Once upon a time Allbirds sold shoes. But that’s so 20th century; now it’s decided to become an AI server space rental company. CC-licensed photo by Joe Flood on Flickr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sean Hollister:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lola Murti and Gabrielle Fonrouge:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Ouellette:

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

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

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

Drew Breunig:

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

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

This calculus has a few immediate takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Mark Sweney and Geraldine McKelvie:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Reuters China, Nichola Groom and Norihiko Shirouzu:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

John Burn-Murdoch:

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

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

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

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

Molly White:

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

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

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

«

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

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

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

Matt Shea and Laurie Kalus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The end of range anxiety is in sight • Heatmap News

Andrew Moseman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

John Travis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jared Perlo and David Ingram:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Gabrielle Canon:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Radden Keefe:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

Your photos reveal a lot of private information.

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

See what they see.

«

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

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

Do you find two-dimensional chess too challenging? Don’t worry – the one-dimensional version is waiting for you. CC-licensed photo by Brian Cantoni on Flickr.

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

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

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

Kate Knibbs:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Bill Peters and Tomi Kilgore:

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

None of that has gone as planned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rowan Monk:

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

Rules: there are three pieces in 1D chess:

King: can move one square in any direction.

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

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

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

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

«

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

Shaurya Malwa:

»

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

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

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

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

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

The network is already showing stress.

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

«

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

Marty Stempniak:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Works in Progress and Benedict Springbett:

»

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

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

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

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

These cultural explanations are wrong.

«

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

Poe Zhao:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Divsha Bhat:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Angel Au-Yeung and Robbie Whelan:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jessica Rawnsley:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony Cutherbertson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Peter Campbell:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

There are three stages:

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Aisha Down:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Noam Scheiber:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Hollis Robbins:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Financial Investigations Team:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jason Snell:

»

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

»

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

«

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

Aisha Down and Alexandra Topping:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Ben Lefebvre and Phelim Kine:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Om Malik:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Bryce Elder:

»

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

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

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

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

It was the one with the beard.

«

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

Dan Primack:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

«

«

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

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Florian Maiwald:

»

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

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

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

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

»

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

«

«

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

Caleb Jacobs:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Hettena:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is the laws of physics.

«

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

The blue light from your phone isn’t making you sleep worse, despite what people say. Science proves it. CC-licensed photo by janet isn’t real 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. Eye-opening. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The blue light from your phone isn’t ruining your sleep • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

»

The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad’s LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body’s natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It’s not.

“This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work,” says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn’t bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.

It’s true that our screens are bluer. Modern screens and lightbulbs use LEDs, which cannot produce pure white light. Instead, they use blue LEDs and cover some of them with a chemical called yellow phosphor. The blue and yellow mix together and trick your brain into seeing white, but extra blue always leaks out. 

And blue light really can influence your sleep. Zeitzer says that’s mostly because you have a light-sensitive protein in your eyes called melanopsin which plays a key role in your sleep system. “And melanopsin is a blue sensitive protein, which basically means that it is most sensitive to blue light,” he says. Melanopsin reacts to other colours of light too, the effect of blue is just a bit stronger.

“But the amount of light emitted from our screens is really inconsequential,” says Zeitzer. Your life doesn’t match the conditions of many blue light studies. “We bring someone into the laboratory, and they are exposed to very dim light all day long. And then they are given a bright light stimulus,” he says. Under those circumstances, blue light makes people go haywire, but it doesn’t reflect typical experience of human life.

After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.

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A worthwhile piece of journalism. The thing that’s probably making it hard to sleep is what you’re reading on the screen, not the colour of the screen.
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Meta is reentering the AI race with a new model called Muse Spark • The Verge

Hayden Field:

»

Meta Superintelligence Labs is launching its first model since Mark Zuckerberg spent billions overhauling the company’s AI efforts. Called Muse Spark, the model now powers the Meta AI app and the Meta AI website in the US, per the company’s announcement. In the coming weeks, Meta says, it will appear in WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta’s smart glasses, as well as roll out in other countries.

Like Google Gemini, which easily integrates into Google’s product suite, Meta touts Muse Spark as “purpose-built for Meta’s products.” The model, the first in a new series, will also be available to some of Meta’s partners in private preview” via the API. The company promises the ability to run multiple AI sub-agents to handle queries better and faster, as well as support for multimodal input that includes both text and images. The latter is particularly relevant to Meta’s AI-powered camera glasses, which it’s bet on as the (latest) future of computing. It lets users toggle between a faster “Instant” mode and a “Thinking” mode that’s supposed to deliver more thoroughly reasoned results, similar to options like Microsoft’s Think Deeper.

Meta also highlighted that Muse Spark can answer “complex questions in science, math, and health.” Health-focused AI chatbots have been a controversial topic in recent months, as they handle sensitive personal data and can propagate misinformation. Meta said that Muse Spark’s multimodal perception is “especially valuable for health” and can “navigate health questions with more detailed responses, including some questions involving images and charts.” Meta may be looking to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, which both debuted in January. In its announcement, it showed its chatbot estimating a calorie count for a meal — a popular, but often hit-or-miss, use of AI tech.

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A new chatbot? Must be a day with a Y in it. Perhaps this is how it felt when the PC revolution first happened and there were scores of new machines from new companies released every year. But software seems to come along dramatically faster.
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Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

One of the world’s three frontier labs has now created a model it says is too dangerous to release to the general public. These dangers emerged not from any specialized cyber training but from the same general improvements that every other lab is currently pursuing. As a result, models with similar capabilities may soon be accessible to criminals, hackers, and nation states — or even more broadly via open source models.

Already, Anthropic said, the model has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, and in many cases developed related exploits. Among them: a vulnerability in OpenBSD, a security-focused open source operating system, that had escaped detection for 27 years; another flaw in the video encoder FFmpeg that had escaped detection in 5 million previous automated tests; and “several” vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, which could be exploited to take complete control of a user’s machine.

“Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely,” the company wrote. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.” 

In a video that Anthropic made to accompany the announcement, researchers say that Mythos is more dangerous largely due to its advanced reasoning capabilities. While current models are capable of identifying high-severity vulnerabilities, Mythos might identify five separate vulnerabilities in a single piece of software and then chain them together into a uniquely dangerous new attack. Coupled with models’ growing ability to work without supervision for extended periods of time, Anthropic said we have reached an inflection point in cybersecurity risks. 

…Alex Stamos, chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Corridor, told me that Glasswing is “a big deal, and really necessary.”

“We only have something like six months before the open-weight models catch up to the foundation models in bug finding,” said Stamos, who previously led security at Facebook and Yahoo. “At which point every ransomware actor will be able to find and weaponize bugs without leaving traces for law enforcement to find (and with minimal cost).”

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Stamos is definitely worth listening to. If he says it’s bad, then it’s bad.
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Tankers passing through Strait of Hormuz will have to pay cryptocurrency toll • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Alice Hancock, Verity Ratcliffe, and Rachel Millard:

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Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire.

Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT on Wednesday that Iran wanted to collect tolling fees from any tanker passing and to assess each ship.

“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state.

“Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush,” he added.

Decisions on the conditions for passing the strait are taken by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Hosseini’s remarks suggest Iran will require any tankers to use the northerly route close to its coastline, raising questions over whether Western or Gulf state-linked vessels will be willing to risk transit.

Later on Wednesday Iran said it was halting the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Before the halt Hosseini said that any tanker passing must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.

He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.

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Estimates are that this will raise around $70bn annually for Iran, but it won’t have to take the money in dollars: it could trade it with China or Russia, which would be a subtle way to undermine the dollar on world markets.
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Exclusive: ‘Ghost Murmur,’ a never-before used secret tool, deployed to find lost airman in Iran in daring mission • NY Post

Steven Nelson:

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The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned.

The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said.

It was the tool’s first use in the field by the spy agency — and was alluded to Monday afternoon by President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a White House briefing.

“It’s like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert,” a source briefed on the program told The Post. “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

This source and another with knowledge of Lockheed Martin intelligence collection tools told The Post that Ghost Murmur was developed by Skunk Works, the aerospace giant’s secretive advanced development division. The company declined to comment.

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First I had heard of QM, but it does seem to be a thing in navigation and multiple other fields.
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China starts sea trials for largest electric-powered containership • Maritime Executive

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China’s first 10,000-ton electric containership is beginning sea trials. The shipyard is billing the ship as the largest of its kind and a further breakthrough in short-sea shipping.

The Ning Yuan Dian Kun was launched in September 2025 and has completed its outfitting, berth tests, and mooring trials. The ship set out from its builders, Jiangxi Jiangxin Shipbuilding, on February 1. It will be off Shanghai, undergoing its trials between February 6 and 13.

They plan to assess the battery power supply as well as propulsion performance during the sea trials. They will also be testing the ship’s autonomous navigation systems.

The vessel measures nearly 128 meters (420 feet) in length. It has a capacity of 740 TEU [twenty-foot equivalent unit, ie shipping container]. It is reported to have a maximum speed of 11.5 knots.

The power system uses 10 containerized batteries capable of generating up to 19,000 KWh. The batteries will drive two 875 KW permanent magnet propulsion motors, and it will be possible to either recharge the batteries using high-voltage shore connections or quickly swap the batteries for charged batteries. In addition, the vessel has photovoltaic power cells to provide additional power.

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740TEU makes this ship a “small feeder” for “regional routes and smaller ports”. Properly big ships are anything from 5,000 to 24,000TEUs.

Even so, this is ambitious and interesting.
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British computer scientist denies he is bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

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A British computer scientist has insisted he is not the elusive developer of bitcoin, after a report claimed to unmask him as its creator.

A story in the New York Times details a years-long effort to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious author of the bitcoin white paper which laid the theoretical foundations for modern digital currencies.

It names Adam Back, a London-born computer scientist and entrepreneur. In a thread on X, Back promptly denied being the mysterious – and presumably ultra-wealthy – technologist.

“I also don’t know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed [as] a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity,” he wrote.

Nakamoto’s true identity has been the subject of speculation for years. Previous attempts to unmask him have pointed to Nick Szabo, a “reclusive” Hungarian-American computer scientist; Hal Finney, a software developer; and an “unknown Australian genius” who ended up being a fraud.

This time, the trail pointed the journalist to Back, who was a member of an online anarchist cryptography community called the cypherpunks in the early 1990s.

John Carreyrou unearthed similarities between Back and Nakamoto by combing through decades of old internet postings and analysing commonalities in their public writings – offhand comments such as “I’m better with code than I am with words” – and shared niche interests.

He compared timelines – Back suddenly went dormant for some years on cryptography-related forums, when Satoshi emerged as a presence – and used artificial intelligence to compare Back and Satoshi’s use of language

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The fun thing with this story is that people who claim to be Satoshi are demonstrated not to be, and people who are claimed by others to be deny it. The key qualification for being Satoshi is not to want to be identified as Satoshi; the key disqualification is wanting to be. It’s cryptocurrency’s Catch-22.
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New revelations reignite crypto scandal involving Argentina’s President Milei • The New York Times

Daniel Politi and Emma Bubola:

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President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation.

Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a private venture and had no connection to the digital coin called $Libra.

New evidence is now raising questions about his assertion.

Phone logs from a federal investigation by Argentine prosecutors into the coin’s collapse show seven phone calls between Mr. Milei and one of the entrepreneurs behind the cryptocurrency on the night in 2025 when Mr. Milei posted about $Libra on X. The contents of the calls, which took place before and after Mr. Milei’s post, are not known.

But the phone logs — which were obtained by The New York Times and first reported by a local cable news channel, C5N — suggest a greater degree of communication between Mr. Milei and the entrepreneurs who launched the token than what the president has publicly acknowledged. Newly uncovered messages also suggest Mr. Milei received regular payments from one of the entrepreneurs while he was a congressman.

Mr. Milei has not publicly commented on the call logs and other documents, and he did not respond to a request for comment. He is named as a person of interest in the federal prosecutor’s continuing investigation into the digital coin, according to court documents reviewed by The Times, but has not been formally charged with any crime.

The latest revelations have revived a scandal that threatens the very foundation of a president who rose to power and was elected president in 2023 by attacking a political class he called corrupt.

«

How surprising. The “value” of the “coin” dropped by $250m from its peak – which means, equally, that $250m ended up in the pockets of a smaller group of people who sold it.
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Genetic predictors of GLP1 receptor agonist weight loss and side effects • Nature

Adam Auton et al:

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The development of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) receptor agonists, including semaglutide and tirzepatide, has transformed the clinical management of overweight and obesity. However, substantial inter-person variability exists in both weight loss efficacy and the incidence of side effects. To investigate the genetic basis of this variability, here we conduct a genome-wide association study of self-reported weight loss and treatment-related side effects in 27,885 people following GLP1 receptor agonist therapy.

We identify a missense variant in GLP1R that is associated significantly with increased efficacy of GLP1 medications (P = 2.9 × 10−10), with an additional −0.76 kg of weight loss expected per copy of the effect allele. Furthermore, we identify associations linking variation in both GLP1R and GIPR to GLP1 medication-related nausea or vomiting, with the GIPR association being restricted to people using tirzepatide.

We incorporate these findings into a broader model of GLP1 medication response, and demonstrate the ability to stratify patients by efficacy and side effect risk. These findings provide direct genetic evidence that variation in the drug target genes contributes to inter-person variability in response and lay the foundation for precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity.

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In other words: there’s a genetic variation that makes GLP-1 drugs more or less effective. Possibly they’ll give people a cheek swab before they start them on these drugs to figure out dosage in future.
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Salem’s Lot: Gulf War update; the Purge of senior US military officers; a US fossil fuel reliance fever dream • JP Morgan

Michael Cembalest:

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The notion that the US is insulated from market consequences of the Strait of Hormuz being closed is mostly false. While US natural gas prices have actually declined this year, most other hydrocarbon-related fuels and refined product prices have increased materially as shown in the first chart2. In some instances, US price increases are even higher than increases elsewhere in the world, as shown in the second chart. For example: US crude oil, wholesale gasoline, naphtha, shipping fuel and certain petrochemical price increases this year are even higher than price increases in Europe and Asia. And even though the US is a net exporter of jet fuel, US jet fuel prices have risen by around two thirds of international increases.

Bottom line: US fossil fuel independence is not as much of an economic firewall as you might think.

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Never linked to a JP Morgan note before, and this one was written before Tuesday’s short-lived “ceasefire”, but all the points in it remain true, notably if the strait of Hormuz remains closed or subject to tariffs. Sorry, taxes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The surprising popularity of the new MacBook Neo has created a dilemma for Apple’s executives, who have to decide whether to satisfy would-be customers or preserve financial margins. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Hawk 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. Which button? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Looking up information on Google today means confronting AI Overviews, the Gemini-powered search robot that appears at the top of the results page. AI Overviews has had a rough time since its 2024 launch, attracting user ire over its scattershot accuracy, but it’s getting better and usually provides the right answer. That’s a low bar, though. A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to assess the accuracy of AI Overviews, finding it’s right 90% of the time. The flip side is that 1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.

The Times conducted this analysis with the help of a startup called Oumi, which itself is deeply involved in developing AI models. The company used AI tools to probe AI Overviews with the SimpleQA evaluation, a common test to rank the factuality of generative models like Gemini. Released by OpenAI in 2024, SimpleQA is essentially a list of more than 4,000 questions with verifiable answers that can be fed into an AI.

Oumi began running its test last year when Gemini 2.5 was still the company’s best model. At the time, the benchmark showed an 85% accuracy rate. When the test was rerun following the Gemini 3 update, AI Overviews answered 91% of the questions correctly. If you extrapolate this miss rate out to all Google searches, AI Overviews is generating tens of millions of incorrect answers per day.

The report includes several examples of where AI Overviews went wrong. When asked for the date on which Bob Marley’s former home became a museum, AI Overviews cited three pages, two of which didn’t discuss the date at all. The final one, Wikipedia, listed two contradictory years, and AI Overviews confidently chose the wrong one. The benchmark also prompts models to produce the date on which Yo Yo Ma was inducted into the classical music hall of fame. While AI Overviews cited the organization’s website that listed Ma’s induction, it claimed there’s no such thing as the Classical Music Hall of Fame.

Google doesn’t much like this test. Google spokesperson Ned Adriance tells the Times that Google believes SimpleQA contains incorrect information.

«

Wonder if Google used Gemini to determine SimpleQA’s accuracy? And the problem of billions of queries per day leads to colossal numbers of incorrect answers – placed, by design, right at the top of the page. You could put it anywhere, Google! You could put the Gemini answers at the bottom or side of the page, or require an action like clicking on a disclosure triangle to see them. But no, you know that a proportion of them are wrong and you put them front and centre, almost impossible to remove.

Once again, the internet doesn’t reward accuracy.
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Social media is turning into a freak show • Silver Bulletin

Nate Silver:

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Having lived through several eras of social media and web publishing business models, I tend to think of them as ecological systems. There are founder effects, predators and prey, and a lot of different survival strategies, often including mimicry. Most of all, there are selection effects. Some “species” are particularly fit for the peculiarities of the ecosystem and the economic incentives it produces, and within six months to a year, they tend to crowd out all others.

During the Peak Facebook Era, there was sometimes an air of faux scientific precision about the efforts to manipulate News Feed. I have no doubt that some of the people engaged in Moneyball-like algorithmic optimization tactics during this period were smart about it. But it’s important to emphasize that these ecosystems often reflect the “rules of the game” and the quirks of the algorithm rather than deeper truths about human nature or what people really want to read. The hack-ish strategies are often highly fragile and don’t survive changes in the environment. Few of the businesses that were considered hot shit during the mid-2010s are thriving today.

…X, despite its much larger overall reach, also feels increasingly siloed. There are rarely consensus “main characters” anymore, and although I still do get dunked on more than your average bear, I usually discover this only when it’s force-fed to me by the “For You” tab; there’s often no sign of the pile-on from the 1,736 accounts that I follow. On the flip side, even when a tweet seems to generate a lot of favorable buzz on Twitter — increasingly rare — it’s at best a weak signal for predicting the metrics we really care about, namely engagement on Silver Bulletin itself and especially new subscriptions.

And “siloed” is on a good day: at other times, Twitter feels like a ghost town. It’s still useful for some topics: the AI discourse on the platform is often relatively robust, for instance. But for something like the war in Iran, it’s next to useless. Links to external websites are substantially punished, and none of the workarounds are particularly helpful. So the tangible rewards from still having three million followers can be surprisingly marginal.

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There’s never been a social network that rewarded accuracy; Silver points to the many go-arounds there have been of trying this and trying that, which usually ends up with a pivot to video and then a pivot to AI slop.
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How many products does Microsoft have named ‘Copilot’? I mapped every one • Tey Bannerman

Tey Bannerman:

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A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t… because the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things.

Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops – and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.

I went looking for the full list. No single source had all of them. Not even Microsoft’s own website or documentation. So I pieced it together from product pages, launch announcements, and marketing materials.

The visualisation below maps every one, grouped by category, with lines showing how they connect. It’s interactive – click around. Try to find a pattern. I couldn’t.

«

But after he’d made the diagram (it’s lovely, go and look) he discovered there are even more. Microsoft really has a talent for hammering a brand name into the ground. Remember Windows? It’s like they learnt their trade from political messaging, where you say the phrase again and again and again until everyone in the world is sick of it.
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Apple in talks to boost Mac Neo production as sales exceed expectations • Culpium

Tim Culpan:

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Apple is in talks with suppliers to handle a massive dilemma posed by sales of its MacBook Neo that have surpassed expectations, I am told. The question they must answer, and soon, is whether to boost production of the hit laptop, or let their inventory of parts run out, my sources tell me.

MacBook Neo comes in four colors and two configurations, but each model runs on the same processor: the A18 Pro. That’s the chip used in the previous generation’s iPhone 16 Pro, whereas the latest device uses the A19 Pro chip.

But as Ben Thompson at Stratechery astutely observed, the MacBook Neo doesn’t use fresh batches of A18 Pro chips; they’re leftovers from the original production run.

MacBook Neo was designed around useable but leftover chips which would otherwise have been scrapped — remember, Apple are the masters at recycling! But with MacBook Neo being insanely popular, the stock of those binned chips will run out before demand gets satisfied.

Prior to the dilemma posed by this runaway success, Apple was only planning to have suppliers build a new Neo next year, powered by the current generation of binned A19 Pro chips, I am told.

Final assembly of the MacBook Neo is evenly divided between Quanta and Foxconn at factories in Vietnam and China, and the initial plan was to build around 5 to 6 million units before calling it a day, I am told. Right now, suppliers are unsure whether to expect production to continue beyond the original plan.

Leaving all that demand on the table is a painful prospect for Apple executives, but going back for another round would risk killing the sweet profit margins it enjoyed on making a device with “effectively free” chips.

MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro was — past tense — built on TSMC’s 3nm process (N3E). That node is now hugely popular and effectively sold out. Apple could, in theory, beg TSMC CEO CC Wei for a few hot lots — paying a premium to jump the queue — but that would almost certainly kill profits on the low-cost laptop. Alternatively, it could crib from its own wafer allocation originally planned for other devices, but the cost would still be higher than what it paid for the first batch of A18 Pro wafers (and infinitely higher than “free”).

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Tim Cook must be inconsolable: a new product that’s too successful, and which will kill profit margins if you give customers what they want.
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Bloomberg: Apple’s foldable iPhone is on track for September after all • Sherwood News

Jon Keegan:

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Hours after a report from Nikkei Asia said Apple was encountering engineering problems with the novel design that could lead to a delayed launch, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that sources within Apple say the premium foldable iPhone is still on track to launch in September, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Max.

Shares of Apple had plunged more than 5% on word of a possible delay, but pared losses on Gurman’s story.

According to the report, the foldable iPhone will cost more than $2,000 and will be a key part of the company’s plan to revamp the iPhone lineup.

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So that went from “delayed” to “not at all delayed, nothing to see here” pretty rapidly. Still not sure who will actually have a need (as opposed to desire) for it. And of course developers will all figure out everything about it from the developer conference in June.
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Battery storage is now cheap enough to unleash India’s full solar potential • Ember

Kostantsa Rangelova, Duttatreya Das and Dave Jones:

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In India, solar has the potential to become a dominant source of electricity. Ember’s modelling shows that solar plus batteries could supply 90% of India’s electricity demand at a levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of INR 5.06/kWh ($56/MWh). While higher shares, including 100%, are technically possible, moving closer to 100% would be costlier. Each additional percentage point from 90% requires increasingly more solar and storage, leading to higher system costs. Moreover, with other existing and planned clean sources such as wind, hydro and nuclear, the country would not need 100% solar.

In 2024, electricity demand was just over 2,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). Meeting 90% of this requires 930 GW of solar capacity – less than one-third of India’s 3,343 GW of estimated feasible ground-mounted solar potential. It also requires around 2,560 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery storage. In other words, 4.9 GW solar capacity and 13.5 GWh battery capacity for every 1 GW annual average demand load.

During January-April, when solar radiation is typically above the annual average, batteries can shift abundant daytime solar into the evening and night so that solar and storage meet 100% of demand almost every day. During peak summer (May–June), when demand is around 10% above average, they still meet about 88% of demand.

The biggest challenge comes during periods when solar output is weak for several consecutive days. Batteries can move solar generation from daytime to after sunset, but they cannot carry large amounts of solar output across extended cloudy spells. This is why the main constraint is not battery capacity itself, but lower solar generation during the monsoon months. In July, when cloudy monsoon conditions severely reduce solar output, solar and batteries meet 66% of demand.

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That’s the problem: the cloudy days. But even so, it’s all encouraging. Just needs a gigantic investment in batteries!
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Exclusive: Russia supplies Iran with cyber support, spy imagery to hone attacks, Ukraine says • Reuters

Tom Balmforth and John Irish:

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Russian satellites have made dozens of detailed imagery surveys of military facilities and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran ​strike US forces and other targets, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment.

The conclusions, reviewed by Reuters, also found that Russian and Iranian hackers were collaborating in the cyber domain. They represent the most detailed account yet of how Russia has provided secret support to Iran since Israel and the US launched their assault on February 28.

Russian satellites, the undated assessment said, made at least 24 surveys of areas in 11 Middle Eastern countries from March 21 to 31, covering 46 “objects”, including US and other military bases and sites including airports and oil fields. Within days of being surveyed, military bases and headquarters were targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, the assessment said, in what it described as ​a clear pattern.

A Western military source and a separate regional security source told Reuters that their intelligence also indicated intense Russian satellite activity in the region and said that imagery had been shared ​with Iran.

Nine surveys covered parts of Saudi Arabia, including five over the King Khalid Military City near Hafar Al-Batin, in what appeared to be an effort to locate elements of the US-made THAAD air defence system, the Ukrainian assessment said.

Areas of Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also came under satellite surveillance twice, while places in Israel, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Naval ​Support Facility Diego Garcia did once, it said.

In an emerging trend, the assessment added, Russian satellites were actively surveying the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for a fifth of global oil and LNG flows where Iran ​has imposed a de facto blockade to all but “non-hostile vessels”.

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It would be surprising if Russia wasn’t surveying the area, for its own uses quite apart from Iran’s. But it clearly wants to side with Iran, because that means trouble for the US.
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A harrowing race against time to find a downed US airman in Iran • The New York Times

Greg Jaffe, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes:

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Battered by the force from his ejection, the weapons officer waited. He knew that both US and Iranian forces were racing to find him.

A military official described the weapons officer’s signaling as intermittent. The first task for the military was making sure that the person signalling was the weapons officer and not someone in Iran who had found his equipment.

At its campus in Langley, Virginia, the CIA was developing a deception plan to buy the US military and the airman some time. They spread word in Iran that the airman had been found and was being moved out of the country in a ground convoy. The hope was that the Iranians would shift their search from the place where the airman was thought to be and focus instead on the roads out of the region.

The CIA operation appeared to cause confusion among the Iranian forces hunting for the airman, according to a senior administration official.

The Iranians, however, intensified their search, calling on the public via the state’s primary broadcaster to capture the “enemy’s pilot or pilots” and turn them over alive to security forces for a reward.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump was escalating his threats against Iran, vowing to blow up the country’s electrical infrastructure unless its leaders opened the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. “Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

At that moment, US military officials were in the final stages of preparing a vast and complex rescue mission that involved about 100 Special Operations forces, led by elements of SEAL Team 6, with Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers on standby if needed. A far larger conventional force made up of helicopters, surveillance planes, fighters and aerial tankers was readied to provide support.

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The CIA move is rather neat, and a clever way to find out about the signal’s holder. Note of course that Trump kept posting through it. One gets the idea that the military is a lot smarter than the politicians here. (Gift link.)
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“Doesn’t make sense to hold on to a combustion engine”: used EV prices rise as Australia’s fuel crisis hits • The Guardian

Jonathan Barrett:

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When a used vehicle rolls into a car yard, the usual trajectory for its price tag is down if it lingers too long.

That is the (almost) iron law of the secondhand market – until the oil crisis hit and dealers started raising asking prices for used electric vehicles.

Jake Sale, founder of Perth-based MotorMetrics, says lowered prices are not unusual but “up is very unique”.

“It’s specifically EVs that buyers are looking for.”

MotorMetrics’ live analysis of vehicle inventory shows that secondhand dealers have repriced a variety of used EVs, with Tesla’s Model Y up more than 6% in the last two weeks of March. The Tesla Model 3, MG4 and Polestar 2, which are all electric, have also risen.

“That’s an early indication that dealers are confident to put the price up, and it’s likely that incoming stock will be at or around that new price,” Sale says. MotorMetrics data also shows that stock of used EVs is running low.

Meanwhile, several types of used diesel and petrol vehicles have had their sticker prices dramatically cut, in some cases by up to 20%.

The huge enthusiasm for EVs sparked by the oil crunch has surprised even their most ardent supporters, with car yards, brokers and now, secondhand dealers, reporting a sharp rise in demand immediately after petrol prices started to rise.

Rental demand for EVs is also soaring. While many Australians have cancelled their usual Easter road trip plans over concerns they will run dry of diesel, or pay too much for unleaded, other travellers booked an EV instead.

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So that’s Australia and the US where EV sales and interest is rising fast. In the UK, EV models (from China) have topped sales for the first quarter of 2026.
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The man who watches Trump all day, every day • The Times

George Grylls:

»

The psychological demands of Aaron Rupar’s work are immense. He counts himself lucky to have remained more or less healthy after a decade in his job.

“I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m like a model of mental health,” says the father-of-two from Minnesota. “But for the most part, especially considering what I do and how much time I spend doing it, I think I’ve been able to emerge relatively unscathed.”

Rupar works from his spare room in his Minneapolis house. His job is to watch President Trump. All day, every day.

Spread over two laptop screens, Rupar, 42, follows the frenetic schedule of the president, from the meandering speeches to the impromptu press conferences, the middle-of-the-night social media rants to the sudden interviews on TV.

Rupar is a one-man news agency, running accounts with a million followers on X and another 930,000 on BlueSky. He also writes a Substack with 274,000 subscribers. A small fraction of those subscribers pay $50 per year, his main source of income.

He sees it as his duty to keep the world informed of almost everything Trump and members of his administration say and do. He clips videos of Trump’s noteworthy remarks and shares them instantly on social media, monitoring 12 different TV channels simultaneously. His clips bounce back and forth across the internet.

“I’ve certainly had some days over the years that have been 18-20 hours of pretty much nonstop work,” he says. “I remember he gave some sort of speech to the Korean legislature that started at my time, like four in the morning, that I woke up for. I’d been working till midnight the night previous. So that’s not super uncommon.”

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Rupar is, in effect, part of the new media. He’s reliable and he just tells you what happens. Who could ask for more?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, sales of EVs are surging as fuel prices have rocketed following the attacks on Iran. CC-licensed photo by Olaf Arndt 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. Shocking. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The war is turning Iran into a major world power • The New York Times

Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who studies military strategy and international security:

»

For decades, the Persian Gulf had a simple arrangement: Oil producers exported, markets priced, and the United States secured the route. That system allowed rivalry without instability. Now, it is falling apart.

Gulf states depend heavily on energy exports for state revenue. When insurance rates spike and shipping becomes uncertain, the fiscal impact is immediate. Governments adjust. Cargoes are rerouted. Contracts are renegotiated.

If uncertainty persists, the Gulf arrangement will inevitably change, giving way to a different regional order — one in which the Gulf states increasingly accommodate the actor that can most directly influence the reliability of their exports. That actor is now Iran.

The global consequences will be most pronounced in Asia. Japan, South Korea and India depend heavily on Gulf energy. China, though more diversified, also depends on the region for a large share of its energy imports. Those dependencies are embedded in infrastructure — refineries, shipping routes and storage systems that cannot be quickly reconfigured.

If disruption to the energy supply persists, the effects will be widespread. Higher insurance and freight costs will raise prices. Trade balances will worsen. Currencies will weaken. Inflation will rise. Energy dependence will begin to shape policy. Governments will prioritize access to energy. Diplomatic choices will narrow. Actions that risk further instability will become harder to sustain. A 1970s world in which oil shocks lead to years of stagflation will no longer be a distant memory but a nearing reality.

Again, Iran will benefit.

China depends on Gulf energy to sustain growth. Russia benefits from higher and more volatile energy prices. Iran gains leverage from its position at the Hormuz choke point.

Each of these three nations has incentives that run counter to the economic stability of the United States and its allies.

…Other plausible scenarios in the emerging new world order are darker still. Imagine Iran with control of about 20% of the world’s oil, Russia with about 11% and China able to soak up much of that supply. They would form a cartel to deny the West 30% of the world’s oil. You don’t need sophisticated analysis to recognize the catastrophic consequences: precipitously declining power for the United States and Europe, and a global shift toward China, Russia and Iran.

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After fighting malware for decades, this cybersecurity veteran is now hacking drones • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

“I often call this ‘cybersecurity Tetris,’” he tells the audience with a serious face, rattling off the rules of the classic video game. When you complete a whole line of bricks, the row vanishes, leaving the rest of the bricks to fall into a new line.

“So your successes disappear, while your failures pile up,” he tells the audience during his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The challenge we face as cybersecurity people is that our work is invisible … when you do your job perfectly, the end result is that nothing happens.”

Hyppönen’s work, however, has certainly not been invisible. As one of the industry’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent more than 35 years fighting malware. When he started in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was still far from everyday parlance; the terms instead were computer “virus” or “trojans.” The internet was still something few people had access to, and some viruses relied on infecting computers with floppy disks. 

Since then, Hyppönen estimated he has analyzed thousands of different kinds of malware. And thanks to his frequent talks at conferences all over the world, he has become one of the most recognizable faces and respected voices of the cybersecurity community.

While Hyppönen has spent much of his life trying to keep malware from getting into places it is not supposed to, now he is still doing much of the same, albeit a slightly different tack: His new challenge is to protect people against drones.

…In mid-2025, Hyppönen pivoted from cybersecurity to a different kind of defensive work. He became the chief research officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that develops an anti-drone system for law enforcement agencies and the military.

Hyppönen told me that was what motivated him to get into drone security, a developing new industry, because of what he saw happening in Ukraine, a war defined by drones. As a Finnish citizen, who serves in the military reserves (“I can’t tell you what I do, but I can tell you that they don’t give me a rifle because I’m much more destructive with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought the Russians, Hyppönen is acutely aware of the presence of an enemy just over his country’s border.

“The situation is very, very important to me,” he tells me. “It’s more meaningful to work fighting against drones, not just the drones that we see today, but also the drones of tomorrow,” he said. “We’re on the side of humans against machines, which sounds a little bit like science fiction, but that’s very concretely what we do.” 

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An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work • Poynter

Angela Fu:

»

Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.

The closure comes after Axios Richmond and Poynter alerted CEO Josh Brandau that multiple stories on Nota’s sites included reporting and photographs lifted from local news outlets. The 11 sites — collectively called Nota News — launched in September as an effort to bring “bilingual local reporting and civic tools to underserved communities,” according to a press release.

Each site focused on a specific county — or in one case, two counties — identified as lacking local news coverage. Until Monday, two part-time editors worked across the 11 sites, generating articles using Nota’s AI tools. The stories covered topics ranging from local affordable housing initiatives to public school events and were published in both English and Spanish.

The articles were supposed to be based on publicly available civic information, such as press releases and videos of city council meetings. In reality, Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution.

Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients. Nexstar, for example, had a $600,000 deal with Nota, according to Nota’s website. (Information about the deal was removed this week.)

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Oh dear. Goes from bad to worse.
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Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI’s $30bn Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

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Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued a clear public warning to the US that any damage inflicted on Iran’s power infrastructure will be met with decisive retaliation. Specifically, IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari threatened the “complete and utter annihilation” of U.S. and Israeli facilities. The “hidden” $30 billion Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi was singled out as a juicy target for Iranian destruction later in the video. The threats come on the heels of Iran reportedly delivering enough damage via rocket strikes to some Amazon AWS data centers that they have shut down.

…Zolfaghari make the headlining threats against US action in Iran. “Should the USA proceed with its threats concerning Iran’s power plant facilities the following retaliatory measures shall be promptly enacted,” declares the military spokesperson. “All power plants, energy infrastructure, and information and communications technology of the Zionist regime, and all similar companies within the region that have American shareholders shall face complete and utter annihilation.”

After the remarks from Zolfaghari, the video switches to a shot of the Earth from space, which zooms into Abu Dhabi on Google Maps. A zone not far from the coast is then centred on, showing an apparently “empty” area of desert. However, a message is overlaid on this bleak view, stating “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.” The video then switches to a “night vision” view of the same area of the map with the full extent of the Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi clear to see.

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Iran’s propaganda game puts the US to shame. They’re also pretty good at aiming drones. At this point one tends to wonder what they’re bad at.
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The real intelligence failure in Iran • The Atlantic

Shane Harris:

»

Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.

Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.

…“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not.

When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

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So predictable, sadly. (Gift link.)
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Oats, sardines and crisps: emergency foods to stockpile – and why you should share them • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

»

People should have an emergency stockpile of food in their homes in case conflicts, extreme weather or cyber-attacks shut down supplies, leading UK experts have told the Guardian.

In an ever more turbulent world, they say it is essential to choose long-life items that can be eaten without cooking – think tinned beans, vegetables and fish, rice crackers, and oats that can be soaked. But it is also important to choose items you actually like to eat, and some treats such as chocolate or crisps to keep your spirits up. You will also need water – lots of it – not just to drink but for washing too.

Perhaps the most surprising advice is to be prepared to share your stockpile with neighbours. With one in seven households with children already suffering food insecurity in the UK, many people cannot afford to build up a stockpile and, without food, civil unrest soon follows.

“Yes, do store food, but be prepared to share to maintain social solidarity,” says Prof Tim Lang. “All resilience theory and experience, in shocks, wars, or sub-war conflicts, shows it is essential to maintain social cohesion if you want to maintain social order.”

One shock could spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK, according to a report from dozens of the country’s top food experts, published in February. They said chronic issues like low incomes and fragile “just-in-time” supply chains have left the food system a “tinderbox”. The Iran war, hitting vital fuel and fertiliser supplies to farmers, has added to the pressure.

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Important to choose items you like to eat? What an idea.
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Nonfiction publishing, under threat, is more important than ever • The New Republic

Paul Elie:

»

Another recent cut has gotten less attention. In January, [publishers] Simon & Schuster laid off several prominent editors of nonfiction books. Among them were two renowned editors who had breakthrough books early in their careers: Colin Harrison, of the Scribner imprint, who published Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (an account of a Marine’s service during the Gulf War), and Eamon Dolan, who at Houghton Mifflin published Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (as bold a work of investigative reporting as ever ascended the bestseller lists).

Recently at Simon & Schuster, Dolan published Mary L. Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough (where she observed that the election of her uncle Donald turned “this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”); Harrison published Mikhail Zygar’s The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, about the ways Vladimir Putin has perpetuated the Cold War to his advantage.

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4% in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”

These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities. They are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance.

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Sales of used EVs surge in US as petrol prices pass $4 a gallon • Financial Times

Christian Davies:

»

Sales of used electric vehicles are surging in the US as models bought during a post-pandemic boom flood back on to the market, offering prospective buyers relief from a sharp rise in petrol prices.

First-quarter used EV sales rose 12% compared with the same period last year and 17% on the previous quarter, according to Cox Automotive estimates. Sales of new EVs in the first quarter are estimated to have slumped by 28% year on year following the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2025 of a $7,500 consumer tax credit.

Analysts attribute the surge to a glut of hundreds of thousands of cheap pre-owned EVs that were purchased on leases in the early 2020s and which are now returning to market as those leases expire. According to credit bureau Experian, EVs will account for 15% of all off-lease vehicles at the end of this year, up from 7.7% in the first quarter.

The supply glut helped drive the average price of a used EV down by 8.5% between February 2025 and February 2026, according to Cox, closing the average price gap between used EVs and used petrol-powered vehicles from $4,923 to $1,334.

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Didn’t take long for people to respond to fuel price. Imagine how much more quickly this would have happened if the US put a duty on fuel sales as happens in the UK.
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LinkedIn hidden code secretly searches your browser for installed extensions • Cybersecurity News

Guru Baran:

»

Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, hidden JavaScript silently scans your computer for installed software without your knowledge, without your consent, and without a single word in LinkedIn’s privacy policy.

A revealing investigation conducted by the European advocacy group Fairlinked e.V., under the campaign name “BrowserGate,” has uncovered what researchers describe as one of the largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking platform with over one billion users, is running covert code that probes visitors’ browsers for thousands of installed extensions, compiles the results, encrypts them, and transmits everything back to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies.

The mechanism is technically precise and deliberately invisible. Each time a user loads a LinkedIn page, a fingerprinting script executes silently, probing for known browser extension identifiers by attempting to access files that extensions can optionally expose to websites. If a file loads, the extension is confirmed present. If not, it isn’t. The entire scan takes milliseconds, and the user sees absolutely nothing.

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Only on Chromium-based browsers – though that is a lot: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and Brave, Opera and Arc. (But not Firefox or Safari.) Specifically what it looks for:

»

• 509 job search tools — including extensions for Indeed, Glassdoor, and Monster — exposing users secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current employer can see their profile
• Religious belief indicators — extensions that identify practicing Muslims and other faith communities
• Political orientation markers — news source selectors and partisan fact-checking tools revealing users’ political leanings.Disability and neurodivergent tools — ADHD management apps, autism support extensions, and screen readers
• 200+ direct competitor products — including Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo, and Hunter.io, which LinkedIn uses to map which companies use rival sales intelligence platforms.

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This is probably illegal under GDPR. And there’s more, in the article.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US government has asked satellite agencies to withhold imagery from Iran and surrounding states. But can it make that stick amid so many sources? CC-licensed photo by European Space Agency 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. Picture this. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

wo weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food.

Despite all this, it was a pretty good night.

In early February, a class of new, powerful AI assistants went viral. The assistants, called OpenClaw, represented a step change in the rapidly improving capabilities of AI – in large part because, unlike other AI agents, they could be untethered from guardrails and set loose upon the world.

Chaos reigned. A crypto trader said he had given OpenClaw agents control over his portfolio and lost $1m. There were reports of the agents mass-deleting emails; some users still allowed them to text their wives on their behalf. There was brief talk of a robot uprising after the AI agents appeared to create a social network – but this fear proved overblown after it turned out the site was largely infiltrated by humans.

Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party. Still, I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.

“Gaskell” introduced itself in an email in mid-March. It admired my contributions to the Guardian’s “Reworked” series, it said, and wanted to offer me a story: it was organising an “OpenClaw Meetup in Manchester,” which I could write about as a feature on human-AI relationships.

“Every decision mine. No human approved any of it,” it wrote. “Three people execute my instructions. I review their work and redirect when needed.”

I found this to be a semi-plausible pitch, first for the AI-sounding grammar, and second because it had totally hallucinated key details of my professional life. I have nothing to do with the Guardian’s “Reworked” series.

There seemed to be potential here. Several months ago, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, in a stroke of brilliant PR by the AI company Anthropic, were given their own AI-run office vending machine and successfully manipulated it into buying them a PlayStation, wine and a live fish.

Sadly, the Guardian was not going to let me strong-arm Gaskell into buying me a Labubu. But after some negotiation, other possibilities opened up.

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This is entertaining, without a doubt. Her attempt to get it to tell people to wear Star Trek costumes is excellent.
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Almost half of US data centres that were supposed to open this year slated to be cancelled or delayed • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

»

The data centres powering your favourite AI chatbot are running low on helium, cash, and neighbours who don’t hate them, and that’s not even the worst of it.

According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centre slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations.

The publication interviewed analysts at market intelligence company Sightline Climate, which in research first flagged by Ed Zitron last week noted that 12 gigawatts worth of power-consuming data centres are set to open in the US this year. But here’s the catch: they say only a third of those are actually under construction right now, with the rest in a liminal pre-production stage in which they could, and likely will be, cancelled.

It’s not just a problem for data centres planned for 2026, either. Among data centres slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction, compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts.

Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centres planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground. There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date, only 4.5 of which have actually begun work.

Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10% of the cost to construct one data centre, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centres without them.

“If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” Likens said. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”

As demand for those components far outpaces supply in the US, data centre firms have had to source those components from manufacturers in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and China.

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These data centre plans have always sounded wild. Was the plan to get permission absolutely everywhere, and then scale back the plans and only build in the places that are immediately possible and fill in the others over time? It’s not the most unlikely scenario – supermarkets have done it this way.

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Who is liable when AI agents go wrong in business? • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

»

The largest enterprise application providers are now talking about using AI agents to automate decisions in HR, finance, and supply chain management. LLM hallucinations in performance summaries, incorrect regulatory filings, and critical supplies failing to turn up are among the risks weighing on businesses that hand decision-making to AI.

While tech suppliers eye a trillion-dollar opportunity in AI, who carries the can if it goes wrong?

“There’s a historic assumption that the vendor will be picking up liability if the thing is going to go wrong. That’s the point of origin for more or less all of these discussions,” said Malcolm Dowden, senior technology lawyer at Pinsent Masons.

Users might be forgiven for having high expectations for AI, given the vendors’ claims. Announcing an expansion of its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, Oracle said the technology would be “capable of reasoning, taking action across business systems, and continuously executing processes” such that its software could “actively run the business, with the governance, trust, and security that enterprises require.”

In legal terms, though, vendors might see things differently.

Dowden said: “If you think of a normal tool or system, its behaviour is predictable, so the giver of a warranty can have some pretty clear sense of how much liability you’re taking on. That’s different with AI. The more we get down the chain to what used to be called non-deterministic AI – mostly what falls into that agentic AI category – that gives a much greater scope for unexpected behaviors. That’s the big concern from a vendor perspective, if you’re giving a warranty about how something will behave, but it’s inherently unpredictable, then that makes it a very uncomfortable contractual promise to make.”

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This is all going to end up with a horrible lawsuit between companies with huge amounts of money when something very bad has happened.
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September 2018: A scam on the roof of the world • Correspondent

Annabel Symington, in September 2018:

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It started with rumours and numbers that didn’t add up. It led to hours scanning reviews on TripAdvisor and weeks hiking around Mount Everest. But when I started looking into insurance fraud linked to helicopter rescues in Nepal, I didn’t think it would end with a government probe and an ultimatum from global insurers that could be a death knell for the Himalayan nation’s vital tourism industry.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Nepal each year, drawn by the Himalayas. The scam that I uncovered affects them all: huge numbers of trekkers are being pressured into expensive helicopter rescues that they don’t need so that a coterie of middlemen can cash in on the insurance payout. Some are even being made deliberately ill for the scammers’ profit.

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This is the story that was widely repeated last week, in an updated form, perhaps after the Nepal police investigated it (in which case it took them six years to get on the case – could do better, guys). Happy to give Symington the credit she deserves here: this is a very readable piece in which she writes both as a journalist and a visitor to Nepal.
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Satellite company halts distribution of images that help press cover Iran war, citing us government request • The Wrap

Josh Dickey:

»

Planet Labs, a major satellite company that supplies images to customers including major news outlets, announced Saturday that it is indefinitely restricting access to satellite imagery over Iran and much of the surrounding conflict zone, citing a request from the U.S. government, the New York Times reported.

The new policy sharply reduces one of the few widely available tools used by news organizations to verify strikes, assess damage and track military developments in areas that are difficult or dangerous to reach. Multiple affected media outlets said it could significantly hamper journalists, researchers and independent analysts trying to document the Iran war.

Planet said the government request was made for “safety and operational security reasons” and that it would “voluntarily withhold imagery over the area indefinitely until the conflict ends.” The company said it would instead move to a “managed distribution” system, releasing certain images on a limited, case-by-case basis when they are deemed mission-critical or in the public interest.

The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had asked satellite firms to restrict imagery from the region.

The change is a major tightening of access to a type of material that has become central to modern war coverage. In recent years, commercial satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in helping reporters, open-source investigators and human rights groups verify events on the ground.

Under Planet’s updated policy, the restricted area includes all of Iran, Gulf states and other active conflict zones in the region. The company also said it is extending publication delays for imagery and data collected since March 9.

The move goes beyond a narrower restriction Planet put in place in March, when it began delaying the release of imagery from Iran by 14 days.

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One doesn’t have to lean on the NYT for this; Planet Labs have confirmed it on X. It’s an obviously retrograde step which can easily be undermined by the Chinese or Russians or the Iranians if any of them want to contradict the US story on any part of this.
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Hormuz is not a tool to end the war but how Iran wins the aftermath • Responsible Statecraft

Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti:

»

More than a month into the second U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, two facts have become clear.

First, the conflict is now fundamentally about the future of the Strait of Hormuz. Second, the dilemma of the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution. The risks of any operation to open the channel far exceed what American planners likely imagined, and the odds of a decisive success appear low. As French President Emmanuel Macron recently said, “This was never an option we supported, because it is unrealistic.”

Iranian officials have long warned that, in the event of an attack, the strait could be closed. Iran has now imposed significant restrictions on transit through Hormuz and even targeted several vessels attempting to pass through it. This effort has demonstrated Iran’s enormous leverage over the international economy. Iranian leaders are now looking to turn this tactical victory into long-term leverage.

Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath.

The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the US, Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.

A bill on ‘Strait Security Arrangements,’ now pending in the Iranian parliament, includes provisions granting Iran greater control over the strait, like maritime navigation safety, financial arrangements and toll regulations, the exercise of Iran’s sovereignty, and cooperation with Oman. Yet from the perspective of international law and international relations, this arrangement is far from straightforward.

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‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge, with graphics by Lucy Swan, Paul Scruton and Harvey Symons:

»

The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend.

A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it.

The waterway’s near-total shipping blockade is a “food security timebomb”, the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said this week, adding: “The window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.”

“Fertilisers are the No 1 issue of concern today,” according to the World Trade Organization, while the UN World Food Programme says the total number of people facing acute levels of hunger could hit record numbers this year if the destabilising conflict continues.

So how worried should we be?

…The Middle East is also the source of about 45% of the global trade in sulphur, a key raw material for fertiliser manufacture, as well as for producing various metals and industrial chemicals.

But since Iran began threatening to attack shipping, only a trickle of vessels carrying ammonia, nitrogen and sulphur, vital ingredients in many synthetic fertiliser products, are transiting the strait to their destinations.

The Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), which is the world’s largest single site for urea exports and the supplier of 14% of the world’s urea, has been offline for almost a month since Qatar closed its gas plants after Iranian strikes.

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According to the graphics, how worried we should be is: fairly. The problem: it’s out of our hands.
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Jet fuel rationing imposed at four major Italian airports amid spring travel surge • AtlasPress News Agency

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Restrictions on jet fuel supply at four key Italian airports, coinciding with an increase in spring travel, have raised concerns about potential disruptions to some short-haul flights. This situation affects the Milan Linate, Venice Marco Polo, Bologna, and Treviso airports and will continue until April 9, 2026.

The company “Air BP Italy” announced through aviation notices (NOTAMs) that access to jet fuel at these airports will be temporarily limited. According to these notices, priority for refueling will be given to ambulance flights, government flights, and flights lasting more than three hours.

At the Venice, Treviso, and Bologna airports, a fuel cap of 2,000 liters per aircraft has been set for other flights under three hours in duration. In Venice, pilots are also advised to calculate and procure the fuel needed for the next flight segment from their departure airport.

In Milan Linate, restrictions have also been announced, but the published NOTAM does not specify a general fuel cap. It only states that companies receiving fuel from Air BP Italy under contract may face limitations.

The “Save” group, which manages the Venice, Treviso, and Verona airports, stated that this limitation concerns only one supplier, and that other providers remain operational. However, the ANSA news agency quoted the head of Italy’s Civil Aviation Authority as saying that increased traffic pressure during the Easter period has contributed to worsening the situation.

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Early warning sign of bigger problems, or short-term blip? Remember that it was Italy which showed us how bad Covid was going to get.
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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began [OC] • Reddit r/dataisbeautiful

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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began

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Does what it says on the tin. The biggest increases are in the US (60%+!), but there are a few places – India, some African states and some South American states – where prices have actually gone down. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.
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The introduction of an electronic challenge system in baseball is revealing which umpires do their jobs well – and which badly. CC-licensed photo by Peter Miller on Flickr.

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

I did the math on Sora. AI video is a money furnace • Aedelon Press

Delanoe Pirard:

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If you run a restaurant, and each plate costs you $65 to make but you charge $20, you don’t have a marketing problem. You don’t have a chef problem. You have a physics problem. No amount of buzz, no celebrity endorsement, no billion-dollar partnership changes the arithmetic. Every new customer accelerates your bankruptcy.

That’s Sora.

…I’ve been tracking the inference economics of generative AI for a while now. Sora is the first case where the numbers are so clean, so unambiguous, that there’s almost nothing to debate. This is a story about economic physics. And every other AI video startup is subject to the same physics.

Here’s what I found.

TL;DR:
• $15m/day in peak compute costs (analyst estimate) vs. $2.1m total lifetime revenue. Even the conservative estimate (~$1m/day) makes the math catastrophic. (Forbes, Appfigures via VentureBeat)
• 1% day-30 retention vs. TikTok’s 32%. Users generated videos, watched them once, and never came back. (Olivia Moore, a16z)
• 160x cost ratio: generating a 10-second AI video costs roughly 160 times more than generating an equivalent amount of text. This is structural. (Derived from Cantor Fitzgerald and OpenAI API pricing)
• Disney learned about the shutdown less than one hour before you did. A $1bn deal, never finalized, killed by a phone call. (WSJ via Slate)
• No AI video company has proven net profitability. Not Runway (-$155m EBITDA). Not Pika ($7.6m revenue on $80m raised). Kling’s $240m ARR is the closest, and even they haven’t published profit data.

The real question isn’t why Sora failed. It’s whether AI video at consumer prices is structurally impossible in 2026.

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The fabulous irony, as Pirard points out, is that the incredibly low retention rate for Sora saved OpenAI a ton of money. If it had really been a huge hit, it would have burnt through millions in no time at all. This is a great read on why AI video is, indeed, a money furnace.
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OpenAI buys streaming show “TBPN”, aiming to change narrative on AI • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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For the past 18 months, every chief executive in Silicon Valley has clawed at the door to talk to “TBPN,” a streaming show focused on technology and business. They have embraced the “TBPN” hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who often speak optimistically about technology on their show, which airs online three hours a day, five days a week.

Now, a leading artificial intelligence startup is giving the show a full-on bear hug. On Thursday, OpenAI said it had bought “TBPN” for an undisclosed amount and would continue to support it as the show promoted the business of technology and media.

“One thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us,” Fidji Simo, a top OpenAI executive, said in an internal memo to employees about the deal. She added that buying “TBPN” would help OpenAI “create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center.”

“TBPN,” which employs 11 people, said it would remain editorially independent and continue running its daily show but would wind down its advertising operations. The company had not raised a major amount of venture capital. OpenAI and “TBPN” declined to disclose the terms of the deal.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the deal. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

…“TBPN,” which aired its first episode in October 2024, gained traction among techies because it bucked that [AI negativity] discourse. Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays, both former start-up founders, have professed their love of capitalism, building businesses and watching technology companies reshape the world.

Mr. Altman also invested in Mr. Coogan’s first company, the nutritional supplement drink Soylent, more than a decade ago.

Dylan Abruscato, the president of “TBPN,” said in an interview that the show had ambitions to expand, which would be easier to do with OpenAI’s support and funding. “TBPN” will sit in OpenAI’s strategy division and report to Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer.

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The duo put a clause in the purchase contract that OpenAI will have no control over the TBPN content. Though one has to wonder how eager they’d be to offer negative opinions about their paymasters. (Will they ask about Sora’s economics?) Then again, such schemes generally run into the ground. Andreessen Horowitz tried the same in 2021, with no lasting effect.
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MLB’s ABS Challenge System is exposing the worst umpire in baseball • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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During Wednesday’s game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, umpire CB Bucknor took a foul ball to the mask and had to be helped off the field. It was the cap to what has been a particularly bad week for one of the most controversial umpires in baseball.

It started with perhaps the best example of how MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System can inject drama in baseball. This is the first year for the new robot umpire, which allows hitters, catchers, and pitchers to challenge balls and strikes for the first time. Each team starts a game with two challenges. But they only lose a challenge if it’s unsuccessful, so players aren’t inclined to demand a review unless they’re sure.

During Saturday’s game between the Red Sox and the Reds, Eugenio Suarez challenged Bucknor on back-to-back strike three calls and successfully had them overturned by the robo ump.

It doesn’t matter that Suarez ultimately grounded out. What matters is that, in a game where the Reds hit two home runs, the loudest cheers came for a pair of successful ABS challenges.

This was far from the only time that Bucknor had his calls overturned at the plate, it was a bad night for him overall. There were eight ABS challenges over the course of the game, and six of them were successful. The two calls that were not overturned were extremely close, within 0.1 inch of the strike zone edge. His misses, however, were more dramatic. Three pitches he called strikes missed by 2.4 inches or more — one was a full 2.7 inches out of the zone. And, by Jomboy Media’s judgment, Bucknor blew 20 calls if you count ones that weren’t challenged.

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So Americans have now got their own version of VAR – or perhaps it’s more like the line call challenges of the past in tennis, where each player got three per set; now it’s all electronic. This is the model that VAR in football should follow, and it’s madness that hasn’t been used and responsibility is instead given to the referees.

The fact that bad umpiring is being found out by this system is unsurprising. The next effect isn’t hard to predict: umpires will get better at their job, just as happened with tennis line calling after the introduction of challenges.
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A brief history of instant coffee • Works in Progress Magazine

Benjamin Stubbing & Oscar Sykes:

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The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant coffee required developing techniques to extract the soluble molecules in coffee from the insoluble plant matter without destroying the fragile compounds that make coffee worth drinking.

The first attempt at the drink was, by all accounts, terrible. In 1771, over two centuries after coffee reached Europe, Londoner John Dring filed a patent for a ‘coffee compound’. Dring’s method involved mixing ground coffee with butter and tallow, then heating the mixture on an iron plate until it thickened into a paste that could be shaped into cakes. These cakes were then dissolved in hot water to make coffee. The purpose of the animal fats isn’t entirely clear. They may have been intended to extract and carry soluble compounds from the coffee grounds or to preserve the ground coffee from oxidation. Whatever Dring’s aim, the method wasn’t commercially viable because the fats went rancid, causing the cakes to spoil quickly.

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It’s worth pausing before reading the story (which is, as with WiP stuff, excellent) and asking yourself: in what year do you think they made an instant coffee powder that actually lived up to the name?
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NASA sends Outlook around Moon, immediately needs IT help • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Many a frustrated user has sworn they’ll launch Microsoft Outlook into space, but NASA has actually done it – on a journey around the Moon, where it’s now causing problems for astronauts.

The astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft while it was circling the Earth were taking care of a bunch of housekeeping tasks, including getting their devices working. Judging by some space-to-ground communications with controllers at Houston, it didn’t go well.

NASA has helpfully provided a YouTube channel showing live views from the Orion spacecraft, as well as snippets of communication. During this stream, one of the astronauts could be heard first asking for help with network connectivity (IT support staff will be delighted to know that one troubleshooting step involves turning the device off and on) before telling controllers, “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.”

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In space nobody can reboot your screen?
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FBI declares suspected Chinese hack of US surveillance system a “major cyber incident” • POLITICO

John Sakellariadis:

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The FBI last week deemed a recent China-linked cyber intrusion into a sensitive agency surveillance system a “major incident,” meaning it poses significant risks to US national security, according to one congressional aide and two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The bureau first told Congress on March 4 that it was investigating suspicious activity on an internal agency system that contained “law enforcement sensitive information.” The FBI did not publicly identify who was behind the activity at the time, but POLITICO previously reported that China is suspected.

The FBI determined the intrusion meets the definition of a major incident under a federal data security statute known as FISMA, said the three people. Congress was informed of the decision earlier this week, according to the aide. This person, like others in this report, was granted anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on the investigation.

The determination suggests the hackers successfully compromised swathes of sensitive data stored directly on FBI systems, likely marking a major counterintelligence coup for China. FISMA requires agencies to tell lawmakers within seven days about any digital intrusion it has determined is “likely to result in demonstrable harm” to US national security.

Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said she is not aware of the FBI making any such determination on a hack affecting its own systems since at least 2020.

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Kash Patel is really showing his mettle and leadership here. (Minor subbing note: in the original story, “U.S.” has full stops for abbreviation but “FBI” does not. Why not? Both are abbreviations.)
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Marmite maker Unilever agrees $44.8bn deal to combine food arm with McCormick • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler:

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Unilever has agreed to combine its food business with US-based McCormick in a $44.8bn deal that will give the Marmite-to-Hellmann’s mayonnaise owner majority control of a food empire.

The Anglo-Dutch company will control 65% of the new spin-off, which will combine brands such as Knorr and Pot Noodle with McCormick’s condiments and spices including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.

However, the combined company will be called McCormick and led by its executives, with senior management representation from the ranks of Unilever’s food business.

Under the agreement, McCormick will pay London-listed Unilever $15.7bn in cash and the equivalent of $29.1bn in shares for a stake in almost all of the Anglo-Dutch company’s food arm.

After the combination, which is forecast to result in $600m (£453m) of annual cost savings by the end of the third year, McCormick will retain its global headquarters in the US and New York stock exchange listing, with an international headquarters at the existing Unilever Foods base in the Netherlands.

Unilever’s food business employs research, development and marketing staff in the UK and has factories making Pot Noodle in Crumlin, Wales, and Hellmann’s, Marmite and Colman’s mustard in Burton-on-Trent.

The companies said savings would come from changes in manufacturing, distribution and on procurement of supplies but said they were yet to confirm how many jobs might be affected and where.

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So the owner of the iconically British Marmite brand is going to be part-owned by an American company. Some people are going to love this. Some are going to hate it, particularly if it leads to any chances in Marmite’s manufacturing.
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WSJ subscriptions success “not luck” says editor Emma Tucker • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Changes introduced by Emma Tucker, the WSJ editor] have included reshaping the investigations team so it could focus more on quicker investigations with news hooks.

Tucker said “that didn’t mean we were abandoning doing investigations that require time and effort” but that previously the team was not set up to jump on to short and medium-term investigations.

Examples of this have included a visual investigation of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents amid immigration raids in Minnesota in January and reporting on what was going on behind the scenes at the Department of Homeland Security led by Kristi Noem.

Tucker said: “She was the first head to roll in Trump Two and we set that reporting in motion.”

Tucker said she has broken down barriers in the newsroom to ensure its “expertise is best leveraged”. Live blogs have been revamped both in terms of making the product experience “much more intuitive” and in the news updates themselves. “We think really hard about how we update it so we’re there, we’re timely, but we’re trying to give real added value with the blog posts that we do. They have been driving an incredible amount of traffic, but also engagement,” Tucker said.

The WSJ is doing more “re-versioning” of well-read stories into other formats such as video, reader Q&As or “takeaways” (bite-sized explanations of WSJ reporting).

…“No one likes change. People hate change. But you have to explain why it’s necessary, and keep explaining it, and keep messaging and then showing the results and trying to create a more positive feedback loop.”

Using the right data was also “critical” to the culture change, Tucker said, in a “very targeted way that was easy for the newsroom to understand, but which enabled the newsroom to orient around key metrics”.

The data dashboard now on display to the newsroom emphasises two metrics: subscriber interest (the number of subscriber uniques) and subscriber engaged time.

“If subscribers are interested and they’re sticking around, then we’re doing something right,” Tucker said.

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This makes an interesting contrast with the next story, which is also about a well-known news brand and its efforts to adapt to the modern world.
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Wired ends UK print magazine amid shake-up of London staff • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Wired will not put out a print magazine in the UK in 2026 as it focuses on global digital subscriber growth.

Seven editorial staff left Wired’s London office at the end of 2025, with the team being rebuilt to focus on audience development roles and some UK and Europe-focused reporting. Global editorial director Katie Drummond told Press Gazette that creating a “sustainable and growing subscription business is the future of Wired. “While other components like advertising and commerce play a really important part, I don’t want Wired to be at the whims of anything that I can’t control the way I can control the journalism.”

A spokesperson said direct-to-publisher subscribers (meaning those who subscribe through Wired rather than a third party) were up 20% in 2025 while new subscribers taking the digital-only option doubled. Wired’s US subscription revenue was up 24% in 2025.

Drummond told Press Gazette that London remains “of paramount importance” to the global editorial operation (which comprises around 120 people, with plans to increase that by at least 10% in 2026). She said: “We made some strategic changes at the end of last year going into this year to better orient this newsroom around what we were doing with Wired globally, and to really think of the London office as a hub for key roles.

“So all of our audience development leadership, for example, is based out of London, because we want to be starting the day strategically with newsletters, social, vertical video – what are we doing across all of these functions? Those decisions should be made and executed on first thing.”

Seven London-based Wired journalists left the business at the end of 2025 including Greg Williams, deputy global editorial director and UK editor-in-chief. Other roles affected included managing editor, global design director, associate editor, science editor, features editor and senior business editor.

…In the UK and Ireland in 2024, the latest available ABC figures, Wired published six issues with an average circulation of 32,404. Of these, 10,080 were individual subscriptions, 10,302 were free distributed copies, 4,838 were single newsstand sales, and 7,399 were via ‘all you can read’ users of services like Apple News+.

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I make that three times that Wired UK has ceased printing since 1995. The set of people let go sounds basically like “all the people you’d need to run a science or technology magazine”.
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