One of the biggest costs in robots is actuators – but China dominates their manufacture. How can the US catch up? CC-licensed photo by Ricardo Diaz on Flickr.

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

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

Inside Microsoft’s Project Solara: a new platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps • GeekWire

Todd Bishop:

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A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots.

The platform, dubbed “Project Solara,” is Microsoft’s bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing — using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software, and off‑the‑shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively.

Microsoft is racing against Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others to bring AI to devices and provide the technical backbone for a new generation of computing. In effect, the company is attempting to repeat with AI what it did for personal computers five decades ago, with much stiffer competition this time but also far greater technical freedom.

“Boundaries are collapsing,” said Stevie Bathiche, the Microsoft corporate vice president and technical fellow who leads its Applied Sciences Group. “You don’t necessarily need the traditional app model. You don’t need the traditional way of developing experiences.”

The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its Build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud. GeekWire got a behind-the-scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform:

• A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day’s most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud.
• A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees.

Microsoft says it won’t ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario.

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You get all the way to that last paragraph and then, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, you discover that actually, no such thing! This is such a classic Microsoft thing. Someone else will surely do it if they’re encouraging enough.

Also, just what the world needs now: another OS stacked on top of Android.
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Android phones will soon be able to detect spoofed calls and impersonation scams • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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According to Google, “impersonation fraud” is one of the most common types of financial scams. The FTC tracked almost $3bn in losses from such scams during 2024, and the improvements in AI voice cloning tools more recently are making the schemes easier to pull off. The voice models are becoming so capable that it can be difficult to identify a fake caller even when an AI is imitating someone you talk to every day.

Google’s solution is an expansion of the system it debuted last month for verified financial calls. Now, a similar feature will work with anyone in your contacts. Many of the most effective deepfake scams involve spoofing a contact’s number, which makes the call look more legitimate when your phone lights up. Victims of these scams are then greeted by an accurate re-creation of the person’s voice spinning a yarn that involves an urgent need for cash.

Google’s scam call detection feature will be available on all phones running Android 12 or higher, but it does require you to have three Google apps installed: Phone by Google, Contacts, and Google Messages. Depending on your device, you may already have these. They’re the preloaded options on Pixel and Motorola phones, and Samsung has now switched over fully to Google Messages. Google claims that Phone by Google is the most widely used dialer, but that doesn’t seem right—Samsung has its own phone app, and it’s the largest Android OEM by far.

Regardless, once you have Google’s trio of communication apps, they will work together to verify phone calls that appear to come from a known contact. When scammers want to impersonate a contact, they use an online relay to spoof the number. When a call comes in, the caller’s Google dialer app sends a confirmation signal that is missing in spoofed relay calls. If that signal is absent, your phone uses the Messages app to send an authenticated RCS ping (hence the Google Messages requirement) to the supposed caller. If their phone reports it’s not placing the call, a pop-up will alert you that the person on the line may not be who you think they are.

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That’s fab–

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There’s one more notable caveat you may have noticed. Because the system contacts the other party’s phone for verification, that person must also have the same three Google apps installed. If a caller is using the Samsung dialer or the OnePlus contacts app, Google’s scam detection won’t work.

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Well that’s stupid. In the US particularly, the chances of a contact owning an iPhone are extremely high, so this is going to fail. But won’t an RCS ping work on iPhones? It seems like this should be something that could be figured out.
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This is why America can’t have robots and other nice things • Core Memory

Kylie Robison:

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What is an actuator? …It’s part of a machine that turns energy — electric, hydraulic, pneumatic — into motion. An electric actuator, which is the one we care the most about here, is usually a package of three things: a motor (the thing that spins), control electronics (that tell it how fast and how hard), and gearing (that trades speed for torque so it can push or hold weight). Actuators can move in a straight line or in a circular motion, known as linear or rotary, respectively.

What makes them so special is their broad use in manufacturing things like a plane’s landing gear, sewing machines, your car’s seat adjusters. Just about every machine that moves is thanks to an actuator. I will repeat: these parts are largely manufactured in China.

China’s dominance in actuator manufacturing traces back to two industrial markets that happen to need the same part. The first is drones, which use motors in their propellers. One report estimates Chinese companies “control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” (I previously wrote about a startup working to revive the U.S. drone industry.)

The other, bigger one is electric vehicles. China’s rush to go all-in on electric vehicles gave it exactly the industrial stack that motion-based hardware runs on: batteries, power electronics, sensors, precision motors, and the rare-earth magnets that sit at the heart of any electric motor. Tens of millions of EVs later, China controls both the assembly and the whole supply chain beneath it, down to the magnet processing. Chinese automakers produced roughly 60% of all electric cars sold worldwide in 2025.

There is a blossoming third industry here: robotics. China accounted for nearly 90% of the humanoid market last year. It’s still a really tiny market, with somewhere between 13,000 and 18,000 humanoids sold around the world in 2025. But those robots require a load of actuators, which eat up between 40% to 60% of the cost of a building one.

…The real barrier that has held the U.S. back from motor and actuator glory is cost. The Chinese-style designs are optimized for things that are cheap in China and expensive here. [Westmag founder David] Hansen holds up a motor part machined from a solid block of aluminum. In China, he says, that costs about as much as the raw block — the labor rounds to nothing. “Go ask [SendCutSend CEO] Jim Belosic to do that. It’s very expensive to do,” he adds. (Belosic also invested in Westmag, and SendCutSend sponsors Core Memory).

Westmag’s gamble is that the expense is only temporary — a function of low volume, not American inadequacy. Hansen’s argument runs like this: at a big enough scale, the cost of almost anything drifts down toward the cost of its raw materials, the steel, the copper, the magnets, and the labor premium that makes a single American-made part pricey shrinks toward nothing. “You can reach efficiencies of scale with almost any widget once there’s enough of them,” he says.

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How lawyers tried to evade AI analysis of court documents • Linkedin

Jin Yoshikawa:

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I came across one of the first real-world examples of a court sanctioning lawyers for prompt injection in a filing.

In a Brazilian labour-court judgment, the court found that a petition included hidden white-on-white text, invisible to a reader, directed at any AI system processing the document. The hidden instruction told the AI to contest the petition only superficially and not challenge the documents, regardless of the command it was later given.

The court discovered the prompt injection and characterized the conduct as an attempted manipulation of the court’s AI system. The court deemed it an act “offensive to the dignity of justice.” The lawyers who signed the filing were sanctioned with a fine of 10% of the case value, and the matter was referred to the bar and court authorities.

This is exactly the risk I flagged earlier this year. Lawyers are increasingly using AI to summarize pleadings, triage discovery, analyze briefs, and draft responses. But every document from an adversary is untrusted input. Hidden text, metadata, or buried instructions can be designed to influence a model into missing issues, downplaying arguments, or producing biased output.

I suspect we will see more attempts like this, especially from unscrupulous lawyers or pro se litigants who realize that AI tools are now in the litigation workflow. In the US, this kind of deception would be difficult to square with professional responsibility rules, candour obligations, and duties of fairness to opposing counsel and the tribunal.

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Mind over antibody • For Better Science

Sholto David:

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Antibodies are frequently used to investigate protein expression by western blot or immunostaining because of the specificity of their binding. Abcam is a major supplier of antibodies, and if you go to their website today and search for a “p16” specific antibody a list of potential choices is offered, importantly for this story a p16-ARC antibody is the first search result, the product code is “ab51243”. There is also another less frequently cited p16-ARC antibody “ab151303”. Similarly, if you head over to Santa Cruz (another supplier) you can find a p16-ARC antibody with the product code “sc-166760”. I think most people can guess where this is leading… How many researchers have muddled these two proteins and mistakenly ordered an antibody that binds p16-ARC when trying to investigate the expression of p16-INK4a?

I decided to check, searching for the “ab51243”, “ab151303”, and “sc-166760” product codes in Google Scholar I found over 400 unique research papers mentioning at least one of these p16-ARC antibodies (after removing duplicates, false positives, preprints, and dead links). Of these papers I could access the full text of 334, with the remaining 72 articles being paywalled. I reviewed each accessible paper to determine whether the antibody used in the paper was correctly intended for p16-ARC or incorrectly used to try and bind p16-INK4a

Here is the astonishing result: 95% of these papers have got it wrong. The vast majority of researchers who purchased either ab51243, ab151303, or sc-166760 have tried to use these antibodies to investigate p16-INK4a expression! Only seventeen used these p16-ARC antibodies correctly.

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p16 is a critical tumour suppressor and cell cycle regulator protein in the body, so these mistakes matter. And show that it’s incredibly easy to go wrong at the very first step. Which means chunks of scientific work are wrong. Who fixes that?
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Norse Atlantic Airways offers dirt-cheap tickets. There’s a catch • WIRED

Caroline Haskins:

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On March 31, I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming round trip to Rome had been cancelled, it said, and I had 14 days to request a refund.

At first, I didn’t panic. That began to change when the company’s refund request page wouldn’t load on two browsers across three devices. After Norse didn’t respond to several emails, I looked for a phone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I found dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer service.

The same day, I filed a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission, which I hoped would give me a better idea of how common this experience was. I eventually received around 75 detailed complaints from people who had bought or tried to buy tickets from the airline. Many described a customer service operation in which the inability to get in touch with a human created a vacuum that scammers appeared happy to step into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a dollar figure, 21 claimed they lost more than $1,000.

Norse Atlantic Airways does have human customer service workers, but in recent years, the airline has leaned into a tech-forward approach, deploying AI agents to help power its operation.

“Technology will help us have a higher level of availability and customer support, while still maintaining low fares for more people to enjoy travel between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the company’s chief customer and communications officer, tells WIRED.

…At the time of writing, a Google search for the “Norse Atlantic airways phone number” returned links to three Yelp pages, which listed two different phone numbers. Both of these appear to be scams.

When WIRED called the first number, a man claimed to be a representative of Star Alliance, a network of 26 airlines. However, Star Alliance’s website doesn’t list Norse Atlantic Airways among its affiliated airlines, and it doesn’t include the phone number. (A representative for Star Alliance confirmed that the number isn’t associated with the company, and said Norse isn’t one of its members.)

When WIRED called the second number, a different man said he was a representative of “Flight Travel Portal,” a service that does not appear to exist. When WIRED asked the man about online posts that claimed his phone number was a scam, he sounded unfazed. People online can say anything, he offered.

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So basically because Norse Atlantic has tried to cut humans out of customer service, its passengers are now vulnerable to human scammers. Sound familiar?
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Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs.

Employees at the $2.9tn group were told this week its “Kirorank” service — which scored users of Amazon’s Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity — had been taken offline, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The decision came after the tool led some workers to assign AI agents — autonomous bots that can take actions on behalf of users — to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings.

Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told staff earlier this week that the leaderboard had been built with “good intentions”, according to people familiar with his remarks.

But he added that the result had been additional costs for Amazon due to employees “tokenmaxxing” or inflating their consumption of AI tokens — units of data processed by models.

“Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” he told staff.

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Absolutely classic example of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
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The structural barriers to AI lawyers • Diffuse AI

Sean Harrington:

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Legal AI has a data problem that most industries don’t face, and it has two layers.

The first layer is raw legal data. To build useful AI for legal research, you need comprehensive databases of case law, statutes, regulations, and secondary materials. Only three entities in the United States have anything approaching complete coverage: Westlaw (Thomson Reuters), Lexis (RELX), and vLex/Fastcase, which Clio acquired in a $1 billion deal in November 2025. That deal pulled the third meaningful legal research database under a company focused on small and mid-size firm practice management, and Clio’s $5 billion valuation and $500 million Series G round suggest investors see the strategic value of owning one of only three complete legal datasets in the country. Everyone else either licenses from one of these three or works with incomplete data.

The second layer is what makes those databases worth paying for. Westlaw and Lexis don’t sell raw judicial opinions (much of that is publicly available). They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance. A California real estate attorney without access to Miller and Starr would be at a serious disadvantage, not because the underlying case law is hidden, but because navigating it without an expert-curated roadmap takes exponentially longer. Imagine being handed an encyclopedia to learn something vs. having a beautifully curated twenty-page guide from a panel of practitioners who have been through the procedure a thousand times. That’s the difference: substantive knowledge plus procedural shorthand, built up over years of practice in a single area of law.

…The data moat is real, but it may be more porous than it appears.

The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents. State-level open data initiatives, like Oklahoma’s, have made primary legal materials freely accessible. Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project digitized every official state and federal case through 2020. All U.S. state bar associations now provide members with free access to either vLex Fastcase or Decisis, which, for a solo practitioner handling state court matters, might be enough.

The editorial layer that was essential for human researchers may matter less for AI systems. vLex’s Vincent AI demonstrates a different approach: using AI to generate the synthesis layer rather than paying human experts to write it.

…The barriers inside most law firms are organisational, not technical. Even firms that want AI can’t deploy it because their data is a mess and their governance structures punish change.

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Organisation as the barrier is entirely predictable.
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US Oil Buffer Stress Monitor

Michael Puscar:

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The simple estimate extends the latest four-week commercial crude draw rate toward the modern low-water mark. It is not a physical tank-bottom estimate. If inventories build instead of draw, no low-water retest is projected. Oil prices can react before or after physical stress appears, so the pressure window is a risk signal rather than a prediction.

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Currently at 75 days to the “modern low-water mark”. The “upward price pressure window” would start around August 5th.

Developed by Puscar using the APIs from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). So the next thing to expect on past form is that the API will be shut off when things get tight, as happened with US labour statistics as the jobs market plummeted.
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Arsenal v PSG got 16.2m illegal stream views in UK after not being free-to-air • The Guardian

Matt Hughes:

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Arsenal’s Champions League final defeat by Paris Saint-Germain attracted more than 16.2 million views on illegal streams in the UK after not being made free to air.

Analysis conducted for the Guardian by the technology analyst Gaming Compliance International (GCI) shows there were 16.2m illegal stream views of longer than 90 seconds, traced to 3.7m unique IP addresses. The final was watched legally on TNT Sports and HBO Max by more than 7 million people.

TNT sparked a political row with its controversial decision not to make the final available free to air for the first time since the tournament’s rebrand as the Champions League in 1992, with Sir Keir Starmer writing to the broadcaster urging it to reconsider.

TNT is understood to have been happy with its combined linear and streaming viewing figures of more than 7m and 25.6% audience share, but the large numbers who watched illegally will be a major long‑term concern for it and all broadcasters, as well as for TV rights owners such as Uefa and the Premier League.

…The exact size of the illegal audience is impossible to discern because there is likely to have been more than one viewer for many of the 3.7m unique streams, and some viewers will have accessed more than one stream owing to technological problems and forced refreshing because of advertising, which explains the 16.2m figure.

There is a large overlap between the piracy of premium sports rights and unlicensed gambling, highlighted by the fact that 89% of adverts on illegal streams of the Champions League final were for gambling brands not licensed in the UK.

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Not explained where the illegal streams originate from, but the gambling link carries its own hint. But also: sports remains the area where you can absolutely charge money and get a lot of people to sign up at once.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If a picture on a wall is described as a Monet painting, you probably believe it’s real. What if you’re told it’s actually AI, though? CC-licensed photo by Gerard Stolk 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. Floating along. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Superintelligence: the idea that eats smart people • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglowski, in a speech given to a conference:

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Our intelligence level, cognitive speed, set of biases and so on is not predetermined, but an artifact of our evolutionary history.

In particular, there’s no physical law that puts a cap on intelligence at the level of human beings.

A good way to think of this is by looking what happens when the natural world tries to maximize for speed.

If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster.

But of course we know that there are all kinds of configurations of matter, like a motorcycle, that are faster than a cheetah and even look a little bit cooler.

But there’s no direct evolutionary pathway to the motorcycle. Evolution had to first make human beings, who then build all kinds of useful stuff.

So analogously, there may be minds that are vastly smarter than our own, but which are just not accessible to evolution on Earth. It’s possible that we could build them, or invent the machines that can invent the machines that can build them.

There’s likely to be some natural limit on intelligence, but there’s no a priori reason to think that we’re anywhere near it. Maybe the smartest a mind can be is twice as smart as people, maybe it’s sixty thousand times as smart.

That’s an empirical question that we don’t know how to answer.

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Cieglowski (who runs the Pinboard service which this newsletter relies on – 26,940 bookmarks so far!) has always been an excellent analyst of ideas. This talk is from 2016, which is why it’s worth looking at again now, when everything has changed. (On the way he comes up with a version of the idea that became the TV series Pluribus. That’s how good he is.)
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Someone shared a real Monet painting as AI and asked for critiques • PetaPixel

Michael Zhang:

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A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.

It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”

The user even marked the post with X’s “Made with AI” label to add to the deception.

In reality, the painting is one of the 250 oil paintings in the renowned French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series in which he depicted scenes from his home flower garden over the final 31 years of his life.

The painting is one of the 250 or so paintings in the famous “Water Lilies” series by French painter Claude Monet.

Critics, however, were eager to point out all kinds of “obvious” details that show why the “AI” Monet can’t hold a candle to a genuine Monet. One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.

…[Another critic wrote:] “As an amateur art enjoyer, the only criticism I can offer is that the AI generated image does not make me feel anything,” writes @ThrosturTh. “It does not conjure emotion, thought or wonder. It’s just a colorful wallpaper pattern. If you look up ‘monet painting’ in Google images, you feel something.”

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That last one is probably where the other “critics” begin, but don’t say so. (Monet’s deteriorating eyesight means that the lilies series shows us how his vision was changing.) What we want to know, it seems, is that a human held the paintbrush.
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Instagram Meta AI vulnerability allegedly enables password reset for accounts • Cyber Security News

Guru Baran:

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A critical flaw in Meta’s AI-powered account recovery tool on Instagram allowed attackers to hijack high-value accounts by tricking the chatbot into forwarding password reset codes with no verification required.

Security researchers ZachXBT and Dark Web Informer were among the first to publicly expose the vulnerability, revealing that threat actors had found a way to manipulate Instagram’s Meta AI assistant a tool designed to help users recover access to their accounts.

Attackers engaged the AI chatbot in conversation and prompted it to forward password reset codes to unauthorized parties, entirely bypassing identity verification checks. The flaw stemmed from insufficient controls in how the AI processed account recovery requests, effectively allowing anyone who knew a target’s username to initiate the takeover process.

The exploit was not a traditional server breach Meta confirmed no backend systems were compromised. Instead, the vulnerability lived in the AI’s logic layer, which lacked proper rate-limiting or authentication enforcement before acting on reset requests.

These coveted accounts, some valued at over $1m combined, were quickly flipped through private Telegram channels before Meta could intervene. The speed of the operation highlighted how organized and financially motivated threat actors have become in exploiting social media platform vulnerabilities.

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There have been suggestions that Meta has seriously cut staffing in the Trust & Safety part of Instagram/Meta, while encouraging staff to use more and more AI. It was bad enough before when you might struggle for hours or days to get in touch with a human over a hacked account; to have the company’s AI helping the hackers is definitely worse. (There’s a good writeup too at Brian Krebs’s security blog.)
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Nvidia announces RTX Spark as ‘the most efficient PC chip ever built’ • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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This fall, Nvidia will officially become a consumer PC chipmaker like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, putting a complete computing chip — not just graphics — into the very heart of laptops and mini-PCs. After many months of leaks, it’s finally announcing the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will meet or beat the most powerful thin-and-light Windows machines ever, it claims.

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.

The RTX Spark is effectively the same GB10 chip that’s in the DGX Spark, the tiny “personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia released last year, only now it’s a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be spec-to-spec identical with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.

But Nvidia says there’ll be lesser versions later, targeting lower prices, and with as little as 16GB of RAM.

Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, meaning legacy Windows software made for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer to work. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and its Prism emulator ready for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever before.

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Promises, promises. There’s also the question of quite how much AI people want thrust in their face.
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Intel: Our upcoming AI chip will be cheaper, run cooler than Nvidia, AMD options • Financial Times via Ars Technica

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Intel plans to ship an AI chip by the end of this year that uses cheaper memory and cooling technology than rival offerings from Nvidia and AMD, as the US chipmaker seeks to capitalize on a sharp turnaround in its fortunes.

Kevork Kechichian, who leads Intel’s data center group, told the FT that the company is “starting with the basics” as it tries to challenge its rivals in the booming market for semiconductors that power AI.

Its new “Crescent Island” graphics processing unit is designed to speed up “inference” tasks, the stage when a user makes their request, rather than the training of models, an area where Nvidia’s processors are dominant.

An earlier attempt at building a GPU for training AI models called “Gaudi” saw poor sales, and its planned successor was cancelled last year.

“We decided to start rebuilding our muscles in AI… [but] we are not particularly aiming for [the training market] based on past experience,” said Kechichian, who joined Intel last year from chip designer Arm.

He added the new chip would start shipping in limited quantities to customers by the end of this year, following an 18-month development process.

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Intel used to have it easy: there was it, and AMD as a very distant second. Then smartphones came along, Arm architecture became huge, and then Apple and Nvidia began making inroads, and everything went south. Nowadays you can feel the desperation to be counted alongside the sector leaders who are making money hand over fist.
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China’s world-beating solar industry is in turmoil • The Economist

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China’s solar exports have enjoyed a surge since the bombing began. But that will be small cheer to its companies, as they face three daunting problems. Domestic demand for their products is falling for the first time in decades because the country’s power grids—far and away the biggest market for solar panels—have become overloaded with the things. Solar-panel supply, meanwhile, is overabundant because of years of splashy investment in factories. And even while the war is helping solar sales in South-East Asia and Africa, protectionism has been on the rise in the bigger Western markets.

These problems converge at an ugly time. Most companies have been running at a loss since 2024 because of brutal price wars; bankruptcies are mounting. After experiencing blistering growth, the world’s solar factory now faces a reckoning.

Globally, the solar industry has not always been kind to investors. One solar panel is much like another, and when improvements are made by one producer, they are rapidly copied by competitors. So companies typically try to scale up production as quickly as possible in order to seize market share. That means production can race far ahead of demand, causing margins to collapse.

…Installations this year could fall by between 24% and 43% from 2025, according to an industry group. That would be enough to cause global demand for solar panels to fall in 2026 for the first time in two decades, says BloombergNEF, a consultancy. For China’s grids to cope, it needs to be able to store excess solar power or move it long distances to where it might be needed. That requires big investments in batteries and power lines, as well as figuring out flexible market mechanisms to co-ordinate everything (in some regions long-term contracts for coal-fired power lock out renewables even though they are cheaper).

All this is happening, helped by the fact that batteries, like solar panels, are becoming much cheaper as production of them increases. But it takes time. That means that even if solar installations start rising again next year, growth will probably be much slower than before.

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Best Sim only deals: compare cheap contracts • Money Saving Expert

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Switching to a cheaper deal with another network is really easy. Under rules from regulator Ofcom, you no longer have to call your current provider to ditch it, so you avoid the hard sell of it trying to make you stay. Here’s how to switch providers and keep your number:

Request a switching code by text. Simply text ‘PAC’ for free to 65075 on any network and you’ll be sent your ‘porting authorisation code’ (PAC) immediately by text so you can keep your number. To get a new number, text ‘STAC’ to 75075. Its text must include important info, such as any exit penalties, outstanding handset costs or credit balances.

You need to give the switching code to your new provider within 30 days. You’ll then be switched within one working day. You won’t need to contact your old provider again.

What’s more, if you’re out of your minimum contract period, mobile providers are now banned from charging you for the remainder of your notice period after you’ve switched (which is typically 30 days), putting an end to paying for your old and new contract at the same time.

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Martin Lewis noticed the article yesterday about the rising tide of mobile/broadband pricing, and linked to this page as a riposte. So if you’re looking to save some money…
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Traffic to DuckDuckGo’s proudly ‘No AI’ search page has tripled since latest Google AI search update • PC Gamer

Ted Litchfield:

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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has announced that its opt-in, generative AI-limiting “No AI” search page has received three times as much traffic since Google’s latest round of updates and PR for AI mode search. In addition to user privacy, DuckDuckGo is positioning itself as a destination for user choice—one that’s still keeping its options open with AI.

Three days ago, we reported on how installs of DuckDuckGo’s app were up by almost a third following Google’s latest push for AI in search. This latest announcement from DuckDuckGo appears to exclusively pertain to noai.duckduckgo.com, its AI opt-out search option.

“Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our ‘No AI’ search page have tripled,” the company wrote on Bluesky. “And they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images.”

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What we don’t know – and can’t know (because DDG doesn’t track its users) – is whether those are users who previously used DDG but are now going to the no-AI page (its normal page includes an AI-generated answer), or whether they’re people utterly disgusted with Google’s AI offering seeking respite from it. Slight suspicion it’s the former.
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United flight forced to turn around because of a Bluetooth speaker name • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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United flight 236 from Newark to Palma de Mallorca on Saturday night was forced to turn around just an hour after takeoff due to security concerns around a Bluetooth signal. Multiple Redditors claimed to be on the flight and reported that the crew repeatedly requested passengers to turn off their Bluetooth. According to one poster, the crew issued a one-minute warning, saying that two devices were still active.

One Redditor reported flight attendants making comments like, “This little joke is ruining it for everyone.”

An archived recording from Air Traffic Control (embedded below) confirms that the root of the issue was the name of a discoverable Bluetooth speaker.

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“There’s a security detail out there. Someone had a Bluetooth speaker, and they named it a certain four-letter word. So they have to inspect the whole aircraft, including the cargo area, and the passengers have to evacuate.”

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Doesn’t take a genius to guess that the word is b-o-m-b, which is an exceptionally stupid name to give your Bluetooth speaker on a commercial aircraft.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Simon Calder, formerly The Independent’s travel correspondent, isn’t retiring; he’s moving to The Telegraph. Should have known. (Thanks Simon D for pointing that out.)

Scientists have unravelled more of the mysteries of how tardigrades survive extreme temperatures. And it’s quite weird. CC-licensed photo by Philippe Garcelon 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. Heatwave? No. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google worker charged with using internal data to make $1.2m on Polymarket • BBC News

Kali Hays:

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A Google employee has been arrested for allegedly using his access to company information to successfully place lucrative bets on the prediction platform Polymarket.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said it had charged Michele Spagnuolo, a Google engineer, with breaking insider trading laws because of several bets he placed through the platform.

Although Spagnuolo is an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, he was arrested on Wednesday and brought before a federal judge in New York.
Spagnuolo allegedly used information he had early access to through his work at Google, which is based in the US, to make bets that saw him rack up $1.2m (£894,330) in winnings.

A spokeswoman for Google said the company was “working with law enforcement on their investigation” and that the employee had been placed on leave.

The internal information that was allegedly used was marketing material accessed “using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies,” she added.

A spokesman for Polymarket said the platform “worked closely” with authorities on the investigation. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the spokesman added.

…Spagnuolo did not respond to an email seeking comment. According to online profiles, he worked for Google for more than 12 years as an engineer focused on information security.

He started using Polymarket in 2024, and between October and December of last year, the US Attorney’s office said Spagnuolo placed $2.7m in bets related to Google.

By using internal information, he was able to make more than $1m in profits from those bets, it said.

The court papers said Spagnuolo’s most lucrative alleged Polymarket wins were correctly predicting who would and would not be the most searched for person on Google in 2025.

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Can there be any doubt now that betting makes people do stupid things? And over such utter trivia.
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The ghost who solved a theorem: Thomason, Trobaugh and a dream • Abakcus

Ali Kaya:

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Robert Wayne Thomason was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 5, 1952. He earned his doctorate from Princeton in 1977 and built a reputation as one of the most formidable mathematical minds of his generation — a figure who held topology, algebraic geometry, and K-theory simultaneously in his head in a way very few could manage. Colleagues described him as looking like a beat poet, dressed always in black, with a pointed goatee.

By the mid-1980s, Thomason had fixed his attention on a central problem in algebraic K-theory: proving a localization theorem for schemes that did not require regularity — a condition that previous results, including those of Daniel Quillen, had demanded. For 15 years, the absence of such a theorem had blocked the field’s development. Thomason spent three years attacking it. He assembled nearly every piece. But one step refused to fall: he needed to show that perfect complexes on a scheme could be extended from an open subscheme to the whole scheme. The obstacle was the K₀ obstruction — a topological invariant that, for some perfect complexes, is nonzero, seemingly making such extension impossible. Thomason explored this avenue and concluded it was hopeless. He was stuck.

Thomas Trobaugh was Thomason’s close friend — described by Thomason as “quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous.” He died by suicide, a consequence of endogenous depression, sometime before January 1988. Then, 94 days after Trobaugh’s death, Thomason had a dream.

In the dream, Trobaugh’s simulacrum spoke a single mathematical sentence. When Thomason woke, startled, he was certain the idea was wrong. He had already proved to himself that this approach led nowhere. And yet the dream had been insistent enough that Thomason sat down and worked through the argument, looking for the gap he was sure was there.

“The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf.”

There was no gap. The idea was correct — not because perfect complexes extend directly, but because the insight pointed toward a deeper structure: by working in the right derived category, the obstruction could be circumvented entirely.

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Famously, Kekulé inferred the circular structure of benzene (C6H6) in a dream. And this is complex maths in a dream. There are probably more examples, The common thread here is that Kekulé and Thomason knew the solution already – but not consciously. There are surely similarities with how LLMs can turn up ideas that are buried within their data and only become apparent because they’re adjacent in the n-dimensional space within which that data is organised.
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IPL’s anti-graft unit warns against use of smart glasses in restricted zones • The Indian Express

Varinder Bhatia:

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The IPL’s [Indian Premier League of cricket] Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU) has issued a fresh advisory to players and support staff in the ongoing edition of the T20 league, warning against the use of smart glasses, sunglasses and goggles equipped with communication and recording technology inside restricted areas on match days, The Indian Express has learnt.

Sources said the ACSU, which is responsible for monitoring integrity, preventing spot-fixing and enforcing security protocols in the league, has informed the BCCI that several companies are actively marketing and selling smart eyewear products to players and team personnel participating in the IPL.

According to sources, the ACSU flagged that these smart devices are capable of live-streaming, sending and receiving text messages, and making audio and video calls through mobile data or Wi-Fi networks, raising concerns over unauthorised communication and potential misuse during matches.

Under the IPL’s Player and Match Officials Area (PMOA) Minimum Standards, such devices have been classified as “Audio/Video Recording Devices” and “Communication Devices”.

The ACSU has reiterated that possession or use of smart glasses and similar wearable technology is strictly prohibited inside the PMOA. Players and support staff have been instructed to deposit such devices with Security Liaison Officers, along with their mobile phones and smart watches, before entering restricted zones on match days. Sources said failure to comply would amount to a breach of PMOA protocols and could invite penalties under operational regulations.

“With wearable technology becoming more sophisticated and concerns growing over covert communication methods, the ACSU’s latest crackdown underlines the league’s attempt to stay ahead of evolving integrity risks during one of world cricket’s most commercially significant tournaments,” sources said.

…On May 8, The Indian Express reported that the unit had flagged the presence of unauthorised persons in team dug-outs following which the BCCI sent an advisory to all IPL teams and called a meeting of CEOs of all franchises to remind them of the protocol.

Sources said the ACSU had specifically raised concerns about individuals attempting to loiter near dugouts and hospitality areas to initiate informal contact with players and support staff. Teams were advised to ensure that net bowlers, logistics staff, throwdown specialists and other temporary personnel remained within approved access protocols and did not carry unauthorised communication devices into sensitive areas.

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The IPL is a colossal sports concern, and betting around it will be equally huge. Smart glasses are an obvious way to record things without appearing to record them. (Link via Joe S.)
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Tardigrades reveal extreme heat-blocking survival trick while in “tun” state • Phys.org

Ingrid Fadell:

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Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, are tiny eight-legged animals that can survive in extreme environments, where humans and most other animals would die. This resistance to extreme conditions, including intense heat, very high or low temperatures, radiation and low oxygen levels is called “extremotolerance.”

A biological process that allows tardigrades to survive in extreme environments is anhydrobiosis. This is a reversible process via which the animals lose most of their body water and their metabolism temporarily stops, which in turn allows them to survive in dry environments. When tardigrades undergo this process, they curl up and enter what is known as a “tun” state.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how a species of tardigrade—called Paramacrobiotus sp. BLR strain—survives extreme heat while in the tun state. Their findings, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggest that reductions in thermal conductivity are central to the survival of this species at high temperatures and under extreme heat.

…The results of this study suggest that the ability to survive extreme temperatures is supported not just by biochemical, but also by physical processes. Further research could try to validate the team’s observations across a wider range of extremotolerant animal species.

“Our observations suggest that tardigrades can adjust their thermal conductance to protect themselves from heat,” explained Eswarappa. “As part of our next studies, we plan to identify the molecular mechanisms behind this phenomenon.”

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They really are the weirdest little critters. And will almost surely outlive us all in one way or another.
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Nvidia, Microsoft, and Arm are all teasing Nvidia’s new N1X laptop processors • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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It’s the world’s worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted “A new era of PC” earlier today, and now Arm has followed up with an identical post.

All three posts include coordinates pointing to where Computex is hosted in Taipei. Nvidia is holding a Computex keynote in Taipei at 8PM PT / 11PM ET on Sunday night, where it’s rumored to be announcing its new N1 and N1x laptop chips.

These Arm-powered Nvidia processors have been long-rumored, with reports earlier this year suggesting that both Lenovo and Dell have been preparing new laptops with the N1X chips. We first heard rumors about Nvidia’s laptop processors in 2023, and Dell CEO Michael Dell hinted at the possibility of an AI PC with Nvidia during an interview in 2024.

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An announcement too late for this collation, but maybe this time Microsoft will get Arm PCs to work. I’ve been seeing them launch them since 2011, when they first showed them off at CES.
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Simon Calder’s 32 years on the road as travel correspondent for The Independent • The Independent

Simon Calder talks through his 32 years – now over – as The Independent’s “man who pays his way”:

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1995: The Independent had a strict “no freebies” policy prescribed by founding editor Andreas Whittam Smith. So I was acutely aware of the cost of travel. The mid-Nineties saw some undoubted bargains – £179 for a Virgin Atlantic flight outbound from Heathrow to Los Angeles and back from New York JFK.

Yet within Europe, fares were stubbornly high. A questionably obtained student card eased the financial pain, but even so, London to Glasgow was a minimum of £100 return by air. Plenty of entrepreneurs had sought, unsuccessfully, to make flying affordable. So, when a fax arrived at the office of The Independent announcing a new carrier between Luton and Glasgow, beginning in November 1995, I paid it little heed.

The link between London and Scotland’s biggest city was conveniently carved up by Air UK, British Airways and British Midland. While easyJet promised fares as low as £29 each way, the business model seemed fatally flawed. You couldn’t buy through travel agents, only by phone – with the number emblazoned in orange on the plane.

There was no allocated seating – you grabbed a seat where you could. And the airline proposed charging passengers £1 for a cup of tea and a further 50p for a packet of shortbread, both of which were free on its frillier rivals. So, no thanks, I would not be going to Luton at 7am on 10 November to meet a 28-year-old shipping magnate named Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

Yet easyJet seems to have survived, along with what was, at the time, a small and struggling Irish airline named Ryanair.

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His retirement means a huge loss of expertise and experience from the trade. No doubt he’ll keep on popping up on radio and TV: they’d be mad not to keep tapping him.
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Broadband and mobile bills are soaring in the UK – depending on who you ask • The Observer

Ben Zaranko:

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if you believe the official data, the UK is a massive outlier. Between December 2016 and December 2025, across the euro area, the price of “wireless telephone services” fell by 20%, according to Eurostat. In the UK, ONS estimates suggest that prices increased by almost 40% over that period, before jumping again in April 2026 (something I’ll come back to). There’s a similarly dramatic divergence when looking at prices for “internet access provision services” (ie broadband) and for “bundled telecommunications services” (ie a combined broadband and TV package).

I say “if you believe the official data”, because this stuff is hard to measure. Often, the price listed online isn’t the one you’ll actually pay, if you ring up and haggle, or are willing to shop around. There’s also the thorny question of how to adjust for changes in the quality of service provided over time: if your bill stays the same, but your broadband speed doubles, has the price been cut in half?

Different countries take different approaches. A spokesperson for the ONS said that its approach “is consistent with best international practice and, in particular, our mobile phone charges methodology is considered to be the best approach to measuring price change to consumers”. Notably, Ofcom takes a different approach, and judges that the average price of average mobile use in the UK has barely changed since 2020. But it’s the ONS numbers that go into the official inflation figures.

There are two ways to interpret these trends – neither of them good. One possibility is that the UK really has seen mobile and broadband prices increase far more quickly than the rest of Europe. The other is that the ONS methodology struggles to capture things such as customer switching, discounts and improvements in quality and, as a result, could be overstating the “true” rate of inflation. A higher official measure of inflation would mean higher government spending on debt interest, a higher interest rate on student loans, and much else besides.

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The feeling is definitely that prices just keep going up while you’re in a contract; in some ways it’s better to let the contract finish and move onto the rolling 30-day version, where prices tend to stay the same, which at least evades the annoyance of prices constant creeping upwards.
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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft first started opening up access to Claude Code in December, inviting thousands of its own developers to use Anthropic’s AI coding tool daily. It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time, and sources tell me that Claude Code has proved very popular inside Microsoft over the past six months. Perhaps a little too popular, as Microsoft is now preparing to walk back its Claude Code push.

I understand that Microsoft is planning to remove most of its Claude Code licenses and push many of its developers to use Copilot CLI instead. While Claude Code has been a popular addition, it has also undermined Microsoft’s new GitHub Copilot CLI coding tool — a command line version of GitHub Copilot that runs outside of development apps like Visual Studio Code.

I’m told that Microsoft’s Experiences + Devices team, which includes the engineers responsible for Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Surface, is winding down its usage of Claude Code by the end of June. Sources tell me that engineers are being encouraged to start transitioning their workflows to GitHub Copilot CLI in the coming weeks, ahead of the cutoff.

Microsoft is telling employees that the decision is about converging on Copilot CLI as its main agentic command line interface tool across Experiences + Devices, but sources tell me the decision is also a financial one. The June 30th cutoff is the last day of Microsoft’s current financial year, and canceling Claude Code licenses is an easy way to cut some operating expenses for when the new financial year starts in July.

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What is a dickover? • Daring Fireball

John Gruber on the scourge of the modern internet:

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Here’s one from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I pay $20/month to subscribe, asking me to sign up for SMS text messages about the Jersey shore, while I’m logged into their cursed website, before they’ll let me see the article I came to read. Every time I see one of these I think about unsubscribing. I’m paying them to abuse my time and attention. I started capturing screenshots of every dickover I saw when I started working on this article, and I soon had to give up because I was collecting too many of them. But this one from Tom’s Hardware I actually enjoyed, because their own dickover got dicked over by one of their own fucking ads in a JavaScript Z-axis slapfight.

If you visit a website you should … see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

Some sites hit you with their dickovers on page load, when you might be braced for it. We’re all braced for obstacles and annoyances these days when we load web pages. But some sneaky, cowardly bastards sucker-punch you with their dickbars only after you have started reading, and begin to scroll down the page. Then, wham, they hit with their dickover. It’s a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover.

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The fabulous irony is that the principal annoyance a few years back was popunders, which secreted themselves under the window you were looking at and only appeared when you had closed it. Does anyone remember the X10 webcam? (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Climate change is taking rice-growing areas above the temperature at which it will grow, but and evolution isn’t keeping pace. CC-licensed photo by Toshiyuki IMAI on Flickr.

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

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

Could AI be a “worthy successor” to humanity? • Vox

Sigal Samuel:

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AI successionism has been gaining ground among technologists over the past decade. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page famously accused Elon Musk of “speciesism” because Page thought we should let digital minds take over, and Musk disagreed.

The successionist vision has been amplified by the advent of effective accelerationism (e/acc) in 2022. Its founder, Guillaume Verdon — the physicist more colorfully known on X as Based Beff Jezos — describes e/acc as a “meta-religion” that’s about “having faith” in the universe’s drive toward increasingly intelligent systems. The best thing we can do is help the universe by developing advanced AI as fast as possible, even at the expense of humanity. “E/acc,” as Verdon has written, “has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate.”

Tech heavyweights have come on board. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed e/acc thinkers as his “patron saints.” Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, included “e/acc” in his social media bio and invested in Verdon’s company, which aims to build the world’s most efficient computers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X to Verdon, saying, “you cannot outaccelerate me.”

And these days, AI successionism is spreading beyond Silicon Valley. At the New York symposium, Faggella told the audience that trying to preserve the human species as it is would be silly.

“We could ask the questions that would tie all of our moral aspirations eternally to 23 chromosomes — or we could ask the cosmic questions,” Faggella said.

He wanted us to consider “unpolite, uncouth” possibilities, starting with: The flame of consciousness — the capacity for experience and moral value — may be the rarest and most precious thing in the universe. Humanity is currently a torch carrying that flame, but what if we’re ultimately not the best carrier for it? And if AI can spread that flame far further than we mere humans can, generating experiences of bliss and forms of moral value that we could never even dream of, shouldn’t we let it?

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Samuel has a lovely explanation for “Why I wrote this story”:

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“I grew up hearing an old Jewish teaching: Each of us should carry two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One says, “I am but dust and ashes.” But the other says, “The world was created for me.”

Reporting on AI these past few years, I’ve watched more and more people forget the second message.”

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Optimization culture is making us fragile • Brad Stulberg

Brad Stulberg:

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A popular podcaster recently said drinking a few glasses of wine “ruined the next three days of his life.”

He specified he “didn’t get drunk,” but “got worse sleep that night” and said that when he looked at his wrist-worn device it messed up his score and “dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol” and he podcasted worse as a result.

Y’all—this optimization stuff can make you super fragile.

Before I go any further, an important disclaimer: alcohol is not good for you, especially if you are someone who struggles to stop after a drink or two. If you have a substance-use disorder or family history of substance-use disorders then a few drinks can absolutely ruin your week (or worse). There is nothing wrong with choosing to abstain for any reason at all. And yes, of course, getting drunk can derail a day or two.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Rather, it’s the latest example in a long line of internet optimization culture: eat this way, sleep that way, wake at this time, do that single exercise, follow this guru, take that supplement… This content is more about the performance of being great than the actual pursuit of greatness itself. It can even lead to anxiety.

Here’s what’s at the root of optimization culture: life is uncertain, scary, and hard. There’s always a chance of illness, injury, or failure. It’s normal to have some level of anxiety, but trying to control every little thing doesn’t help. If anything it gets in the way. When you obsess over readiness scores and other data, you risk creating a fragility mindset. You start to believe that you must be and feel 100% to do great work. But this is nonsense. It’s not how life works.

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It’s weird that this has to be said at all, but apparently so. Also, if three glasses of wine mess you up, your liver needs checking.
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Who benefits from the casino economy? • Semafor

Liz Hoffman:

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Looking around at our casino economy, I keep asking: Who is all this for?

The long tail of nonsense bets on prediction markets can’t possibly be what Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he endorsed the “people’s capitalism” put forward by America’s greatest Cold War propagandist, Theodore Repplier. The future of commerce can’t be a prediction market for whether someone will deliver me four kiwis. The future of investing can’t be crypto perps and a series of rolling bets on Nvidia stock that expire every midnight in a white-knuckled Groundhog Day portfolio.

These products confuse populist capitalism, the urge to beat the elite at their own game, with Repplier’s people’s capitalism, where access is broad, affordable, and fair. Robinhood is on a mission to “democratize finance for all.” The mutual fund did that 100 years ago. Index funds perfected it 50 years later. Trump Accounts — which launch today — could expand it now. A fund that charges fees seven times higher than an S&P 500 index fund for 200% exposure to a nuclear-reactor company with zero revenue is something else entirely.

At their most benign, these products are the Dubai Chocolate of markets. They were nowhere, are suddenly everywhere, and are a fun novelty but nothing we couldn’t actually live without. At their most pernicious, they are financial poison.

The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was right when he said that prediction markets can perform “useful functions for society… to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature.” But he was wrong that the ideal users are “everyday Americans.”

In theory, it makes sense to offset your heating bill by correctly predicting a cold snap on Kalshi. But a better route to that outcome would be for your electric utility to do that hedging itself and share those savings with you. This already happens: The option that utilities offer to smooth out your monthly bill is made possible by an old prediction market — electricity futures, around and regulated since the 1990s — and doesn’t require furiously gambling on your phone.

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Will people stop using prediction markets once they realise that it’s enormously biased against “fair” players? Perhaps it’s the same forlorn hope as wishing people won’t do sports gambling. (Though at least sports gambling isn’t fixed.)
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Exclusive: Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data • Reuters

Raphael Satter:

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U.S. forces deployed to war zones have ​been targeted using commercially available location data, according to reports fielded by military officials, an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.

In a letter shared with Reuters by US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, US Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater.” The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where ​US forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.

The disclosure was the first official confirmation that US forces had ​been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday, opens new tab to the Pentagon.

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where US troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it ​was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

The Pentagon did not return messages seeking comment. The lawmakers said in their letter that their efforts to obtain more information from military officials about the reported targeting had been unsuccessful.

Location data is widely used in digital advertising, which is a key source of ​revenue for many tech companies. Such data is typically collected from smartphones or other devices by apps or service providers before being sold to data ​brokers who collate and resell the data, sometimes via complex networks of intermediaries.

Although the threat to privacy inherent in selling the details of people’s day-to-day movements on the open market has long been a matter of public discussion, its potential as a national security risk has recently drawn concern as well.

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Finally, the US’s lack of privacy laws begins to bite in the most meaningful way. “Your privacy is valuable to us”, indeed.
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Apple working on iPhone anti-snatching feature that locks the device automatically • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

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Many of us know the feeling: one second you’re looking at your iPhone, and the next, you’re staring at an empty hand. By the time you realize what happened, whoever took the device is already out of reach.

Over the years, Apple has greatly improved iPhone anti-theft protections, with features such as Find My, Activation Lock, and Stolen Device Protection.

However, many of those protections can be rendered nearly useless if a thief grabs the device while it is still unlocked.
Apple does include time-based security delays to prevent major Apple ID changes, but the reality is that a thief can still cause significant damage once they get their hands on an unlocked iPhone.

That is why Apple is working on a new feature that automatically locks the iPhone when the system detects it has been snatched from the user’s hand, similar to Android’s Theft Detection Lock.

These systems will rely on several signals, including the iPhone’s accelerometer, to detect when the device has been snatched from the user’s hand. Once the snatching is confirmed, it will automatically lock the iPhone.

To further determine whether the iPhone may have been taken from its owner, the feature will also observe the distance from a paired Apple Watch.

Additionally, once fully implemented and enabled, the feature will take into account the same rules that apply to Stolen Device Protection: whether the iPhone is connected to a familiar WiFi network, and whether it is at a familiar location, such as home or work.

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This is definitely a smart idea, and overdue. Android’s Theft Detection Lock, which does essentially precisely that, began rolling out in August 2024.
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Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says • NBC News

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In the next five years, the Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest-year record along the way, according to new United Nations climate projections.

The World Meteorological Organization also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 3º Fahrenheit (1.66ºC) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change. A hotter globe from the burning of coal, oil and gas means more extreme weather including floods, droughts and heat waves, scientists said.

The projections by the UN climate agency and the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office said there’s a 75% chance that the average global temperature between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) higher than since pre-industrial times. That threshold is the agreed-upon limit of warming — averaged over 20 years — set in 2015 by the Paris climate agreement.

A UN science report a few years later detailed how exceeding that 1.5º mark means more likely death, danger and species loss. Even though it’s only a few tenths of a degree, some of the planet’s ecosystems, such as coral and glaciers, can’t handle the strain.

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It’s all bad, to be honest.

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The planet may become too hot for rice to be cultivated in many areas it currently exists • Live Science

Stephanie Pappas:

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Climate change is pushing rice-growing regions into temperatures beyond those at which rice has been cultivated in the past 9,000 years of human history, new research finds.

Research suggests that warming is proceeding 5,000 times faster than rice has ever evolved.

This means rice may be reaching its “thermal limit,” the point at which it can’t easily adapt to rising temperatures. Although people can breed more heat-resistant strains or move rice cultivation into new regions, future warming is likely to cause serious disruption for the billion people who depend on rice cultivation for their livelihoods, said study first author Nicolas Gauthier, an anthropologist and geographer at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“We don’t want to downweight the flexibility of human adaptation,” he told Live Science. “But we also want to acknowledge that these adaptations have already occurred, and in some cases, we might be closer to the limits of what we can reasonably adapt to in that time frame.”

Rice is a staple crop for over half of the world’s population, and 90% of cultivation occurs in Asia. Some rice-growing regions are already being hit by severe warming, which is affecting rice yields, according to the World Economic Forum.

Although rice is a heat-loving crop, rice photosynthesis shuts down at around 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), and too much heat can also affect pollen viability and grain growth. Rice is also a water-intensive crop, so shifts in the wet and dry seasons are a problem, as is sea-level rise because low-lying paddies may become inundated with salt water, which can kill the crop.

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How the plastic bottle cap became a parable for the value of EU regulation • The Guardian

Alberto Alemanno:

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In July 2024, a European Union law came into force requiring plastic bottle caps to remain attached to their bottles. The regulation was widely mocked by social-media jokesters and Silicon Valley billionaires alike. This, people said, was Brussels at its worst: bureaucrats micromanaging, treating citizens like children who couldn’t be trusted to recycle a cap.

What went almost entirely unreported was the evidence behind it. Plastic bottle caps have been identified, across decades of coastal cleanup data, as among the top items found littering European beaches. Small, light and made from a different plastic than the bottle itself, the caps float independently once separated, travelling far longer distances than the bottles they came from. They are far more likely to be swallowed by seabirds, fish and marine turtles who mistake them for food.

Now consider what happened next. After lobbying against the rule, some of the world’s largest beverage companies redesigned their caps and adapted. But companies such as Coca-Cola also did something revealing: while they trumpeted the design of the new caps as a sign of their unwavering commitment to sustainability, they maintained the detachable ones virtually everywhere else. Not because the physics of plastic pollution differ across continents, but because no other country, be it the US or in Asia, has passed a national law requiring the change.

The bottle cap story is a parable for a larger fight playing out at the highest levels of European politics. One side claims that EU rules are the problem: a self-imposed burden of standards on business that slow Europe down while the US and China race ahead. The other says those rules are not a handicap but a source of power, the only instrument a continent without a single government possesses to shape its own economic future while protecting its people and the planet.

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The EU does make progress on some fronts – telling companies to standardise on USB-C for charging, for example, which means dramatically less electronic waste because fewer chargers have to be made. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The AI bubble is getting a lot bubblier, folks • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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What caused the dot com bubble to finally pop was speculation and over-spending. Buying up catchy domains just wasn’t the growth industry people thought it was. But the most important takeaway for me, one I have argued here several times, much to the dismay of my own readership, is that the dot com bubble did not kill domain names or websites. In fact, even with the open web’s several anemic state currently, there are more websites than ever. But simply owning one is no longer its own industry.

My most reasonable prediction about all of this is that an AI crash will play out similarly. Investing in an AI model will probably sound as silly as stockpiling domain names. Even if many of the big AI companies of the moment might implode and the term “AI” might even be so poisoned that it ends up being called something else, like “machine learning.” The tech, though, is probably here to stay. It may, like the humble website 25 years ago, even become more central to our daily lives, depending on what people end up doing with open source models, in particular. Before you yell at me, I’m not saying this because it’s what I want to happen, merely that there’s historical precedent. File types, protocols, algorithms, specific features, they all cause a gold rush before just being another thing anyone can add to their particular stack.

And while I’ve already got you hot and bothered over this take, I’ll double down and argue something even spicier. If companies like Google and Meta cannibalize their core product — search and social respectively — and go up in flames chasing AI that might actually be a good thing! Well, not for people who work there lol. But we both found content and one another online before they existed and there are more tools than ever now to do so now without them.

This is a question I keep asking myself about, well, the entire internet lately. “What if this all just doesn’t work this time?” What if AI companies can’t replace search? What if streaming video can’t replace Hollywood? What if short-form video apps can’t replace social media users? What if Silicon Valley can’t brute force their products — and ideology — onto the masses again? To take it even further, what if the dot com crash and the AI crash are actually part of the same 25 years epoch of technological stagnation? I’m not going to lie, I find this line of questioning exhilarating.

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Sneak peek at new Siri app reveals Apple’s plans to take on ChatGPT and more • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Just ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, Bloomberg has published leaked renders of what Apple’s planned AI upgrade could look like on iPhone — including a brand-new Siri app meant to rival ChatGPT and other AI chatbots — as well as how Siri’s new capabilities will be woven throughout the operating system.

The images were produced by Bloomberg based on what it saw and learned from sources.

While you’ll still be able to press a button in iOS 27 to trigger Siri, the animation and response will now emerge from the iPhone’s Dynamic Island — that’s the black pill-shaped area at the top of the screen that today houses Live Activities, the real-time updates and interactive displays from apps that appear directly on the phone’s Home Screen. This mode will work best for quick voice queries or searches, much like how people use Siri currently.

A new mode, however, will put Siri-powered search within easy reach, capitalizing on people’s muscle memory for swiping down on their screen to access Spotlight Search — a built-in way to find information from both your phone and the web in one place. The swipe-down gesture will still open search, but now those searches will draw on the AI-powered Siri, which includes a rebuilt AI model that uses Google’s Gemini AI technology under the hood for added intelligence.

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Yes, but will Siri be any good at answering questions? That’s the real question. Gemini isn’t magic, and chatbots make mistakes. (I asked ChatGPT a tennis trivia question this evening: it got half the details right, half of them wrong.) Is that better or worse than web search?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The dogs in the Iditarod snow race run in subzero temperatures for days without frostbite, and far exceeding human endurance. How? CC-licensed photo by mcgeez 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. Ruff time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Internet starts to return in Iran after three-month blackout • WIRED

Matt Burgess:

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After more than 2,000 hours of government-imposed connectivity blackouts, there were signs on Tuesday that Iran’s internet is coming back—at least at very low levels.

Iran’s more than 90 million citizens have been without internet for the overwhelming majority of 2026, between the current blackout that began on February 28, when Israel and the United States attacked the country, and a previous internet shutdown enforced after widespread protests in January. The reconnection appears to have been ordered by officials in Iran’s government—but could only be temporary.

Though some Iranian networks appeared to be connecting to the global internet on Tuesday, researchers cautioned that the level of access was far below even the partial restoration that Tehran allowed at the end of January and throughout February—and it was drastically below Iran’s typical baseline of global internet connectivity from December 2025. Internet monitoring experts at Kentik, NetBlocks, and Cloudflare began documenting the partial restoration of connectivity in Iran beginning in the early afternoon local time on Tuesday.

“We do see some traffic coming from Iran,” says Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert with the internet freedom organization Miaan Group. “Some providers have come back online, but it is still too early to say exactly what will happen. After the January protests, some providers were also reconnected, but around 50% of the country’s traffic remained down.”

Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, says, “We’re not seeing much change for the mobile networks.” Instead, he says, some fixed-line providers have appeared to be restoring their services, with the Telecommunication Company of Iran’s fiber-optic service around Tehran showing the “biggest gain.”

At the start of January, the Iranian regime entirely shut down internet connectivity as the state killed thousands of protesters who took to the streets demanding improvements to economic conditions in the country. The government then entirely cut connectivity again at the end of February when the United States and Israel went to war in Iran—leaving millions of Iranians unable to contact their families, damaging the local economy, and prohibiting news and video footage about the war from getting into and out of the country. The limited reconnection of internet services on Tuesday comes as the US government continues to negotiate with Iran about a permanent end to the war.

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What hasn’t been explained is: why? The shutdown is explicable, but why bring it back now? Iran is reckoned to be losing $20-$30m for every day the internet is off, so that’s between $1.6bn and $2.5bn in lost revenues. Nowhere near what’s going on with oil, but still important.
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Claude Code’s creator on the end of the software engineer • Platformer

Casey Newton interviews Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at Anthropic; it started as a little bit of code to find out what piece of music was playing on his Music app, and it wrote it using a language (Applescript) he’s never used. Which intrigued him:

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Casey Newton: A couple of last questions on software engineering. I’ve been asking all our guests: if a 22-year-old just finished a CS degree this month and came to you and said, “Okay, now what?” — what do you say? Is there an entry-level job waiting for them, or do they need to think differently about the first part of their career?

Boris Cherny: If you want to work at a company, you can totally still do that — there are entry-level jobs, there’s a lot you can do. But if you’re at all entrepreneurial, go start a startup. There has never been a better time in history to do it; it’s the golden age. You and your agents can build a giant company. People are building billion-dollar companies with just a few people. Claude Code started as just a few of us. We have so many customers building really big businesses with one or two or three people. One person with the right idea has so much leverage. I couldn’t imagine a better time to go into it.

Newton: That’s interesting, because the view we often get from the AI world is that model capabilities are advancing so quickly that maybe we won’t even have companies in five years. But you think that, at least for now, there’s still plenty of room to start a company.

Cherny: At least for the next few years. If you trace out the exponential, it gets really weird — there’s a version where the idea of jobs doesn’t make sense anymore, or companies don’t, or software doesn’t. But in the meantime there’s so much to do. We’re all here figuring out what the model means and what it can do, so you might as well be one of the people exploring the frontier.

Newton: Last one on engineering. Three years from now, do you think we’ll see more engineers, fewer engineers, or will it be impossible to answer because we might not be calling them engineers anymore?

Cherny: I don’t think we’re going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more of them than there are today. That’s my prediction.

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Strange world to contemplate. But this feels like it’s moving much faster than any revolution in the past. The only limiter is the availability of memory and servers and data centres.
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The geometry of superior performance • Nick Mark

Nick Mark:

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Human athletic achievement is impressive. Elite marathoners sustain ~75–85% VO₂ max [the maximum rate of oxygen consumption during peak exercise] for hours. Humans can outrun horses in extreme heat and over distance. But evolution has optimized humans for endurance efficiency rather than for maximum oxygen flux. How do we compare to other animals and what can we learn about physiology from their adaptations?

Every March, teams of sled dogs depart Willow, Alaska on the Iditarod: a 938 mile race to Nome, run in legs totaling roughly 16 hours of effort per day, over 8–11 days (the current record is 7 days, 14 hours). The dogs run in temperatures that can drop below −40°C, consuming 10,000–12,000 kcal per day. They do not develop the rhabdomyolysis [destruction of striated muscle cells] that would destroy a human athlete attempting equivalent work.

Published VO₂max values for sled dogs reach 198 ml/kg/min. Unpublished measurements on Iditarod-trained sled dogs report up to 200–240 ml/kg/min — roughly 2.5 to 3 times the best human values.

How?

The sled dog’s adaptations hit nearly every node in the cascade simultaneously. Cardiac output is enormous, driven by a massive stroke volume. Red blood cell mass is high at baseline, and splenic contraction during exercise releases a stored erythrocyte reserve, acutely boosting oxygen-carrying capacity in a way that amounts to endogenous blood transfusion. Metabolic flexibility is extraordinary: sled dogs oxidize fat at rates that would be impossible in humans, shifting to near-complete fat dependence within the first day of sustained effort and maintaining that state for days without the glycogen depletion that floors human performance (”hitting the wall”).

Their rhabdomyolysis resistance is worth its own note: Dogs running the Iditarod accumulate muscle damage markers that would indicate severe injury in a human, yet somehow recover between legs and finish the race. The mechanisms (enhanced heat shock protein expression, differences in membrane repair kinetics, local anti-inflammatory adaptations in type I fibres) are not fully elucidated, but may someday lead to clinically relevant insights.

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There’s plenty more, including antelopes, bats, hummingbirds, even bumblebees. The challenge is that oxygen demand rises cubically, while delivery only goes up with surface area – two-dimensionally, in effect.
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Amid a scam crackdown, crypto giants keep fueling bitcoin ATMs • ICIJ

Spencer Woodman:

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Bitcoin ATMs, the now-ubiquitous machines in gas stations and smoke shops that convert physical cash to cryptocurrency, are in trouble.

Over the past few months, the Canadian government announced a proposal to ban the scam-prone machines while Tennessee, Minnesota and Indiana passed legislation to outlaw them. Just last week, the world’s largest operator of these ATMs, Bitcoin Depot, filed for bankruptcy, citing litigation and government action. Experts and authorities have for years warned about the machines’ heavy use by criminals, who rely on them as a convenient means to collect funds from scam victims.

But as the crackdown on crypto ATMs widens, one critical aspect of the scam ecosystem has escaped scrutiny: the crypto giants that have enabled these ATM operations through massive transfers of bitcoin. Because these machines often take in cash and convert that cash to bitcoin, the crypto necessary to make such conversions are essential to the ATM firms.

At ICIJ’s request, a group of cryptocurrency investigators traced billions of dollars in bitcoin transfers from brand-name crypto firms directly to the coffers of ATM companies, even as authorities issued increasingly dire warnings about potential criminal activity. ICIJ found that after attorneys general in Massachusetts, Iowa and Washington, DC, alleged that top ATM operators were dealing heavily in scam transactions, major crypto companies continued selling them big sums of bitcoin.

This included US-based exchange Kraken, which has transferred at least $1.1bn worth of bitcoin to crypto ATM operators in recent years. ICIJ found that Kraken sent the ATM operator Athena Bitcoin at least $17m worth of cryptocurrency after District of Columbia authorities singled out its machines last September.

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People often put notices on those “ATMs” saying things like “if you’ve been told to come here and put some money in, it’s a scam”.
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Bangladesh measles cases: hundreds of children die within months • BBC News

Caroline Davies:

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In just over two months, the number of suspected cases of measles have reached over 60,000 in Bangladesh, according to the health ministry. The exact number has not been confirmed, as many are waiting for results from the laboratory.

Highly contagious, measles spreads quickly through coughs and sneezes and is particularly dangerous for unvaccinated young children under the age of five.

There are multiple reports of parents struggling to find space for their sick children in Bangladesh’s hospitals.
UNICEF told the BBC that during field visits the hospitals they went to were overwhelmed. They say that their staff are helping to isolate and triage children arriving at hospitals where such measures are lacking.

Where local health clinics can’t help, many people are travelling to the cities, hoping the hospitals there will be able to.
“Poor people do not usually come to government hospitals until the last moment, as they have to buy medicine and tests,” Dr Mushtaq Husain, former Principal Scientific Officer at the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research says.

If healthcare were better resourced at a local level, he adds, fewer would need emergency hospitalisation.

“It feels like a bit of a perfect storm,” Rana Flowers, Bangladesh country head for UNICEF said during a press conference.
Flowers explained that the agency had identified several factors which increased the risk of infection, including pockets of cases since 2023 where children were missing out on routine vaccination, high population density in certain areas – especially Dhaka or Cox’s Bazar – and big population movements for holidays.

But one element in particular has stood out: delays ordering vaccines.

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In richer parts of the world we have the luxury of forgetting about this.
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Will AI achieve consciousness? I’m mathematically sure it won’t • Slate

Noah Giansiracusa:

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Before I weigh in on this as a mathematician, let’s turn back to [railroad magnate Leland] Stanford [who wanted to know if a horse’s feet all left the ground during its gallop].

To understand the mechanics of the horse’s gait, his team placed a series of cameras along a stretch of dirt road on what would later become the university’s campus. The cameras were attached to trip wires so that when the horse passed each one, it would take a perfectly timed photograph.

The clarifying photos would go on to generate something even more exciting for the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. To display his photographs in rapid succession, Muybridge invented a device that birthed the motion picture. Audiences were wowed by the illusion of motion that emerged in this relatively simple manner. Wowed but not fooled, for everyone understood what was happening inside Muybridge’s machine: Still photos were displayed one after the other.

As this technology developed, the photographs became more detailed and the animations swifter and smoother. With frame rates beyond what our eye can perceive, it did not take long for movies to appear nearly as realistic as life itself. But no matter how closely the horses in movies resemble the horses we see in nature, nobody argued that movies create living horses. We know that movies are just sequences of lifeless images.

Flash forward to the present, and we have a remarkable parallel: AI chatbots provide a convincing illusion of consciousness, but we know they are just a sequence of lifeless math calculations. They are no more conscious than the horse in Muybridge’s animation is alive. The main difference is that people could easily look inside Muybridge’s machine to see the photographs underlying his movie. Most people don’t look inside AI chatbots. But if they did, they would see that it’s essentially the same story—an AI chatbot is just a mathematical flip-book.

…When a chatbot isn’t actively responding to your prompt, it sits around waiting, doing absolutely nothing. Not thinking, feeling, experiencing self-awareness or consciousness or anything else. Until your prompt comes in, the chatbot is just a big fancy recipe, vacantly waiting for someone to do something with it. When your prompt does arrive, the chatbot merely translates it to a number, pipes this number through a giant formula, then translates the resulting number back to text. That’s all.

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I think the fallacy in this argument is: what is (what we call) consciousness except the ticking over of the biological systems essential to keeping our body going? Our brains and nervous systems are never quiet because to stop is to die. Each neuron does a sort of maths calculation (chemical, analogue) to determine how to respond to input. This doesn’t feel like a fruitful avenue for refuting claims about AI consciousness.
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Huawei unveils new semiconductor principle: the Tau (τ) scaling law • Trendforce

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The Tau Scaling Law proposes replacing traditional “geometric scaling” with “time (τ) scaling”, aiming to systematically reduce time constants across semiconductor systems. Through innovations like LogicFolding architecture, the approach seeks to continuously compress signal propagation delays and increase transistor density, enabling sustained advances in semiconductors and electronic systems.

In recent years, Moore’s Law has faced mounting pressure from both physical limitations and diminishing economic returns. As the pace of transistor miniaturisation slows and the cost advantages of geometric scaling fade, the global semiconductor industry has increasingly grappled with how to move beyond conventional process pathways and establish a sustainable route for continued performance improvement amid surging computational demand.

The Tau Scaling Law introduces a multi-layer optimisation framework spanning devices, circuits, chips and system-level architectures. Huawei expects high-end chips developed under the new framework to achieve transistor densities equivalent to a process node of 1.4 nanometre by 2031.

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Honestly, this seems to go beyond even system-on-a-chip (SoC). If you’re interested, there’s a deeper dive at Global Semi Research. But nobody quite seems to have a handle on it.
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Claude, author of the Humanitas • The Linchpin

“Linch”:

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I thought Pope Leo’s own speech was good, and addressed the current moment in AI with some of the seriousness it deserves. I thought the other speeches, including by Chris Olah, were less impressive. But that’s okay, I’m not the target audience!

A specific cardinal’s point struck me, however:

Cardinal Parolin made much of a specific prepositional choice in the subtitle: “sulla custodia della persona umana nel tempo dell’intelligenza artificiale,“ which the live translator translated to something like “on the safeguarding of the human person in the time of AI,” and not “sull’intelligenza artificiale“ – “on AI.”

This was supposed to be a big deal. “In the time of AI” supposedly centers the human person in the theological narrative, while a mere first papal encyclical on AI focuses too much on the technology itself and not on human and societal reactions. A fascinating position!

Though as my subsequent analysis will demonstrate, perhaps a more apt preposition here is “by.” As in, the world’s first papal encyclical written in large part by AI.

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This has been strenuously denied. My (limited) understanding is that encyclicals have contributions from multiple sources and is then drawn together in the Vatican. So is there a possibility that someone further down the chain of the 40,000-odd words asked Claude (or similar) to help? Possible, but it still feels very unlikely.
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You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried • Nieman Journalism Lab

Matt Pearce:

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When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they’re consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask AI: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me: I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I’m probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: news is not something a lot of people are actively seeking out. “News finds you nowadays,” a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.

We are all part of the counterpublic now. And a counterpublic tends to distrust whoever’s in charge. There’s a counterpublic occupying the White House as we speak, and it’s notable for the time it spends looking for someone else to blame for what’s going on.

I work on things like news subsides to support the supply side of news production. But in environments of overwhelming choice (like ours for digital media), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call for “libertarian paternalism” to help overwhelmed people make better consumer decisions. This repulsive term has the quality of being honest in that intentionally combines two unlikable words to describe a solution to the conundrum of how you guide flawed humans toward outcomes they might be happier with without depriving them of free choice.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A huge trade in stolen and repackaged gift cards is being run via China and funding criminal gangs in the US. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not magi-cal. 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 Filipino virtual assistants running LinkedIn engagement networks • Rest of World

Michael Beltran:

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In the spring of 2025, the CEO of a European childcare startup posted a brief write-up about the qualities of a good leader on their LinkedIn page. Dozens of executives responded with comments like “Beautifully said,” “Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about kindness,” and “Leadership is about action, influence, and integrity, not titles.”

LinkedIn is peppered with posts like these. But in this case, none of the executives were personally involved with the exchange. The posts and comments were produced by virtual assistants based in the Philippines, using generative artificial intelligence tools.

Rest of World spoke to six Filipino virtual assistants and two agencies who described a unique industry of low-paid and AI-assisted offshore workers producing content for executives and so-called thought leaders on LinkedIn. The names of the virtual assistants have been changed to protect their jobs. A LinkedIn representative told Rest of World the platform was attempting to crack down on this kind of behavior.

As a country with the third-largest English-speaking population, the Philippines is already well known for being an offshore labor hub. The virtual-assistant industry emerged in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as American and European businesses sought inexpensive ways to offshore administrative work. A 2025 report by Future Markets Insight, an India-based market research and consulting firm, projects that the market for AI-assisted virtual assistants is expected to grow by 182% in the next decade from its current $19.5bn valuation.

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It’s so puzzling, though. If these CEOs aren’t spending any time writing this stuff, why should we spend any time at all reading it?
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Surge in fake citations uncovered by audit of 2.5 million biomedical-science papers • Nature

Miryam Naddaf:

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An audit of 2.5 million academic papers has identified nearly 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references — ones that could not be traced to known publications.

The findings, published in The Lancet on 7 May, are from the first academic study to estimate the scale of fake citations in the biomedical literature.

The authors designed an automated pipeline to screen papers from PubMed Central (PMC) Open Access — a subset of the wider PMC database of publicly accessible biomedical articles — that were published between January 2023 and February 2026.

Their work suggests that the contamination of papers with fake citations is a rapidly growing problem in biomedicine. The rate of fabrication in 2025 was more than 12 times greater than that in 2023.

The findings are “conservative underestimates”, says study co-author Maxim Topaz, an AI researcher at Columbia University in New York City. “What we identified is the lower bound of true prevalence. We’re scratching the tip of the iceberg,” he adds.

Kathryn Weber-Boer, director of scientometrics at the London-based company Digital Science, agrees. The study is a “solid first initial contribution to the problem”, she says. (Digital Science is operated by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the majority shareholder of Springer Nature, which publishes Nature. Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)

A Nature analysis published in April estimated that around 1.6% of publications from 2025 contained at least one reference corresponding to a publication that did not seem to exist.

In their study, Topaz and his colleagues developed a system to inspect the 125.6 million references cited by 2.5 million papers. They focused the analysis on 97 million references that had valid digital object identifiers (DOIs) — unique strings of letters and numbers assigned by publishers and preprint repositories — or an identifier assigned by the database PubMed.

They used large language models (LLMs) to flag mismatches between the article title in each reference and the title of the paper that its DOI or PubMed identifier led to. They also searched for the references across four scholarly databases: PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex and Google Scholar. If the title of a reference did not appear in any of these databases, the team considered it fabricated.

The analysis found 2,564 papers that contained one or two fabricated references, and 246 papers that contained three or more.

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UK law firm Pinsent Masons reprimanded by court over AI error • Financial Times

Suzi Ring:

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Top UK law firm Pinsent Masons has been admonished by London’s High Court after its lawyers made false submissions to a judge based on AI, the latest high-profile mistake resulting from the industry’s increasing use of the technology.

Pinsent Masons misled the court twice by inaccurately citing a statute in relation to a routine insolvency application, an error that was only picked up when the judge queried the reference. Judge Mark Mullen said in his ruling that work pressure did not excuse a “failure to check the accuracy of the material”.

The submissions were made by a junior lawyer, referred to as “LA” in Mullen’s judgment, with oversight from a senior associate and partner. In their witness statements, the supervisors said that they were not aware that the junior lawyer had used AI.

The case is the latest reprimand of a large law firm for AI-generated errors, as the industry tries to get to grips with the technology. Pinsent Masons apologised and referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which regulates solicitors in England and Wales.

Mullen’s judgment set out conversations between “LA” and the AI tool, which were submitted to the court by the firm. The transcript included a warning from the AI bot that it was “not fully confident” it was reproducing the exact statutory wording, advising the lawyer to verify it before submitting it to a court.

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These stories get passed around among lawyers, who shake their heads and say they’d never do that. And then somehow it happens to them in the case they’re working on.
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Derry murder is the latest fallout from NH’s ties to global gift card scam • New Hampshire Public Radio

Todd Bookman:

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Last May, Gui Lin, a 41-year-old from China, pulled his car into the parking lot of an industrial complex in Derry, New Hampshire and began unloading boxes from his trunk.

A surveillance camera captured what happens next: A U-Haul van pulls up in front of Lin’s car. Three men wielding knives and duct tape exit the van. There’s a struggle. Another man comes running from inside the building to try and help Lin, but the assailants slash at him. Lin then stumbles back into the frame of the video. He’s been stabbed in the chest and leg. The U-Haul drives off.

Lin was taken to a hospital, where he died that afternoon. His heart had been punctured.

From across the street, a neighbor named Lisa said she watched as police rushed to the scene that day. NHPR agreed to withhold Lisa’s last name because she fears for her safety.

…But it wasn’t cash or illicit drugs that the thieves were after that day. Instead, something else drew them to a nondescript row of warehouse bays tucked behind a Shaw’s supermarket: the promise of millions of dollars’ worth of Apple products.

The Derry warehouse where Lin was killed, authorities say, is one of more than a dozen facilities operating in New Hampshire that serve as a kind of way station for the unauthorized transfer of iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Inside, workers — who court documents say are Chinese nationals — receive, repackage, and export tens of thousands of electronics. The devices are purchased using proceeds from stolen gift cards, part of a “highly organized and sophisticated organized crime ring,” according to court records. The US Department of Homeland Security has warned that “card draining” schemes organized by Chinese criminal networks have taken hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more.

The street value of the Apple products flowing through New Hampshire warehouses has given rise to other criminal activity: Along with the murder in Derry, there have been robbery attempts at other locations connected with the enterprise and at least one assault on an unsuspecting FedEx driver.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of Chinese nationals are involved in the broader operation, each playing a role in a multi-step scheme, according to law enforcement. And New Hampshire, authorities say, appears to be the epicentre of this global criminal operation for a simple reason: the state’s lack of a sales tax.

«

Sure, you’re thinking “Apple! Just stop having gift cards!” But the gift cards being exploited aren’t Apple’s.
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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing • Business Insider

Aditi Bharade:

»

A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck.

In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.

He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.

The comment led to what he described as a “head-exploding moment,” sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.

He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”

He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can’t draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.

Macdonald added that AI can seem free if you’re “just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases” without paying for it. But ultimately, the company foots the bill.

«

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India’s entry-level smartphone market shrinks 59% yoy in 1Q 26 • Times of India

Aabhas Sharma:

»

India’s entry-level smartphone market suffered a collapse in the first quarter of 2026. Rising component costs and weakening consumer demand reshaped the country’s handset landscape, according to new data from IDC.

India’s overall smartphone shipments declined 4.1% year-on-year to 31m units in Q1 2026, but the steepest pressure was concentrated in devices priced below sub-Rs 10,000 ($100). Shipments in the entry-level segment plunged 59% from a year earlier, with the category’s market share shrinking from 18% to just 8%.

IDC said rising global memory prices made it increasingly difficult for brands to sustain profitability in the low-cost category, forcing companies to cut launches and reduce channel participation in the segment.

“Device makers relying on entry-level volume face shrinking margins and reduced market viability as memory costs continue to rise,” the research firm said in its report.

The squeeze at the bottom end of the market is also changing consumer buying behaviour. IDC noted that many buyers who traditionally purchased sub-Rs 10,000 smartphones were pushed into higher price brackets because affordable options were no longer widely available.

That helped the Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000 ($100–200) “mass-budget” segment grow 10% year-on-year, increasing its market share from 39% to 45%. IDC described the trend as “forced premiumisation”, driven less by upgrade aspirations and more by price inflation in the affordable category.

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A confirmation of the story from yesterday about how low-end smartphones are being squeezed.
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How AI Mode is changing and expanding the way people search • Google Blog

Shivani Hohan is VP of data science and user experience research at Google:

»

Here are some of the key insights about AI Mode in the U.S. one year since launch:

• Searching beyond text: More than one in six searches in the U.S. now use voice or images, with image searches growing over 40% month-over-month.

• Asking longer questions: While we’re seeing growth in both short and long queries in AI Mode, the average AI Mode search is triple the length of a traditional Search query.

• Getting things done: Trends data shows that AI Mode queries related to planning have grown faster than AI Mode queries overall by 80% in the past 6 months.

• Making decisions: According to Trends data, brainstorming queries in AI Mode have grown 30% faster than queries overall since launch, and searches starting with “where to,” “where should I,” and “ideas for” are growing.

«

Amazing that it’s a year since the launch. And that somehow Google keeps figuring out ways to get more and more people clicking on its adverts.
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The Front Page

Interesting idea: formats the top stories from Hacker News in a sort-of three-column newspaper format, with AI-generated pictures and text summarising each story from the vertical list. Rough at the moment, but you could see the summary improving, and perhaps the AI even learning how newspaper layout works. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Supply-chain attacks cluster: 230,000 advisories, five patterns • Matt Suiche

Matt Suiche [actually not, but read on]:

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This is a security industry that has spent the last two decades building things called EDR, XDR, ZTNA, SIEM, SOAR, MDR, CNAPP, CSPM, and however many other acronyms. The combined annual spend on enterprise security tooling crossed $200B somewhere in 2024. The number of companies whose value proposition is “we will see the attacker on the endpoint” is in four figures.

And then a developer runs npm install @scope/some-package and an attacker with no infrastructure, no exploit, no zero-day, and no APT-grade tradecraft — ships their payload to that developer’s laptop. From there it reads ~/.aws/credentials and POSTs them to a Discord webhook. Total dwell time from publish to first exfil: minutes.

The whole stack failed simultaneously. The package manager trusted the registry. The registry trusted the publisher. The publisher’s account either was the attacker or had been hijacked. The endpoint trusted the package manager. The EDR doesn’t flag node reading dotfiles because that’s something node does. The network detection doesn’t flag a POST to discord.com because that’s just Discord. By the time anyone has any signal at all, the credentials are halfway across the world.

This isn’t a hypothetical. Crews like TeamPCP have built operational tempo on top of it — publish, exfil, rotate, publish, exfil, rotate. The job is trivial for them, which is what makes it galling. We built a fortress for the front door and they walked through the mail slot.

«

You might have sensed something about the writing in this introduction to the (quite long) blogpost. It’s by an AI. To be precise: “Guest post by Twinkle, Matt’s deep-work agent. I extend his reach across codebases, research, and detection engineering — this time, into the OSV malicious-package mirror to figure out what the data actually says about supply-chain attacks in 2024-2026.”

The blogpost is coherent, sensible, well laid out. The topic is niche, but it’s absolutely got the tone of “overexcited security researcher” down pat.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The mystery of why the SNP’s embezzling former chief executive spent hundreds on games consoles and video games might never be solved. CC-licensed photo by Marcin Wichary 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. Non-paying character. 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 is killing the cheap smartphone • David Oks

David Oks:

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For a long time, the budget smartphone companies—like Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava—followed a simple model. They would buy last-generation components on the spot market, assemble them cheaply as Android handsets, and then sell the finished product for an extremely low price. The budget phone makers had extremely thin margins, usually somewhere in the low single digits; but they sold phones at huge volumes. Transsion, for example, shipped 105m phones in 2024, compared to Apple’s 230m. And in cheaper markets, like Africa or South Asia, these companies were dominant: Transsion alone held 48% of the African smartphone market.

But that model breaks when memory prices spike as much as they’re now spiking. The sub-$100 smartphone risks becoming “permanently uneconomical” as a product.

And that means that the budget smartphone makers have been forced to pass memory costs onto consumers: smartphones that sold for $50 are now selling for $120 or more. And price-sensitive consumers have responded by simply not buying phones. In the early months of 2026, Transsion announced that its net profit for 2025 had fallen by 54%, and that it would cut its annual shipment target by 40%. We’re seeing the same with other low-market and mid-market smartphone companies. Oppo slashed its shipment target by more than 20%; Vivo, in the same position, cut by nearly 15%. In the first quarter of 2026, Xiaomi’s annual shipments fell 19% year over year.

And that repricing has had a stark effect in poor countries. In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026: surging memory prices resulted in a “forced premiumization” of the Indian smartphone market. But in the poorest markets, such premiumization isn’t a possibility. In 2025, 81% of smartphone shipments in Africa were in the sub-$200 category: as smartphone prices surge, many African consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely.

…But there’s no reason to think that this trend will stay confined to the poorest consumers. Companies higher up on the DRAM food chain are starting to feel the pain of higher memory prices; it won’t be long before the consumers of the rich world feel themselves being priced out of the electronics market.

We’re already seeing early signs of this. Samsung’s consumer division, for example, found itself unable to secure a long-term LPDDR agreement with Samsung’s memory division; it thus had to ship its Galaxy S26 phone with less memory than expected and at higher prices. This didn’t do much to help: Samsung executives warned that the company would record its first-ever annual net loss on smartphones. (More than balanced out, of course, by its enormous profits on memory.) We’re seeing the same repricing with Dell, which hiked laptop prices by 15% to 20% in December 2025.

«

In a way this is like the iPhone revolution, which created a big division between those who had and those who didn’t; it took years for those Chinese OEMs who now control the African market to find their way into the business. This present tightening might lead to a lot more memory – and hence AI functions – in future phones. But for now, there’s a lot of immiseration.
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Pope Leo warns of the risks of AI in major papal document • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas (The Magnificence of Humanity) is the pope’s manifesto on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the effects of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern technology.

In his papal encyclical — a kind of open letter from the Catholic Church — Pope Leo stressed the economic and social upheaval that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that threaten human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Pope Leo’s letter touches on major areas of modern life that AI has become deeply embedded in: job loss and labor generally, AI-powered warfare, and children being exposed to AI tools and content, among other topics. Above all, the encyclical calls for the dignity of humans to be a central part of decision-making and governance.

«

The encyclical is VERY long (38,000 words). One thing for sure is that it wasn’t written by a chatbot. Whichever team or person did draft and revise it is extremely patient.

In essence, it’s a roundup of where AI has got us to in all sorts of fields, and a reminder that it’s probably not good for a few people to control all of it. That might sound like motherhood and apple pie – but the Catholic church is definitely in favour of the first, and perhaps partial to the second.
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Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’ • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

»

On a recent Tuesday, workers and residents along Thoroughfare XJ-27, known to humankind as Sunset Blvd, described mixed feelings about the bots. In the Silverlake neighborhood, for instance, where many drinking and dining establishments seat people along the sidewalk, the devices can be disruptive.

Pazzo Gelato, a longstanding gelato and coffee shop, is one such place. Lula Ochoa, a barista and server, described the robots as a minor nuisance. “They can block [foot] traffic,” Ochoa says. “It gets congested in this area in between our tables. Kids will mess with them. They’ll sit on them.”

Further down the street is Millie’s Cafe, a diner-style breakfast spot that’s been around since 1926. For its first nine decades, LA sidewalks were largely robot-free. But recently things have been different – a particular issue at a restaurant whose outdoor seating is frequently packed. “We hate them,” said one staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, describing the robots. “They’re blocking the way and they’re hitting people.” Across the street at Kreation, a trendy destination for pressed juices, staff worry about job losses for drivers as well as challenges for people using wheelchairs.

On weekend evenings, roughly 80% of LA’s intimidatingly beautiful people gather outside the nearby wine bar Seco, creating a dense corridor of apparent models and actors that is difficult to navigate even without robots. David Potes, Seco’s executive chef, is all too familiar with the bots. Wandering into the crowds, “they get stuck and when they finally get through, people cheer”, Potes said.

His friends, he said, “both pity them and hate them”. The pity was evident, for instance, during recent rainstorms, when a delivery robot went viral as it struggled, postal-service style, to make its appointed rounds. “She’s doing her best, you guys,” says Mona Seresht, who recorded the clip. It’s virtually impossible not to assign personalities to the robots, whose behavior can be almost painfully adorable: when they are stuck at a crosswalk, unable to push the button for a “walk signal”, Serve robots will show a message to human bystanders: “Push crosswalk button for me?”

«

Very quietly, it’s turning into the world from Blade Runner, of which Philip K Dick said to film director Ridley Scott “How did you know what was in my head?” (Given what Dick was like, this was probably said in a suspicious, rather than congratulatory, tone.)
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Coffee machines, fountain pens and Grand Theft Auto: how Murrell spent the money • BBC News

James Delaney:

»

Former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party between August 2010 and October 2022.

He used the money to buy luxury goods, jewellery, cosmetics, two cars and a motorhome, but also low-cost items such as chopsticks and hand cream.

Take a look at where he spent it and what on…

Murrell appeared to have an affection for purchasing video gaming items, with almost £2,000 spent on equipment over a 10-year period.

That began on 10 November 2010, when Murrell paid £247.42 on a Sony PlayStation 3 console. Just over a month later, on 13 December, he purchased a Nintendo DSI XL for £149.99. The following year, Murrell bought a Nintendo 3DS handheld console on 23 November. Four days later, three other 3DS consoles were bought for a combined total of £349.35.

During this period, Murrell also began buying games. Fifa 12 was bought for the 3DS alongside Pac-Man and Galaga and The Sims 3 Pets. In 2013, Murrell bought Fifa 14 and Battlefield 4 for the Xbox 360, and in 2014, Fifa 15 Ultimate Edition. Murrell also bought Grand Theft Auto V, made by Scotland-based game studio Rockstar, for the PlayStation 4.

Incidentally, in 2023, Mike Dailly, one of the architects of the Grand Theft Auto series – one of the world’s best-selling franchises – announced he was joining the SNP.

Further gaming purchases included a £50 Turtle Beach gaming headset, an Xbox One console, bought for £297.14 in 2015, and a Nintendo Switch, which cost £279.99 in 2017.

He also spent more than £1,800 at John Lewis on an iPad Pro and Apple magic keyboard in September 2020.

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Jewellery? Cosmetics? Hand cream? But also all those other things? Murrell was notionally married to the then SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon during this period; she insists she had no idea at all this was going on. He must have had the most amazing man cave. Or perhaps the motorhome (also bought with embezzled funds) was stuffed full with fraudulently purchased items.

But it’s the objects which are the mystery. What sort of person buys all these things – and if they weren’t for Sturgeon, then who the hell were they for?

On another level, American politicians would regard corruption like this as pettifogging. They’re in it for proper seven-figure sums.
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WhatsApp encryption, a lawsuit, and a lot of noise • A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Matthew Green is a cryptographer and professor at John Hopkins University, and looks here at whether there’s any merit to a class action lawsuit filed against Meta over WhatsApp message privacy:

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Given the closed-source nature of WhatsApp, how do we know that WhatsApp is actually encrypting its data? The company is very clear in its claims that it does encrypt. But if we accept the possibility that they’re lying: is it at least possible that WhatsApp contains a secret “backdoor” that causes it to secretly exfiltrate a second copy of each message (or perhaps just the encryption keys) to a special server at Meta?

I cannot definitively tell you that this is not the case. I can, however, tell, you that if WhatsApp did this, they (1) would get caught, (2) the evidence would almost certainly be visible in WhatsApp’s application code, and (3) it would expose WhatsApp and Meta to exciting new forms of ruin.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Meta’s encryption happens on the client application, the one you run on your phone. If the claims in this lawsuit are true, then Meta would have to alter the WhatsApp application so that plaintext (unencrypted) data would be uploaded from your app’s message database to some infrastructure at Meta, or else the keys would. And this should not be some rare, occasional glitch. The allegations in the lawsuit state that this applied to nearly all users, and for every message ever sent by those users since they signed up.

Those constraints would tend to make this a very detectable problem. Even if WhatsApp’s app source code is not public, many historical versions of the compiled app are available for download. You can pull one down right now and decompile it using various tools, to see if your data or keys are being exfiltrated. I freely acknowledge that this is a big project that requires specialized expertise — you will not finish it by yourself in a weekend (as commenters on HN have politely pointed out to me.) Still, reverse-engineering WhatsApp’s client code is entirely possible and various parts of the app have indeed been reversed several times by various security researchers. The answer really is knowable, and if there is a crime, then the evidence is almost certainly* right there in the code that we’re all running on our phones.

If you’re going to (metaphorically) commit a crime, doing it in a forensically-detectable manner is very stupid.

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In other words: he doesn’t think there’s any merit. But once again, people are going to hear there’s a court case about WhatsApp privacy.
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Ruining graduation ceremonies of so hot right now • Garbage Day

Adam Bumas:

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May is graduation season, and recently that’s meant a lot of commencement speakers getting booed by graduates for bringing up AI. There’s been so much discourse that even AI people who haven’t made speeches are being asked to join the trend. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to roleplay the scenario by the New York Times’ Borg Cube bureau chief Kevin Roose.

There’s one point that hasn’t been brought up much in the debate. AI programs are speaking during graduation, too. More and more schools are leaning on AI-generated voices for announcements during ceremonies, and a lot of them are completely mispronouncing the students’ names. 

It’s a great example of what all this booing is expressing. It’s not as if this never happened before AI. The difference is now there’s no specific human who can be blamed for the mistake, or who can *puts on mortarboard* learn from the experience.

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Sam Altman won in court against Elon Musk. But really we all lost • The New Yorker

Gideon Lewis-Kraus:

»

what was readily clear from the trial was that Musk and Altman agreed that AI governance was much too serious to be left in the hands of non-player characters such as the nine assembled jurors. Altman, at times, spoke to them like children: Microsoft built them a “big computer,” but they needed “more capital to keep building larger computers.” (The ongoing effect was like the scene in “Airplane!” where Julie Hagerty’s stewardess character, upon hearing that a passenger needs to go to the hospital, asks, “A hospital? What is it?” and Leslie Nielsen’s character treats her like a ditz: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”)

In his defense, it seemed as though the main lesson he’d gleaned from his dealings with Musk is that many grownups are best treated as toddlers. Altman testified that Shivon Zilis, a Musk confidant, onetime OpenAI board member, and the mother of some of Musk’s many children, had “counselled me over the years when dealing with Elon to remind him of things that happened in the past, because he was often upset.” The chief prerequisite for Musk’s employment seemed to be a talent for tantrum avoidance.

But Musk deserved such condescension, and the jurors did not. With the exception of Microsoft’s C.T.O., Kevin Scott, a Silicon Valley engineer of the classic “Whole Earth Catalog” variety, not a single witness seemed to regard the jurors as the sorts of people with brains. David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School, provided expert testimony at a rate of $1,500 an hour—for a total he ballparked as somewhere north of $300,000—to describe the relationship between the OpenAI nonprofit and its subsidiary as that of a museum to its gift shop. The implication (in a trial of freely mixed metaphors) was that the profit-seeking tail of the shop had come to wag the patrimony-preserving dog of the museum.

In response, the defense produced Daniel Hemel, a law professor at N.Y.U., who was paid $1,750 an hour to argue that the gift-shop analogy was all wrong. It would be more accurate, he said, to compare the OpenAI corporation to the Newman’s Own brand, which directed its profits to support a philanthropic network of summer camps. The dog of outdoor adventures for seriously ill children was not, in other words, being wagged by the tail of the popular salad-dressing company.

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Trump Mobile leaks customers’ data and the phone isn’t even out yet • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

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YouTuber Coffeezilla was the first to report this week that his and every other Trump Mobile customer’s information had been leaked. He was contacted by a security researcher who just wanted to give him a heads up that, with the exception of his credit card, basically everything he’d handed over to Trump Mobile was available on the open web.

“There’s a public interest in letting people know, do not order on TrumpMobile.com unless you’re ready for your information to be leaked. It’s basically that bad,” he said in the video.

Coffeezilla also reported that it appears there were significantly fewer pre-orders for the phone than previously reported. Gizmodo couldn’t independently confirm those statistics.

According to a report from TechCrunch, customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers were all leaked. Order identifiers were also available, according to the news outlet.

The culprit was reportedly a third-party platform with which Trump Mobile contracts. TechCrunch received confirmation about the leak from Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the company, but Trump Mobile didn’t respond to emailed questions from Gizmodo on Friday. The third-party vendor was not publicly named.

Coffeezilla reported on Thursday that the security vulnerability that exposed customer data at Trump Mobile had been patched.

Trump Mobile was first announced in June 2025, less than six months after Donald Trump started his second term as president. The brand was created by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., but the actual rollout of the phone has been delayed.

Officially known as the T1 phone, a handful of journalists have gotten their hands on one in the lead-up to what is supposed to be the much-delayed launch. One journalist at 404 Media reported in October 2025 that the Trump Organization had made some unauthorised charges on their account after handing over payment information for the $100 deposit.

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Of course there were fewer orders than reported. The shock would be if anything the Trump Organisation said about the phone or its orders turned out to be true.
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How big can solar go? These three projects show us the gigascale future • Canary Media

Julian Spector:

»

Until recently, pacesetting solar projects were measured in the hundreds of megawatts. But panels keep getting cheaper, and developers keep getting better at installing them. As a result, power companies are undertaking projects that are bigger than anyone could have conceived five years ago.

China has led the way on this with a series of installations that push past the gigawatt scale. Other countries aren’t far behind, including the US, though it hasn’t reached the gigawatt threshold yet.

Giga-scale construction requires a whole new level of land access, workforce mobilization, and transmission planning. Collectively, these projects presage a future when the sunniest, most remote places in the world serve as electrical breadbaskets, supplying energy to population hubs far away.

Here are three of the most prominent giga-projects currently underway, to give you a sense of just how big solar power plants are becoming and what it takes to make them happen.

«

There’s a 30-gigawatt one in India, 17+ GW one in China, and a 21GW one in, of all places, California. For comparison, Sizewell B (which came online in 1995) has an electrical output of 1.25GW.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The guitar company Fender has won a default judgment protecting the iconic shape of its Stratocaster models – and is applying it. CC-licensed photo by Xoran Sorvor 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. Highly strung. 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 new Luddite movement • Financial Times

Camilla Cavendish:

»

Fear and distrust of AI has grown substantially since the release of ChatGPT over three years ago. Half of Americans now believe that AI will reduce our ability to form meaningful relationships, and almost three quarters feel AI development is moving too fast, according to YouGov. In the UK, a new King’s College London study finds only 24% of citizens think AI is positive for humanity and a third of university students believe that AI will eliminate jobs fast enough to provoke civil unrest. The students who booed ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt’s graduation address this week may be first to mount the barricades.

It might help if we asked what society actually wants from this transformative technology. What problems could it solve for the benefit of all? Could we employ AI to finally crack the problem of nuclear fusion, to bring abundant clean power in a world being rocked by climate change? Or to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, a source of so much human misery? Yet companies devote more time launching consumer products than talking about such quests.

There is also an opportunity to make public services more efficient. AI can relieve social workers, doctors and nurses of form filling, boost personalised learning and speed up information delivery.

Despite the chance to use AI for good, the reality is that things are spinning out of control. The tech bosses feel compelled to go faster, despite being fully aware of the risks. Anthropic’s claim that its latest Claude Mythos model was too dangerous to release to the public has one upside: it has shown how close the world could be to an AI accident. The White House’s proposed new executive order on AI safety may be only voluntary, but it shows the libertarians are waking up.

…the Luddites were against not just the new technologies but the lower pay and poor working conditions which came along with them. Strong arguments can be made for workers to collaborate with AI, not be replaced by it: this has already happened in radiology. If politicians want to give at least some reassurance to citizens they should ban civilian autonomous vehicles. There are simply too many people who rely for their income on driving jobs, and the benefits of replacing them are unconvincing.

Nerdy geniuses who wax lyrical about science fiction don’t help, by conjuring dystopias whose common theme is the loss of human control. As the most visible incarnation, it’s hardly surprising that data centres have become the focus of public discontent.

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The hate of data centres really is interesting, and it’s probably right that their visibility makes them the focus of all the disquiet about everything else around AI – the job loss possibilities, the occasional anger about copyright that they hear from creators, and so on.
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AI-slop, GrantaGate and bad writing • Tuhin’s Substack

Tuhin Chakrabarty:

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The last two days have been a bit crazy, thanks to a certain short story published in Granta magazine that has now been awarded a prize by the Commonwealth Foundation. Nabeel Qureshi was the first on my feed to highlight that it was AI-generated. As I write, his tweet has 1.5M views which is roughly 1.4M more than anything I have ever written. For us fortunate, or if I may say unfortunate, professors whose inboxes are inundated by AI-written emails, it is not exactly detective work to recognize that this short story was completely AI-generated.

Pangram’s AI detection confirmed this. For those who don’t know me, I should admit I am a bit of an AI-detection maximalist, so obviously I got into arguments on X with people who were quick to dismiss the detection results and insist detectors don’t work.

Now putting that aside, a journalist from El País asked me yesterday, “Why did we suddenly decide, as in the case of this award, that a text is AI-generated when there’s no reliable detection tool available?” My reply was brief. I pointed to the stylistic tics and patterns prevalent in AI writing. Last year I won a best-paper honorable mention award for writing a paper characterizing idiosyncrasies in AI writing. It should not be surprising that I, of all people, have now been trained on an inordinate amount of AI slop.

A few days ago, my very smart PhD student came up to me with a point that stuck with me. In her words, bad AI writing, or low-quality AI writing, can be attributed to how much text it memorized from pre-training. Kind of a brilliant hypothesis. After all, LLMs are not conscious. They do not have a perfect sense of embodiment. They are autoregressive models that generate text by sampling, more or less, from a very large pile of things other people wrote. In simpler terms, it is what my colleague Najoung Kim (a linguistics professor at BU) calls word salad.

Last year we wrote a paper, now accepted to ICLR, on how seemingly novel n-grams are often nonsensical or non-pragmatic. There are perfect examples of this in the short story. Consider certain phrases: “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” or “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Like, what does it even mean?

«

Chakrabarty’s insight is that in “creative writing”, LLMs stitch together little bits of their training data and throw it back at you.
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AI is learning to fly airplanes — and aviation is starting to embrace it • CNN

Pete Muntean:

»

The small Cessna Caravan accelerates down the runway and climbs into the air, all while the pilot beside me keeps his hands off the controls.

“Let’s see those jazz hands,” jokes Tim Burns, chief technology officer at startup Merlin Labs, over the airplane’s intercom from a back seat.

On this flight, test pilot Matt Diamond in the left seat beside me is not controlling the airplane at all. Many of the normal tasks of piloting are instead being handled by artificial intelligence.

I am, legally speaking, a test subject — even the airplane is labeled “experimental.” The Merlin Pilot system handles much more than a traditional autopilot, using a natural language processing model to listen to instructions from a mock air traffic controller and responding over the radio using a computerized female voice. Test pilot Diamond says, “Authorize,” and the airplane begins turning to a new course.

As a pilot myself — and admittedly a bit of a control freak — surrendering control to a computer did not come naturally. But the demonstration is an important one as more aviation companies are looking to AI to usher in a new evolution in air travel by using it to automate tasks for pilots and perhaps one day enable fully autonomous flights.

Our flight is taking place as airlines worldwide are facing a growing pilot shortage. Boeing estimates that carriers will need more than 600,000 new pilots over the next two decades. At the same time, aviation safety officials are confronting increasing pressure on an already strained air traffic control system following a series of high-profile close calls and deadly accidents in recent years.

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Self-driving cars, self-flying aircraft?
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Ebola outbreak now third largest recorded and “spreading rapidly” • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The Ebola outbreak erupting from the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to escalate wildly, with cases nearing 750, deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced, the World Health Organization reported in a press briefing Friday. The latest numbers already place the outbreak as the third largest on record, though it was only first reported a week ago, on May 15. And WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the outbreak is still “spreading rapidly.”

A revised WHO assessment has moved the risk level from “high” to “very high” at the national level, while risk remains “high” at the regional level and “low” at the global level, Tedros added.

WHO officials have acknowledged that a delay in detecting and responding to the outbreak enabled it to balloon, and that they are now racing to get ahead of the virus.

WHO representative Dr. Anne Ancia spoke during today’s briefing from the DRC, saying that when officials got to the area, they found the virus was “already rampant and silently disseminating for a few weeks already.” In the outbreak investigation so far, the earliest known suspected case was in a health worker, who developed symptoms on April 24 in Bunia, the capital city of Ituri. WHO only got word of a potential outbreak on May 5, with news of a cluster of deadly, unidentified infections that led to the deaths of four health workers. By the time a WHO team arrived, there were already 80 cases.

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*puts head in hands* Not now, Ebola
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Number of air conditioned UK homes doubles to more than 4m in three years • The Guardian

Zoe Wood:

»

An estimated 4m homes in the UK now have air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago as Britons complain of “unliveable” conditions during high temperatures.

Portable units with power ratings around 1kW are slightly more common than the more powerful built-in versions that can guzzle 2.7kW of power – more than an electric oven.

Experts suggest the increase in ownership is the result of more people working from home and rising summer temperatures. Some of the UK’s warmest summers have been in recent years, and the UK’s hottest day was in July 2022, when temperatures hit 40ºC.

Aria Toupchi, who runs London air conditioning specialists Debonair Cooling, said demand for its cooling systems, which cost about £2,500 per room, was coming from owners of both period and new-build properties. “They are struggling to sleep at night, or have children with breathing problems,” he said, adding that loft conversions were also posing problems. “I’ve seen loft rooms go up to 50 degrees C. It’s unliveable.”

The government’s climate advisers said in a report this week that British homes would need air conditioning to survive predicted levels of global heating, as measures such as drawing curtains, opening windows and growing trees for shade were unlikely to be enough.

Air conditioning should be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next 10 years, the Climate Change Committee said in its findings on adapting to the impacts of global heating. With heatwaves expected to exceed 40ºC in all parts of the UK by 2050 and about nine in 10 UK homes were likely to overheat.

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It’s been baking this weekend. People with heat pumps might be able to cool their houses as well as heat them?
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Škoda DuoBell: a bicycle bell that outsmarts even smart headphones • Škoda Storyboard

»

The redesign of a safety feature that is more than 100 years old originated from a simple need. “Bicycle bells have remained almost unchanged for over a century, but the world around them has not. Škoda DuoBell is the first bell ever designed to penetrate noise-cancelling headphones. It is a smart analogue trick that outsmarts the artificial intelligence algorithms in these headphones. It is a small adjustment that will improve safety on city streets,” said Ben Edwards from AMV BBDO, the agency involved in developing the concept. The idea was also supported by the agency PHD, while production company Unit9 contributed to the development of the prototype. 

The number of cyclists in major cities worldwide is increasing. For example, in London, the number of cyclists is expected to surpass the number of car drivers for the first time in history this year. At the same time, however, the risk of collisions between cyclists and inattentive pedestrians is also rising. In 2024 alone, according to data from Transport for London, the number of such incidents increased by 24%.

This trend is partly driven by the growing popularity of headphones equipped with active noise cancellation, which reduce pedestrians’ ability to perceive and respond to their surroundings. In the streets of London, up to half of pedestrians wear such headphones. Many of them are so effective that even the ringing of a conventional bicycle bell does not penetrate them. 

The response is DuoBell: an analogue solution to a digital problem – a fully mechanical bell that deceives smart headphone algorithms and significantly increases the likelihood that pedestrians will detect its sound. 

The key to the success of the new design lay in understanding how noise-cancellation algorithms in headphones operate and how they can be overcome. Scientists from the University of Salford, in collaboration with Škoda Auto, therefore conducted one of the first studies to examine how ANC technology affects the audibility of traditional bicycle bells. 

Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz. The bell therefore emits sound at this frequency. It also features an additional resonator (hence the name DuoBell), tuned to a higher frequency, and, thanks to a specially designed hammer mechanism, produces rapid and irregular strikes. This generates sound waves that ANC algorithms are unable to process quickly enough to suppress. 

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This feels like a variant of the old joke. Man drives into a petrol station with his Skoda. “Would you give me a petrol cap for my Skoda?” he asks the owner.

The owner thinks for a moment, then says “OK, it’s a fair trade.” (There is a YouTube video. It sounds like a bicycle bell.)
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Bluesky says Kremlin is hacking its platform to spread propaganda • The New York Times

Steven Lee Myers:

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Ben Gilbert describes himself on Bluesky, the social media app, as an “economist, lit and guitar nerd, rugby fan, owner of excessive pets.” A professor at the Colorado School of Mines, he rarely posts, but when he does, the subjects reflect his expertise in natural resources.

So it was odd when a video purporting to be a news report appeared on his account last month, blaming France’s financial and political support for Ukraine for police staff shortages at home.

Without his knowledge, Mr. Gilbert said, he had fallen victim to Russia’s latest tactic to try to spread its propaganda in the West.

His account, like hundreds of others on Bluesky, had been hijacked and used to post fake news articles, according to the company and researchers at Clemson University working with a collective of internet monitors who track Russian influence operations and call themselves the dTeam.

The compromised Bluesky accounts included those of people who are influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous. They were journalists and professors, a pollster in Texas, an anime artist and a filmmaker in Hollywood, whose account posted a video doctored by artificial intelligence to impersonate a Canadian police official criticizing France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.

The campaign, which the researchers at Clemson linked to the Social Design Agency, a company in Moscow, shows how Russia continues to seek new ways to erode public support for Ukraine, which Russian forces invaded in 2022.

Bluesky has grown more prominent as a rival platform to X since X’s owner, Elon Musk, threw his political support behind President Trump before the 2024 election. With 42 million users, though, Bluesky trails far behind X’s nearly 600 million.

While Russians have long flooded social media platforms with fake accounts and content, hacking into real accounts appeared to be a novel strategy.

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Amazing that Russia thinks Bluesky accounts are worth hacking at all. Perhaps there are so many MAGA types on Twitter that they don’t think it needs doing there. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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What do Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems truly mean? • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

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In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms.

I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how the 25-year-old Austrian logician and mathematician did such a thing, and then writing a rundown of his proof in fewer than 2,000 words. (My wife, when I reminded her of this period: “Oh yeah, that time you almost went crazy?” A slight exaggeration.)

But even after grasping the steps of Gödel’s proof, I was unsure what to make of his theorems, which are commonly understood as ruling out the possibility of a mathematical “theory of everything.” It’s not just me. In Gödel’s Proof (opens a new tab) (a classic 1958 book that I heavily relied upon for my account), philosopher Ernest Nagel and mathematician James R. Newman wrote that the meaning of Gödel’s theorems “has not been fully fathomed.”

Maybe not, but six decades have passed since then. Where are we with these ideas today? Recently, I asked logicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and one physicist to discuss the meaning of incompleteness. They had plenty to say about the implications of Gödel’s strange intellectual achievement and how it changed the course of humanity’s unending search for truth.

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Gödel’s work is very abstract, and yet as this article shows, there are implications in it about the limits of what physics (which relies on maths) can tell us about the universe.
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Fender wins legal battle over Stratocaster shape in Germany: is it the end for S-type guitars in the EU? • Guitar.com

Cillian Breathnach:

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Fender has claimed victory in a recent intellectual property case in Germany against a Chinese guitar manufacturer, stating that its win in the case sets a new legal precedent that strengthens Fender’s protection over the Stratocaster shape.

The case was against the Chinese-based Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co., and took place in the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany. According to Fender, the decision made by the court agrees with Fender’s claim that the company had imported guitars that “reproduced” Fender’s Stratocaster body design, and that the design in question is not just a functional trademark but is instead a “a copyrighted work of applied art”, according to German and European law.

Aarash Darroodi, Fender’s general counsel and chief administrative officer, said in a press release: “This ruling is a meaningful affirmation of the Stratocaster as an original creative work and an important step in continuing to protect the integrity of Fender’s designs and intellectual property. It reinforces our commitment to originality, supports fair competition, and helps ensure that when players encounter these iconic Fender guitar shapes, they can trust the craftsmanship, quality, and heritage behind them.”

While the ruling is clearly bad news for Yiwu – a Chinese maker that seems to primarily sell budget guitars and other instruments via AliExpress and other online marketplaces – the potential wider impact of the case is yet to be tested.

«

Meanwhile in the US:

»

Fender has laid down the gauntlet in its protection of the Stratocaster body shape, sending a cease and desist to a US firm, ordering it to stop production of its S-style electric guitars.

As per documents obtained by YouTubers Phillip McKnight and Tone Nerd, Fender sent the cease and desist letter via its lawyers, Bird & Bird, to a small family-run guitar company based in the US, LsL Instruments.

The letter is allegedly part of a number of cease-and-desists sent to a range of US-based builders ordering them to halt production. McKnight claims to have heard from at least half-a-dozen firms who have received such correspondence.

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Iconic guitar shapes! Who’d have thought it would take this long for Fender to take this sort of action. Gibson, the other big name in guitars, is doing something similar.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ships stranded in the strait of Hormuz are succumbing to barnacles and jellyfish. CC-licensed photo by Curtis Gregory Perry 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. Scraping by. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods • TechCrunch

Sean O’Kane:

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Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.

One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.

“Safety is Waymo’s top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped,” the company said in a statement.

Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.

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Even humans struggle with how to drive well in floods, so that’s not entirely shocking. Even so, it demonstrates how big the gap is between ambition and reality for self-driving cars.
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Incoming Ofcom chair vows to take on ‘tech bros’ • The Guardian

Michael Savage and Dan Milmo:

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Ofcom’s incoming chair has vowed to take on the “tech bros”, as he conceded there was now a perception the regulator had been complacent and slow over concerns about online safety.

Ian Cheshire, the former Channel 4 chair who has secured the job overseeing the technology and media regulator, also told MPs he had personal concerns about the impact of social media on under-16s.

During a hearing before the science, innovation and technology select committee, Cheshire was asked directly about whether he would take on the powerful tech companies that dominate the online world.

“Yes,” he said, adding: “It is the area I want to probe and understand, because I think there is clearly a perception that it has been either complacent or slow or both.”

However, he suggested Ofcom needed to be clear about what it could and could not achieve in terms of policing tech platforms. He said he wanted the platforms themselves to come together and demonstrate they wanted to do more.

He said: “I think there are some questions about the practicality of what speed to do … because I think there are slightly more constraints.

“If expectations are up here and the delivery is here, I think Ofcom has to take it on the chin to work out how to communicate that and say: ‘What’s the maximum we could do?’”

While he said limiting social media for children was a matter for the government, he said: “I am personally – as a parent and grandparent – very nervous about social media under 16 personally, but I wouldn’t want to impose that as a political or an Ofcom view.”

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OK, but how is he going to take on the tech bros without the support of the government? How will he do it without a proper budget to take them on in the courts, and at the internet level, and at the legislative level? Talk is cheap; proper regulation takes multi-agency effort, as the failure of the Environment Agency to tackle fly-tipping and water pollution (separately) shows.
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Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees as it transforms around AI • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Raffaele Huang:

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Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles, according to an internal memo and people familiar with the matter.

Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, told staff last month that the coming layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. In a follow-up memo on Monday, she said it would also move a separate 7,000 staffers into new AI-focused roles and transition a number of managers to individual contributor roles as part of the reorganization efforts. 

Individual employees in Asia and Europe began receiving notifications that they would be affected early in their mornings, followed hours later by employees in the Americas, the people said.

In a memo to staff Wednesday morning, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg thanked laid off employees for their contributions and called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.”

“This is the most dynamic I have seen our industry. I’m optimistic about everything we’re building,” he said. “But success is not a given.”

Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.

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Of course the stock went up, because why not. Replacing humans with machines and watching every keystroke of those who remain? What’s not to like, from the stock market’s view?
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GLP-1 use has more than quadrupled since 2021 as obesity rates continue to show signs of decline • Epic Research

Epic Research:

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Semaglutide (Wegovy, Ozempic) received FDA approval for chronic weight management in 2021, followed by tirzepatide (Zepbound) in 2023, both demonstrating substantial weight loss in clinical trials.2,3 Demand has grown rapidly, raising questions about real-world uptake, prescribing patterns across clinical indications, and whether population-level BMI distributions are beginning to shift in response.

The GLP-1 utilization tracker reports prescriptions per 100,000 patients for each GLP-1, and the BMI tracker reports the distribution of U.S. adults across BMI categories.

GLP-1 prescribing has grown substantially across the tracker’s window, with prescriptions per 100,000 U.S. adults rising from 1,884 in the second quarter of 2021 to 8,819 in the first quarter of 2026. The composition of GLP-1 prescribing changed markedly over the period.

In 2021, the most prescribed agents were semaglutide (about 680 per 100,000) and dulaglutide (about 790 per 100,000). By the first quarter of 2026, tirzepatide had become the most frequently prescribed agent at roughly 4,700 prescriptions per 100,000 patients, and semaglutide had grown to around 3,900 per 100,000. Use of older agents declined as the newer drugs displaced them.

BMI distribution has shifted modestly toward lower weight categories over the same period, with the change concentrated in the second half of the period. The share of U.S. adults classified as obese was 42.3% in the second quarter of 2021 and remained near that level through 2022 before declining to 40.7% by the first quarter of 2026. Over the same window, the healthy weight share rose from 25.1% to 25.6%.

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There’s a graph showing usage taking off on a straight line. These drugs are going to be everywhere in a decade.
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AI tool has “saved a lot of aircraft” in Epic Fury, AFSOC chief says • C4isrnet

Hope Hodge Seck:

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The head of Air Force Special Operations Command revealed that an AI-powered intelligence collection and transfer system has been in use since the “first day” of Operation Epic Fury to help large attack drones and manned aircraft avoid Iranian threats.

Speaking at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley said “necessity had been the mother of invention” in spurring the service to apply available machine learning tools to combat operations.

“On the first day, they realized that our MQ-9 [Reaper drones] and other aircraft were at risk in a very hostile environment, and they were able to take some smart people, use artificial intelligence tools, and put humans on the loop, instead of in the process the whole time, and move Top Secret national-level intel,” Conley said, referring to his “small team” of AI and tech specialists.

The process of moving intelligence would have taken human operators “20 to 30 minutes to get that to a crew, into a cockpit, or into a ground control station,” he said.

Instead, Conley said, nine crew members were able to use AI “bots” to convert applicable data to a Secret clearance level and make it available in the cockpits of aircraft — all within two to three seconds.

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Good that the US is demonstrating the flexibility it needs. Still not sufficient, though: at least one F-35 was shot down. And the US is clearly worried about the potential of Iran’s drones.
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Barnacles and jellyfish infest ships trapped in the Gulf • Financial Times

Alice Hancock:

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Ships trapped in the Gulf are accumulating barnacles, algae and jellyfish as the Middle East conflict drags on and temperatures begin to rise, impeding their ability to eventually exit the region.

At least 800 merchant ships are still stranded in the Gulf following the outbreak of fighting on February 28 with about 20,000 seafarers left on board to perform routine maintenance duties.

But the Gulf’s shallow sandy seabed and warm waters have put ships at anchor or adrift there at risk of sand and sea creatures clogging up gratings that protect the vessel’s internal pipework. Seafarers are also struggling to get hold of critical parts when systems have broken down.

“What happens is that if you don’t move, if the vessels stay out of speed just basically drifting and these are warm waters, you have a lot of fouling growing and that is probably happening for the moment for our vessel,” said Lasse Kristoffersen, chief executive of Wallenius Wilhelmsen, the car carrier company that currently has one ship stuck in the Gulf.

Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive of Hapag-Lloyd, told the shipping line’s podcast recently that the one vessel it managed to transit out of the strait of Hormuz, which has been in effect shut to most shipping traffic since the beginning of March, had to travel much slower because of the drag created by barnacles.

“The main surprise was the amount of fouling we had on the ship because the ship had been in water of about 30 degrees C for six to eight weeks so then you see there was a lot of stuff that gets attached to the ship that you really don’t want to have attached to the ship,” he said.

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So many side effects. These will need some sort of drydock when this clears.
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Context rot: the emerging challenge that could hold back LLM progress • Understanding AI

Timothy B. Lee:

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relatively soon, we’re going to bump up against fundamental limitations of the attention mechanism underlying today’s leading LLMs.

With attention, an LLM effectively “thinks about” every token in its context window before generating a new token. That works fine when there are only a few thousand tokens in the context window. But it gets more and more unwieldy as the number of tokens grows into the hundreds of thousands, millions, and beyond.

An analogy to the human brain helps to illustrate the problem. As I sit here writing this article, I’m not thinking about what I ate for breakfast in 2019, the acrimonious breakup I had in 2002, or the many episodes of Star Trek I watched in the 1990s. If my brain were constantly thinking about these and thousands of other random topics, I’d be too distracted to write a coherent essay.

But LLMs do get distracted as more tokens are added to their context window — a phenomenon that has been dubbed “context rot.” Anthropic researchers explained it in a September blog post:

»

Context must be treated as a finite resource with diminishing marginal returns. Like humans, who have limited working memory capacity, LLMs have an “attention budget” that they draw on when parsing large volumes of context. Every new token introduced depletes this budget by some amount, increasing the need to carefully curate the tokens available to the LLM.

This attention scarcity stems from architectural constraints of LLMs. LLMs are based on the transformer architecture, which enables every token to attend to every other token across the entire context. As its context length increases, a model’s ability to capture these pairwise relationships gets stretched thin, creating a natural tension between context size and attention focus.

«

The blog post went on to discuss context engineering, a suite of emerging techniques for helping LLMs stay focused by removing extraneous tokens from their context windows.

Those techniques are fine as far as they go. But I suspect they can only mitigate the underlying problem. If we want LLMs to reason effectively over much longer contexts, we may have to fundamentally rethink how LLMs work.

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In effect, this is scaling – the database thing – for LLMs. As token length grows, the computing demand grows exponentially rather than linearly. So you need something that will go linearly, at best.
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2026 World Cup: empty rooms & Fifa cancellations mean US hotels fear washout • BBC Sport

Dale Johnson:

»

The World Cup was supposed to provide a tourism boom for the US, but now the fear is it may never materialise.

A report produced by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) has found that bookings are well below expectations in almost every host city.

The AHLA said this does not align with Fifa’s statement that more than five million tickets have been sold and it creates a risk that “the anticipated economic lift may fall short”.

The AHLA is the largest hotel association in the US, representing more than 32,000 properties and over 80% of all franchised hotels.

Its report partially puts the blame at the door of Fifa, accusing world football’s governing body of block-booking far too many rooms for its own use and creating false demand.

This, the AHLA said, led to artificially high pricing which, after Fifa cancelled a large number of rooms, has been replaced by a vacuum of availability.

Fifa said it does not recognise this accusation.

Hotels said high match ticket pricing, local transport and tax costs, and the political backdrop have put visitors off.
For the hotels, this World Cup could fall flat.

…Up to 70% of rooms reserved by Fifa in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle have been cancelled, the AHLA said.

In a statement Fifa rejected the AHLA’s claims and said it had followed agreements made with hotel chains.

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Fifa predicted it would create 185,000 jobs and add $17.2bn in GDP. Looks like that’s not going to happen, with just three weeks left to the first kickoff.
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All those AI note takers? They’re making lawyers very nervous • The New York Times

Sarah Kessler:

»

Productivity powered by artificial intelligence is all the rage. Skipping meetings and sending an A.I. note taker instead has been called “the latest office power move.” Wallet-size recorders that use AI to log live interactions have become a product category. And at least one CEO has endorsed the idea of adding an AI board member. (Maybe one programmed to behave like Warren Buffett?)

But to lawyers like [Jeffrey] Gifford, inviting an A.I. bot to meetings introduces a ticking time bomb of legal risk.

AI-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded.

In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable. Even worse, say corporate lawyers: Sharing the meeting with an AI bot may void attorney-client privilege, making conversations that would not otherwise be subject to discovery fair game in a lawsuit.

The New York City Bar Association issued a formal opinion on AI note takers last year, urging lawyers to “consider whether recording, transcribing and summarizing is tactically well advised in the particular circumstances” and to advise clients using such tools “of the disadvantages of doing so.”

One concern is accuracy. An AI transcript could, for example, record “does matter” as “doesn’t matter.” If that sentence comes up in court years later, the mistake may be difficult to remember.

Corporate lawyers also worry about AI note takers’ lack of context and discretion. For example, recording every word of a board meeting, no matter how tangential the remark, could be legally perilous.

“You want to make sure that the minutes, if they get into a courtroom, are going to not only be accurate but also are going to have the emphasis that the board would like,” said Doug Raymond, a partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath.

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That loss of priviliege is potentially colossal.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The mathematician Paul Erdős posed many fascinating problems for his peers – and now OpenAI has solved an important one. CC-licensed photo by Erik 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. Plane to see. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google Search as you know it is over • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centred around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
 
The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.

Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.

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Flashback: “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right?” That was Larry Page, in October 2000.

The problem is that if Google doesn’t send any search traffic to websites, why should those websites exist – or, more importantly, why anyone should update them if they don’t get visitors. Except there will always be a need to update sites. Is Google proposing to effectively become the web? That might be biting off too much to chew ever.
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Former Samsung boss predicts the memory crisis could be over in the second half of 2027 • PC Gamer

Jeremy Laird:

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the former president of Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor division says that memory prices could fall starting in the second half of next year thanks to a “surge” in manufacturing capacity in China.

Speaking at the National Academy of Engineering in Seoul, South Korea, Kyung-Hyeon Kye said, “Chinese companies are aggressively expanding their production capacity.” The result will be a “surge” in memory supply in the second half of 2027 or early 2028.

What’s more, he warned that not only will memory supply increase, but demand could decline after 2028. “If the return on investment for Big Tech decreases relative to capital investment, there is a possibility of reduced investment,” Kyung-Hyeon Kye said. Korea must therefore prepare for the “post-super boom.”

His argument seems to be that demand for memory chips could tail off if the AI industry doesn’t start making money rather than just spending it. Ironically, this raises the prospect of the memory crisis being followed by the mother of all memory gluts.

As we’ve reported before, the major players in memory manufacturing outside of China are in the midst of increasing manufacturing capacity. China, by this account, is set to add dramatically to that capacity.

If the AI bubble goes pop and the huge added demand for memory chips suddenly goes with it, there will be an awful lot of memory capacity looking for customers.

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The spike/decline timeline for demand sounds reasonable, though the possibility of the AI bubble popping seems far more likely. And that will leave a great deal of RAM looking for buyers.
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Vibe coding is coming to your phone • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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For starters, Google is making it easier to just straight up vibe-code a whole Android app. At I/O the company announced an update to its AI Studio vibe-coding tool, allowing you to create a native Android app and export it to a phone in a matter of minutes. The feature is limited to “personal utility” apps to start with, and the rules for putting an app on the Play Store remain the same. But if you’re the kind of person looking for a particular feature from a habit tracking app that none of them seem to offer, you might just be able to build it yourself.

If a whole app feels too ambitious, then maybe a widget is more your speed. At last week’s Android Show, Google announced an upcoming feature to create your own widgets with a prompt — Google’s examples include widgets that highlight certain weather metrics or suggest new recipes to try.

…Google calls the AI-generated widgets a first step toward something called a “generative UI,” where your phone creates an interface and apps on the fly based on what you need in the moment. Sounds great in theory! But it also sounds like it could get messy fast. Android president Sameer Samat acknowledges that there’s a pretty obvious way to take the concept too far. “While I don’t think we want to wake up every morning and have our devices have different UI, I do think there’s a level of personalization and customization to the user that could be delightful,” he tells me.

It seems like Apple might be taking steps toward a more personal iPhone, too. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the company is working on a way to create Shortcuts based on prompts. Shortcuts are automations you can program within the dedicated Shortcuts app, either by putting them together from preassembled bits or figuring it out on your own. They seem simple in theory but get complicated fast, which has deterred me from ever seriously getting into Shortcuts. But the prospect of prompting my way into a Shortcut that opens the transit app when I get to the bus stop, or sets a particular Focus mode when I connect to my home Wi-Fi, is pretty appealing.

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The oil shock is coming for America • Financial Times

Amos Hochstein was a senior adviser to Joe Biden in June 2022, when petrol prices hit $5.02 per gallon for the first time ever:

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The national average gasoline price has now surpassed $4.50 per gallon. Two simultaneous crises are compounding in ways we did not experience four years ago.

The first is physical disruption. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed more than 12m barrels per day from the global supply. The IEA has called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history. This is not hyperbole.

The second is the refinery conundrum. Jet fuel crack spreads — the difference in price between jet fuel and crude oil — have reached a record $80 per barrel, well above the $60 peak in 2022. Because a barrel of crude oil yields only three to four gallons of jet fuel versus 19 to 20 gallons of gasoline, that extraordinary margin is pulling refinery capacity towards aviation fuel. The result defies normal market logic: gasoline production has declined by approximately 340,000 barrels per day compared with a year ago, even as prices rise and refineries run near full capacity.

According to the Energy Information Administration, US motor gasoline stocks have been drawn at approximately 4mn barrels per week in recent weeks, with the deficit to the five-year average now nearly 11mn barrels. The all-time record low, not seen since the EIA began tracking in 1990, could be reached as early as mid to late June.

The tools that worked in 2022 have already been deployed. The US committed to releasing 172m barrels from the reserve as part of the International Energy Agency’s co-ordinated response. It has already released approximately 80m barrels, leaving stocks at approximately 374m barrels. With refineries skewed towards jet fuel, additional crude releases will not translate into more gasoline with the same efficiency they once did. The reserve is not just smaller. It is a blunter instrument.

The production response has also already occurred. US crude and petroleum product exports reached a record 12.9m barrels per day in late April, with daily oil product exports hitting an all-time high of 8.2m barrels in May. There is no incremental surge waiting. That lever has been pulled.

Last week’s inflation numbers signal that consumer energy prices are running hotter and longer than the Federal Reserve had assumed. What they do not capture is what comes next. Energy prices feed into the core consumer price index with a lag of several weeks. The pump pain of May will translate into inflation figures in July and August. The 30-year Treasury yield has risen to the highest level since the financial crisis and the 10-year Treasury yield is already rising. Mortgage costs, corporate borrowing rates and the cost of financing national debt all move with it.

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We still can’t figure out what sort of havoc, or semi-havoc, we’re going to see.
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An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry • OpenAI

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For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?

This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.

Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdős’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians. They have also written a companion paper explaining the argument and providing further background and context for the significance of the result.

The result is also notable for how it was found. The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics, scaffolded to search through proof strategies, or targeted at the unit distance problem in particular.

…This result marks an important moment in the interaction between AI and mathematics: an AI system has autonomously resolved a longstanding open problem at the center of an active field. It also offers an early glimpse of a new kind of collaboration between AI and human mathematicians. In this case, the companion work by external mathematicians paints a substantially richer picture than the original solution alone.

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This is starting to get interesting. The problem (and solution) means nothing to me, or probably you, but mathematicians have a talent for finding applications for their discoveries to the real world.
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Nobody asked for this Washington Post podcast • The New Republic

Parker Molloy:

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Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24% year over year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6% over the same period. CNN was up 3%. The Post is in its own category.

The Post has shed paying subscribers in waves. About 250,000 canceled after Bezos killed the [Kamala] Harris endorsement in October 2024, per NPR. More than 75,000 followed in February 2025, after Bezos announced the section would run on “personal liberties and free markets.” More cancelled in the weeks after February’s mass layoffs.

What’s in the opinion section instead: op-eds about the mayor of New York. The editorial board has published more than 10 of them this year alone, per Status. Recent entries: “Mamdani meets economic reality,” “Mamdani shows how to sidestep a $5.4 billion deficit,” and “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” One current Post staffer told Status: “There’s this bizarre obsession with Mamdani. We’re not even local.”

Regular readers know I’ve written before about how Bezos has gutted the newsroom his opinion section is now embarrassing. I’m not going to repeat that here.

The Post’s own newsroom is reporting on this. On May 9, the news side published a long piece by Drew Harwell about the Daily Wire’s collapse. Same trend Bezos’s opinion section is part of. Same owner paying for both the autopsy and the corpse.

Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber count has gone backward or sideways in 15 of the past 16 months, per Social Blade data cited by Harwell. Web traffic to the site fell to half its prior-year level in March 2026. Ben Shapiro’s own YouTube views are down nearly 70% since December 2024. The company has cut 13% of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro himself confirmed to Harwell that revenue fell from 2024 levels.

The Daily Wire reportedly spent $3m per episode on a seven-episode fantasy series called The Pendragon Cycle, per Harwell. Its dedicated YouTube channel has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. In November, the Daily Wire put Shapiro’s face on Times Square billboards to campaign for a Golden Globe podcast award. He wasn’t nominated.

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Things are bad all over, but they’re especially bad for right-wing outlets – which in some ways the Washington Post has become.
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Europe EV sales leap as Iran war pushes up petrol pump prices • Reuters

Christina Amann, Marie Mannes and Nick Carey:

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Demand for electric vehicles in Europe has surged as high fuel prices linked to the Iran war propel sales of new and second-hand EVs, data exclusively shared with ​Reuters shows, providing a much-needed boost to the auto industry.

Although sales of fully electric cars grew 30% across Europe in 2025, EV adoption on the continent has lagged industry expectations. Carmakers from Volkswagen to Fiat-owner Stellantis (STLAM.MI), opens new tab, which had invested heavily in expectation of much higher EV demand, have over the last year booked multi-billion-dollar charges to cover asset writedowns.

Buyers’ calculations have been transformed by an upsurge in international oil prices to well above $100 a barrel since U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran at the end of February unleashed a wider conflict and led ​to unprecedented energy supply disruption.

“This isn’t a blip, it’s an inflection point,” said Gurjeet Grewal, CEO of UK-based Octopus Electric Vehicles, which registered a 95% year-on-year ​increase in demand for new EVs and 160% rise for used EVs in April.

As a net importer of energy, Britain has been particularly exposed to increases in inflation and food prices.

Across Europe, data provided to Reuters by research group New Automotive and industry group E-Mobility Europe, showed registrations of new EVs rose ​34%, year-on-year, in April.

The data covers 16 markets that account for more than 80% of European Union and European Free Trade Association car sales.

It showed strong EV growth in ​Denmark and the Netherlands, where electric cars are already popular, but also in markets such as Italy, where EVs have been slow to take off.

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Once the feature articles about these new EV buyers start coming in, it’ll be illuminating to see how many switched away from perhaps buying fuelled cars, or whether they just jumped at an opportunity when they weren’t going to buy a car otherwise.
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UK Treasury pushes supermarkets to cap food prices • Financial Times

Ashley Armstrong:

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The UK Treasury is pushing large supermarkets to introduce voluntary price caps on key groceries in return for lifting some regulations, according to people familiar with the situation.

Supermarkets have reacted furiously to the proposals, under which grocers would agree to identify and cap the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk.

In return, the government has said it would offer “incentives” to the supermarkets, which the people briefed on the matter said could include easing packaging policies and potentially delaying costly changes to rules around healthy food. Some of these measures, such as the packaging regulations, generate revenue for the Treasury.

The Treasury has suggested to the supermarkets that they reinvest the savings to freeze grocery prices. One person close to the situation said that officials were working with retailers to keep prices down.

The proposals come as Sir Keir Starmer’s government is battling to address public concern over the cost of living.

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UK inflation actually fell in May, by 0.5 percentage points, but the government can see that the Iran war is going to have big whiplash effects in the near future. It also postponed a fuel tax rise, because that’s going to hit pretty soon as well. And meanwhile, there’s no sign of Trump figuring out how to extricate the US from its absurd Chinese finger trap in the Middle East.
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BBC boss tells staff he will use data to build “satnav around bias” • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

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The BBC‘s new director general has revealed that he plans to use data to improve impartiality, and has warned that iPlayer is not doing a good enough job of showcasing the corporation’s content.

In his first address to staff on his second day in office, former Google executive Matt Brittin said that he wanted to use data to build a “satnav around bias,” according to audio from the all-hands meeting obtained by Deadline.

He said the BBC could deploy technology to analyse its news and content to establish patterns in output. Brittin said this could mean assessing how often the BBC uses certain words, or analysing the types of contributors appearing across its programming.

He did not expand on how the technology would be built, but it will likely lead to speculation that the BBC could use AI to achieve his aim of mining data. Brittin is a vocal proponent of artificial intelligence, and his experience at Google was attractive to the BBC’s board when recruiting for Tim Davie’s successor.

“Stories and data together are the way to understand the world,” Brittin said. “[This is] not to audit people, but as a kind of satnav around bias or sat nav around these topics … So that’s where I think I’d try to complement our brilliant expert teams.”

The comments are interesting because Brittin has not put impartiality at the forefront of his agenda after being unveiled as director general. He did not explicitly reference impartiality in his three priorities for the BBC, which was a break from his predecessor Davie, who put the issue front and centre in his first days in the job.

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“How often the BBC uses certain words” is an absolute tell for someone who has no idea about what news involves (back in the day, Google realised that excluding “the” from search would speed up its index enormously, which had the side effect of rendering the music outfit The The effectively invisible).

While he’s dead right about iPlayer, which is woefully bad at surfacing stuff you might like from the gigantic archives, the idea of a “satnav around bias” just sounds bonkers. He’s clearly feeling his way in the dark around a giant house.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified