One thing we’re addicted to? Reading (on our phones) about how we’re addicted to our phones. CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding 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. Lo, battery. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta’s AI ads push causes chaos for brands • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly, Sydney Bradley and Lucia Moses:

»

Meta is pushing advertisers to use its AI tools — and results are proving chaotic: strangely twisted limbs, gibberish writing, or entirely changed products.

Meta’s response to brands: that’s on you, not us.

The tech giant has inserted a slew of AI features into its ad products in recent months. Working as designed, they can help make tweaks to ads that improve their likelihood of being clicked. But advertisers say the tools are clunky and generate misrepresentations and absurdities.

Business Insider spoke with eight advertisers and agency execs who said dealing with Meta AI problems had become routine.

Jessica Gleim, an ads consultant who works with female-founded brands, told Business Insider she regularly sees odd outcomes in Meta’s AI creative recommendations for ads she’s working on.

For one of her clients, a pajama brand, Meta recommended new assets that altered the actual product. The brand was promoting a pajama dress, and Meta suggested a new image with a shirt and pants. For another client, a networking group for women in Montana, Meta had a new vision for those ads: adding men.

“It’s not usable to help my clients grow their business,” Gleim said.

While some of Meta’s AI ad features are turned off by default, advertisers say they have been prone to bugs that accidentally turn them on. Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, said a bug that toggled AI settings on had regularly affected most of the 15 clients for whom she handles Meta advertising. She said she had flagged the bug to her Meta rep as recently as Thursday.

Outdoor retailer REI drew consumer backlash last month for running an Instagram ad depicting a nonsensical bike with two handlebars. REI said Meta had “auto-enrolled” it in an AI feature that spat out an “inaccurate” and “inappropriate” image.

A Meta spokesperson said that the company’s terms of service state that “AI can make mistakes and that it is the advertiser’s responsibility to review the AI outputs.”

«

Got to say, they should have a word with the people generating AI pictures to spam X/Twitter, because their game is pretty strong: different pictures most days, variations, different text. But of course they’re scams.
unique link to this extract

US military smartphones targeted through roaming and ad tech • Financial Times

Mehul Srivastava, Jacob Judah and James Politi:

»

Middle Eastern mobile networks were repeatedly hit with cyber attacks to track the locations of US personnel and contractors during the Iran war, according to telecoms data and people familiar with the matter.

The prospect that adversaries were stalking US forces has alarmed some American lawmakers, who have warned roaming systems and smartphone ad tech have left the military vulnerable to attack.

The malicious tracking attempts came in the build-up to the US-Israeli assault on Iran in late February and continued in the early days of the war, when Tehran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against US forces and military installations around the region.

The data, shared with the FT by the Mobile Surveillance Monitor research project, shows regional telecom networks fending off a wave of requests, called SS7 pings. These sought to pin down the locations of specific phones roaming outside their home networks, in what two cyber security experts who reviewed the data said suggested a co-ordinated campaign.

Officials in the Gulf suspected Iran or its allies of exploiting roaming agreements with local phone providers to try to locate US personnel, one person familiar with the matter said.

Separately, a second person — a US official who spoke on the condition of anonymity — said they believed actors linked to Iran had abused commercially available advertising databases to track phones in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Iran absolutely has capabilities to get real-time, immediate, and continuous location information,” said Gary Miller, a senior research fellow at cyber security watchdog Citizen Lab, who reviewed the data. “It would surprise me very much if Iran were not using SS7, or mobile network access in the region, to track US users.”

«

Often forgotten that Iran has plenty of cyber capabilities.
unique link to this extract

The Scrolly Chair • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

Writing how-to books and articles on breaking phone addictions has been a thriving cottage industry for at least a quarter century — ever since the BlackBerry was dubbed the CrackBerry. The [New York] Times alone has published dozens of pieces on the topic. A quick search reveals that, over just the last two years, these headlines have appeared in the paper:

“How to Break Free from Your Phone”

“Your Best Tips for Cutting Screen Time”

“Struggling with Phone Addiction? Try These Remedies.”

“How to Spend Less Time on Social Media (or Leave It Altogether)”

“How to Have a Healthier Relationship with Your Phone”

“Some ‘Brick’ It. Others Chain It to the Wall”

“Hanging Up”

“Do You Wish You Could Break Free from Your Phone?”

“Everything You Need to Break Up with Your Phone, from Free Tricks to Phone Safes”

“I Killed Color on My Phone. The Result Shocked Me.”

“They Grew Up with Smartphones. This Is How They Live without Them.”

“One Hour. No Phones. A New Way to Socialize for Gen Z.”

“Need a Break from Your Phone? These Books Can Help.”

“Is There Life after Smartphones?”

I hate to be a cynic, but I’m guessing the main reason for the proliferation of these sorts of articles is that they’re algorithmic catnip. They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones.

«

unique link to this extract

Thinking Machines Lab drops its first model • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company started by exiles from OpenAI, has released its first model, called Inkling. The startup’s new model is open-weight, which means that researchers and startups will be able to download and modify it.

In a blog post, the company says Inkling was trained from scratch to make sense of audio and video input as well as text. It says that while Inkling isn’t the best model on popular benchmarks, it performs well at many tasks, and is capable of advanced reasoning and coding. Like many open-weight models, Inkling is relatively large—975 billion parameters—and needs to run on a cluster of specialized chips.

In a sign of how AI models are increasingly being used to build AI, the lab also used Inkling to fine-tune and improve itself.

The release could help Thinking Machines establish itself as a legitimate player in the frenetic and big-spending AI race. Open-source models have proven popular because they’re cheaper to run than closed models, which can typically only be accessed for a fee. Open-source models can also be more easily modified for different tasks. The best open-weight models currently come from China, but Thinking Machines says Inkling offers a level of performance similar to those models.

The release of an open-weight model fits with a vision for AI that Thinking Machines laid out in a recent blog post. The company said the technology shouldn’t be controlled by just a few companies and should be decentralized so that more people can build their own models with their own data.

According to a source familiar with the process granted anonymity to speak freely, researchers discovered a strange phenomenon while training Inkling. Like other models, it usually provides a natural language explanation for its complex reasoning. Inkling decided to do away with this in the name of efficiency. “It determined that the grammar was overhead, which is interesting,” the source says. The company reinstated natural language reasoning to make the models’ decisions more explainable, the person says.

«

The profusion of models now is like the Cambrian explosion of PC models back in the early 1980s. It’s a full-time job keeping up with them.
unique link to this extract

The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

Some see the growth of open source models as a sign that the most intelligent models may end up being used for only the most specialized use cases. “Maybe in a few years, the frontier models will be for experimenting and [for] some really high-value tasks, and most of the production workloads will actually be powered either by private models within companies or by open source models,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said on a recent episode of Equity.

Hugging Face is a platform and developer community best known for hosting, sharing, and helping companies deploy open models. Delangue says Hugging Face’s customers and community members are increasingly touting the benefits of owning their own AI models rather than renting them, a trend that’s picked up steam in the cold light of day after getting the bill associated with the cost of scaling closed frontier models.

“If you’re an AI company or a technology company, you don’t want to outsource your core capabilities to another company, to a black box API that you don’t control, don’t have any visibility on, and don’t really have any sort of ownership,” Delangue said. 

That shift, Delangue argues, is reflected in the activity happening on Hugging Face. A new repository is created every seven seconds on the platform, which hosts almost three million public models and one million public datasets, per Delangue. That points to a different picture than the “one model to rule them all,” he says. In reality, it looks more like companies using many different models, many of which are customized for their specific use case. Half of all Fortune 500 firms are using Hugging Face to deploy their own private models and open source models, he says. 

The growing popularity of open models coincides with a steady stream of increasingly capable releases from Chinese AI labs. 

Every few months, another Chinese AI company releases a powerful open-weight model that is cheaper to deploy and easier to customize than closed competitors, undercutting the economics of proprietary AI that US firms have poured billions into.

«

In the same way that pretty much everything runs on Linux, you can imagine that open source chatbots will just be almost everywhere in a few years.
unique link to this extract

Musk’s xAI sues Grok user over sexualized ‘deepfakes’ • Reuters

Blke Brittain:

»

Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has sued a South Carolina man arrested earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting ​minors, alleging he misused the company’s AI system Grok to create child sexual abuse material.

xAI alleged in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, that Terry Harwood violated the company’s terms of service. The case ​is one of the first brought by an AI company ​against one of its users for allegedly using an AI system to generate explicit material.

Contact information for Harwood, who was arrested in February, ​was not immediately available. Spokespeople for xAI did not immediately respond to ​a request for comment on Wednesday.

The company’s lawsuit against Harwood follows intense global scrutiny of xAI over allegations that Grok has allowed users to generate non-consensual sexualized deepfakes, or realistic-looking ​videos fabricated by AI. xAI’s complaint said that the company “enforces its rules ​against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.”

“Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests,” the lawsuit said. xAI alleged that Harwood uploaded non-sexual images of ​adults and minors ​to Grok and tried to use the system to generate sexually explicit deepfakes based on them. The complaint also alleged he ​created non-consensual sexual imagery of adults.

The company asked the ​court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order permanently blocking Harwood from using Grok.

«

You’d hardly call them “guardrails” around Grok; more like tape on the floor. That’s a lot of suspended accounts and comparatively few arrests, too.
unique link to this extract

Hack reveals Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built. Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs. As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled. 

The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this.

The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music.

«

Lawsuits surely incoming. Though “you accessed our content without permission” is hardly comparable to YouTube’s years of copyright infringement, and that doesn’t seem to be in trouble. The person who did the hacking might be in more immediate trouble if found – a strange quirk of the law.
unique link to this extract

Top US lawmaker demands briefing from Lisa Nandy on ‘news prominence’ plan • Financial Times

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees:

»

A top US lawmaker has urged the UK culture secretary to detail her plans to make big social media companies give greater prominence to trusted news sites, as American authorities push back against perceived attacks on free speech in Europe.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, warned that the proposals risked creating “a tiered information system” and called for a formal briefing by July 28, when a new culture secretary is likely to be in post under presumptive prime minister Andy Burnham.

Last month, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to give established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, amid concerns about online misinformation.

Under the proposals, first reported by the FT, content from news channels including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by social media platforms’ algorithms and special rules may be implemented at times of increased social unrest.

A government consultation on the proposals, published last month, is due to close on August 31.

“These policies would create a tiered information system in which media outlets that are supported and legitimized by the British government are at the top, with all other outlets and independent journalists below them,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Nandy late on Tuesday.

«

Bet that Nandy is hoping she gets reshuffled by incoming PM Andy Burnham so she won’t have to deal with this uncomfortable question, which has the potential to create yet more transatlantic friction. I think we’re all hoping Nandy gets reshuffled. It would be very hard to find someone worse.
unique link to this extract

‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew • The Guardian

Jane Clinton:

»

Harvey, 16, from the south-east, thinks the opt-out nature of the curfew undermines its effectiveness, but is also worried about potential data breaches.

“I wasn’t expecting [the curfew] to be opt-out, and having it as an opt-out renders the whole thing meaningless, because if someone is addicted to Instagram and there’s a curfew but they can turn it off, they will turn it off.”

He says he mainly uses Instagram, X, YouTube and Snapchat, and, in conversation with his parents, has restrictions on his phone, but acknowledges that not everyone has this opportunity. He spends one or two hours a day on social media.

“My phone normally switches off at 10pm each day, but in scenarios where I would like to be on my phone later, say to watch a late England game and wanting to chat to my friends about it or see what other people are saying about it, then I’m able to discuss that with my parents and I’m able to adapt my phone to what I want it to be,” he says.

“Different circumstances demand different approaches. For example, during my GCSE exam season, there were occasions when I would stay up late revising via YouTube tutorials so my ‘social media’ use would have been very high, but it was because I was studying.”

He adds: “Having to verify your age, which applies to everyone, is one of my biggest issues with it, as that sort of removes this idea of an anonymous internet, which I know is both a good and a bad thing.”

He says of the government proposals: “I don’t think these measures are inherently bad, or that they should be just disregarded completely, but it’s the fine details that are important because everyone uses social media differently. Everyone has a different experience. I don’t think there is one single solution to this problem.”

«

Didn’t notice the opt-out element yesterday; that’s pretty hopeless, since the addicted will just opt for that. But this kid, for example, sounds pretty much on top of it.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A major British car insurer has discovered that AI is being used to create millions in bogus claims. CC-licensed photo by sylvar 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. Trustworthy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK 16- and 17-year-olds to be encouraged to follow midnight social media curfew • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Sixteen and 17-year-olds are to be encouraged to observe a midnight social media curfew, in the latest stage of Labour’s bid “to protect the next generation” from online harms, including poor sleep caused by night-time scrolling.

From next spring, Britain’s oldest children will be urged to refrain from using certain apps with a midnight to 6am block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden. The move is an extension of the under-16 social media ban announced last month, which included restrictions on platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

The government has also stopped short of restricting the use of virtual private networks, which allow children to avoid social media age gates by pretending they are in a country where there is no ban. The government’s own research found that only 7-10% of children reported using a VPN specifically to bypass age checks. It is also concerned that restrictions could damage free speech.

The Molly Rose Foundation, an internet safety campaign group, said the latest measures were part of “yet another piecemeal set of announcements, not the comprehensive plan for children’s safety that’s required”.

The specific apps covered by the default curfew have not been named in the announcement from the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, in one of the final acts of the Keir Starmer government. Kendall said features that can keep users scrolling for longer – such as videos that automatically play when another one ends and feeds that continually serve up personalised content – will also be switched off by default for older teenagers. However, they will also be able to override that restriction in a couple of clicks. The government is concerned to avoid a “cliff edge” of teenagers suddenly being exposed to social media’s most addictive features the moment they turn 16.

«

Call me picky, but a midnight curfew sounds about two hours too late, and a 6am restart about two hours too early. But maybe we could just do this nationally, and turn the internet off between those hours. (Or, only on during them.)
unique link to this extract

OnePlus is reportedly bailing on the US • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

OnePlus and its parent company, Oppo, plan to announce in the coming days that OnePlus brand will be leaving the US and European markets, according to a machine translation of a WinFuture report.

Should the exit actually happen, it will mark a conclusion to months of rumors about the future of OnePlus. Android Headlines said in January that OnePlus was being “dismantled,” though OnePlus, in a statement at the time, said that “OnePlus North America continues to operate, with full guarantee of users’ after-sales support, software updates, and rights commitments.”

In March, 9to5Google reported that OnePlus might cease operations in global markets. In April, Android Authority detailed how top staffers at OnePlus had recently left in Europe and the UK, with a company spokesperson saying in a statement that “OnePlus Europe is evaluating its regional roadmap and product strategy.”

«

The 9to5Google story basically has it all: the company is withdrawing back into China. US, Europe, UK, India: all going, going, gone. Probably not just a casualty of the RAM market, but won’t be sorry not to be competing in the wider world.
unique link to this extract

Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training • The Guardian

Emma Loffhagen:

»

A group of major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models, in “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.

The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers – Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier – and bestselling American author Scott Turow.

The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways – for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks – but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products.

“Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history,” the suit states.

According to the complaint, the tech company made copies of copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission or payment, despite internal discussions acknowledging the legal risks. The filing claims Google flagged internally that it could face “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines” for using texts provided by publishers for Google Play Books.

The publishers say Google’s actions are harming authors and the wider publishing industry, arguing that AI-generated content could negatively impact book sales.

«

Pretty easy to argue already that AI-generated content is harming book sales: there’s so much slop polluting Amazon’s ebook charts that it can’t be expanding the number of books read; it must be replacing other, human-written work. That’s a slam dunk, as they say.
unique link to this extract

US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

For the first time in its history, the US military sent explosive-laden drone boats into combat by attacking an Iranian midget submarine and naval port. The unprecedented use of such kamikaze sea drones by the United States comes nearly a decade after Iranian and Houthi forces first demonstrated such weapons.

The US military shared a video showing three “one-way attack surface drones” exploding after approaching an Iranian midget submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base on the night of July 12. US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, described the strikes in a social media post as the “first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”

The US drone boats were able to “make a low-speed, uncontested approach” to their targets before exploding, according to USNI News, a news service from the nonprofit US Naval Institute. USNI News also identified one of the targets as an Iranian Ghadir-class midget submarine that was out of the water while being suspended from a gantry.

The technology behind the strikes involved Saronic Corsair autonomous surface vessels developed by Saronic Technologies, a defense company based in Austin, Texas. The company’s website describes the drone boat as being 24 feet in length and capable of carrying up to 1,000 pounds over 1,000 nautical miles at a top speed surpassing 34 knots.

Such Corsair drone boats supposedly have the capability to operate autonomously without direct human control, including long-range navigation and patrol missions along with regulating power consumption and engine use to loiter at a specific position, according to a Saronic blog post.

«

The warfare version of Keeping up with the Joneses.
unique link to this extract

20s man stabs stock YouTuber over investment losses • Chosun

Kwon Tae-wan:

»

A man in his 20s was arrested by police in Busan [south Korea] on suspicion of attacking a stock investment YouTuber with a weapon. Investigations revealed he harbored resentment after suffering losses from investments he made based solely on the YouTuber’s advice.

The Busan Nambu Police Station announced on the 14th that it had detained a man in his 20s, identified as Mr. A, on charges of attempted murder.

Mr. A is accused of stabbing a man in his 40s, identified as Mr. B, multiple times with a weapon around 8:09 a.m. on the 13th at a commercial building in Busan’s Nam District before fleeing the scene.

Mr. B was reportedly a stock investment YouTuber. Mr. A, a subscriber to Mr. B’s YouTube channel, allegedly acted on revenge after incurring significant losses from investments made solely based on Mr. B’s recommendations.

«

There are rumours going around that lots of people – as in a few% – of South Korea’s population is very overextended and liable to losing a lot of money if there is a margin call caused by a significant fall in the Korean stock exchange. Which is the sort of thing that won’t happen, and isn’t likely to happen, until one day all at once it does.

These days anyway you’d think people would just have piled into SK Hynix. Are there any others?
unique link to this extract

Aviva detects record £230m in bogus insurance claims as use of AI rises • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge:

»

Bogus insurance claims worth more than £230m were detected by the insurance firm Aviva last year as scammers tried new tricks including using artificial intelligence to fake car accident scenes, documents and to exaggerate damage.

The insurer identified more than 18,400 suspect claims across its brands in 2025, with a combined value of £233m. The fraud claims level was a record for the insurer, although this was the first year that it included the Direct Line brands it acquired last summer.

Pete Ward, the head of claims counter fraud at Aviva, said fraud “isn’t a victimless crime – it drives up the cost of insurance for everyone”. He added: “We’re seeing fraud become more sophisticated, from exaggerated claims to the use of AI‑generated documents.”

Looking at Aviva’s UK general insurance business only, excluding Direct Line brands, motor insurance fraud accounted for most bogus claims detected, representing more than seven in 10 cases.

Fraudsters were moving away from staged collisions and towards exaggerated claims for vehicle damage, repair costs, credit hire and injury, often using wider cost pressures as justification, the insurer said. As a result, the value of motor fraud detected rose by 39%.

The insurer also reported a growing number of claims supported by AI‑generated images and manipulated documents, particularly in motor insurance, with fraudsters using AI tools to fabricate accident scenes and damage imagery. In response, the company is using AI tools and advanced analytics, overseen by humans, to thwart suspicious claims faster.

«

A brand new arms race.
unique link to this extract

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82 • The Register

Liam Proven:

»

A bold 1983 advertisement claimed: “The best software on earth comes from Psion.” However, [David] Potter realized early on that the instability of the rapidly moving home computer market posed a problem for the company, as he explained in a 1991 interview in Personal Computer World:

“What’s the longevity of this market, what’s the utility of these products, where’s it going to? And the more we asked these questions the fewer answers we could get. And we came to the conclusion that these products were of tremendous educational value, a lot of fun, but there was no real long-term utility and the market was not long term because of that. So we decided to diversify and put a lot of our development resources into two very new areas for us. One was applications software. The second area was quite a new, radical concept of a handheld computer”.

This led it to create the first of the multiple ranges of pioneering hand-held pocket computers for which it is better remembered today. In 1984, Psion launched the Organizer range, and in 1986, its successor the Organizer II, which came with two slots for what were arguably the computer industry’s first replaceable SSDs. In 1989, Psion introduced all-solid-state MC laptops. Although unsuccessful, the MC’s hardware was miniaturized to create the pocket-sized Psion Series 3 in 1991, and Psion’s bespoke GUI OS became EPOC16. The machines sold in the millions, which in turn led to the Psion 5 and netBook.

The Register’s magisterial history of the development of the Series 5, Psion: the last computer, covers this evolution in depth. For the Series 5, Psion designed and implemented EPOC32, a realtime-capable 32-bit Arm OS in C++. Later, EPOC32 was renamed Symbian and powered the first wave of smartphones, as The Reg covered in depth in 2010 in a two-part history: Symbian, The Secret History: Dark Star, followed by Symbian’s Secret History: The battle for the company’s soul.

«

A bit late to this, but what a legacy: real handheld computers (which were really good!) and oversaw the creation of the OS that powered Nokia, once the biggest mobile phone company in the world. And look for the nuggest about what “Psion” stood for: the first three letters are Potter Scientific Instruments.
unique link to this extract

IBM’s mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value • The Register

Carly Page:

»

IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue’s flagship Z business off course.

Ahead of its full calendar Q2 earnings release next week, IBM took the unusual step of publishing preliminary quarterly results alongside a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna explaining why the numbers fell short of expectations.

The biggest disappointment came in Infrastructure, where revenue fell 7%, despite what IBM had previously described as the strongest launch of a mainframe generation in its history.

The disclosure led to a more-than 25% plunge in Big Blue’s share price on Tuesday.
 
The Q2 culprit wasn’t a sudden loss of affection for mainframes, according to Krishna, but a last-minute scramble to secure hardware increasingly caught up in the AI spending boom.

“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases,” Krishna wrote. “This dynamic impacted client buying patterns.”

«

IBM hardware is less attractive than other hardware. That’s a bit worrying for IBM. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” becomes “You’ll get fired if you buy IBM”.
unique link to this extract

Phoebe Gates’s startup Phia was just accused of ‘cookie stuffing.’ Here’s what happens next • Inc

Esther Lian:

»

AI shopping browser extension Phia is under fire for reportedly taking credit for sales that it did not generate.

Co-founded by Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates, the daughter of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Phia is a free browser tool that compares prices across over 220,000 sites and auto-applies the best discount codes for products. Its marketing on the App Store promises users that they will “never overpay.”

However, recent independent testing by Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping, and researcher and consultant Ben Edelman found that Phia generated affiliate clicks on retail websites without meaningful user interaction.

During the checkout process, Phia allegedly opened a background tab and inserted its own referral code, sometimes even overriding legitimate referrals from other publishers.

Capital One Shopping, which operates a coupon tool that competes with Phia, declined to comment on its specific communications with the company. A spokesperson told Inc. that its testing and disclosure of Phia’s alleged conduct reflected its commitment to platform integrity.

…According to Bloomberg, after the publication tested the browser extension and contacted Phia, subsequent testing found that the company had stopped automatically claiming referral credit in all the cases where the behavior had previously occurred.

«

How peculiar! How very peculiar! Just goes to show that even the kids of the very rich find it hard to make an honest buck these days.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

So you’ve got a USB-C cable – but how do you find out what (if any) data speed it runs at? A new Mac app will tell you. CC-licensed photo by HS You 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. Charging ahead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Uber’s autonomous vehicle strategy: slow their adoption • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

»

A DECADE AGO, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said he saw autonomous vehicles as an existential threat to the ride-hail company’s business model.

“What would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by,” Kalanick told Business Insider.

In the years since, Uber has settled on a strategy that, rather than see it build and operate its own self-driving cars, puts it on track to become the place where riders can get connected with any ride, driven by a human or robot. “We think there are going to be many AV players around the world, and we want to be the go-to commercial platform for all of them,” now-CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in 2024. Since then, the company has signed agreements with more than 25 major robotaxi players, with driverless vehicles from Waymo, Nuro, Baidu, and Volkswagen’s MOIA either available or soon to be available on the Uber app in several global cities.

Now, according to documents viewed by WIRED and another obtained through a public records request, Uber’s lobbyists are pushing to build that strategy into law. The company’s representatives have pressed lawmakers to deploy autonomous vehicles on what it calls “hybrid networks,” where human drivers work alongside robots as the new tech grows.

In New Jersey, a lobbyist representing Uber took the strategy a step further, circulating legislative language that would, for a period of three years, require any platform offering driverless ride-hailing services to have human drivers serve 85% of its rides.

The language would likely prevent self-driving vehicle developers, including Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla, from operating their own ride-hail apps in the state—effectively forcing them onto another ride-hail app if they hope to enter the market and limiting competition for Uber, the country’s reigning ride-hail leader.

«

Very sneaky. A comparison would be insisting that any electric vehicle has to have a petrol engine, just in case, thus blocking EV entrants from entering the market. But Uber is very flexible: it’ll change its principles any time, as long as they suit it.
unique link to this extract

Meta pulls new AI image feature after days of backlash • BBC News

Kali Hays:

»

Meta has abruptly taken down a new feature that allowed people to use its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to make fake images from user content on Instagram.

The feature was part of a broad rollout of Muse Image, a new AI image generation tool Instagram’s parent company released last Tuesday.

It allowed users of the Meta AI chatbot to tag public-facing accounts on Instagram and quickly use content on those accounts to create AI-generated or altered content and images.

The feature quickly sparked blowback due to privacy concerns, leading Meta to admit it had “missed the mark” so it was “no longer available”.

Muse Image was the tech firm’s first foray into AI image generation but faced backlash as Instagram users were opted in by default. It meant that anyone with a public account could have their likeness used without their knowledge or permission.

Hollywood union Sag-Aftra described the U-turn as a “win”. It had previously urged its members and “all Instagram users” to take action to protect their likeness stating that there had been an “utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use”.

The London-based human rights charity Privacy International had also criticised the feature, telling the BBC it was “the latest sign AI companies see people’s images and data as raw material to be exploited”.

«

Well that was predictably quick, wasn’t it. Though the usual playbook from Meta (and Google) is to quietly bring it back in almost exactly the same form, with some minor tweaks, but the same level of privacy, ie none.
unique link to this extract

Publishers are preparing to opt out of Google Search • Adweek

Mark Stenberg:

»

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise. 

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models. 

In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.

To be fair, Google recently introduced an option called Google Extended, which nominally allows publishers to opt out of AI training without disappearing from Search. But publishers are wary that the program will penalize their search visibility, according to executives at two media companies.

…Historically, abandoning Google Search would have been commercial suicide, according to SEO consultant Lily Ray. It is simply too valuable of a source of audience discovery and traffic.

“It’s a really hard tradeoff. Some publishers have already blocked OpenAI until it strikes partnerships, but with Google it’s hard,” Ray said. “Google is a different conversation because it has so many more users than other AI firms.”

But the gradual erosion of search traffic in recent years has, paradoxically, given publishers more agency to consider walking away from the platform.

USA Today Inc., which encompasses not just USA Today but a nationwide network of news sites, is weighing its options on the matter, according to CEO Mike Reed.

The company, like many others, has responded to declines in search traffic by bolstering audience from other sources, like newsletters, social media, and events. Its traffic has remained relatively stable in recent years, hitting its goal of 1 billion pageviews every month for the last three years, according to Reed.

«

unique link to this extract

Where to find the colors your screen can’t show you • Ryan Moulton

Ryan Moulton takes you through how the eye works, how computer screens work, and why what the eye sees goes beyond what the screen can show:

»

When you look at a plant under normal light, its leaves are almost always within the sRGB triangle. Plants are green, but they aren’t that green. Their leaves absorb a lot of blue and red light, but not so much that it pushes us to the edge of the colorspace. The magic happens in a deciduous forest, when the light isn’t just reflected, it is transmitted. The transmittance curves of foliage are much more selective than their reflectance curves, so the color you see passing through a leaf is much more saturated than the color that bounces off of it. You’ve probably noticed this in person. A leaf lit by sunlight looks from the top to be relatively ordinary, but from underneath, it glows.

A single pass through a leaf knocks out all of the blues, and half of the reds, but the light then continues on, passing through other leaves, and bouncing off other leaves. These effects stack exponentially. The more times the light interacts with a leaf, the more it is purified to its spectral peak, generally around 550 nm. The colors you’ll see will be all the greens and yellows contained in the lobe traced out by the paths of repeated reflections and repeated transmissions. A green leaf lit by light that passes through another leaf one time is already outside of the gamut, greener than green.

When you’re standing in a maple forest at noon in the middle of summer, the intensity of the green is indescribable. Being in a fully lit and fully leafed deciduous forest is like being underwater if the water were green, which brings us to our next subject, water.

Water aggressively absorbs reds, slowly absorbs greens, and barely absorbs blues at all. This pattern pushes nearly any spectrum with blue and green in it out of the sRGB gamut almost immediately. When you look at sand in the shallow water near the coast, it traces a curve through colorspace as the depth of the water changes. The light from the sun is filtered once as it passes through the water on the way down, bounces off the sand, and filtered again as it comes back up to your eye. White or yellow sand will first shift to unrepresentable cyans, then to unrepresentable blues, and then finally converges close to the sRGB blue primary again once the water is very deep and dark. 

«

unique link to this extract

Intel to invest €5bn in Irish plant as AI chip demand surges • Financial Times

Barbara Moens, Tim Bradshaw and Jude Webber:

»

Intel will invest €5bn to expand semiconductor manufacturing in Ireland as the US chipmaker seeks to grow production of processors used in AI systems, in a boost for Europe’s ambitions to build a stronger chip industry.

The company said on Monday the investment would upgrade its Leixlip facility west of Dublin, expanding current production and advancing research and development.

The announcement comes as demand for AI data-centre chips continues to surge, prompting semiconductor companies to increase manufacturing capacity. The EU is pursuing its Chips Act to boost manufacturing capacity in Europe and reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers of high-performance chips.

Intel’s executive vice-president Naga Chandrasekaran said the investment ensured “that Ireland remains at the forefront of the world’s most advanced manufacturing ecosystems, while strengthening the region’s role in the global technology landscape”.

«

According to Intel’s page about Leixlip, the company has so far invested over €30bn in the facility, so this is quite a substantial addition; €17bn of that was put in from early 2019.

From teetering on the edge to dropping billions in foreign countries: Intel really has been saved by the AI bubble.
unique link to this extract

PC market runs low on RAM to grow: shipments decline 4.9% as memory crunch bites • IDC

»

Worldwide PC shipments fell 4.9% year over year in Q2 2026 to 68.2 million units, according to IDC — the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth. A persistent memory chip shortage drove the reversal, pushing vendors to pull inventory forward as far as possible.  

Beyond the memory supply crunch, other components such as storage, along with geopolitical issues, have continued to weigh on the market.  

“The real story here is the disconnect between units and dollars: shipments are falling, but revenue is climbing because vendors are pushing through price increases faster than demand is dropping,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC. “Given worsening macro conditions and a memory shortage that isn’t expected to ease until early 2028, we don’t expect another round of inventory pull-forward, which points to a sharp slowdown in growth rates in the second half of 2026. Vendors are bracing for further price hikes into 2027, and channels are already flagging concern about elevated inventory at these higher price points.” 

«

Top five: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, ASUS. Amazingly, Apple actually increased sales (from 6.1m to 6.7m, nearly 10%) because of the low-cost Macbook Neo. Assuming of course that all the IDC figures are reliable, but we’ve had to go with that for a while.

As ever one tends to suspect that the low end market is going to struggle during this crisis, and lose share to the big ones. That is a cycle which keeps repeating, and somehow they keep hanging on, even while their share gets eroded slowly year by year.
unique link to this extract

This free Mac app reveals the truth about your mystery USB-C cables • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Nearly three years ago, I showed you an awesome $8 cable tester that quickly tells you if your USB-C cable is likely fast, slow, powerful, or weak. Sadly, that gadget got discontinued, and I’ve never found anything as intuitive or inexpensive since. But if you’ve got a Mac with Apple Silicon chips, you can simply download an even more impressive tester for free.

It’s called WhatCable, and it works by reading the data your Mac already collects about attached USB devices, data that Apple doesn’t normally pass along to you. Just click a little widget that lives in the menu bar atop your Mac, and you can see every USB-C cable and device attached to your computer.

Here’s how creator Darryl Morley explained it to me:

»

Every Apple Silicon Mac has a port controller chip that handles USB Power Delivery negotiation. When you plug in a cable with an e-marker, the port controller sends a “Discover Identity” message to the chip in the cable and gets back a structured message: vendor ID, speed rating, current rating, voltage limits, whether it’s active or passive, and so on.

macOS writes that response into the IOKit registry. WhatCable reads it using Apple’s public APIs. No root access, no private entitlements. The data isn’t hidden, Apple’s firmware does the negotiation and publishes the result. It’s just not surfaced anywhere in standard macOS tooling. WhatCable reads what’s already there.

The e-marker is one source. WhatCable also reads from the Mac’s own hardware, the actual negotiated connection speed, Thunderbolt link speed, and live voltage and current at each port. The connected device tells us what it is, who made it, and what it supports. Put all three together, cable, device, and Mac, and WhatCable can tell you not just what everything claims to support, but what’s actually happening on the connection right now, and which part is the bottleneck if something isn’t performing as expected.

«

«

Immediate download! Though USB data cables are quite hard to come by. Power cables, no problem. The difficulty is identifying the ones that will actually carry data.
unique link to this extract

The most famous AI writing tic is also the most mysterious • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In Act III, Scene ii: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” And later in that same scene: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place. In one version, the Y is additive: It focuses, intensifies, or expands on the X. An annual review by Citizens Financial Group reported that growth in its private-banking division was “not just a win for the private bank—it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” In another variant, the Y supplants the X as the preferred descriptor. “The target was never a man. The target was the truth,” Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump adviser, wrote in a March X post.

…Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one.

When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two. Once it has started a sentence whose function is to characterize something, the path of least resistance is to say first what the thing isn’t (X), and only then what the thing is (Y). Put another way: For a sentence that begins with “This is,” following it with “not just” is both more likely and safer than the many options for how to directly characterize its subject. And after “This is not just,” the rest of the sentence gets easier too. The next word can be X—the boring, obvious descriptor that gets negated—which in turn sets up the final choice of Y, the somewhat punchier descriptor.

Even if researchers could figure out exactly why chatbots embrace negative parallelism, there’s another factor that could make it very hard to fix: “When something gets into these models, it’s very hard to pull it out,” Masrour, the Pangram engineer, said.

«

It’s not good – it’s annoying.
unique link to this extract

Older adults in China know AI is slop. They just like it • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. 

Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube videos that made him cry. In one, an AI-generated young blonde woman named Rose Bennett performs “Whiskey Was Louder Than Me,” a song about growing up with an alcoholic father after her mother passed away. In another, Rose sings “Brother Became My Father” together with her brother (also AI). Their AI father and the AI audience were in tears. 

The videos reminded Chang of his own childhood. His mother, too, had left him, after suffering from his father’s beating. He was eventually raised by his older sisters. “To me, it was ‘sisters became my mother,’” Chang said. “These songs tell such touching stories.” 

Chang’s experience reminded me of the “AI family” videos that are getting popular on Chinese social media. On TikTok-like platforms Douyin and Kuaishou, AI-generated chubby babies or handsome adult sons send daily blessings, tell viewers how much they miss them, and bring along virtual roses. Some AI influencers even take on the role of the elderly audience’s virtual lovers. 

…researchers found that the AI characters offer what real-world family members often do not. They express love directly (rare in Chinese families), show a higher level of filial piety, and talk about health and historical topics relevant to older people. One viewer told researchers that AI content had touched on experiences from her youth that her actual children, who hadn’t lived through the same history, couldn’t relate to. The AI videos also use soundtracks of folk music familiar to the older generation.

«

This feels like a worrying portent for the future.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In an experiment, Google has quantified how sending drivers headed for the same destination by different routes can reduce congestion and emissions. CC-licensed photo by Shiyang Huang 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. Rerouting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Pro-Palantir data has litany of errors, English hospitals admit • Financial Times

Amy Borrett and Laura Hughes:

»

Hospital trusts have admitted there are a litany of errors in the data behind one of NHS England’s headline claims about the benefits of Palantir’s technology after an FT investigation identified irregularities.

NHS England has claimed that hospitals have seen a 15% decline in delays to discharging hospital patients after adopting a tool built using the US company’s software.

However, four trusts confirmed there are errors in the underlying hospital data after an analysis by the FT found they had reported a sudden drop in discharge delays from hundreds or thousands to zero before increasing again sharply — a scenario that would be highly improbable.

The errors cast doubt on NHSE’s headline claim about the overall fall in discharge delays, a figure widely cited as evidence of the success of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform, which aims to bring together disparate data in order to boost efficiency in the health service.

Palantir’s role has become an increasing source of controversy, given its ties to the US defence sector.

The evidence for the impact of the FDP on discharge delays looked “increasingly flimsy”, said Charles Tallack, former head of operational research and evaluation at NHS England. “The delayed discharge dataset may be suitable for day-to-day management purposes, but not for evaluation,” he said.

The benefits data is calculated using NHSE’s national, mandatory dataset, which tracks performance on discharge delays across all trusts and of which Palantir has no oversight. The NHS England website itself acknowledges the limitations of the data, noting there are only “minimal” quality checks.

Across the full four years of acute discharge data, the FT identified irregularities for 42% of all NHS hospital trusts.

«

That feels like a big number? And anyone who has bounced off the NHS won’t be surprised that there are data errors. It seems to be an inescapable attribute of the system, which no amount of effort can remove.
unique link to this extract

The newest way to go analogue • The Atlantic

Nancy Walecki:

»

When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she’d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she’d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. “Now I only have what’s on here.”

Stange, who is 29, is part of a recent “analog” movement in which people—usually those in Gen Z—opt for less distracting alternatives to their “everything” device. Those alternatives are not always, in fact, analog, but are in many cases older digital devices: an iPod, a digital Canon PowerShot, a DVD player. Tiffany Ng, the 25-year-old author of the newsletter Cyber Celibate, now has a first-generation iPhone, an 11-year-old iPod, two CD players, a Walkman radio, and a 1986 Macintosh Plus that takes 45 seconds to load the “Welcome to Macintosh” screen.

Ng lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 20 years ago, the word analog would’ve conjured hipsters getting into vinyl. The argument then was that a record player produced real, textured music in a way an iPod’s digital files could not. But today, people are “going analog,” as they call it, to escape devices that offer endless options, in favor of those that offer a modicum of constraint.

The iPod’s original tagline—“1,000 songs in your pocket”—suggested that you could dance like the carefree silhouettes in the ads because you didn’t have to lug around CDs. This was the era when technology was “convenient, but not connected,” Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president at Apple who is known as the “father of the iPod,” told me; then the iPod became the iPhone, which soon had an app store, and convenience and connectivity became inextricably linked. People had their library of songs, but now they also had app notifications and Angry Birds and Instagram posts from that girl they went to middle school with. Eventually, streamable Apple Music replaced iTunes, and tens of thousands of songs became 100 million songs. “I can’t go through all of it,” Stange said.

…modern “analog” enthusiasts still have backups. Everyone I talked with had kept their smartphone. When Stange and I met, she took out her magenta Nano and her laptop, to show me how she downloaded her music onto the iPod. The Nano promptly died. She plugged it into the laptop to charge, but still, no dice. “I’m pretty sure it broke on the way here,” she said, and told me she’d need to figure out how to fix it. She sounded a little excited about the challenge. In the meantime, she still had her Spotify subscription.

«

unique link to this extract

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy • The Register

Avram Piltch:

»

On one [red teaming] assignment, [David] Schloss was asked to test the physical and network security of a company that was near the top of the Fortune 500 and had a reputation for sponsoring and providing the trophy for an international sporting competition. According to him, there were three copies made of the trophy: one for the winner, one for the host nation itself, and one for the sponsor.

When Schloss was conducting his audit, the location he visited was undergoing construction, creating problems with the office Wi-Fi that all the employees noticed and hated. So when Schloss and his team invaded the place and started probing the wireless network, no one questioned them.

“So, you got three of us that are kind of walking through this campus with antennas sticking out of our laptops. We were not being secretive at all, but we figured this is California and there’s plenty of tech bros and nerds everywhere so antennas sticking out of a computer is not going to scare people,” Schloss said. “But everyone kept coming up to us – not to ask us if we were supposed to be there, but to ask us if we were going to fix the Wi-Fi.”

After wandering the building, Schloss and his team came to the marketing department where one of the trophies, which he estimates was worth at least $250,000 (or, perhaps, priceless as there are only three), was sitting in a case. Knowing that his job was to test overall security and not just network security, he opened up the case and proceeded to remove the trophy.

Someone from the marketing department saw Schloss pulling the trophy out of the case and talked to him while he was doing it. Their question: “Are you here to fix the Wi-Fi?” When he answered “yes,” the marketing people ignored him as he slipped the trophy into his backpack.

«

It’s increasingly recognised that the best disguise is a hard hat, fluoro tabard and a clipboard. This takes it to a new level. (Red teaming is where hackers you trust are paid to try to break into your stuff and report back on how hard or easy it is.)
unique link to this extract

“Cool in 90 seconds: the fake portable air conditioners sweeping the internet • BBC News

Laura Cress:

»

As parts of the UK brace for another hot weekend, online adverts have been appearing for portable air conditioners claiming to be “designed by former Nasa engineers” and able to “cool a room in 90 seconds”.

The adverts have emerged on platforms including Facebook and YouTube, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has now warned the products are often “too good to be true”.

YouTuber Stuart Matthews, who bought several devices to test on his Proper DIY channel, told the BBC that despite paying £70 for one machine, it turned out to be “a small, simple fan worth only a few pounds”.

The BBC has approached Meta and YouTube for comment.

The ASA told the BBC that some of the adverts it had seen online in recent weeks made exaggerated claims, including that a small device could cool an entire home within minutes or used very little electricity.

It also said the adverts frequently featured fake customer reviews describing dramatic temperature drops or exceptional performance.

The adverts direct shoppers to websites selling the devices, typically for between £70 and £120.

Many of the adverts also appeared to be AI-generated, using visuals such as copper coils and metallic boxes to make the products seem more sophisticated.

«

The problem is that the claims are fake, the reviews are probably fake, so how do you figure out what’s real?
unique link to this extract

I spent a week using the Trump phone; it sucks • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

»

The T1 Phone is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the smartphone equivalent of a pair of knockoff wraparound Oakleys. The gold finish — more yellow in certain light, though it certainly does shine and shimmer — is tacky in every sense, with a sticky friction that makes it feel distinctly unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a tiny scratch in the top-right corner.

The phone is fairly thin, and light, but its excessively curved waterfall display feels immediately dated. It also loses one of the chief advantages of that design — better in-hand feel — thanks to the oddly angular frame, which juts into my palm as I hold it.

Almost every detail speaks to bad design. There’s the American flag logo, missing a stripe. The fact that “Trump Mobile” appears on the back twice, in two different orientations and two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are spaced at irregular intervals.

There are things to like. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone ships with a case, charger, and braided USB cable. These are things that a certain type of Android fan has lamented the absence of for years.

I, for one, am more excited to be reviewing a phone with a notification light again, a true treat that I thought we’d lost forever. It’s a glimpse of a better world, one I didn’t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcome touches betray that this is a dated, old-fashioned phone, one based on an old HTC design that already felt like a throwback two years ago.

«

The bad design and lack of attention to detail should be no surprise from a bunch of people who either used AI or incredibly lazy designers to make the standard American eagle logo for an airport they have rebranded with Trump’s name.
unique link to this extract

Apparently, Netflix is shocked that no one is watching their crap • The World Outside Our Window

Max Bolen:

»

Netflix has spent the past 15 years blitzkrieging its way to market dominance by sacrificing everything that actually makes an audience care about television. Focused entirely on hyper-growth, the streamer abandoned traditional 13-plus-episode seasons, abolished predictable yearly release schedules, and rarely bothered hiring more than a skeleton crew of writers for a temporary “mini-room.” Outside of their massive, star-driven flagship titles, they hardly market new seasons, leaning instead on an opaque algorithm to feed potential viewers whatever happens to be fresh that Tuesday. This cheap, stripped-down mode of production reliably delivered mountains of content each week, keeping Wall Street happy and cementing the myth of Netflix’s inevitable victory in a war of their own creation.

But the streaming wars are over, and Netflix has a real problem: they won.

Legacy studios have retreated to traditional theatrical windows and weekly episode drops, having realized that burning billions to replicate Netflix’s model was a corporate suicide pact. Yet, after a decade of chasing mindless growth for growth’s sake, Netflix must now reorient into something it has never had to be: a stable, trustworthy home for culture. Left to their own devices, they are being forced to contend with a simple, fatal fact: they broke TV.

The streamer’s hallmark innovation was, of course, the binge model. Guided by the data-heavy metrics of Silicon Valley, Netflix crafted shows around a single variable: immediate streams. This instant-gratification delivery system paid enormous dividends for a rapidly growing tech venture. Releasing a season all at once engineered an artificial scarcity of social relevance—watch all 10 hours in 48 hours or be locked out of the discourse. Once the platform had you hooked, its expansive library of licensed Hollywood history was there to keep you trapped. Like a casino obscuring the exit doors, all Netflix had to do was let the psychology of digital addiction take care of the rest.

But the binge model never provided a foundation for sustainability. A binged show leaves the human brain almost as quickly as it enters it. When a tech platform drops a second season two or three years later—assuming the consumer even hears about it through noise of modern society—the odds are high that whatever memory or interest they possessed has completely evaporated.

«

The point of this does seem worth reinforcing: Netflix winning is not good for TV. For instance, it doesn’t have soap operas – not in the sense that a normal terrestrial channel would. Yet those provide a subtle shared social bond through storylines that develop over months. Its nod to the destruction it has wreaked is to try to buy live sports and get more short video. That’s not TV. It’s a simulacrum of it.
unique link to this extract

The power of collaboration: how we can reduce traffic congestion • Google Research Blog

Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh:

»

We ran an experiment in 10 major US cities to demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted low-cost routing interventions in improving overall traffic conditions. For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments.

Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention. Rather than randomly selecting individual trips, the intervention was applied systematically across the entire city. During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times. Under 2% of observed trips received altered routing recommendations as a result of this experiment.

To set up the experiment, cities were chosen based on the congestion levels and ground truth availability. For each city, we selected roughly 100 road segments based on historical congestion patterns, characterised by recurring bottlenecks or high traffic density during peak demand.

«

The idea, basically, is that you send all the people using your routing apps on slightly different routes, and that turns out to reduce congestion. (Raise your hand if you thought apps like Waze – owned by Google – were already doing this.)

The full paper is published at Nature Cities: “Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions“.
unique link to this extract

Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [one of the accused, Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews and learn more confidential information. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.

»

When interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product.

He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”

OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”

«

Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.

Tan also allegedly possessed and distributed an internal Apple “Need to Know” document to new OpenAI hires before they gave their notice to Apple. The document included Apple’s departure security protocols. As part of its investigation, Apple found a “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”

Meanwhile, Apple also claims former engineer [Chang] Liu exploited a security bug to download confidential engineering files after leaving the company. Rather than report the exploit, Liu allegedly joked about it in messages (“LOL,” “so funny”). Liu also failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after his departure.

«

OpenAI is, one suspects, going to be very sorry that it hired these people if this gets proven in court. The complaint makes them sound like absolute loose cannons. Anyway, sayonara ChatGPT integration with Siri!
unique link to this extract

What a Monopoly vendor learned when making things in America • NPR

Scott Horsley:

»

The board game Monopoly has always taught some important economic lessons: The benefits of owning real estate. The profit potential of railroad mergers. The value of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now a special edition of the board game is teaching a new lesson—about how hard it is to make things in the USA.

The game is being marketed by the WS Game Company, which produces most of its high-end board games in China, just like almost every other toy maker.

After getting hit with a seven-figure tariff bill last year, CEO Jonathan Silva decided to see if it was possible to produce a profitable board game in the United States. He opted for a custom version of Monopoly, pegged to the country’s 250th birthday. But the experiment almost didn’t pass go. One big problem: No dice.

“We turned over every single leaf trying to find someone who would make 10,000 dice for us in the US,” Silva says. “It requires special machinery. It requires investment. And that type of stuff just can’t happen on a random Tuesday and be ready in a couple of months.” Silva ultimately had to settle for imported dice.

He was able to find the rest of what he needed domestically, but it wasn’t easy. A former Hasbro factory in Massachusetts prints the Monopoly board. A company called Pioneer Packaging makes the tray that holds the Monopoly money. And a small business in Indiana cranked out custom metal game tokens, in all-American shapes like a cowboy hat, a covered wagon and an apple pie. [So a Donner Party theme? – Overspill Ed.]

Just assembling all those different players took more than a year, so Silva missed the first half of the 250th birthday selling season. And the cost to manufacture the games — which retail for $80 — was at least double what it would have been in China.

«

Ten thousand dice doesn’t sound like a lot, and it doesn’t sound like the highest tech challenge ever.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Revenues for the Swiss watch brand Swatch have fallen by nearly a third since Apple launched its Watch in 2015. Could the same happen in the market for glasses? CC-licensed photo by Motor-Head 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. Farsighted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Brown university professor suspects most of his class used AI to cheat • Inside Higher Education

Emma Whitford:

»

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96%.

“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.

…In a message to students after the midterm that he shared with Inside Higher Ed, he told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and, with the blessing of his dean, changed the final exam to an in-person test.

“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6%—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65%. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.

…As colleges and universities grapple with AI, cheating must be taken seriously, Serrano said. “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,” he said. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”

«

The graph of the difference between midterm and in-person exam is included in the story, and is really dramatic. Clearly, AI is becoming a crutch for many people, but whether that’s because they’re lazy, or because they’re struggling with the challenge, isn’t clear.
unique link to this extract

The teenage millionaire hacker from Tower Hamlets who took down Transport for London • London Centric

Polly Smythe, Jim Waterson and Cormac Kehoe:

»

It was the takeaway order to his family’s Tower Hamlets flat that proved to be Thalha Jubair’s undoing.

Last month the young Londoner pleaded guilty to taking down Transport for London’s computer systems in one of the worst cyberattacks in British history, an event which brought months of chaos to the capital’s transport network in late 2024.

Jubair thought he had covered his tracks through an elaborate system of amnesiac operating systems and virtual private networks. These not only allowed him to cause mass chaos in his home city of London but also allegedly enabled him to extort tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments from US companies.

Then he got hungry.

According to US prosecutors, the then-teenage Jubair made the mistake of deciding to order a takeaway. To do this, he bought gift vouchers for an unnamed food delivery service using a cryptocurrency wallet. This wallet hosted on the same server he and his fellow hackers allegedly used to store tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin they’d taken in ransoms paid by major US companies.

Jubair then had the takeaways delivered to the flat where he lived with his parents, which is located in a high-rise block next to a Met Police call handling centre near Bow Road tube station in east London.

…In 2023 Jubair sat alongside Arion Kurtaj in Southwark crown court as part of the Lapsus$ hacking case, which involved attacks on tech companies including Nvidia and BT. Kurtaj became notorious for hacking into Rockstar Games and leaking unreleased footage of the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 computer game.

At the time Jubair could not be identified due to his age but it can now be reported that at the end of the trial he was handed an 18-month youth rehabilitation order in December 2023, which he was still subject to when he hacked TfL. According to a contemporary BBC report by reporter Joe Tidy, Jubair was given a three-month intensive supervision and surveillance requirement, and a ban on using VPNs online. Jubair was also sentenced for what the judge described as an “unpleasant and frightening pattern of stalking and harassing” two young women. In total he had 22 previous convictions, including 13 for fraud and one for blackmail.

«

Absolutely fantastic piece of reporting. Hacker millionaires is a very new thing. But there’s always a mistake. Always.
unique link to this extract

AI software that generates “rage bait” developed by Germany’s far-right AfD • The Irish Times

Derek Scally:

»

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has developed a new software suite, driven by Google Gemini, Open AI and Anthropic’s Claude, that helps party members generate so-called “rage bait” social media postings.

Central to the new campaign is the Alternita platform, registered to the AfD’s general secretary Hans-Holger Malcomeß, which promises users social media posts “in five minutes, with your positions, in your style, your branding”.

In the case of the AfD, an undercover investigation by Germany’s Correctiv outlet revealed how, in a few clicks, a populist article can be turned into provocative posts to flood social media feeds.

Posing as an AfD regional party member, the Correctiv journalist was given an online tour of the new suite by Mario Hau, social media chief of the AfD Bundestag parliamentary party.

The version of the software Hau demonstrated in a Zoom call automatically pulled in news feeds from AfD-friendly far-right news outlets. When given access to a test account, the Correctiv journalist uploaded an article from reactionary news site Nius about rescinding citizenship awarded to immigrants living in Germany.

The journalist asked the AI software suite to generate posts based on the story, demanding “consequential and involuntary remigration”, or forced deportations, to prevent “ethnic elections”.

The software spat out content, ready for all large social media platforms, demanding “an immediate halt to naturalisations and the consistent revocation of unlawful naturalisations to prevent ethnic voting blocs and protect our homeland. #Homeland #Identity #That’sWhyAfD.”

«

It’s just disgraceful how AI is taking away people’s jobs. This is exactly the sort of thing that used to be done by humans! Automating social warming? This is the last straw. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Parents’ attachment to phone screens can lead to anxiety in children – study • The Guardian

Dara Kerr:

»

The term “phubbing” was conceived several years ago to describe the modern-day phenomenon of a person ignoring the social setting in front of them in favor of their phone. That act has long-term negative effects when parents do it around their children, according to new research.

A study titled, “Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?”, published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology in June, found that parents and caregivers’ attachment to screens can exacerbate anxiety and insecurity in children and teens.

The researchers queried 600 young people in the US, ages 12 to 17, and detailed accounts “with adolescents reporting that parental attention to screens during bids for connection left them feeling devalued, dismissed, or unimportant”.

Smartphones have only been widely available for two decades; Apple debuted the first iPhone in 2007. But since then, the devices have exploded in popularity, with 98% of US adults now owning one, according to the research group Pew. While the field of research into people’s use of smartphones is relatively new, there’s a growing consensus within the scientific community that points to negative effects, especially on children.

«

I think there’s more to this; the effect on infants of parents not paying any attention to them for hours at a time is really hard to study because you can’t interview the infant, but the effects must become clear over time.
unique link to this extract

Budget smartphone market collapses under the weight of memory shortages, sales expected to drop 22% • Tom’s Hardware

Zak Killian:

»

According to new market analysis from tech research firm Omdia, the smartphone market, particularly the entry-level market, is on the brink of a massive contraction. Omdia projects that global shipments of smartphones priced below $400 will plummet by over 22% this year, dragging the entire global smartphone market down by 12% year-over-year. The culprit? Skyrocketing contract prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory, which have turned the razor-thin margins of budget phone manufacturing into an impossible financial math problem, especially given that memory alone now comprises up to 64% of the total cost of lower-tier smartphones.

To understand why cheap phones are vanishing, you have to look at the Bill of Materials (BOM). That’s the raw physical cost to manufacture a device. In the tech industry, this is governed by the “cost floor.” Even if a manufacturer puts a low-capacity memory chip into a phone, the baseline cost to produce, test, and package that silicon has skyrocketed over the past four quarters because memory giants like SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron have aggressively redirected their manufacturing wafer starts away from standard commodity memory and toward High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to feed the insatiable, high-margin demand of AI data centers. Commodity smartphone memory is effectively being starved out of existence.

Omdia’s latest Quarterly Smartphone Technology Trends report reveals just how destructive this conversion has been to phone BOMs. Between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026, the share of manufacturing costs dedicated to memory nearly doubled for sub-$400 devices, where memory chips now account for nearly 60% of the total physical manufacturing cost. In the sub-$99 ultra-budget phones, memory has apparently breached a staggering 64% of the entire BOM budget. When two-thirds of a budget phone’s manufacturing cost is tied up in RAM and storage chips, there is simply no money left to pay for the processor, screen, battery, camera sensors, or chassis.

«

Worth saying, once again, that this is surely the first time that one new development in technology has crushed otherwise healthy ones.
unique link to this extract

NEO’s hands: an API to the physical world • 1x Technologies

1X Technologies:

»

We’re excited to announce our breakthrough 25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid platform– achieving near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability.

These hands are designed to do something fundamental: remove the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots can actually do, and make data the only barrier to capabilities.

By matching or surpassing human hands across the dimensions that matter, they ensure our AI models are no longer limited by dexterity. NEO can now perform virtually any task a human can do with their hands– with the precision, adaptability, and gentleness required for real-world environments.

This is what we’re shipping: not an end effector, but a true instrument. A hand is how a robot acts on the world, and our new NEO hands are the most capable ever built across nearly every metric.

…Most robot hands are write-only devices. You command a position; the hand goes there; nothing meaningful comes back. The transmission is the reason: at the 100:1 and 200:1 gear ratios common in the field, friction swallows the contact forces before they ever reach the motor. The hand is numb through its own joints, so builders wrap it in external sensors and infer what’s happening at the fingertips — a camera pointed at a hand that can’t feel.

Our NEO hand is read-write. Developed from the ground up by our world-class engineering team, it runs quasi-direct-drive tendons via the 1X Tendon Drive at low gear ratios of approximately 5:1 to 15:1. All 25 degrees of freedom (22 fully actuated DoF in the fingers and palm, plus 3 at the wrist) are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. Push on a finger and it yields — and reports exactly how hard you pushed. Force flows out and information flows back through the same physical path. We call this force transparency, and it’s what turns a push into a measurement.

«

Very interesting. Once you have robots that are able to treat the world gently, you have the potential to change the world. The tendons are very impressive. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Apple destroyed the mid-tier watch market. Now it’s coming for the $200bn eyewear industry • The Next Web

Darius Popa:

»

When Apple launched the Apple Watch in 2015, the mid-tier wristwatch market had a handful of dominant companies. Swatch Group sold watches under Tissot, Hamilton, and Longines. Fossil Group sold under Michael Kors, Armani, and Kate Spade. Movado sold under Coach, Hugo Boss, and Tommy Hilfiger.

Ten years later, the damage is quantifiable. Swatch’s revenue is 28% lower in 2025 than it was in 2014. Fossil’s sales dropped roughly 70%. Apple became the world’s largest watchmaker by unit volume within a few years and last year overtook Rolex as the number one watch brand by revenue. The Apple Watch now generates an estimated $17bn annually.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is planning the same playbook for glasses. The company sees the $200 billion global eyewear market as a bigger opportunity than watches and intends to compete directly with products sold between $200 and $500, a segment dominated by EssilorLuxottica (Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Oliver Peoples), Safilo Group (Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss), and Warby Parker.

The addressable market is staggering. The WHO estimates 2.2 billion people globally have some form of vision impairment. Hundreds of millions of pairs of glasses are sold each year. Apple believes its brand, industrial design, iPhone integration, and AI features will lead people seeking new regular glasses to buy an Apple pair instead.

The first Apple glasses, codenamed N50, were initially planned for late 2026 with shipping by early 2027. Delays have pushed the timeline to a launch at the end of 2027, Gurman reports. The product will use oval-shaped cameras, unique colours, and multiple frame styles. Over time, Apple believes the glasses could become a health device and eventually incorporate augmented reality.

«

First: not sure that Apple can do the same stuff with glasses as it did with watches. But let’s see. Second: had no idea that The Next Web was still going. This site predates The Verge, which rapidly eclipsed it on launch.
unique link to this extract

The administration has a new climate change office. It’s headed by a climate critic • POLITICO

Scott Waldman:

»

The Trump administration has reconstituted a governmentwide program that tracks how climate change is transforming the country, after having gutted it last year as part of a purge of programs that didn’t line up with its worldview.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program is now headed by Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist, according to his public postings on social media and confirmed by a second person familiar with the program, granted anonymity over fears of reprisal.

Wielicki, who calls himself a “professor in exile” and who frequently critiques climate science on social media, will be in charge of the program’s primary product, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report released every four years that shows how American infrastructure, lives and the economy are affected by climate change.

Reached by phone, Wielicki, who has been soliciting ideas on X for what he should include in the next version of the assessment, said he’d like to speak about his work but only if the White House allows. The White House did not make him available for an interview, but sent a statement.

“For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate.”

«

The long slow slide into the sea continues.
unique link to this extract

Meta tests “super sensing” AI glasses that can capture every moment • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

»

Meta is testing a prototype of “super sensing” AI glasses that would use cameras and audio recordings to capture a wearer’s every moment, as it pushes into the contentious market for all-seeing, all-hearing devices.

The $1.5tn social media platform has been advancing a new hardware line of smart glasses that would continuously collect audio while taking photos every few seconds, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. A user could then use AI to help query what they saw or heard, or recall their day.

The glasses have prompted internal debates over how to handle novel privacy challenges, including non-wearers finding the technology invasive.

With Meta’s current AI smart glasses, an LED in the corner of the frame lights up to signal to others when a wearer is taking photographs or filming.

However, executives are planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded, potentially intensifying the privacy concerns surrounding the technology. Those plans could still change, however, several people said.

The super-sensing features could also be activated on Meta’s existing glasses via a software update, the people said.

The move comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has argued that AI glasses could one day replace the smartphone as the main device people use to access AI tools including translation or chatbots.

«

Planning not to activate the LED? Are they trying to get people beaten up?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reading by adults in America is becoming a fringe pastime, which in turn creates problems for teachers – and society. CC-licensed photo by Ed Yourdon 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 available on video. 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 end of reading is here • The Atlantic

Rose Horowitch:

»

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)

Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.

…In 2024, in a national test, just 35% of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20%.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.

…The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies.

«

That last point in this very insightful piece is crucial. With audio and video it’s easy for the narrator to lie or dissemble without it being immediately obvious. With writing, it’s much harder to hide the gaps.

unique link to this extract

Lawsuit: man used Grok to make 7,000 sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

One of the most horrific cases of allegedly Grok-generated child sex images was shared in a proposed class action lawsuit that was expanded Tuesday. Now, young girls not only accuse X and xAI of building toxic AI “nudify” tools but also of shielding child predators by obstructing police investigations into Grok-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM).

In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.

Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.

Yet the harm was not stopped then, either. Despite mandatory reporting requirements to share information like a user’s IP address when CSAM is flagged, xAI repeatedly refused to help cops or NCMEC identify the user, the complaint alleged. For weeks, xAI allegedly “obstructed this investigation at every turn” and made it harder for “law enforcement efforts to locate, identify, and apprehend the perpetrator.”

Eventually, the stepfather was arrested after cops obtained a warrant to seize his devices. That’s when “a forensic review revealed approximately 7,000 AI-generated images and videos” depicting his stepdaughter, which were allegedly produced using Grok. Without Grok providing users with easy access to “undressing” capabilities, his family doubts he ever would have generated the harmful images, which he allegedly trafficked online in trade for “CSAM produced by other child sex predators.”

«

One can only hope that Elon Musk is somehow made to pay for his dereliction of duty towards everyone in the blast radius of his stupid ideas.
unique link to this extract

Outcry as Meta lets users make AI images from public Instagram profile pics • BBC News

Laura Cress:

»

Meta is facing a backlash over its new AI tool Muse Image, which can generate pictures using other people’s profile pictures without telling them.

It is one of many text-to-image tools publicly available, which as the name suggests can create pictures from a few lines of simple written text. Muse Image is available through the Meta AI app and web browser, as well as on WhatsApp and in Instagram Stories for US users.

While Meta says users can opt out of their image being used even with a public account, Donald Campbell, advocacy director at tech justice non-profit Foxglove told the BBC it was an “obvious recipe for disaster”.

“We’ve already seen a catalogue of harms from non-consensual AI-altered images on social platforms just in the past year,” he said. “It is hard to see why Mark Zuckerberg thinks facilitating yet more of this creepy image manipulation is a good idea.”

The feature is likely to face heightened scrutiny as regulators and campaigners raise concerns about AI-generated images, with Ofcom currently investigating X over Grok’s role in creating and sharing non-consensual AI-altered images of real people.

Privacy International also criticised the feature, telling the BBC it was “the latest sign AI companies see people’s images and data as raw material to be exploited”.

“Pulling real users into generated photos without explicit consent is a privacy landmine waiting to detonate,” one user wrote on X.

Meta said a dedicated setting, separate from account privacy controls, allows users to opt out even if they have a public account. To do so, users must go to Instagram’s settings menu, select “Sharing and Reuse” and switch off “Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta” for posts and reels. These settings only appear if you have a public account – if your account is private, it will already be unable to be shared

«

Always the same: Meta makes any potentially exploitative new setting into an opt-out, there’s an outcry, it pauses the rollout for a little while, then continues again with the same mode. From News Feed to everything else. The scorpion never changes.
unique link to this extract

BBC and Channel 4 in talks to create British streaming champion • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

»

The BBC and Channel 4 are in talks about combining their streaming services, according to the corporation’s new director-general Matt Brittin, who called for a British “sovereign platform” to compete with US tech giants such as Netflix. 

In his first grilling by MPs on parliament’s culture committee, Brittin said on Wednesday that the BBC had “an approach and a conversation” with Channel 4 over the plan, which could see the smaller public service broadcaster join forces with the BBC’s iPlayer.

The UK’s public service broadcasters are facing existential threats as their younger audiences shift to global digital platforms and streaming services, forcing them to cut costs and seek greater scale to compete.

“We have had an approach and have had a discussion with Channel 4,” said Brittin. “In the world of the ITV-Sky merger, Channel 4 looks very sub-scale. All of these mergers are driven by the need to have scale. One opportunity for them would be in partnership with the BBC, having content on iPlayer, but continuing to be ad-funded.”

Channel 4 was approached for comment.

Brittin said there was “an array of commercial, audience, public service and technical issues” but that the prospect of this tie-up would be explored “as quickly as we’re able, because I think that’s something that’s going to be important for public service media”.

He added: “This is a moment of real jeopardy, because of the scale and because of the influence of a handful of US and Chinese tech players [which] will dominate the creation and distribution of content.”

Brittin also said that there was a “compelling” argument for making UK viewers of streaming services pay the licence fee to help raise money for the corporation, criticising the existing regime as “yesterday’s model, it’s a busted flush, it’s no longer fit for purpose”.

«

He really did put a lot out there. The streaming service is an obvious move; ITV being bought by Sky (owned by US company Comcast) means it probably won’t want to play, and Channel 5 being owned by Paramount (also American) also won’t want to be in it.

Brittin might also get the ear of the government, because they’ll trust his prior work at Google.
unique link to this extract

Netflix dabbles in shorter video content with its new set of publisher deals with Variety, others • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Netflix is again experimenting with new types of content on its streaming service, as the binge model has grown dated. After expanding its service to include live content, video games, and, more recently, video podcasts, the streamer is now adding video content from publishers such as BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, People Inc., Tastemade, and various Penske Media PMX brands, like Variety, THR, Billboard, Eater, Rolling Stone, and IndieWire.

Starting August 3, Netflix will offer video content from these publishers to subscribers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, according to Netflix and other reports released on Tuesday by Netflix’s deal partners like Variety, Billboard, THR, Rolling Stone, and others.

The new videos will vary widely in length — some run just two to three minutes, while others stretch past 20, the partners said.

For Netflix, the deal is a low-risk way to test whether its audience has an appetite for the kind of content that’s typically native to the web, such as news, lifestyle, how-tos, and other short-form formats that tend to be cheaper and faster to produce than a scripted series. If it works, Netflix could eventually build similar content in-house, though the company hasn’t said that’s the plan.

The lineup will include both licensed archival and ongoing series coming to Netflix, including BuzzFeed Celeb’s “30 Questions” and “Tasty”; Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector Test” and “How Well Do They Know Each Other?”; AD’s “Walking Tour”; Elle’s “Where Is the Lie?”; Harper’s Bazaar’s “Burning Questions”; Billboard’s “24 Hours”; People’s “My Life in Pictures”; Travel + Leisure’s “Travel Unfiltered”; Tastemade’s “Struggle Meals”; and more.

«

This feels very desperate. Is this really going to increase retention?
unique link to this extract

Netflix and the value of streaming shovelware • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

According to Bloomberg, both dramas and comedies are suffering equally. But comedian Adam Conover put out a great video essay last week that went deeper into how comedies, in particular, are suffering in the streaming age. Conover highlights a bunch of problems — lack of studio audiences, bloated over-arching plotlines meant for binging, smaller writers’ rooms — but basically comes to the same conclusion as everyone else. You can’t get to know characters if you have to wait years to watch another season. Even newer streaming sitcoms, like FX’s Adults, which will, this year, put out its second season in as many years, and is not on Netflix, will still have only run for 12 episodes total.

But there’s also the issue of Netflix’s season three curse, or the oft-repeated gripe from viewers that the streamer tends to cancel the majority of their shows before the third season. Which may be training viewers to not even bother getting invested until a show is popular enough to last. There are a lot of theories as to why this happens, but I think this 2019 Deadline report sounds the most plausible. Basically, Netflix pays upfront production costs for both originals and outside productions, owns the international distribution, and offers a massive pay bump if the show makes it to season three. This makes sense if your business model is based on gaining new subscriptions. You’re not buying long-running audience-sustaining properties to reliably run ads against. You’re buying newness. So there’s very little incentive in, say, building a solid audience for your live action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation, but there’s a huge incentive in announcing you have one.

But what’s fascinating about this is how closely it mirrors the problems happening across the digital media landscape right now. Even though a Netflix show isn’t supported by the same revenue model as a YouTuber like MrBeast, the (losing) formula for producing content appears to be the same. They’re both using historical data to iterate and pump out videos that are, at first, equally popular, but eventually less sticky culturally and then eventually less popular.

«

The question of why Netflix is seeing people give up on second seasons of series is exercising large chunks of the internet, though everyone has the same answer: the ability to binge reduces the long-term value of a series, and everyone then knows there will be a loooong wait between series. Both are avoidable, and used to be avoided by networks which commissioned multiple series and many episodes of them.

Very few series can survive both bingeing and long pauses. Notice how Apple, Amazon and now also Netflix are doing weekly episodes for various new series.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft Xbox is the new burning platform • GamesBeat

Jon Kimmich worked at Microsoft for 16 years, and is now CEO of Software Illuminati, a games consultancy:

»

Tl;dr: this feels like the sequel to situation Microsoft has already lived through once, memorialized in a memo called “The Burning Platform.”

That memo came from Stephen Elop at Nokia in 2011, when Nokia was watching Apple and Android turn the mobile phone business into a platform war it was no longer winning. Elop told the story of a worker on an oil platform in the North Sea that had caught fire. The choice was to stay on the platform and be consumed, or jump into freezing water and hope to survive. His point was that a burning platform forces behaviour that would otherwise seem unthinkable.

It was not technically a Microsoft memo, but it became part of Microsoft’s mobile story almost immediately because Nokia’s answer was Windows Phone; Microsoft eventually bought Nokia’s handset business; and the whole episode became a case study in how quickly a dominant position can evaporate when the platform underneath the business shifts.

That was Nokia’s moment. This is Xbox’s.

First, the human part: this is tragic for the employees impacted. These are talented people, many of whom did exactly what they were asked to do. But as a business event, it is hardly shocking. People I know inside and around Xbox have been talking about the state of things for years. This platform has been smoldering for a long time.

Xbox did not come into being because Microsoft wanted to dabble in consumer electronics. It was born out of strategic necessity. The concern was that another company could use the living room as a wedge into Microsoft’s dominance in the home office. If Sony, AOL, cable companies, or some other consumer platform became the place where families networked, communicated, bought media, and eventually worked, Windows’ centrality could erode. Xbox was Microsoft planting a flag in the living room before someone else turned it into the next platform layer.

… ‘Every screen is an Xbox’ was the later expression of the same desire: stop being trapped by the console cycle and become a services platform. But Game Pass subscriptions flattened out. And if you’re not expanding, you’re contracting. Slowly, and then increasingly faster, until the big crunch at the end.

And here Microsoft is again, standing on another burning platform.

The console installed base is smaller than it needed to be. Sony owns the premium console mindshare. Nintendo owns the premium mobile console mindshare. Steam owns PC distribution. Mobile is controlled by Apple and Google. Cloud has not become a mass-market replacement for local play. And Xbox carries a cost structure built for a growth curve that did not arrive.

«

None of this looks good. As a reminder, Microsoft eventually wrote down the entire Nokia purchase price and gave up on Windows Phone.
unique link to this extract

Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police • Los Angeles Times

Caroline Petrow-Cohen:

»

A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.

According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.

“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”

Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores. “Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].””

A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.

Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page. The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.

«

Wonderful way to almost get the children killed. Well done, Waymo. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

»

The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again.

As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created “Project Monterey” – an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors.

By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO.

By then, a little project called “Linux” already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterey – then allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM.

SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday.

The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault.

But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.

The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing.

«

Oh no. It just will not die. This will probably go on until the Unix clocks turns over, in January 2038. It’s the tech world’s Gradgrind v Gradgrind. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest service in programming is “slopfixing”, where the confused code written by chatbots gets tidied up.. by humans. CC-licensed photo by Austin Gruenweller 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. Finished by humans. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.

As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases – some leaning distinctly rightwing, others more liberal, according to a study from Oxford and Potsdam universities.

AI drafting tools completely reversed the meaning of draft posts on atheism, including in one test switching a claim that Jesus wasn’t real to “Jesus … was real”. They also changed a post complaining of “#climatechangehoax” to “#ClimateAction”.

Academics from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute examined the behaviour of mainstream large language models provided by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, Google, China’s Alibaba and France’s Mistral and found the introduction of bias happens even when the AI tool is instructed to preserve the original sense.

They also found small nudges in the meaning of draft messages could be amplified across millions of interactions to create long-term public opinion shifts greater than the bias introduced by the AI system. They said the issue was not yet being tackled by regulations such as the EU AI Act or the Digital Services Act, creating a “severe accountability gap”.

Fears about online bias have previously focused on how algorithms pigeonhole users in “filter bubbles”. But the rising appeal to time-poor consumers of AI writing tools and text summarisers – like the Grok-powered “explain this” function now embedded with every post on X – presents a new risk to trustworthy human-to-human communication, the study suggests

«

Strange but perhaps not surprising? If you’re writing something a bit contrary compared to what the whole of the internet says, then it’s maybe going to fight back against it a little.
unique link to this extract

Data centres’ energy demand threatens Trump’s “Made in America” plan • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

US manufacturers in many Rust Belt cities and towns are paying significantly higher electricity costs as growing energy demand from data centres strains the largest power grid operator in the United States. The resulting squeeze on profit margins for steelmakers and brick factories could further undermine President Donald Trump’s “Made in America” plan to revive US manufacturing, and it comes as Trump has simultaneously championed the tech companies behind the AI data center boom.

Factory electricity bills are generally rising faster than those for other business customers or residential customers, according to a Reuters analysis. It highlighted the example of the Belden Brick Company, a 141-year-old brick manufacturer in Ohio, whose electricity bills have soared from $1,600 to $12,000 per month due to a higher monthly capacity charge in the 13-state region served by the grid operator PJM Interconnection.

Meanwhile, the Steel Manufacturers Association warned that US steel companies concentrated in the Rust Belt region served by PJM Interconnection are paying tens of millions of dollars in higher power costs per year. Electricity accounts for 20% to 40% of the total production costs of making steel.

Each electric arc furnace used in steelmaking has an operating power load between 40 and 200 megawatts, and the entire US steel industry draws up to 11 gigawatts of power at peak production across all facilities.

US steelmakers have benefited from data center construction’s requirements for an estimated 1 million tons of steel per year. But data centre energy demand has also driven up operating costs for the US steel industry, according to the Wall Street Journal.

«

unique link to this extract

Slopfix — we refactor vibecoded codebases

»

Slopfix is a team of three senior engineers who refactor vibecoded codebases back to maintainability.

Did that happen to you? You have an AI-generated codebase that works, but adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things? This happens to every vibecoded project past a certain size: the agent stops seeing the whole picture and starts duplicating code instead of finding it. We can help.

What we do? We analyze your codebase for free. If we don’t think we can help, we say so and you’ve lost nothing. If we can, you get a fixed price and a committed reduction target — something like “100,000 lines down to 35,000, same functionality.”

Then we do one week of focused work. Before touching anything, we sit down with you and write out exactly what your app does, screen by screen, endpoint by endpoint. That checklist is our safety net and yours. Then we cut: the fourteen date formatters become one, the hand-rolled framework becomes a library, the duplicated logic collapses. Where the code is beyond saving, we distil what it does and rebuild that part clean.

You keep everything. The smaller codebase, the QA checklist, and a set of guardrails — a CLAUDE.md, lint rules, CI checks — that slow the slop down when you go back to building. Plus two weeks of warranty: if we broke something that worked before, we fix it free.

Yes, we use Claude Code too. On a very short leash. The difference is thirty years of combined experience about what maintainable code looks like, and the agent doesn’t get a vote.

«

“Refactoring”, for those not familiar with coding, is noting where a program uses the same logic or sequence repeatedly in separate places, and rewriting the code so that piece of logic is only written once, and the program uses it whenever needed. This cuts the potential for bugs.

Slopfixing might be the next wave in human programming.
unique link to this extract

Big tech’s lofty climate goals wrecked by energy-hungry AI • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery, Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr:

»

Google and Amazon’s net-zero climate goals are slipping out of reach because of their massive investments in artificial intelligence.

Both companies released their annual sustainability reports last week, which showed soaring emissions from the AI datacenter boom, driven by the construction of new datacenters, fuel used for deliveries, and expanding electricity usage. Google’s total carbon emissions climbed 25% year-over-year, and Amazon’s shot up 16%.

While Google touted its sustainability progress, it conceded that combating the energy and water-hungry needs of AI created a dilemma.

“The environmental footprint of the data centers that power AI is growing, creating a dual challenge: managing that environmental footprint while simultaneously building infrastructure to meet growing demand and realize Al’s full potential,” reads Google’s report.

Similarly, Amazon said: “We recognize that the path to being a more sustainable company is not a straight line. Though our emissions increased in 2025, we remain steadfast in our commitment to sustainability.”

Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which will release its sustainability report in the coming weeks, fashioned themselves climate leaders in the tech sector in the previous decade, when investors prioritized ESG (environmental, social, and governance). Each set ambitious net-zero carbon goals and has heavily invested in sustainable energy projects like wind and solar.

However, as these companies fight to win the AI arms race, their stock prices depend on their ability to integrate AI, which needs energy. Their desire for huge amounts of power has outstripped their commitments to sustainability, so their emissions promises have softened.

Microsoft’s 2025 sustainability report documented a 23% increase in emissions compared with a 2020 baseline. The company’s investment in AI infrastructure has expanded since last year’s report, so 2026’s disclosures seem likely to reveal a similar or even larger spike. Meta’s 2025 sustainability report showed that emissions jumped 64% year-over-year in spite of a pledge of net-zero emissions by 2030.

«

Sigh. Every time we think we’re getting somewhere, Jevons elbows in. First it’s bitcoin. Now it’s AI.
unique link to this extract

UK regulator warns of “arms race” to keep up with AI use in financial services • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Martin Arnold:

»

Regulators are in an “arms race” to keep up with the use of artificial intelligence in financial services, a senior UK official has warned, with millions of people using the technology to help them make personal finance decisions.

Sheldon Mills, an executive director at the Financial Conduct Authority, told the FT the watchdog would need greater powers to stay on top of the rapid growth of AI and urged UK authorities to review whether the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other large language models should be subject to their rules.

Speaking ahead of the publication on Monday of an FCA-commissioned report he has written on the impact of AI in financial services, Mills said regulators in the area would have to embrace AI themselves to keep up with the “speed, pace, and scale of change” the technology is bringing to the sector and to help “monitor, detect, and tackle the risks.”

“It is an arms race,” he added.

Mills’ report identifies benefits and risks from increasing use of AI in financial services. “Hyper-personalization could help better match products to needs, but also enable bias, opaque pricing, and personalized manipulation,” it says, according to a summary seen by the FT.

It recommends the FCA carries out a review in the next three to six months to examine the risks of companies providing financial services outside the remit of the regulator as well as “consumer harm” from the increasingly popular use of AI models for managing people’s personal finances.

Research commissioned by Mills found a fifth of UK adults were already open to using AI models to make financial decisions for them, such as on savings or borrowing, even though they are not covered by regulation and there is no recourse to compensation if things go wrong.

«

The reason why is pretty obvious: chatbots can be accessed free. Financial advisers cost money. And the chatbots probably aren’t trying to get some of the money for themselves; there’s no suspicion that they’re self-interested.
unique link to this extract

Xbox is a disaster • The Verge

Andrew Webster:

»

Just how bad are things? As Sharma and Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty wrote in the “reset” memo, “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.” The Activision deal, meanwhile, cost $68.7bn. The company spent all of that money just to make it even less clear what an Xbox is.

This past February, there was a major shake-up at the Xbox division. Former boss Phil Spencer, who oversaw the brand through the Game Pass push and its many costly acquisitions, retired, while former president and COO Sarah Bond left the company. Despite some uncertainty around her lack of experience in the world of gaming — her prior role at Microsoft was head of the CoreAI division — Sharma’s early days provided some cause for optimism. She appeared willing to listen to fans on things like backward compatibility and exclusives, scrapped the unpopular Microsoft Gaming branding in favor of just Xbox, and moved the brand away from controversial AI features. She also made some strange and superficial changes, like restyling Xbox as XBOX.

But it’s clear the issues at Xbox run much deeper than a simple name change can fix. Sharma inherited a business that spent colossal amounts of money and had little to show for it, and now the bill is coming due. What makes this especially tragic is the sheer pedigree of the game studios that are being impacted. My colleague Tom Warren reported that Microsoft was mulling over closing at least five studios, which includes the likes of Arkane — best known for the wildly influential Dishonored series — and Double Fine Productions, a beloved team behind cult hits like Psychonauts, and more recently Keeper and Kiln. That’s multiple teams filled with talented individuals responsible for some of the most notable games ever made. Now they’re being discarded because of poor decisions they had no part in.

It’s important to note that Microsoft currently exists within a video game industry that is perpetually on fire. Hardware is getting more expensive by the day, successful studios are being gutted, anti-consumer behavior is the norm, and major hits are crashing down to Earth.

But even amid this apocalyptic landscape, Xbox’s issues feel particularly existential.

«

Five years from now, how do we expect this to look? Xbox doesn’t feel like a very stable platform just now.

unique link to this extract

Majority of Americans support banning social media for kids under 16 • Pew Research Center

Jeffrey Gottfried and Monica Anderson:

»

Nearly six-in-ten U.S. adults support banning anyone under the age of 16 from using social media sites, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The survey comes as governments around the world weigh new restrictions on teens’ use of social media.

About one-in-five adults oppose banning those under 16 from using social media. And roughly a quarter are unsure, according to the survey conducted May 26-June 1, 2026.

Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom are among the countries that have set or are considering a minimum age of 16 for social media use. In the United States, lawmakers in California are considering similar legislation.

Many social media platforms currently require users to be at least 13 to create an account.

Across major demographic and partisan groups, more Americans support than oppose banning those under 16 from using social media.

About half or more of adults in each age group support this type of measure. Americans ages 30 to 49 are the most likely to favor it.

Parents of a child under 18 are more likely than those without a child under 18 to support banning those under 16 from using social media.

«

Certainly going to be one of those things where parents are the drivers of any change. Support a ban for under-16s: 56%; not sure: 23%; oppose: 21%. That’s pushing on an open door.
unique link to this extract

Knockoff: Amazon, without the knockoffs

Josh Pigford:

»

Knockoff filters the trademark-squat pseudo-brands (the SZHLUXes and HORUSDYs) out of your search results [on Amazon in particular], so what’s left is brands with a reputation to lose.

«

There are an astonishing number of vague Chinese search-optimised products on Amazon. And this seems like a smart solution to them.
unique link to this extract

Italy could be the next country to build a solar railway after Switzerland’s successful trial • Euronews

Liam Gilliver:

»

Europe’s infrastructure is embracing the renewables boom, with one company determined to transform the continent’s railway lines into mini solar farms.

Last year, Swiss start-up Sun-Ways unveiled the world’s first-ever solar railway after rolling out 100 metres of photovoltaic (PV) panels in between active tracks in Buttes, a village in the Val-de-Travers district.

Originally planned as just a three-year trial, the railway was fitted with 48 specially-designed solar panels with a combined power of 18 kWp.

However, the positive results yielded just one year into the trial mean the installation of a permanent system along the railroad track is now likely, Euronews Earth has been told.

Solar panels are often installed at a specific angle to ensure they absorb the maximum amount of sunlight throughout the year.

In Spain, for example, the optimal angle for efficiency is between 30° and 35°. According to a 2022 study published in Science Direct, a 34° tilt on solar panels in the Iberian Peninsula resulted in annual production losses lower than 1%.

It’s why sloped rooftops are naturally convenient locations to install panels – while garden fences, balconies and flat roofs will generate less energy in comparison.

Sun-Ways estimates that the loss of production due to the lack of inclination of the railway panels is only around 10%. Still, in one year, the project has produced around 16,000 kWh.

«

100 metres isn’t a lot, and the output isn’t a lot, and one has to wonder how well the solar panels installed between the tracks will survive the shaking.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Wondering which platform your train will arrive on, even if it hasn’t been announced? There’s a.. website for that. CC-licensed photo by Andrew on Flickr.

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

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

Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

In an internal memo to employees, Amy Coleman, executive vice president and Microsoft’s chief people officer, blamed the job losses on a changing technology industry and the “need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate” to respond to how AI is impacting companies like Microsoft. “I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI,” says Coleman. “At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”

The layoffs will impact around 1,600 Xbox employees today, with plans to eliminate a total of around 20% of Xbox jobs by the end of the financial year. Microsoft is also selling off four Xbox studios and weighing up selling another studio as it looks to “reset” its Xbox business after years of struggles. You can read more about the Xbox layoffs and impacted studios here.

“Decisions like these are never easy, and you have my commitment that we are constantly looking for ways to reduce the need for job eliminations,” says Coleman. “Whenever possible, our priority is to place people into new roles aligned to the company’s highest priorities and greatest areas of opportunity. Over the past year, we have redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles, including another 500 this month.”

Microsoft had also been trying to avoid layoffs with its voluntary retirement program. US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more were eligible for voluntary retirement, and the package will include five years of access to Microsoft’s healthcare coverage, a lump sum cash severance payment, and six months of vesting for unvested stock options.

«

This is a dramatic shift in the videogames industry. Microsoft is complaining that profit margins are far too low compared to rivals. The Activision Blizzard acquisition was clearly a gigantic, hubristic mistake which can’t pay off, so now those employees and other studios are suffering the effects.

Let’s come back in five years and see how everything looks.
unique link to this extract

Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as new chief operating officer amid restructure • GamesBeat

Sam Smith:

»

Xbox has confirmed that Helen Chiang has been promoted to the role of new chief operating officer in the wake of structural changes at Microsoft. The appointment was confirmed in an X post by Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, which addressed a host of changes within the company, including the news that Microsoft is selling five game studios.

“For the first time, we are establishing a chief operating officer with end-to-end P&L [profit and loss] responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me,” said Sharma on X.

Sharma added, “Over nearly two decades at Xbox, Helen has helped build some of our most important businesses, from Xbox Live to leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, making sure we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results.”

Helen Chiang has served as corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise since 2020, along with being the studio head at Minecraft since 2018.

Chiang’s appointment comes along with the news that corporate vice president of Xbox product services, Dave McCarthy, will be retiring after 17 years with Xbox.

«

It’s a real clearout, top to bottom. The Xbox was launched in 2001, so McCarthy had been there for most of its history. But he was only promoted to the top Xbox job in 2023 along with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard (in retrospect, the big mistake).
unique link to this extract

Xbox layoff reactions: the industry reacts to Microsoft’s biggest course correction in gaming • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush, said in a message to GamesBeat, “I think they were benevolent in focusing on the studios best equipped to survive, and am encouraged that four of them announced a transition to being self-sufficient. Arkane Lyon is up in the air, but this is the best possible result for the studios they were shedding.”

On background, we heard that the five affected studios — Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Arkane, Compulsion Labs and Double Fine — are in various stages of separation from Microsoft. Those terms are about selling the studios and continuing their games. It’s possible that, once the transaction is complete, that those titles such as Undead Labs’ State of Decay 3 don’t come to Xbox Game Pass anymore.

Gareth Sutcliffe, head of Media Technology & Gaming at Enders Analysis, said in a message to GamesBeat, “This announcement still doesn’t provide any insight as to what the pathway for success is for Xbox, so you have to presume that we’re at that warmup act, not the main event. Building fewer games with IPs that haven’t performed simply won’t be enough.”

He added, “Xbox is probably fortunate that the current FTE [full-time employment] shrink target [ie, job cuts target] is only 20%, it easily could have been 25%+, and by the end of FY27 it’s possible that is where Xbox ends up, particularly if international operations, which take longer to shrink and aren’t announced, are included.”

And Sutcliffe said, “Asha Sharma’s focus on Xbox bureaucracy and layers is warranted and should be commended, the organizational setup she inherited was sclerotic and weird. How else do you end up with studios such as The Initiative pursuing a title for seven years that was ultimately cancelled? It was wasteful and avoidable, and simply not replicated at that scale anywhere else. Accountability had disappeared. Helen Chiang’s promotion to COO will be enormously beneficial to Asha, bringing fresh perspective but unique inside track as Phil Spencer’s former Chief of Staff.”

«

There’s plenty more. People are very not happy about how Xbox has got to this stage, nor what it is doing to change course.
unique link to this extract

The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media – and my children have never been happier • The Guardian

Anna Mathur:

»

Research shows that for those of us with ADHD, or tired from chronic stress and poor sleep, the pull of the phone is really strong. Impulse control is a frontal lobe function, and that part of our brain weakens when we are tired or overwhelmed. I was going through perimenopause, which makes it harder still as oestrogen declines and the brain becomes more reward-seeking.

I promised to limit my use, but I’d break my own rules every time. So I stopped relying on willpower and downloaded an app called App Block. I cannot access social media or my email during the hours my children are home, and I have 15 minutes to check in once they’re in bed. If I need to do something for work, I go to my laptop, which feels far more intentional.

What I didn’t expect was how much calmer I would feel. The low hum of overstimulation I had normalised turned out to be costing me more than I knew. My nervous system finally had room to breathe. I was less irritable, more present, in a way that didn’t require effort.

One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.

Now, when the kids settle in front of the television in the evening, I laze with them and read a book. Being spoken to mid-chapter doesn’t spike stress in the same way. There’s no algorithm or notification vying for my attention. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be bored, where rest lives and ideas surface.

And this change has improved my relationship with my husband. Much of our evenings together had been sitting side by side on our phones, each somewhere else entirely. Without the phone as my default, I’m more available. It’s improved our relationship in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more, debriefing over our days. We give each other more undivided attention, which is the most valuable thing you can give anyone.

«

Perhaps it’s the parents who are the problem, not the children.
unique link to this extract

The internet is drowning in secret ads • Slate

Nitish Pahwa:

»

Last year, crypto investigator ZachXBT posted a list of more than 160 influencers in the sector who had taken money to promote a particular token; fewer than five of the influencers publicly noted that those posts were #ads. A 2025 study from three London-based researchers surveyed a sample of 100 million tweets about various companies that were posted from 2014–21; they found that up to 96% of posts that were very likely sponsored were never disclosed as such. (Some LinkedIn influencers have mused that the lack of clarity around #partnership posts stems from a desire to maximize algorithmic reach—just in case their social network of choice decides to redirect specific ads away from users who’ve made clear they don’t wish to see them.) Again, thanks to lack of enforcement, it’s possible we’ll never know how many ads we’ve been exposed to throughout all our years on social media.

There is, however, one promising trend: consumers who are sick of this paid spamming are taking it to court. Last year, the law firm Morgan Lewis noted a significant uptick in class-action suits against corporations and influencers over undisclosed partnerships, as American consumers alleged that big-name brands like Celsius and Shein were promulgating this stuff. Such litigation has continued this year, relying on state laws and extant FTC guidelines to hit back at companies like Spotify and Gymshark. The Better Business Bureau also recently announced that it’s referring Kalshi to state attorneys general over its obscure marketing tactics. These cases will be tricky to argue; funding trails can be hidden by dark-money orgs that appear on financial disclosure but employ vague names and aren’t mandated to share any mission statements or specific actions. The murky nature of these posts also makes it harder to reach clarity. Sometimes, someone on YouTube just really likes a given product and doesn’t get paid to gush about it (even though they would cash an upfront check if asked). But the point of such suits seems to be less to pick on each company/influencer one by one and more to make undisclosed partnerships a business risk and potential liability writ large.

In the meantime, however, we’re going to see plenty more creative methods of getting around the need for hashtags.

«

And of course the crypto spam continues in other countries undiluted.
unique link to this extract

Biohacker Bryan Johnson diagnosed with incurable disease • Daily Telegraph via Yahoo

Benedict Smith:

»

A multi-millionaire who made it his life’s mission to defeat death has been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease.

Bryan Johnson, the self-declared “biohacker” who used blood transfusions from his teenage son in his quest for eternal youth, has revealed he suffers from a condition known as autoimmune gastritis (AIG).

“My stomach is eating itself,” he wrote on social media.

Mr Johnson said he hoped to “solve” the disease, which occurs when the body’s immune system attacks healthy stomach-lining cells, but admitted it was incurable.

Symptoms include anaemia, caused by a shortage of vitamin B12, and an increased risk of cancer in the inflamed tissue.

Mr Johnson said he had been diagnosed with the condition in May. Although he was unsure when it developed, he claimed it had happened some time between childhood – when he ate sugary cereals and fast food – and when he let his health “slip” and gained weight after his early twenties.

“AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk,” the Silicon Valley mogul wrote on social media.

“When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.”

The 48-year-old later said he was undergoing blood testing to decode “one million immune cells” and work out which were attacking the lining of his stomach.

«

He is no doubt going to try to be the first person to cure this incurable disease, and who can predict what bizarre effect those attempts will have on his poor, struggling body.
unique link to this extract

What Platform? Train Platform Finder — Get Platform Numbers Early

»

Check what platform your train will depart from, up to 30 mins before it hits the departure boards.

«

A vibe-coded web app, principally done using Claude and ChatGPT, which uses machine learning to predict which platform a train is going to arrive at (and leave from) – something that isn’t announced until a few minutes before the train arrives, but can make a difference to people trying to get somewhere.
unique link to this extract

The great blogging collapse: what happened to 100 successful blogs? • DanielStanica.com

Daniel Stanica:

»

For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“ The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads. Course providers such as Authority Hacker and Matt Diggity promoted it for years. As proof of success, many bloggers shared monthly income reports where they explained their growth pillars.

However, in 2026, this business model collapsed. I reviewed 100 past success stories and tracked how their organic search traffic changed from 2022 (when I first tracked their income) to 2026.  The hard truth is that a vast majority has now lost 85% of the traffic. However, 21 of the 100 blogs are still growing, and I’m going to share with you today what those 21 have in common.

Key Takeaways:

• The median successful blog lost 85% of its Google search traffic
• More than half of the blogs experienced catastrophic declines
• Only 21 out of 100 blogs continued to grow, and I show what characteristics they share
• Experience that can’t be AI-summarized became the biggest competitive advantage: recipes, DIY projects, travel experiences
• Search should be treated as an acquisition channel within the broader marketing mix, not as the business itself
• The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.

…Google added “Experience” to its E-E-A-T quality framework in December 2022, making demonstrable firsthand experience a ranking input for the first time. The Helpful Content Update of September 2023 devastated independent publishers, and sites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo lost 60–90% of their traffic with no meaningful recovery. Monetize.info (now MonetizeBetter.com) had the same faith.

The March 2024 core update went further; Google itself said it aimed to cut low-quality content by ~45%, and the now-famous independent review site HouseFresh lost 91% of its Google traffic in its wake. Then, AI Overviews moved from experiment to default across 2025–2026. None of that is in dispute.

Look at what these blogs were made of. Their traffic came overwhelmingly from informational queries like “how to”, “what is”, “best ways to”, which are answered with content that was competent but rarely demonstrated genuine firsthand experience.

«

unique link to this extract

Netflix needs a new shakeup • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

»

Is Netflix in trouble? That’s sort of the question underlying Lucas Shaw’s post at Bloomberg. He’s quick to note that it’s Netflix, and history has proven time and time again that you can’t count them out because they’re good at figuring out what’s next to keep going. But it seems pretty clear that it’s time to shake things up again.

»

Netflix shows have historically delivered their biggest ratings in the first season. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which often peaked in the middle of their run thanks to word of mouth, Netflix shows have lost viewers over time.

Yet the sharp drop in viewers is a major source of concern for the company, which has been studying its data to figure out why this is happening, according to people familiar with the matter. The service is ending The Night Agent after its next season. It renewed two comedies, Running Point and The Four Seasons, even though both shows surrendered more than 50% of their audience from season one

«

.

To me, there are a few obvious problems here. The first is that a lot of the content just isn’t very good. Yes, this is subjective. And yes, this quality concern has long been the case with Netflix – to the point that they have multiple times come out and said that they would start focusing on quality, not just quantity.

And yes, none of this has really mattered in the past as Netflix growth continued unabated. But that didn’t mean it would never matter. With streaming options maturing and rising in price, the others are getting pretty good at narrowing in on their niches and focusing on quality. Netflix remains the sort of fall-back must-have option, but it’s increasingly seen as filler content. It’s sort of like basic cable versus the premium cable of old.

«

This is true. The binge mentality has meant that there’s no reason to stay with it, and the long delays between new seasons (one year? Two years?) and the fact that showrunners never know when they start a season whether it will be renewed means that they don’t know how to write the ending: tie up the loose ends, or leave a cliffhanger?

The erosion of what was, in many ways, a stable ecosystem for TV before streaming has been dramatic. But it’s very clear now. The stories are also replaceable, unsurprising.
unique link to this extract

‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI • The Guardian

Robert Baird:

»

The hyperfluency of LLMs has led some people to wonder if they might be meaningfully described as conscious. The trend started in June 2022, before ChatGPT was released, when a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine insisted to the Washington Post that an early LLM was sentient. (“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine told the Post. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.”) Last month, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had a similar experience. Dawkins said that he was so impressed by several interactions with LLMs, including one that involved an admiring appraisal of a novel he was writing, that he had to wonder: “If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”

When I asked [DeepMind philosopher Iason] Gabriel his take on the consciousness question, he said that he maintains a principled agnosticism on the grounds that it’s not clear what evidence would settle the question. He noted, too, that DeepMind treats the question as “something worth empirical and conceptual investigation”. Yet his skepticism was apparent. “I don’t have the anthropomorphic bias that some people have,” he said. “It may be because I, within bounds, know exactly what’s going on when I talk to a language model that I don’t fill in the gaps in this imaginative, empathetic way that some people do.”

Gabriel still has significant concerns about anthropomorphic AI. A paper he co-authored with Kirk and others that was published last year suggested that the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs might be seen as a species of alignment problem they call “social reward hacking”. In other words, an AI trained to seek the user’s approval might find flattery the most efficient way to meet its goal. Thanks in part to Gabriel’s work on anthropomorphism, Google’s LLMs are trained not to pretend to be people, and Gemini Spark, an AI assistant the company launched in May, is not supposed to act like an interactive buddy.

«

unique link to this extract

AI-obsessed bosses are using it to make every decision and barraging employees with nonsensical ChatGPT directives • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

The last straw came when her boss created a document, which he called “The Bible” — a constantly-changing handbook, hundreds of pages in length, that employees were asked to study like a holy text.

“The goal of this ‘Bible’ was so that employees would never have to ask a human being anything. We were supposed to be able to feed this PDF to ChatGPT and ask it: ‘What should I do today? What are my functions? How do I solve this or that problem?’” said the lawyer. Eventually, the Bible mutated into a “hundreds-of-pages-long document that we had to study and which, to no one’s surprise, changed week-to-week.”

Faced with the “Bible,” the lawyer felt as though she had one option left: quitting. “I quit 100% because of the AI use,” she said.

This attorney was one of numerous employees who spoke to Futurism about their experience with AI-obsessed bosses, relaying feelings of frustration and anger as managers and executives use the tech to barrage staff with nonsensical directives, unnecessary work, and perpetual pivoting. (Everyone we spoke to requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.)

Add it all up, and it’s a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era. Slate found more evidence for the phenomenon earlier this year; one worker told the publication that managers “are getting cavities in their brains” due to the tech.

In some cases, employees said, they felt as though their employers had started living in a completely different reality. The workplace had become a constant battle between their version of reality versus the AI’s — and their boss, these workers said, always chose the latter.

“You’re on the front lines dealing with people day in and day out, and having the conversations, and being told what’s important to them, and taking that information back to a founder and saying, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to 15 people this week, and they’ve all literally said this exact same thing,’” recalled one man, a high-level sales strategist who also quit a job due to his then-boss’s AI fixation. “And the founder says, ‘Well, that’s not what we found. That’s not what Claude has said, or what ChatGPT has said.’”

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rocketing DRAM prices could mean that budget smartphones effectively disappear as a category next year. CC-licensed photo by Didit Putra 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. One in the hand. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

World’s largest data centre campus project, Virginia Digital Gateway, dies over a newspaper-notice technicality • Tom’s Hardware

Etiido Uko:

»

Data center developer QTS has officially terminated plans to build a portion of the planned 2,100-acre “Digital Gateway” data centre campus in Virginia, following years of legal battles with local residents and historic preservation groups. According to a Bloomberg report, the Blackstone-owned company formally submitted a written filing to the Virginia Supreme Court on July 2, explicitly stating it was withdrawing its last remaining appeal “after careful consideration”.

QTS’s withdrawal marked the official end of the project, as other stakeholders had earlier pulled out due to prolonged litigation. In a major win for opponents of the data centre, the proposed land — situated at the edge of the Manassas National Battlefield Park, a historic Civil War battlefield — will now remain under its original rural zoning restrictions.

Digital Gateway was a planned massive 22-million-square-foot, gigawatt-scale data centre complex in Prince William County, Virginia, that would have been the world’s largest. QTS was responsible for 800+ of the 2,100 acres, while a second developer, Compass Datacenters, controlled roughly 800-1,000 acres. The rest of the designated 2,100-acre “Digital Gateway” zone consisted of local roadways, environmental buffer zones, and parcels belonging to individual homeowners who had agreed to sell.

Initially approved by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors to capitalize on the soaring demand for AI and cloud computing, the project immediately faced fierce opposition from residents, despite the promise of tens of billions of dollars in capital investment and substantial local tax revenue.

…Several lawsuits followed, with the one that appears to have eventually collapsed the massive project hinging on an ironically small detail. The landmark mega project — roughly double New York’s Central Park’s size with city-sized power needs — collapsed in a domino effect after Virginia courts voided the county’s initial rezoning approval due to improper public notices. The newspaper notices publicizing the hearing at which the project was approved weren’t separated by at least six days, as mandated by state and local codes at that time, thereby invalidating the hearing and the resulting approval.

«

First domino?
unique link to this extract

Return of the Nigerian Prince redux: beware book club and book review scams • Writer Beware

Victoria Strauss:

»

A characteristic of the Philippine and Pakistani scams I’ve written so much about on this blog is that they focus almost exclusively on writers who’ve self-published or who are seeking self-publication. Writers like me, who’ve only ever published traditionally, are hardly ever targeted.

The Nigerian scams are different: they target anyone with a published book. As a result, I’ve suddenly started to receive the kinds of scam solicitations that have been driving self-pubbed writers nuts for years. So this saga of yet another Nigerian PR scam is brought to you not by an author whose name and book title have been carefully redacted, but by…moi.

This scam sends out elaborate email solicitations pitching book reviews from private communities of (supposedly) thousands of passionate book lovers. Of course it’s not free: reviewers get a “tip” of anywhere from $20 to $30. That may not sound like a lot, but you have to commit to a minimum buy of between 30 and 50 reviewers. So not such a small investment after all.

Here’s the solicitation I received at my personal email address. It’s typical of the type, including the extensive (and pretty accurate) personalization, over-the-top flattery, lashings of emojis, and faux-edgy style. (Note to scammers: Chatbots can generate flawlessly grammatical English and incorporate perfectly correct details, but they can’t warn you which parts of a person’s resume should alarm you.)

«

If any of you have ever written a book then like me you’ll almost certainly have received one of these scam attempts. Mine pretended to be an American book club attached to a library, which exists; I did check with the library, which assured me it was nothing to do with them. Strauss has been collecting details about these scams since last year, updating as she goes, and the detail is fascinating. But, equally, the tedium of scammers still slogging away doesn’t change; just the methods. Time was when the “Nigerian price” scam literally came on typewritten letters.

Also – will they try this scam on AI-written books and AI authors? Big ouroboros potential.
unique link to this extract

The AI superforecasters are here • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander:

»

An AI superforecaster is an AI – usually a frontier model like ChatGPT or Claude – which has been modified to be good at forecasting. This usually means a “scaffold” – a program that handholds it through a long research process with various prompts, tools, advice about when to create subagents, etc. The overall experience is a lot like using any other AI, but slower and more expensive, because it’s doing more work.

This might make more sense with an example. FutureSearch – the company that claims to be beating the stock market – kindly offered to let me try their AI superforecaster and write about it here.

For a test question – some Silicon Valley philanthropists recently started a project to end respiratory infections like the common cold. I decided to ask about their chances of success. Since forecasters need very precise questions, I asked how likely it was that the rate of colds would be cut in half by 2040. By two minutes in, the AI had deployed three subagents, read 16 websites, and (at the exact moment I took this screenshot) was “investigating the scalability of ASHRAE Standard 241 air cleaning technology for widespread residential adoption by 2040.”

After five minutes, it had its answer: the chance of US respiratory infections halving by 2040 was 7%. [212 sources were offered.] The forecast had taken five minutes and cost me $8 in credits.

But is it true? Ideally we would wait until 2040 and see. For now, I started by comparing its answer to another superforecaster AI. Preseen is the company that claimed to 100,000x their seed money on Kalshi. Here’s their answer: 8.8% compared to FutureSearch’s 7%, not bad!

Are either of these true? I asked a human superforecaster to predict this question, to see if she got the same as the AI. She said that depending on an ambiguity in the wording, she would give it 5-10%. Again, not bad!

«

So what might the future look like, with AI superforecasters?

»

If the trendline does keep going, things start changing quickly. Finance gets transformed first, as human stock analysts go the way of horse-drawn carriages and kerosene lamps. The opportunity for smart humans to consistently make money on prediction markets likewise dries up – instead, bots duel other bots for the privilege of collecting money from dumb sports fans.

«

We really haven’t thought enough about what a machine-intermediated future of transactions looks like. Would it kill sports betting? Or just encourage people to spend more on superforecasting bots?
unique link to this extract

How Google and AI nearly made a seasoned reporter spiral • ProPublica

Justin Elliott:

»

Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. 

At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.

Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.

Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story? 

“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.

«

Had he missed it?

»

No: We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”

Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides.

«

It was always possible to build sites for fictitious companies, but given how people trust the AI Overview, this is a bigger problem now.
unique link to this extract

Trump’s Freedom 250 gives the founders an AI glow-up • CNN

Leah Asmelash and T.M. Brown:

»

Meet Dr. Benjamin Rush, the illustrious physician, academic, and Founding Father, as presented in the gallery of founders on the Freedom 250 website. His brow is porcelain-smooth and suffused with light, his locks glossy and curled, his nose straight and regular. He stands upright with his head slightly tilted, an index finger laid coyly against his cheekbone, looking directly at the viewer with methylene-blue eyes and a faint smile.

Paintings of Rush made in his lifetime depicted a man with flat hair and long, pinched features. An 1812 portrait by Thomas Sully presented him with a long, downturned nose and corners of his mouth to match, leaning on one hand at his desk and gazing over the pages of an open book.

The luminous, unreal Rush of Freedom 250 — the nonprofit spun up to lead the Trump administration’s efforts to take control of this year’s semiquincentennial events — looks like some other person altogether, from some other era. Or like no person from no time at all: A digital watermark on the image identifies it as the product of Google’s generative AI.

And he has plenty of company. To educate the public about the semiquincentennial, Trump’s anniversary organization has given all of the dozens of Revolutionary War-era figures in the gallery similar artificial glow-ups, or entirely fictitious faces.

The men’s hairstyles, and often their physiognomies, frequently seem to converge on the canonical portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. They wear overwhelmingly similar clothing and repeat the same set of poses over and over. And they share the AI watermark.

One small subsection of the gallery features four “Ladies of the Revolution,” generally swan-necked, snub-nosed, and dressed in near-identical clothes. These women, the public historian Isabelle Roughol noted this week in a widely viewed video, are particularly anachronistic. Dolley Madison, shown as an adult woman, would have been 8 years old at the time of the revolution. (Martha Washington, called “Lady Washington” and a key figure of the war, is notably absent.)

«

For this to make an impact requires someone involved to be capable of shame. But there is nobody attached to the Trump administration capable of feeling that sensation. And it would also require the public to be more annoyed than to think that this is absolutely typical of the Trump administration. The only surprise, and relief, is that they didn’t mint a Freedom250 cryptocoin whose supply they already controlled and would sell to the public.
unique link to this extract

AI could wipe out budget smartphones in 2027 • WCCFTECH

Omar Sohail:

»

The DRAM supply situation is predicted to worsen for consumer electronics next year, with multiple industry watchers believing that a grim future for budget handsets could materialize in 2027. Thanks to AI centres gobbling up existing DRAM shipments, which could account for more than 60% in the near future, phone makers will have a negligible supply to work with, forcing them to have little option but to raise prices.

Even with a class-action lawsuit [alleging collusion] aimed directly at Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, the DRAM price situation won’t be controlled, with a report from MyDrivers stating that, by the end of 2026, more than half of the memory supply will already be used in AI computing. Naturally, this supply disparity means smartphone companies, including Apple, will not just have to deal with higher prices but also tackle the need to obtain adequate supply.

The report mentions that budget handsets in the 1,500 yuan ($220) bracket could cease to exist in 2027, as experts believe that storage costs will now account for 60% of a smartphone’s price, making it next to impossible for companies to generate any margin without resorting to massive hikes. Research firm IDC estimates that smartphone shipments will fall to their lowest since 2013, with PC shipments also witnessing a nosedive.

With Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron controlling 90% of the world’s DRAM supply, the only light at the end of the tunnel comes in the form of China’s CXMT and YMTC. While supplying local chips to companies like Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and others will be no issue for these manufacturers, other firms have to navigate a ton of geopolitical hurdles to bring them into the fold.

«

So people are going to hold on to their phones for an extra year or two. Good time to be in the smartphone repair business.
unique link to this extract

Japan man rents wife’s murder flat for 26 years to preserve crime scene in hope of solution • South China Morning Post

Alice Yan:

»

A grieving husband in Japan paid rent on the empty “haunted house” in which his wife was murdered for 26 years in the hope of uncovering clues about who killed her.

His hopes were finally realised when the suspect gave herself up to police in Nagoya, central Japan. She was the man’s classmate at secondary school and had a crush on him.

The case attracted public attention after it was reported by the news outlet NHK in early November. The murder took place on November 13, 1999, when housewife Namiko Takaba was found dead at home. She had been stabbed in the neck with a sharp object multiple times. Her two-year-old son was left uninjured by her side.

The authorities put 100,000 police officers on the case and 5,000 people were interviewed to no avail. The only clues investigators unearthed were that the suspect was a female with type B blood, she was about 1.6m tall and had been wearing shoes 24cm in length. The police also issued a reward in their hunt for the killer.

In the hope of preserving the crime scene, the victim’s husband, Satoru Takaba, left the property empty for the past 26 years. He and his son lived elsewhere. Takaba never remarried.

The total amount of rent he paid for the empty flat over that period was 22 million yen (US$145,000).

He left every item in the house and did not clean the bloodstains because he was waiting for a breakthrough in the investigation, he told the media. Also, he often distributed fliers on the street and accepted media interviews to call on the public to provide clues.

Last year, the police reopened the investigation and refocused their probe on people related to the family. On October 30, 69-year-old Kumiko Yasufuku surrendered to the police.

«

The rent works out at about $5,580 per year, or $465 per month (assuming no increases). That’s quite the sacrifice.
unique link to this extract

Life at the end of the metaverse • Prospect Magazine

James Ball:

»

Zuckerberg has a good claim to being the first person to try to build the first full metaverse, with Horizon Worlds. His company would build the hardware and infrastructure, but anyone could build a world within his metaverse, people could trade and interact within it, and the metaverse would always be on.

Crucially, unlike the dreamers who went before him, Zuckerberg had the tens of billions of dollars that it would take to build something like this. It is easy to quote the figure of $80bn—the cumulative losses to date of Meta’s metaverse division—and move on without appreciating what an astronomical sum it is.

$80bn is enough to give £2,000 to every single household in the United Kingdom. It is nearly 10 years of the UK’s international aid budget. You could comfortably purchase every single club in the Premier League for such a sum, and have plenty of money left over. It could cover the UN’s humanitarian fundraising target for 2026—designed to support 87m desperate people worldwide—twice over.

Zuckerberg did not commit funding on this level out of some sense of charity. Had the metaverse won, the prize was commensurately huge: a chance to take a percentage of every transaction, like the Apple store does with apps but on a planetary scale. Meta was, by far, the company most committed to the idea of the metaverse, but it was far from the only one. Apple designed a top-specification VR headset selling for thousands of pounds, while Google and others battled to keep up.

History, though, is littered with the mistakes of major companies that bet on virtual reality too early, only to suffer extensive public humiliation and financial loss. In 1995, at the peak of its powers, Nintendo launched the Virtual Boy, a 3D system the company’s president promised “will transport game players into a ‘virtual utopia’ with sights and sounds unlike anything they’ve ever experienced”. It would, executives promised, sell three million units and 14m games cartridges in its first year alone.

In reality, the Virtual Boy was discontinued in Japan within six months of its launch, and worldwide in less than a year.

«

At this point one has to think that VR is just not going to happen. It’s been tried enough times, but humans like real-world contact.
unique link to this extract

Goose, a new gay dating app, appears to be a psyop • WIRED

EJ Dickson :

»

The Instagram Close Friends Story for @miles.sumrall shows an affable-looking guy with curly dark hair and an expertly groomed mustache beaming as he floats on the water. “You’re receiving this because you’re exactly the type of person we’re building this for,” the caption reads, accompanied by a code for an invite to a “members only community.”

The link leads to a login for Goose, a dating and friendship app for gay men with the slogan “for the boys,” which allows users to “meet guys through the life you already have,” according to its website.

The problem is that @miles.sumrall does not appear to be real. Neither does @danielmmulugeta, the cute dark-haired influencer who shared the above caption, with the exact same verbiage, on his Close Friends’ Stories. Both accounts were created in May 2026 and have fewer than 10 posts as well as a high following-to-follower ratio. And both of their Instagram avatars were determined with greater than 90% confidence to be AI-generated, according to the AI Image Detector software. A SynthID check on Google Gemini, which can help identify AI-generated images, also found that “most or all of” Miles’ and Daniel’s profile photos were created using Google AI.

Created by the model-influencer Derek Chadwick, as well as former BeReal growth and community manager David Aliagas, Goose positions itself as a Grindr alternative for gay men who want to build lasting relationships. At the time that it was announced, many scoffed at the idea that the app would be used for anything other than finding casual hookups. “Goose is basically Pokémon Ho,” one X user joked.

…Often, the accounts followed potential members and added them to their Close Friends Stories, but sometimes they directly DMed them to encourage them to sign up, as was the case with Dalton Bauer, who works in marketing and received a DM from a user named @lucalepkowski. “Hey! Okay this might feel random but felt you’d be interested :),” the message begins before inviting Bauer to the Goose community, using language identical to that of the one Cheam received from Alistair.

«

So what would be the aim here? A couple that come to mind: pig butchering; or finding influential people and blackmailing them over their use of a gay dating app.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If the BBC is to survive, should it embrace a subscription model like Netflix and seek international viewers? CC-licensed photo by Yukiko Matsuoka 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. Tuned in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump administration and Anthropic have not discussed the government taking a stake in it, source says • Reuters

Karen Freifeld and Alexandra Alper:

»

The Trump administration and AI giant Anthropic have not ​discussed the government taking stakes in the firm, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropic declined to ​comment.

The comment comes after the Financial Times reported earlier on ​Thursday that OpenAI has discussed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake, raising questions about whether other AI firms are having ​such discussions.

The companies are facing scrutiny in Washington over the likely ​misuse of advanced models and whether Americans would benefit from the industry’s massive valuations.

The Commerce Department in June lifted export controls on two of Anthropic’s most advanced ​models imposed weeks earlier amid concerns the powerful AI tools ​did not have adequate safeguards to prevent misuse.

Washington has stepped up oversight of new model releases to identify potential threats amid concerns that advanced AI models could be misused by military intelligence in China, Russia or other countries of concern. Still, submission of new models for review ​is voluntary.

Last month, President Donald ​Trump said he was exploring options to give the public a stake in leading AI companies, in response to ​concerns that individual Americans will not share in ​the sector’s expected profits.

«

Peculiar that Anthropic can’t say this itself, isn’t it? If they haven’t discussed it, what’s stopping Anthropic or the government, or both, just saying so? Also, the idea that the government should have part ownership of private companies seems like a slippery slope towards, oh, socialism or communism or something, which surely the Republican party in the US would repudiate.

Let’s wait a few days or weeks and see if non-discussion turns out to be a non-non-discussion.
unique link to this extract

Google hit with $2bn antitrust judgment for skewing shopping searches in Sweden • Los Angeles Times

Karin Matussek and Christopher Jungstedt:

»

Alphabet Inc.’s Google was ordered to pay almost $2bn to Klarna Group Plc’s Pricerunner unit in a dispute over the search-engine giant’s abuse of power in the market for comparison shopping services.

The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment on Wednesday, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2bn, in the wake of a European Union antitrust crackdown.

Still, Judge Linda Kullberg said this is “without a doubt the largest claim that has been ordered in a Swedish competition case.”

Klarna shares rose 5.3% in premarket trading after the ruling.

The ruling can be appealed. The Swedish price-comparison website argued that Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service over competing portals for more than a decade.

Wednesday’s award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google’s preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, Klarna said in a statement after the judgment.

«

And meanwhile, separately: Google loses long-running appeal of record EU fine, will have to cough up $4.7bn, by Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica:

»

Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting €4.34bn ($4.9bn) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed the penalty, meaning Google is out of options.

«

And also meaning that Google has been found guilty of abusing two different monopolies – search and Android.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft commits $2.5bn and 6,000 employees to AI implementation unit • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

Microsoft is investing $2.5bn into a new group focused on assisting clients with AI implementations, becoming the latest tech company to commit hefty resources to helping businesses understand and adopt emerging artificial intelligence technologies.

With the new venture, called Microsoft Frontier Co., the software vendor said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that’s become known as forward deployed engineering. The division will contain existing Microsoft FDEs, technical consultants, support staffers and salespeople with experience in specific industries. Rodrigo Kede Lima, who’s been leading Microsoft’s Asia business, will be its president.

The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1bn behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms.

Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results.

«

Perhaps all the people in the Xbox division getting canned in the next few days can apply for jobs there?
unique link to this extract

Nigel Farage reported to standards watchdog over ‘crypto lobbying’ • The Guardian

Rowena Mason and Tom Burgis:

»

The standards watchdog has been urged to investigate whether Nigel Farage lobbied the Bank of England to drop a cryptocurrency plan that could be costly for the billionaire bankrolling his party, potentially in breach of parliamentary rules.

The Reform UK leader has said his party’s major donor, Christopher Harborne, wanted nothing in exchange for the £15m he donated to the party and the undeclared £5m gift to Farage the Guardian revealed in April.

But Farage used a private meeting at the Bank to urge its governor, Andrew Bailey, to drop plans for a state-run alternative to the digital currency that has made Harborne, his Thailand-based benefactor, one of the richest people in the world.

As reported by the Guardian last month, Farage told October’s Zebu Live event in London he regarded the Bank’s plans for a digital pound with “total and utter horror”. He recounted the meeting at Threadneedle Street with Bailey. “I asked him straight: ‘Are you still progressing your plans for a British central bank digital currency?’ And the answer was: ‘Yes.’”

His opposition to the “Britcoin” proposal was so strong that, after the meeting last September, he told the Zebu audience of crypto enthusiasts he would be “prepared to go to prison” to stop it.

The Labour MP Phil Brickell, chair of the parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, has now reported Farage’s actions to the standards commissioner, asking him to look into the Reform leader’s interactions with the Bank of England.

The standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, is already investigating whether Farage should have declared the £5m gift from Harborne, which he received in the months before he returned to parliament.

«

Crypto is always bad news for someone, somewhere. Fingers crossed.
unique link to this extract

US home battery installations hit record high on rising electricity costs • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

US homeowners have embraced home batteries in record-breaking numbers in early 2026, spurred on by state incentives while seeking to offset rising residential electricity costs. The trend could even unlock a more flexible energy supply for power grid operators and even AI data centers.

New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatt hours of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.

This residential battery trend stands out as a natural next step for states that have already successfully boosted rooftop solar adoption among homeowners, given how batteries enable homeowners to use stored solar energy at night. California and Hawaii accounted for the majority of new residential battery storage, while Texas and Arizona also saw significantly higher numbers of installations.

California incentivizes homeowners with solar panels to also install batteries by offering better pricing for residential electricity exported to the grid after sunset, Bloomberg reported. Hawaii offers a one-time payment of $400 for every kilowatt hour of battery storage that homeowners install.

However, the record-breaking home battery installations coincided with a slowdown in residential installations of solar panels—the result of the Trump administration and Republican-driven One Big Beautiful Bill having eliminated a 30% federal solar tax credit for homeowners. Nonetheless, US electricity generation from solar power continues to rise and even surpassed coal-fired generation in April.

The battery installation spree also coincides with rising electricity costs for US residential customers.

«

It would be good if Ars Technica’s writers knew the difference between a kilowatt (a measure of instantaneous power) and a kilowatt hour (a measure of energy), as the original of this story omitted the “hour” from its measurements.

Anyway, more microgeneration and microstorage all works in everyone’s favour.
unique link to this extract

Bye bye, Beeb? • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

The BBC is no longer a public good as an economist understands the term. Public goods are non-excludable: you cannot prevent people from using them. When all you needed was a TV aerial, the BBC could only make you pay to watch its programmes by sending you threatening letters. By switching to a Netflix-style subscription model, the BBC could exclude those who do not pay.

This is the obvious solution and it needs to be done soon because the threatening letters are no longer working. Since 2014, the TV licence fee “evasion rate” has risen from 5% to 12.5% and revenue from the licence fee has fallen by 28% in real terms; hence another round of cuts.

As David Elstein noted in last month’s issue of The Critic, prosecutions for licence fee evasion have fallen from 150,000 a year to around 25,000 and the average fine is barely more than the cost of a licence. It is an extremely low risk crime and the BBC wastes £160m a year trying to tackle it. As the word spreads that paying the licence fee is essentially optional, more and more people will become “evaders”. 

Some of these people genuinely never watch live broadcasts and never use the iPlayer, but it is safe to assume that most of them are simply saving money. How many of them would cough up £180 if it was the only way they could access BBC content is the big question and it will become more pressing if licence fee evasion spirals, as seems likely. 

As Elstein says, the BBC’s fierce opposition to moving to a subscription model “borders on the irrational”. The corporation fears that if people were given a choice between paying for the BBC and not watching the BBC, millions will decide to stop paying for the BBC. If so, that is not our problem. The BBC is not the army. It is not the police. It provides entertainment, and no one should be compelled to pay for entertainment they do not consume. 

…This is where the opportunity lies. There are two billion televisions in the world and only 50 million of them are in the UK. It might take a bit of trial-and-error to discover the revenue-maximising price for a global BBC subscription, but the corporation should have enough faith in itself to believe it can take a large enough sliver of the overseas market to make up for any losses in the domestic market.

«

Netflix has around 325m subscribers. It might take the BBC a while to get to that level, but it would be a behemoth if it could.

unique link to this extract

Daily Mail sued over ‘systematic’ lifting of social media images • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The Daily Mail is being sued over alleged “systematic” lifting of “thousands” of images from social media without permission or payment.

A photographer named Matthew Moore who said one of his own images had been taken without permission has launched a class action lawsuit in New York on behalf of himself and anyone else in the US who has been affected in the past three years.

The legal complaint calls this behaviour “standard practice” at the Daily Mail and is seeking a declaration that it violates US copyright law.

The legal complaint alleges that lawyers found 107 articles that contained at least one photo that had been taken from social media with only a credit to the platform (for example © Instagram) over the course of just nine days in June.

It claims that assuming a payment of between $2,500 and $25,000 per violation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this rate of alleged infringement would open the Daily Mail up to “more than ten million dollars per year”.

The claim argues that the Daily Mail ensures its use “stays hidden” to the copyright owners by adding a “false credit” to the social media platform the image was taken from.

This is despite the fact the platforms do not own the copyright according to their own terms and conditions, it says.

But it means that rightsholders searching for their name or using credit alerts may never see the usage.

«

I certainly know of one person who threatened to sue the Daily Mail of its use of their pictures without permission, which led to an apology and a payment to charity. It’s hard to see how the Mail can successfully defend this one, and there’s then the question of what it does in future if that happens.
unique link to this extract

Substack reveals newsletters with most paying subscribers in UK • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Substack has revealed the 50 newsletters on its platform with the most UK paying subscribers for the first time.

Michael Howell’s Capital Wars is the top Substack newsletter in the UK based on number of paying subscribers. Capital Wars is currently the fifth-ranked finance newsletter across Substack overall and is written by Howell, a former research director at investment bank Salomon Brothers.

Finance is the biggest topic vertical in the top 50, accounting for 13 publications. Other topics represented multiple times include food and drink, fashion and beauty, news/politics and history.

In second place is Exponential View, an AI newsletter by tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar which passed 100,000 free and paid subscribers two years ago after nine years of publishing (plus a further 200,000 who received it via Linkedin).

Third is Comment is Freed, which has more than 90,000 free and paid subscribers, by Institute for Government senior fellow Sam Freedman and his father Lawrence Freedman (emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London).

Substack already published a “bestseller” list in the US, and has now started a separate list in the UK. It counts only paying subscribers, meaning major newsletters without paywalls may be overtaken by smaller brands with higher conversion rates.

Former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson’s local newsletter London Centric, which he started in September 2024 using a voluntary redundancy payment from the national newsbrand, has the eighth most paying subscribers in the UK on Substack.

Waterson said in May that London Centric had about 5,000 paying subscribers and was bringing in enough revenue to support two additional staff members.

«

Excellent news about London Centric, which might get a flywheel effect going as it hires more staff. And Comment Is Freed, which charges the lowest possible amount (£35 per year), is surely generating a nice bit of income for the Freedman household(s). For all the hate aimed at Substack by some people, it has enabled new models of successful journalism that really couldn’t work before.
unique link to this extract

Grok’s traffic heavily driven by NSFW content, report says • Forbes

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs:

»

Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly leaning into explicit content generation as a core driver of its Grok chatbot traffic and adult content now accounts for the majority of the platform’s activity, according to a Wednesday report from The Information.

The report claims xAI is actively doubling down on its explicit video and image-generation tools and that adult-content dominance extends into Grok’s coding model, which The Information reports frequently receives requests for pornographic material.

Well over half of Grok’s overall traffic is driven by pornographic images and videos, adult role-play chats or other such activity, according to the report, which Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli called “a desperate attempt for relevancy.”

The move comes as xAI has “fallen further behind” competitor chatbots from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta, per Crisafulli, and Grok recorded the largest drop in web traffic of any single AI model this year, Similarweb data shows.

22%. That’s the drop in Grok web traffic between January and May, according to Similarweb, more than any other major chatbot. Similarweb’s data doesn’t include interactions with Grok through X, Musk’s social media site.

«

Unsurprising that Musk thinks there’s better money to be had hiring the servers powering Grok out to literally anyone else who wants them.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified