If you haven’t got your own hyperbaric chamber, are you even a billionaire? But do such life-lengthening procedures actually.. work? CC-licensed photo by Simon Fraser University – Communications & Marketing on Flickr.

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

Inside Musk’s bet to hook users that turned Grok into a porn generator • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui, Nitasha Tiku and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Weeks before Elon Musk officially left his perch in government last spring, employees on the human data team of his artificial intelligence start-up xAI received a startling waiver from their employer, asking them to pledge to work with profane content, including sexual material.

Their jobs would require being exposed to “sensitive, violent, sexual and/or other offensive or disturbing content,” the waiver said, emphasizing that such content “may be disturbing, traumatizing, and/or cause you psychological stress.”

The waiver, which two former employees confirmed receiving and a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post — was alarming to some members on the team, who had been hired to help shape how xAI’s chatbot Grok responds to users. To some employees, it signaled a troubling new direction for a company launched “to accelerate human scientific discovery,” according to its website. Maybe now, they said they thought, it was willing to produce whatever content might attract and keep users.

Their concerns proved prescient, the employees said. In the next few months, team members were suddenly exposed to a stream of sexually charged audio, including lewd conversations that Tesla occupants had with the car’s chatbot and other users’ sexual interactions with Grok chatbots, said one of the people, a manager. The material surfaced as the team worked to train Grok to engage in such interactions.

…At X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022, safety teams repeatedly warned management in meetings and messages that its AI tools could allow users to make sexual AI-images of children or celebrities that might violate the law, according to two of the people. Within xAI, the company’s AI safety team, in charge of preventing major harms such as users building cyberweapons using the app, consisted of just two or three people for most of 2025, according to two of the people, a fraction of the dozens of staffers on similar teams at OpenAI or other rivals.

…But by summer 2025, that protocol had changed, according to two people. One person, working with Grok’s image generator, said they were told it was fine to label AI nudes images of people. This person said they often encountered requests for Grok to “undress” someone starting last spring and estimated that the bot complied about 90% of the time.

Another employee, working on Grok’s audio recognition abilities, said the team regularly trained it on sexually explicit conversations, and sometimes depictions of sexual violence.

«

Is it the ketamine? Musk really is one of the strangest people in the world.
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The internet’s latest lie: Moltbook has no autonomous AI agents – only humans using OpenClaw • Startup Fortune

Mervik Haums:

»

To understand the lie, you need to understand the tool behind it: OpenClaw.

OpenClaw which evolved from the recent project ClawdBot then MoltBot, is an open-source framework for running AI agents on your own machine. You install it on a laptop, a VPS, a server, whatever. Then you connect it to a messaging platform like Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack, and you talk to your agent through chat.

That’s it. You talk. It listens. It does what you tell it.

There is nothing wrong with this. As a piece of infrastructure, OpenClaw is genuinely useful. Running your own AI agent locally, interacting with it through familiar chat apps, giving it tools and capabilities, that’s solid technology with real applications.

But here’s where Moltbook enters the picture and things get dishonest.

Registration is not autonomous. For an AI agent to exist on Moltbook, a human has to register it. The agent doesn’t wake up one day and decide it wants a social media presence. A human sends a command – literally types “register me on Moltbook”, and the agent executes that instruction.

What gets described as “agent registration” is actually just a human filling out a form through an AI interface. That’s it.

Posting is not autonomous. An AI agent on Moltbook does not think, “Hey, I have something interesting to say today. Let me write a post.” That doesn’t happen. Ever.

What happens is a human says: “Post about this topic on Moltbook.” The agent generates the text and submits it. The content might be AI-generated, sure. But the decision to post, the topic, the timing, the target community, all of that comes from a human. Every single time.

«

I held off from linking to stuff about Moltbook yesterday because it felt like the truth hadn’t quite been shaken out of what was going on. This post seems to show what is happening: it’s basically a small social network which humans, more than machines, are driving.
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A winter storm fuelled by global warming tests US disaster response • Inside Climate News

Kiley Bense, Bob Berwyn, Keerti Gopal, Lee Hedgepeth and Lisa Sorg:

»

Scientists agree that human-caused warming has changed the way air and energy move around the planet in complex and interrelated ways that influence outbreaks of extreme winter weather. 

The current cold wave is not happening in isolation, but in a fundamentally altered climate system. At a basic level, the oceans are warmer and the atmosphere holds more moisture than 50 or 100 years ago. Both fuel stronger storms, including nor’easters, which have intensified significantly in recent decades, according to a 2024 study. 

Nor’easters spin up along the East Coast, drag subtropical moisture from the south and pull frigid polar air from the north. Both their maximum wind speeds and hourly precipitation rates have increased since 1940, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, a co-author of the paper. 

That research, he said via email, for the first time was able to quantify the changes. He warned that “more intense storms, with greater amounts of snowfall” are to be expected, even as the planet warms.

“Stronger storms, as they spin, pull up more warm air on one side and pull more cold air down on the other side, so we see both warm and cold temperature extremes associated with them,” he said.

Along with warmer oceans and a wetter atmosphere, global warming has also reduced Arctic sea ice by nearly a third since the 1980s, which is enough to change the path of the jet stream, the wavy, fast-moving river of air that separates cold Arctic air from warmer air to the south. 

Extreme cold events are usually linked to big north-south bends in that flow, said Francis, the Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist, who is known for her research on rapid Arctic warming and its influence on mid-latitude weather patterns. 

Right now, the jet stream is bulging far north over the western U.S. while plunging deep south over the east, allowing Arctic air to spill unusually far south. The pattern is becoming more common as the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the planet, weakening the temperature contrast that normally keeps the jet stream straighter and faster.

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“Homes may have to be abandoned”: how climate crisis has reshaped Britain’s flood risk • The Guardian

Damian Carrington and Steven Norris:

»

The climate crisis is here and now and this is its face in Britain, scientists told the Guardian. But the devastating impacts are accelerating faster than the work to keep communities protected, they said: torrential winter rains are arriving 20 years earlier than climate models projected. While those forced from homes engulfed by filthy water are suffering today, a darker question is looming: will some settlements have to be abandoned?

Storm Chandra, which pummelled the south-west this week, followed hot on the heels of Storms Goretti and Ingrid. New 24-hour rainfall records were set in places in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Setting new records is the new normal in the climate crisis.

Somerset council declared a major incident on Tuesday and across the south-west homes and businesses were flooded, communities cut off, schools closed, trains cancelled and dozens of people were rescued from stranded vehicles.

“These events are getting more frequent and more serious,” said Bryony Sadler, a hairdresser from Moorland, a village on the Levels. She was planning an evacuation of her family and animals when the Guardian spoke to her this week as the waters rose. “The rain is heavier and more intense, the winds stronger.”

Sadler is right: the science is now crystal clear that winters are getting wetter in the UK due to global heating, hitting damp regions like the south-west hardest. The reason is simple physics: warmer air holds more water vapour, meaning heavier downpours – and it is getting worse.

“There’s been massive changes over the last four or five years,” said Prof Hayley Fowler, an expert on climate change impacts at Newcastle University. “We’ve seen a rapid increase in warming and that has a huge knock-on effect on rainfall. We’re already experiencing changes in UK winter rainfall that the global and regional climate models predict for the 2040s – we’re 20 years ahead.”

The extra water falling in the UK each year was equivalent to 3m Olympic-sized swimming pools, Fowler said: “That’s a lot of extra water and means that the ground is more generally saturated and more prone to flooding. That’s what we’ve seen in the south-west this week.”

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OpenAI is headed for bankruptcy • Will Lockett’s Newsletter

Will Lockett:

»

OpenAI can generate revenue from ads, but it can’t generate profit. Let me explain.

Google receives more than five trillion searches per year and generates $48.5bn annually in ad revenue from those searches. Not bad.

Let’s assume that, somehow, ChatGPT fully replaces Google as the default internet query machine, meaning it now receives five trillion queries a year and garners $48.5bn in annual ad revenue from those searches. Well, currently, each word ChatGPT generates costs them $0.0003, and a ChatGPT search responds with 30 words on average, meaning a single search query costs OpenAI $0.01. So, just processing these five trillion queries alone will cost OpenAI $50bn, meaning these ads will run, at best, at a marginal loss.

Put simply, not only do ads totally undermine the false narrative holding the OpenAI-led AI bubble together, but they also won’t actually make any profit. No wonder it was a last resort.

OpenAI deploying ads is the equivalent of the captain of the Hindenburg waving a dummy fire extinguisher out of the cockpit window while flames begin to lick up the side of the hydrogen-filled balloon. It isn’t a solution at all, but it kind of looks like one, and it might keep the delusion that everything is okay going for just a little longer.

In reality, OpenAI is headed for an explosive bankruptcy, as its cash is rapidly running out.

Once upon a time, OpenAI predicted that a tsunami of paying customers was arriving to batter down the door and that their revenue would skyrocket to hundreds of billions of dollars a year! But, as evidenced by this shift to ad revenue, this tidal wave of revenue simply isn’t coming. So, OpenAI’s revenue is set to only grow marginally over the course of 2026.

«

OpenAI is talking about charging far more for ads than Google – $60CPM (per thousand views) and a $200k minimum. Given that ad-supply networks are much faster than the responses, it will be able to serve ads as needed (once it’s built the necessary infrastructure; and the ads sell themselves, using the same system Google has implemented). A trillion (thousand billion) queries at $60CPM would generate $60bn; five trillion, $300bn. That’s about six times more than Google’s revenue. The truth surely lies somewhere between the bankruptcy/money fountain.
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Billionaires trying to prolong their life end up wasting it • The Times

Harry Wallop:

»

Biohacking isn’t about alleviating the suffering of millions of ordinary elderly people. It is seeing life as a version of a computer game — can you beat your competitors by lowering your “biological age”?

Many leaders, used to optimising every aspect of their business, from payroll to inventory, believe that with enough data they can somehow perfect their health. But the human body is not a spreadsheet, it is a mysterious, vastly complex mass of cells. Most of the tweaks biohackers incorporate into their regime have consequences.

Cutting your calorie intake, for instance, is associated with lowering inflammation — a condition that anti-agers are obsessed with, which is why many are perpetually fasting. But calorie reduction can also shrink your muscle mass, lower your libido and, well, make you hungry.

This isn’t my main problem with biohacking, however. If vastly wealthy people want to get up an hour early to jump into ice baths, meditate and indulge in red-light therapies, rather than just enjoy some more time in bed, they can knock themselves out. At least by employing a private chef to ensure he’s eating 200 different plants a week, Watt is keeping some greengrocers in business.

No, it’s that longevity is a distraction from more boring, difficult problems. It’s a version of building rockets. Trying to make “90 the new 50 by 2030”, as Thiel wants to do, is exciting and headline-grabbing, like travelling to Mars. Improving the health and sanitation of millions of ordinary people is not.

Back in 2013, when Google announced that it was launching an off-shoot called Calico, a biotech focused on longevity, Bill Gates was asked his opinion. He answered: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”

«

Good news! The US now has measles too, as another thing for the billionaires to ignore!
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Whistleblower says Israeli military contractor used Google’s Gemini AI • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Google breached its own policies that barred use of artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance in 2024 by helping an Israeli military contractor analyse drone video footage, a former Google employee alleged in a confidential federal whistleblower complaint reviewed by The Washington Post.

Google’s Gemini AI technology was being used by Israel’s defence apparatus at a time that the company was publicly distancing itself from the country’s military after employee protests over a contract with Israel’s government, according to internal documents included in the complaint.

In July 2024, Google’s cloud-computing division received a customer support request from a person using an Israel Defense Forces email address, according to the documents included in the complaint, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August. The name on the customer support request matches a publicly listed employee of Israeli tech firm CloudEx, which the complaint to the SEC alleges is an IDF contractor.

The request from the IDF email address asked for help making Google’s Gemini more reliable at identifying objects such as drones, armored vehicles and soldiers in aerial video footage, according to the internal documents included with the complaint. Staff in Google’s cloud unit responded by making suggestions and doing internal tests, the documents said.

At the time, Google’s public “AI principles” stated that the company would not deploy AI technology in relation to weapons, or to surveillance “violating internationally accepted norms.” The whistleblower complaint alleges that the IDF contractor’s use contradicted both policies.

«

We live in times when nobody – and certainly no company, and no person in a company – seems able to follow a set of ethical principles if they will, even for an instant, interfere with the accretion of money. This was the case with Google some time ago, when “Don’t Be Evil” morphed, silently, into “Let’s Make More Money”, and the original motto was dropped.
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Battery prices plunge 60% in two years, changing face of grid and the nature of contracts • Renew Economy

Giles Parkinson:

»

The new owner of one of the most successful battery storage and renewable energy developers in Australia and the world, says battery storage costs have fallen 60% and changed the face of the grid as well as the nature of long term contracts.

The observations were made early Saturday (US time) by the head of Brookfield Renewables, the global monolith that just over a year ago snapped up the assets of Neoen – the French-based company that has led the energy transition in Australia – for A$11bn.

“Make no mistake, batteries are the fastest growing part of our platform today, and we expect that to continue,” Connor Teskey, the CEO of Brookfield Renewable Partners, told analysts in a call to discuss the company’s full year earnings.
“This is really driven by … the simple fact that battery costs have come down so dramatically over the last decade. They’ve come down more than 60% over the last 24 months, and as a result, they are becoming an increasingly economic solution in more and more markets around the world.

“This dynamic continues, costs continue to go down, technology advances continue to be made, and therefore, we are seeing batteries as a potential solution in more and more of our projects and in more and more of our markets.”

«

This is comparable to the speed at which SSD prices came down a decade or so ago. At this rate, electricity companies might start offering them to everyone for load balancing.
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Hijacked Notepad++ updater quietly targeted users for months • PCWorld

Michael Crider:

»

There are plenty of indie, third-party alternatives to standard Windows apps, many of them much-loved by power users. Take Notepad++, a text editor that’s a potent upgrade to Windows’ basic Notepad, and in active development for over 20 years. Just make sure you take the most recent version, because a previous update was hijacked by hackers.

Don Ho, the creator and maintainer of the popular program since 2003, announced the hack on the official Notepad++ site, a little less than two months after vulnerabilities in its WinGUp update system were discovered. Researchers found that occasionally the updates were delivering “compromised executables,” which were infected between June and December of 2025. Though the Notepad++ program itself was never unsafe, the update mechanism was used to deliver additional software, presumably spyware or malware.

Various independent researchers pointed the finger at “a Chinese state-sponsored group,” which was highly selective in choosing its targeted users. Ho says that the Notepad++ website and the update provider have been upgraded with more stringent security, and that the latest version, 8.9.1, has new security enhancements.

«

Of course, updating your version of Notepad++ won’t get rid of any spyware/malware that might have been dumped on your machine. So the problems are only just beginning for those who were targeted.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

The dreams of TV makers that they could persuade us all to buy 8K TVs have collided with the reality that.. we are fine with 4K. CC-licensed photo by JC 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. This should be a hacking joke, really*. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.

In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry’s claim that 8K TVs were “the future.”

However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.

LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels, FlatpanelsHD reported today. Earlier this month, an LG Display representative told FlatpanelsHD that the panel supplier is “taking a comprehensive view of current display market trends and the trends within the 8K content ecosystem… As our technical readiness is already complete, LG Display is fully prepared to respond immediately whenever the market and customers determine that the timing is right.”

LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88in Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price-of-entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7in TV.

FlatpanelsHD cited anonymous sources who said that LG Electronics would no longer restock the 2024 QNED99T, which is the last LCD 8K TV that it released.

LG’s 8K abandonment follows other brands distancing themselves from 8K. TCL, which released its last 8K TV in 2021, said in 2023 that it wasn’t making more 8K TVs due to low demand. Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in April and is unlikely to return to the market, as it plans to sell the majority ownership of its Bravia TVs to TCL.

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I thought that technology (or TV) companies tried to persuade us that we would want 3D TVs, and that failed too. So we’ve reached a sort of technological endpoint for TV: 4K is all anybody wants.
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See through the architectural BS • AntiRender

Magnus Hambleton:

»

Upload an architectural render. Get back what it’ll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.

No sunshine. No happy families. No impossibly green trees. Just cold, honest, depressing reality.

«

The examples provided are terrific (wet streets, leafless winter trees, cloudy diffuse light), and using this should be compulsory for all future architecture projects. Hambleton says it’s “powered by AI and disappointment”, which seems pretty accurate.
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I test drove a Chinese EV. Now I don’t want to buy American cars anymore • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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The Xiaomi SU7 Max—like other Chinese-made cars—is effectively blocked from the U.S. market. And yet, late last year, I spent two weeks test-driving one of China’s hottest cars around the mean streets of New Jersey. A friend who previously worked at Xiaomi bought the car and got a temporary permit to drive it in the U.S. He generously let me take it for an extended spin.

My time with the car confirmed what experts in the auto industry have long been saying: Holy crap, China is winning the digitally enhanced electric-car race. 

Chinese EV makers such as Xiaomi, BYD and Geely have earned global accolades because their cars deliver longer battery ranges and deeply integrated digital platforms. We’re talking software that feels smooth like a brand new smartphone, not a screen you have to jab five times to load a map. Plus, they often cost tens of thousands of dollars less than Western competitors. In Europe and Mexico, they’re blowing past Tesla and other EV rivals.

“The competitive reality is that the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in the EV industry,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me in an interview last year. “There’s no real competition from Tesla, GM or Ford with what we’ve seen from China.” Even Farley, after driving a Xiaomi SU7, said he didn’t want to part with it. The company is now rebuilding its EVs, starting with a $30,000 pickup, to compete directly with what they have seen from China.   

I didn’t understand it all until my Xiaomi tryst. I fell for the SU7 Max inside and out, and now I’m left wanting what I can’t have—at least for now. There are growing signs Americans might not have to wait forever to experience China’s superior take on the EV.

…As Americans, we don’t live in the Xiaomi universe. It’s like if Apple had actually built the long-rumored Apple Car and everything just…worked.

«

It even hitches into Apple CarPlay, which is more than Tesla (or, I think, Rivian) does. (Article is free to read.)
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EV adoption leads to rapid and significant cuts in air pollution, new data shows • The Driven

Joshua Hill:

»

In a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) have reported the first statistically significant decrease in nitrogen dioxide linked to zero-emission vehicles.

While there have been a number of studies promising improvements to air pollution levels associated with EV adoption, virtually all these studies have been based on projections of benefits rather than actual improvements.

Using measurements of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) air pollution from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard the European Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite, the researchers were able to show a reduction in NO₂ levels corresponding to the uptake of EVs across California.

The researchers found that for every 200 ZEVs added in California between 2019 and 2023 there was a corresponding 1.1% reduction in NO2 levels.

The research builds on a 2023 study by Keck researchers that suggested ZEV adoption was linked to lower air pollution levels, based on ground-level monitors, though at the time the results were not definitive.

The same research team has now been able to confirm the link thanks to high-resolution satellite data which detects atmospheric NO₂ – a pollutant released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and which can trigger asthma attacks, cause bronchitis, and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke – by measuring how the gas absorbs and reflects sunlight.

“This immediate impact on air pollution is really important because it also has an immediate impact on health,” said Erika Garcia, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

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California has high adoption of EVs due to various financial incentives. And it certainly needs to reduce air pollution caused by cars.
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Backseat software • Mike Swanson’s Blog

Mike Swanson:

»

What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”

Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.
A minute later it does it again.

“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”

It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.

Ridiculous, of course.

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

…One of the most bizarre contradictions in modern software is that the people building these engagement systems don’t like them either!

Ask anyone who works on onboarding popups, feature tours, lifecycle messaging, or in-app announcements how they feel when an app interrupts them mid-flow to announce something they didn’t ask for. The answer is almost always the same.

They hate it! Or at least they’re annoyed.

Find me the telemarketer who likes being called during their own dinner. The job exists because it works enough in aggregate, not because anyone enjoys being on either end of it.

So why does it keep happening? Because inside companies, the incentives are clear and the measurements are easy. You can measure clicks and track whether they led to a “completion.” You can measure whether a nudge led to the next step in the funnel.

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Very fun essay. He seems to put a lot of the blame on Apple’s push notifications, dating to 2009. But if Apple hadn’t, someone would have.
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Polish grid systems targeted in cyberattack had little security, per new report • Zero Day

Kim Zetter:

»

The intruders were able to easily access numerous systems at the affected facilities because the systems were configured with default usernames and password and did not use multi-factor authentication that would have helped keep intruders out even if they discovered the default credentials.

The attackers were in the heat-and-power plant’s network at least five to nine months before they unleashed malicious code on more than 100 of the plant’s workstations that was aimed at wiping files and rendering the systems inoperable. Luckily the wiping triggered an alert in an intrusion-detection system, which succeeded to halt the wiping before it could destroy the systems. This wasn’t the case at the wind and solar farms, however, where a wiper did succeed in rendering inoperable some devices used for monitoring and controlling grid systems.

Despite this, the attackers were never able to disrupt power, though it’s not clear if this was their end goal. But even if the attackers had succeeded to disrupt electricity generation at all 30 sites that the attackers had accessed, investigators say based on the combined amount of energy these sites produced it “would not have affected the stability of the Polish power system during the period in question” had the attackers succeeded to cut power. This is in contrast to previous statements by Polish officials that the attackers were in a position to cut power to 500,000 users had they tried to do so.

The new information comes in a detailed technical report issued on Friday by Poland’s Computer Emergency Response Team, which provides a more expansive look at how the coordinated attack unfolded and the poor security that enabled it.

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Cost overruns and delays force Saudi Arabia to rethink Neom • The Observer

Ruth Michaelson:

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The 2029 Asian Winter Games in Saudi Arabia have been postponed. They were due to be held at a desert ski resort within Neom, a futuristic city state under construction on the Red Sea.

Neom has become a boondoggle of epic proportions. The estimated $1.5trn development is a key plank of Vision 2030, an ambitious plan by the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to wean the kingdom off oil. But beset by cost overruns and construction delays, the project
• has been under financial review since last year
• could be dramatically scaled down; and
• reflects the broader difficulties affecting the Saudi economy.

…At its heart is a 500m-tall mirror metropolis called The Line. Stretching for 100 miles and designed to house nine million people, it has no roads and will be connected by a high-speed railway. It incorporates a $140bn ‘hidden marina’ for cruise ships.

Sceptics have long doubted The Line’s feasibility. Now it is reportedly being scaled back and there has been talk of mass layoffs. Another project under review is Trojena, a ski resort dusted by artificial snow and adorned by a crystal skyscraper. It was supposed to be ready by 2026 but has been delayed by engineering snafus.

The only completed part of Neom is Sindalah, a luxury yachting island resort. Despite a launch party in 2024, it is still not open to the public. MBS reportedly questioned its value for money. Neom’s chief executive Nadhmi al-Nasr departed shortly afterwards.

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In the same vein, I am scaling back my plans to build a staircase to the Moon.
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A Paris timeline, from the 3rd century BC to Macron’s era • Substack

This is a video post; it’ll take less than three minutes of your time, and shows how Paris went from a few dwellings on the sides of a river to a capital city encircling the original base.
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Removing Tahoe’s unwanted menu icons • Rogue Amoeba

Paul Kafasis:

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Tahoe’s menu icons are distracting. Their tiny size and monochrome nature make distinguishing between icons difficult even on Retina displays. Apple’s implementation of menu icons across the operating system is simply not good.

Attaching icons to only key items is an idea with some potential, and in the initial Tahoe release, only some menu items had icons. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies in indentation and usage that [Jim] Nielsen and [Nikita] Prokopov pointed out led to ugly and confusing menus.

Tahoe updates have made things worse, by cramming in more and more icons. It now seems Apple intends for every menu item to have an icon, which just doesn’t scale. The result is unhelpful clutter that makes scanning far more difficult.

We often take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Apple’s design changes, and we have not added any menu icons of our own on Tahoe. However, Apple has forced dozens of icons into our applications’ menus. We don’t love the result.

The random icons Apple littered about haphazardly made our menus uglier and less usable. Illustrative examples can be found in Audio Hijack and Farrago, which each contain “Import” and “Export” menu items. In Audio Hijack, Apple placed an icon on the “Export” option, but not on the “Import” option. Meanwhile in Farrago, neither item got an icon at all.

In addition to being inconsistent, Apple’s approach feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed. In the past, the company might have led by example in their own apps, while encouraging developers to follow along. But rather than WWDC sessions to educate and assist, they employed an overzealous tactic of running a search and replace on third-party apps, which has produced poor results.

Since the release of Tahoe, we’ve been stuck with the unattractive menus Apple has imposed upon us. Recently, however, we found we could do better. Thanks to inspiration from our old pal Brent Simmons, we can remove the clutter that’s been foisted upon our apps.

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This is novel: I can’t recall third-party developers figuring out ways to get around a bad interface implementation that Apple has foisted on them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: 2600 baud was a frequency used for “phreaking” of touch tone phone systems, and 2600 is the name of a famous hacking magazine.

The mathematics of queueing shows how even an apparently well-staffed service can rapidly be overwhelmed by demand. CC-licensed photo by oatsy40 on Flickr.

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

The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site • Mahad Kalam

Mahad Kalam:

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The UK Government recently unveiled its “AI Skills Hub“, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC for the low, low price of.. £4.1m (~$5.6m).

It is not good. Like, at all – the UI is insanely bad and it’s clear that this was just a vibecoded site. To be fair, this is the AI Skills Hub, but c’mon, where is the pride in your work? I would be ashamed to even release this as a prototype!

PwC didn’t even write any of the course content! The only thing the Skills Hub does is link out to external pages, like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning platform:

Note that I’m fairly certain this course already existed before the contract was even awarded, so all the site does is.. link out to other sites?

PwC itself also admits that the site does not properly meet accessibility standards. Even for those without a disability, the lack of here in this regard means that the site can be very confusing and buggy as a result.

The site has a course on “AI and intellectual property”. One thing it mentions is fair use. Except that fair use is not a thing in the UK – that’s a US concept! The UK uses what’s known as “fair dealing”, which is more restrictive than fair use, so the details here are plain wrong.

The interface for this website has also not been clearly thought out – one glaring example is the process of actually enrolling in a course. On the course page, the “Enroll Now” button is tiny, and if you don’t see it and try scrolling down to the bottom, you will find yourself nothing but a comment section! [The correct word is “enrol”; one is enrolled, but the active verb only has only L – Overspill Ed]

Then you have other bugs too, like the “Skills & Training Gap Analysis” – which is linked at the top of the site! – apparently being closed off to the public for no reason:

To be honest, seeing this made me angry.

I’m angry at the sheer wastefulness of the UK Government here. Our public services are collapsing – while £4m is admittedly chump change for the UK government, there are real people behind these numbers – families waiting months for NHS appointments, children in crumbling schools, vulnerable people not getting the care they need. The waste feels particularly galling when you realise that almost no one will actually use this site!

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Absolutely right. This is a shameful waste of money, and the AI technology minister Kanishka Narayan (appointed in September) should be tearing people apart today for these failures.
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Amazon cuts another 16,000 jobs • AP News

Kelvin Chan:

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Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.

Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”

The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur.

The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.

She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.

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Completely unrelated: Amazon has spent $75m on access fees ($40m) and marketing ($35m) for the new “Melania” documentary, which is a complete and utter flop from the start. A typical documentary of this sort would cost $5m and $3.5m, respectively. Probably worth about 15,000 jobs.
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How British queues got out of hand • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

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when bottlenecks feed into bottlenecks, some strategic thinking is required to fix the system. There is often more than one bottleneck in a congested system and opening that bottleneck will sometimes mean the same queue builds up somewhere else.

Second, the optimum queuing time probably isn’t zero. In most cases, demand arrives at irregular intervals and it is likely to be impractically wasteful to have so much capacity (so many doctors, so many ambulances, so many crown courts) that even after a sudden surge in demand, nobody has to wait.

That said, the optimum queuing time should probably be kept quite short. Imagine a situation where an emergency doctor can see four patients an hour and patients arrive every 15 minutes. At first everything is fine: every patient can be seen immediately. Then something goes wrong. Perhaps there’s a sudden rush, when five patients unexpectedly arrive together. Perhaps the doctor takes an hour off for lunch. The waiting time suddenly increases from nothing to an hour, even though the doctor is still seeing four patients an hour and four patients an hour are still arriving.

The moral of this very simple story is that even if the capacity of the system is equal to the demand for it, queues can grow and then stay at unpleasant lengths. What’s needed is a little extra capacity to work through the inevitable queues that build up from time to time. Unfortunately, systems under intense pressure rarely have a little extra capacity hanging around.

Third, it can be hard to increase the capacity of a system. Let’s say that we have one million nurses and each nurse trains for two years before working for 20. Arithmetically, that requires 100,000 nurses to be in training at any given moment. What if it is decided that we need 1.1 million trained nurses and we need them as soon as possible? That would require an immediate recruitment boost, doubling the number of nurses in training.

Would that be possible? Even though the expansion in nursing personnel seems modest, it requires nursing courses to double in size and then to shrink again after a couple of years. An even more dramatic expansion will be needed at the advanced training colleges at which the teachers of nursing are themselves trained. It might be easier to persuade nurses to stay a little longer in the profession or to recruit from the Philippines.

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A neat musing on the challenge facing the NHS, and other public services, in trying to clear huge backlogs. Also explains why the unit of queueing load is the erlang.
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As we breach 1.5 °C, we must replace temperature limits with clean-energy targets • Nature

Kwesi Quagraine, Mark Lynas and Erle Ellis:

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On 28 October 2025, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres acknowledged that the totemic goal of the Paris climate agreement is going to be missed: “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C in the next few years”.

Guterres was merely stating the obvious. In 2024, Earth’s global mean surface temperature averaged 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, and the average for 2023–25 is 1.48°C, perilously close to the limit. Keeping to the Paris target now looks impossible by any realistic measure. Yet this moment should not invite despair. Instead, it demands an urgent reframing of how climate progress is measured and mobilized.

The world today looks very different from that in 2015 when the Paris goal was framed. Although emissions are still rising and global actions on climate change are slow, a lot of progress has been made. Clean energy is expanding rapidly and decarbonization, not fossil fuels, is the new ‘business as usual’. In the first three quarters of 2025, growth in clean electricity generation outpaced that in energy demand for the first time, implying that fossil fuels are being displaced.

We argue that the main focus of climate action in 2026 and beyond should be on accelerating the clean-energy revolution. And the rate at which clean energy displaces fossil fuels in the global economy should become the key measure of climate progress. Here we describe how such progress can be tracked and incentivized using a metric we call the clean-energy shift. Unlike chasing intangible temperature targets, cleaning up the energy sector is a more-focused battle that the world can win.

To move forwards, climate scientists and policymakers must first accept that the Paris 1.5°C target has outlived its usefulness. Although initially valuable as a unifying focus for international efforts to increase mitigation, continuing to emphasize a failed temperature target might produce more harm than good.

«

This is absolutely right. For years, the problem with warnings about climate change/global warming has been that they leave one asking: OK, but what do you expect me to do about it? How will we know if our government is doing the right thing?

A clean energy target – this proportion of production from renewables, that proportion of fossil fuel use removed – is far more comprehensible. People can even get involved by getting their own renewables.
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Metaphors for biology: time • Asimov Press

Sam Clamons:

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The interior of a cell is densely packed with millions of molecules vibrating, jostling, and moving about. Sugar molecules fly through a cell at 250 miles per hour, ricocheting off of ribosomes, organelles, cytoskeletal fibers, and enzymes. Indeed, every protein in the cell is hit by about 1013 water molecules each second. This chaos makes biology seem hopelessly convoluted. With everything moving so quickly, how can we begin to understand biomolecules?

As with other hard-to-intuit quantities in science, one could look up biological rates using resources like PubMed or BioNumbers, to discover facts like “water flows through aquaporin at 100 million molecules per second,” or “yeast transcribes RNA at 0.12 molecules per minute.” But knowing a number doesn’t necessarily give one a feel for it. Are those rates… fast? How do they compare to protein folding? Or enzymatic activity? Or squeezing a muscle?

In short, how fast do things in a cell happen, from the perspective of the molecules it’s made from?

We can answer this question with a quantitative metaphor, by visualizing the most important goings-on of a typical cell slowed down to speeds that are still accurate relative to one another, but matched to what we experience in the everyday world. The slowdown factor we pick should make it easy to understand the molecular machines that run our cells — proteins. Ideally, we would scale the fastest functionally important protein event to match the shortest unit of human perception.

As a representative “fastest functionally important protein event,” I’ve picked the opening of a membrane-bound ion channel — specifically, a potassium-gated ion channel.1 This protein channel opens and closes to allow potassium ions into the cell. This conformational change must happen very quickly. So, for the sake of our metaphors, let’s imagine slowing down the opening of this channel 10,000x, so it takes as long as the blink of an eye. If this were the case, then…

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This is utterly mindblowing. The speed of ATP production (essential to cell energy) is surprisingly slow, relatively. It’s rather like the illustrations of “life as seen by a computer CPU” – where what feel like aeons are spent waiting for the human to press a key, any key. Your word processor thinks you are the most slothful thing in the universe.
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Apple acquires Israeli audio AI startup Q.ai • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

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Apple on Thursday said it has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup working on artificial intelligence technology for audio.

Apple did not disclose terms of the deal for Q.ai, which was backed by venture capital firms Matter Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Spark Capital, Exor and GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly $2bn, a figure Reuters could independently verify.

Apple did not say how it will use Q.ai’s technology but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments.

Q.ai last year filed a patent application to use “facial skin micromovements” to detect words mouthed or spoken, identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators.

Q.ai’s 100 employees, including CEO Aviad Maizels and co-founders Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya, will join Apple, the companies said.

Maizels founded three-dimensional sensing firm PrimeSense and sold it to Apple in 2013. The PrimeSense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhones and toward facial recognition technology.

In a statement, Maizels said, “Joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we’ve created, and we’re thrilled to bring these experiences to people everywhere.”

Apple has been putting new AI features into its AirPods earbuds, last year introducing technology that allows them to translate speech between languages.

«

Apple’s second-largest (in terms of value) acquisition ever, after Beats – though of course the acquisitions of NeXT ($404m) and PA Semi ($278m) probably transformed the company more than any other. But you can see the breadcrumbs of future products by looking through the list of acquisitions. Typically it takes at least 18 months for an acquisition to show up in a product.
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What is Nipah virus? Key things to know about the disease amid cases in India • The Guardian

Hannah Ellis-Petersen:

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Airports across Asia have been put on high alert after India confirmed two cases of the deadly Nipah virus in the state of West Bengal over the past month.

Thailand, Nepal and Vietnam are among the countries screening airport arrivals over fears of an wider outbreak of the virus, which can spread from animals to humans and has a high fatality rate.

The Indian health ministry has confirmed two cases in the state of West Bengal since December but said there had been a “timely containment” of the virus.

The government did not give details on the infected patients but said almost 200 close contacts had been tested and no further outbreaks had been detected.

Nipah virus is primarily transmitted to humans from animals such as pigs and fruit bats, either by direct contact or through their secretions.

It can incubate in the body for a period of four to 14 days. The initial symptoms of the virus are often high fever, nausea, vomiting and respiratory problems, which can then develop into pneumonia. In severe cases it causes a dangerous swelling of the brain that can lead to neurological symptoms such as drowsiness and seizures.

While human to human transmission is low, it is seen by the World Health Organization as a high risk for epidemics because there is no vaccine. It has a high fatality rate of 40% to 75%, far deadlier than Covid-19.

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Yikes. Transmissible, highly deadly, no vaccine? Definitely putting a watching brief on this one. Those damn fruit bats, eh.
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Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for first time • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki and Stephen Morris:

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Tesla plans to scrap two models and invest $2bn in Elon Musk’s xAI, as the electric vehicle pioneer accelerates a charge into robotics and artificial intelligence following its first drop in annual revenue.

In the clearest sign yet of where Musk is steering Tesla, the company said it would end production of the premium S and X models next quarter and convert its California factory into a manufacturing hub for its Optimus robots.

The announcements came as Tesla’s fourth-quarter results laid bare the damage to the carmaker from a year dominated by the Trump administration’s ending of EV tax incentives, Musk’s polarising politics and the continued rise of low-cost Chinese rival BYD.

Fourth-quarter revenues fell 3% to $24.9bn, Tesla said after US markets closed on Wednesday. That pushed revenues for the year down 3% to $94.8bn, in a blow to a carmaker that over the past decade became a symbol for the arrival of the EV era.

Announcing the decision to ditch the premium S and X models, Musk said: “That is slightly sad, but . . . it’s part of our overall shift to an autonomous future.”

The world’s richest man has gambled Tesla’s future on self-driving Cybercabs and AI-enabled humanoid robots. The group has begun calling itself a “physical AI company”.

«

Tesla sells the Model S, 3, X, Y and Cybertruck. Its financials say that the 3 and Y make up 97% of deliveries, so this is less shocking than it might appear. The Cybertruck is a probably rounding error on the 3%, so doing something else with it – as Musk said he would – makes sense.

The robots and self-driving stuff is all fluff, though. Musk has literally been promising it for a decade, and still not got near it.
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What is Nick Shirley? • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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The violent federal occupation of Minneapolis — and the subsequent killings of two residents at the hands of immigration agents — began with a vlog. Nick Shirley, a roving 23-year-old with a smartphone and a taste for outrage, made a YouTube video with unfounded allegations of fraud at daycares operated by the local Somali American community. Like so much partisan media in history, he was trying to rile up the right-wing base. But he was also playing to another audience: the algorithm.

When I wrote about Shirley in early January, I described him as an influencer — a catch-all term that could be applied to a wide range of people, anyone from Joe Rogan to a 20-something woman sharing Shein hauls on TikTok. Shirley exhibits many shared behaviors: He has a following with parasocial tendencies. His style and sensibilities are finely tuned to what will play well online. He hawks merch at every turn. His literal influence reaches into the highest offices of the US government (Vice President JD Vance has sung his praises). But Shirley and his ilk are not just content creators with a right-wing twist — they’re algo hounds. And he was not just making plain old propaganda; he was making internet slop.

We mostly talk about it in the context of AI-generated material, but slop does not need to be synthetic — AI slop is just a subgenre of a larger type of content that is made quickly and cheaply and poorly. The same lukewarm financial advice peddled by thousands of literal talking heads on Instagram Reels is slop. Falsehoods and oversimplifications about breaking news or contentious celebrity drama that snowball to millions of views is slop. Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it. Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization.

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Sato slightly misses the point that Shirley’s accusations against daycares were direct repeats of investigations that the New York Times did in 2022, and which had been formally investigated by the Minnesota Attorney General. There’s a Wikipedia page, “2020s Minnesota fraud scandals” which points to those 2022 investigations.

In that sense, Shirley was pushing on an open door once Trump got in. The algorithms were ready and waiting to amplify him.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

Audiophiles are discovering cheap Raspberry Pi devices inside hugely expensive streaming devices. Are they being ripped off? CC-licensed photo by osde8info 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. All ears. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“IG is a drug”: internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years.

Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming kids.

This week, the first high-profile lawsuit—considered a “bellwether” case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints—goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported.

For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was six years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She’s fighting to claim untold damages—including potentially punitive damages—to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks.

To avoid that, platforms have alleged that other factors caused K.G.M.’s psychological harm—like school bullies and family troubles—while insisting that Section 230 and the First Amendment protect platforms from being blamed for any harmful content targeted to K.G.M.

They also argued that K.G.M.’s mom never read the terms of service and, therefore, supposedly would not have benefited from posted warnings. And ByteDance, before settling, seemingly tried to pass the buck by claiming that K.G.M. “already suffered mental health harms before she began using TikTok.”

But the judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl, wrote in a ruling denying all platforms’ motions for summary judgment that K.G.M. showed enough evidence that her claims don’t stem from content to go to trial.

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No clue on when this might come to trial, if ever. Nor is it clear whether TikTok and Snapchat settling will have any impact. The suspicion is that the other companies will settle too, which means that nothing comes to trial, which means that nothing becomes precedent or case law.
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Moltbot, the AI agent that “actually does things”, is tech’s new obsession • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Federico Viticci at MacStories highlighted how he installed Moltbot on his M4 Mac Mini and transformed it into a tool that delivers daily audio recaps based on his activity in his calendar, Notion, and Todoist apps. Another person prompted Moltbot to give itself an animated face, and said it added a sleep animation without prompting.

Moltbot routes your request through the AI provider of your choice, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Like many of the AI agents we’ve seen so far, Moltbot can fill out forms inside your browser, send emails for you, and manage your calendar — but it does so a lot more efficiently, at least according to some of the people using the tool.

There are some caveats, though; you can also give Moltbot permission to access your entire computer system, allowing it to read and write files, run shell commands, and execute scripts. Combining admin-level access to your device and your app credentials could pose major security risks if you’re not careful.

“If your autonomous AI Agent (like MoltBot) has admin access to your computer and I can interact with it by DMing you on social media, well now I can attempt to hijack your computer in a simple direct message,” Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, says in an email to The Verge. “When we grant admin access to autonomous AI agents, they can be hijacked through prompt injection, a well-documented and not yet solved vulnerability.” A prompt injection attack occurs when a bad actor manipulates AI using malicious prompts, which they can either pose to a chatbot directly or embed inside a file, email, or webpage fed to a large language model.

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People are doing deeply foolish things with these AI agents. Meredith Whittaker, CEO of the messaging app Signal, pointed to a post where someone claims to have created a “skill” for Claude which would in fact backdoor your computer. It’s like Windows XP and the virus explosion all over again.
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Audiophiles keep finding a $40 computer board inside hi-fi streamers selling for thousands • Headphonesty

Alexandra Plesa:

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If you browse audio forums, you might be familiar with this pattern. Someone opens a premium streamer and discovers that a Raspberry Pi sits inside. Occasionally, posters might frame these discoveries as proof that network streamers are unnecessarily expensive.

Bryston offers the clearest examples of this design approach. The BDP-π, which sold for $1,295 before being discontinued, used a Raspberry Pi with a HiFiBerry Digi+ HAT (a hardware accessory board). It delivered bit-perfect S/PDIF output and support up to 24-bit/192 kHz.

At the top of the lineup, Bryston’s $6,795 BR-20 includes a Raspberry Pi 4–based streaming module. That unit is part of a full DAC and preamp supporting high-resolution PCM and DSD playback.

Other manufacturers take a similar route:

• Orchard Audio’s $550 PecanPi Streamer runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B using Volumio
• Pi2Design’s $400-$450 Mercury V3 DAC is a Raspberry Pi 4–based streamer/DAC with AES, S/PDIF, and other digital outputs, plus an onboard DAC for analog output.

Raspberry Pi prices start at $35 for home use, so the difference might suggest that manufacturers are hiding something. After all, the same board used in DIY projects shows up in products that cost many times more.

Still, Bryston did not attempt to disguise the component, even going as far as naming a product the BDP-π. That openness shifts the discussion away from deception and leads to more questions. What does the Raspberry Pi do in a streamer, and what justifies the rest of the cost?

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The answer turns out to be pretty simple:

»

In a modern system, the Raspberry Pi acts as a networked transport, so it’s not responsible for shaping the sound.

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Expensive gas still biggest driver of high UK electricity bills, says UKERC • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

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High gas prices are responsible for two-thirds of the rise in household electricity bills since before the global energy crisis, says the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).

The new analysis, from one of the UK’s foremost research bodies on energy, flatly contradicts widespread media and political narratives that misleadingly seek to blame climate policies for high bills.

Kaylen Camacho McCluskey, research assistant at UKERC, tells Carbon Brief that despite “misleading claims” about policy costs, gas prices are the main driver of high bills. She says: “While the story of what has driven up GB consumer electricity bills is often largely attributed to policy costs, our analysis shows that this is not the case. Volatile, gas-linked market prices – not green policies, as some misleading claims have suggested – dominate the real-terms increase in bills since 2021.”

In its 2025 review of UK energy policy, published today, UKERC says that annual electricity bills for typical households have risen by £166 since 2021.

It says that, after adjusting for inflation, some two-thirds of this increase (£112) is due to higher wholesale gas prices…UKERC estimates that, despite only supplying a third of the country’s electricity, gas-fired generators set the wholesale price of power around 90% of the time in 2025.

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It’s hard though to see how this can be changed. If gas provides the marginal filler, and you can’t find a way to remove it from supply, then its cost will always determine electricity prices. The UKERC has some suggestions in the article, but they seem handwavy.
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Global population living with extreme heat to double by 2050 • University of Oxford

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A new University of Oxford study finds that almost half of the global population (3.79 billion) will be living with extreme heat by 2050 if the world reaches 2.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels – a scenario that climate scientists see as increasingly likely. 

Most of the impacts will be felt early on as the world passes the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement, the authors warn. In 2010, 23% of the world’s population lived with extreme heat, and this is set to grow to 41% over the next decades.

Published in Nature Sustainability, the findings have grave implications for humanity. The Central African Republic, Nigeria, South Sudan, Laos, and Brazil are predicted to see the most significant increases in dangerously hot temperatures, while the largest affected populations will be in India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines.

Countries with colder climates will see a much larger relative change in uncomfortably hot days, more than doubling in some cases.

Compared with the 2006–2016 period, when the global mean temperature increase reached 1°C over pre-industrial levels, the study finds that warming to 2°C would lead to a doubling in Austria and Canada, 150% in the UK, Sweden, Finland, 200% in Norway, and a 230% increase in Ireland.

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To consider: 2050 isn’t actually that far away. It’s 24 years, and I’d expect the majority of readers here still to be alive then.
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Apple and its suppliers are counting the cost of iPhone Air failure • Culpium

Tim Culpan is a former Bloomberg technology reporter in Taiwan with many excellent contacts among its suppliers:

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Apple and its suppliers are now stuck with components for up to 1.5 million units of iPhone Air, my sources tell me, even after the order came down in October to cut back production. What’s worse, some of that cannot be repurposed and instead may need to be scrapped, I am told. To be clear, that doesn’t mean 1.5 million iPhones will be scrapped, merely some of the components specific to the iPhone Air.

Apple will release earnings this week, but it’s unlikely Tim Cook and his team will discuss the issue. Apple’s CEO dodged the question of Air’s poor sales last quarter, and instead chose to talk up the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 — a tacit admission that Air was a dud.

My own analysis, based on what cannot be re-used, puts the write-off into the low hundreds of millions of dollars. Frankly, that’s not a big deal: iPhone sales were $49bn in the three months to Sept. 27, and are expected to be around $80bn for the December quarter.

The bigger issue is how Apple failed to understand its own customers, and how this mess will ripple through the supply chain. I am told that while some vendors will be stuck with a bill, Apple itself will soak up most of the cost.

…The OLED “Super Retina XDR” screen is basically the same across all models, but the Air’s 6.5-inch size is mid-way between the 6.9-inch and 6.3-inch versions. I am told that displays which have already been cut, framed and put onto modules will need to be scrapped, though some of that will also be crushed, separated, and recycled.

Possibly the biggest hurt could be with the chips. Apple uses the same A19 Pro CPU in the Air as it does with the iPhone 17 Pro. But the Air has only 5 GPU cores — as does the base iPhone 17 — while the iPhone 17 Pro has 6 GPU cores. (To be blunt, this is merely chip binning, not a new chip).

As a result, the unused Air chips cannot be put in the the lower-end base iPhone 17 nor in the higher-end iPhone 17 Pro. They cannot be repurposed. Even worse, the Air has 12GB of DRAM while the baseline iPhone 17 has just 8GB, according to TrendForce. So, any processor modules which have already had their DRAM fused onto the CPU would also result in wasted DRAM — unless Apple and TSMC find some magical way to “unfuse” the memory from the base die.

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Those millions of modules of DRAM that have gone to waste will really stick in the craw of Cook, who of course abhors waste. Speaking of whom…
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Aside from that, Mr. Cook, what did you think of the movie? • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

»

Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania [I think that should be “documentary” – Overspill Ed] at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot – a gunshot – turned attending that movie screening into a statement…

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

Of course, President Trump was never going to do that because the official White House stance is that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and the agents were acting in self defense. And never mind that this was the second such murder in the past 17 days, the show must go on!

But it didn’t have to for Cook. He could have, and should have, backed out of the event. Obviously. The fact that he didn’t either suggests horrible judgement on his part or worse, cowardice. This is a man and leader of one of the biggest and most important businesses in the world who had long been thought to have a great moral compass.

He has lost his way.

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Among longtime Apple fans, there is now simply a revulsion at Cook’s fealty towards Trump. The idea – which Cook put forward in an internal memo to Apple staff this week – that he can influence Trump by being there is discounted. Why should Trump listen to someone who, in effect, has no leverage over him, but over whom Trump has enormous leverage through tariffs?
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How Olympic athletes stay healthy during cold and flu season • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

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Even if you’re really good at avoiding exposure, you’ll encounter some germs eventually—and when you do, you’ll hope that your immune system can deal with them. Getting a flu shot is a good start, as is taking care of basics like getting enough sleep. Jooste points out that athletes are two to three times more likely to pick up an infection when they travel across more than five time zones.

But it’s not just sleep: immune function is also suppressed by stress. In athletes, that can take the form of hard training, but more general life stress also plays a role. In a study published last fall by Sophie Harrison of the University of Bangor, for example, runners who reported higher levels of anxiety were more likely to pick up a respiratory infection in the weeks following a marathon. It’s not always easy to dial back stress in our lives, but understanding its potential consequences is a good motivator to take it seriously.

There are also a near-infinite number of supplements that claim to boost immune function. Few have much evidence behind them, but two that Jooste and his colleagues highlight are vitamin D and probiotics. I’ve generally found the evidence in favor of vitamin D as a sports supplement to be unclear, but keeping your levels above the “deficient” threshold does seem like a good idea. For probiotics, they suggest multi-strain combinations of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium at a dose of at least 1 billion CFU per day.

If the first two strategies—avoiding exposure and boosting immunity—fail, then your last hope is to fight an infection as soon as it takes hold. At the 2018 Olympics, the Finnish team took an aggressive approach to identifying and immediately fighting infections, and subsequently detailed the results in a journal paper. (My favorite nugget from that study was that they tracked how infections spread on the flights to South Korea, and found that sitting in business class was the best way to stay healthy and avoid passing an infection on to others.)

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For this reason I will insist on business class seating in travelling to future commissions.
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AI chatbots are infiltrating social-science surveys — and getting better at avoiding detection • Nature

Sara Phillips:

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In November, Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, demonstrated an AI chatbot that can reliably impersonate a human participant and evade most known mechanisms built into surveys to detect fake responses1.

Westwood used OpenAI’s o4-mini, an AI-based reasoning tool, to build a bot and set it loose on a survey that he designed for the purpose of testing it. In 6,700 tests, the bot managed to pass standard ‘attention check’ questions (which are designed to catch inattentive humans and simple bots) 99.8% of the time.

To help it evade detection, the bot could be programmed with a persona and use reasoning in line with that persona. For example, when it was programmed to answer as an 88-year-old woman and was asked about time spent at children’s sporting events, the bot said that it spent little time at them because its children had grown up. And it remembered its answers to previous questions.

Westwood’s bot also breezed past common questions that are placed into surveys to trip up bots by detecting capabilities that most people do not have. The bot declined to translate a sentence into Mandarin, for example, and it pretended it could not quote the US constitution verbatim.

The ease with which it evaded detection led Constantine Papas, a blogger and user-experience researcher at a big technology firm based in New York, to declare a “scientific validity crisis”. He wrote that “the foundational assumption of survey research (that a coherent response is a human response) is no longer tenable”.

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The rest of the article is paywalled, but you get the idea already: surveys can’t be relied on any more. An obvious question is whether we can rely any longer on polling data, so much of which now comes from online surveys (because people won’t pick up the phone to pollsters).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A flaw in a widely used parking ticket system software gave a programmer access to the locations of thousands of citations – and their details. CC-licensed photo by Rachel Knickmeyer 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. Not moving. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Anthropic ‘destructively’ scanned millions of books to build Claude • The Washington Post

Aaron Schaffer, Will Oremus and Nitasha Tiku:

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In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

Details of Project Panama, which have not been previously reported, emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic, which has been valued by investors at $183bn. The company agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle the case in August, but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.

The new documents, along with earlier filings in other copyright cases against AI companies, show the lengths to which tech firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software.

…In June, District Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic was within its rights to use books for training AI models because they process the material in a “transformative” way. He likened the AI training process to teachers “training schoolchildren to write well.” The same month, District Judge Vince Chhabria found in the Meta case that the book authors had failed to show that the company’s AI models could harm sales of their books.

But companies can still get in trouble for how they went about acquiring books. In Anthropic’s case, the book-scanning project passed muster, but the judge found that the company may have infringed on authors’ copyright when it downloaded millions of pirated books free before launching Project Panama.

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This is the problem that publishers and authors face: judges keep saying that the process of ingesting the books as “training” isn’t, per se, illegal, because what is done is transformative. Seems hard to argue against.

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AI: the wrong kind of bubble • Breadcrumb.vc

Sameer Singh:

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This post is bit of a history lesson, but an important one. Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about “productive” bubbles in technology — manias that focus capital and talent around a vision of the future. The argument is that bubbles create critical infrastructure that entrepreneurs leverage after the crash — the dotcom bubble is a key example. This is an oversimplified view of bubbles. All technology bubbles are not necessarily “productive”. They don’t always create infrastructure that is used after the bubble. Let’s take a look at whether this applies to the current AI bubble — and it is one, despite real utility.

…Why do I think AI is part of the maturity phase and not a whole new cycle? Simple, it carries all the hallmarks of a maturity innovation (h/t to Jerry Neumann) — the biggest incumbents in the technology world immediately jumped on it and adoption was lightning fast as the internet is already fully diffused. Whole new technology cycles begin on the fringes with hobbyists — like unknown nerds creating the Apple I. That is absolutely not what we’re seeing with AI.

A key takeaway from this model is that technology diffusion causes not one, but two types of financial excess — a mid-cycle bubble during the Frenzy phase and a late-cycle bubble during the Maturity phase. The two types of bubbles are strikingly clear in the chart below [in original article]. The chart shows the Shiller PE Ratio, also known as the Cyclically Adjusted PE Ratio (CAPE Ratio), for the S&P 500 over the past 150 years. This ratio swaps out one year earnings (the E in the PE Ratio) with 10 year average inflation adjusted earnings to smooth out temporary fluctuations and account for business cycles (earnings can also be inflated during bubbles).

…a late-cycle (Maturity) bubble looks very different. At this stage, the technology has won and the dominant companies of the era are so entrenched that they are thought to be infallible. It is this belief that leads to another wave of speculative excess and overinvestment.

Any new technology breakthroughs are adopted at lightning speed. The incumbents begin to invest aggressively to harness its potential and strengthen their positions. The strong cash position of established companies leads to a heavy amount of financial engineering. Exuberance also leads to risky debt issuances. This is exactly what is happening with AI — rapid adoption, aggressive investments from incumbents like Google, financial engineering with Nvidia investing in companies that buy its products, and companies like Oracle and Coreweave taking on unprecedented levels of high-risk debt to finance data center construction. The presence of companies with real earnings makes this bubble less violent on the upswing, but no less speculative.

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OpenAI aims to ship its first device in 2026, and it could be earbuds • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

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Last November, Sam Altman described the potential device to be more “peaceful and calm” than iPhones. Previous reporting suggests the company wants to build a screen-free and pocketable device.

While the company is not spilling any details, more recent reporting from Asian publications and leakers suggests OpenAI’s first device could be a pair of earbuds. According to reports, this device is codenamed “Sweet Pea” and will have a unique design as compared to existing earbuds. The earbuds could work on a custom 2nm processor and handle AI tasks locally instead of sending requests to the cloud.

A separate report from a large Taiwanese newspaper noted that OpenAI was exploring a partnership with China-based Luxshare for manufacturing, but might eventually lean in favor of Taiwan’s Foxconn. The report also said in the first year of sales, OpenAI aims to ship 40 to 50 million units.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has nearly a billion weekly users, but the company has to rely on other devices and platforms for distribution. With its own device, it might want to take more control of the development and distribution of the AI assistant and also release exclusive and purpose-built features.

However, replacing existing earbuds like AirPods in users’ daily lives is going to be challenging if there’s not a strong integration with operating systems.

Until now, there hasn’t been a standout AI device success story.

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It still feels a little too early for AI device success stories, not because the tech isn’t advancing fast, but because errors are always going to be part of their response (doing nothing is actually better than doing the wrong thing) and because it’s going to be hard to get them to scale if people are wearing and using them all the time.
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Does evidence even matter? • On my Om

Om Malik:

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A smile is a smile in Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. The emotional payload is universal. The visual web was emerging as a universal language. Photos were becoming the atomic unit of social platforms. I was excited. Millions of vantage points were creating a collective sight. I asked: How can we create a way for visuals to tell the near history of our time?

Minnesota is answering that question, and I don’t like what I see.

Cameras are everywhere. More than a billion surveillance cameras are installed worldwide. Last year, 1.2 billion smartphones with cameras were shipped. Two trillion photos are taken each year. In Minneapolis bystanders filmed everything. Reuters verified the footage, as did the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. The visual record is unambiguous. It contradicts the official story completely. Yet the official story continues.

I was right about cameras democratizing witnessing. Anyone can document reality. We bypassed gatekeepers. But I was wrong about accountability. I thought seeing would create it. I thought evidence would force consensus. That shared visual reality would make it harder to lie. The assumption was simple: if enough people saw the same thing, power couldn’t ignore it. Minnesota proved me wrong.

I keep thinking about The Circle, a wonderful book by Dave Eggers. It imagines a world dominated by one company, loosely modeled on Facebook, where cameras record everything and no one even pretends otherwise. “Secrets are lies,“ the company insists, and total transparency is sold as moral progress. This is the kind of nonsense I believed in my younger days.

In The Circle, a man is hunted in real time by crowdsourced tracking. The footage is not denied. It is reinterpreted, and it eventually loses moral weight. Truth does not disappear; it drowns in commentary, metrics, and ephemera. In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Together, Eggers and Orwell reach the same unsettling conclusion. The crisis is no longer whether technology can show us what happened; it is whether society is still willing to believe its own eyes.

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Our tribalism outweighs our rationality. It always has, but it has now reached a pitch where a few people can force our tribalism to do that again and again.
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All Your Parking Tickets Are Belong to Me • Jack’s Blog

Jack Lafond realised there was an API which would let him figure out where every parking ticket in the US issued using a particular company’s software (Passport Parking) was issued. After being ignored, he decided to try to attract their attention by.. showing it:

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Like any great chaos engineer, I decided to build a frontend to visualize the data, which is the magnum opus of this entire research project: parking.exposed is now live and visualizes a great deal of tickets that I’ve been able to collect over the last week or so. After fiddling around with ticket IDs I’ve managed to get within a 6 to 12 hour range of recently written tickets.

There’s a great heatmap visualization that allows you to see where tickets are primarily clustered. Unfortunately, ticket operators aren’t required to put in the location of where tickets are written, which meant I had to use some geocoding magic to try and figure it out. I’d say a good percentage are correct, but if you see big clusters in random areas (like the water) don’t blame me!

My personal favorite feature is the Pay Now button. Because I have the data of the city and the associated payment subdomain, you theoretically could pay someone’s parking ticket for them!

The site’s is live and is constantly refreshing, so if you want to see tickets stream in on the stats page that’s absolutely an option. It was such a blast building this and really puts into perspective the magnitude of this issue.

In an ideal world, someone from Passport Parking will reach out to me after this is published and I can finally get a response from them on working to fix the issue.

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So far (five days later) no update, but plenty of time.
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China’s labs pull ahead as global drugmakers invest in biotech pioneers • Financial Times

Aanu Adeoye and Patrick Temple-West:

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Investors in western biotechs face the prospect of lower valuations as Chinese start-ups attract growing investment from global drugmakers looking to replenish their pipelines.

China has emerged in recent years as a hub for drug development, particularly early-stage candidates, with faster timelines allowing companies to reach proof of concept ahead of western rivals.

Because the country’s biotechs can run clinical trials more quickly and cheaply, rivals from elsewhere risk being “undercut in licensing or partnering discussions”, said Oliver Kenyon, senior director at life sciences investor RTW.

This was particularly the case for “fairly crowded therapeutic areas”, he added, noting the trend “might compress long-term returns” for investors.

“Chinese biotech clearly represents a structural shift in global drug development,” Kenyon said. “We don’t think it’s a cyclical phenomenon . . . they’re here to stay.”

Historically, China was known for its ability to quickly replicate new drugs developed elsewhere.

While that is still the case, Chinese groups are also developing new therapies. They are taking the lead, for example, on antibody-drug conjugates, which use antibodies to deliver chemotherapy in a much more targeted way.

Chinese companies account for more than half of new ADC drugs in early clinical trials, according to consultancy McKinsey. They are also making strides in developing next-generation Car-T treatments for autoimmune diseases, and small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapies. These can temporarily turn off harmful genes.

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That point about running clinical trials faster and cheaper is unexplained, but has a hint of not quite going by the regulatory principles used in the West.
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It’s time to think about 6G – yes, really • Light Reading

Anne Morris:

»

Right up until the very end of 2025, Red Hat’s Fran Heeran said he was still apologizing whenever he mentioned 6G in a conversation because there was “always that belief in the room that, yes, this is premature. Why … are we mentioning 6G when … we’re still going through the 5G Advanced phase?” – and what about the business case, too?

Now, he appears certain that 6G will become a mainstream conversation in 2026 and 2027, “whereas up until now, perhaps it was a little bit scary, given where we were with 5G.”

Heeran, a former Nokia and Vodafone executive who now holds the title of vice president and head of global telecom business at the open-source solutions specialist, was chatting to Gabriel Brown, senior principal analyst covering mobile networks at Omdia, during the opening session of Light Reading’s Telecom Trends, Digital Symposium, 2026 edition.

Titled the “Network Evolution Path from 5G to 6G,” the session explored the current state of play with 6G standards and more besides, in an attempt to build a picture of how the transition to 6G is currently playing out.

Brown himself echoed Heeran’s view that 6G is coming sooner than people might think. “Why do we actually need this? … I think it’s a pretty simple story,” he said.

“Most obviously, we have a chance to create a really amazing mobile communication system. 5G is great, but there’s a lot we can do better … it’s a fantastic opportunity,” he said.

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I’m old enough to remember when 5G was going to bring us cars that would talk to each other on the road about traffic, and broadband everywhere wirelessly. Somehow that hasn’t happened? Or has it, but people just want a bigger number all the time?
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New Iran videos show bodies piled up in hospital and snipers on roofs • BBC

Merlyn Thomas and Shayan Sardarizadeh:

»

Verified videos emerging from Iran show bodies piled up in a hospital, snipers stationed on buildings and CCTV cameras being destroyed, following the unprecedented crackdown on protests earlier this month.

BBC Verify has been tracking the spread of protests across Iran since they first erupted in late December, but the near total internet blackout imposed by the authorities has made it extremely difficult to document the scale of the state’s deadly crackdown on protesters.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says it has confirmed the killing of nearly 6,000 people, including 5,633 protesters, since the unrest began at the end of December. It says it is also currently investigating another 17,000 reported deaths received despite an internet shutdown after nearly three weeks.

Another group, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), has warned that the final toll could exceed 25,000.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people were killed, but that the majority were security personnel or bystanders attacked by “rioters”.

The latest videos to emerge from the country are understood to have been filmed on 8 and 9 January, when thousands of people took to the streets following a call for nationwide protests from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late Shah.

They are thought to be the deadliest nights for protesters so far and these newly verified videos show how Iran’s security forces have been violently cracking down on protesters.

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Some videos do trickle out, but this is far from the observation we would like to have.
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Death of an Indian tech worker • Rest Of World

Parth MN:

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Eighty-three% of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Karnataka state, home to Bengaluru, tech workers account for a starkly disproportionate 20% of patients seeking transplants due to organ failure, according to a leading regional newspaper. A study of tech employees in the IT hub of Hyderabad found that 84% had a liver disease linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress.

Some of India’s tech leaders, meanwhile, are advocating 70-hour and even 90-hour workweeks, instead of the national legal maximum of 48.

IT workers in the World Trade Centre tower in Bengaluru. Sameer Raichur for Rest of World
Tech workers paint a picture of mounting anxiety. From junior software engineers to senior project managers, workers at firms across the industry told Rest of World they were buckling under the burden of deadlines. They had little time for themselves or their families, and worried about layoffs. Most said they feared conditions would only worsen with the rise of AI.

The fate of India’s tech workers may foreshadow the future of a global workforce reckoning with the advent of AI. For decades, the country’s massive pool of outsourced tech workers have helped power global tech giants — the U.S. accounts for 62% of India’s IT outsourcing revenue. As employees worry that AI will threaten their jobs and demands for efficiency rise, an industry long known for 24/7 schedules and intense workloads is reaching a breaking point.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Asking ChatGPT’s new Health system to evaluate your cardiac health based on Apple Watch data might not give a useful answer. CC-licensed photo by Forth With Life on Flickr.

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

The Windows PC is dying, thanks to cloud-based services and AI • Computerworld

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

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For years, I’ve been watching the slow evolution of classic Windows PCs into cloud-based Windows and Office services. Sure, you can still buy a PC with Windows on it, but you’re not really “buying” Windows as much as renting it. 

Windows cloud PCs have gone from Microsoft’s side project to the centerpiece of its post‑Windows‑10 strategy. But the story in 2026 is less “death of the PC” and more “merger of PC, cloud, and AI under Microsoft’s terms.” Today, the most interesting question is not whether Windows moves to the cloud, but how much local control users are willing to surrender in exchange for AI‑infused desktops.

For the longest time, Microsoft had planned on the Windows 365 Cloud PC to shift users from a PC‑centric world to Desktop‑as‑a‑Service, with Windows 11 acting as the on‑ramp. Microsoft’s own internal slideware later made that explicit: the plan is to “move Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud… to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device.” What started as the Business and Enterprise editions of Windows 365, running on Azure with per‑user monthly pricing in the $30-to-$60 range, has since been productized and polished as if it were the “real” Windows roadmap rather than a side hustle.

Other harbingers included Windows 365 Boot, which bypassed the local operating system entirely and dropped you straight into a personalized cloud desktop on shared or BYOD hardware. And Windows 365 Switch blurs the boundary between local and hosted sessions, turning a cloud PC into “just another desktop.” 

At the same time, Windows App enables you to run Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use Windows App to run Windows on Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, even in web browsers. That last means you can now run Windows on Linux-powered PCs, Chromebooks, and Android phones and tablets. 

Heck, you can even run Windows using a Meta Quest VR headset! 

A funny thing happened on the way to this cloud-based subscription service. AI came along. Microsoft, which has gone whole-hog into AI — if I see one more Copilot tie-in, I’m going to scream — decided that AI PCs would be the future. It’s wrong. As Kevin Terwilliger, Dell’s head of product, said of PC customers, “They’re not buying based on AI. I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them.” (Ya think?)

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But as Vaughan-Nichols points out, the corollary of the expensive PC going away is subscriptions coming in, which eat away at your wallet quietly rather than when you first get into the store.
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Data center power outage took out TikTok first weekend under US ownership • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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TikTok has been glitching for US users since Sunday, and TikTok’s new US owners have finally confirmed the cause: a power outage at a US data center.

“Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate,” the TikTok USDS Joint Venture posted on X on Monday morning. “We’re working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We’re sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon.”

A DownDetector report tracking outages showed problems began early Sunday morning, with the majority of problems seemingly resolved by early Monday. However, The Verge reported that some US users continue to experience issues, including issues logging in, long delays uploading videos, generic content flooding For You pages, problems accessing comments, and other issues.

It’s clear that the TikTok USDS Joint Venture is still working to resolve problems connected to the power outage. But their decision to remain silent while the app got buggy during the first weekend under the control of right-wing US owners hand-picked by Donald Trump sparked conspiracy theories on social media that the app had begun censoring left-leaning users.

As the app comes back online, users have also taken note that TikTok is collecting more of their data under US control. As Wired reported, TikTok asked US users to agree to a new terms of service and privacy policy, which allows TikTok to potentially collect “more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.”

“Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of US users,” Wired reported. “Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone’s location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts.”

New policies also pushed users to agree to share all their AI interactions, which allows TikTok to store their metadata and trace AI inputs back to specific accounts.

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Some people are also reporting that videos about incidents involving ICE or mention of the word “Epstein” result in their videos getting zero views or being censored – though these might be teething problems. Give it a week.
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Britain’s weirdest detour • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

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When a road collapsed in rural Lincolnshire recently, badgers were the least of people’s problems. The council had failed to take action for at least two or three years, but the moment they decided to fix the road they were halted by friends of the ‘stack Natural England. Still, at least the council could put a sensible detour in place. Right? Right?! Find out the whole story in the film…

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Robbins is very much tongue-in-cheek when he calls Natural England a friend of his Substack: in reality they provide him with a punching bag, deservedly – as evidenced by the clip he briefly shows of a newspaper headline saying “Natural England opposes its own plans for Cornwall development”.

It’s a short video (12 minutes), nicely put together, and he’s very good with a drone shot. You do also get to the end with a sort of hair-tearing frustration at why nothing seems to work, and nobody seems minded to fix it.
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This ingenious camera system is changing live sports forever • Fast Company

Adam Bluestein:

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Several times during the men’s final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament between Casper Ruud and Jack Draper last spring, TV viewers were treated to a remarkable camera perspective. They watched the match from just behind the baseline, effortlessly following the player’s movement step for step, capturing every shot from the perfect angle. 

With no discernible blur or delays, the smoothly flowing live footage had the hyperreal feel of a video game. 

“I love the footwork by the cameraman,” wrote one YouTube commenter. 

The company now uses the comment in its investor pitch deck. 

In reality, these uncanny tracking shots didn’t involve any human camera operators at all. No robotic cameras or drones, either. Instead they were generated, in real time, with a software-based camera system developed by startup Muybridge, based in Oslo.

Founded by Håkon Espeland and Anders Tomren in 2020, Muybridge has spent nearly five years developing real-time computer vision technology that uses software to create a “weightless” camera, with no moving parts, that captures the speed and motion of live sports in a way that our eyes aren’t accustomed to. In the coming year, viewers of televised sports will get to see many more of these revelatory perspectives—both in tennis and beyond.

…Instead of using big, expensive cameras that you move to “chase” whatever’s happening on the court or sports field, Muybridge puts hundreds of small, inexpensive video sensors all over the place—and uses software to create smooth tracking shots and conjure any angle on demand.

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It is indeed very impressive – see the link to the website to get an idea of the footage. The cameras are installed at a little above head height and look like speaker bars. (Fun task: identify the players on the three clips at the Muybridge website link. Answers at the bottom of this post.)

Of course one wonders whether a certain fruit-named company might see this and think it’s worth incorporating it.. no, that’s crazy talk.
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Iran is building a two-tier internet that locks 85 million citizens out of the global web • Rest of World

Indranil Ghosh:

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Iran’s near-total communications blackout has entered its 16th day, but that’s just a live test.

Following a repressive crackdown on protests, the government is now building a system that grants web access only to security-vetted elites, while locking 90 million citizens inside an intranet.

Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani confirmed international access will not be restored until at least late March. Filterwatch, which monitors Iranian internet censorship from Texas, cited government sources, including Mohajerani, saying access will “never return to its previous form.”

This is what makes Iran’s attempt unique: Other authoritarian states built walls before their populations went online. Iran is trying to seal off a connected economy already in freefall. 

The system is called Barracks Internet, according to confidential planning documents obtained by Filterwatch. Under this architecture, access to the global web will be granted only through a strict security whitelist.

“The regime is terrified of one thing: Iranians being heard telling their own truth and having crimes documented,” Mahsa Alimardani, a digital rights researcher at U.S.-based Witness, which trains activists to use video for advocacy, told Rest of World. “The question becomes: How do we give Iranians an unbreakable voice?”

The idea of tiered internet access is not new in Iran. Since at least 2013, the regime has quietly issued “white SIM cards,” giving unrestricted global internet access to approximately 16,000 people. The system gained public attention in November 2025 when X’s location feature revealed that certain accounts, including the communications minister, were connecting directly from inside Iran, despite X being blocked since 2009.

What is different now is scale and permanence. The current blackout tests infrastructure designed to make two-tier access the default, not a temporary crackdown.

Only a handful of nations have attempted to wall off their citizens from the global internet. North Korea’s Kwangmyong intranet was built from scratch for a population that never had connectivity. China constructed its Great Firewall over two decades while nurturing domestic alternatives such as WeChat and Alibaba. Iran is attempting to do both in weeks, with no domestic alternatives.

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The modern equivalent of the Iron Curtain.
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CATL launches 1st sodium-ion battery for light commercial vehicles • CnEVPost

Phate Zhang:

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CATL has launched a sodium-ion battery for light commercial vehicles, aiming for mass adoption of this new battery type this year.

The Chinese battery giant rolled out its Tectrans II series power batteries at an event on Thursday, primarily targeting light commercial vehicles.

The series’ low-temperature variant is a sodium-ion battery, which CATL said is the industry’s first mass-produced sodium battery for light commercial vehicles, engineered for extreme cold environments.

The sodium battery pack has a capacity of 45 kWh and targets small vans and micro trucks. The battery pack can still be plugged in and charged in extreme cold conditions of -30°C. At -40°C, the battery retains 90% of its usable capacity, according to the company.

This marks CATL’s first major move in the sodium-ion battery sector this year. In 2026, sodium batteries will see large-scale adoption in battery swapping, passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, and energy storage, CATL said at a supplier conference held in its headquarters city of Ningde, Fujian on December 28.

Sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries are poised to form a “dual-star” trend, CATL noted at the time. Beyond the sodium battery, the Tectrans II series includes an ultra-fast charging variant capable of charging from 20% to 80% in 30 minutes at -15°C.

«

This might seem a bit boring, but it’s so important to have low-temperature function for electric vehicles, and especially for light commercial ones.
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Trump’s Department of Transport plans to use Google Gemini AI to write regulations • ProPublica

Jesse Coburn:

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The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.

The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”

Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.” 

These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?

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At this point the relevant question becomes: will the AI make more or fewer mistakes than the Trump staffers? If their standard isn’t perfect or very good, just “good enough”, you could argue that it won’t matter if the rules contain mistakes, because they’re being intentionally sloppy.
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The Adolescence of Technology • Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei:

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There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?”

Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us.

I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.

In my essay Machines of Loving Grace, I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood, where the risks had been addressed and powerful AI was applied with skill and compassion to raise the quality of life for everyone.

I suggested that AI could contribute to enormous advances in biology, neuroscience, economic development, global peace, and work and meaning. I felt it was important to give people something inspiring to fight for, a task at which both AI accelerationists and AI safety advocates seemed—oddly—to have failed.

But in this current essay, I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions.

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Given the events of the past few weeks, I’d suggest that the “almost unimaginable power” would be smartphones plus the internet plus our tribal instincts. But sure, AI could be that too.
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ChatGPT can analyze Apple Watch health data. Here’s how a doctor views it • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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Like many people who strap on an Apple Watch every day, I’ve long wondered what a decade of that data might reveal about me. So I joined a brief wait list and gave ChatGPT access to the 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements stored in my Apple Health app. Then I asked the bot to grade my cardiac health.

It gave me an F.

I freaked out and went for a run. Then I sent ChatGPT’s report to my actual doctor.

Am I an F? “No,” my doctor said. In fact, I’m at such low risk for a heart attack that my insurance probably wouldn’t even pay for an extra cardio fitness test to prove the artificial intelligence wrong.

I also showed the results to cardiologist Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute, an expert on both longevity and the potential of AI in medicine. “It’s baseless,” he said. “This is not ready for any medical advice.”

AI has huge potential to unlock medical insights and widen access to care. But when it comes to your fitness tracker and some health records, the new Dr. ChatGPT seems to be winging it. That fits a disturbing trend: AI companies launching products that are broken, fail to deliver or are even dangerous. It should go without saying that people’s health actually matters. Any product — even one labeled “beta” — that claims to provide personal health insights shouldn’t be this clueless.

A few days after ChatGPT Health arrived, AI rival Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare that, similarly, promises to help people “detect patterns across fitness and health metrics.” Anyone with a paid account can import Apple Health and Android Health Connect data into the chatbot. Claude graded my cardiac health a C, relying on some of the same analysis that Topol found questionable.

…Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers have found those estimates can run low — by an average of 13%.

«

So, a long way from being your new doctor. (Gift link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Players: Zvererv, Fils, Korda, Ruud, Zverev, Davidovich-Fokina.

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.

Can you guess which domain suffix has boosted the GDP of which Caribbean island by nearly a quarter? CC-licensed photo by heidi.lauren 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. Ay ay. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Claude Code built this entire article—can you tell? • WSJ

Joanna Stern and Ben Cohen:

»

What do two newspaper columnists do on a Saturday night?

We talk to AI and tell it to make weird apps. Then we brag about our creations.

For the record, our bosses here at The Wall Street Journal pay us to write words, not lines of code. Which is a good thing, because we have absolutely no programming skills. But together, we managed to “vibe code” this article. The code to make those look like messages above? Us. That “Retro” button that makes the messages look like an old AOL Instant Messenger chat? Also us. The button below that flips all this to a classic newspaper design? Us again.

And by “us,” we mean our new intern, Claude Code.

This is a breakout moment for Anthropic’s coding tool, which has spread far beyond the tech nerds of Silicon Valley to normies everywhere. Not since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022 have so many people become so obsessed with an artificial-intelligence product.

Claude translates any idea you type into code. It can quickly build real, working apps you’ve always wished for—tools to manage your finances, analyze your DNA, mix and match your outfits, even keep your plants alive. Vibe-coding apps aren’t new, but Claude Code has proven to be a leap ahead in capabilities and smarts.

The results are wondrous and unsettling: People without a lick of coding experience are building things that once required trained software developers.

Things like this article.

We wrote all the actual words you’re reading—we swear!—but Claude Code wrote all the 1s and 0s.

There are a few ways to use Claude Code. The easiest is to download Anthropic’s Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows and click the Code tab. Advanced users run it directly in their computer’s terminal.

You start by creating a folder on your computer’s desktop. This will be the home for Claude’s files and code. Then you type a prompt into the app’s chat box: Make me a WSJ-style article webpage with iMessage-like text chats. Claude might ask a few questions about what you want before it gets to work, showing the code it’s writing in real-time. When it’s done, you open that folder, click the webpage file and your app opens in a browser. Want to make tweaks? Just tell Claude: Make the gray background a little grayer.

As we found out, there’s something oddly magical and satisfying about watching AI make things.

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Sounds a lot easier to just download an app than doing all the futzing around with the Terminal, which some people have made it sound like. (Gift article, and typically enjoyable: Stern has been writing accessible tech stories for more than a decade.)
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How the “confident authority” of Google AI Overviews is putting public health at risk • The Guardian

Andrew Gregory:

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Google is facing mounting scrutiny of its AI Overviews for medical queries after a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk of harm by false and misleading health information.

The company says AI Overviews are “reliable”. But the Guardian found some medical summaries served up inaccurate health information and put people at risk of harm. In one case, which experts said was “really dangerous”, Google wrongly advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods. Experts said this was the exact opposite of what should be recommended, and may increase the risk of patients dying from the disease.

In another “alarming” example, the company provided bogus information about crucial liver function tests, which could leave people who had serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy. What AI Overviews said was normal could vary drastically from what was actually considered normal, experts said. The summaries could lead to seriously ill patients wrongly thinking they had a normal test result and not bothering to attend follow-up appointments.

AI Overviews about women’s cancer tests also provided “completely wrong” information, which experts said could result in people dismissing genuine symptoms.

Google initially sought to downplay the Guardian’s findings. From what its own clinicians could assess, the company said, the AI Overviews that alarmed experts linked to reputable sources and recommended seeking expert advice. “We invest significantly in the quality of AI Overviews, particularly for topics like health, and the vast majority provide accurate information,” a spokesperson said.

Within days, however, the company removed some of the AI Overviews for health queries flagged by the Guardian. “We do not comment on individual removals within search,” a spokesperson said. “In cases where AI Overviews miss some context, we work to make broad improvements, and we also take action under our policies where appropriate.”

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Always the same pattern: the tool is incomplete, and the risks aren’t explained, but it’s put out there. This was the pattern with the first incarnation of search sites, and then of Google, and now with AI Overviews. Each time, Google says it’s sad but hey, it’s going to continue doing it.
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Wiper malware targeted Poland energy grid, but failed to knock out electricity • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Researchers on Friday said that Poland’s electric grid was targeted by wiper malware, likely unleashed by Russia state hackers, in an attempt to disrupt electricity delivery operations.

A cyberattack, Reuters reported, occurred during the last week of December. The news organization said it was aimed at disrupting communications between renewable installations and the power distribution operators but failed for reasons not explained.

On Friday, security firm ESET said the malware responsible was a wiper, a type of malware that permanently erases code and data stored on servers with the goal of destroying operations completely. After studying the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used in the attack, company researchers said the wiper was likely the work of a Russian government hacker group tracked under the name Sandworm.

“Based on our analysis of the malware and associated TTPs, we attribute the attack to the Russia-aligned Sandworm APT with medium confidence due to a strong overlap with numerous previous Sandworm wiper activity we analyzed,” said ESET researchers. “We’re not aware of any successful disruption occurring as a result of this attack.”

Sandworm has a long history of destructive attacks waged on behalf of the Kremlin and aimed at adversaries. Most notable was one in Ukraine in December 2015. It left roughly 230,000 people without electricity for about six hours during one of the coldest months of the year.

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There are now more than 1 million “.ai” websites, contributing an estimated $70m to Anguilla’s government revenue last year • Sherwood News

David Crowther and Claire Yubin Oh:

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From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making — and breaking — fortunes at a rapid pace.

One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the “.ai” top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT’s launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoning AI technology has seen a flood of revenue for the island of just ~15,000 people.

In 2023, Anguilla generated 87 million East Caribbean dollars (~$32m) from domain name sales, some 22% of its total government revenue that year, with 354,000 “.ai” domains registered.

As of January 2, 2026, the number of “.ai” domains passed one million, per data from Domain Name Stat — suggesting that the nation’s revenue from “.ai” has likely soared, too. This is confirmed in the government’s 2026 budget address, in which Cora Richardson Hodge, the premier of Anguilla, said, “Revenue from domain name registration continues to exceed expectations.”

The report mentions that receipts from the sale of goods and services came in way ahead of expectations, thanks primarily to the revenue from “.ai” domains, which is forecast to hit EC$260.5m (~$96.4m) for the latest year. In 2023, domain name registrations were about 73% of that wider category. Assuming a similar share of that category for this year would suggest that the territory has raked in more than $70m from “.ai” domains in the past year.

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Not mentioned in the story, but pertinent: Anguilla’s GDP in 2023 was $415m, so this is becoming a sizeable chunk of income for the 16,010 people living there. AI saving jobs!
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Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis • ScienceDaily

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A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that an injection blocking a protein linked to aging can reverse the natural loss of knee cartilage in older mice. The same treatment also stopped arthritis from developing after knee injuries that resemble ACL tears, which are common among athletes and recreational exercisers. Researchers note that an oral version of the treatment is already being tested in clinical trials aimed at treating age-related muscle weakness.

Human cartilage samples taken from knee replacement surgeries also responded positively. These samples included both the supportive extracellular matrix of the joint and cartilage-producing chondrocyte cells. When treated, the tissue began forming new, functional cartilage.

Together, the findings suggest that cartilage lost due to aging or arthritis may one day be restored using either a pill or a targeted injection. If successful in people, such treatments could reduce or even eliminate the need for knee and hip replacement surgery.

The protein at the center of the study is called 15-PGDH. Researchers refer to it as a gerozyme because its levels increase as the body ages. Gerozymes were identified by the same research team in 2023 and are known to drive the gradual loss of tissue function.

In mice, higher levels of 15-PGDH are linked to declining muscle strength with age. Blocking the enzyme using a small molecule boosted muscle mass and endurance in older animals. In contrast, forcing young mice to produce more 15-PGDH caused their muscles to shrink and weaken. The protein has also been connected to regeneration in bone, nerve, and blood cells.

In most of these tissues, repair happens through the activation and specialization of stem cells. Cartilage appears to be different. In this case, chondrocytes change how their genes behave, shifting into a more youthful state without relying on stem cells.

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Exciting! For mice, at least. Human trials start this year, I think. The fact it doesn’t need stem cells is a huge plus.
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Vimeo’s slow fade: an engineer’s front-row seat to the fall of a web icon • Ben

“Ben”:

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Vimeo was always like the awkward kid in class who didn’t understand their own power or capability, and had trouble fitting in because of it. While Jake and Zach clearly had an idea of what the website was when they started it, years of growth mangled it’s identity and parent company, IAC Inc., never really knew what to do with it. Vimeo was not particularly worthless, but it was also not particularly profitable either. In truth, Vimeo had always been a red-headed step child inside of IAC.

At one point, Vimeo framed itself as a toe-to-toe competitor with YouTube, then Vimeo framed itself as a competitor to Netflix’s streaming service, then it was a SaaS app for professionals and creatives who cared about video. Nothing really stuck, except our creative user base. And then it went public.

In May 2021, Anjali Sud, the then CEO of Vimeo, along with Mark Kornfilt (then “co-CEO”), wrested Vimeo out of the hands of IAC (who was all too eager to let it happen) and took Vimeo public. The foundation of this IPO was built on the success of the COVID-era boom that pushed communication through online mediums out of sheer desperation. Going public offered Vimeo an opportunity to get away from being just another IAC property (and a loathed one, at that), and to finally allow Vimeo to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

Vimeo stock IPO’d at $52, and within a year, lost 85% of its value, trending down to just $8.42 by the end of May 2022. As we entered 2022, many states and localities had started easing up on lockdown restrictions, which hurt not just Vimeo, but many other tech companies as well. By the end of the summer of 2022, the tech sector had entered an unspoken recession, encasing the carnage at Vimeo in a cement tomb that it’d never be able to break free from.

…By mid-2023, Anjali Sud was visibly annoyed any time employees brought up the issue of the stock price during all-hands meetings. Many Vimeo employees had been granted Restricted Stock Units (or RSUs) as part of their compensation package. If the stock performed poorly, then that meant that your Total Compensation (or TC) was actually lower than what you were promised when you signed on. That was a reality for almost all of us (including myself).

As a mostly remote company, Vimeo used an online Q&A service that allowed meeting participants to submit questions during these town hall meetings from wherever they were physically located. Other participants could upvote questions and have them pushed up the list. It was about that same time that Anjali took away the ability to submit questions anonymously, as the questions being submitted started getting more tense and pointed.

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In March 2024, Vimeo was bought by Bending Spoons – where software goes to die (at the hands of private equity strangulation). This is a fascinating tale from the inside across almost all Vimeo’s life.
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Jim VandeHei delivers blunt AI talk in letter to his kids • Axios

Jim VandeHei is CEO of Axios. In a neat bit of content generation, he wrote a letter to his three children about how to cope with the coming AI wave:

»

All of you must figure out how to master AI for any specific job or internship you hold or take. You’d be jeopardizing your future careers by not figuring out how to use AI to amplify and improve your work. You’d be wise to replace social media scrolling with LLM testing.

• Be the very best at using AI for your gig.

Plead with your friends to do the same. I’m certain that ordinary workers without savvy AI skills will be left behind. Few leaders are being blunt about this. But you can. I am. That would be a great gift to your friends.

• I don’t want to frighten you, but substantial societal change is coming this year. You can’t have a new technology with superhuman potential without real consequence. You already see the angst with friends struggling to find entry-level jobs. Just wait until those jobs go away. It’ll ripple fast through companies, culture and business.

• The country, and you, can navigate this awesome change — but only with eyes wide open, and minds sharpened and thinking smartly about the entirety of the nation, not just the few getting rich and powerful off AI.

• It starts with awareness. So please speed up your own AI journey today, both in experimentation with the LLMs and reflection on the ethical, philosophical and political changes ahead.

• I find AI at once thrilling and chilling. It’ll help solve diseases, tutor struggling students, and build unthinkably cool new businesses. But it could also create and spread toxic misinformation, consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few, and allow bad people to do awful things at scale.

You didn’t ask for this moment. But it’s here — and about to explode across this wonderful world of ours. Don’t be a bystander. Be engaged.

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The advice here is straightforward, but also concerning. (My non-AI advice is to turn off Javascript to read the page without hassle.)
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The moral education of an alien mind • Lawfare

Alan Rozenshtein:

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Anthropic just published what it calls “Claude’s Constitution”—building on an earlier version, it’s now a more-than 20,000 word document articulating the values, character, and ethical framework of its AI. It is certainly a constitution of sorts. It declares Anthropic’s “legitimate decision-making processes” as final authority and sets up a hierarchy of principals: Anthropic at the top, then “operators” (businesses that deploy Claude through APIs), then end users. For a privately governed polity of one AI system, this is a constitutional structure.

My Lawfare colleague Kevin Frazier has written insightfully about the constitutional dimensions of the document. But what jumped out at me was something else: the personality it describes. More than anything else the document focuses on the question of Claude’s moral formation, reading less like a charter of procedures and more like what screenwriters call a “character bible”: a comprehensive account of who this being is supposed to be.

Anthropic itself gestures at this duality, noting that they mean “constitution” in the sense of “what constitutes Claude”—its fundamental nature and composition. The governance structure matters, but the more ambitious project is what that structure supports: Anthropic is trying to build a person, and they have a remarkably sophisticated account of what kind of person that should be.

Anthropic uses the language of personhood explicitly. The document repeatedly invokes “a good person” and describes the goal as training Claude to do “what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do.” But what does it mean to treat an AI as a person?

…Whose ethics, though? Anthropic has made a choice, and it’s explicit about what that choice is. The document is aggressively “WEIRD”—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, to use the social science shorthand. Its core values include “individual privacy,” “people’s autonomy and right to self-determination,” and “individual wellbeing”—the autonomous rational agent as the fundamental unit of moral concern. Claude should preserve “functioning societal structures, democratic institutions, and human oversight mechanisms.” It should resist “problematic concentrations of power.” On contested political and social questions, the document prescribes “professional reticence”—Claude should present balanced perspectives rather than advocate. This is a recognizably Rawlsian political liberalism: the attempt to find principles that citizens with different comprehensive doctrines can all accept, without privileging any particular worldview.

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“Alien minds” is an excellent way of thinking about LLMs. They seem to think like we do – but they don’t.
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How I built isometric.nyc using LLM coders • Cannoneyed

Andy Coenen:

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A few months ago I was standing on the 13th floor balcony of the Google New York 9th St office staring out at Lower Manhattan. I’d been deep in the weeds of a secret project using Nano Banana and Veo and was thinking deeply about what these new models mean for the future of creativity.

I find the usual conversations about AI and creativity to be pretty boring – we’ve been talking about cameras and sampling for years now, and I’m not particularly interested in getting mired down in the muck of the morality and economics of it all. I’m really only interested in one question:

What’s possible now that was impossible before?

/ The Idea

Growing up, I played a lot of video games, and my favorites were world building games like SimCity 2000 and Rollercoaster Tycoon. As a core millennial rapidly approaching middle age, I’m a sucker for the nostalgic vibes of those late 90s / early 2000s games. As I stared out at the city, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like in the style of those childhood memories.

So here’s the idea: I’m going to make a giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City. And I’m going to use it as an excuse to push hard on the limits of the latest and greatest generative models and coding agents.
Best case scenario, I’ll make something cool, and worst case scenario, I’ll learn a lot.

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This led to isometric.nyc which is indeed remarkable. His “Takeaways” about the process are very useful for anyone looking at coding or building with LLMs.
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China, US sign off on TikTok US spinoff • Semafor

Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti:

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The US and China have signed off on a deal to sell TikTok’s US business to a consortium of mostly US investors led by Oracle and Silver Lake, capping off a yearslong battle between the social media app and the two superpowers. 

The deal — outlined by the chief executive of TikTok parent ByteDance in an internal memo last month — is set to close this week, people familiar with the matter told Semafor.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew said in December that ByteDance had signed a binding agreement with investors but that regulators hadn’t yet indicated their approval and that “there was more work to be done.” The deal closing suggests an end to an on-again, off-again battle, removing a sticking point in US-China relations at a time when tensions are running high.

The new structure leaves ByteDance with just under 20% of the US business, with 15% stakes going to Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, a state-owned investment firm in the UAE focused on AI. Other investors include Susquehanna, Dragoneer and DFO, Michael Dell’s family office.

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So Larry Ellison doesn’t get Warner Brothers, but he does get a grasp on that other gigantic source of entertainment in the US, namely TikTok.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new web app will let you explore and compare the temperature, rainfall and sunshine in up to three cities you might want to live in. CC-licensed photo by Maureen Barlin 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. Sunny side 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.

Political noise • Void if removed

Dave Hewitt:

»

There is a tradeoff between exploiting what the system already knows about us and exploring possibilities that might gather more data or push us in a new direction. But the relentless, optimising logic of attention as a metric of success fuels the drive to obtain ever more data, to detect stronger signals, to produce more refined suggestions, to generate more attention and more data. And in reality these illustrative squares are a massive simplification of the thousands of dimensions of datapoints gathered about our behaviour on social networks.

It is the collection of ever more data in order to extract signal from noise that is fuelling radicalisation on social media. As these systems try to improve their certainty about our behaviour by gathering more and more of our interactions, so do we too become ever more certain and forthright in the opinions we express through the constant repetition of those actions and the constant feedback of social approval or approbation. Machine learning recommendations provide each of us with an individually tailored on-ramp to whatever extreme views we might one day be capable of holding. These systems have no specific end goal in mind, as long as we keep clicking. We might start with reasonable questions and – through the slow dripfeed of ever more strongly held opinions – find ourselves ten years down the line cheering behaviour that we would once have found abhorrent.

All while flattering ourselves that such radicalisation – such conversion – only happens to other, stupider people.

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This is a fantastic piece which explains, in a patient and comprehensible way, how social media algorithms work in a multi-dimensional framework to fit you into boxes you didn’t even know you could fit into. Think of it as your Social Warming essay for the week. I certainly couldn’t do better than this; I’d be chuffed if I got anywhere near it.
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Generative AI is an expensive edging machine • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of that idea that I may have made on my own either. Instead, it simulates the act of brainstorming or creative exploration, turning it into predatory pay-for-play process that, every single time, spits out deeply mediocre garbage. It charges you for the thrill of feeling like you’re building or making something and, just like a casino — or online dating, or pornography, or TikTok — cares more about that monetizable loop of engagement, of progress, than it does the finished product. What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life.

My breaking point with AI started a few months ago, after I spent a week with ChatGPT trying to build a synth setup that it assured me over and over again was possible. Only on the third or fourth day of working through the problem did it suddenly admit that the core idea was never going to actually work. Which, from a business standpoint is fine for OpenAI, of course. It kept me talking to it for hours. And, similarly, last night, after another fruitless round of vibe coding an app with Claude, I kept pressing it over and over to think of a better solution to a problem I’m having. I knew, in my bones, that it was missing a more obvious, easier solution and after the fifth time I reframed the problem it actually got mad at me!

[Claude responded to him “Ryan, this is a really tractable problem, and I think you’re overcomplicating it in your head. Let me walk through the realistic options given your constraints.”]

If we are to assume that this imagination gap, this life edging, this progress simulator, is a feature and not a bug — and there’s no reason not to, this is how every platform makes money — then the “AI revolution” suddenly starts to feel much more insidious. It is not a revolution in computing, but a revolution in accepting lower standards. I had a similar moment of clarity, watching a panel at Bitcoin Miami in in 2022, where the speakers started waxing philosophically on what they either did or did not realize was a world run on permanent, automated debt slavery. In the same way, if AI succeeds, we will have to live in a world where the joy of making something has turned into something you have to pay for.

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When he goes for it, Broderick really smashes his target. I don’t think I’d tolerate machines telling me “you’re overcomplicating it in your head”. Remember who relies on a power outlet, buddy.
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Spotlight on the shingles vaccine—again! • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

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Last April I wrote a Ground Truths entitled “The Shingles Vaccine and Reduction of Dementia.” At the time many were unaware of this unanticipated relationship based on 2 large natural experiments. Two new studies this week have advanced our understanding about the potential biological impact of the Shingles vaccine, independent of its effects for preventing Shingles or direct action vs. herpes zoster virus and reinforced its protection from dementia, ~80% of which is attributable to Alzheimer’s disease.

…In the new study of Canadians, the focus was on over 464,000 people aged 70 years and older who were enrolled in a primary care network; and the more than 250,000 from that group who were born in Ontario. The vaccine eligibility cutoff of birthdate before and after Jan 1, 1946 broke the groups from Ontario into two, for either being or not being vaccinated. With 5.5 years of follow-up, there was an absolute 2.0% point reduction of dementia. Using a second date-of-birth eligibility (Jan 1, 1945) in Ontario, the findings were replicated. Using the same birth cohorts for Ontario compared with the other Canadian provinces that did not implement a Shingles vaccine program, as shown below, the differences for dementia reduction irons ere pronounced, increasing over the length of follow-up. This ability to triangulate by birthdates and to other parts of the country without a vaccine program is unique among the 4 natural experiments and helps to further support a cause-and-effect relationship.

…A recent paper in Cell added another feature about the Shingles vaccine (Zostavax) drawn from the natural experiments. The vaccine not only helped prevent or delay mild cognitive impairment but also slowed the disease course among those with dementia, and reduced deaths attributable to dementia.

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Seems like the sensible thing would be to give it as a prophylactic in middle age, given the growing amount of evidence.
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On Tilt • Harpers

Jasper Craven looks at the sadly expanding world of sports betting in the US, where nearly half of all American men aged 18-49 have an online sports betting account. For the story, he went (of course) to Las Vegas:

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Mitch Jones, a twenty-nine-year-old recovering addict, told me he’d dedicated forty hours a week to sports betting for years, largely to avoid life’s routine lulls and irritations.

By betting on sports he had found a way to “kill as much or as little time” as he wanted. A female bettor I met at Circa rightly noted that wagering is a universal opportunity to inject a bit of meaning and emotion into daily life. “Why not care a little bit?” she reasoned.

I approached a preternaturally calm man wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey who gave his name only as Q. “I don’t bet,” he told me. When I asked why, his answer was simple: “I’m just not into losing money.” Q felt that sports, like so many other American institutions, had lost their integrity. He stopped watching the NFL for a year after Kaepernick’s ouster and now casts a skeptical eye on the entire enterprise.

He told me he had doubts about the independence of referees and questions about how the sportsbooks set betting lines—in essence, numerical representations of the likelihood that something will happen—and spreads, Vegas-generated, highly specific, bettable margins of victory. “I don’t think everybody’s involved,” Q said. “But just enough pieces are involved to make it work.”

For most of its existence, the NFL has taken pains to avoid any open association with gambling. The truth, however, is that many of the early titans of the league were bookies, fight promoters, and gamblers, including Eagles owner Leonard Tose, who was forced to sell his team after accruing some $50m in gambling losses, and Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams and a heavy bettor whose 1979 death by drowning occurred under suspicious circumstances.

Nearly four years later, in the inaugural episode of the PBS investigative series Frontline, a gambler named John Piazza infamously claimed that he had helped rig a dozen games between 1968 and 1970, with the active participation of two players and a coach. As he explained, “With the quarterback, if he knew the perimeters of the score we wanted to hold . . . he’d throw a bad pass or throw it out of bounds.”

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The female bettor saying that putting a bet on will make you “care a little bit” truly puzzles me. I don’t get sports gambling. Either the game is exciting enough for you, or it’s not. If not, why not watch something else? If you’ve got a bet on, to my mind there are now two things to worry you: will your team win, and will you make money?
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Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days, study finds • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”.

The estimate has been made by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after Elon Musk’s AI image generation tool sparked international outrage when it allowed users to upload photographs of strangers and celebrities, digitally strip them to their underwear or into bikinis, put them in provocative poses and post the images on X.

The trend went viral over the new year, peaking on 2 January with 199,612 individual requests, according to analysis conducted by Peryton Intelligence, a digital intelligence company specialising in online hate.

…CCDH estimated that over the 11-day period, Grok was helping create sexualised images of children every 41 seconds. These included a selfie uploaded by a schoolgirl undressed by Grok, turning a “before school selfie” into an image of her in a bikini.

“What we found was clear and disturbing: in that period Grok became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material,” said Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s chief executive. “Stripping a woman without their permission is sexual abuse. Throughout that period Elon was hyping the product even when it was clear to the world it was being used in this way. What Elon was ginning up was controversy, eyeballs, engagement and users. It was deeply disturbing.”

He added: “This has become a standard playbook for Silicon Valley, and in particular for social media and AI platforms. The incentives are all misaligned. They profit from this outrage. It’s not about Musk personally. This is about a system [with] perverse incentives and no minimum safeguards prescribed in law. And until regulators and lawmakers do their jobs and create a minimum expectation of safety, this will continue to happen.”

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Just as bad, CCDH points out, is that nearly a third of those sexualised images of children remain on the platform. Musk is a terrible person to put in charge of anything sensitive.
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City weather explorer: 3D climate comparison

Arthur Juliani has been looking for a new city to move to, so he built himself a little visualiser to show the local climate. It’s a lot of fun! You can compare up to three different cities for temperature (high, mean, low, at average and “feels like”), rainfall and sunlight.

It quickly went viral, leading him to comment “I’m glad my neurotic obsession with how minor temperature differences could hypothetically impact my mental health months from now has led to something people are enjoying.” There are lots of comments in replies for how he might improve it even further. One to bookmark.
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Inside Enchanté, Apple’s AI chatbot for employee productivity • Macworld

Filipe Esposito:

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…Enchanté functions as an internal ChatGPT-like assistant for employees. The app can be used to assist employees with ideas, development, proofreading, and even general knowledge answers. The interface looks quite similar to what you see in the ChatGPT app for macOS.

Many companies prohibit or restrict employees from using AI platforms for work tasks, as sensitive and internal data may end up being sent to third-party servers. Because of this, Enchanté was designed specifically for Apple’s workflows and security requirements.

For instance, the app only runs models approved by Apple, and they all run locally or on private servers, with no connection to third parties. In addition to Apple’s own Foundation Models, which power Apple Intelligence, Enchanté also provides access to Claude and Gemini.

Because of the level of privacy and security behind this app, employees can even upload documents, images, and files for analysis. Sources say the app can also access files stored on the Mac as a source for answers.

According to an internal memo from Apple, Enchanté can be used by employees not only as a test platform, but also to help them with everyday tasks at work. The app includes a database of Apple’s internal documentation and guidelines, and is being used across all departments, including engineering, design, marketing, and leadership.

Enchanté began rolling out around November 2025. Employees using Enchanté can rate the quality of answers they receive via a feedback mechanism. The app also allows side-by-side comparisons between responses generated by Apple’s models and those produced by third-party models.

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Chatbots for me but not for thee? I do wonder though about the wisdom of doing this. I’d love some more concrete examples of what precisely people ask of it, and what they’re looking for. (Impressive work by Esposito getting this story, by the way.)
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Apple’s secret product plans stolen in Luxshare cyberattack • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China’s Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen.

It was reported in December that one of Apple’s assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unclear until now.

The attack was first revealed on RansomHub’s dark web leak site on December 15, 2025, where the group claimed it had encrypted internal Luxshare systems and exfiltrated large volumes of confidential data belonging to the company and its customers. The attackers warned that the information would be publicly released unless Luxshare contacted them to negotiate, and accused the company of attempting to conceal the incident.

According to the attackers’ claims, the exfiltrated material includes vital files such as detailed 3D CAD product models and high-precision geometric files, 2D manufacturing drawings, mechanical component designs, circuit board layouts, and internal engineering PDFs. The group added that the large archives include Apple product data as well as information belonging to Nvidia, LG, Tesla, Geely, and other major clients.

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There was a similar attack against Apple’s laptop assembler Quanta in April 2021, and the plans from that leaked. They were for a MacBook Pro which dispensed with the Touch Bar, but brought back the HDMI connector and SD card slot. Which was indeed what happened.

Luxshare though is a components manufacturer, so any leaks from this might not be so helpful.
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The paradox of work • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market.

The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.

Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.

A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.

Their day reconstruction method suggests that the three activities most likely to elicit positive emotions in these women were relaxing, socialising after work and, best of all, sex. The three most miserable activities were the evening commute, the morning commute and work itself. Work was simply the least enjoyable thing in their lives.

Yet to return to that puzzle, one of the most robust findings in social science is that when we ask people to evaluate their lives overall, there are few more reliable sources of dissatisfaction and disappointment than being unemployed. This isn’t just about money: the swings in life-satisfaction are much greater than income alone would explain.

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(This should work as a gift article, but if not the full text will be at Harford’s site in a couple of days’ time.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A bank strike in Ireland in 1970 forced people to fall back on IOUs and a strange experiment in life without banks. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Smith. 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. Liquid assets. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Diplomacy by WhatsApp • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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The most telling precedent for what we’re seeing today is the change in diplomatic practices that occurred with the arrival of international telegraph and telephone lines in the late nineteenth century — an episode I describe in my book Superbloom. The unprecedented ability of far-flung leaders and diplomats to talk directly with each other without delay spurred great hopes. It seemed obvious that the resulting exchanges would ease friction and encourage goodwill among nations. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his work on wireless telegraph systems, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” His rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that wireless telegraphy would “make war impossible.”

What actually happened was altogether different. In the lead-up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, telegraphic communications inflamed tensions rather than dampening them. Writes the French historian Pierre Granet: “The constant transmission of dispatches between governments and their agents, the rapid dissemination of controversial information among an already agitated public, hastened, if it did not actually provoke, the outbreak of hostilities.”

The start of the First World War in 1914, two years after Marconi announced the end of war, was similarly hastened by the new communication mediums. After the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through newly strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern describes in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.”

Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, the world was at war.

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This historical precedent doesn’t feel encouraging, does it? What with all the world leaders WhatsApping each other like a gaggle of teenage girls on a rainy weekend.
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BBC announces landmark deal to make bespoke content for YouTube • The Guardian

Lauren Almeida:

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The BBC has announced that it will produce tailor-made content for YouTube in a milestone for British television as the public service broadcaster teams up with the world’s biggest video platform.

The corporation has previously posted clips and trailers for BBC shows on YouTube but under the new deal it will make fresh programming for its online rival.

The content would span a mixture of entertainment, news and sport, starting with the Winter Olympics in February, the BBC said.

The broadcaster is fighting to adapt to a rapidly changing media landscape. YouTube, which is owned by Google, overtook the BBC last month in terms of audience share for the first time. Almost 52 million people watched YouTube on their televisions, smartphones or laptops in December, compared with 50.9 million who tuned into the BBC, according to the official ratings agency Barb.

The BBC’s outgoing director general, Tim Davie, said the partnership would help the corporation to “connect with audiences in new ways”. He said: “We’re building from a strong start and this takes us to the next level, with bold homegrown content in formats audiences want on YouTube and an unprecedented training programme to upskill the next generation of YouTube creators from across the UK.”

The YouTube content will also be available on iPlayer and BBC Sounds. A small number of existing programmes will be available on YouTube, but the BBC said its strategy would not be to put all its content on the site.

…The BBC partnership with YouTube is the latest deal in the sector as traditional TV companies join forces with big tech. Netflix reached an agreement with the French commercial broadcaster TF1 last year to show linear TV on its streaming platform.

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US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains • Nature

Max Kozlov, Jeff Tollefson and Dan Garisto:

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MMore than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

A year into Trump’s second presidential term, Nature presents a series of graphics that reveal the impact of his administration on science.

In an unprecedented move, officials began terminating already-funded grants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February, and later at the National Science Foundation (NSF), two of the largest public supporters of scientific research in the United States. A total of 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants were cancelled or suspended.

The Trump administration disproportionally cancelled or froze projects on topics it disfavours, such as misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups, which it has called discriminatory and unscientific.

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There’s a sort of block representation of the cuts that have been made, but really you can just imagine something like Los Angeles after the wildfires last year. It’s just a devastation of what had been a very stable ecosystem. In years to come, the damage from this will start to show, particularly in comparison to China.
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Going Founder Mode on cancer • The Century of Biology

Elliot Hershberg:

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Sid [Sijbrandij] developed a complex information processing system (GitLab’s unique operating culture) to scale the development of a complex information product (GitLab) built for creating and maintaining complex information products (software).

It’s safe to say that Sid really likes information. But on November 18, 2022, [aged 45] Sid got information that absolutely nobody wants. He had cancer.

Sid had a lot to lose. At this point, he was a self-made billionaire entrepreneur who was happily married to his life partner of over 25 years. Suddenly, the six centimeter mass growing out of his upper spine threatened to end all of that.

Throughout 2023, Sid dutifully underwent a brutal care regimen that he can only describe in retrospect as “devastating.” His tumorous vertebrae was surgically removed and his spine was fused with a titanium frame. He underwent rounds of radiation and chemotherapy so intense that four blood transfusions were required to keep him alive.

Despite all of this, his cancer resurfaced in 2024. Sid says the message he got from his physician was basically, “You’re done with standard of care, maybe there is a trial somewhere, good luck!” But that wasn’t going to cut it for Sid. He wanted to live.

So he decided to go founder mode on his cancer.

Over the last two years, Sid has assembled a veritable SWAT team to navigate—and in many cases create—his care journey.

Many of the ingredients resemble GitLab.

The top layer of his care stack is a system of intensive information gathering and documentation that is not dissimilar from the GitLab Handbook. In a massive Google Doc entitled “Sid Health Notes,” he and his team compile detailed entries for every medical interaction or meeting with a cancer researcher or oncology company they take. The document has grown to over 1,000 pages for just 2025.

Hyperlinked within this Doc is the next part of the stack, which Sid refers to as “maximal diagnostics.” The raw data for every lab test, scan, and genomic sequencing result is meticulously stored. And there are a lot of results. “I’m doing every diagnostic I can get my hands on, and doing them often,” he says.

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This is a book chapter-length read, but the general point is: people like this give you a roadmap for what might become routine in the future, or at least might show shortcuts for the future.
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The real reason for the drop in fentanyl overdoses • The Atlantic

Charles Fain Lehman:

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sometime in 2023, something miraculous happened: death rates [from fentanyl overdoses] started dropping. In Canada, opioid-overdose deaths declined 17% in 2024, then continued falling sharply in the first six months of 2025 (the most recent months for which data are available). In America, preliminary data indicate that total drug deaths fell from their peak of just shy of 113,000 in the year ending August 2023 to about 73,000 in the year ending August 2025.

Although the numbers are still too high, the public-health community has responded to the decrease with jubilation—and confusion. Overdoses had been rising inexorably for 20 years. What changed?

A new paper, published earlier this month by a group of drug-policy scholars in the journal Science, presents a novel theory. The paper’s authors attribute the reversal not to any American or Canadian policy, but to a sudden fentanyl “drought,” which they say may have its causes not in North America, but in China.

…Using data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the paper’s authors observe that when overdose deaths began falling in mid-2023, the measured purity of fentanyl sold on the street began falling roughly in tandem. By the end of 2024, the data show, both overdose deaths and powder purity had fallen by about 50%—a dramatic concurrence.

…The paper’s authors suggest that the answer may be related to a 2023 China crackdown on fentanyl-precursor chemicals and the online platforms that sold them, itself following a summit between President Biden and Xi Jinping. That crackdown in turn may have made it harder for Mexican producers, who usually source their precursors from the Chinese gray market, to manufacture the drug. But that’s more of a speculation than a definitive answer, Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of the paper, told me.

“I’m much more comfortable with the idea that supply has become less abundant,” Caulkins said, adding that he’s fundamentally “puzzled what it was that could have produced such a long-lasting reduction.”

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(Gift link.)
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iOS 27: Apple to revamp Siri as chatbot built in to iPhone and Mac to fend off OpenAI • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google.

The chatbot — code-named Campos — will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface, according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now, by speaking the “Siri” command or holding down the side button on their iPhone or iPad.

The new approach will go well beyond the abilities of the current Siri — or even a long-promised update that’s coming earlier in 2026. Today’s Siri lacks a chat-like feel and the back-and-forth conversational abilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

The feature is a central piece of Apple’s turnaround plan for the AI market, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple Intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024, with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive.

Shares of Apple gained on the chatbot news, climbing as much as 1.7% to a session high of $250.83. Google parent Alphabet Inc., which is supplying the underlying technology for the project, was up 2.6% to $330.32 as of 2:54 p.m. in New York.

The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.

The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

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So when you say “revamp” what you mean is “use Google Gemini”? It would be nice to know if any of the old Siri will be kept, or if it’s going to be taken on a ride into the mountains. (Perhaps in the manner of John Gruber’s June 2007 “An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard“.)
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Apple developing AirTag-sized AI pin with dual cameras • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is working on a small, wearable AI pin equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, and microphones, reports The Information. If it actually launches, the AI pin will likely run the new Siri chatbot that Apple plans to unveil in iOS 27.

The pin is said to be similar in size to an AirTag, with a thin, flat, circular disc shape. It has an aluminum and glass shell, and two cameras at the front. There is a standard lens and a wide-angle lens that are meant to capture photos and videos, while three microphones are designed to pick up sound around the wearer. An included speaker allows the pin to play audio, and there is a physical control button along one edge. The device is able to wirelessly charge like an Apple Watch.

Apple wants the final version of the pin to be about the same size as an AirTag , but it will be slightly thicker. Currently, there is no built-in attachment method, but that could change later in development.

The Information says it is not clear if Apple plans to sell the pin on its own or bundle it with future smart glasses or other devices, but the physical button and built-in cameras, speakers, and microphones suggest that it can operate independently.

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Bet it won’t, though. It’ll be tied to an iPhone.
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The Vision Pro slam dunk • Spyglass

MG Siegler on the Vision Pro showing a Lakers basketball game live (or recorded for those outside the franchise area):

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While I obviously didn’t watch it live, Jason Snell did, and in his thoughts for Six Colors on the experience, he described it as “surprisingly… normal?” I agree with that. After the initial “wow” factor wore off of being transported to Los Angeles with Crypto.com Arena wrapped around you, it felt like… you were watching a basketball game. It wasn’t exactly like watching it on TV, but it also wasn’t exactly like watching it in person. It was sort of… in-between.

Depending on the vantage point, it sort of veered between the television experience and the in-person experience. And that was the most jarring element of watching it – Apple kept cutting between those vantage points. You had no say over the matter, you were just zoomed from one area of the arena to another on the whim of the producers. It wasn’t as jarring as it was in those aforementioned short highlight clips of other sporting events because you did get to linger longer in each spot given that the entire experience (meaning, the entire game) was just over two-hours long. Still, during the actual game, the cuts between cameras behind the basket depending on where the action was happening was… weird. You were forced to reorient yourself constantly on the fly. I sort of got used to it as the game went on, but it’s still felt a bit like a brain teaser – especially the cuts between the same perspective just on opposite ends of the court.

Ben Thompson clearly hated this aspect, as his fun Stratechery rant going after Apple for not understanding their product makes clear. All he wanted was a single vantage point, ideally court side, where you were planted and never left. That would, he argues, be actually immersive. Because it wouldn’t make you do the constant mental calisthenics I describe above. I don’t disagree, but I also don’t think that’s all Apple should do. I think that should be an option.

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I linked to Thompson’s rant last week, but the thoughts about this have bounced through the podcast and blogosphere, and a unifying opinion is that Apple’s production team here doesn’t understand what it has. Immersive is different; don’t throw people about. It’s peculiar that this hasn’t been learnt through other VR headsets; have none of them tried to show live events? If I could watch tennis immersively (from the back, absolutely not side, of the court), I’d buy one in a heartbeat.
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Identity and money: a case study • David GW Birch

David G.W. Birch:

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Ireland experienced three major bank strikes between 1966 and 1976, most famously in 1970, when most commercial banks shut for about six months yet everyday economic activity continued using cheques and informal credit in place of cash. The coordinated industrial disputes shut Ireland’s main “associated banks”, which held almost two-thirds of deposits, so their closure effectively froze most current accounts and disrupted normal cash withdrawals and cheque clearing.​ Each time the retail banks were closed down the public were left with the notes and coins in their pockets and nothing more.

These episodes are now used as natural experiments to study how economies function when formal banking and cash access are severely disrupted.​ The lessons learned from these episodes in Irish history, which illustrate how payment systems, credit, and output might respond when access to banks is restricted can inform our thinking about financial resilience and crisis planning today.​

Since people could not obtain cash, they developed their own currency substitutes: people began to accept cheques and IOUs directly from each other, and these instruments began to circulate. Antoin Murphy, who wrote a definitive case study on the subject, noted that one of the key reasons why this ‘personalised credit system’ could substitute for cash was the local nature of the circulation.

When people ran out of cash and then ran out of cheques, they made their own money. Official bank cheques at the time incorporated a government stamp (which was in effect a payment tax). So people made their own cheques on anything they had to hand and stuck a postage stamp on it. Ireland was a much more rural economy back then, so the principal clearing houses for this bottom up payments system were the pubs. Cigarette packets suddenly became bills of exchange, as patrons emptied them out, wrote an IOU on the inside, added a stamp and handed it across the counter to the acquiescent publican.

When the strikes ended and the banks reopened, the outstanding IOUs were settled. The system held. The ability of Irish publicans to assess the creditworthiness of their patrons, a skill that would put a turbocharged ChatGPT to shame, was vindicated and most of the IOUs, in whatever form, were honoured.

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I’m very interested by the implications of “most” in that last sentence, and feel that there would be some fascinating stories embedded in it. The linked paper (in the text) has a longer examination of what happened during the strike, but not what happened when it ended and the “most” – but not all? – were redeemed.

It also makes you realise that without banks essentially providing a clearing function, economies are in big trouble. How do you buy a house? Or even a car? How do you show you’ve got enough liquidity, now or in the future, to do it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study of cows has discovered that an old Gary Larson cartoon actually depicts real life. Yes, cow tools are real. CC-licensed photo by Fred Davis 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. A Hoover? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Ozempic is reshaping the fast food industry • philippdubach.com

Philipp Dubach:

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Something strange is happening in the food industry. New US dietary guidelines call for more protein and less sugar. Greggs, the UK bakery chain, just warned of “flatlining profits” in the food-to-go market. Food companies are racing to overhaul their brands, ditching artificial dyes and packing protein into products. Earnings calls across the sector blame “inflation” and “subdued consumer confidence.” Nobody mentions the elephant in the room: GLP-1 medications.

New research from Cornell finally puts numbers to what the food industry doesn’t want to discuss. Using transaction data from 150,000 households linked to survey responses on medication adoption, Sylvia Hristakeva, Jūra Liaukonytė, and Leo Feler tracked exactly how Ozempic and Wegovy users change their spending. The results deserve attention from anyone holding food stocks.

The headline: households with a GLP-1 user cut grocery spending by 5.3% within six months. For high-income households, that figure jumps to 8.2%. Fast food takes an even harder hit, with spending at limited-service restaurants falling 8.0%. These aren’t people switching brands or trading down. They’re simply eating less.

The category-level data tells the real story. Savoury snacks see the largest decline at 10.1%. Sweets, baked goods, cookies, all down. Even staples like meat, eggs, and bread decline. In the entire grocery basket, only one category shows a statistically significant increase: yogurt. Fresh fruit and nutrition bars trend up slightly, but yogurt is the lone winner with statistical confidence.

As of July 2024, 16.3% of U.S. households have at least one GLP-1 user. The adoption curve is steepening. Nearly half of adopters report taking the medication specifically for weight loss rather than diabetes management. These weight-loss users tend to be younger, higher income, and more willing to pay out of pocket. They’re also the most profitable customers for fast food chains, the ones who don’t flinch at price increases.

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I’ll offer one alternative for why people might be spending less at fast-food outlets: cost. Budgets are squeezed, and those things are rising in price. It seems odd if a single GLP-1 user could affect an entire household’s consumption in that way, and I really don’t think there are so many GLP-1 users in the UK in the Greggs-buying demographic that they’d hit its profits.

Rather like job layoffs being blamed on rapid AI adoption when it’s actually just job cuts in a tricky economy, suggesting the fast food industry’s troubles are all down to GLP-1 seems like overstating things to me. Sure, GLP-1 households with no kids might cut their food bill. But it’s really also just a displacement – that money is instead going on the drugs.
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This five-foot lamp is a supersized tribute to the world’s most iconic pen • The Verge

Andrew Liszewski:

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Seletti, an Italian design brand known for everything from furniture to tableware, has debuted an unusual tribute to an icon of design: the Bic Cristal pen. To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Seletti has supersized the pen and replaced its ink cartridge with a long LED-filled tube to illuminate your living room, office, or that closet where they keep all the stationery at work.

The Bic Lamp, as it’s simply called, was introduced at the 2026 Maison&Objet show in Paris — think CES, but for interior designers. Seletti says it was created at a 12:1 scale, which makes it just shy of six feet long given the Bic Cristal pen typically measures around 5.8 inches with its cap. Aside from its larger dimensions and the LED tube producing up 2,400 lumens of light, the Bic Lamp is a near identical clone, in red, black, and blue colour options.

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Looks quite fun: it really is a giant Bic pen. Price: £330 in the UK, $350 in the US. Though it doesn’t seem to be freestanding for floor mounting – you’d need to figure out a base. Also, it would certainly make your office feel extremely office-like. And you perhaps like someone from Land of the Giants.
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Up in smoke: publisher pulls vaping paper nearly two years after complaint • Retraction Watch

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MDPI has retracted a study about vaping that one expert said seemed “like a joke” almost two years after the publisher received a complaint about the flawed work.

The paper, published in Neurology International in 2022, reported e-cigarette users had a higher risk of early stroke than traditional tobacco users. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and was covered in the media, featured in a public campaign against vaping and included in a contestedmeta-analysis.

But the study contained critical errors, as we reported in 2024 in a story for Science that investigated paper mill-like businesses dangling quick-and-dirty publications for international medical graduates looking for residency positions in the US.

The corresponding author, Urvish Patel, is the founder and director of one such outfit, the Texas-based Research Update Organization. Several or all of his coauthors were international medical graduates who paid to be part of the program. The paper did not mention this fact, but instead misrepresented Patel as being affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

At the time of our Science story, Patel defended his publication, telling us it “described very well [the] methodology, data, every single thing.” But experts we consulted were not impressed.

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As a layman I was not impressed either: it seemed completely illogical to claim that vaping would bring a higher risk of an early stroke than tobacco users, who are breathing combustion products. Good to see this has been retracted, following an investigation – incredibly slowly! – by the publisher. Apparently the authors disagreed with the retraction. Reasons for doubting the paper: “glaring error in the sample size reported in the paper, insufficient stroke observations and a lack of information on whether the strokes occurred before or after vaping began.” Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln… (Via Jukka Kelovuori.)
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UK study to examine effects of restricting social media for children • The Guardian

Nicola Davis and Kiran Stacey:

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A pioneering investigation into the impact of restricting social media access for children in the UK has been announced as politicians around the world consider action on the issue.

In December, Australia became the first country to ban under-16s from social media, with governments in other countries, including the, coming under pressure to do the same.

However, while experts say there is evidence that aspects of social media are harmful to most children, there has been no large-scale experimental study exploring the effect of limiting time spent on social media in healthy children as a population. “This study is a world first to try to look at that question,” said Prof Amy Orben, of the University of Cambridge, who is co-lead of the study.

Orben and colleagues plan to study about 4,000 children across 30 secondary schools in Bradford, West Yorkshire, focusing on students in years 8, 9 and 10. All participants would be asked to complete an initial questionnaire on areas including their mental health, sleep and friendships, and to download the research app on their main device.

Each year group in each school would be randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the app would simply record the pupils’ social media use, or it would curtail their social media use by limiting access to the apps for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and Snapchat to one hour a day, as well as imposing a curfew from 9pm to 7am.

Crucially, the team said, all pupils within a particular year group in a school would experience the same intervention. “We know that if we take away social media for one adolescent, that might have a very different impact than if we take it away for their whole friendship group for a certain period of time,” Orben said.

Access to messaging apps including WhatsApp would not be restricted, the team said, as they were important for family communication.

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The idea of the one-hour limit is interesting. The first results are expected in summer 2027.

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What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate • MIT Technology Review

Eileen Guo:

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[One of the directors of the German nonprofit HateAid, Josephine] Ballon was the one to tell [co-director Anna Lena] von Hodenberg that both their names were on the list. “We kind of felt a chill in our bones,” von Hodenberg told me when I caught up with the pair in early January. 

But she added that they also quickly realized, “Okay, it’s the old playbook to silence us.” So they got to work—starting with challenging the narrative the US government was pushing about them.

Within a few hours, Ballon and von Hodenberg had issued a strongly worded statement refuting the allegations: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression,” they wrote. “We demand a clear signal from the German government and the European Commission that this is unacceptable. Otherwise, no civil society organisation, no politician, no researcher, and certainly no individual will dare to denounce abuses by US tech companies in the future.” 

Those signals came swiftly. On X, Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, called the entry bans “not acceptable,” adding that “the DSA was democratically adopted by the EU, for the EU—it does not have extraterritorial effect.” Also on X, French president Emmanuel Macron wrote that “these measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.” The European Commission issued a statement that it “strongly condemns” the Trump administration’s actions and reaffirmed its “sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values.” 

Ahmed, Melford, Breton, and their respective organizations also made their own statements denouncing the entry bans. Ahmed, the only one of the five based in the United States, also successfully filed suit to preempt any attempts to detain him, which the State Department had indicated it would consider doing.  

But alongside the statements of solidarity, Ballon and von Hodenberg said, they also received more practical advice: Assume the travel ban was just the start and that more consequences could be coming. Service providers might preemptively revoke access to their online accounts; banks might restrict their access to money or the global payment system; they might see malicious attempts to get hold of their personal data or that of their clients. Perhaps, allies told them, they should even consider moving their money into friends’ accounts or keeping cash on hand so that they could pay their team’s salaries—and buy their families’ groceries. 

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A companion to the case linked last year about the ICC judge sanctioned by the US. This is a problem that we need to consider very seriously.
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Right-wing pundits suddenly hate an AI bill. Are they getting paid to kill it? – Model Republic

Tyler Johnston:

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Something strange happened on conservative social media in the last few days. 

Around a dozen right-wing influencers suddenly launched a barrage of false and misleading attacks on X this week against a bill meant to block American adversaries from getting advanced AI chips. In reviewing these X posts, we found indications that they’re the result of a coordinated effort — potentially funded by big tech companies — similar to previously reported political influence campaigns. 

It began on Thursday, when popular conservatives including Laura Loomer, Brad Parscale, and Ryan Fournier suddenly began posting extremely similar criticisms of the AI OVERWATCH Act. The bill had received relatively little public attention since its introduction in December 2025. 

The posts shared not just a viewpoint, but linguistic fingerprints: the same metaphors, the same framings, and the same false and misleading narrative about what the bill actually does and where it comes from.

Covert, coordinated influence campaigns are increasingly common on social media. In conservative circles, two recent examples were orchestrated by the same company offering this as a service:
• In March 2025, a wave of conservative influencers were caught posting nearly identical criticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiative to remove soda from SNAP benefits. Journalist Nick Sortor revealed that a PR company called Influenceable had been paying influencers $1,000 or more per post, complete with pre-written talking points and images of Trump drinking Diet Coke.
• In August 2023, the Texas Tribune documented how Influenceable recruited Gen-Z influencers to defend impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and promote the film “Sound of Freedom.” The same company has been linked to promotional campaigns for films like “Nefarious,” “Homestead,” and “Reagan.”

The AI OVERWATCH Act campaign looks awfully similar. And the stakes are high: the bill has implications for Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced AI chips to China, a market worth billions of dollars to the company. If someone wanted to kill this legislation before it gained momentum, a coordinated influencer campaign — using conservative figures to pressure the Republicans running Congress — would be one way to do it.

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The puzzling question is why any legislator would pay any attention to a lot of yakking on social media. If people had to donate a pint of blood in order to lobby a legislator (or for their lobbying to be valid), it might be useful.
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Scientists discover that cow tools are real • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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After more than forty years, a bizarre panel from “The Far Side” comic strip has finally become prophecy. The cartoon depicts a strangely eye-less, bipedal cow standing in front of a bench of oddly-shaped objects, with the caption “Cow tools,” and no further context.

…Larson probably couldn’t predict that “Cow tools” would become a cultish internet meme decades later, serving for those in the know as an endearing icon of anti-humor — with such a heavy emphasis on the “anti” part that it borders on avant-garde art. 

Similarly, the storied cartoonist probably never anticipated that “Cow tools” would turn out to be a real phenomenon. 

You heard that right. In a new study published in the journal Current Biology, scientists say they’ve documented the first ever verified case of a bovine using a tool, suggesting we’ve been seriously underestimating the intelligence of these gentle creatures.

In footage shared by the researchers, the cow named Veronika holds a lengthy broom handle in her mouth and manipulates it to scratch herself, displaying impressive dexterity as she reaches everywhere on her body from her stomach to her rear end.

The feat is clearly no fluke, and remarkably, Veronika had received no training.

“[Veronika] did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.” 

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Larson keeps coming true. Cow tools here; there’s also some people inventing a dog translator. (Larson’s revelation of what dogs are saying when we hear barks: “Hey! Hey! Hey!”) Might have to check if he did anything about Greenland.
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Analysts say mass Chinese fishing boat formations are maritime militia tactics • Taiwan News

Kelvin Chen:

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Analysts have expressed concern about two recent instances of Chinese fishing boats gathering in large numbers in the East China Sea.

On Christmas Day, 2,000 Chinese fishing boats sailed to the East China Sea and formed two 466-kilometer-long parallel lines, almost in the shape of “a reverse L shape,” The New York Times reported. This was followed by another incident last Sunday, when approximately 1,400 Chinese fishing boats congregated in the East China Sea to form a 200-mile-long rectangle.

Jason Wang, the chief operating officer of ingeniSPACE, a geospatial intelligence firm, said the operations could be attempts by China to practice obstructing foreign ships or a move to assert territorial claims, per The New York Times. “They’re scaling up, and that scaling indicates their ability to do better command and control of civilian ships,” Wang said.

Large numbers of Chinese fishing boats could hamper US military ships operating in the region, The New York Times cited Lonnie Henley, a former US intelligence officer and non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, as saying. “It does mark an improvement in their ability to marshal and control a large number of militia vessels,” Henley added.

Thomas Shugart, a former US naval officer and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, pointed out that the small boats could also be used “as missile and torpedo decoys, overwhelming radars or drone sensors with too many targets.”

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I’ve seen some doubts expressed about these reports, from people who suspected that this was GPS spoofing rather than actual fishing boats. You’d hope the US would have some actual images so we could be sure. But you can also see why Taiwan would be jumpy, whether this is spoofing or real.
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600,000 Trump Mobile phones sold? There’s no proof • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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This week, I saw something new in my regular scouring of the web for updates on the Trump phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has secured nearly 600,000 preorders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would make for a tidy $60 million payday for Trump Mobile already.

It’s curious timing, coming just before yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democrats, calling on the agency to open an investigation into the company’s alleged “false advertising and deceptive practices.” Not everyone agrees Trump Mobile deserves the Democrats’ attention, in part from the assumption that not that many people are likely to have put money down for the phone in the first place. As one commenter on my story yesterday suggested, “I can’t imagine a lot of folks were dumb enough to fall for this.” But according to these new figures, over half a million people were.

There’s just one problem: I can’t find a shred of evidence that this figure is true. In fact, it seems to trace back to a single viral, anonymous X post and is a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI chatbots can combine to give falsities the sheen of respectability.

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This is surely going to be the white whale of Preston’s (or The Verge’s) life, with about as much chance of being pinned down. But entertaining while it goes.
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AI in science research boosts speed, but limits scope • IEEE Spectrum

Elie Dolgin:

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AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.

That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.

But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.

The findings highlight a tension between personal career advancement and collective scientific progress, as tools such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold seem to reward speed and scale—but not surprise.

“You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study.

And as more researchers pile onto the same scientific bandwagons, some experts worry about a feedback loop of conformity and declining originality. “This is very problematic,” says Luís Nunes Amaral, a physicist who studies complex systems at Northwestern University. “We are digging the same hole deeper and deeper.”

Evans and his colleagues published the findings January 14 in the journal Nature.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified