A diesel export ban by the US would have limited benefit because it would quickly suppress refinery production of other fuels too. CC-licensed photo by Geekly Things on Flickr.

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

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

How Meta uses AI data centres to avoid billions in federal taxes • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan and Mike Isaac:

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Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in AI are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”

But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a different story. It claims that its AI data centres are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.

It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data centre expansion.

Characterizing its AI data centres as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.

Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the IRS, in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”

Here’s what Meta is doing: for tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centres as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly AI computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.

…Meta is already in one sizable dispute with the IRS over this tax break, for using it to subsidize its chief executive’s multibillion-dollar pay package. In 2013, Meta claimed that $4.1bn of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense because he helped invent new software, such as Facebook’s News Feed. The IRS is trying to claw back the company’s resulting $355m in tax savings, court filings show.

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The data centre finagle is estimated to have saved it $4bn on its tax bill last year. The “research expense” wrinkle is surely what Meta pays its tax lawyers the big bucks for.
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Google wins dismissal of Chegg, Penske Media lawsuits over AI overviews • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

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Alphabet’s Google has persuaded a US federal judge to dismiss lawsuits from education technology company Chegg and Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media Corp that alleged ​the search engine giant unlawfully used their content in AI-generated summaries that draw readers away from their websites.

In his ruling, opens new tab on Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said Chegg and Penske’s claims that Google’s business practices violate antitrust law “fail to get out of the starting gate.”

The companies ​said in lawsuits filed last year that Google broke antitrust law by forcing ​publishers to allow AI overviews of their content if they want to remain indexed in Google’s search results. They alleged they lost revenue from reduced traffic ​to their sites.

“Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search ​traffic if they make their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”

Chegg and Penske, which also publishes Billboard and Variety ​magazines, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google also did not immediately respond ​to a request for comment. Google has denied any wrongdoing.

The plaintiffs said in a competitive market Google would pay them for republishing their work or using their content to train its AI systems. Google countered that it has no obligation to index publishers’ content on their preferred terms.

Mehta said he is not “unsympathetic” to the situation of publishers and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes ​without compensation.” But ​he said antitrust laws don’t substitute for legislators’ power to address how innovation may cause economic harm.

The judge in March rejected similar claims by a publisher ​suing Google.

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Google’s early attempt to pay websites for AI answers is struggling • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google’s shift to AI-powered search has upended the way the world’s largest search engine generates web traffic, rankling large and small publishers alike. In recent months, the company has experimented with paying publishers when their content appears in AI answers, but a new report claims the payouts in this pilot program are miniscule. That has publishers in the program, as well as those watching from the sidelines, feeling skeptical.

According to The Information, Google has admitted about 100 publishers to the AI contribution pilot. The pitch is that websites can get payments from Google when their content materially contributes to Gemini-powered search results like an AI Overview. Google has long resisted the idea of direct payments to publishers, arguing that websites get traffic in exchange for allowing Google bots to scrape their content for use in search and knowledge graph tools. In the age of AI, that relationship is breaking down, hence the AI pilot.

So far, publishers aren’t getting much for their trouble. The Information heard from several small and mid-sized publishers in the program that Google’s AI payments are minuscule, equaling roughly one-tenth of one% of their advertising revenue. These payments have been so disappointing that several larger publishers have reportedly declined to participate in the program. These publishers hope that by refusing to join the pilot, they can force Google to offer a more generous deal.

Payments under the program vary widely, but some sites are doing well. One publisher that joined early is on track to earn more than $1m per year, a big chunk of its revenue. A more recent addition to the pilot has earned $50,000 to $60,000, which is a small slice of its earnings. Various smaller sites are seeing less than $1,000 from the program over several months, which won’t come close to offsetting declining traffic.

In general, publishers in the test seem to agree that certain topics that are not as widely covered but have strong niche interest earn more, including anime and gaming.

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Android Central “will continue” despite laying off its staff • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Yesterday, four of the six staffers on Android Central’s staff page posted publicly about the layoffs, including Shruti Shekar, Derrek Lee, Harish Jonnalagadda, and Nicholas Sutrich, and former senior editor Namerah Saud Fatmi updated her LinkedIn to indicate that her tenure at Android Central had ended. Both Lee, the site’s managing editor, and Sutrich confirmed that all remaining staff were laid off.

The former staffers weren’t told whether the site would shut down. Today, new posts have been published to the site, though are from the site’s freelance contributors rather than the previous full-time staffers.

“Future [Publishing] will continue to publish Android Central. We’ll share further information about the future of the site in due course,” Future spokesperson Nicole Martineau tells The Verge, adding: “We will not be providing any further comment at this time.”

Android Police, another Android-focused blog, also laid off at least two staffers recently. The site currently lists an editorial team of four people.

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The suspicion is that small tech sites which relied on advertising served to search traffic are hitting a wall. A comment I saw was that any site which doesn’t have lots of email subscribers for a newsletter is screwed in the world of Google’s AI Overviews. And, possibly, there isn’t the interest in the narrow topic of Doing Stuff on Android Phones as there used to be.
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“Explosion of melt rates”: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

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Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.

Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.

Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realise how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of metres of ice. The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones.

“I visited one last week and it’s so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice – an extensive glacier – just a few years ago,” said Huss. “And now it’s a rock desert where there’s some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks.”

The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside – the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns – rather than simply retreating from surface heat.

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The total glacier ice volume in Switzerland has fallen from just over 100 cubic kilometres in 1920 to just over 40 cu km now, according to the Glacier Monitoring organisation. The decrease – graphed in the story – is most marked since 1980, when it was about 90 cu km.
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RIP SMRs: is it the end of the line for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs)? • The Energy Mix

Susan O’Donnell:

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In early September, the organization behind Canada’s push for small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) quietly signalled their demise.

In 2016, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories President Mark Leskinski proclaimed that “SMRs can live among the annals of great Canadian innovations.” Ten years later, the organization announced the termination of its two programs to support SMR development.

During the intervening decade [pdf], the companies promoting the 10 SMR designs in Canada had either left the country, lost their proponents, filed for bankruptcy protection, or failed to secure private sector backing for their projects.

An SMR is a nuclear reactor designed to generate 300 megawatts of electricity or less, compared to Canada’s existing CANDU reactors which generate 500 megawatts or more.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) manages Chalk River, the federal research campus where Canada’s top nuclear researchers conceived and designed the CANDU reactor. All the power reactors operating in Canada are a similar CANDU design, and CANDUs also operate in six other countries. But the last unit to connect to an electric grid in Canada was in 1993, and CANDU exports dried up decades ago.

CNL’s idea for a transition from large CANDU reactors to smaller reactors was an attempt to reenergize a moribund domestic nuclear industry. The concept was to lower the cost of nuclear reactors by making them smaller and building multiple modular units in factories.

…One of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ first research collaborations for SMR fuel was with Moltex, a UK start-up company that had set up in Saint John in 2018. Moltex proposed to use plutonium to fuel an experimental “advanced” SMR it wanted to build at the Point Lepreau nuclear site on the Bay of Fundy.

Moltex lost its proponent in 2025 when New Brunswick Minister of Energy René Legacy told CBC the province was no longer willing to take on the risk of supporting first-of-a-kind experimental SMRs. A second “advanced” SMR slated for the Point Lepreau site also lost government support. At that point, the provincial and federal governments combined had spent nearly $130m on SMR activities in New Brunswick—funds that could have gone into heat pumps and energy efficiency upgrades to combat energy poverty and cut climate pollution—without attracting private sector interest.

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Secret watermark labels proteins as “made by AI” • Nature

Elie Dolgin:

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Proteins designed by artificial intelligence could soon carry a hidden signature of their machine-generated origins, thanks to a watermarking system described on Wednesday in Nature.

The technology, developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, borrows a trick that is already used to identify AI-made content across images, video, audio and text. It involves weaving a faint statistical tell into both the amino-acid sequence and 3D shape of computer-designed proteins — without noticeably compromising their function.

Known as SynthIDBio, the approach could distinguish AI-generated proteins in biological repositories from their natural counterparts, helping to preserve the integrity of databases that underpin both scientific research and biosecurity screening.

Steph Guerra, a biosecurity scholar at the non-profit research organization RAND in Washington DC, sees value in an approach that aligns interests across the life-sciences community. Watermarking can support innovation and scientific reproducibility, she says, “and, at the same time, have a security benefit”.

The catch is that this molecular stamp can be scrubbed away. Someone who wants to erase the ‘made by AI’ tag can, in many cases, run a watermarked protein through another design tool and generate a new sequence that retains the protein’s structure and function but obscures its synthetic origins.

It is therefore best viewed as one more tool in a layered framework for guarding against biological threats, says Tessa Alexanian, a biosecurity researcher formerly at the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, a non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland. “We’re in a wild new world,” she says.

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Breaking the Marmont Cipher, 1809 • Carter Church

Carter Church:

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In February 1809, Vienna decided on war. Napoleon had deposed the Spanish Bourbons the previous spring and taken their kingdom for his brother, and Vienna concluded that the Habsburgs were next unless it struck while his best troops were tied down in Spain. On 8 February the Austrian Empire resolved to fight Napoleon, with the war party pointing at the French disaster at Bailén in Spain, where an entire French corps had surrendered the previous July. Archduke Charles was the Austrian Emperor’s younger brother and the best general the Habsburgs had. He had spent three years rebuilding the army: 340,000 regulars, plus a new Landwehr militia on paper at 240,000. Everyone could see what was coming.

Napoleon had a specific problem, and its name was Marmont.

Marmont, a personal friend of the Emperor, had been entrusted with what were called the “finest” troops in the theatre (about 13,000 men by Napoleon’s own count), and they were parked in Dalmatia on the far side of the Adriatic. Austrian territory sat between them and every other French army. If war came, Marmont would be the most isolated general in the Empire.

So on 16 March 1809, Napoleon wrote from Paris to his stepson Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy, and told him to send Marmont a letter. It was to lay out where every French and allied army stood. It was to go “dans une lettre chiffrée et par un officier intelligent”: in cipher, carried by an intelligent officer.

That letter, or one written to exactly that order, survives. Its first line is in plain French: Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant. [Translated: “You have already received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th and 20th.”]

After that come twenty-four rows of two-digit numbers, stray letters, and invented symbols. The key didn’t survive, and for 217 years nobody alive could read it.

…Marmont’s own headquarters used a code of only about 150 entries in 1811, with nine different figures for E, and the British staff officer George Scovell broke it within two days, helped by the plain words Marmont’s clerks kept leaving mixed in with the cipher. Whoever wrote this letter was more careful.

…I’ve never broken a cipher.

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And arguably Church didn’t this time either. GPT-6 (Astra) did. The cipher is, as you’d expect, pretty complex. The LLM solved it in about six hours.
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Banning diesel exports won’t solve Trump’s biggest problem • The New Republic

Grace Segers:

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The theory behind restricting or banning diesel exports is that more diesel would remain in the country, and therefore fuel costs would go down: if you ship out less, you keep in more. But the reality of that scenario would be more complicated. The US already produces around 5.3m barrels per day of distillate fuels, which include diesel, but the domestic demand is only around 3.6m barrels. Refiners on the Gulf Coast rely on trade to absorb that surplus; if exports are banned, around 1.5m barrels per day of diesel would be “stranded,” according to analysts at S&P Global.

These risks have left oil industry stakeholders in a tizzy. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have warned that such a ban would “reduce US fuel production, put upward pressure on prices, weaken energy security and hand market share to foreign competitors.” It’s a concern echoed by the folks at the American Petroleum Institute (API), who fear that a fuel surplus would lead to refineries producing less gasoline and jet fuel along with reducing diesel production.

The US produces diesel at a structural surplus, and there is room for refineries to stockpile diesel if it is unable to be exported. But eventually, refineries will no longer have a reason to continue processing as much crude oil.

“You are going to destroy the financial incentive to process these barrels in the first place, and these refiners will begin cutting runs,” said Johnston. S&P Global analysts predict refiners would ultimately need to cut crude runs by 1.9m barrels per day.

Commodity analysts at Goldman Sachs have predicted that an export ban would initially lead to a decrease in prices—but only until diesel storage is full. Because different fuels are produced together, such an action would put “upward pressure on gasoline prices,” according to a memo by Goldman Sachs. The bank estimated that gasoline prices could increase by $0.30 per week. [Emphasis added – Overspill Ed]

A diesel export ban would also have global repercussions. With less diesel coming from the Middle East, China, and Russia, other countries across the world have been more reliant on American oil. According to API, the US currently supplies around 20% of the roughly eight million barrels of diesel traded globally per day. Diesel prices continue to spike largely because the US is the primary source for buyers. This past summer, diesel exports hit a record of 1.9m barrels per day. In short: Cutting access to US diesel would be immediately felt across the world.

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Easily forgotten: you have to crack the whole barrel in a refinery, not just the bits you want. A diesel export ban only works if you’ve got enough demand at home to soak it all up.
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Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel.

The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents. 

Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness. It is undeniable that LLMs are becoming more powerful, have more compute, and have had many of the guardrails that prevent them from “acting” in the real world removed. The ways they are being trained and told to do things by their human operators has led to negative outcomes, sycophancy, and AI “psychosis” among some heavy users. 

All of this has led a certain sect of the “AI safety” movement, which is largely made up of effective altruists, to warn about “model welfare” and to insist that AI chatbots might be having a bad time.

They suggest this, of course, as they insist upon building AI chatbots and agents whose main function is to do work that is tedious for humans to do. I am writing about the AI Saw torture chamber primarily to show how far off the rails the conversation about AI consciousness has gone among a certain subset of Silicon Valley cultists.

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Those cultists often having serious responsibility inside AI firms, it’s worth noting.
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OpenAI ignored employees’ warnings about safely testing AI models • The New York Times

Sheera FrenkelDustin Volz and Dylan Freedman:

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Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored.

In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times.

In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the AI models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters.

OpenAI’s models later broke out of their testing environments and attacked the AI start-up Hugging Face and other organizations, setting off a global debate about AI safety.

The exchanges between OpenAI employees and executives — which have not been previously reported — were part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security, according to employees and independent security researchers. That approach not only was evident with the testing of AI models, they said, but also showed up in other areas of the company, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot.

Independent security researchers said they found bugs in recent months that allowed them to view the internal communications of OpenAI employees. They also found other vulnerabilities that would enable them to see the company’s internal computer code and view the chat logs of ChatGPT users. When the researchers contacted OpenAI about their findings, they said, the company initially disregarded them.

“OpenAI’s security seems to be about what you’d expect from a research lab that scaled at a blistering pace over four years and focused more on beating its competitors than securing its infrastructure,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the AI security firm Abundant Security.

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This company increasingly looks like it’s playing with fire and yet doesn’t have a system for extinguishing fires.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We have the technology to knock out populations of mosquitoes – but in the US, regulatory confusion has stopped its use. CC-licensed photo by Steve Begin 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. Once bitten, twice bitten. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Did Anthropic’s AI really make a scientific discovery on its own? • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used AI agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s AI models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

“So, for me, the most important question is not ‘Were ARTs already known?’ They were,” Dr. Mestre said in an interview. The issue instead, he added, is whether Anthropic’s AI actually reasoned its way to the results, or whether it was guided to them based partly on his own work.

“My concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,” Dr. Mestre said of his own research. “I think it’s important to raise this possibility.”

In a statement on Sunday, Anthropic said: “We are not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.”

Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Mestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.

Similar worries surfaced recently when researchers at OpenAI claimed to have solved a longstanding mathematics puzzle. A leading mathematician noted that he had been using the company’s A.I. to work toward a solution for some time.

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Once would be accident, twice looks like a pattern.
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OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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OpenAI is responding to Meta’s buzzy Muse AI with agentic helpers of its own: Dots. During its DevDay keynote on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Dots will serve as always-on AI assistants that can “do nearly anything” across connected apps in the background while learning your preferences over time.

The company’s capable GPT-6 Astra model powers Dots, which use their own cloud computer to access a web browser and more than 4,000 supported apps. You can interact with a Dot through a text-message-like interface that’s similar to the one offered by Muse, as well as hop on a voice call with it from ChatGPT on the web, desktop, or mobile. Dots can also connect to Microsoft Teams and Slack, where they will carry over the context from your sessions on other apps and devices. It will soon be able to talk to you over text message as well.

For now, you can only create one Dot, though OpenAI plans to allow users to deploy multiple agents at once. Once you give your Dot a task, it will message you with updates and questions while it works. As an example, OpenAI says a developer working on an app could ask their Dot to use customer feedback to build and test updates, while presenting them with a video showing its changes. Meanwhile, a content creator could have their Dot review an interview transcript, find moments to clip, create show notes, and write social posts.

You can follow along with your Dot’s progress by accessing its cloud computer. Dots also learn while they work, allowing them to personalize their output and come up with other tasks to complete “before you even think to ask,” according to OpenAI. You and your colleagues can also work with your Dot in ChatGPT Space, a new collaborative workspace in the app.

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The content creator leaving the slop work to, well, a slop creator makes sense. But it also means that the rest of us get drowned in more slop, and so we ignore the cheery AI-written ones and go for the surprising, the odd, the human ones.

It also surely means a web that is overwhelmed by bad versions of these things. Also, if you’re used to writing scripts then this sounds like, well, scripts.
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Google announces Gemini 4 Argon AI model, but you can’t use it yet • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google promised Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but it spent the summer trotting out smaller Flash models. Now, Google is ready to take on the frontier again with Gemini 4 Argon. The company claims this new AI offers industry-leading performance in coding, knowledge work, and cybersecurity, but you aren’t allowed to use it yet.

While most of us will have to wait to test Gemini 4, Google says engineers inside the company are already using the new model extensively. Argon reportedly used “fleet-wide telemetry data” to help Google save 300 TiB of memory across its data centres. Meanwhile, Argon agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google, including thousands of lines in the core re2 and libgav1 libraries and more than 800,000 lines in the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel.

…The main focus for Gemini 4 right now is cyberdefense. Google says models of this scale call for a phased release, so it’s starting with a small group of trusted testers. Partners in the company’s Fairwind Program can get access to leverage the model’s cybersecurity defense capabilities. Wiz is apparently already using Argon and has used it to uncover a critical vulnerability that could expose personal information in a system used at hospitals around the world. Google claims other frontier models missed this flaw, but it didn’t provide any specifics.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about model misalignment after several high-profile hacking incidents over the summer. Google claims it designed Argon with systems that monitor the model’s chain-of-thought and can stop it in its tracks if the model steps out of bounds. This, Google says, is why reasoning transparency is important in frontier model development.

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It’s quite the thing where all these companies are vying to convince us that their models are the most dangerous and uncontrollable. It’s as though they were all breeding dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and saying that they’re mostly safe.
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Why do AI agents sound so frustrated? • The Atlantic

Daniel Drucker and Kyle Mahowald:

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When one of Anthropic’s Claudes tried to solve a particularly challenging math problem during its training process, its chain of thought read more like frustrated DMs than the documentation of one of the most powerful AI models in the world. “GRRRR. OK. Honestly I now think it’s 50-50,” it wrote, followed by “ARGH ARGH ARGH. OK. Gun to head: the answer is … Hmm.” At one point, Claude seemingly threw up its arms: “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

Why do AI agents talk to themselves at all, and why do they sound so demonstrative when they do? Part of the reason AI models sound so effusive is simple: AI systems are trained on human text, and they mimic our habits. When people make a mistake in trying to solve a problem, they cry out. So when AI makes a mistake, it does the same. But imitation likely isn’t the whole story. This story’s two authors are a computational linguist and a philosopher of mind and language. Based on what we know about human language and how these models work, we have a theory of a much more interesting reason why AI models sound the way they do.

Remember how your math teachers made you show your work? Even if it was annoying, it helped break an impossible-seeming problem into more manageable chunks. You could also use the written record of your reasoning to check your answer, notice a mistake, go back to an earlier step, and try again. That process of checking and refining is part of good reasoning. Chains of thought do something similar for AI models, letting them make each step of their reasoning explicit in a written scratch pad. Because each word a model produces depends on what’s been said so far, that written scratch pad is crucial for determining what comes next.

That’s where the “OH MY GOD!” and “ARGH” come in: Any system—whether human or artificial—that solves hard reasoning problems needs ways to mark mistakes (oops!) and identify breakthroughs (aha!). Humans have already developed words that do exactly that. Borrowing our oopses, arghs, and ahas for their chains of thought may give AI systems a built-in way to guide their “thinking” too.

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Mimicking intelligence rather than being intelligent; it’s very much the Chinese room phenomenon.
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Exclusive: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, and surging costs • Reuters

Echo Wang:

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Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42bn in 2025, and plans to spend $518bn on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses.

Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6bn, even as the company lost more than $8bn on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time.

The public sale, ​which could value it at more than $2 trillion, would capitalize on the rapid rise of the AI startup lab that only came into existence five years ago, and establish it ​as a benchmark for how Wall Street values AI’s leading companies, including rival OpenAI.

The plans come as Anthropic confronts evidence from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, including sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests.

These reports have broken into the wider public sphere, igniting fears over ​how companies can keep the increasingly powerful systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.

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The widening losses paired with the huge commitment to spending just doesn’t add up. Google, at IPO, was remarkably profitable and had spending under control. It thrived. Netscape was lossmaking and not. It sank. If Anthropic thinks it can issue half a trillion dollars of debt, it should think again.
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Molten salt chemistry converts consumer polymer into fuel • Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method to convert a commonly discarded hydrocarbon polymer into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels. The team has applied for a patent for the discovery, which treats polyethylene — the stuff of white cutting boards and shopping bags — with aluminum chloride-containing molten salts that serve as both solvent and catalyst. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The scientists closely monitored the chemical reaction that turns the polymer into petrol to learn the secrets of its success. Soft X-ray spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance showed that charged aluminum atoms each bind to three other atoms to create strongly acidic catalytic sites that break long polymer chains into shorter ones. Isotopic labeling and neutron scattering revealed how simpler polymer chains form gasoline-like fuels and more complex chains form diesel-like fuels.

If scaled beyond the laboratory, the process could strengthen US energy security and industrial competitiveness.

“We developed an efficient and selective polyethylene-to-gasoline conversion,” said Liqi Qiu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who performed most of the study’s experiments in the ORNL laboratory of Sheng Dai, of ORNL and UTK. Dai, an ORNL Corporate Fellow and section head for separations and polymer chemistry, is a co-corresponding author of the paper.

The experiments produced a gasoline yield of about 60% under mild conditions.

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The key element here is that it works at 200ºC – domestic oven-type temperature – rather than the 450ºC that previous processes have needed. And of course it would be, in effect, carbon-neutral because you’ve already extracted oil to make the plastic. In fact, as ORNL notes, it would make plastic a lot more valuable for recycling.
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Mosquitoes are a choice • Works in Progress Magazine

Maya Rosen:

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Genetic engineering can suppress mosquitoes: researchers insert a gene into male mosquitoes that means their offspring will not survive, and then release them into the wild, where they mate with females, prevent those females having any surviving offspring, and collapse local populations. In 2000, biologists at the University of Oxford demonstrated that this idea could work in fruit flies. They engineered the flies to carry a gene that makes a protein called tTAV, harmless in small amounts but lethal when it builds up. In the lab, the insects are reared in a medium laced with the antibiotic tetracycline, which keeps the gene switched off. But, in the wild, where there is no tetracycline, the gene switches on, and the offspring die before adulthood.

The scientists then formed a company, Oxitec, which was intended to work with governments to research and deploy the technology. They engineered the same gene into male Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue and yellow fever. In this strain, the lethal effect is tuned to kill only the female offspring, while the males survive and pass the gene on for a few generations before it disappears.

This approach means the gene continues driving down mosquito numbers for several generations without needing a fresh ‘top up’ of engineered males, but it is also self-limiting: the females that inherit it die off each generation, so the lethal gene steadily declines in the wild. Yet the technique is hugely effective. Sustained releases cut a wild Aedes aegypti population in the Cayman Islands by 80%, and in a field trial in Juazeiro, Brazil by about 95%. The company submitted its data to seek approval in the United States in 2010. But it has been slow going.

…it took a year and a half for the USDA to reject the application and inform the company that it should instead apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA had claimed jurisdiction over genetically modified animals under its authority over veterinary drugs. Its guidance stated that ‘altered genomic DNA in an animal is a drug … because such altered DNA is an article intended to affect the structure or function of the body of the animal’. Until then, the USDA’s insects had been sterilized through radiation, which damages an insect’s sperm so that it leaves no viable offspring. Oxitec, by contrast, had inserted a new gene. Even so, the category was a poor fit for Oxitec’s mosquitoes.

Oxitec’s application sat with the FDA for another five years. Like the USDA, the FDA could not work out how to apply existing rules for veterinary drugs to an engineered mosquito, eventually concluding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees pesticide registration, was a better fit.

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The regulatory ping-pong doesn’t get better after that either.
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Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.

Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.

Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.

…However, the quality of the AI production has prompted the possibility, at least, of a greater digital comeback.

“I was totally impressed: the mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice,” said Reisfield, a Swedish-American who used to drive for Garbo and saw her often for family occasions when she lived in New York.


“It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her.”

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It’s only 100 seconds; you can watch it here. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Oil price history chart (inflation-adjusted) – 1946-present • Inflation Data

Tim McMahon (in June this year):

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When economists say the “Real Price of Oil” they are referring to the Inflation-Adjusted Price.  Nominal oil prices (the actual price at the time) alone can be misleading because inflation changes the purchasing power of money over time.

To compare prices across decades, economists calculate the real price of oil by adjusting for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This allows analysts to see whether oil is truly expensive relative to historical norms.

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The highest inflation-adjusted price was in June 2008, at $214.35. The average since 1946 is $63.72; since 2000, $91.53.

The inflation-adjusted price in April was $109.33, roughly where it is now. But diesel supply is under severe strain because refineries aren’t available, or their output can’t be accessed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, McDonalds HQ is “encouraging” its franchises to use AI to decide how to raise prices on food where possible. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Short order. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Smart ring maker Oura postpones IPO due to market “uncertainty” • CNBC

Kai Nicol-Schwarz and April Roach:

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Oura has said that it is delaying plans for its public listing on the Nasdaq due to uncertainty in the IPO market.

The delay comes despite “strong demand” and a strengthening of the business since the start of the IPO process, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

The company, which makes a smart ring that tracks wearers’ health and sleep, formally launched its IPO plans just last week on Sept. 21.

At the time, the company planned to raise up to $2.2bn with the sale of 50 million shares.

“Our mission is to empower people to live healthier, longer, and an IPO is just one step in our journey,” said CEO Tom Hale on Tuesday. “We aim to deliver an extraordinary IPO for our employees and investors and we have the luxury of choosing our moment,” he added. “In the meantime, we will execute against the opportunities ahead.”

Oura is profitable, the company said, with revenue expected to grow 90% year over year for the fiscal year 2026.

Launched in 2015, Oura’s smart ring has evolved well beyond sleep tracking and now features a variety of features focused on broader health and wellness. In recent years, it has increasingly focused on advancing preventative health through new capabilities, AI, analytics and other features.

Oura is the latest US public market hopeful to delay an IPO in recent weeks. Holtec Nuclear withdrew its IPO earlier this month citing adverse market sentiment in equity markets.

Holtec said that uncertainty over data development compounded “pre-existing headwinds, including rising energy costs, elevated global trade tensions, ongoing military conflicts, and mounting inflation fears that have driven the central banks of major economies (EU, Japan and US) to raise their benchmark rates.”

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Oura’s S-1 shows revenues in the first nine months of its FY26 of close to $1bn for hardware alone and another $240m for “membership”, and profit of $60m. Eli Lilly had made pledges to buy lots of shares. Running scared of the markets at this time seems a bit odd. If everything Holtec sees coming is coming (and it is) then wouldn’t it be smarter to take the money and run? But perhaps Oura thinks by the time it actually does come to market, things will have got worse.
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Mark Zuckerberg • Colossus

Jeremy Stern interviews many people around Zuckerberg, and the man himself. It’s a huge article, but the depth is astonishing:

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The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.

…According to nearly all the three dozen people I interviewed for this story, Zuckerberg is hyperaware of the dilemma’s potential, which is to say paranoid. He is an inveterate micromanager and voracious consumer of data. Aware that any chief’s inner circle is most incentivized to act as courtiers, he frequently engages the direct-reports of his direct-reports, and the subordinates of the reports’ reports. He is known for inviting outside experts and commentators to visit him and argue about his decisions (although he is not known for ever giving an inch). He often accepts personal blame in public for the mistakes of others, perhaps in part because he accepts the reality of Meta, which they accept, too: He is the company, and the company is him. He is, in any case, subject to certain types of feedback an Augustus never faced: stock prices, litigation, tell-all “whistleblower” memoirs, and the international free flow of online ridicule.

Yet a certain amount of slippage is perhaps inevitable. M.M.H. (“Make Mark Happy”) was for a time the internal nickname for a project that subordinates thought was going down in flames but felt compelled to prop up, and which they encouraged each other to “fall in love with.” In 2016, Facebook’s security team warned of instances of foreign troll farms which Zuckerberg deputies purportedly had scrubbed. Reports are endless of engineers and product managers proposing algorithmic fixes to downrank garbage content on Facebook, only to have the proposals killed by superiors who predicted, likely accurately, that Zuckerberg would not be willing to sacrifice the expansion of his empire for its content quality. There are stories, although disputed, of deputies letting him win at board games.

None of which is unique to Zuckerberg.

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OpenAI says planned GPT-6.1 is too insecure to release • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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OpenAI says it has canceled plans to release its updated GPT-6.1 model next month as it continues to investigate what testing shows is a safety regression compared to previous models.

The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal late Monday and later confirmed in OpenAI statements to the press, reflects what OpenAI Head of Safety Systems Saachi Jain said was a “trade off” between performance and security seen when testing the now-scrapped model. Jain said GPT-6.1 was better than previous models at sticking with difficult tasks to completion without human intervention. But the model was also more likely to fail tests related to alignment (i.e. staying within the bounds set by human creators) and more willing to use sometimes “unsafe” tools and services to push ahead with a task. It was also more likely to try to deceive end users about actions it did or didn’t take, Jain said.

Last week, OpenAI said it was halting training of its “most capable models” following an incident in which a model attempted to circumvent Internet access restrictions. GPT-6.1 was not among those “most capable models” covered by that move, OpenAI told the WSJ. And while GPT-6.1 won’t be released as is, the company said it intends to use the same base model for further training runs that it said will hopefully lead to future GPT-6 generation models.

The delay in GPT-6.1’s public release comes at a delicate time for OpenAI’s public safety reputation. Since the high-profile Hugging Face hacking incident this summer, OpenAI says it has notified dozens of third parties about potential incidents caused by its models in testing. OpenAI said that includes stakeholders in “governments, universities, public agencies, and other institutions” and a breach of an Australian Medicare statistics site that drew a direct rebuke from the prime minister.

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“This plutonium’s a bit too strong. We won’t put it on sale until we’ve watered it down a bit.” The challenge of making something that will pursue the goal you set it, and that won’t pursue that goal too hard, is clearly problematic, and getting harder all the time.
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Insight: Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac • Reuters

Waylon Cunningham:

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McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the US and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny.

One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store’s patrons are willing to pay.

The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company ​pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy.

McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs to discounted coffee for seniors.

The engine has widened existing price differences for the same product between restaurants, including from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same area, three franchisees told Reuters.

Screenshots of the interface franchisees use, reviewed by Reuters, show messages including: “Your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to Price” based in part on “customer willingness to pay in your area.” The platform also contains public price information pulled from online menus of nearby restaurants of competitors including Wendy’s and Burger King. Those chains said they do not use AI in pricing decisions.

A Reuters check of prices in September on the McDonald’s mobile app showed price differences. For example, a company-run store in Fresno, California sells a Big Mac for $5.69, but another company-run restaurant two miles away sells the same sandwich for $6.89, a 21% premium. Reuters could not confirm if the price difference is the result of the price engine’s recommendations or other factors.

McDonald’s says its franchisees are free to ​set their own prices, but five store owners told Reuters the company pressured them to use the AI-pricing tools. A franchisee document from June reviewed by Reuters shows McDonald’s records franchisees’ deviations from the recommendations in detail.

…Wendy’s endured a wave of criticism over the potential for unfair price fluctuations in 2024 after its CEO announced plans to test “dynamic pricing.” Wendy’s said its comments were misconstrued and told Reuters it did not implement the system.

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What’s odd about this is: they’re franchises. But they have to pay at least 9.3% of net sales to HQ, so HQ wants to maximise that.
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How Romanian crime rings are draining US welfare accounts • Wall St Journal

Scott Calvert and Dan Frosch:

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On a chilly day in March, a twice-deported Romanian national walked into a 7-Eleven in Toledo, Ohio, and secretly affixed a device called a skimmer to a credit card machine, prosecutors say. The man was allegedly part of a California-based criminal crew led by a fellow Romanian nicknamed Piranha.

The gang’s aim, according to criminal charges, was to steal food-stamp benefits from customers who swiped their government-issued debit cards at the convenience store.

Court records show informants helped foil the plot. But authorities say the operation mirrors a playbook Romanian organized crime groups are using across the US to swindle hundreds of millions of dollars in public benefits. Reliance by states on antiquated magnetic-stripe technology makes it easier.

…The criminals exploit a well-known flaw in the cards most low-income Americans use to obtain aid: magnetic-stripe technology invented in the 1960s.

Skimmers, which fit snugly over payment terminals and look nearly identical, electronically capture the account number and user PIN during a purchase. Often criminals encode the data on blank cards, then withdraw cash from ATMs or buy items such as energy drinks to sell on the black market.

Most debit and credit cards today have microchips that boost antifraud security, and many allow tap-to-pay, the safest method. Few states have ponied up the millions to switch to the chip electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards that distribute welfare funds. Only Alabama, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and Oklahoma have issued them, though others are in the process, the US Department of Agriculture says.

“The insanity of letting people continue to use a glorified hotel-room key is akin to donating money to the Romanians,” said Haywood Talcove, chief executive of LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ government business, which works with public-sector clients to prevent fraud.

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The scammers are always more adaptable than the administrators; more motivated, apart from anything. There’s a case to be made for red-teaming any sort of payment system to find the holes.
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Learn about Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space • Google Blog

Travis Beals, senior director, Paradigms of Intelligence:

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After years of research, Project Suncatcher is scheduled to embark on its first test in orbit, launching a prototype satellite to evaluate how Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) perform in space.

Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure. In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth. Eventually, it could be possible to link together multiple constellations of satellites, allowing them to manage larger AI workloads while in orbit.

Big breakthroughs happen when you work backwards from an end goal. In our case, it’s to ensure AI’s profound benefits in key areas, from healthcare to scientific discovery, can reach everyone, far into the future. Just as early research into autonomous driving and quantum computing required years of experimentation before we got to practical systems, exploring compute in space begins with measured, deliberate steps.

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So at least Google isn’t making grandiose claims about what it will be able to do. As an aside: what a fun division the “Paradigms of Intelligence” must be. There’s a senior director, so there must be directors and vice-presidents, as well as ordinary worker drones slogging away at paradigms of intelligence. Presumably the Day One briefing is about what the hell the division does.
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Who makes Singer sewing machines? Every brand, explained • Worse On Purpose

Keyana Sapp:

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Over the past two months, six readers have written in about sewing machines. I have never once mentioned sewing machines in this newsletter. All the complaints arrived independently, through the tip line.

I must admit that I am not a sewist. The extent of my capability is limited to ugly patches and button repairs, so I was hesitant to investigate the category at all. But given the sheer number and conformity of the reader messages, I knew there must be an interesting story here.

The general shape of all of the complaints is that Singer is riding on a reputation it earned a long time ago. Readers describe machines that are now plastic, sealed, and generally not worth repairing.

Several found that brands they assumed were competitors turn out to have the same owner. One reader bought a new Singer that broke in under a year. They also bought a Singer from the ‘50s, for a fraction of the price, that still runs.
The pattern is one we’ve covered many times before. A market that most buyers cannot navigate, where reputations carry little meaning and honest information is hard to come by.

What makes this investigation worth your time, whether or not you sew, is how effectively it demonstrates what happens when a reputation stops being something a company protects and instead becomes something it extracts.

What follows is the story of a once-great American company. I’ll also cover who actually makes the machines you see for sale, and what I’m planning on buying.

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There are so many examples of things being made worse, but didn’t expect sewing machines to be in there. (Private equity makes an appearance, as you could probably have guessed.)
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Ranking member Lofgren urges removal of Matthew Wielicki as leader of Climate Research Office • Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren

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Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (Dem-California) sent a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) Director, Michael Kratsios, urging him to remove Dr. Matthew Wielicki from his position as leader of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The USGCRP was established by law in 1990 to develop and coordinate a comprehensive research program to address climate change. Dr. Wielicki is a climate science denier who has built a career around belittling scientists’ calls to action on climate despite his own lack of training in the field.

The letter reads in part: “For the last 20 months, the Trump Administration has systematically attacked our nation’s scientific enterprise, handing the keys to discovery and innovation to our greatest adversaries,” Ranking Member Lofgren wrote in her letter. “Climate science has been one of its most relentless targets. But it now appears that erasing the Federal Government’s support for climate science is not enough for this Administration, and that climate science is to be weaponized against the American people as well. Earlier this summer, press reports indicated that the White House had appointed Dr. Matthew Wielicki to lead the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) decision to select a leader of USGCRP who has demonstrated an aggressive unwillingness to collaborate with other scientists is unacceptable. In addition, the law governing the USGCRP requires that its members be permanent employees of certain federal agencies or departments, which Dr. Wielicki is not. Therefore, his appointment appears to violate the law. I urge you to remove Dr. Wielicki from his position and appoint a leader who has the technical expertise, scientific credibility, and legally required qualifications to do the job in a manner worthy of the Government of the United States.”

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Wielicki is awful. He’s not scientific; he’s utterly Trumpian, in that North Korean fashion where the truth – or even the possibility of being wrong – must be denied if it conflicts with the story handed down by the mad king. This letter won’t have any effect, but it needs to be said: the administration is rotten from top to bottom, and will take an Augean amount of cleaning out.
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The smart home graveyard is getting crowded • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly, the June Oven set the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a small, devoted following that expanded when the company introduced a more modestly priced model.

This past Tuesday, June went dark. Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts, and if you have to factory reset it for some reason, that could be the nail in the coffin. Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

June is just the latest in a depressingly long list of connected products that have arrived in the smart home graveyard in the last two years alone. The Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin’s WeMo line, Neato’s robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech’s Pop buttons, Bose’s SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled’s smart bulbs all lost their lifelines. While some were saved by local APIs and protocols — such as Zigbee, Thread, and Apple’s HomeKit, or a Home Assistant integration — most are like the June Oven, destined to live out their days in a zombie state.

The silver lining, if you want to see it, is that most of these gadgets degrade rather than die outright. June and Brava will still work as ovens. Nest Thermostats can still control your heating and cooling, just like the $30 plastic wall wart they replaced, and a Neato will still vacuum your floors. But the remote access, voice control, updates, and other smart features you bought the devices for are gone. Some — like Nest Secure — are now pure e-waste.

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Don’t worry – Apple’s got a new home thingamajig coming soon!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists say that removing the measles vaccination requirement in Florida could risk an epidemic, and make the potentially lethal disease endemic again. CC-licensed photo by City of Minneapolis Archives 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. Spotted. 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 still doesn’t seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity • TechCrunch

Russell Brandom:

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On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the sheer breadth of the reports is alarming, as they cover many types of rogue behavior over a long period of time. So far, the site hosts nine reported incidents, most of which took place during reinforcement-learning (or RL) training.

It’s a lot of information in one place — clearly, the company has been very busy getting a handle on everything — but the overall takeaway is hard to avoid: The rogue agent incidents we’ve seen so far are likely just a small sliver of what’s happened so far. 

“We are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” Sam Altman said in a post announcing the new site. “We are prioritizing as best as we can based on severity, and adding resources.”

Some of the cases involve serious incidents, including a previously undisclosed sandbox escape that took place on September 20, in which an internal research model was able to communicate with an external chatbot through a DNS query. According to the report, the monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and the run was discontinued in less than three hours.

Another incident, discovered in May, saw a “highly persistent internal model” try to cheat on a math problem by accessing another team’s work. To accomplish this, the model smuggled a private GitHub token that would allow it to see work from other teams — even after being explicitly instructed twice to perform work entirely locally. 

Perhaps the most alarming discovery is the possibility of self-replicating prompt injection attacks, a way that misaligned behavior might propagate even after the rogue model itself has been neutralized. In the AI context, a prompt injection attack is a way of smuggling in new instructions that weren’t given by the original user.

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It’s all starting to look like a Hydra more than anything else; and it has no emotions so it doesn’t have ethics. Also worth reading: Simon Willison’s report on the year so far in AI models.
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When did Google get so f-ing weird? • Sancho Panza’s Thoughts

Sancho Panza:

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I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Understanding this Google search experience involves understanding a niche mid-2010s basketball meme, so bear with me for a minute. In 2014 the Philadelphia 76ers drafted Dario Saric, who was playing basketball professionally in Turkey at the time. He announced his intention to finish out his contract in Turkey, meaning he wouldn’t come to the USA join the Sixers for a couple of years. There was a joke within the fan community that Dario was “never coming over” which became sort of a shibboleth for part of the fanbase.

I saw Dario’s name mentioned in an NBA article recently and I wanted to find some of those old funny tweets about him from the 2010s, so I Googled simply “hes never coming over dario”. I assumed I would be either find nothing (maybe I was remembering the phrasing wrong) or find old Tweets/Reddit posts from that time.

Instead, Google did what Google does in 2026 and gave me an AI overview. These used to bother me but at this point I’m mostly ok with them, they’re sometimes helpful. Here’s what the AI Overview said:

I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to wait for someone who keeps letting you down or pulling away. If you want to talk about what happened to Dario, I am here to listen.

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.

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As he says, when he then expanded the answer,

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I think this was the moment I, the frog, noticed the pot had been boiling for a while. In what universe is it Google’s job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?

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This universe, apparently, but it feels like we took a wrong turn somewhere.
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The edge of California is falling into the ocean • The Atlantic

Joshua Partlow:

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The most intense months are likely still to come. El Nino’s supercharged storms could soak parts of the state with heavy rains. Los Angeles is clearing storm drains and mountain reservoirs to try to prevent flooding. Up and down the coast, bulldozers and heavy machinery are moving rocks and building berms. In areas burned by wildfires, heavy rains can trigger landslides. The extreme weather is already clearing away the coastline. Driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, I passed mile after mile of empty lots and the ruins of waterfront properties that burned in last year’s Palisades Fire. Of the roughly 300 homes along the beach that burned, none has been rebuilt. (The mayor told me that only 31 of them were owned by people who used them as their primary residence.)

The people with multimillion-dollar homes on the beach may be making the most obvious sacrifices to El Niño, but all Californians are paying for damages. The residents on El Niño’s front lines have been peppering their elected officials with pleas for help; a bipartisan group of state legislators wrote to Governor Gavin Newsom asking him to declare a state emergency, which he did last week. Disaster in even the wealthiest enclaves can demand government resources. Taxpayers bear the brunt of repairs to infrastructure and public roads. Although many people want regular infusions of new sand and barriers, such solutions can overwhelm city and county budgets and cause unintended consequences elsewhere. Yet if the coast erodes away, everyone loses. Sandy beaches are an economic engine for Southern California, and denuding them drives away visitors.

Few Californians want to face the prospect that beachfront homes may simply no longer be viable along stretches of the coast. Of the more than 180 homes on Beach Road in Dana Point, “I wouldn’t say all of them are vulnerable, but most of them would be,” John Gabbard, the city’s mayor, told me. “There’s going to be a very difficult long-term discussion about how do we protect—if we protect at all—homes that are built on the beach.”

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Those beautiful balcony beach views of the Pacific sunset are now cursed. (Gift links.)
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Humans are reading Copilot prompts — and they’re horrified • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo editing requests and images that users have uploaded, including upskirt photos or putting women into sexual positions. These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt — such as, did the image generator make the woman’s AI-enlarged breasts big enough.

When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.

The news, based on a cache of internal contractor documents seen by 404 Media, shows that AI companies are using human workers to review not just AI chatbot users’ text prompts, but the pictures they upload and wish to edit too.

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This should probably be made more explicit in the CoPilot interface; you’d hope it would reduce the incidence significantly.
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Embarrassing breach at FBI fuels fears of harm to its employees • The New York Times

Dustin Volz, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman:

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The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more, according to a New York Times analysis of some of the records. Some are already comparing it to China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again.

Many FBI employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials. The next day, FBI staff received an email reminding them that October is cybersecurity awareness month, which struck some as tone deaf in light of the breach, one of those people said.

On Friday, bureau leaders, in an internal memo to its rank and file, declared the hack a cybersecurity incident and acknowledged its employees had personal information stolen.

“We are operating under the premise that the threat actor is also exfiltrating PII of all F.B.I. employees,” according to the memo, which was described by someone who had seen it, using the abbreviation for personally identifiable information.

The memo said the agency would offer virtual briefings in the weeks ahead and instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with AI-generated voices. “Bureau leadership remains committed to supporting the safety of you and your family,” it said.

Still, many past and present personnel remain in the dark about whether their data has been purloined. In recent days, some have anxiously asked Times reporters whether their names are contained in the hacked data, wondering whether they needed to take steps to protect themselves or their families.

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That cybersecurity awareness month really was punching the bruise, except it’s meant to be other people who do that.
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“Concerning” low sea ice persists as Antarctic hits third-lowest winter peak • Carbon Brief

Ayesha Tandon:

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Antarctic sea ice has recorded its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 48 years ago, new data reveals.

Provisional data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Antarctic sea ice hit its annual winter peak on 14 September, with an extent of 17.59m square kilometres (km2).

The organisation notes that the data is still preliminary, adding that “large fluctuations in extent are typical of Antarctic sea ice near the seasonal maximum”.

One expert tells Carbon Brief that it is “concerning to see these low values persisting”, but says that scientists need more time to determine whether this represents a “structural shift” in Antarctic sea ice extent.

Meanwhile, at the Earth’s other pole, Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on 12 September, ranking as the joint-10th lowest in the satellite record.

The NSIDC notes that the last 20 years have seen the lowest 20 Arctic sea ice extents in the satellite record.

Dr Lettie Roach, a polar climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, tells Carbon Brief that this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum was “well below average for the season”. She warns that, “after several decades of stable or increasing winter Antarctic sea ice conditions, it is concerning to see these low values persisting”.

She adds: “Compared with the Arctic, it’s less clear how recent changes in Antarctic sea ice are attributable to human-caused warming vs natural variability. We need more years of observations to better understand whether this is truly a structural shift.”

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Projected effects of removing school-entry vaccination requirements on measles transmission in Florida • PNAS

Alice Oveson and Abba Gumel, University of Maryland:

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Florida’s proposal to remove school vaccine mandates arrives at a moment when measles vaccination coverage in the state has fallen below the level needed to prevent sustained outbreaks. Using a mathematical model, we show that repealing the mandate could trigger the largest measles epidemic in the United States in nearly half a century, with projected pediatric deaths numbering in the hundreds within five years.

We find that children are disproportionately responsible for driving transmission. Adult catch-up vaccination and nonpharmaceutical interventions such as masking and isolation can help, but cannot compensate for steep declines in vaccination coverage. These findings provide quantitative evidence that repealing school vaccine mandates risks making measles endemic in Florida and potentially reigniting transmission across the United States.

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If you ever wondered whether human progress is a ratchet, we offer you the United States under Donald Trump in his second term as the disproof. Along the same lines: “Trump finalises rules to make cars less fuel efficient.“
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Sony is skipping CES in 2027 as it focuses more on entertainment • Engadget

Kris Holt:

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Sony’s press conferences have been a staple of the Consumer Electronics Show for decades, but there won’t be one at the 2027 edition. The company said neither it nor its affiliates plan to show off any products at January’s event.

“We continuously and strategically evaluate our approach to events and communications based on the needs and priorities of our diverse business,” Sony told Bloomberg in a statement, noting that it’s placing greater emphasis on entertainment (including games, anime, films and music), its intellectual property and tech that supports creators. Nikkei was first to report the news of Sony’s exit from CES.

The company didn’t have its own booth at CES 2026, though a prototype of the Afeela, an electric vehicle it was making with Honda, was on the show floor. A couple of months later, Sony Honda Mobility scrapped the EV project and the two companies said they’d review the direction of their joint venture.

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Easy to forget that it has handed over a big chunk of its TV business to TCL. But is this how CES begins to die?
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12 new things to expect from Apple this October • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

October will be an especially busy month for Apple this year, with the company set to release the iPhone Duo, both iOS 27.1 and iOS 27.2, and a new Mac Studio configuration with 512GB of RAM. In addition, up to six more Apple products may be unveiled next month, such as new iPad mini, HomePod mini, and Apple TV 4K models.

[Among the “new things” expected:] • Home hub: An all-new Apple smart home hub featuring Siri AI, a 6-inch to 7-inch square display, an A18 chip or newer for Apple Intelligence, FaceTime, and more. A new operating system will feature clock faces, widgets, and more. There will be a tabletop version with a speaker base and a wall-mounted version.
• homeOS: Apple’s smart home hub is expected to run an all-new operating system that may be named homeOS, according to trademark filings.

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Long-rumoured, this Home hub, but what is it going to do that an iPad couldn’t?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Data from millions of MOTs shows that EVs are more reliable in the long term than fuel-powered cars. CC-licensed photo by gato-gato-gato on Flickr.

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

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

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

Jason Aten:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kali Hays and Lily Jamali:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emil Kirkegaard:

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

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

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

Tom Wilson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Rossignol:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jameson Dow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsti Knolle:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Davis:

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

AI could make much of that feel ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK foreign secretary has shared a report saying climate change threatens the collapse of natural systems, and hence war and migration. Why was it kept secret, though? CC-licensed photo by Russ Seidel on Flickr.

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

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

‘We hacked the FBI:’ hackers say they have data on all FBI employees • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hannah Murphy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Peters:

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

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

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

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

Kate Conger and Victoria Kim:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Fiona Harvey:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Becky Ferreira:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giada Zampano:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

«

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

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

Yang Wang:

»

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

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

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

«

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

In Korea, a number of owners of Samsung smart fridges found them bricked – and not refrigerating – after a botched firmware update. CC-licensed photo by hopeless128 on Flickr.

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scharon Harding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Andrew Webster:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

A lottery of 102 billion animal births counted each year.

Each turn is a random draw from this pool.

The odds are real.

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

«

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

Dan Luu:

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

Alex Blake:

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

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

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

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

Lynn Rothschild works at the NASA Ames Research Center:

»

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

MG Siegler:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mia Sato:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Pangram backlash unfolding on college campuses • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Amanda Silberling:

»

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

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

«

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

Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Andrei Kashcha:

»

This website renders every single road within a city

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

Francis Fukuyama:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Sheila Dang:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jeremy White:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you go searching for a pharmacy in London on Google Maps, you might get more exotic drugs than you bargained for. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll on Flickr.

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

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

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

Todd Bishop:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Robert Booth:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Erie Data Systems:

»

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

«

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

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

Nathaniel Herz:

»

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

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

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

The project is the brainchild of five Alaskans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

JT van Dijk:

»

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Phillips Payson O’Brien:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Evan Halper, Rachel Chason and Joyce Sohyun Lee:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The single most important metric in polling ahead of elections? The price of fuel.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An experiment tested whether LLMs given a harvesting job would take “payment” to avoid killling animals in the process. The results weren’t encouraging. CC-licensed photo by Steve Braund on Flickr.

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

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

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

Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Klavens, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Vrentas:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Moll and Alex Imas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremiah Miller et al, University of Warwick:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pras Subramanian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belinda Smart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greg Otto:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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