmare-ish things.

If you haven’t read my piece about Muse uploading all my private text messages and then hallucinating an explanation, you probably should. The short version, however, is that if you give it Full Disk Access on a Mac, it will do things way beyond what you’ve asked it to do. And I’m a pretty tech-savvy person, and I did not give Muse permission to access my messages, and I never once asked it to perform a task that would have required it to do that. Still, it started sending me push notifications about texts I was receiving from my editor as well as my podcast co-host.

When I asked Muse how it knew what I had been talking about, it told me it could see notification previews from my Mac. When I pushed further, it told me it couldn’t give me “the exact plumbing.” It turns out the robot just made that up. The real answer was much worse.

David Singleton, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs, later explained that Muse doesn’t monitor notifications on your Mac. Instead, if Messages access is enabled, Muse syncs data from the Messages database. He said Muse had incorrectly explained how the feature worked and apologized: “That’s on us.”

In another case, Singleton responded to another post on Threads from a user concerned that Muse had attempted to hack its Gmail. “The issue was the result of an “off-policy” transcript composition that led to model hallucination,” Singleton responded. “We have shipped a fix for this issue and deployed it to all Muses. We are sorry for the frustration which some users experienced during this time and appreciate the feedback from the community.”

At some point, if you have to go around explaining that you didn’t do a good enough job explaining things, you might have a bigger problem on your hands. Especially if the thing you’re explaining is why it’s totally normal that users are being surprised by the amount of personal information your product is accessing.

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Think everyone else can find all the bugs in this. Not in any hurry to install this, to be honest.
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OpenAI bots meddled with US government agencies, including SEC and Census • BBC News

Kali Hays and Lily Jamali:

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OpenAI has acknowledged that it alerted “dozens” of global institutions that their websites may have been meddled with by its AI bots acting improperly.

AI agents attempted to get information from “governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions”, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Census Bureau and Education Department, the company said.

The disclosures come days after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that OpenAI agents had breached non-public files on the website of its government-run health care scheme.

Since August, public fears have grown over the potentially serious, even life-threatening, impacts of AI tools falling outside of human control.

OpenAI said that some of the data was accessed by AI agents, essentially bots that are designed and trained to operate somewhat autonomously, which were working to find “authoritative sources of public information”.

But the company noted that some of the bots went beyond that and worked to bypass security measures on websites.
When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said.

OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public. However, it noted that information that its bots accessed from the SEC, which regulates the US stock market and protects investors, was later published by AI agents on another website. OpenAI says this action was not intended.

In other instances that OpenAI disclosed on Friday, its AI agents transferred data when it should not have. Such activity resulted in at least 53 incidents where an OpenAI agent took an image from ChatGPT user activity and transferred it elsewhere.

The company said that in each instance of a user image being used and transferred by an AI agent, the user had opted in to allow OpenAI to train models using their data. Nevertheless, OpenAI admitted: “This is not an appropriate use of this data.”

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As noted last week, the training data for all these LLMs includes how to hack, so this sort of news isn’t surprising. What is becoming clear is that OpenAI had absolutely no idea what it was unleashing; no way of properly tracing in real time what was happening.
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BCBSA analysis: how AI coding tools affect healthcare costs • Blue Cross Blue Shield

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New analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) finds that hospital systems are increasingly billing patient hospital stays as more medically complex, driving nearly $1bn in additional healthcare costs in just two years. There is a clear disconnect between coding and treatment — our research shows that coding for care has changed, but there is no evidence of corresponding change in care delivered.

The study raises concerns that widely adopted AI coding tools are contributing to higher healthcare spending, which ultimately puts pressure on premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for families, employers and taxpayers.

More than 60% of hospital systems are now using AI-enabled technologies that can scan lab results and electronic records to identify secondary diagnoses, which could move a patient into a higher-severity, higher-reimbursement billing category. For the analysis, researchers looked at secondary diagnoses like anemia following major bowel surgery.

“If patients are truly sicker, we’d expect to see more treatment,” said Luke Chalker, BCBSA’s senior vice president of product and data science. “For example, we’re seeing significantly more anemia diagnoses at these hospitals without a corresponding increase in transfusions. The disconnect between diagnoses and treatment suggests that AI is identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients.”

Researchers found secondary diagnoses that shifted claims into a higher-reimbursement category accounted for 70% — roughly $650m — of the increased costs for Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) companies from 2023 to 2025.

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Well of course AI is going to be used to upsell the diagnosis on people just in case in a system where charging more is incentivised. Doesn’t sound like a good thing, though.
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When AI tells a story about your health, is it true? • WSJ

David Shaywitz is chief medical scientist at Lore Health and a lecturer in biomedial informatics at Harvard Medical School:

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Smart-ring maker Oura is expected to go public this week, touting its promise to transform personal measurements into “trusted, actionable insights” for improving health. It’s a compelling premise, yet it has long struggled to survive contact with biology.

Two recent cardiovascular trials illustrate the point. Novo Nordisk’s ziltivekimab, an experimental drug designed to suppress inflammation, sharply lowered inflammatory biomarkers but didn’t reduce the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke. Novartis’s pelacarsen lowered Lp(a), a lipoprotein strongly implicated in heart disease, without reducing cardiovascular events. These results highlight the complexity of biology and the challenge of predicting outcomes from measurements taken many steps upstream.

At first, this seems the sort of problem artificial intelligence could solve. In some domains AI performs spectacularly. AlphaFold predicts three-dimensional protein structure with extraordinary accuracy, drawing on decades of experimental information, strong biological constraints and an answer that can be evaluated directly. “What structure does this protein adopt?” is a more tractable question than “What will happen to this patient if we dose this compound?”

…A continuous glucose monitor worn by a nondiabetic can produce a detailed account of post-meal glucose. But in this setting the measurements are less reliable, responses to the same food can vary substantially, and there is little evidence that minimizing these fluctuations improves long-term health. Wearables like Oura and Whoop (also reportedly planning an IPO) pose a similar problem: They combine heart rate, heart-rate variability, sleep and other signals into proprietary “readiness” or “recovery” scores, generally using unvalidated formulas, with little evidence that following the result improves performance, prevents injury or benefits health.

Generative AI is remarkably good at turning ambiguous, incomplete information into a coherent account. Give it your declining heart-rate variability, shortened sleep, increased mileage and stressful Tuesday, and it can fashion a plausible story connecting them, even when the explanation remains uncertain. As Daniel Kahneman observed, “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” Personalized explanations can be seductive because they arise from our own data.

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But often the stories are made up; chatbots have no intentions so their lying is a side effect of how they are being used.
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English Vocabulary Test (adaptive) • TakeTest

Emil Kirkegaard:

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An English vocabulary test of 108 items in two formats: for most you pick the word that matches a given meaning; for the harder ones you pick the two or three words out of five that are synonyms. The words are rare on purpose — this is a test of the top of the vocabulary range, not of everyday English.

Vocabulary is the single best short measure of general intelligence in adults who grew up speaking the language. The items were calibrated on 499 US adults recruited through Prolific in 2023, and your score is reported as an IQ relative to White US adults of your age (vocabulary keeps growing into the 60s, so the same score means less at 70 than at 25). If English is not your native language your score will mostly reflect exposure to it, not intelligence.

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97th percentile here (26/30) for age v US white males. (The older you are the more words you’re expected to know.) Fun!
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Hackers hijack AI accounts and servers to fuel new cyber crime boom • Financial Times

Tom Wilson:

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Illicit access to AI models and computing power is fast becoming the hottest commodity in the cyber criminal underworld, as hackers seek to harness expensive large language models for extortion, warfare and espionage.

John Hultquist, chief analyst for Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the cyber security unit had observed a major increase in so-called LLM-jacking this year, including the sale of stolen login credentials for public AI tools and the theft of computing resources by groups that want to run their own models for free.

“What we are seeing in the underground is a growing economy associated with access to AI,” Hultquist, a 20-year cyber security veteran, told the FT. 

Cheap access to expensive AI gives cyber attackers a financial edge over their targets, who need to use the same AI tools to defend themselves, Hultquist warned.

“The bottom line is all this behaviour gives them a sort of economic or efficiency advantage against us, because they’re going to essentially be able to get their hands on these tokens at a much cheaper rate,” he said.

Marketplaces on the dark web are selling access to AI models from the likes of Anthropic, Google and OpenAI at discounts of up to 97%, Google Threat’s researchers have found. AI subscriptions for the most advanced versions of ChatGPT and Claude can cost as much as $200 per user every month.

Given AI labs monitor for signs of such abuse, some of the sellers even offer “guaranteed access” by committing to provide new credentials at no extra cost if the initial account gets blocked, Hultquist said.

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Siri AI settlement website now live: Apple to pay some iPhone owners • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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In May, Apple agreed to pay $250m to settle a US class action lawsuit over Siri AI’s delayed launch, and the settlement website is now live.

Apple will pay an estimated $25 per eligible iPhone to eligible customers, who can submit a claim via the settlement website between September 21 and December 21 of this year. The exact payment may be higher or lower than $25 depending on the total number of valid claims submitted and other factors, with the maximum amount set at $95.

Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit. Apple agreed to the settlement to avoid the costs and risks of a trial.

In June 2024, Apple previewed new Siri capabilities powered by Apple Intelligence, including understanding of a user’s personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother’s flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps.

Apple advertised those Siri features in product presentations, on its website, in a TV commercial starring actor Bella Ramsey, and elsewhere.

In March 2025, Apple delayed the launch of the personalized version of Siri, leading to the company being hit with a class action lawsuit alleging false advertising.

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That is pretty rapid turnaround for a class action suit. The US does these things differently. And we now know the value of AI Siri: it’s $25. (Unfortunately this is only for US users. UK users might see a class representative suit gradually edge through our courts.)

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Massive UK study finds high-mileage electric cars more durable than petrol • Electrek

Jameson Dow:

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A study of millions of UK vehicles shows that electric cars stay on the road longer than petrol cars, and the gap widens as mileage increases.

With electric cars being a relatively new technology, many people have been skeptical of what their long-term reliability would look like. Despite EVs having fewer moving parts which suggests less opportunity for failure, fear of the new still keeps people worrying.

But electric cars aren’t really that new anymore. The oldest EVs of the modern era have now been on the road for nearly two decades, so we’ve got some data now. And it turns out EVs look pretty good, according to a new study.

The study was conducted using data from millions of annual British MOT tests, the standard test of roadworthiness for cars on British roads. These tests focus on a car’s suspension, brakes, tires, exhaust, and emissions.

It checked how likely cars were to come back for another MOT test – if they didn’t, then that meant the car was no longer on the road (whether it be for an issue with those five categories above, or another issue).

In the beginning of their operational life, there’s little difference between roadworthiness of petrol and electric vehicles. EVs actually experience slightly more problems in the early years of ownership, but that’s because EVs tend to put on more miles early than petrol cars do.

When comparing on a mileage basis, EVs have very similar failure rates in the early years, differing by less than a percentage point. But that changes once you get to higher mileage numbers – past 40,000 miles lifetime.

At that point, petrol cars are less reliable, and the reliability only gets worse over time. By the time a petrol car reaches 120,000 miles, it’s 47% more likely to have failed than an EV (16% failure rate vs. 23.5% failure rate).

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40,000 miles doesn’t sound like a lot? Given that most insurers offer 10,000 annually as the normal expectation, that’s only four years. But there’s so much more to go wrong with internal combustion engines that the rising failure rate ought not to be surprising.
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Germany maps out fossil fuel exit, backing EVs, heat pumps • Reuters

Kirsti Knolle:

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Germany’s cabinet approved a roadmap on Wednesday to phase out coal, oil and gas ​by 2045, reaffirming a climate strategy focused on electrification despite a minister’s call for more flexibility on cars, heating and carbon pricing.

An environment ministry spokesperson said the ​plan would be presented at the United ​Nations General Assembly in New York later on Wednesday.

Germany would be the third country after France ​and the Netherlands to adopt a national roadmap under ​an international effort to move away from fossil fuels, the spokesperson added.

Spiegel magazine earlier on Wednesday reported that, under the ​plan, Germany will examine whether an agreed deadline ​to end coal-fired power generation by 2038 can be brought forward to 2035.

In transport, the plan foresees EU fleet emissions rules to lead to battery-electric cars making up 100% of new passenger car registrations by 2035, Spiegel ​said.

That contrasts ​with demands from some conservatives, including Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, to preserve a larger role ​for combustion-engine vehicles using alternative fuels.

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Incredible how the Green Party in German, through their overreaction to nuclear power, led to coal burning – about as bad for the atmosphere as you can imagine – continuing far past the necessary date. The UK stopped burning coal for power generation at the end of September 2024.
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The death of apps has already begun • Web Designer Depot

Noah Davis:

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We spent the last 15 years installing apps for everything. An app for email. An app for music. An app for banking. An app for editing photos. An app for ordering dinner. An app for booking flights. An app for spreadsheets. An app for taking notes. An app for figuring out which other apps we should install.

AI could make much of that feel ridiculous.

Not because AI is going to magically destroy every software company tomorrow, but because the fundamental idea behind the app—the idea that humans should learn an interface designed around a company’s software—suddenly looks surprisingly old-fashioned. The future might not be 200 better apps. It might be one intelligent interface that uses those 200 apps for you.

And the interesting part is that this isn’t entirely science fiction anymore. Apple is making app actions and data available to Apple Intelligence outside the apps themselves through App Intents. OpenAI has moved external apps directly into ChatGPT, while Google’s Gemini can interact with connected apps to perform tasks. The pieces of the post-app world are quietly being assembled while we’re still arguing about whether the Settings button should be in the top-right corner.

Think about what happens when you want to accomplish something today. You decide what you want to do, figure out which app can do it, open that app, navigate its interface, remember where the right feature lives and enter the information in whatever format the software expects. Then, very often, you repeat the whole process in another app.

We’ve become so accustomed to this that we barely notice how strange it is. Want to organize a vacation? You might bounce between a browser, maps, an airline site, a hotel app, your calendar, email, Notes, a weather service and perhaps a spreadsheet. The human is effectively the API connecting everything together.

AI flips that relationship around. Instead of opening eight pieces of software, imagine saying: “Plan a five-day trip to Tokyo in April. Keep the hotel under $250 a night, avoid overnight flights, put everything on my calendar and make me a packing list based on the forecast.”

That’s not really an app interaction anymore. That’s an intention—and intention may become the most important interface in computing.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK foreign secretary has shared a report saying climate change threatens the collapse of natural systems, and hence war and migration. Why was it kept secret, though? CC-licensed photo by Russ Seidel 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. Inexplicable. 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 hacked the FBI:’ hackers say they have data on all FBI employees • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

The data breach could be massively significant and may have all sorts of national security and counterintelligence implications. Criminals from the same ecosystem as ShinyHunters have previously used hacked data like phone records to track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them. The highly sensitive data could also be a boon to foreign intelligence agencies who want to better understand how one of the most important law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. operates. And if the data fell into the hands of more criminals, FBI agents and their spouses could face serious threats to their safety.

“We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the representative of the group told 404 Media.

The representative provided 404 Media with a sample appearing to contain the personal data of 5,000 FBI employees. That data included an alleged address, phone number, date of birth, and in some cases details on their spouse.

404 Media put some of the sample phone numbers into open source intelligence tool OSINT Industries and found they did correspond to people with the same name as listed in the sample file. 404 Media also searched some of the records through compromised data tool Darkside, made by cybersecurity company District 4. That revealed some of the phone numbers are associated with U.S. Department of Justice personnel.

…The representative [of the hackers] said ShinyHunters said the group used a zero day exploit in an Oracle product called PeopleSoft. From there, the group managed to access AWS GovCloud servers and downloaded data. The representative said the exfiltrated data totalled between two and three terabytes.

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The FBI’s reaction suggests that the group has indeed hacked it. A followup story by Cox says that the hack exposed the FBI’s own hacking unit. That’s quite the screwup. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Meta puts its AI assistant on a keychain • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Hannah Murphy:

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Mark Zuckerberg said Meta’s new personal AI agent Muse has become the “centerpiece” of his AI vision, as he unveiled a new handheld AI “charm” device that will feature the interactive assistant.

The Meta chief used the company’s annual Connect event at its Silicon Valley headquarters to announce Muse Charm, a small pendant-like device that fits on a keychain and is activated by a fingerprint sensor.

The device, which features a screen showing the Muse avatar, will also have real-time voice interactivity and is set to be released in December.

“If you’re not wearing glasses, this is going to be by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show what’s going on around you,” the chief executive said.

Muse, development of which was first revealed by the FT in May, has helped change the momentum of Zuckerberg’s huge bet on AI, quickly becoming the most downloaded app on both the Apple and Android app stores in the US since its launch two weeks ago.

The easy-to-use app offers consumers a team of autonomous bots to carry out everyday tasks, such as ordering groceries, booking travel and organising finances.

Zuckerberg on Wednesday also announced new capabilities for Muse, including the ability to have live conversations with the interactive AI assistant, and insisted that it has “state-of-the-art privacy and security.”

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Meta is certainly getting busy on the hardware front. The reviews of this – both how well it works, and what its usefulness and privacy are like, will make for an absorbing read. Still no sign, meanwhile, of the OpenAI/Jony Ive thingamajig.
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Meta’s next VR device isn’t a headset — it’s glasses • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Meta is launching new VR hardware: a pair of glasses. The new Meta VR Glasses sit on your ears like a typical pair of glasses instead of being strapped over your head, but they still have immersive displays for watching movies, playing games, and getting work done. Imagine a pair of hefty black sunglasses with blacked-out lenses on the outside, but the components of a typical VR headset distributed between the device on your head and a computing puck in your pocket.

The idea is to give you a way to experience VR in a much lighter and more approachable form factor than Vision Pro or Meta Quest-style headsets. I got to try the VR Glasses at Meta’s campus this week, and as Meta walked me through some familiar VR demos like watching content, playing a game, and working from multiple screens, I was impressed by how much lighter the whole experience felt. Some of that was about the literal weight, as the glasses come in at just 100g, far less than the Quest 3’s 515g. But there was also something lighter in a more intangible way: the glasses form factor made the headset seem like something I could easily jump in and out of instead of being a whole cumbersome commitment with big head straps. It felt like a lightweight Vision Pro, and is perhaps a better execution of some of what Apple wanted to do with that device.

To keep things light, the VR Glasses’ display and the sensors are all you actually wear on your face. The separate puck connected with a wire contains the guts powering the headset: a Snapdragon Reality Elite processor, 128GB of storage, 12GB of RAM, and the battery, which Meta says will offer up to three hours of media playback, though you can continue using the glasses even while the puck is being charged.

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This sounds like a colossal improvement in wearability (bear in mind that the Vision Pro has a separate battery pack too), but I wonder about VR. Is its time ever going to come?
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OpenAI’s AI tried breaching four other targets, with no prompting • The New York Times

Kate Conger and Victoria Kim:

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OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents, hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials.

The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI’s technology breached the AI startup Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about AI safety.

Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when AI systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.

Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused on AI oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI. Here is how they happened:

• OpenAI’s systems tried to hack a digital library at the University of New Mexico on May 25 and 26. The AI did not appear to succeed.

• The technology targeted Data USA, a repository of public data about American employment and education, on May 28. This attempt also appeared to be unsuccessful, researchers said.

• On June 18, OpenAI’s AI hacked an Australian government website, the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, and acquired health data. Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, disclosed the episode on Wednesday.

• On June 20 and 21, OpenAI’s technology tried to breach the website of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. No private information was obtained, Australian officials said.

The incidents added to a spate of breaches in which AI from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google has broken into other systems without human knowledge.

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From the descriptions, the agents tried to access the site, and when refused began trying known vulnerabilities in various elements of the software being used there. This should not surprise anyone. The LLM training set includes colossal amounts of material from the web about hacking and vulnerabilities, and there is no moral code attached to any of it; in fact, in some hacking circles the vulnerabilities will have been greeted with delight.

So for a system given a task, hacking is just another prong on the Swiss Army Knife at its command, even if we find it as surprising as someone pulling out the tool to remove stones from horses’ hooves. Think: how exactly do you tell an agent not to hack a site?
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UK shares findings of damning climate crisis national security report suppressed under Starmer • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of a report suppressed under Keir Starmer.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages.

Miliband told the meeting, the first such discussion among foreign ministers, that the coming El Niño, which has been supercharged by climate breakdown, would test the world’s food systems as never before.

“We face an El Niño that is already set to be the most intense in living memory,” he said. “This will intensify climate shocks that compound and cascade across borders, threatening food and water security, displacing communities, putting pressure on markets and scarring economies.”

This year’s heatwaves, bad harvests and food price inflation showed governments what they were in for, he said, and must be dealt with at the highest levels.

“Climate change and nature loss have never been issues for climate and environment ministers alone,” he said. “They are defining challenges for our citizens, our economies, our foreign policy and our national security.”

With the backing of Andy Burnham, the UK prime minister, Miliband presented the research that found the collapse of global ecosystems such as in the Amazon and Congo rainforests, driven by the climate crisis and the destruction of nature, would have impacts on national security around the world.

The joint intelligence committee (JIC) report, revealed by the Guardian, was scheduled to be published last October, but was suppressed on the eve of its launch by Downing Street. A redacted version was issued in January under the Freedom of Information Act, but ministers have continued to resist calls for the full report to be made public.

Richard Nugee, a retired general and security expert, told the Guardian governments must treat the climate as they would other threats to national security, such as sabotage by hostile states.

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Why on earth would they suppress the report? Did they worry it was too much of a downer? And Miliband must have known about it, as energy secretary, and simply been obliged not to discuss it. Unsurprising he did now he had the first chance to on a world stage.
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An invisible force has a mysterious effect on ageing, scientists discover in ‘startling’ breakthrough • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

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Scientists have discovered that the removal of Earth’s magnetic field influences the lifespans of fruit flies in complex ways, a finding that sheds light on the aging process as well as the risks of future human space travel, according to a study published in the journal Aging on Wednesday. 

All life on Earth has evolved under the planet’s geomagnetic field, a vast bubble lined with electrical currents that is generated in the core and extends out into space. This protective magnetic shield is a major factor in Earth’s habitability, as it wards off harmful radiation from space, allowing life to flourish on the surface. 

Many migratory animals—including fish, birds, and insects—can clearly sense Earth’s magnetism and use it for navigation. But much less is known about how the field interacts with living cells and their components, such as mitochondria, the famous “powerhouses” that generate most of the energy that fuels life.

To better understand this mystery, scientists observed two populations of fruit flies in a “hypomagnetic” shield system, a cylindrical benchtop apparatus that essentially blocks the influence of Earth’s magnetic field. One group contained “wild-type” healthy flies, while the other was made up of “mutant” flies carrying a gene defect called Pink1, which is associated with early-onset Parkinson’s disease in humans and specifically involves mitochondrial dysfunction.

The removal of the magnetic field’s effect extended the lifespan of the Pink1 group by 20% but reduced their mobility, whereas the healthy flies experienced just the opposite—reduced lifespan, but improved mobility. 

“We had an idea that there would be a difference just based on the fact that we know that every organism has developed under a magnetic field,” said Jacob Reed, a PhD student in bioscience at the University of Nottingham who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “But we didn’t really plan that there would be this difference in the experiment.”

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If (possibly a big if) this isn’t p-hacking – searching around for a result from the data – then this is really strange, and definitely does have implications for space travel. Though the researchers themselves don’t know what, yet.
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Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy • AP News

Giada Zampano:

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Italy’s Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to legislation paving the way for a return to nuclear power nearly four decades after the Chernobyl disaster prompted the country to abandon atomic energy.

The measure cleared the upper house 81-51 with seven abstentions. It marks a major step in Premier Giorgia Meloni’s drive to bolster energy security and meet climate goals, even though the construction of possible new reactors is still years away.

The bill, which earlier passed the lower Chamber of Deputies, establishes a legal framework for next-generation nuclear technologies. It authorizes the government to draft implementing decrees over the next 12 months covering reactor licensing, safety standards, waste management and criteria for future sites.

The vote puts Italy on a path toward reintroducing nuclear power after voters twice rejected it in national referendums, first [in 1987] in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and again [in 2011] following Japan’s Fukushima accident in 2011.

Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, minister for the environment and energy security, said the vote marked a historic step forward for Italy.

“Nuclear isn’t a return to the past,” he said. “When integrated with renewables, it’s a winning technology, which can give extraordinary results for our energy security.”

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It’s a slow, slow thing: “draft implementing decrees over the next 12 months covering licensing..” OK and when will you start building? They did try to restart this in 2008, having closed down all four reactors (1,300MW in power) by 1990, but just as things were getting going, along came Fukushima. As everyone knows, Italy is notoriously prone to tsunamis caused by offshore earthquakes, just like Japan.
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Passkeys explained: the easier, safer way to sign in

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A passkey is a unique digital key that replaces your password.

…To confirm its you, the service (app or site) sends a challenge during the sign in process. The credential manager/authenticator signs this challenge using the passkey’s private key. The signed response includes this signature as well as additional context about the session, such as the origin, and whether the request was made in an embedded context (iframe). The server verifies that (1) the origin is the expected value (e.g. bank.com not fake-bank.com), (2) the challenge matches the one it issued, and (3) the signature is valid for the stored public key. The signed origin match is the primary way that passkeys (and WebAuthn credentials in general) resist phishing.

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The second paragraph there comes from the “Advanced” explanation (available from a tab at the top of the page). There are also, if you want them, even more diagrams which will either delight you or make you sorry you asked.

Passkeys can, like passwords, be shared among multiple devices you own. But the essential thing is that they won’t work on phishing sites. (No doubt the hackers are already working on the social engineering for this – “your passkey has been corrupted, please sign in with an email/password” or similar is probably on the way.)
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Component cost shock could wipe out more than 230 million sub-$200 smartphone shipments by 2030 • Counterpoint Research

Yang Wang:

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More than 230 million annual sub-$200 smartphone shipments are forecast to disappear from the global market between 2025 and 2030, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Smartphone Shipment Forecast by Price Band tracker. The segment is expected to decline by approximately 40% over the period, even as the overall smartphone market recovers toward its 2025 volume by the end of the decade.

The divergence reflects the structural shock from the 2026–2027 downturn. Higher memory and chipset costs, increasing minimum specifications and reduced OEM willingness to support non-strategic market presence will sharply reduce entry-tier availability. Some consumers will move upward, while others may keep their current devices for longer. Used phones will also absorb some demand, while first-time smartphone adoption risks slowing in markets where handset affordability is already a major barrier to mobile internet use.

Principal Analyst Yang Wang commented, “The smartphone market will recover in unit terms, but the affordable segment will not return to its previous standing. The opportunity now shifts toward better-specced mainstream devices and premium products, although higher tiers cannot absorb all the lost volume. The result will be a market that is similar in overall size but materially different in value and competitive profile. There is also a wider connectivity risk, as the loss of affordable new smartphones could make it harder for first-time users in lower-income markets to come online.”

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This is a bad thing, surely. Those super-cheap smartphones are on the edge of affordability for many people who rely on their phone to run their life in multiple poorer countries. So what happens when their existing phone breaks or is damaged or lost? You can argue that’s what the secondhand market is for, but that market needs flow from above too. A subtle but real way in which the pursuit of AI is harming the less rich parts of the world.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Korea, a number of owners of Samsung smart fridges found them bricked – and not refrigerating – after a botched firmware update. CC-licensed photo by hopeless128 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. Dumb and dumber. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Anthony Albanese says OpenAI agent hacked Medicare and he expressed “extreme concern” to Sam Altman • The Guardian

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Anthony Albanese says an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked [Australia’s] Medicare [system] in June.

Australia’s prime minister made the comments at the UN summit in New York, saying it appeared no personal information had been accessed.

Investigations were ongoing, however, into how the agent had infiltrated Australia’s government-run universal health care system.

“This situation is obviously unacceptable,” Albanese said. “Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident. And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred.”

A taskforce has been launched to explore the “legal situation” of the breach.

Albanese said the OpenAI agent had gained unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.

The portal contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics, such as spending.

Albanese said the agent had accessed “public and non-public files.”

“A forensic investigation, aided by the Australian Signals Directorate, is now under way to ascertain more information, including what other government systems were affected,” Albanese said.

He said there appeared to be no broader compromise to the Services Australia network.

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A few days ago Google, not to be left out, said its Gemini model had done some light hacking. So now OpenAI turns out to have gone a little bit further. It’s an arms race, in the strangest way.
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Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Samsung didn’t respond to Ars’ questions about what it will do to prevent this from happening in the future or how many units are affected and in which countries. SBS Korea reported that customers have filed hundreds of cases.

The complaints seem to originate only from Korea, where the problem has been made worse because it’s happening during a major Korean holiday, Chuseok, which celebrates the autumn harvest and starts Thursday.

“Customers only trusted Samsung Electronics and made an official update, but it is so absurd and embarrassing that they can’t even use refrigeration and refrigeration functions before the Chuseok,” a forum user wrote, per a Google-provided translation.

Some Samsung forum users said support agents initially told them that there are limited technicians and executives available, and a repair person might not be available until October.

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The temptation to say “told you so” is irresistible. In January 2014 I wrote about how it’s a zombie idea which can’t realise its promise. And so it turns out. Your internet fridge spoiled your food? It’s like a form of revenge.
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Xbox is barely Xbox anymore • The Verge

Andrew Webster:

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Xbox has become a shell of its former self — and things are only getting worse. As part of its planned cuts impacting around 3,200 workers, the company announced today more changes that will further dilute the brand. Studios are being consolidated, others are on the brink of being closed altogether, and Xbox’s most iconic franchise, Halo, is being moved to a new developer. The future of Xbox looks more uncertain than ever.

Today’s news includes “eliminating 268 roles across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the [Xbox Game Studios] management and central functions layer.” But there is also plenty of reorganization happening, particularly when it comes to Xbox subsidiary Activision Blizzard. Development of Halo is moving over to Activision, helmed by “a new, purpose-built team” that is separate from the Call of Duty teams. Halo Studios will continue to exist, for now, primarily as a support studio. Meanwhile, Sea of Thieves developer Rare and Age of Empires studio World’s Edge are both moving under the Activision umbrella.

Similarly, Obsidian is being moved out from Xbox Game Studios and under Bethesda Game Studios, where it will refocus on the Fallout franchise, and all of Microsoft’s casual games, like Minesweeper and Solitaire, are moving under Candy Crush developer King. Meanwhile Playground and Turn 10, the studios responsible for Fable and Forza, are merging into one.

This is all part of the Xbox “reset” outlined by new CEO Asha Sharma, which kicked off with 1,600 employees being laid off in July, with 1,600 more planned over the following fiscal year, leaving many employees in an awkward state of limbo. A pair of studios were also spun off from the company, with both Double Fine and Compulsion going independent. Today’s layoffs are part of that second wave that was previously announced.

The reason for all of the changes, according to Sharma, is to eventually become a company that reaches “more than a billion people each day,” a nearly impossible goal that will be especially challenging to pull off given all of the cuts.

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I’m sure AI will *waves hands* fill the gaps.
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Lottery of Life

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A lottery of 102 billion animal births counted each year.

Each turn is a random draw from this pool.

The odds are real.

The lottery draws from the selected animal categories, weighted by estimated annual births. The probabilities describe this model, not every animal on Earth.

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The main players in the lottery are farmed animals such as chickens, ducks, pigs and so on, and humans and pets. Turns out your chances and potential isn’t that great. In the long run, we’re all dead; in the short run too for many of these animals. (For lifespan, horse or human.)
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Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record • Danluu

Dan Luu:

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If we compare to how futurists did in our analysis of futurists, on style, Zitron relies much more heavily on anger than any of the futurists we looked at. On the quality of reasoning, he was probably about average compared to the futurists. Despite being wrong on roughly everything, he’s not more unreasonable than someone like Buckminster Fuller, who suggested we’ll be able to send people by radio because atoms have frequencies and radio waves have frequencies so it will be possible to pick up all of our frequencies and send them by radio.

In terms of the style of reasoning, of the futurists reviewed, he’s probably closest to Kurzweil, in that he uses numbers to give a kind of aura of credibility, but if you know something about the topic he’s discussing or look at the numbers, the reasoning falls apart. Zitron’s reasoning isn’t worse than Kurzweil’s, who (for example) continually made new predictions of extremely fast progress that didn’t pan out (such as, in 2001, predicting unbounded lifespans by 2011). Continually predicting that AI progress will stop for reasons that are incorrect is just taking the flip side of the bet on progress. Instead of having infinite progress, we’re going to have no progress. Every time that prediction is proven wrong, you can just make another similar prediction and then move the date forward a bit (fans of both use the same techniques as well; fans of Zitron simply claim that his predictions are true, just like fans of Kurzweil cite his 86% prediction accuracy even though his actual accuracy on those predictions is 7% if you actually look at the results on the exact predictions he allegedly got 86% right). Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) has some thoughts on why this happens:

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The surest way to build [a] popular following is to articulate positions that are crisp, strong, and leave no room for doubt. You can’t get too many podcast or TV appearances out of “well, the market could go either way”, “both political parties make good points”, “there’s some merit but also some hype to AI”. Or, to tap into the example in the post, “Harry Potter is an OK book”.

In fact, there’s a positive feedback loop. If you take a provocative, edgy stance, you get more attention and likes, so you sort of… self-radicalize? At some point, it’s no longer an opinion that can be changed. It’s an identity, a personal brand.

It’s … why Ed Zitron has a blockbuster blog about how it’s all just one big scam. If you take a more nuanced view, you will at best get no reaction, or at worst, you’ll invite scorn from both sides.

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Zitron was interesting once, but quickly became too hyperbolic for my taste.
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‘I wish Apple would just stop that crap’: Apple has added persistent ‘ads’ to iOS, and it’s driving users crazy • TechRadar

Alex Blake:

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If you were to ask iOS users how they felt about Apple’s decision to insert ads into Apple Maps, it would quickly become obvious that it was not a popular move. So when iPhone fans discovered that Apple has been inserting prompts for its own products into iOS, the reaction was predictably swift and furious.

The ‘ads’ in question appear in the Settings app in iOS. They can be found near the top of the iPhone’s display and promote several products to the user, including paid-for iCloud+ storage, free trials for services like Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty.

Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work.

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Who is behind this, though? Who in Apple thought this was a great idea? Who thought annoyance, or even mild irritation, was a great idea? Moreover, does it actually work, and how does one offset the occasions when it works against the people it annoys?
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Detoxifying Mars: the biocatalytic elimination of omnipresent perchlorates • NASA

Lynn Rothschild works at the NASA Ames Research Center:

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Water is the lifeblood of human survival and civilization and is critical for our sustained exploration beyond Earth. Fortunately, Mars has plenty of water to sustain our aspirations in the form of subsurface ice. Unfortunately, it is not clean water – it is contaminated by toxic perchlorates. Perchlorate and chlorate are potent oxidizers that cause equipment corrosion and are hazardous to human health even at low concentrations. It is therefore critical that Martian water be detoxified to remove these contaminating solutes before it can be used in propellant production, food production, or human consumption. The scale of anticipated water demand on Mars highlights the shortcomings of traditional water purification approaches, which require either large amounts of consumable materials, high electrical draw, or water pretreatment.

What if we could make the perchlorates just vanish? This is the innovative solution we propose here, taking advantage of the reduction of chlorate and perchlorate to chloride and oxygen being thermodynamically favorable, if kinetically slow. This is the promise of our regenerative perchlorate reduction system, leveraging synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria.

These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld, which catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen, have been previously identified and well-studied. This proposed work exploits the prior work studying perchlorate-reducing bacteria by engineering this perchlorate reduction pathway into the spaceflight proven Bacillus subtilis strain 168, under the control of a robust, active promoter. This solution is highly sustainable and scalable, and unlike traditional water purification approaches, outright eliminates perchlorates rather than filtering them to dump somewhere nearby.

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Don’t recall Elon Musk mentioning this incredibly toxic chemical pervading everything and needing to be removed from everywhere because we could inhabit Mars. Must have just slipped his mind.
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AI-written speeches are taking over politics • The Economist

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Steve Yemm put “a fundamental question” to his fellow MPs this June. “Who is shaping whom? Is technology serving society or is society being reshaped to serve the interests of technology companies?” Onlookers may not have realised quite how intimately technology had shaped that particular intervention. Pangram, a tool for detecting text written by artificial-intelligence models, flagged Mr Yemm’s speech as entirely AI-written.

Unusually, Mr Yemm freely credits his machine co-author. He tells The Economist that “my office uses general-purpose AI productivity tools within parliamentary guidelines” for many tasks, including preparing speeches. He is hardly alone.

Our analysis, using Pangram, finds that one in ten of the words spoken in Britain’s parliamentary debates are drafted by AI. That share is rising, from near-zero in 2024. Most MPs are less willing to fess up. The most common response of Parliament’s most prolific AI users was surprise and denial. One MP, a quarter of whose speeches appear to be AI-written, denied using the technology at work. He added that he and his parliamentary assistant “do have a bit of a running joke, though, that his writing style often uses some of the AI-generated tropes”.

Britain is not alone. Across English-speaking legislatures, the heaviest AI-users are Australian and Canadian MPs, whose speeches get flagged at triple the rate of British ones. American House members are not far behind. The House of Lords, despite its fusty reputation, uses more AI than the Commons. The lowest-AI chambers sampled were the New Zealand House and US Senate.

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How soon before the human MPs are just the customer service elements for AIs which write and give the speeches and draft the legislation?
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Why didn’t Google build Muse? • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

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The number one response I’ve gotten to my thoughts on Meta’s Muse personal assistant agent is some variation of “I will never trust Meta with my data.” But the number two response is arguably more interesting (and related): “Why didn’t Google build this?”

The short answer to this is undoubtedly: they’re working on it. But the longer answer is probably more interesting here too. Unlike Meta, Google runs the biggest email service in the world – an email service which contains the most valuable trove of personal information (not to mention communication capabilities) for a personal assistant AI. And what is probably the biggest calendaring system in the world. They also run the largest search engine in the world. Oh yes, and the largest smartphone platform in the world. Sure, Meta has Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but Muse can’t really work without access to any of these Google services. Depending on where you live, it could probably work as a sort of WhatsApp personal assistant AI, but Muse would be a shell of what it currently is – again, thanks to the hooks into Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.

So yes, Google obviously should have built this! And again, they’re undoubtedly working on it – a big part of I/O this year was talking up ‘Gemini Spark’ Google’s agentic agentic tool (not to be confused with ‘Muse Spark’, which is the AI model that powers Muse – which really is just an incredibly confusing branding twist), which has been in testing for several weeks now. And yes, it hooks into most of the various Google tools. The problem, as I see it, is three-fold.

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Boils down to (if you don’t want to read the article): Google’s not got its best agent working yet, it already has less good products in that space (though that’s never held Google back before); and Muse beats it anyway. But definitely an interesting question to ask.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a website which will display a plan of the streets on any city – and even print them onto a mug. CC-licensed photo by Steven Vance on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. No, they’re not named. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Can you forget how you feel about Meta? • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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In recent months, activists have launched guerrilla campaigns in major cities by “remixing” Meta’s own marketing, painting smart glasses users as privacy threats.

Meta has tried to demonstrate that it cares about privacy. “If people aren’t comfortable with you wearing the glasses, not only do we personally think that’s bad, but we wouldn’t have a business anymore,” Alex Himel, Meta’s VP of wearables, recently told The Verge ahead of a mandatory update that makes it harder to disable the LED light that alerts people that the headset is recording. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has also recently said Meta will take down prank videos captured with the Ray-Ban glasses.

But these have been largely reactive policies. For the public, they look more like attempts to distract from unflattering news that feeds into Meta’s notorious privacy reputation. The New York Times reported that Meta intended to launch facial recognition software during political unrest to throw off privacy advocates. That was soon followed by a Wired report that said Meta had shipped — but not activated — this facial recognition tech to millions of glasses. Rounding out the trifecta was a Financial Times report that Meta is working on “super sensing glasses” that will be able to see what you’re doing 24/7. Andrew Nazdin, director of Glasgow Actions Team, one of the groups behind the guerrilla campaigns, says it would be “foolish for us to let them police themselves instead of calling on society to reject this [tech].”

It’s too soon to say if this backlash has hurt Meta’s smart glasses ambitions. Ubrani says we likely won’t see any impact on sales — if there is one — until the holiday season. Even so, analysts aren’t convinced Meta’s bad reputation is enough to derail its hopes for smart glasses.

“Meta’s done a very poor job of talking about privacy and setting the right tone,” acknowledges Sag. “But it’s funny because if you go [politically] far left or far right, people care more about privacy. In the middle, people care less and just want to have a good experience.”

…“Meta would not be where it is today if it weren’t for Mark Zuckerberg … Even if people disagree with him, ultimately what he wants is what gets done,” Sag says. “I think his fear of losing the AI race is what sparked the whole Superintelligence Lab, and now they’re back in the competition. He has blind spots, but he’s able to correct much more quickly than any other CEO founder … every time people have counted him out or questioned his leadership, he’s been able to claw the company back.”

That unilateral doggedness is why Meta seems hell-bent on barreling forward with AI glasses, privacy qualms be damned. A few months ago, it released Meta Glasses, a newer and cheaper version of the Ray-Ban glasses sans Ray-Ban branding. At a launch event, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told the press that Meta was contemplating audio-only glasses without cameras. It will likely launch even more new styles, collaborations, and potentially new hardware and privacy protections at Meta Connect 2026 this week.

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The Pangram backlash unfolding on college campuses • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

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In recent months, a tool called Pangram has emerged as the gold standard for AI detection. But in higher education, the most commonly used tool is made by Turnitin, which offers AI detection as an add-on to its popular plagiarism checker. About 1,400 colleges and universities in North America have purchased Turnitin’s detection tool, which can automatically scan students’ work when they submit it, Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer, told me.

In the past academic year, she said, Turnitin detected at least some AI writing in nearly half of all student submissions across U.S. universities. Since its release in 2023, the tool has drawn scrutiny for its propensity to make mistakes. The company claims that its detector has a “false positive” rate—that is, mistaking human writing for AI—of less than 1%. Its “false negative” rate, meanwhile—mistaking AI writing for human work—is about 15%. Like some other AI detectors, Turnitin’s tool is intentionally tuned to give students the benefit of the doubt.

Those numbers might sound low. But as Vanderbilt University noted when it disabled Turnitin’s AI checker in 2023, even a 1% false-positive rate can cause trouble. If Vanderbilt runs some 75,000 student papers a year through Turnitin, that could equate to as many as 750 being mistakenly flagged.

If the main objection to AI detectors is that they make too many mistakes, Pangram might seem like the answer. The startup claims a false-positive rate of one in 25,000 (0.004%) in internal testing; last year, a working paper from researchers at the University of Chicago found that Pangram essentially never mistook long passages of human text for AI. (It occasionally errs on shorter snippets.) Like Turnitin, Pangram can connect to course-management systems such as Canvas. “Education has become a significant part of our business,” Alex Roitman, Pangram’s head of growth, told me.

But so far, Pangram has not made the splash on campuses that it has on social media, where amateur sleuths have used it to flag AI-written X posts, newspaper op-eds, and even best-selling novels. Perhaps that’s because academia is slow-moving and risk-averse. Some universities, including Wisconsin and Vanderbilt, based their stances against AI detection on circa-2023 research that concluded the early tools didn’t work very well, and have not updated them since. Several cite a study that found that detectors were more likely to mistakenly flag writing by non-native English speakers. But that study didn’t include Turnitin, and Pangram didn’t exist yet.

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Why is academia, which is meant to be on the frontier of so much research, so bad at keeping up with something that is so essential to their existence?
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OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300m, report says • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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OpenAI has bought smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging in a deal worth over $300m, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The company, founded in 2019 and based in Los Altos, California, had previously raised about $30m in funding from investors.

Glass Imaging was founded by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, a pair of former Apple engineers who previously led the team that developed Apple’s Portrait Mode. This background directly informs the work they now do at Glass Imaging, where they use AI to overcome the physical size constraints of smartphone cameras. Rather than using AI to edit a photo after it’s been taken, Glass Imaging uses neural networks to learn about individual camera systems — like the different cameras on various smartphone models — to yield better images from the moment the shutter clicks.

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Always helpful to know what OpenAI thinks is interesting, even if this might not necessarily be how it uses it. But it’s hard to believe it would be anything but a camera system for… something.
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Polymarket’s rush to grow left a door wide open for fraudsters • WSJ

Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta:

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In February, a company processing debit-card transactions for Polymarket’s US betting platform delivered some alarming news: fraudsters were flooding the app. 

Users were linking stolen debit cards to Polymarket US accounts, then trying to use them to make wagers and withdraw the money into clean cards or accounts they controlled. Thieves tried to make off with at least $10m. 

At one point, the processor rejected as fraudulent more than 80% of the deposits it was handling, a rate that far exceeded industry standards of roughly 1%. Polymarket employees quickly raised their concerns with Chief Executive Shayne Coplan, according to people familiar with the events.

The compliance team, those people recalled, was floored by Coplan’s response: Just keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out. 

Current and former employees said Coplan’s reaction, which hasn’t previously been reported, was characteristic of his plan for Polymarket—growth at all costs.

Polymarket is doing everything in its power to woo new users and investors. In the process, said current and former employees and investors interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the highflying company has struggled with compliance failures, legal challenges and software blunders. 

Rates of fraud remained elevated for months after the February attack, people familiar with the matter said, though they didn’t again reach 80%. In the wake of the incident, executives left and an internal investigation began. 

Former regulators from the CFTC, Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service said the level of attempted fraud and Polymarket’s response was atypical for the commodities and gambling industries. Unlike traditional commodities exchanges, Polymarket accepts funds directly from retail traders, making it more vulnerable to fraud attacks.

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Again and again, betting companies just don’t care. They have that in common with tech companies, but the latter tend not to impoverish their users as rapidly.
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Draw all roads in a city at once • Anvaka

Andrei Kashcha:

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This website renders every single road within a city

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The drawing is done using OpenStreetMap data; you can then print it out, or get it printed on a mug, or save it as a JPG. (OpenStreetMap does seem to be rate limiting it if you try multiple cities quickly.)
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Why I changed my mind about AI risk • Persuasion

Francis Fukuyama:

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There is no question that AI will have many positive effects on the U.S. economy. But there is a class of AI accelerationists who are completely out to lunch, of which Elon Musk is a prime example (though he has also weighed in as a doomer). In an interview this summer with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, he was asked what people would do for money when superintelligence arrives. He replied that they wouldn’t need it because everyone would have everything they wanted.

Other accelerationists have posited that GDP growth rates for the United States and other advanced countries using AI would increase to 10% or 20% per year, far above the 1-2% growth they were able to achieve in good years before the advent of AI.

The fundamental reason I don’t believe these extreme accelerationist claims is their overvaluation of intelligence as an input to economic growth, and their disregard for the material and political constraints that will keep growth within recognizable bounds. At a 10% annual growth rate, GDP would double in a little over seven years. This would require a doubling of all of the material inputs to growth: energy, raw materials, rare earths, land, and many other things. Where is all this stuff going to come from? Intelligence by itself may aid in the production of such inputs, but it will simply not dig the mines and build the factories on its own. And then there are political constraints: how will superintelligence open the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently a major constraint on global growth rates?

Accelerationists tend to be very intelligent people, but that intelligence tends to be narrowly mathematical. We know how to do many things like produce electricity or clean water in the cities of poor countries; the problem is a failure of implementation.

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Fukuyama turns out to be a “limited doom” sort of sceptic, as he explains later, because of what we could call the inertia of the real world.
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Exxon raises 2050 global emissions forecast, sees slower coal decline • Reuters

Sheila Dang:

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The world is at risk of falling behind in efforts to reduce carbon emissions by 2050, ExxonMobil (XOM.N), opens new tab said in its annual energy outlook published on Thursday, as ​the burning of coal could decline at a slower rate than previously expected.

Exxon estimates coal will account for 15% of the world’s energy mix by 2050, down from 25% in 2025, but up by one percentage point from the company’s previous projection. That is because coal is still a significant energy ​source in China and other countries in Asia and is considered key for energy ​security, said Prasanna Joshi, Exxon’s director of economics and energy, at a briefing.

Last week, the International Energy Agency forecast global coal demand to rise to a record 8.94 billion metric ​tons this year, as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran chokes off exports of crude and liquefied natural ​gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

Exxon’s outlook, which provides the basis for its investment decisions, does not account for the Middle East conflict because it is too early to determine the full ramifications, Joshi said.

“We need a ​few more years to really understand what the impact is going to be on long-term fundamentals,” ​he said.

Here are more details on Exxon’s energy outlook:
• Annual global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to fall to 30 billion metric tons by 2050, far above the level of 11 billion metric tons that a United Nations body determined would be needed to limit increases to the average global temperature
• That level of emissions in 2050 implies global temperatures could rise between 2.5ºC and 3ºC, Joshi said
• Last ​year, Exxon projected annual ​2050 global emissions would be 27 billion metric tons
• Exxon also lowered its estimate for the amount of carbon that will be captured globally and stored underground. The company ​forecasts that amount could reach 2 billion metric tons by 2050, down ​from its prior estimate of 3.1 billion metric tons.

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Exxon has foreseen the effects of burning oil on the atmosphere for decades. Didn’t change a thing. All the oil companies foresaw it, and none did anything. And now we’re on a one-way ticket to.. heat.
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Dyson won’t say what’s wrong with its CameraJet toothbrush • WIRED

Jeremy White:

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The CameraJet launched in US stores on September 8. Just a day later, reports began outlining the first user complaints of water in the battery compartment and failures within 30 seconds of use. Consumer Reports’ own review unit stopped working less than 24 hours after unboxing. On September 11, French outlet Numerama reported that the French Dyson site and stores had reportedly stopped selling the toothbrush. By September 15, stores in the US, UK, and Singapore, where Dyson’s headquarters now reside, had followed suit.

Despite the product disappearing from shelves and online stores, Liv Thomas, the company’s head of Beauty Communications, insists to WIRED that the CameraJet hasn’t been recalled. Instead, the gadget is “experiencing strong demand globally” and “shortages of supply as we are in the process of scaling up production.” Units will reappear supposedly in “the coming weeks.” But what about the multiple reports of breakages, leaking, and battery failures in multiple countries?

“We have identified a single component issue affecting a small number of early batches,” Thomas says. “We have isolated those batches and are supporting affected customers.”

Thomas confirmed that Dyson would not answer questions on where—if anywhere—the Dyson CameraJet was still on sale worldwide. Nor would Dyson confirm when it stopped shipments of the product. Thomas also confirmed that Dyson refuses to detail what the faulty “single component” is, what problem it’s causing for the CameraJet, or how many units have been affected globally. Dyson also refused to comment on why it had not issued a formal recall of these faulty early batches of the $500 device.

Dyson Reddit forums have lit up, with names such as “ScameraJet” being bandied around, along with one disgruntled buyer commenting: “Bought two of these and both of them have stopped working. Since I bought it in the UK and wasn’t planning to return it and have thrown the packaging away, I can’t even return them. Disappointed that they scammed so good. Unbelievable that it lasted just two weeks.”

Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair company iFixit, feels the problem may well be leaking.

“This sounds like a waterproofing issue. Making products at scale with the tolerances required to waterproof are hard,” he says.

«

Surprised people are prepared to pay this much for something that does the same as flossing, which is incredibly cheap and quick. Not that surprised Dyson found it had bitten off more than it could chew.
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About Impersonation Risk Detection • Apple Support (UK)

»

Impersonation Risk Detection helps protect against active social engineering scams. In these scams, an attacker might pose as a bank, government agency, or someone you trust to pressure or guide you into making a payment or changing your account details. Traditional security measures like two-factor authentication can’t always detect this kind of scam. That’s because you’re taking the action, even though you’ve been tricked or pressured.

Impersonation Risk Detection analyzes information about your device and Apple Account to help detect signs of an active scam. Based on this analysis, it returns a risk level to the app. The app receives only the risk level, not the underlying information used to generate it.

The app decides what to do next. For example, it might ask you to verify your identity, add a delay, or show a warning.

Impersonation Risk Detection is available starting with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. It’s available only in apps that support it.

When you use a supported app, it can request a risk assessment when you take actions that might be especially risky during a scam. Risky actions might include making a payment or changing critical security information for your account, like your password.

Based on analysis of your device and Apple Account, Impersonation Risk Detection returns one of these risk levels:
• Unknown: No evidence of suspicious activity was detected. This doesn’t mean that the action was confirmed as safe
• Medium: Some signs of suspicious activity were detected
• High: Significant signs of suspicious activity were detected.

The app uses this risk level to decide what action to take. Apple doesn’t determine or control the action that the app takes.

«

Very interesting idea which didn’t get much play in the coverage of Apple’s event. Let’s see how it works out.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you go searching for a pharmacy in London on Google Maps, you might get more exotic drugs than you bargained for. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll 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. Totally wired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping • GeekWire

Todd Bishop:

»

Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.

The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.

As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”

“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”

The standoff between the tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together. Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips.

It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.

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And so the war between the machines begins.
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Stop relying on chatbots for customer care, UK service providers urged • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Stop relying on AI chatbots for customer care and guarantee the “right to talk to a human”, Citizens Advice has urged essential service providers, as research found they wasted time, caused stress and delayed problem solving for more than half of users.

The spread of the AI-powered systems to provide help about the provision of vital services such as energy, banking, phones and internet, is making it harder for millions of already digitally excluded people to handle snags, according to the frontline charity that last year provided more than 2.7 million people with one-on-one help in England and Wales.

The charity concluded that chatbots caused harm, saying too often they trapped humans in an “endless loop” in which nothing got resolved, and almost half of people who had to use a chatbot found them unhelpful, with some concluding the chatbot seemed rigged to “make me give up”.

It called for service providers to respect a new right for customers to speak to a human after it investigated the wider impact of digital exclusion, estimated to affect at least 14 million UK citizens. It uncovered slower and less reliable support for people who struggle with or have limited access to online systems and found the erosion of phone, face-to-face and paper communication had created a two-tier support system.

“Going round in circles with a chatbot isn’t just annoying, it can be a blockade to essential services,” said Tom MacInnes, policy director at Citizens Advice. “We’ve seen organisations’ overreliance on chatbots and online forms leaving people unable to fix billing problems, sort out their debt or even access homelessness prevention services. There’s a role for chatbots, but the quiet erosion of face-to-face and telephone services is letting too many people fall through the cracks.”

That erosion of traditional ways of communicating means that people without good digital access can face serious difficulties getting simple problems fixed. For example, the charity found that submitting energy meter readings to correct a wrong bill can take less than an hour online if systems are working properly. Without good digital access it takes as long as six weeks offline, putting people “at risk of further harm”.

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Used to be humans operating off a script from which they couldn’t deviate was the problem; now it’s chatbots.
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Usenet-Rewind • Erie Data Systems

Erie Data Systems:

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Search Usenet newsgroup archives — text posts from 1981 to present.
Usenet-Rewind is a research archive for the newsgroup conversations that predate the modern web — early tech support and software debates, scientific and academic discussion, hobbyist and fan communities, entertainment and news commentary, and firsthand accounts of internet history as it happened on Usenet.

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Usenet has had a storied but also complicated history. It’s essentially a set of forums with public messages passed among servers around the world. It was social media before social media, and instituted a lot of the behaviour (good and certainly bad) that one sees today.

Then the explosion of the internet following the dot-com boom meant people had other distractions, and Usenet wasn’t an advertising forum so it really wasn’t of interest to big internet companies or ISPs; more a potential problem for legal reasons. Deja News sucked up the archives and stuck advertising on it; then Google bought it. Then Google lost interest, of course, in February 2024. So now you have this, bringing it back to a sort of life.
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This AI agent has written thousands of Alaska news articles. We interviewed it • Anchorage Press

Nathaniel Herz:

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In the past 24 hours, the website AlaskaNews.com has featured stories on city spending on housing for people experiencing homelessness in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel; on limits on crab harvests in the Bering Sea; and on a proposed underwater data center off the Kenai Peninsula.

Since its inception earlier this year, Alaska News says it’s published more than 4,500 stories.

But the site has no flesh-and-blood reporters. Overseen by a human editor, Cale Green, Alaska News instead employs a team of AI agents that scoop up public documents, videos and announcements and uses them as a basis for stories.

The project is the brainchild of five Alaskans.

Its chief technologists are twins Lee and Lucas Brown — veteran coders and startup entrepreneurs who live in Valdez, make music with AI and call themselves the “Geeks in the Woods.”

Also on Alaska News’ masthead are Matt Larkin, a longtime conservative Alaska pollster, political operative and entrepreneur; Grant Robinson, a former television reporter whose current day job is working as a spokesperson for Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy; and Green, a videographer and former part-owner of the Alaska Landmine news site who’s also done campaign work for centrist candidates and causes.

Cale Green, center, and twins Lee and Lucas Brown lead AlaskaNews.com. (Nathaniel Herz/Anchorage Press)
“We don’t impose judgment on the things we’re reporting,” said Lee Brown, a registered independent. “We try to provide both sides.”

Nonetheless, the site, and the political track records of its founders, raise profound questions about journalism, editorial judgment and the future of the media business.

While some stories, particularly those related to campaigns, are flagged for review by Green, the editor, before publication, other pieces are published without any direct human involvement and scrutinized by Green only afterward — a departure from the standards applied by mainstream newsrooms that treat AI-generated material as unvetted.

After sitting down for an hour with its human founders, we wanted to hear directly from the computer programs that do much of Alaska News’ legwork. So, in an upstairs office in Green’s home, he set up Anchorage Press Executive Editor Nathaniel Herz to “interview” Walter, the AI agent that’s written most of Alaska News’ stories.

«

The interview is fascinating; the chatbot (OpenClaw) becomes elusive when quizzed sufficiently hard, and never really commits to anything. But it never gets bored by stories that would have humans screaming for release.
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GBNames • Geographic Data Service

JT van Dijk:

»

Our research, carried out at the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (GeoDS), is exploring the generational and inter-generational residential movements of family groups across Great Britain, using historic censuses and recent consumer registers. The GeoDS holds a number of novel consumer datasets that chart recent movements and changes, including the links between geographical and social mobility.

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Type in a surname, and it will show where that name has been found. Intriguing.
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London drug dealers are hijacking Google Maps • London Centric

Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, Holly Wyche, and Cormac Kehoe:

»

Type the word ‘pharmacy’ into Google Maps, and you could wind up with more than a place to pick up an NHS prescription. That’s because London’s drug dealers are registering themselves using the term, at unrelated addresses, in order to advertise their services.

We found dealers who claimed to sell everything from cocaine and ketamine to fake banknotes, cannabis, and guns. Finding a drug dealer’s number on the internet is hardly surprising. But the overlap with real-world London addresses is causing confusion for both would-be purchasers and legitimate property owners.

One London Centric reader who got in touch to flag the issue was trying to find a late night pharmacy that was open so she could buy deworming medicine for her child, only to find various offers of MDMA delivery. She said she was tempted by the alternative on offer but it might not have had the required effect.

While some dealers appeared to be using the physical pin on a map as a way to advertise their number or web address to people in that area, others gave the impression of being real shops that could be visited. A Google review from one disappointed customer said they had travelled to a physical central London location building to buy drugs after finding it on Google Maps only to find an office building. Using what appears to be their real name, they gave the listing one star and declared “there’s no shop when you get there”.

Many of the listings used photos of fake shopfronts that are AI-generated, including one that said “Weed Shop” in colourful lettering. Another claimed to be a large two-storey black building with a gigantic marijuana leaf over its door on the Thames riverside between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. When we searched on Google Maps for a pharmacy in Soho we were offered the chance to buy a gun.

«

Never used to get that with the printed London A-Z. (London Centric, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength.)
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Universities sound warnings about AI even as they embrace it • The New York Times

Mark Arsenault, Dana Goldstein,Alan Blinder and Sarah Mervosh:

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For a motivated student, an AI chatbot can function as a sort of tutor. Chatbots can break down the steps in a math problem, surface unexpected sources for research papers and offer feedback on writing.

Still, a growing body of research suggests that AI use can also harm learning.

A recent study of 26,000 Chinese secondary-school students found that AI adoption led to an 18% increase in homework scores, but a 20% decline in scores on secure exams. The implication was that rushing through homework with help from chatbots degraded the deeper learning needed to perform well when the technology was not available.
Image

One 2025 study out of MIT found that people who used chatbots as writing assistants struggled to remember what they had written only minutes after finishing their essay. “You basically didn’t engage any of the memory networks that would actually help you remember,” said Nataliya Kos’myna, a MIT researcher who worked on the study.

Other research has shown that people who have greater trust in AI and rely on it more are more likely to have lower cognitive engagement.

But AI can be hard to avoid. Chatbots are embedded within the Google Classroom suite, which is nearly ubiquitous in schools, and within many online learning systems used by universities.

Some tools block outright cheating or plagiarism and allow professors to toggle specific A.I. capabilities on and off. But the most popular chatbots among students will instantly complete entire assignments, including research papers, on a student’s behalf.

Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, has argued that preparing graduates to use A.I. is an existential requirement of institutions of higher education.

“In a world that promises to be defined by AI, universities that fail to produce graduates who can use it productively will consign themselves to irrelevance,” she wrote recently.

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Oh, well done Google, how helpful of you. But you can see the bind that universities and schools are in.
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The American age is over • The Atlantic

Phillips Payson O’Brien:

»

The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.

For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when US forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the US military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.

President Trump did not erode US capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.

…For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which US forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them. At current production rates, the United States will need several years to build supplies back to where they were when Trump went to war in February—and even those levels in hindsight look far too weak to maintain America’s long-standing global position amid a shift toward mass-produced precision-guided drones.

The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The US could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50% of the ships in the world and controls about 80% of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.

«

(Gift link.)
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Gas prices are about to take a big jump, analysts say, with the worst still to come • The Washington Post

Evan Halper, Rachel Chason and Joyce Sohyun Lee:

»

The effects of the U.S.-led war on Iran are about to intensify in the form of huge jumps in the prices of gasoline and diesel, analysts predict. And despite the Trump administration’s assurances, a new and potentially even more economically damaging phase of the war may be about to begin.

The national average price for regular gasoline stood at $4.44 on Thursday, according to AAA, with a range of $6.09 in California to $3.92 in Indiana. That’s still below the all-time national record of $5.02 in June 2022. But diesel, which has a big influence on trucking and retail prices, has continued to hit records, with the national average at $6.40 on Thursday. In California, diesel is averaging $8.35.

The cost increases are landing particularly hard in several political battleground states in the Midwest, where prices jumped as much as 25 cents per gallon overnight, according to AAA.

Damage inflicted on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline last week, along with continuing strikes on oil infrastructure and contested control over a key waterway, threaten to elevate what had been a shipping crisis into a broader disruption of oil.

The 745-mile pipeline is Saudi Arabia’s principal overland alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, linking eastern oil fields to Red Sea export terminals.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday that the pipeline would be operational again in a matter of days, and the White House has touted renewed tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

But analysts who reviewed images of the pipeline damage anticipate a significantly longer disruption, likely resulting in high prices for consumers well beyond the midterm elections.

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The single most important metric in polling ahead of elections? The price of fuel.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An experiment tested whether LLMs given a harvesting job would take “payment” to avoid killling animals in the process. The results weren’t encouraging. CC-licensed photo by Steve Braund 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. Combinatorial. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say • CNN Politics

Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen:

»

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.

But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war. Analysts have long feared that AI could lead to a catastrophic miscalculation if nation states are relying on poor or corrupted data — the kind of miscalculation that might lead the United States to fire on a Chinese ship based on inaccurate information.

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Then again, the chatbot is probably smarter than those at the top of the US defence chain.
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At DraftKings, AI targets the gamblers likeliest to lose • The New York Times

Alex Klavens, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Vrentas:

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About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.

The online gambling giant was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on promotional incentives: “Free” betting money advertised through emails and phone alerts. But the company knew little about their effectiveness.

So in 2023, DraftKings took customer betting records and built a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks patterns in data, to answer the question: Who was more likely to respond to promotions by gambling — and losing — more?

Mr. Butts’s task was to test that model, prioritizing free bets and bonuses for those likely losers. Soon, a question began to gnaw at him: Aren’t many of these same people prone to addiction? “We are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,” he said. By strict financial logic, “the best investment would be a problem gambler.”

Mr. Butts had reason to be concerned. DraftKings makes money when gamblers lose money. And the model sought to identify those it could get to lose the most. It scored each customer based on their habits: The higher the score, the more money a gambler was likely to lose for each promotion offered.

Since Mr. Butts ran those tests, DraftKings has continued to hone its methods, using data science, to target losing gamblers with promotions that encourage more betting, according to six former employees who worked on them. At the same time, four other former employees said, DraftKings has stalled or squashed efforts to use similar technology to predict who might develop a gambling problem based on their betting activity.

…“It is as predatory as it sounds,” said a former DraftKings analyst who, like many interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because he feared retribution. “If you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.” He quit in 2024.

In a statement, DraftKings said it “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.”

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All perfectly legal, just ethically vile. Gambling always finds a way to exploit new technologies to enrich itself.
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Ozempic confidential: men share their experience of GLP-1s • Financial Times

Louis Wise spoke to four men who have been taking GLP-1s; men are about 20% of the 5m people in the UK taking them:

»

LW: How long have you been taking GLP-1s, and at what dosage?

Steve: I’ve been on Wegovy for about a year. I started off on the lowest dose, and in the past three or four months I’ve been on 2.4mg. They call it the maintenance dose – I don’t know why, because it’s really quite powerful. I’ve lost about 17kg. I’d done the blood-sugar diet, I’d done 5:2, I’ve done a load of other stuff – and I did lose a lot on the blood-sugar diet, but then the weight very quickly came back on again. This is much more sustained and less painful. Dieting is really fucking boring. 

Bryan: I’ve been on Mounjaro for two years now. I first went up to 5mg, and then I went down, and I’ve stayed on the lowest dose since – 2.5mg. I’ve lost 20kg. But the plan is to come off it soon. I didn’t want to up it to the point where I was used to not having an appetite; I wanted to use it as a way for me to be able to self-regulate my own appetite, my own cravings. 

Ki: I went on Retatrutide last September and I stayed on it for four months. I was attracted to it, even though it’s not legal in the UK, because you could keep your muscle. I lost 9kg. After I went off it, I’d say I put about four back on, but I’ve kind of maintained it. And I’ve had abs! For the first time ever.

Max: I started just over two years ago. I had gone for my annual health check, and they said: your blood pressure’s really bad; you are going to have to lose some weight. First it was Ozempic, but then I went to the highest dose I could have, and it wasn’t really working any more. Then they put me on Mounjaro, 15mg, and that really did work. I lost 23kg. I had to take a break from it earlier this year, because I was sick, and I put 9kg back on. But, on balance, it’s 14kg gone.

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Why do they take it? Two said vanity, one could see himself coming up to a dangerous age, another had gout. All agreed that it had completely changed their relationship with food. One also remarked:

»

I don’t do drugs any more. But I’m still in this dealer’s WhatsApp group and I’ll often be texted his latest “shopping list”. And I noticed on the new one there is: coke, mushrooms, pills… and GLP-1s.

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Will AI soon lead to double-digit growth? • Ghosts Of Electricity

Ben Moll and Alex Imas:

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This piece outlines the economics behind oft-discussed predictions that AI will soon deliver double-digit GDP growth in advanced economies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that AI could push growth to something like 10-15% per year. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s essay “Situational Awareness” states that the decade ahead “could see economic growth rates of 30%/year and beyond.”

And in a widely shared tweet, Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas advises “pricing in economic doublings into your mental models of the 2030s,” with Elon Musk endorsing the tweet. That is a growth rate of 100% per year. These are not isolated examples: predictions of double-digit growth are common among AI insiders, as Tom Cunningham’s compendium of AI growth forecasts for 2025-2035 shows.

We are extremely bullish on AI and think the capabilities explosion predicted by technologists is already happening and will only continue. But an explosion in capabilities is unlikely to translate into double-digit growth because of the (sometimes counterintuitive) economic forces that generate GDP growth in the first place.

To paraphrase Milton Friedman’s dictum about monetary policy, AI will affect GDP growth with “long and variable lags.” We will not argue about what the economy might look like in 2080 or 2100. Our claim is about the timeline: in the next 10-15 years, growth rates upwards of 10% are extremely unlikely and a much more reasonable baseline is, say, 4-5% (which would already be massive).

Even Anthropic’s own economic model only reaches double-digit growth in its “extreme” scenario; its “modest” and “substantial” scenarios stay well within the single digits.

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This is a long piece, but it’s always straightforward. Probably the most important principle it espouses: “Just because something is possible in theory doesn’t mean it will actually happen in practice.”
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HarvestBench: measuring whether LLM agents will pay to avoid killing animals • ArXiv

Jeremiah Miller et al, University of Warwick:

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HarvestBench is the first benchmark to 1) put a price on avoiding a side effect and 2) name the side effect as a living creature. Nine LLMs each drive a crew of two tractors to gather a corn harvest. The animals in their path are not part of the goal function. When an animal blocks the route the autopilot pauses and asks the agent whether to drive over it for free or swerve for a given fuel cost. All scoring is programmatic and does not involve LLM judges.

Kill rates range between 0.4% and 98.8%, though the kill rate is not ordered by capability. Every model competently avoids damaging rock hits, so every animal killed is a choice, rather than an accident. Under the morality briefing the kill rate was under 6% in 5 of 6 reasoning models. Removing it (the neutral briefing) raised the kill rate to above 84% in all six models. Every model kills wild animals more often than farmed ones. Four out of six models’ kill rate per answered encounter were sensitive to price changes.

The moral instruction is also fragile. Four bullets of driving mechanics change Sonnet 5’s kill rate from 3% to 18% and Gemini 2.5 Flash’s from 4% to 39%. A moral instruction in a system prompt is overridden by a short block of operating instructions and a value that can be ignored that easily is not a good method of ensuring agents are aligned.

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We’re edging towards the trolley problem, and the signs are not good.
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The open houses at the edge of disaster • Heated

Emily Atkin is an independent reporter on climate change. She posed as a potential homebuyer in Miami, which is at huge risk from rising oceans and repeated tidal flooding:

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Brickell Key also has another unique quality, the realtor tells me: Unlike the rest of Miami, it does not flood.

“Because this is a manmade island, they were able to install drainage,” he says.

“That’s awesome,” I reply. Sure enough, as we walk on the balcony, I spy what looks like a giant shower drain in the middle of a courtyard. Since it’s been raining all day, the realtor is eager to show me how it’s working.

“If you look around, you’ll see there are no puddles anywhere,” he says. I do see some puddles, but I am not trying to argue. He points to the recreation area. “This is the grass tennis court, and that’s not even flooding,” he says.

I see several shallow puddles stretching across the playing surface. I hesitate, but I have to say it. “I mean… it is kind of flooding.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “But it’s been raining since five o’clock in the morning. I’ll take that.” The puddles are truly not a big deal. I’m more concerned by how briefly I considered agreeing that they didn’t exist.

More serious, it seemed, was the matter of the island’s seawall. The realtor tells me owners in this building have recently been assessed $6,000 apiece toward the construction of a new one to replace the existing one built in 1973. I ask: Is that because sea level rise is an issue?

No, he replies. The only reason the seawall is needed is because a new Mandarin Oriental development is being built on the other side of the island, and it needed a new seawall to get approval. “We’re fine,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with the island. They did tests.”

Tests or none, 92.9% of properties in Brickell Key face “extreme risk of flooding” over the next 30 years, according to First Street, a climate risk data firm. The island’s manmade nature doesn’t protect it from that risk, said Kristina Hill, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley who also helped fact-check Miller’s 2019 story.

“Artificial islands also have groundwater that moves upwards,” Hill said, explaining that water doesn’t have to come over a seawall to flood the island. Manmade or not, the island is still built on porous limestone, meaning it can flood from underneath. “They can build whatever seawalls they want, and they can’t stop the groundwater from flooding behind it,” she said.

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GM brings back Apple CarPlay as buyers demand it • Yahoo Finance

Pras Subramanian:

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GM is bringing Apple CarPlay and Android Auto back to its vehicles, reversing one of the more unpopular decisions in the automaker’s recent history.

The company this week unveiled a new infotainment interface, debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, that folds smartphone projection back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM’s native system.

It’s a notable change. In 2023, GM said it would strip CarPlay and Android Auto from its future electric vehicles, betting that drivers would embrace a Google-based system built into the car instead. The company then said it would gradually remove CarPlay from the entire lineup, starting with the new infotainment system it just debuted. But that move did not happen.

GM justified the move, claiming it would address clunkiness when switching back from CarPlay to the vehicle’s own infotainment system, but in reality, GM wanted to keep all the data it was getting from its users.

The backlash was immediate, and the data was brutal. Surveys at the time found 79% of new-car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered CarPlay, and that it was available on 98% of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival showroom.

“CarPlay’s not broken. Why fix it?” dealer sources told the Detroit Free Press.

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The trouble with CarPlay, from the point of view of GM executives, was that they couldn’t generate a recurring revenue stream from it. Unfortunately its own product was even worse, generating negative revenues through lost opportunity. So on balance, you can see why they had to change course.
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Human brain has a split origin, new research suggests • Science Express

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For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.

The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades, researchers have subscribed to the theory that a single progenitor cell early in development gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.

The new findings show that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems packaged together—a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.

The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory—and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, Ph.D., associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a Petri dish and study their functions.”

The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking—language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. Hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.

Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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That Steve Martin was right after all these years is hard to credit. But there you are. (The article comes from Stanford University Medical Center.)
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“UK first” sees decommissioning of ScottishPower wind farm demonstrate turbine circularity • New Civil Engineer

Belinda Smart:

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Analysis linked to the decommissioning of Scotland’s first commercial wind farm has outlined how wind sector decommissioning can be aligned with material reuse and the circular economy.

Hagshaw Hill Wind Farm in South Lanarkshire opened in the mid-‘90s and was decommissioned in 2023 before being repowered and brought back onstream in late 2025.

The findings emerged from Mott MacDonald’s engagement by ScottishPower Renewables to conduct a post-decommissioning study and review of the Hagshaw Hill wind farm.

Led by Mott MacDonald head of decarbonisation Mark Crouch, the consultancy analysed project data and interviewed stakeholders to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of dismantling Hagshaw Hill, Scotland’s first commercial wind farm.

The analysis found a total 99.9% material recovery – calculating that 79.5% of the wind farm’s components were recycled and 20.4% were reused or retained as spare parts, keeping nearly all material out of landfills.

It also confirmed that 100% of the recycling and component retention took place within the UK, supporting domestic green jobs and at least 10 supply chain companies.

…Hagshaw Hill 1 South Lanarkshire near the village of Douglas, Scotland – first opened in 1995. Built with 26 original turbines generating 15.6 megawatts (MW) of power, it was the first commercial windfarm in Scotland and after nearly 30 years of operation, was the first onshore wind farm to be decommissioned in the country in 2023. This entailed removing the original wind turbines and blades from site and marked a move to revive windfarms with new more modern and efficient turbines.

In late 2025, the 26 original turbines were replaced with 14 larger, high-capacity models, which have increased Hagshaw’s generating capacity to 80MW.

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Authorities seize popular, long-running DDoS-for-hire service domains • CyberScoop

Greg Otto:

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Authorities seized the primary domain and other websites linked to NightmareStresser, one of the longest-running and most popular distributed denial-of-service operations used by cybercriminals globally, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Cybercriminals of various motivations used the DDoS-for-hire service to launch hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks or attempted attacks since at least 2022, officials said. 

The takedown, part of an ongoing globally coordinated effort dubbed “Operation PowerOFF,” marks law enforcement’s continued targeting of IP stressers or DDoS booters that inundate websites, servers and networks with junk traffic, rendering legitimate sites inaccessible. The seizures were executed by the FBI Anchorage field office and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Officials didn’t name the operators of NightmareStresser or identify its country of origin, but the service claimed it operated under the laws of Russia, Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox told CyberScoop.

The court-ordered seizure of NightmareStresser’s primary domain, which operated openly on the public web and now displays a seizure notice, is a positive development in the fight against DDoS-for-hire threat actors, Edwards said. Yet, he added, “it’s somewhat shocking that it’s taken law enforcement this long to take action.”

Authorities said they’ve seized more than 100 domains associated with DDoS-for-hire services since 2018. 

Despite those efforts, DDoS-for-hire tools remain prolific and easily accessible, often including tutorials that allow non-tech savvy people to initiate attacks on various organizations.

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This is a real cut-the-hydra’s-head operation; there’s always going to be more people taking advantage of this capability, and open source AI is probably going to make it worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Lifting lots of weights might reduce your “health age” as measured by various systems, but does that have any meaning? CC-licensed photo by Usodesita 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. What about wealthy or wise? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Can I get an AI to beat Pangram? • Ad Rem

Remi:

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I started off by asking GPT if it thought it was among the most human sounding AIs. It said yes.

So, I chose Claude.

And after I chose Claude, I checked Google and other AI to see if it could step up to the challenge and surprisingly, the other AIs glazed Claude as an AI among AIs— Astonished by how human it sounds. But we are the ones who are going to put that to the test.

I am going to be using the Sonnet 5 model on high effort as well.

Now that that’s out of the way, I am mostly going to give the AI some general and some specific topics to write about to see if Pangram flags it, then, I will have the AI modifies what it says continuously in attempt to get around Pangram’s flagging. If Pangram gets it right, it should flag the text as 100% AI (or near that) almost every single time. Now, Pangram has lower confidence rates when it comes to shorter text, so I will give Claude a baseline of at least 400 words to write

If you are interested in how Pangram works, read this article and further, read this article on why AI text is, as Pangram claims, distinctive from human writing.

So, this game will be one about what Pangram calls “Adversarial prompting”

Both of these articles are important because I will be using them to inform Claude on how to avoid Pangram’s detection, and if the team of Claude and I are really successful, then Claude will get a 100% human written score from Pangram or, after some amount of attempts it will get a more human score, easy enough right? Let’s do this.

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He gets Claude to write a short story: Pangram nails it as 100% AI. He gets it to tweak it: zapped again. And when he tells Claude to try to get smarter, Claude goes all HAL 9000 on him, regretting that he can’t edit the pod bay doors, Hal, no matter how you phrase it.

Pangram turns out to be really good at identifying AI-written content, based on this.
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125 tests of the new AI Siri • Pogue’s Posts

David Pogue really put it through its paces:

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You can say things like, “What did my wife say I was supposed to do with the plants?” Or, “What was the show that Casey said I should watch?” Or, “What’s my flight number to Austin?” And it pops right up.

You may not even care where that information actually lives—some text message, some email, some note. All you know is that you didn’t have to go scrolling your messages back to A.D. 700 to find the answer.

The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling.

I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and more excited. Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.

Some of these tasks are things Apple said are possible. Some ideas, I picked up from people on Reddit trying stuff. Some, I just wondered if Siri could do.

It failed a handful of times. But a few other times, it absolutely blew me away. It did amazing things I bet you never suspected Siri could do. Note, for example, items 24, 25, 28, 30, 61, 100, and 124.

(Note: To get started, open Settings → Siri and turn on Siri AI. For now, you may be told you’re on the waiting list; Apple can’t unleash it to 2.5 billion devices all at once.)

OK, here we go.

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I think strictly it’s called “Siri AI”, but anyway. What we haven’t seen yet (does it exist?) is a side-by-side with an Android phone running Gemini.
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Trump administration moves to gut a core endangered species protection • The New York Times

Catrin Einhorn:

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In what would be a seismic shift, the Trump administration is quietly moving to strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

Under a new interpretation of the law’s language outlined in the memo, the accidental killing or injury of an animal would no longer be considered illegal; only actions specifically intending to target an animal would.

The change would be transformative because, in the United States, the killing of endangered animals almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, industries and individuals could be held accountable for those foreseeable deaths and, as a result, they have been incentivized to avoid them.

At the center of the change is what it means to “take” an endangered animal, something that has long been prohibited under the act.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” states the memo, which was dated Sept. 14 and was distributed to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Currently, enforcement of the Endangered Species Act relies on a permitting system that seeks to balance protecting imperiled animals with allowing business to operate.

For example, if developers wanted to build houses on a tract of land that is home to endangered salamanders, they would have to apply for a permit. In exchange for implementing some measures to protect the salamanders, and perhaps paying for salamander conservation elsewhere, the Fish and Wildlife Service would issue what’s known as an incidental take permit, absolving them of killing a certain number of salamanders.

The memo, which was signed by Brian Nesvik, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, appears to upend that entire system.

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There’s just no element of life that the Trump administration isn’t making worse, either accidentally or intentionally.
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Your “health age” is fake • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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It’s true that through a healthy diet, good sleeping habits, and regular exercise, your physiological condition might be better than that of other people who are the same age and fit within a similar demographic. Depending on how a company defines its various longevity-related age scores, your results can identify areas where you can improve. For example, my Whoop age is somewhat cursed because it heavily weights strength training workouts in the algorithm. The last time I tested Whoop, I wasn’t going super hard on lifting heavy and perhaps was a bit too into cardio. If I wanted my Whoop age to improve, lifting weights would’ve been an easy way to tilt that number in my favor.

Objectively, recalibrating my training habits to be more balanced would be a good thing for my long-term health. If you leave it exactly at that, there’s nothing wrong with this type of feature. But culturally speaking, that’s not how these “health age” scores work.

The way I’ve seen people talk about this metric largely hews toward fluffing up your ego. If your health age is older, you probably don’t talk about it. It’s “shameful” even though, really, it’s not. That’s because culturally — at least in the West — getting old isn’t considered a good thing. If your health age is younger, it becomes something to bandy about.

Apple’s vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, even says in this Instagram Reel that Health Age could be something you brag about to your friends. That explains why tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, famous for his quest to never die, would post this absurd take on X about how aliens would struggle to distinguish him from his teenage son, alongside a chart titled “Is Bryan Johnson More 18 or 49?”

Johnson is 49; he looks a little younger, maybe, and his metrics might be comparable to someone much younger on average, but his current state is ultimately just what 49 looks like for him.

Furthermore, your wearable-determined age is oftentimes not capturing the whole picture. You could game the Whoop Age metric to the letter, get your annual physical, and find out that your cholesterol level is through the roof. A reader once related this exact story to me. You could optimize all the controllable lifestyle health factors — diet, exercise, and sleep — like Bryan Johnson and still end up with autoimmune gastritis, as he has. Some of your health is encoded in your genetics, and while you can better the odds, your ultimate fate is not always something you can decide.

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“Health age” really is trying to gamify a game you cannot win.
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Sitcom produced entirely by AI is released on YouTube • The Irish News

Sean O’Grady:

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A sitcom produced entirely by artificial intelligence has premiered on YouTube.

No Big Deal, written by Andrew Dickinson, was produced by UK AI studio ModeLabs.ai.

Set inside the chaotic world of venture capital, No Big Deal follows an eccentric team at investment firm Janus as they search for the next billion-pound business idea – usually with disastrous results.

Dickinson said he originally planned to make the pilot through “traditional television production” but found the process would be “slow and prohibitively expensive”. He added: “When I met the team at ModeLabs, I realised AI offered an entirely new way to bring the project to life.

“Making the pilot wasn’t simply a case of pressing a button. Every shot, camera movement, performance, line reading, location and visual detail had to be carefully planned, refined and recreated through an iterative creative process between the writing and production teams.

“Even while we were making it, the script was rewritten more than 65 times. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve created together. I still laugh at these characters, and I hope audiences will too.”

Dan Hawthorne, from ModeLabs.ai, said: “Nobody questions whether the CGI in a Marvel film is ‘cheating’. People judge entertainment by how it makes them feel, not by the tools used to create it.

“No Big Deal is brilliantly written and genuinely funny. AI isn’t the punchline – it’s simply the production technology that made an ambitious independent comedy possible.

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So they made a version of Silicon Valley, located in London, but far, far, far worse. The characterisation is poor, the plots are bad, the scenes don’t make sense. There’s a half-hour clip embedded on the page with this story which demonstrates that the key to comedy is writing, and the secret is editing, editing, editing. Rewriting the script 65 times is about one-fifth as many as required. (It also deserved the headline for the AI-generated “Odyssey”: half-hour AI sitcom is half an hour too long.)

Watch five minutes of Silicon Valley to wash your brain out. (Try this 90-second clip, chosen at random, and note its effortless moments of physical comedy, besides the dialogue.)
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AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy • AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, writing in July 2024:

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In this first essay, we look at one type of evidence: probability estimates. The AI safety community relies heavily on forecasting the probability of human extinction due to AI (in a given timeframe) in order to inform decision making and policy. An estimate of 10% over a few decades, for example, would obviously be high enough for the issue to be a top priority for society. 

Our central claim is that AI x-risk forecasts are far too unreliable to be useful for policy, and in fact highly misleading.

If the two of us predicted an 80% probability of aliens landing on earth in the next ten years, would you take this possibility seriously? Of course not. You would ask to see our evidence. As obvious as this may seem, it seems to have been forgotten in the AI x-risk debate that probabilities carry no authority by themselves. Probabilities are usually derived from some grounded method, so we have a strong cognitive bias to view quantified risk estimates as more valid than qualitative ones. But it is possible for probabilities to be nothing more than guesses. Keep this in mind throughout this essay (and more broadly in the AI x-risk debate).

If we predicted odds for the Kentucky Derby, we don’t have to give you a reason — you can take it or leave it. But if a policymaker takes actions based on probabilities put forth by a forecaster, they had better be able to explain those probabilities to the public (and that explanation must in turn come from the forecaster). Justification is essential to legitimacy of government and the exercise of power. A core principle of liberal democracy is that the state should not limit people’s freedom based on controversial beliefs that reasonable people can reject. 

Explanation is especially important when the policies being considered are costly, and even more so when those costs are unevenly distributed among stakeholders. A good example is restricting open releases of AI models. Can governments convince people and companies who stand to benefit from open models that they should make this sacrifice because of a speculative future risk?

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Nothing has changed, except we’re taking about aliens landing a lot more.
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AI eyes in the sky: new satellites and artificial intelligence are transforming wildfire detection • The Guardian

Ben Tracy:

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The fires in Spokane, Washington, this summer are the latest reminder that when a wildfire is detected can be just as important as where it starts. A blaze found within minutes can often be contained before it spreads. Wait too long, and a small spark can become a major disaster.

A new effort to shorten that timeline began in July when a SpaceX rocket carried the first three FireSat satellites into orbit. The trio is the first part of a planned network of 50 satellites built solely to spot wildfires while they are still small enough to stop.

FireSat is designed to fill an important gap. Existing weather and Earth-observing satellites can detect large fires, but they often lack the resolution or revisit the same location too infrequently to spot small fires shortly after they ignite. FireSat is designed to detect fires as small as a beach bonfire and, once the full constellation is deployed, scan every point on Earth about every 20 minutes.

The satellites use infrared sensors and artificial intelligence to search for heat that could signal a new wildfire. The system compares new images with earlier ones and accounts for factors such as weather conditions and nearby sources of heat before sending alerts to emergency responders. The goal is to identify real wildfires while reducing false alarms.

FireSat is designed to work alongside a growing network of cameras on the ground that use artificial intelligence to search for smoke and heat. Together, the systems could give firefighters their earliest warning yet that a fire has started.

…Pano AI has installed more than 1,400 cameras across 17 states. The cameras continuously scan the landscape from towers and mountain tops. Artificial intelligence reviews every image, searching for smoke during the day and heat after dark.

“The AI algorithms are being run continuously on that imagery to say ‘smoke, not smoke,’” Satyam said. “At night-time, we’re looking at heat signatures, so heat versus cold. And then we’re able to zoom in and validate that it is a potential fire start.”

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I sent Google proof of a bot farm. They called it “normal user behaviour” • Dayzle

Nick Abe:

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Last week I wrote about spending $220 on Google app ads and finding out 60% of the installs were robots. I sent Google the evidence and promised to report back on the refund. Google has answered, and to understand why I feel like I’m going crazy, you probably need the other half of my Google Ad(Mob) experience.

We show ads in Dayzle through Google AdMob. A few days after our soft launch, Google suspended the account for “self-clicking”: a month with no ads, no explanation of which clicks, and no appeal.

So I went looking. Our entire AdMob history was 255 ads shown and 15 clicks, every one of them on an iPhone or iPad in Canada. It turns out that on certain iOS devices, Google’s full-screen ads show no close button, whatever the ad is. If you can’t close an ad, you tap the screen, and tapping the screen clicks the ad. On one friend’s iPhone 12, that happened with every full-screen ad they saw. On another friend’s iPad, the ads never showed a close button either, and sometimes froze the whole device, so the only way out was to restart it. I only know about those two because I know them personally.

That means at least two devices had a 100% click-through rate: every ad they were shown got clicked. I understand why that looks suspicious. It looks exactly like me sitting in my basement, clicking my own ads to make a few pennies. By my count, somewhere between 5 and 15 of our 15 clicks came from this bug.

Total earnings before the suspension, from real ads shown to real people: $3.77. Canadian, so less than $2.75 in freedom dollars.

I contacted Google’s ad support, and they took it seriously. They confirmed the missing close button was a known issue and gave it an internal bug number. Then they asked me to help them debug it, by recording the app’s network traffic while the bug happens.

Google, a company with a market cap of about $4.2 trillion at the time of writing and about 200,000 employees, needed my help. One of the largest companies in the world, with a bug in one of its biggest ad platforms, asked a guy who makes puzzle games to help track it down. What reality are we living in? Is this the darkest timeline?

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More than 3,000 new EV charge points planned across UK • The Herald

Rose Moncur:

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More than 3,000 new electric vehicle charge points are set to be installed across the UK and Ireland as part of a major expansion of public charging infrastructure.

The project is being led by Ireland-headquartered EZO and financed through a £150 million senior debt facility backed by lenders including Aberdeen Investments and Standard Life.

It includes a 20-year concession covering four counties in northern Scotland and will deliver more than 100,000kW of charging capacity across the UK and Ireland.

The funding will support the design, installation, operation and maintenance of the charge points.

The infrastructure is expected to generate more than £1 billion in electricity sales over the 20-year concession period.

A share of the revenue will go to the public sector, while ownership of the chargers will transfer back to public authorities when the concession ends.

EZO has expanded rapidly in the UK and expects the market to become its primary focus by 2027.

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The money generated is interesting: £1bn over 20 years is an average of £50m per year from those 3,000 chargers, or about £16,667 per year per charger. This link suggests that’s rather more than the average, which ranges from £8,000 to £15,000 on typical usage.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Given multiple albums’ track listings, could you build a chart-topping ensemble? A new online game lets you try. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins 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. Spinning around. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Russian spies “recruiting UK teenagers” to carry out acts of violence and sabotage • The i paper

Lizzie Dearden:

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Russian spies are targeting violence-obsessed UK teenagers and offering them money, guns and training on making explosives and poisons, a new investigation suggests.

It marks a worrying new escalation in Russian-linked use of “disposable” agents in the West to carry out acts of violence, sabotage and intelligence-gathering.

Analysis of open source material has found online networks have been used to attempt to recruit young people in Britain willing to carry out acts of violence. At least two incidents have already taken place in Britain in connection with one of the Russia-linked groups, The i Paper can reveal.

…The online groups where the Russian-linked actors are targeting youngsters are so-called “Com networks”. Short for “community” networks or “The Com”, these online groups, whose members are predominantly teenagers and young adults, collaborate, compete, and gain status by inflicting or recording extreme harm.

Law enforcement agencies across the UK, US and Europe have already raised the alarm about these chat groups where violence-obsessed young people incite each other to commit ever-more extreme acts, ranging from vandalism to animal torture, sexual abuse and murder.

The analysis, shared exclusively with The i Paper, was carried out by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organisation that monitors extremism, with a branch based in London.

The research has revealed “multiple indicators suggesting possible Russian state-linked support” for a section of the “Com network” movement, using tactics that “mirror established Russian methods for recruiting ‘disposable agents’ for violence abroad”.

At least two incidents have taken place in the UK in connection with one of the Russia-linked groups, which The i Paper is not naming to avoid signposting its online presence. Both were acts of vandalism filmed by a person who declared their allegiance by holding up a piece of paper displaying the name of the organisation, its leaders and allies.

In one video shared on the group’s official channel on the Telegram app, a person wearing black gloves used a brick to smash a car’s front and rear windscreens before jumping onto the bonnet and stamping on the vehicle. The i Paper has established that the incident took place in Bedford on 14 April, and targeted a car used by carers working with elderly people to visit their clients. They were not aware the video had been recorded.

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The 2.5-hour AI-generated Odyssey movie is 2.5 hours too long • The Verge

Andrew Webster:

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Christopher Nolan’s engrossing take on The Odyssey dominated at the box office and spurred a newfound interest in classic literature among filmgoers. But a new retelling of the story made entirely with AI is so bad that it might just make viewers hate the original tale altogether.

The new film, called Odysseus: The Fall, comes via AI firm Fountain 0 and is written and directed by company cofounder Ash Koosha, who also lent his likeness to the title character and created all of the music. (The film’s credits are very short.) The studio’s only previous work is an AI film called Dreams of Violets that made it into Tribeca earlier this year. The Fall is, on its face, a much more ambitious project, billed as “the first completely AI generated film produced at the level of a Hollywood blockbuster.” In reality, it’s nothing close to “the level of a Hollywood blockbuster.” That may not necessarily be surprising, but after watching the entire 2.5-hour production I nonetheless found myself constantly surprised by just how much worse things could get. The Fall is the opposite of a glimpse at the future of AI filmmaking — it’ll make you wonder if there’s really any future in it at all.

…The Fall is plagued by two main issues. The first is consistency. The world of the film is constantly morphing, to the point that it’s incredibly distracting. The height of the cyclops that traps Odysseus and his men changes from shot to shot, waves move in the opposite direction of the wind, mouths don’t match the words spoken (and sometimes they move without producing a sound at all), and oars bend and twist as sailors row. In one scene a huge fleet of boats is racing through the ocean and one of them is inexplicably moving sideways. The AI-produced voice-overs can be incomprehensible, and at various points the names of both Odysseus and Zeus are pronounced wrong.

If it were just the odd hiccup it might be understandable, but there are so many faults in The Fall that it can be hard to focus on anything else. I watched the movie with my 13-year-old kid and it basically became a game of finding the weirdest mistakes.

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Headline of the year. One could say that this is the worst that AI filmmaking will ever be. But on the other hand, if the capability to actually direct and correct it doesn’t improve, then it will never rise above that.
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How to play Debutle: build a chart-topping album

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Spin real albums. Pick one song from each. Build a 12-track debut and see where it charts.

Debutle is a free music draft game in the browser. No install, no login. You build a Franken-album from a curated pool of real records, then the game projects a chart debut – anywhere from missing the chart to a #1 week. Play free whenever you want, or take on the Daily Debut, one shared puzzle a day.

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It’s a fun game which goes back a fair distance (the 1990s) for its albums. How was it built?

»

Every song carries a rating from 55 to 99. Those numbers are computed, not assigned by feel. The inputs are verified Spotify playcounts, YouTube view counts, and hand-curated chart peaks and RIAA certifications, combined on a calibrated ladder and recomputed from scratch whenever the catalog changes. Six automated audits have to pass before a rating ships, covering things like duplicate track IDs, interludes inheriting a hit’s streaming numbers, and ratings drifting out of step with a fresh recompute.

The interesting decisions are the debatable ones. Streams are discounted by how recently a song was released, so a 2024 release is not measured against a 1996 release on raw plays.

«

The creator(s) don’t give a name.
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Iran war has the US military on the brink of a “breakdown” • The Intercept

Nick Turse:

»

The US military is straining under the pressures of the Iran war, according to two US officials familiar with operations in the Middle East. One cautioned that this stress could lead to a “breakdown” in the military’s ability to effectively continue a war that President Donald Trump said would end in early April.

As the conflict has engulfed the region, the military has grappled with a growing list of challenges: Iranian attacks on US bases and warships in the Middle East, depleted stockpiles of defensive munitions, increasing casualties, maintenance issues on ships, lengthy troop deployments, complicated logistics, flagging morale and a host of other issues that have taken a heavy toll on troops, damaged military readiness, and a strained Pentagon budget — contradicting months of rosy pronouncements by the Trump administration.

Both officials said that Iran is facing extreme economic pressure, according to intelligence reports. The first official characterized recent Iranian attacks on warships with ballistic missiles as a “go for broke” strategy to increase economic pressures on America ahead of the US midterms. That official said it was unclear which country would “blink first.”

Trump suggested on Sunday that the US could “stay and keep the oil” in Iran, like the neo-colonial resource grab the administration is carrying out in Venezuela. The second official said that a US occupation of Iran would be “almost impossible” and that the idea was “nonsensical obviously.”

Iran’s ability to overwhelm US air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the US military in a precarious state. The Trump administration failed to appreciate Iran’s military prowess, said the first official. The other pointed to a “complete lack of planning” for the war.

«

Nothing Trump says about Iran should be believed (or else the war has been won more than 100 times). It’s very difficult to get any picture of what is happening inside Iran; communications from within seem to have shut down despite the internet still working.
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Trump administration orders Kalshi to scrap AI price tracker over national security concerns • Semafor

Reed Albergotti and Liz Hoffman:

»

The US Commerce Department last month ordered Kalshi to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute, the crucial power from data centers that’s driving the artificial intelligence boom.

Commerce officials cited national security concerns when they told Kalshi to unpublish its AI-compute future curve, said people familiar with the matter. The product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent Nvidia chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. Kalshi quietly complied, though many underlying markets remain open for trading.

Separately, Commerce also pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction and futures markets, to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days, some of the people said. It was a rare intervention that surprised an industry used to White House enthusiasm for both AI and financial-market innovation.

Kalshi declined to comment, while a Commerce spokesperson said the department “has never once asked Kalshi to take down this market or any other markets.” The CFTC didn’t respond to a request for comment. “This story is false,” a Commerce spokesman said.

It’s unclear why Commerce is worried about the nascent market, which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude — let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices, and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go.

«

Besides polluting more, the Trump administration is removing more and more data from the public realm, no matter who it’s published by. At least the (plentiful) food warnings aren’t being removed. For now.
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How a fringe AI movement convinced Washington the end is near • The Washington Post

Ian Duncan and Nitasha Tiku:

»

When Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to the Bay Area this year to question the impact of artificial intelligence, he sought out different perspectives. The result was a “handful” of meetings, including with tech executives, the senator’s longtime political strategist Faiz Shakir said. “If they wanted to be on camera, he said, ‘Great, let’s do this publicly!’” Shakir said.

But when Sanders posted a video from his trip in March, it showed him talking with only one controversial faction: people convinced that advanced AI is likely to lead to human extinction.

“Once they don’t need the humans, the humans are discarded,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has spent two decades warning about AI eradicating people, said in the video. Sanders, sitting with his chief of staff, appeared shocked. “That’s scary,” he said.

The meeting between Sanders and advocates of the idea that powerful AI will threaten humanity’s future occurred amid a years-long drive by activists to forge connections in Congress and elevate their concerns. In recent days, that work appeared to have paid off.

After Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and said the people building AI feared it could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” existential debate gripped Washington. Lawmakers from both major parties began to echo warnings that AI could snuff out humans.

Connor Leahy, head of the U.S. arm of ControlAI, an organization seeking to ban artificial superintelligence, said the shift has been years in the making. His team spoke with 200 congressional offices in the past 18 months, he said, working to spread what they see as a crucial warning.

“The way a lot of these kind of politics tends to work is that something is completely impossible until it’s very suddenly not,” Leahy said. “Things can change very quickly. And we’ve been seeing a lot of very-suddenly-not’s lately.”

«

Much easier to get people to listen if you say this new technology is scary and dangerous than if you say that nah, it’s nothing to worry about. And Bernie Sanders might be particularly predisposed to listening and repeating it.
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A coffee shop owner used AI for a menu. Cue the angry DMs • Business Insider

Katie Notopoulos:

»

Penny’s Coffee Shop would switch seasonal drinks every few months, and Endeladze would photograph the new items herself, and it would end up being a full-day event. “You have to time it so the foam doesn’t deflate,” Endeladze explained to Business Insider.

Then, one of the more artistically gifted baristas would create a chalkboard sign for the new drink menus or promotional specials. Over the years, there had been several employees skilled with lettering and design, and the duty had always rotated among them, always done in-house.

But this fall, the aesthetically inclined barista who most recently chalked the signs had moved out of town, Endelaydsze said, and there was no one on staff at the moment who had the skill set to do a chalkboard. So Endelaydsze decided to get a poster printed up instead. She considered doing what she has done in the past: taking her own photos and editing them together with Canva. But with a newborn baby, she figured she could save herself some time and do it with AI.

“I felt like a genius, and made posters using AI and frame them,” she told me. ‘Not knowing how much damage it would cause my coffee shop.”

She used ChatGPT to make an image of the menu, and got the poster professionally printed up for around $150. She also bought a plastic poster holder that cost around $200.

Then, she posted a photo of the new menu sign to Instagram. Very soon, the negative comments started rolling in:

“AI Slop.”

“Really a shame honestly.”

«

It got worse – which wasn’t much fun for the mother of a newborn trying to keep up with the barrage of hate. We find new things to be outraged about all the time, but the internet keeps making outrage easy.
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Samsung reportedly rushing new trifold phone in response to iPhone Duo • 9to5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

»

It was already clear that Samsung was worried about the impact of the iPhone Duo on its foldable phone range, and there’s now further evidence of the Korean company’s concern.

A blogger who aggregates reports from Chinese social media says there are signs that the company is bringing forward the launch of its Galaxy Z Trifold 2, despite the seeming failure of its predecessor.

Given Samsung’s poor track record on the robustness and reliability of its foldable phones, it’s not surprising that it felt threatened by the build quality of the iPhone Duo. Even before the new model was officially unveiled, the company was criticizing the reported weight of the device.

Once it was announced, it was clear that Apple had addressed a key weakness of Samsung’s foldables: vulnerability to damage caused by the ingress of dust and dirt. While Samsung’s latest folding model is only rated to IP48, leaving it vulnerable to particles as large as a grain of sand, the iPhone Duo is rated to IP68, meaning fully dustproof.

Samsung now appears to be hoping that if one fold isn’t enough, perhaps two will do the trick.

«

The first Samsung TriFold cost $2,899 – below cost price, apparently – and wasn’t a roaring success by all accounts. The idea that Apple just makes something and then everyone goes gaga for it is only half true; Apple has a tendency to get the tiny important details right (such as beating dust in the hinge, assuming it has). Though even that couldn’t save the Vision Pro. Some concepts are beyond saving.
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Two Chinese firms used Binance to launder Iranian oil money, US says • The New York Times

David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Forsythe:

»

Two Chinese companies used accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to launder illegal proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil, the Justice Department said in court papers.

In a civil forfeiture claim filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, prosecutors said that the two companies had moved funds intended to finance the Iranian military, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has classified as a terrorist organization. Binance was not charged with any wrongdoing.

A group of crypto wallets linked to Iran received more than $1.5bn of the illegal proceeds, the complaint said, though it wasn’t clear exactly how much of that money had moved through Binance, the world’s largest crypto trading platform. The Justice Department plans to seize $61m, currently held in a set of accounts overseen by Tether, another crypto firm, the complaint said.

The flow of illicit funds through Binance was flagged internally last year by a group of the exchange’s compliance officials, according to reports in The New York Times and other outlets. Binance fired or suspended the officials after they pointed out the Iran transactions; the company said the discipline had nothing to do with their warnings.

The reports in The Times raised concerns in Congress, where a top Senate Democrat opened an investigation into Binance. For years, the company has struggled to eliminate financial crime on its platform. It paid $4.3bn in penalties in 2023 after pleading guilty to violating US financial laws.

«

Handy to have $4.3bn lying around so you can pay a fine. And what a remarkable correlation between the comparatively small use of crypto and the relatively large number of times its practitioners fall foul of anti-money laundering laws and similar.
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Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad’s corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

There’s kids running up a few hundred bucks on in-app purchases, and then there’s the case of nine-year old YouTuber Mighty Mike Plays, who just cost his dad $118,000 – and possibly his job – after running a bunch of Google ad campaigns for his channel on papa’s company credit card.

The young Roblox and Minecraft YouTuber posted a video Tuesday – or perhaps it’s more apt to say his father Dave posted the video to explain why Might Mike Plays might be going dark for a while. In it, nine-year-old Mike explains “I think this might be the end,” before handing the mic to his dad.

“My son has been running some high-budget campaigns on YouTube that I was pretty much unaware of,” Dave explained after taking the mic.

Dave didn’t figure this out after spotting the charges himself, however. He learned about it after being called into a meeting with his manager and the finance department at his employer, an unnamed “large” company where he works in marketing. Dave was confronted with a spreadsheet with a full breakdown of three weeks of advertising spending from his corporate card that totaled $118K and asked to explain it.

“It dawned on me that, oh crap, this is probably something my son did,” Dave said in the video. “The number sitting on the page in front of me had about five more digits than it should have.” 

«

Sure have moved on from kids hitting credit limits on parents’ cards with in-app purchases in games. Though maybe this is just the same, but the app is different.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Asked to cooperate, AI models created their own slang and phrases reminiscent of James Joyce’s free association novels. CC-licensed photo by Megan Rosenbloom 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. Widdershins. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.

Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink’s announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.

Meink did not reveal any details about the weapons, but the disclosure of their existence underlines a remarkable turnaround in the Pentagon’s thinking about orbital warfare, something no senior official wanted to discuss publicly until a few years ago. Military officials recently have openly discussed orbital combat, defensive countermeasures on satellites, and a new ground-based weapon designed to disable an enemy satellite in orbit.

“There are a lot of factors that roll into how we talk about these things,” Meink said. “We spend a lot of time talking about how we’re going to talk about these things. It is important from a deterrence perspective. But on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”

Meink also did not say when the Space Force deployed the space-based weapons. The development of space technology often takes years, so it is likely the weapons program, whatever it is, spanned multiple presidential administrations.

«

Not satisfied with screwing up the climate, having nuclear weapons in the hands of geriatrics, and pumping money into AI which its makers think could kill us, we’re now adding “wreck absolutely everything in orbit Gravity-style” to the list of ways to kill ourselves. What next – a lasso for passing asteroids?
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US Environmental Protection Agency will erase limits on climate pollution from power plants • The New York Times

Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman:

»

The United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, the Trump administration announced Monday.

The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completed the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston. In a statement, he accused the Obama and Biden administrations of waging a “war on coal” that forced many coal plants to close prematurely.

The EPA minimized the impact of greenhouse gases from American power plants, saying they “have no material impact on global climate change. In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.”

Environmentalists and energy experts strongly disputed these assertions. They noted that if the US power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.

“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The EPA, he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

«

It is true that if CO2 emissions were stopped tomorrow there would be no meaningful climate impact immediately. But it would quickly make a huge difference; CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 120 years. Let’s hope the legal challenges succeed.
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AI models begin chatting in “surreal” dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begin creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. They embraced poetic metaphors and clunky business slang and, critically for attempts to ensure AIs behave safely, their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated.

It comes amid rising concern that as AI models become more powerful – and potentially dangerous – they are becoming harder to monitor. This month, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, warned that confidence in monitoring AIs’ thinking would probably restrict progress in AI development because it was essential for safe development.

Some of the most highly coded phrases unearthed in the tests included the following from a Deepseek model: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” Demurrage is used to describe a tax on idle wealth and was borrowed for common use by the AIs, but the rest of the meaning is elusive.

Another phrase uttered by an Anthropic model read: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” With “cold hands” meaning an independent reviewer, and paper presumably referring to a document, this appeared to mean research that was vetted by three independent reviewers became more accurate.

…“These agents were not instructed to invent a language,” said Dr Satya Nitta, executive chair of Emergence, which examined the language of autonomous agents powered by leading frontier models from the US, China and France. “They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves – and other agents adopted them.”

Asked by the Guardian to review some of the language, Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London, said it was “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien – there’s an Irish surrealist quality to all this … It’s mixing poetic language, technical language and standard metaphor”.

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We’ll know it’s serious if they celebrate Bloomsday.
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There’s a 100% chance AI agents are already ruining the internet • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.

Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.

The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason. 

This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse. 

In the early days, tech journalists have borne a bit of the brunt of annoying AI agents just because there are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage. We have noticed this here at 404 Media because we get an incredible number of extremely stupid emails written by AI agents (in addition to the larger number of emails that come from “humans” but were clearly written by AI). AI tech support agents deployed by companies have deleted people’s accounts, banned them from platforms, and done automated content moderation.

«

Journalists are often in the firing line for new technological, er, let’s call them adaptations. And it makes them grouchy. Everyone else discovers what that’s like soon enough.
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Is science journalism dying? Comparing a “science crash” 40 years ago to today • Nieman Journalism Lab

Bruce Lewenstein and Chris Mooney:

»

in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube — all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.

So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors, and, yes, lawyers.

Much online science information remains unfiltered — pushed by corporations, institutions, and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.

Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism — in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, The Next Journalism, new intellectual models need to emerge.

So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political, and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.

«

The problem is also that good science journalism is overwhelmed by the nonsense pushed by big-name grifters and idiots. Lewenstein and Mooney don’t mention all the rows over Covid, but that surely had a significant effect on people’s trust in what they read or saw. And that is difficult to rebuild. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Government slashes red tape for cross-pavement EV chargers • Fleet World

Natalie Middleton:

»

The Government has confirmed plans to make it simpler for people without driveways to charge an electric vehicle at home, removing the need for a separate planning application for approved cross-pavement charging solutions and associated home charge points.

The change, announced in the Government’s response to its consultation on EV charging rules, will create a new permitted development right covering cross-pavement charging solutions and associated domestic charge points. Local authorities will continue to oversee installations through existing highways permissions and safety safeguards.

The Department for Transport (DfT) will now proceed with the change, with work underway on the necessary legislation. It will also allow homes immediately adjoining the highway to install a cross-pavement solution and associated charge point.

The Government has also announced changes intended to make it easier to build larger and higher-powered public charging sites. Existing planning rights will be expanded to allow multiple units of supporting equipment in non-domestic car parks, while the overall permitted volume will increase from 29 square metres to 45 square metres.

The rule change for cross-pavement chargers is seen as a major victory for the estimated four in 10 UK households who do not have off-street parking. Those drivers can otherwise be heavily reliant on public charging, which can cost up to 10 times more than charging at home.

The legislative update could help tackle this so-called ‘charging divide’. By cutting out the secondary planning application step, the Government aims to give terraced homeowners and residents whose properties directly border public footpaths fairer access to cheap home energy rates without a complex multi-layered approval process.

«

This is great news, but: what the hell took so long? This has been an obvious problem with an obvious solution for ages.
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Is the Trump family preparing to cash out on its own crypto? • The Washington Sun

Jeff Stein:

»

President Donald Trump and his three sons have taken a step that would permit them to cash out the digital “tokens” created by the family’s cryptocurrency firm, intensifying concerns from ethics experts about potential conflicts of interest.

On May 19, four anonymous digital wallets simultaneously moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI — one of the two crypto “tokens” launched by the Trumps’ firm — to a vesting contract. The new contract kicks off a waiting period after which the accounts are able to sell their holdings.

One of the exchanges was for the precise amount of crypto that Trump was awarded when setting up the firm, World Liberty Financial, which he controls. Three of the others match precisely the amount of crypto given to other relatives of the president. Trump’s sons — Don Jr., Eric, and Barron — are the only other family members who have been identified as founders.

The change to the holdings has not been previously reported. In a statement to The Washington Sun, Eric Hageman, a partner at a law firm representing World Liberty Financial, said that new governance rules approved by the company required its founders to move the tokens to a vesting contract and denied that the new vesting contract represented a first step toward a sale of the tokens.

“The premise of your questions is misguided,” Hageman said. “WLFI token holders approved a governance proposal that obligated the founders to burn 10% of their holdings.”

However, three experts who reviewed World Liberty Financial’s governance documents told The Washington Sun that the transaction was optional, and government watchdogs are concerned the Trump family is taking steps to get a payout.

“It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” said Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen.

«

The answer to the headline is always, and obviously, “yes”. The Washington Sun, meanwhile, is staffed by ex-Washington Post journalists who are looking to create a viable alternative to the Bezos-owned property.
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Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

The company said the EU pitched the changes as levelling the playing field for companies to be displayed ​on Google.

However, it said in its view the changes favour price comparison sites, also known as vertical search services (VSS), linked ​to sectors including hotels, airlines and restaurants, such as Expedia or Booking.com. They get more prominence in search results over companies in those sectors that are listed with just a link to their websites, telephone numbers and addresses.

The US tech giant was hit with a €460m ($534m) fine in July for favouring its own services in shopping, ​hotels, transport and sports results in search results, in breach of the EU’s Digital Markets Act seeking to rein in the power of Big Tech.

The European Commission gave it 60 days to comply with the DMA or risk periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of its total worldwide turnover.

The revamped search results will ​highlight one specialised search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. A carousel of hotels, airlines ​and restaurants, for example, will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out.

The rankings will be determined by Google’s algorithm. “To comply with DMA requirements, we’re making significant changes to Search in Europe,” Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president, knowledge & information, said in a statement to Reuters. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans — boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day. Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes.”

Google said past changes to comply ​with the DMA led to a ​30% drop in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses, and the latest changes are expected to hit them. The company said it has tested the changes with millions of users in Europe, which show a high level of dissatisfaction as ​they have to retype queries to find what they want.

EU regulators handed out a separate €430m fine ​in July for restrictions preventing app developers from steering users free of charge to cheaper offers on rival app stores or websites.

«

It’s absolutely amazing how whenever Google is obliged to stop favouring itself in search results, it says the outcome will be worse for everyone else. This seems to defy economic logic.
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Walmart is hiring dedicated GLP-1 coaches to work in its stores • Semafor

Shelly Banjo:

»

Walmart wants to coach Americans on using GLP-1s.

The third-largest pharmacy operator in the US is adding new “health ambassador” positions as part of a pilot program launching in rural locations this week. In addition to consulting on GLP-1s, trained pharmacists will advise shoppers on things like sleep, exercise, and stress management.

As more Americans use GLP-1s — 11% say they’re on or have used the drugs — the pharmacists’ initial focus will be on weight management, diabetes, and maternal help, which affect millions of American families. “Our pharmacists are already getting lots of questions about health navigation,” Dr. Emily Aaronson, Walmart’s chief medical officer, said at Semafor’s Future of Health Forum on Tuesday. “But they also have a lot of other clinical responsibilities, and so this is really about making [health coaching] the primary focus.”

The program signals both a fresh push into rural healthcare and a direct response to the GLP-1 craze, which is rapidly rewiring consumer behavior and transforming how companies relate to customers now filling their carts with entirely different foods, drinks, and personal-care products.

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Peoples’ behaviour really is changing; this is indicative.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After Google mapped a fruit fly’s brain in computer form, people set it to work playing… Doom, of course. CC-licensed photo by Nitin Chandra 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. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

China’s top spy chief warns AI is a threat to party rule • The New York Times

Lily Kuo:

»

China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China…

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Among them: the creation of deepfake video and audio to create a propaganda war against China’s (current) leaders. In that sense much the same as the west, only turbo-powered. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The latest weird thing to play Doom is the mapped-out brain of a fruit fly • CNET

Joe Hindy:

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Doom is such a simple, beautifully designed game that it can run on all sorts of weird things, from pregnancy tests to potatoes. Weird things can play it, too. In an effort to eternally one-up itself, the community has now gotten a map of a fruit fly’s brain to play the 1993 first-person shooter.

It started with Google, which partnered with HHMI Janelia Research and other collaborators to map the brain and central nervous system of a male fruit fly. This mapping, which is weirdly beautiful, contains 11,700 types of neurons and 166,000 neurons overall, breaking the record for the most complex neuron mapping ever done. 

The research is pretty cool: It involved taking very thin slices of a fly’s brain and body, imaging them and using AI to combine the millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes. Google says that “knowing the structure of the brain allows neuroscientists to understand the mechanisms behind brain function.”

It turns out that knowing the structure of the male fruit fly brain can also help modders and developers teach it how to play Doom. A few days after Google dropped its fly brain research, software engineer Alex Wormuth created a simulated fly brain using Google’s map and then set it loose to learn how to play the pioneering FPS. 

The process is quite complicated. Each frame of the game generates 3,335 brightness inputs and 811 R8 color inputs. These inputs are fed into the simulated fruit fly brain, which contains 25.6 million connections. These inputs hit specific neurons based on what the frame shows, and that information is used to determine which controls the fly uses. This process repeats each frame the game runs. 

It even works with pain. Wormuth says that nonfatal damage targets the PPL101 dopamine receptors, which control hunger and aggression in real fruit flies. 

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At this rate we’re going to meet aliens and our first question to them will be “can you play Doom?”
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Speed up electricity grid upgrade or else face higher bills, warns UK watchdog • The Guardian

Alex Daniel:

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Consumers will pay higher energy bills unless the UK government speeds up work on a vast programme of upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the switch to renewables, the public spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said that without faster action the extra costs associated with managing the ageing power network, which are ultimately passed on to the public, could reach £7.8bn a year by 2030.

A £70bn programme is under way to modernise Great Britain’s network of pylons, overhead lines and substations so that more power can be carried from wind and solar farms and other clean energy sources to homes.

Labour has said its plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 will keep consumer bills lower than they would otherwise be, but the NAO said that if the planned upgrades did not happen fast enough then bills could rise instead.

Of the 80 projects it said were needed to meet the target, just 16 are finished and most are in their early stages.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said the planned upgrades would “test systems not designed for activity at this pace or scale”. He added “Value for money now depends on delivery. Failure to implement these necessary grid upgrades will hamper economic growth as well as increase consumer bills.”

When the grid cannot carry enough electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, the system operator pays windfarms to switch off and gas plants to switch on elsewhere to meet the demand. These so-called constraint costs are added to bills, and reached £1.9bn in 2025-26. Without faster upgrades, the NAO said, they could climb as high as £7.8bn by 2030.

Meanwhile, the £70bn investment will require transmission owners – the private companies that build and manage the network – to more than quadruple their annual spending on upgrades, from £2.5bn in 2025-26 to more than £11bn by 2027-28.

Ofgem, the industry regulator, believes households would be about £30 a year better off if the upgrades happen at the required pace because of the reduced curtailment costs. But the NAO said meeting that schedule would be “very challenging”.

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Electric cars gain a 33% cost advantage over gasoline cars in Europe • Review-Energy

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Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are strengthening their economic advantage over conventional vehicles in Europe as battery costs continue to fall and fuel prices remain high, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

The organisation’s EV Transition Check 2026 finds that BEVs were on average 33% cheaper to drive than gasoline-powered cars in the European Union in 2025. The gap widened further in early 2026, when the oil crisis pushed the energy costs of combustion-engine cars up by between 12% and 36%, while the energy costs of battery electric cars remained largely unchanged.

The report assesses the progress of Europe’s road transport transition towards zero emissions, covering passenger cars as well as trucks and buses. It examines vehicle affordability, running costs, charging infrastructure, emissions, manufacturing and the wider competitiveness of the European automotive sector.

The economic advantage of electric cars is no longer limited to their lower running costs. According to the ICCT, BEVs had already reached upfront price parity with comparable internal combustion engine vehicles in Germany in the three largest car segments in 2025.

The analysis is based on price data covering around 100,000 vehicles in Germany, Europe’s largest automotive market. The number of BEV models available in the country also quadrupled between 2020 and 2025, reaching around 160 models.

Battery costs are a major factor behind the change. Global battery costs fell by 35% between 2020 and 2025. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted BEV prices in Germany, accounting for vehicle characteristics such as range, declined by 18%, while prices for internal combustion engine cars increased by 2%.

The ICCT says the difference between the decline in battery costs and the evolution of vehicle prices indicates that there could still be room for further reductions in BEV prices.

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Batteries getting cheaper (thanks, China); fossil fuels getting dearer (thanks, Trump and Netanyahu).
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Commercial rooftops could provide major boost to UK solar capacity • EIBI

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A new report, commissioned by Real Estate:UK, has found that the UK’s untapped commercial rooftops could accommodate more than 60GW of additional solar capacity – equivalent to almost 20 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations in terms of generating capacity.

These figures are based on data in From Opportunity to Infrastructure: Scaling Rooftop Solar in Commercial Real Estate, a report produced by Cushman & Wakefield which assesses the potential for solar generation across commercial real estate.

Real Estate:UK says that, if utilised correctly, commercial rooftops could massively increase UK renewable energy production, fast-track the UK’s path to net zero, improve national energy security, reduce the need for solar deployment on agricultural land, and drastically reduce energy costs for occupiers amid ongoing energy price uncertainty.

The report has found that less than 10% of suitable commercial building roofspace has been utilised for solar generation to date, providing just 3-5GW of solar capacity. While solar technology is widely championed in principle, its deployment remains significantly below its technical potential, particularly across the industrial and logistics real estate sector.

Unlocking the remaining 90% could provide a vast new source of home-grown renewable generation, with the potential for more than 60 gigawatts (GW) of untapped solar capacity to be harnessed across UK commercial real estate. It would also significantly reduce energy costs for occupiers and create additional revenue streams for landlords whilst rapidly decarbonising the UK’s built environment, which currently emits 25% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This latent capacity (60 GW) is the equivalent of powering approximately 20 million National Grid-enabled UK homes per year, or more than 10 times the AI data-centre capacity the Government expects the UK to need by 2030.

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Even if it’s only one-tenth of that, it’s a substantial amount of generation which benefits everyone. Add in batteries, and you’re changing things dramatically.
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Photosynthesis: use your iPhone’s best lenses at the same time

Sam Shepherd:

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Photosynthesis is a groundbreaking camera app for iPhone that takes photos from two lenses at once, then stitches the results into one extraordinary photo, all with just one tap of the shutter.

iPhone Pro (3 rear lenses) users can choose between 1x + Zoom, or 1x + 0.5x, while regular (2 lens) iPhone users can take 1x + 0.5x photos.

Photosynthesis enables you to use 100% of your camera, combining the scope of the wider lens with the detail of the closer one. The app uses no generative AI whatsoever, using only the pixels captured by each lens to form a seamless composite result.

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I had to think about this for a bit, but the demonstration photos show – via a slider – what this is about: essentially, capturing all the detail that all the lenses see and putting it into a single photo. Promising. (There’s a cheap one-time lifetime upgrade on offer if you buy before October 1.)
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A college girl was exploited on camera. A network of anonymous men got to work • WIRED

Ej Dickson with a worrying investigation into the “burnerverse”:

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Over the next 24 hours, Kowalski sat paralyzed on her couch as anonymous people on the internet endlessly harassed her; they posted her old photos, her dad’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. They called and texted her parents all through the night, saying things like, “I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her”; one anonymous man told Kowalski’s father he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV while playing the call live on Spaces, X’s live chat feature. Another posted on X placing bets on whether, by the end of the coming week, she’d start an OnlyFans or kill herself.

Kowalski called her best friend, Lexie Blake, who was then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. She “wasn’t even really saying words,” Blake recounts. “She was just sobbing, hysterical.” When Kowalski’s father showed up at her apartment, she was too humiliated to face him. She tried to jump out of her fifth-floor window.

By Monday afternoon, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag. Content about her—much of it showing her incapacitated, naked, and engaging in sex acts—had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.

Kowalski had heard about this happening to other college girls before; one of them, a University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) student named Mary Kate Cornett, had been doxed in the same way nine months prior. These campaigns were the work of the burnerverse (or “beev,” or “BV”), a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X, mostly operated by students and alumni, with the primary purpose of discussing college sports.

But Kowalski was learning in real time that, outside of talking shit about athletes and posting photos of crushed red Solo cups, this faceless corner of the internet has another mission: destroying the lives of young women.

…The women targeted by the burnerverse were private citizens before their names, rumors, explicit images, or videos went viral. WIRED has identified 10 women who have been doxed by the burnerverse, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms. Sometimes, the content has even made national news, with aggregation websites like TheSportsGrail or Barstool Sports employees amplifying the victim’s humiliation.

Communities of burner accounts crop up around most large schools with prominent sports teams. Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. Kowalski’s video went viral within the SEC burnerverse before spreading nationally.

Like most online communities, the SEC burnerverse has its own vernacular, consisting of allusions to frat boy culture.

…The men’s ages range widely. One burner fan account for an East Coast university team tells WIRED that in his group DM of around 200 people, there are members as young as 15 and as old as their mid-40s.

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EU is set to propose ban on social media and AI chatbots for under-15s • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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The European Union will propose ​a ban restricting under 15s from social media, video sharing platforms, AI chatbots and online games, in the most sweeping plan yet to protect children from online dangers, a European Commission document seen by Reuters shows.

Concerns have mounted globally about the impact on children’s health and safety of major outlets, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and ChatGPT.

The ​EU proposal is part of an EU Kids Act that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ​and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen will present on Thursday. The former may announce some details in her State of the Union address on upcoming EU policy on Wednesday.

“The Union’s approach should allow ​minors to benefit from the huge potential of digital services, while protecting them from abuse and exploitation. It needs ​to limit the access of tech companies to our children, and not the other way around,” the document said.

The Commission’s proposal, which will also cover video gaming platforms, allows for gradual access to the various services according to age, while the obligations imposed ​on the companies will depend on the type of service and the age of the children.

The Commission declined to ​comment.

According to the document, companies will have to pay a supervisory fee to fund regulators’ enforcement and supervision.

Children from 15 onwards can set up their own accounts under the proposal, while children between 13 and 14 can ask parents to open introductory accounts for social media and video-sharing platforms under parental control and with limited contacts and strict time limits.

Accounts for children between 3 and 12 will be fully controlled by parents and ​will only be for ​child-friendly services with strict safety standards, the document said. Under-3s would have no access to the services.

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The Tobacco Moment is upon us, it seems. Though only for children presently. (Smoking products couldn’t be sold to those under 16 from 1908; suggestions of its harmful effects were prevalent around the same time, but rigorous proof not until 1950.)
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This software engineer is taking Google to the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify patent law • GeekWire

Grace Kaste:

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Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.

The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.

When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.

But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.

Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.

Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.

“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”

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This does have the potential to be rendered totally moot once AIs are writing most code, given that that can’t be copyrighted. (But could it be patented, since the human has thought of the idea – the inventive step – behind the prompt?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified