The introduction of an electronic challenge system in baseball is revealing which umpires do their jobs well – and which badly. CC-licensed photo by Peter Miller on Flickr.

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

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

Delanoe Pirard:

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

That’s Sora.

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

Here’s what I found.

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

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

«

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

Mike Isaac:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrence O’Brien:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Benjamin Stubbing & Oscar Sykes:

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

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

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

Richard Speed:

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

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

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

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

John Sakellariadis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Tobitt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Tobitt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I make that three times that Wired UK has ceased printing since 1995. The set of people let go sounds basically like “all the people you’d need to run a science or technology magazine”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A remarkable investigation by Nepal police suggests some climbers were made ill for an insurance scam. CC-licensed photo by Mark Horrell 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. Elevated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple at 50: the roots of a tech revolution • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Vicki Amon-Higa, whom [Steve] Jobs hired in early 1990 from the power utility Florida Power & Light, characterises his approach at the time as “brute force and great people”.

The idea was that you hire geniuses, lock them in a room and apply pressure until brilliant products emerge. Process, by contrast, sounded bureaucratic and stultifying. Process was not just absent from Jobs’ thinking; it was antithetical to it. Amon-Higa says Jobs understood “small q quality” (a narrow focus on product) but did not grasp “big Q quality” (how to enforce standards across the entire organisation).

…She invited her mentor, Noriaki Kano, a quality expert who emphasised customer satisfaction, and Juran — the so-called “architect of quality” whose writings had been promoted by Sarasohn — to speak with NeXT. The impact was profound.

Jobs tended to think that talent was innate, but Kano taught him that people needed to be coached and developed, to bring out their best. Juran, then in his eighties, convinced Jobs to empower the individuals actually doing the work to make improvements and taught him the value, Jobs later said, of “seeing everything as a repetitive process, and to instrument that process, and find out how it’s running”.

He particularly liked that for Juran, quality was just one aspect of a broader system that did not sound stifling. “Dr Juran was one of the few people that I met that had a real down-to-earth approach to it, that didn’t think that quality was the second coming,” Jobs said for a Juran documentary, in late 1991. “He approached it much more scientifically.”

Jobs called Juran’s philosophy “a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one” — but it was too late for NeXT. Their pipeline of products had no market fit and, by 1993, Jobs was forced to abandon manufacturing.

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McGee is the author of “Apple in China”, which has been highly praised for its research and writing. This piece traces the origins of Apple’s success in manufacturing back to Japan’s rebirth after World War 2 as a manufacturing giant.
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Everest guides “secretly poisoned” climbers to trigger costly helicopter rescues’ as part of £15m scam • Daily Mail Online

Perkin Amalaraj:

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Guides taking tourists up and down Mount Everest have allegedly been secretly lacing climbers’ food to trigger costly helicopter rescues as part of a £15million insurance scam, according to a new investigation.

Poor weather and patchy communications at the world’s tallest mountain have allegedly led to a cottage industry that sees shifty pilots, guides and doctors charging insurance companies for services not rendered.

According to the Kathmandu Post, the fake rescue racket works by getting a climber to stage a medical emergency. A helicopter is then called and taken to a nearby hospital. An insurance claim is then filed that bears little resemblance to what actually happened.

Nepal Police’s Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) identified two ways this scam is manufactured. The first involved tourists who don’t want to walk all the way back down. Treks can take up to two weeks on foot, so guides tell climbers to fake a medical emergency so that a helicopter comes.

But the second method is far more troubling, and involves tricking climbers into thinking they’re having a medical emergency. Above 3,000m, altitude sickness is common. Symptoms include headaches, tingling in the body’s extremities, and a drop in blood oxygen saturation. In most cases, this can be resolved with rest, hydration or a gradual descent.

But Nepal’s CIB says that some guides and hotel staff are told to terrify tourists into thinking an evacuation to a hospital is the only thing that will save them. If this doesn’t work, investigators found that in some instances, guides tried to induce symptoms by giving tourists suffering mild altitude sickness tablets and excessive water.

In at least one case, baking powder was mixed into tourists’ food to make them physically unwell.

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An amazing storry, apparently all done by the Nepal Police investigating.
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Lessons from your petrol pump • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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In 2002, the economist David Popp published a study of “induced innovation”, tracking the response by inventors to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The oil price leapt in 1973 and surged further in 1979, before sliding lower throughout the early 1980s. Popp found that patent activity tracked the oil price — for example, there were 10 successful patent applications in the field of solar energy in 1972, but more than 100 in 1974 and about 300 a year in the late 1970s. As the oil price fell back, so did patent activity, with fewer than 50 successful solar patents a year from the mid-1980s onward.

Popp found that a similar story could be told for batteries (a natural complement to solar energy), and patent applications for deriving liquid and gaseous fuels from coal. In each case, the few years of high oil prices led to a few years in which oil-saving patent activity was also high.

Today’s high oil price sends more signals: to find oilfields outside the Gulf region; to build new pipelines and tanker ports that are further from harm; to find ways to defend vulnerable shipping. In fact, there are far too many to list, and that is the point: a price signal — which, of course, is also a monetary incentive — is an invitation to everyone, everywhere, to do things a little differently.

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There’s plenty more (Harford is always thorough) but the key question seems to be: how long does the price signal have to last before it permeates through all that’s affected?
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Anthropic is having a month • TechCrunch

Connie Loizos:

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Here’s what happened on Tuesday: When Anthropic pushed out version 2.1.88 of its Claude Code software package, it accidentally included a file that exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and more than 512,000 lines of code — essentially the full architectural blueprint for one of its most important products. A security researcher named Chaofan Shou noticed almost immediately and posted about it on X. Anthropic’s statement to multiple outlets was nonchalant as these things go: “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.” (Internally, we’d guess things were less measured.)

Claude Code isn’t a minor product. It’s a command-line tool that lets developers use Anthropic’s AI to write and edit code and has become formidable enough to unsettle rivals. According to the WSJ, OpenAI pulled the plug on its video generation product Sora just six months after launching it to the public to refocus its efforts on developers and enterprises — partly in response to Claude Code’s growing momentum.

What leaked was not the AI model itself but the software scaffolding around it — the instructions that tell the model how to behave, what tools to use, and where its limits are. Developers began publishing detailed analyses almost immediately, with one describing the product as “a production-grade developer experience, not just a wrapper around an API.”

Whether this turns out to matter in any lasting way is a question best left to developers. Competitors may find the architecture instructive; at the same time, the field moves fast.

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These Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

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As of today, the price of the 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100, a price bump that’s almost as much as the original $120 price tag. Driven by the ongoing RAM shortage, Raspberry Pi is raising prices on over a dozen of its bare-bones computers, after previous increases in December and February. The increases range from $11.25 to $150.

In a blog post announcing the price increases, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton reiterated that they won’t be permanent, stating, “The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can.”

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And, Upton was obliged to point out, this was not an April Fools joke.
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Hackers slipped a trojan into the code library behind most of the internet. Your team is probably affected • VentureBeat

Louis Columbus:

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Attackers stole a long-lived npm access token belonging to the lead maintainer of axios, the most popular HTTP client library in JavaScript, and used it to publish two poisoned versions that install a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT). The malicious releases target macOS, Windows, and Linux. They were live on the npm registry for roughly three hours before removal.

Axios gets more than 100 million downloads per week. Wiz reports it sits in approximately 80% of cloud and code environments, touching everything from React front-ends to CI/CD pipelines to serverless functions. Huntress detected the first infections 89 seconds after the malicious package went live and confirmed at least 135 compromised systems among its customers during the exposure window.

…The attacker took over the npm account of @jasonsaayman, a lead axios maintainer, changed the account email to an anonymous ProtonMail address, and published the poisoned packages through npm's command-line interface. That bypassed the project’s GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline entirely.

The attacker never touched the axios source code. Instead, both release branches received a single new dependency: plain-crypto-js@4.2.1. No part of the codebase imports it. The package exists solely to run a postinstall script that drops a cross-platform RAT onto the developer’s machine.

The staging was precise. Eighteen hours before the axios releases, the attacker published a clean version of plain-crypto-js under a separate npm's account to build publishing history and dodge new-package scanner alerts. Then came the weaponized 4.2.1. Both release branches hit within 39 minutes. Three platform-specific payloads were pre-built. The malware erases itself after execution and swaps in a clean package.json to frustrate forensic inspection.

StepSecurity, which identified the compromise alongside Socket, called it among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm's package.

…Three npm's supply chain compromises in seven months. Every one started with a stolen maintainer credential.

The Shai-Hulud worm hit in September 2025. A single phished maintainer account gave attackers a foothold that self-replicated across more than 500 packages, harvesting npm tokens, cloud credentials, and GitHub secrets as it spread. CISA issued an advisory. GitHub overhauled npm’s entire authentication model in response.

Then in January 2026, Koi Security’s PackageGate research dropped six zero-day vulnerabilities across npm, pnpm, vlt, and Bun that punched through the very defenses the ecosystem adopted after Shai-Hulud. Lockfile integrity and script-blocking both failed under specific conditions. Three of the four package managers patched within weeks. npm closed the report.

Now axios. A stolen long-lived token published a RAT through both release branches despite OIDC, SLSA, and every post-Shai-Hulud hardening measure in place.

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This would have been very, very serious if it had laasted any longer. It was bad even for the minute it lasted.
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Renewables hit 49.4% of global electricity capacity in 2025 • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.

The International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) 2026 Renewable Capacity Statistics report, published on Wednesday, found that renewables dominated new power additions last year, accounting for 85.6% of global capacity expansion. Solar, in turn, was the dominant renewable technology, accounting for nearly three-quarters of last year’s renewable capacity additions.

Those additions totalled 692 GW in 2025, lifting installed renewable capacity by a record 15.5% year over year, IRENA noted. By the end of last year, renewables accounted for 49.4% of global installed electricity capacity, while variable renewable sources such as solar and wind represented roughly 35% of total capacity. 

For reference, it was only in 2023 that renewable energy sources crossed the threshold of generating 30% of the world’s electricity.

As IRENA notes in a press release, renewable energy is back in the spotlight amid the US conflict in Iran causing a spike in fuel prices and energy (i.e., oil) instability. According to IRENA Director General Francesco La Camera, conflicts like the Iranian mess are a perfect reason to push for more renewable adoption. 

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35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped? • The Guardian

Stuart McGurk:

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Cargo theft operates according to the law of supply and demand. When a truck carrying 400 50-litre kegs of Guinness – the equivalent of 35,000 pints – was stolen from a logistics hub in Northamptonshire in December 2024, it was widely seen as the cause of a nationwide shortage. This wasn’t quite true – the truck was targeted because there was a shortage in the first place – but it only made the scarcity worse, which in turn only made the stolen Guinness more valuable.

The cost of living crisis has made food and beverages an increasingly attractive target, with thefts rising as much as 79% in 2024 according to one report. In October of that year, 950 wheels of premium cheddar were stolen in London, an incident soon dubbed “the grate cheese heist”. (Jamie Oliver asked the public to keep an eye out for “lorryloads of posh cheese”.) Last week, a truck carrying KitKats went missing after setting off from Italy. A spokesperson for Nestlé said criminals had “made a break” with more than 400,000 bars. In some ways, it’s the perfect crime. If stolen cargo isn’t found within the first few hours, it’s as good as gone. It re-enters the supply chain, and, soon after, the evidence will get eaten. At present, Dawber says, olive oil is a popular target. With the value of Italian extra virgin hovering around £10 a litre, the average truckload is worth about £250,000, making it more valuable than most wine.

When accounting for lost revenues, VAT and insurance costs, cargo crime is estimated to cost the UK economy about £700m a year. For freight companies, often operating on minuscule profit margins, the impact can be crippling. Insurance premiums rise with every claim. Excesses are regularly in the thousands. Many haulage companies have to absorb the costs and pay the customer for the goods lost.

For years, the industry has attempted to sound the alarm. One partial remedy, it argues, is maddeningly simple: make freight theft its own crime. (At present, it is categorised as “theft from motor vehicle”, the same offence as nicking a pair of sunglasses from a glovebox.) In parliament last year, Rachel Taylor MP introduced a bill that would do just this, meaning that sentences for criminals could be longer and accurate statistics on the scale of the crime could be collected. A second reading is due to take place next month.

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Great, and timely, article. There’s a more formal one for the US; less entertaining.
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Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project • Nature

Nicola Jones:

»

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested1.

The conclusions of the initiative, called the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, have been “eagerly awaited by many”, says John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved with the programme. The scale and breadth of the project is impressive, he says, but the results are “not surprising”, because they are in line with those from smaller, earlier studies.

Researchers have been investigating a ‘crisis’ in the reliability of scientific results for more than a decade. They’ve found that many scientific experiments can’t be repeated — not just in the social sciences, but also in the biomedical field.

The SCORE findings — derived from the work of 865 researchers poring over papers published in 62 journals and spanning fields including economics, education, psychology and sociology — don’t necessarily mean that science is being done poorly, says Tim Errington, head of research at the Center for Open Science, an institute that co-ordinated part of the project. Of course, some results are not replicable because of either honest mistakes or the rare case of misconduct, he says, but SCORE found that, in many cases, papers simply did not provide enough data or details for experiments to be repeated accurately. Fresh methods or analyses can legitimately lead to distinct results. This means that, rather than take papers at face value, researchers should treat any single study as “a piece of the puzzle”, Errington says.

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The suspicion is that the problem comes straight from the “publish or perish” imperative imposed on so many researchers.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines may have to cut flights inside Europe within a month if jet fuel supplies don’t resume at volume, experts say. CC-licensed photo by Aldas Kirvaitis 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. Unplaned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

After more than 53 years, humans may finally return to the Moon this week • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favourable, with an 80% chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s mission management team, told reporters Monday that there were “no showstoppers” for launch on Wednesday. Ground teams powered up the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for final checkouts early Tuesday, setting the stage for loading super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket Wednesday morning.

«

So let’s be clear. It’s not a “return to the Moon”. It’s a return near the Moon, doing the same dance that Apollo 8 managed back in December 1968. That’s nearly 60 years of no progress.

Worse: there are good reasons to think the heat shield of this mission is less than perfect. We can hope that’s wrong. But nobody has explained what we’re really doing with this. It’s not new science, it’s not new technology.
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Gmail adds ability to change usernames after 22 years • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

If you’re embarrassed by your Gmail address but haven’t wanted to start a new account for fear of losing messages, we have good news. Ahead of Gmail’s 22nd anniversary on Wednesday, Google says it is now letting US users change their account username.

That’s right: You can now swap out that less-than-professional address you registered years ago but still use because it became the de facto hub of your online life back when that joke username still seemed like a good idea.

Google announced the change in a rather brief note on its Keyword blog on Tuesday, only mentioning that it was now available for all Google Account users in the US. This vulture can personally attest to not having the ability available in his account, suggesting that like most other features Google rolls out for its products, this is probably being released gradually. 

If you do have the option to change your Gmail username, you can follow the steps on this linked page to do so.

…Per the help page linked above, your previous Gmail address stays on as an alternate address, and emails will still be received by both, effectively making it an alias for the new account. You can still sign in to Google services using either the old or new address in case you forget what you renamed that 20-year-old account at some point.

«

OK, but they do check that the desired account name isn’t already in use, right? Right? Because there are ever so many ways for this to go wrong. Of course it’s a stupid question, but Google sometimes misses the obvious.
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European jet fuel supplies under threat as Iran war halts flows • Financial Times

Ryohtaroh Satoh and Sylvia Pfeifer:

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A drop in shipments of jet fuel from the Middle East is prompting warnings of a looming supply crunch for Europe’s aviation industry as the Iran war chokes off cargoes.

European imports of jet fuel are expected to fall to about 420,000 barrels a day this week, down roughly 40% from last week and the lowest level for March since 2022, according to energy data provider Vortexa.

The decline follows the near shutdown of flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global fuel shipments that accounted for roughly 40% of Europe’s jet fuel supply before the war.

“Fuel supplies are a major concern,” said one airline industry insider, adding that while supplies had remained “relatively stable over the past ten days”, carriers were in “daily monitoring mode”.

A senior jet fuel manager said European markets could begin to face physical shortages within weeks.

While airlines had until recently been supported by cargoes already en route from the Gulf, which typically take several weeks to arrive, flows from the Middle East have now largely ceased.

Volumes have fallen about 90%, with just over 1mn barrels still in transit at the start of the week, according to Mick Strautmann, an analyst at Vortexa.

Insights Global, which tracks storage levels at key hubs in north-west Europe, said jet fuel inventories had been declining but that levels were still in line with those of February 2024. However, it added that the pace of drawdowns from storage could accelerate as Middle East shipments fall.

…Mylène Scholnick, an adviser to UK aircraft leasing company World Star Aviation, said airlines may cut flights towards the end of April if the fuel shortage persists, with the impact expected to be most acute on short and medium-haul routes in Europe and Asia, where demand is more price-sensitive.

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Impact of online competition on local newspapers: evidence from the introduction of Craigslist • The Review of Economic Studies

Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante and Gregory Martin:

»

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices?

We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist—the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising—across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante.

We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest.

Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections. Taken together, our findings shed light on the determinants of the decline of print media and on its broader implications for democratic politics.

«

So we could draw a straight line and say Craigslist is responsible for Trump, and the current energy crisis? That’s what it feels like. (Though the same dynamic occurred in the UK, without Craigslist.)
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Epic Games layoffs today: Fortnite losses force 20% job cuts • Fast Company

Jennifer Mattson:

»

Video game maker Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, announced on Tuesday that it is laying off 1,000 employees, or about 20% of its workforce. (In 2023, Epic cut 830 jobs, or 16% of its workforce at that time, per Variety.)

“I’m sorry we’re here again,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a note to Epic employees, which the company posted on X. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.”

He continued: “This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles, puts us in a more stable place.”

Fast Company reached out to Epic, which had no further comment.

The note said some of the challenges the company is facing were industry-wide. Those challenges included lower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling fewer units than past generations did; and games competing for time against other entertainment. Sweeney said the layoffs are not due to AI.

«

Once upon a time Fortnite was huge. Now it’s not. Times change, and with them tastes. Epic seems not to have been able to adapt.
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Hollywood work dried up. So they’re taking survival jobs • L.A. Material

Alex Zaragoza:

»

Across the entertainment industry, countless creatives are in the same boat, taking jobs bartending, dog walking, or playing fake patients at hospitals, all the while confronting an existential crisis. The landscape is bleak and getting bleaker. Threads from out-of-work entertainment workers asking for advice on jobs pop up on Reddit and other message boards regularly, their tenor growing more defeated as time wears on. Studio executives — the ones who still have jobs, anyway — may be raking in multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses as many studios turn massive profits, but it can feel like everyone else is holding on for dear life.

The hope is that the job engine of Hollywood in Los Angeles is facing a slump — and not an irreversible crash.
The punches have come one after another in recent years. There was the COVID pandemic, which led to nearly a million jobs lost; the 2023 double strike of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA; and the 2025 wildfires. Through that also came the proliferation of AI, production moving out of state to take advantage of cost-saving subsidies offered elsewhere, and major studio mergers threatening to create a monopoly that will undoubtedly make matters worse. The result has been fewer TV shows and films being made, and a stream of layoffs across the industry. It has all depressingly accounted for 41,000 industry jobs lost in just two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last year, FilmLA, the film office for the City and County of Los Angeles, reported a 13.2% decline in production between July and September of 2025 from the previous year. The Writers Guild of America reported a 40% decrease in jobs in the 2023-2024 television season. International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that oversees stagehands, craftspeople, and artisans in film and television production, saw 18,000 jobs disappear from 2022 to 2024. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA went back into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last month, with a key goal of protecting members from losing work to AI. 

Add it all up and what has been a jobs drought the last couple years now stands to become a career-ending wasteland, leaving the creative workforce scrambling to figure out how the hell they’re going to get by.

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Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops within months • This is Money

Lucy Evans:

»

Eco households who want to distance themselves from fossil fuel energy, which is susceptible to market fluctuations, can install traditional solar panels.

They use daylight to create electricity for your home, which means your family will be less reliant on expensive fossil fuel energy to power your lives.

But they are expensive to install – around £6,000 on average, with £350 a year in energy bill savings, according to Energy Saving Trust. So despite the potential savings, some families shy away from such a purchase due to the thousands of pounds needed upfront to install the panels.

These plug-in versions, however, are far cheaper and can be put on a balcony or in an outdoor space such as a garden instead of being fixed permanently on a roof.

They can be plugged into a mains socket like any other electronic device to provide a home with free solar power.

These cheaper versions are already available in other European countries. In Germany, for example, almost half a million new devices are plugged in every year.

The Government says this technology is “easy to install” and will allow consumers to ‘significantly cut energy bills’.

«

The problem with introducing these in the UK (Germany has wide deployment) is the difference in electrical wiring systems between the two countries. The UK’s ring mains system is different from the spur systems used in Germany, and that creates problems over power flow.

Amusing too that the story has a link to this guide of its own in the middle: “Step by step, what to do NOW to stop the Middle East energy crisis leaving you penniless. This is how to get the best deals on petrol, mortgages and household energy and stay afloat”. Well, at least someone’s taking it seriously.
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Railway clock glitch causes false delays and payouts • Daily News Hungary

Hetzmann Mercédesz:

»

Hungary’s switch to daylight saving time on Sunday morning caused an unexpected technical issue at the state railway company, MÁV. While most digital systems automatically adjusted to the new time, MÁV’s passenger information system failed to update accordingly, leading to widespread confusion.

For several hours after the clock change, the system incorrectly registered trains as being delayed by around 60 minutes, even when services were running on time or with only minimal delays, Telex reported.

The issue became particularly visible on the Vonatinfó platform, where the map appeared flooded with delay indicators. At first glance, it suggested that nearly the entire Hungarian rail network was experiencing significant disruption:

In reality, no such nationwide breakdown had occurred. The problem was that the system “forgot” to advance the time, which resulted in incorrect delay calculations being shown to passengers.

The glitch had an unexpected upside for some travellers.

Because MÁV’s system interpreted the situation as widespread delays exceeding 20 minutes, it automatically began issuing compensation payments.

Under the railway’s policy, passengers are entitled to partial refunds if their train is significantly delayed. Due to the error, even those travelling on time or with minor delays were flagged as eligible and received compensation.

…By late Sunday morning, MÁV issued an official statement confirming that an “IT error” had caused the incorrect delay reports following the clock change. The company said the issue was resolved within a few hours, and the system has since been restored to normal operation. Importantly, the railway company clarified that passengers who received compensation due to the error will not be required to return the money.

«

Still – still! – after all these years there are systems which fail to update when the clocks change. True, it’s not easy. But that’s why they get paid the medium-scale bucks.
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Top Brussels official urges Europeans to work from home and drive less • POLITICO

James Fernyhough, Elena Giordano, Ben Munster and Ben Makuch:

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The European Commission has urged people to work from home, drive and fly less, and for EU countries to urgently roll out renewables, as it warned of a prolonged energy crisis as a result of the conflict in the Gulf.

In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said Europe was facing a “very serious situation” with no clear end in sight.

“Even if … peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future,” he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU’s 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis.

“The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off,” Jørgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included “work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometres [an hour, ie 6mph], encourage public transport, alternate private car access … increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices.”

Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying “this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent.”

Tuesday’s talks between ministers ended with no concrete proposals, although Jørgensen promised the Commission would be announcing a package of EU-level measures in the near future.

His comments come as fears grow that the world faces a major energy crisis exceeding even the 1970s oil shock that could have global economic ramifications comparable to the coronavirus pandemic.

«

Unlike the pandemic, though, there’s absolutely no question of this being anything to do with China.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The polling company YouGov withdrew a survey about young people’s church attendance last week. The reason why is concerning: it’s bots. CC-licensed photo by barnyz 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. Unbelievable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books • The Guardian

Amelia Hill:

»

The news last week that Mia Ballard’s “femgore” horror novel Shy Girl could be up to 78% AI-generated, however, has forced literary agents and publishers alike to consider whether sharp eyes alone can detect AI-generated work.

“The question of how Shy Girl slipped through Hachette’s net is something the publisher has to answer themselves, but in reality, it was only a matter of time before this happened,” said Anna Ganley, the chief executive of the Society of Authors.

Wildfire, a UK imprint of Hachette, had published Shy Girl in November 2025. It was due for US publication in April, but the controversy led to its UK discontinuation and US cancellation earlier this month. Ballard has denied using AI to write Shy Girl, telling the New York Times, which first reported the story, that an acquaintance she hired to edit a self-published version of the novel had used it.

An editor at one of the “big five” publishing houses said a “cold shiver went down my spine” when the Shy Girl story broke. “It really is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’” they said.

“It’s an issue publishers are keenly aware of. We make it very clear to authors what we expect, we get them to sign contracts and we run their work through multiple AI detection tools, but we know all this is fallible.

“Hence the cold shiver: if an author is determined to use AI, then cover their tracks, there’s very little we can do.”

Prof Patrick Juola, a US computer scientist known for his work on authorship attribution, agreed. “I don’t want to call AI detection tools a scam, but it’s a technology that simply doesn’t work.”

He likened the failure to antibiotic resistance: “AI is a learning system continually upgraded by its manufacturers. If there was a detection technology that worked, then people would simply build better AI tools to fool it.”

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The antibiotic resistance analogy is a good one.
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Running on empty: Australia’s hard truths on security • The New Daily

Amy Remeikis:

»

It was the right [wing Australian political parties] that derailed Australia’s energy transition, that prioritised fossil fuels above the nation, that fought reality and convinced a slew of Australians it was common sense to put their faith in a finite resource that was not only contributing to killing the planet, but causing harm to millions in the fights over who controlled it.

It is a fantasy to think that any nation that does not control its energy supply has security. Australia could have been well on its way to securing its energy, if John Howard [of the centre-right Liberal party] and his ilk hadn’t had a tantrum over a changing world, and succumbed to their desires to keep everything the same.

The Morrison government [Liberal party 2018-2022] gave instant tax write-offs to encourage the take-up of big dumb utes [SUVs: “ute” = utility vehicle], while fighting against vehicle emission standards and delaying the take-up of EVs.

The agriculture industry was not encouraged to move away from its reliance on diesel. A general ennui swept middle Australia, lulled by the right into fighting for its own interests.

Nor is [the centre-left party] Labor blameless. Instead of fighting for science and for the future, it took defeats over the carbon price and emissions trading scheme and assumed the only way to beat them was to join them.

Neither party has seen fit to unhook Australia from US foreign policy, and Anthony Albanese [leader of the Labor party, now in power] was one of the first leaders in the world to throw his support behind the American and Israeli decision to bomb Iran, despite not knowing of it in advance, its justification, its legality or even its objectives.

…Australia is no closer to a serious conversation about energy security, even with this latest crisis.

The opposition won’t push the government on it, because that would reveal its major role as a wrecker for politics’ sake in the past three decades. Angus Taylor [leader of Australia’s now-in-opposition Liberal party] can’t even spearhead the “how will you get fuel to Australians?” conversation, because of his own previous culpability in not only derailing the energy transition, but because he decided to store Australia’s fuel reserves in Texas and Louisiana to help strengthen our relationship with the US.

«

It is an incredible irony that Trump’s impetuous and badly advised Iranian adventure may finally get a lot of countries to face up to their reliance on oil and gas, and to move away from it as fast as possible. Strong medicine never tastes good, though, and no politician wants to be the one administering it.
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I decompiled the White House’s new app • Thereallo

Thereallo:

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The White House released an app on the App Store and Google Play. They posted a blog about it: “Unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.”

It took a few minutes to pull the APKs with ADB, and threw them into JADX.
Here is everything I found.

It’s a React Native app built with Expo (SDK 54), running on the Hermes JavaScript engine. The backend is WordPress with a custom REST API. The app was built by an entity called “forty-five-press” according to the Expo config.
The actual app logic is compiled into a 5.5 MB Hermes bytecode bundle. The native Java side is just a thin wrapper.

…The app has a WebView for opening external links. Every time a page loads in this WebView, the app injects a JavaScript snippet. …It hides: Cookie banners; GDPR consent dialogs; OneTrust popups; privacy banners; login walls; signup walls; upsell prompts; paywall elements; CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes.

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

So: an official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

[And] …Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls [the phone’s location] every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

«

This is clearly thrown together by a relatively inexperienced development house – it loads some Javascript from a totally random user’s Github page, which if compromised would compromise everyone using the app. I haven’t seen an analysis of the iOS version, but it’s probably a work of equal knife-and-fork programming, though one would hope that iOS’s stronger permissions settings would prevent some of the more egregious behaviour.

Every time you think this administration can’t get worse, it does something worse.
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When Jimmy Carter was president, he had a plan to.. seize Kharg Island • X

Shashank Joshi is The Economist’s defence editor, and unearthed a fun document at the CIA’s clippings library:

»

Fun story from 1980: Carter’s supposed plan to seize Kharg island. “The plan was originally designed to compensate for not getting the hostages, kind of a tit for’ tat,” explained a top source. “They’d have the hostages; we’d have their key oil depot.”

«

This is the document – in fact a clipping of a newspaper report. As Joshi points out, times have changed: back in February 1980 Carter wanted better ground pictures of the target, so ordered a spy satellite to be shifted to cover it.

That took four months. Ultimately they decided it was too risky. (The whole discussion under the post is very worthwhile. One hopes there are some people left in the US military who know how to find 46-year-old documents, if journalists on X can.)
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Sony shuts down nearly its entire memory card business due to Flash memory shortage • PetaPixel

Jaron Schneider:

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The global shortage of solid state memory has claimed its first photographic victim, as Sony has announced that it is suspending fulfillment of all orders for nearly its entire SD and CFexpress memory card product lines.

Sony Japan published the notice on its website on March 27:

»

Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.

Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.

Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.

«

The suspension includes all of Sony’s memory card lines, including CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD cards. The 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacity Type A cards have been suspended, as have the 480GB and 240GB Type B cards. The full gamut of Sony’s high-end SD cards has also been suspended, including the 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB TOUGH-branded cards and the lower-end 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, and 256GB plainly-branded Sony cards, which cap out at V60 speeds. Even Sony’s lower-end, V30 128GB and 64GB SD cards have been suspended, showcasing that the SSD shortage affects all types of solid state, not just the high-end ones.

«

Hope you weren’t planning to take any photographs of all the conflicts on your professional camera.
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UK ‘weeks away’ from medicine shortages if Iran war continues, experts say • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

Britain is “a few weeks away” from medicine shortages ranging from painkillers to cancer treatment if the Iran war continues, according to experts, while drug prices could also rise.

The conflict has disrupted the supply of a myriad of crucial raw materials, including oil, gas, crop fertiliser and helium – and health essentials could be next.

David Weeks, the Texas-based director of supply chain risk management at the analytics group Moody’s, said: “It’s the perfect storm. We have the conflict in the Gulf that caused the strait of Hormuz to shut down, and India is known as the pharmacy of the world. They produce a lot of the generic [off-patent] drugs and APIs [active pharmaceutical ingredients]. With the geopolitical situation, it’s harder and harder to get those out.”

With airports in Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi initially closed and now operating a limited schedule, pharmaceutical companies have had to reroute their shipments via air, and some are now relying on sea transport, lengthening journey times.

Shipping – the main route for most medicines – is also under strain because of the near total closure of the strait of Hormuz.

“We’re not in a crisis currently but it’s still a serious situation,” said Mark Samuels, the chief executive of Medicines UK, which represents manufacturers of the cheap, off-patent drugs known as generics that make up 85% of medications used by the NHS.

He said that if the conflict dragged on then drug shortages could emerge in only a few weeks’ time. Medical distributors typically stock six to eight weeks of stocks to avoid shortfalls; while suppliers to hospitals in England have to hold eight weeks’ worth.

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It seems that every crisis – the Suez blockage, the RAM shortage, now the strait of Hormuz – makes us discover that the western world is hugely dependent on a few crucial chokepoints which we just assume are always going to work fine.
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Young men, bad data and moral panic • Chris Curtis

Chris Curtis:

»

Last week, YouGov retracted a poll suggesting church attendance had risen sharply among younger people in England and Wales. The poll, published as part of a Bible Society report called Quiet Revival, claimed that the share of young people going to church had jumped from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024.

It was later withdrawn because of what YouGov described as “a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”. I should say at the outset that I think YouGov deserves real credit for how it responded to questions about their research. They investigated what went wrong, admitted the problem, and were transparent about the findings. And the problem they are grappling with here is very far from being just a YouGov issue, but an industry-wide one, and one with wide ranging consequences.

…YouGov began polling when the internet was a very different place. More people were asking Jeeves than Googling, Charlie had not yet been born, let alone bitten anyone’s finger, and if you tried to make a phone call while someone else was online you were greeted by that dreadful dial-up screech.

And since then, a new problem has been growing fast: fake accounts set up to harvest survey incentives. We called them “bots”, but in practice they are often just large numbers of fake or semi-automated accounts, controlled by one person, all trying to extract those payments at scale.

There have always been people on the internet trying to game any system with a cash reward attached to it. And like everyone else online, research agencies have always had tools to try to catch and block people who are playing the system. But AI has made it much easier to do this at scale, and much harder to spot who is real and who is not.

So what has this got to do with young men?

If you are setting up these fake accounts, you want to be invited to the most surveys, so that you can make the most money. And if you want to be invited to the most surveys, you set those accounts up claiming to belong to a demographic that is underrepresented on panels.

And the most underrepresented group is almost always young men… If you believed every headline, you would think the average 24-year-old man was attending church in the morning, investing in crypto by lunch, and overthrowing liberal democracy by teatime.

«

Curtis (who explains that he worked in polling 2015-2024, including at YouGov between 2015 and 2020) points out that polling definitely has a problem. But if polling has a problem, then all of us have a bigger problem: we can’t know what is true.
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Analysis: EVs just outsold petrol cars in EU for first time ever • Carbon Brief

Molly Lempriere:

»

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) overtook standard petrol cars in the EU for the first time in December 2025, according to new figures released by industry group the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). 

The figures show that registrations of battery EVs – sometimes referred to as BEVs, or “pure EVs” – reached 217,898, up 51% year-on-year from December 2024, as shown in the chart below. 

Meanwhile, sales of standard petrol cars in the bloc fell 19% year-on-year, from 267,834 in December 2024 to 216,492 in December 2025. (Note that this definition, from ACEA, excludes “hybrid” cars that only run on petrol, but also have a small battery.)

Overall in 2025, EVs reached 17.4% of the market share in the bloc, up from 13.6% the previous year. 

(EVs run purely from a battery that is charged from an external source, plug-in hybrids have both a battery that can be charged and an internal combustion engine, while regular hybrids cannot be plugged in, but have a smaller battery that is charged from the engine or braking.) 

According to ACEA, 1,880,370 new battery-electric cars were registered last year, with the four biggest markets – Germany (+43.2%), the Netherlands (+18.1%), Belgium (+12.6%), and France (+12.5%) – accounting for 62% of registrations. 

«

That doesn’t include diesel cars, of course, or anything happening in trucks. But as fuel prices rise, EVs are going to look increasingly attractive to anyone who can find a way to buy one and charge it cheaply.
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Exposé of parasite SEO firm Clickout Media removed from Google • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

A Press Gazette investigation into parasite SEO firm Clickout Media has been removed from Google’s search index after a spurious legal complaint.

On Wednesday (25 March), Press Gazette revealed how UK-based Clickout Media has bought a number of news websites in order to exploit their reputations in Google and promote online casinos.

In some cases, journalists have been fired and replaced with AI-powered writers. Some sites were removed from Google’s search results as a result of Press Gazette’s reporting, effectively killing the sites off.

Now Press Gazette’s own reporting of this issue has been removed from the Google archive after a bogus copyright complaint.

A search of the exact Press Gazette headline: “The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands” does not bring the article up.

A note at the bottom of the Google search results page reveals for this query states: “In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint, Complaint.”

According to the Lumen Database, a public archive of legal complaints sent to internet platforms, the article was removed by Google following a complaint sent via the “US Hub” of an unnamed “private” entity. This suggests the complaint originated outside the US.

The spurious and completely ungrounded complaint suggested Press Gazette’s entirely original investigation infringed the copyright of a 2024 article on The Verge about a similar topic (even though The Verge is not the complainant).

«

The right to please, please, please be forgotten.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some schools in the US are rethinking their use of computers such as Chromebooks. CC-licensed photo by Virginia Department of Education 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. Calculated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump runs out of options • Comment Is Freed

Lawrence Freedman:

»

It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own foot steps. Marco Rubio is involved in the decision-making but he has neglected to acquire the professional staff assessments that should inform such decisions (see this from Dan Drezner).

The military part of the Pentagon still functions, but the civilian part has been purged.

…The war has been unpopular from the start and it is getting more so. The inflationary effects of the war are already biting and if some vital supplies stay trapped in the Gulf the pain will soon get worse. Without a quick resolution of the war, many Republicans take for granted a hammering at the mid-terms.

Against this backdrop there are unsurprising reports that Trump is fed up with the war and wants to end it as quickly as possible. His normal ploy is to declare a stunning victory and move on. He has in fact been trying this since early March and still talks about the war being ahead of schedule, at least in terms of the US and Israel running out of things to bomb. But as much as he’d like to walk away this would mean leaving behind a mess in the Gulf. In the rest of this post I’ll look at the prospects for a negotiated settlement, further military escalation, and the possibility that the US will retreat without a resolution.

…This is the conclusion that America’s allies fear. The US does enough to wound the regime but it hangs on. The regime finds itself with leverage which it intends to exploit, both to get regional states to acknowledge its power and provide an extra source of finance. If the US does not have good ideas about how to open the Strait militarily it would be surprising if European and Gulf states, even acting together, would have more success.

If the US walks away from a problem it created because it has become too difficult, then this point could go down as one in which US influence took a steep decline. The Gulf states know all about past efforts to ‘eliminate’ Iranian proxies, and how these somehow managed to survive and recover. They have been shocked by Iranian strikes against them, so they are not confident of a deal with Tehran, yet can no longer rely on the US. This is bound to lead to some policy reappraisals. In the short term while they might explore options for getting open the Strait they will also need to develop ways of getting round the current restrictions. All will be expensive and time-consuming and add to the international bill.

«

Subscribing to (Sam and Lawrence) Freedman’s Substack is very cheap, and provides excellent insights. Nothing here is positive.
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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.
With that in mind, the Mac Studio is clearly set up to be the ‘pro’ desktop Mac of the future in Apple’s lineup.

«

The “pro” always used to be the top-end version to which one could add graphics cards and other extras comparatively easily; the best example was the G4, where one side latched down to give access to the internals.

But the desktop market is shrinking, and has been for years; it was 80/20 in favour of laptops about 15 years ago, and nothing’s taking it in the other direction. For a while Apple has had four desktop products: the Mac mini, the iMac, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro. That’s at least one too many, and the Pro was just a Studio with a different case. So now it’s dead.
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FBI confirms hackers targeted Kash Patel’s personal emails • POLITICO

Maggie Miller and John Sakellariadis:

»

The FBI on Friday confirmed that hackers targeted the personal emails of Director Kash Patel, hours after an Iranian government-linked hacking group posted documents and images online, claiming to have stolen them from Patel.

In a statement, the FBI confirmed the agency was “aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity.”

“The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information,” the FBI added. The statement did not include details on who was behind the attack. “The FBI will continue to pursue the actors responsible, support victims, and share actionable intelligence in defense of networks,” it said.

Earlier in the day, Iran-linked hacking group Handala claimed to have hacked Patel’s email and published several pictures of the director, including one showing him brandishing a cigar and another that appears to be his personal resume. Most emails are dated between 2012 and 2014, though there is at least one from 2022, according to files posted by Handala on Telegram and reviewed by POLITICO.

In a post on Thursday, also reviewed by POLITICO, Handala claimed to have breached an FBI network, but did not provide details on what information may have been accessed.

Handala has recently been linked to a high-profile cyberattack against a U.S. company. Last week, the DOJ said the group was responsible for a hack of Michigan-based medical device manufacturer Stryker, which wiped roughly 200,000 devices and exfiltrated large amounts of data from the company.

«

Patel got hacked because he used the same password for his personal email as on other sites, and so when those sites get hacked, your password is in there. Quite probably it was hashed, but if you’re the Iranian government hackers then you’re going to put some effort into digging Patel’s email/password pair out of a big data dump and decrypting it.

Obviously hacking isn’t good. But Patel is such a pompous idiot that one hopes it takes him down a peg or two: he has nobody to blame but himself.
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What AI hypists miss • Persuasion

Francis Fukuyama:

»

Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20% per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone.

I happen to know something about the latter issue. I’ve been teaching cases over the past decade on why South Asian cities like Hyderabad and Dhaka have struggled with providing municipal water. The reason isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years.

The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host “water mafias” that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books.

It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems. And this points to a central conceit that plagues the whole AI field: a gross overestimation of the value of intelligence by itself to solve problems.

«

This would be enough on its own, but the post then goes on to explain the ways to solve the real challenges that are much more complicated in the real world than “Hey ChatGPT, how do I get water from underground to the surface?” Immediate subscribe. (Via John Naughton.)
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Claude’s popularity is forcing it to hit the brakes on users • Business Insider

Brent Griffiths:

»

All of that conquering is starting to stretch Claude thin.

Earlier last week, Anthropic adjusted its usage limits for Claude free, Pro, and Max subscribers. While weekly limits don’t change, it means users will approach their cap more quickly when they are using Claude during peak hours, which Anthropic defines as between 5 am to 11 am Pacific Time.

“We’ve landed a lot of efficiency wins to offset this, but ~7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn’t have before, particularly for pro tiers,” Thariq Shihipar, who works on Claude, wrote on X. “If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further.”

“I know this was frustrating,” Shihipar wrote. “We’re continuing to invest in scaling efficiently. I’ll keep you posted on progress.”

Anthropic has seen a surge in mainstream interest since CEO Dario Amodei refused to grant the Pentagon unfettered access to the company’s AI models. Amodei has previously said the company’s core focus is its enterprise business.

Like its competitors, Anthropic is experiencing growing pains as it tries to balance out its available compute. The reality of tools like OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, is that users can tap into the full potential of AI models like never before. At the same time, the explosion of agents means users are blowing through compute like never before.

OpenAI announced earlier this week that it is jettisoning Sora, its once-popular TikTok-esque AI video generation app, as it refocuses its compute on core services.

«

One suspects there’s more of this retrenching to come. Data centres are hard and slow to build, while demand is going up exponentially, at a guess.
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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative. Last week the UK chancellor also launched a drive to get millions more Britons using AI.

The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming.

Previous research has largely focused on testing AI’s behaviour in controlled conditions. Earlier this month the AI safety research company Irregular found agents would bypass security controls or use cyber-attack tactics to reach their goals without being told they could do so.

Dan Lahav, Irregular’s cofounder, said: “AI can now be thought of as a new form of insider risk.”

In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.

In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.

«

There is always the underlying problem that we don’t really know what “rules” these systems are operating under. So they do things that we think are precluded by the rules; they don’t perceive those rules. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Chromebook remorse: tech backlash at schools extends beyond phones • The New York Times

Natasha Singer:

»

The coronavirus pandemic only increased school reliance on tech tools. In 2021, Chromebook shipments to schools more than doubled to nearly 16.8 million, compared with shipments in 2016, according to Futuresource Consulting, a market research firm.

When [Inge] Esping [the principal of McPherson Middle School in McPherson, Kansas] took over as principal in 2022, she worried that rampant tech use was hindering learning. So the school banned student cellphones.

Online bullying and disciplinary incidents quickly decreased, she said. But online distractions continued.

Some students became so hooked on playing video games on their Chromebooks that teachers had difficulty getting them to concentrate on their schoolwork, administrators and teachers said. Students also sent mean Gmail messages or set up shared Google Docs to bully classmates with comments. Hundreds of children logged on to Zoom meetings where they made fun of their peers, teachers and students said.

The school blocked Spotify and YouTube on school laptops. Then administrators stopped students from messaging one another on school Gmail. Even then, some educators said they were spending so much time policing student Chromebook use that it was detracting from teaching. Some parents complained their children were spending hours playing video games on their school-issued devices.

Although the idea of taking back students’ Chromebooks seemed unorthodox, given U.S. schools’ deep reliance on Google’s sprawling education platform, the middle school went ahead. The changes took effect in January.

On one recent morning, school formally began with the Pledge of Allegiance, broadcast over school loudspeakers. Homeroom teachers then led group sessions on organizational and interpersonal skills to help children navigate life without their own laptops. Homeroom topics have included tips for students on using paper planners for school assignments and doing homework during school hours. (Students who want to practice things like extra math problems online can borrow Chromebooks from the school library to take home.)

Teachers have also taught students how to play board and card games like Scattergories and Uno.

«

This does all seem eminently sensible. There’s plenty of time to learn how to use computers (and phones) outside school. The purpose of school, though, isn’t to learn how to use them.
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Balancer Labs to shut down following $110m exploit, co-founder says in DAO post • CoinDesk

Shaurya Malwa:

»

Balancer Labs, the corporate entity behind the Balancer decentralized exchange, is shutting down after a 2025 exploit created ongoing legal and financial strain, though the protocol will remain online in a leaner form.

The project’s total value locked has fallen about 95% from a 2021 peak of nearly $3.5bn to $157m, prompting an aggressive restructuring that ends BAL emissions, winds down veBAL governance and redirects 100% of protocol fees to the DAO treasury.

Essential staff will move to a new Balancer OpCo, the product scope will narrow to a handful of core pool types and non-EVM expansion, and a BAL buyback aims to give tokenholders what the founder calls a fair exit if they do not support the revamped protocol.

«

The story that follows it below is pretty much gobbledygook to any normal person who isn’t immersed in the whole DeFi (decentralised finance) space. But my eyes keep going back to the “$110m exploit”, and my thoughts keep on asking: how on earth are you still going, since this thing only generates about $4m in fees annually?

Still haven’t seen anything to persuade me that any of this has true utility which hasn’t already been covered by conventional banking and its carefully secured offshoots.
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Technology weakens our minds. It’s time to resist • The New York Times

Cal Newport:

»

Research from Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, indicates that our attention spans are about one-third as long as they were in 2004, with the biggest drops happening around 2012. Long-running surveys reveal that the share of US adults who struggle with basic reading or math has risen markedly over the past decade, while the percentage of 18-year-olds who report difficulty thinking and concentrating jumped in the same period. A Financial Times article about these findings proposed a shocking but relevant question: “Have humans passed peak brain power?”

Many of these declines in cognitive skills became notable starting in the mid-2010s, exactly the period when smartphones became ubiquitous and the digital attention economy exploded in size. An increasing amount of research implies that this timing is no coincidence. A meta-analysis released last fall showed that consuming short-form video content, as delivered by apps like TikTok and Instagram, is associated with poorer cognition and reduced attention, and the results of a clever experiment from 2023 found that the mere presence of participants’ smartphones in a room significantly reduced their ability to concentrate.

The growth of AI has brought new cognitive concerns. A study from January, based on surveys and interviews with more than 600 participants, revealed a “significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” Another recent study, which tracked the brain activity of research subjects who were writing with the help of large language models, found that “brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support.”

The loss of our ability to think is a big deal. Close to 40% of the U.S. gross domestic product comes from so-called knowledge and technology-intensive industries, from aerospace manufacturing to software development to financial and information services. Companies in these fields alchemize advanced human thought into revenue; as we weaken our brains, we also threaten to weaken our economy.

«

Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Deep Work”, which came out in 2016. He argues that we should treat the many, many distractions around us as being like ultraprocessed foods – to be avoided in favour of stuff we make ourselves. Good luck, as they say, with that.
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Business Insider lost 27% of paid subscribers over three years, report says • The Wrap

Corbin Bolies:

»

Business Insider has seen its subscriber base decrease each of the past three years, dropping about 27% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2025, according to a report in Status.

The Axel Springer-owned business and tech-focused publication finished 2022 with about 185,000 paid subscribers, according to Status. But as the publication went through a series of changes — the installation of Barbara Peng as CEO in 2023 and the appointment of Wall Street Journal veteran Jamie Heller as editor-in-chief in 2024, among others — its subscriber count continued to drop.

The publication ended 2023 with about 160,000 paid subscribers, a roughly 14% decline from 2022. In 2024, it finished with roughly 150,000 subscribers, about a 6% drop. Last year, it ended the year with about 135,000 paid subscribers, a roughly 10% drop.

The publication, which rebranded from Insider back to Business Insider in 2023, has scaled back its newsroom, laying off 21% of staff last year, its third consecutive year of job cuts. In January, it’s chief revenue officer and global head of sales exited.

A Business Insider spokesperson told TheWrap that the publication has reshaped its editorial strategy and paywall over the last three years, which has produced “a more defined and engaged core audience.” It has also moved away from aggregation, and about 80% of its content is exclusives, scoops and original reporting, they said.

«

Should one look at the number of subscribers lost, or the number retained? As long as they’re in six figures, things are probably OK. But these days there are a zillion sites (particularly on Substack) yowling for our attention and especially our money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Shortages of helium shipments from Qatar are already hitting tech manufacturing. CC-licensed photo by fdecomite 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. Deflated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Study finds sycophantic AI can undermine human judgment • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

»

We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been several recent cases of overly sycophantic AI tools leading to negative outcomes, including users harming themselves and/or others. But the harm might not be limited to these extreme cases, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. As more people rely on AI tools for everyday advice and guidance, their tendency to overly flatter and agree with users can have harmful effects on those users’ judgment, particularly in the social sphere.

The study showed that such tools can reinforce maladaptive beliefs, discourage users from accepting responsibility for a situation, or discourage them from repairing damaged relationships. That said, the authors were quick to emphasize during a media briefing that their findings were not intended to feed into “doomsday sentiments” about such AI models. Rather, the objective is to further our understanding of how such AI models work and their impact on human users, in hopes of making them better while the models are still in the early-ish development stages.

Co-author Myra Cheng, a graduate student at Stanford University, said she and her co-authors were inspired to study this issue after they began noticing a pronounced increase in the number of people around them who had started relying on AI chatbots for relationship advice—and often ended up receiving bad advice because the AI would take their side no matter what. Their interest was bolstered by recent surveys showing nearly half of Americans under 30 have asked an AI tool for personal advice. “Given how common this is becoming, we wanted to understand how an overly affirming AI advice might impact people’s real-world relationships,” said Cheng.

Granted, there has been some prior research looking at AI sycophancy, but these focused on very limited settings, such as how often an AI tool will agree with you even if means contradicting a well-established fact. Cheng and her co-authors wanted to look more closely at the broader social implications.

«

Given the number of people who (wrongly) seem to think chatbots are a sufficient replacement for search engines, this is a worrying finding. The ideal would be for all the chatbot makers to make their systems grumpier, but that’s just not going to happen, because people like smarmy robots.
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Model collapse is already happening, we just pretend it isn’t • Communications of the ACM

Alex Williams:

»

People tend to imagine model collapse as some dramatic cliff where a model suddenly starts producing gibberish. The reality is more subtle and, honestly, more dangerous because of that subtlety. What you get is a slow erosion of variance. Outputs become more generic. Edges get sanded down. The model starts producing text that reads fine on a surface level but carries less information per sentence.

Think of it like making a photocopy of a photocopy. The first few generations look almost identical to the original. But by the tenth copy, the image is washed out. Everything is legible, technically; it’s just lost the detail that made it useful.

In language, that loss shows up as homogenization. The model reaches for the same sentence structures, the same hedging phrases, the same predictable cadences. If you’ve ever read a block of text and thought “something about this feels AI-generated” without being able to point to a specific error, you’ve already felt what an AI-native web looks like from the outside post model collapse.

The obvious response is: just filter the synthetic data out. Use classifiers to detect AI-generated text and exclude it from training sets. In theory, that’s fine. In practice, it’s becoming nearly impossible at scale.

Detection tools are in an arms race with the models producing the content, and the models are winning. As generation quality improves, the statistical signatures that classifiers rely on get weaker. Watermarking has been proposed, but there’s no universal standard, no adoption incentive, and plenty of ways to strip watermarks after the fact. The metadata layer of the Internet was never designed to track whether a piece of text was written by a person or a machine.

What the field actually needs is a robust data provenance infrastructure. We need to know where training data came from, how it was generated, and whether it’s been through a model already. That’s a hard systems problem, and it’s not glamorous enough to attract the attention it deserves. Everyone wants to build the next frontier model. Very few people want to build the plumbing that makes frontier models trustworthy.

«

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Helium shortage has started impacting tech supply chains, execs say • Reuters

Eduardo Baptista:

»

Tightened supply of helium due to the Middle East conflict has started affecting some production in the global tech supply chains, leaving ​companies scrambling to secure alternative supplies, industry executives said.

Helium is used in several key stages of chipmaking, including cooling, leak detection and precision manufacturing processes, and its prices have soared since the Middle East crisis began.

Supply of helium, a byproduct of natural ​gas processing, is highly concentrated geographically, with Qatar producing nearly one third ​of world supply, according to data from the US Geological Survey.

Qatar contributes a major share of global helium supply—around 63 million cubic feet in 2025 [34% of the global total]—making it the largest producer outside the U.S [which produces 81m cu ft, 44% of global output].

“A helium shortage is an absolute concern,” said Cameron Johnson, senior partner at supply ​chain consultancy Tidal Wave Solutions, at Semicon China in Shanghai, one of the ​industry’s largest annual gatherings.

He said companies had few immediate options beyond slowing output and prioritising critical products, adding that many were hoping for a quick resolution.

Prolonged shortages could force production cuts ​and ripple through industries from electronics to automobiles, Johnson added.

“As there’s a shortage, ​companies might start slowing production or ultimately shutting production down, making chips,” he said. “If that happens, you will see an impact on things like electronics, automobiles, even smartphones.”

Jerry Zhang, China sales head at Swiss semiconductor components firm VAT, said the conflict in the Middle East had tightened helium supply and was already affecting production at his and other ​companies, adding that transport ​delays were compounding the impact. The company is seeking alternative sources, including from the United States.

«

Nobody, absolutely nobody, thought this through. And now everyone gets to pay the price.
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‘Things are going to get worse’: swing-state mothers sour on government • Semafor

David Weigel:

»

They felt “overwhelmed” by bad news and grocery bills. They weren’t sure who “you can trust these days.” And they couldn’t name a politician that might fix it.

By convening a focus group of seven swing state voters, all mothers between 27 and 48 years old, the Democratic firm Navigator Research found angst about the country’s direction and little faith in either party’s ability to fix its problems.

“It’s just very overwhelming to me trying to figure out what direction we’re actually going in,” said a 40-year-old mother of three from Georgia, who’d voted for neither President Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris in 2024.

“I feel like things are going to get worse before they get better,” said a 38-year-old mother in Wisconsin who’d supported Trump. “It’s going to take a lot to break down those evil walls that were built up and all the evil behind everything so that things can be better eventually.”

Navigator Research regularly gathers groups of representative Americans to check in with voters who aren’t overly engaged with politics. Last week’s session, which was viewed by Semafor, focused on women who felt it had become too expensive to comfortably support a family in the US.

“The gas prices are going up right when taxes hit,” said a 27-year-old mother from Arizona.

But the voters surveyed didn’t seem to see either party as the solution. Even those who had voted for Harris couldn’t name a Democrat who spoke to their needs.

«

I think anyone would be hard-pressed right now to name a Democrat politician who has all the answers and has the attention of voters. However:

»

Asked what news sources she relied on, the Michigan mother said traditional news had “turned into the shows my grandma used to watch” — soap operas with forced narratives. Two women who had voted for Harris said that they got news and analysis from right-wing personality Candace Owens; one of them even said that she’d like to see Owens, who is known for spreading conspiracy theories, run for president. “She does fact-check,” she explained. “She has a lot of resources.”

«

OK, that is quite worrying. If there’s anyone who should be kept as far as possible from anything resembling a lever of power, it’s Owens.
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Find out where Australia’s fuel shortage is most acute • Yahoo News Australia

Zac de Silva:

»

Each jurisdiction measures fuel shortages shortage differently but Energy Minister Chris Bowen has provided a state-by-state breakdown in federal parliament:
• As of Wednesday In NSW, 187 service stations had no diesel and 32 had no fuel at all
• In Queensland, 55 had no diesel and 35 had no regular unleaded
• In Victoria, 134 were out of at least one grade of fuel
• In South Australia, 49 stations were dealing with shortages
• In Western Australia, six are out of all fuel and four have no diesel
• In Tasmania, one service station has no diesel and six have no unleaded
• In the Northern Territory, there are no shortages because of the Middle East war, Mr Bowen said, but an ongoing flooding and cyclone disaster was affecting supplies
• In the ACT [Australian Central Territory], one service station was without diesel

How has the government responded?
• Fuel companies have been told to release more than 500 million litres of petrol and diesel from their emergency reserves, which is being directed towards regional areas where shortages are most acute
• Fuel quality standards for petrol and diesel have also been reduced, meaning lower-quality fuel usually reserved for export can also be used onshore

Government officials say they’re not considering rationing fuel at this stage, but have encouraged motorists to only take as much as they need, and no more.

«

This is a direct effect of the Iran conflict, and particularly the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. (Subbing note: it’s Strait, singular, not Straits. There’s only one navigational strait that goes part the island of Hormuz.)
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Global PC shipments to decline 5% YoY in 2026 amid rising memory prices • Counterpoint Research

»

The market is witnessing a clear polarization in performance across major vendors:

Lenovo, HP and Dell: All three are expected to see mid-single-digit shipment declines. Notably, Dell is projected to record the mildest contraction among the three, buoyed by its high exposure to the commercial and premium segments, which typically exhibit higher price inelasticity.

Apple: Apple is uniquely positioned to turn this market volatility into a growth opportunity through strategic aggression:
• Entry-level disruption: By launching its first-ever $599 laptop (MacBook Neo), Apple is aggressively capturing demand in the budget and education sectors. This strategy aims to maximize long-term revenue from services and lock younger demographics into the Apple ecosystem at an earlier stage
• Portfolio premiumization: With the expected launch of its first OLED-based laptop in the second half of the year, Apple’s product portfolio will reach an unprecedented level of diversification and technical sophistication.

ASUS, Acer and Tier-2 brands: These vendors are forecast to suffer more pronounced declines. Their high exposure to low-end segments makes them vulnerable to price sensitivity. Furthermore, smaller procurement volumes may lead to weaker bargaining power, resulting in steeper cost hikes or supply chain marginalization during memory shortages.

Senior Analyst Minsoo Kang said, “The continuous surge in memory prices is forcing PC OEMs into a difficult choice – absorb margin compression or pass the costs on to consumers through price hikes. As major players are already implementing or planning price increases, an immediate softening of consumer demand is highly anticipated.

While higher prices may provide some ASP (average selling price) uplift, the projected 5% YoY drop in shipment volumes will result in revenue declines for most of the OEMs. However, around 40% of the current installed base still consists of Windows 10 or older systems, suggesting that a significant portion of devices still requires upgrades. Consequently, the PC market’s decline is likely to be less pronounced compared to other consumer electronics segments.

«

PC makers will be relieved that Microsoft is helping them out again. Though the smaller players are going to get squeezed for sure: this might be an extinction event for some of them.
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The internet loves this band of lost dogs journeying home. Too bad the story is fake • CNN

Jessie Yeung:

»

By now, the video has been seen tens of millions of times. The internet is enamored; how can you not be?

The short clip shows a group of dogs in China who were purportedly captured to be eaten but escaped and made the long journey home as a merry band of misfits – including a golden retriever, an injured German shepherd, and a brave corgi leading the way.

The problem: It’s not real. Though the original clip is authentic, showing seven dogs wandering down the side of a highway in northeastern Jilin province, Chinese state media has since debunked the narrative of their escape and journey home.

…The phenomenon illustrates how misinformation can multiply after a viral moment, spreading what can seem to be harmless narratives that are made harder to verify in the age of AI. In this case, some of the false storylines included racist stereotypes.

Amid the doom and gloom of news coverage, audiences are hungry for wholesome feel-good content like animal videos.

They offer an escape but their popularity also encourages social media creators to invent or embellish content for clicks, said TJ Thomson, associate professor of digital media at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

“Folks are trying to capitalize on existing viral content or trends,” he said. “Attention is money online and on social media. So, the more attention you get, the more engagement you get.”

…All of the dogs belonged to villagers who lived a few kilometers from the highway where they were filmed, according to the Chinese state-owned City Evening News, which tracked down the owners. The German shepherd had been in heat, which is why other dogs were drawn to it, the owners said.

Most dogs in the village were free-roaming and often disappeared for a day or two during their heat cycle, Cover News reported. The seven dogs in question have since returned home, with the German shepherd now restrained on a leash until its heat cycle ends.

«

Oh well. Look, it’s still a happy story – dogs some distance from home return home. It just doesn’t have the theft angle.
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That’s all, for now • Asimov Press and Niko McCarty

Asimov Press:

»

Asimov Press is going on hiatus. While a few more articles will appear over the next month — and our stunning hardcover book, Making the Modern Laboratory, will come out this summer — operations will pause in April. All articles will remain freely accessible online.

As we prepare to pause, I want to celebrate what we’ve accomplished. In June 2023, Asimov Press was just a vague idea. (I remember posting the announcement from my phone in the Amsterdam metro, feeling a deep sense of fear about what we were starting.) A few months later, I brought on Xander Balwit. The two of us were its only editors and only full-time staff. We launched with about 7,000 subscribers, ported over from my personal blog, Codon. Our first article appeared in January 2024.

While I had attended journalism school and thought I knew about publishing, I soon discovered that literally everything — from managing people, to recruiting and paying writers, to fact-checking stories, printing books, and much else — doesn’t play out as it’s taught in school. By trial and error, Xander and I had to learn how to develop an eye for writers with exceptional promise, separate good pitches from vague ones, figure out which parts of a draft were most compelling, and make sure stories were told deeply enough to satisfy scientists, while remaining accessible to all “ambitious” readers.

…We’ve come a long way since our inception. Today, we have about 42,000 subscribers between Substack and our website. The press has published 149 original articles, reaching about half a million readers each month.

…Our decision to pause is not related to funding. Asimov has supported us for the last two years, and we’ve received generous grants from Astera Institute and Stripe. But new projects have called away Xander and I, making it a good time to recalibrate.

«

A relief that this is not about funding, because Asimov really has been a terrific entrant to the science publishing space (using Substack under the hood). Let’s hope the pause is not too long.
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OpenAI puts erotic chatbot plans on hold ‘indefinitely’ • Financial Times

Cristina Criddle and Stephen Morris:

»

OpenAI has shelved plans to release an erotic chatbot “indefinitely” as it refocuses on its core products, following concerns from staff and investors about the effect of sexualised AI content on society.

Sam Altman’s start-up had already delayed the release of its “adult mode” amid internal discussions over whether to scrap the model entirely, according to multiple people familiar.

The sexual chatbot faced growing pushback over how it could encourage unhealthy attachments to AI systems and expose minors to problematic sexual content.

The erotic model was on hold with no timeline for its release, OpenAI confirmed. The $730bn AI lab said it wanted to have long-term research on the effects of sexually explicit chats and emotional attachments, as part of product development, acknowledging there was no “empirical evidence” at present.

It marked the latest decision by OpenAI to drop what executives have termed “side quests” in favour of devoting resources to productivity tools, bringing together products such as coding assistants and ChatGPT into one “super app”.

OpenAI on Tuesday said it was winding down its Sora video generation model and social app.

«

Finally, some good news! Though the idea of OpenAI trying to create a superapp seems quixotic. People in the west simply don’t want Swiss Army knives; they prefer the individual tools.

More generally, OpenAI is definitely pulling its horns in. Perhaps the first sign of winter.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Utah, the Great Salt Lake is drying up and now America wonders if market forces can refill it. CC-licensed photo by Scott Elliott Smithson 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. Dessicated. 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 just patented the end of your website • Forbes

Joe Toscano:

»

A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

This isn’t a feature announcement, it’s a patent, meaning Google has legally protected the ability to do this. Whether and when they deploy it is a separate question, but the direction is unmistakable – your website may soon be optional.

The system described in the patent is more sophisticated than a simple redirect. When a user submits a query, Google generates a standard search result page. But simultaneously, the system scores the most relevant landing page using signals like conversion rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, and design quality. If that score falls below a threshold – or if the page simply lacks the desired content – search results maybe be updated to include a navigation link to an AI-generated alternative.

That alternative page isn’t a cached copy of your site. It’s a dynamically assembled page built from the user’s current query, their search history, their account context, and whatever Google can extract from your original page. The patent describes possible elements including personalized headlines, suggested product filters, a product feed, sitelinks to product detail pages, and even an embedded AI chatbot. In other words, a complete brand experience built by Google. Not you.

There’s one particularly striking detail buried in the patent’s claims: “In some instances, the navigation link can be included in a sponsored content item.” What the patent does not say is how that sponsored unit would be billed, who sets it up, or whether it requires advertiser consent.

«

Google has decided that at some point people might be just no good at writing websites. Or maybe that AI is no good at writing websites, which is happening more and more. Between this and the rewriting of headlines on articles in results, Google really seems to think the rest of the web isn’t trying hard enough. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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Elon Musk pauses plan to improve X • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

»

On Tuesday, [X’s head of product since last summer, Nikita] Bier announced a change to X’s revenue-sharing system: It would encourage X users who make money by posting on the platform to post about “content that resonates with people in your country, in neighboring countries and people who speak your language.”

That is: Bier’s plan was meant to discourage X users based in places like India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe from riling up big audiences in the US with incendiary posts about US politics.

“While we appreciate everyone’s opinion on American politics, we hope this will disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts and instead, drive diverse conversations on the platform,” Bier wrote.

That seems like a good idea. It’s also one that builds on work Bier had done previously on the platform, when he started disclosing where X users were actually based, which made it clear that lots of accounts that purported to be very interested in American politics and culture wars were run by people outside America.

Bier’s plan wouldn’t prevent those posters from weighing in on US elections or anything else. But it would make it harder for those posters to make money doing that.

And now it’s not happening, per Musk. “We will pause moving forward with this until further consideration,” he told an X user who was complaining about the new policy early Wednesday morning.

This may have been news to Bier, who was on the platform at the same time, defending the policy and telling some users they would make more money with the new system.

So what happened? I’ve asked X and Musk for comment. [Which hasn’t been forthcoming.]

It’s hard to imagine Bier making a decision that would affect power users on X without consulting with his boss, who is also X’s biggest power user. But who knows? Maybe he did, and Musk changed his mind — something he does all the time.

Or maybe he did and Musk forgot, because he’s got a lot on his mind. For instance, he is getting ready to launch what could be the biggest IPO in history, when he files to take SpaceX public — something that could happen in the next few days, per The Information.

That also means he would be taking Twitter/X public, since he merged that company with his xAI business last year, and then merged those companies into SpaceX earlier this year.

«

Bier seemed to be taking cautious steps towards making X a more trustworthy place; the revelation of where people are posting from made a huge difference in helping root out bad actors. The whole monetisation scheme has created a morass of perverse incentives which need to be unwound.
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Meta and YouTube designed addictive products that harmed young people, jury finds • The Guardian

Dara Kerr:

»

Meta and YouTube have been found liable for deliberately designing addictive products that hooked a young user and led to her being harmed, a jury ruled on Wednesday. Jurors found the tech companies to be both negligent and having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their products.

The jury awarded the plaintiff in the case damages of $6m, with Meta to pay 70% and YouTube the remainder. It took nearly nine days of deliberations for the Los Angeles jury to reach its verdict. This lawsuit, over social media’s alleged harm to young people, was the first of its kind to go to trial.

Over the course of the six-week trial, which took place in Los Angeles superior court, jurors heard from top executives at Meta and YouTube, whistleblowers, expert witnesses on social media and addiction, and a 20-year-old woman at the center of the lawsuit, who has gone by the initials KGM for court proceedings.

KGM testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said had deleterious effects on her wellbeing. By age 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm as a result. Her social media use allegedly caused her to have strained relationships with her family and in school. When she was 13, KGM’s therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, which KGM attributes to her use of Instagram and YouTube.

“How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones,” Mark Lanier, KGM’s lawyer said during closing arguments last week. “These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”

KGM’s lawyers say her experience is emblematic of what tens of thousands of young people have faced on social media and in their offline lives.

«

Juries really don’t like Meta or YouTube, do they. The question is, will this change the behaviour or design of any of their products? If the trial doesn’t come with some sort of government sanction attached, it’s hard to see anything changing.
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Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

»

A jury on Tuesday found Meta violated New Mexico law in a case accusing it of failing to warn users about the dangers of its platforms and protect children from sexual predators.

The jury found Meta liable on all counts, including for willfully engaging in “unfair and deceptive” and “unconscionable” trade practices, and ordered the company to pay $375m in damages.

Meta for years has faced concerns about risks to kids and teens on its platforms from parents, whistleblowers, advocates and lawmakers. Tuesday’s decision marks the first time the company has been held accountable in a jury trial for those issues.

A Meta spokesperson said the company “respectfully” disagrees and plans to appeal the decision.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023 for allegedly creating a “breeding ground” for child predators on Facebook and Instagram, claims that the company denies. The jury’s award was smaller than the billions in damages New Mexico had sought, but a later portion of the case to be presented directly to the judge could also force Meta to make changes to its platforms and pay additional penalties.

The case is part of a wave of legal pressure Meta and other social media platforms are facing over the safety of young users. As jurors in New Mexico state court delivered a verdict, jurors in Los Angeles are considering a separate case against Meta and YouTube accusing them of intentionally creating addictive features that harmed a young woman’s mental health. Social media giants are also facing hundreds of other cases from individuals, school districts and state attorneys general — some of which are set to go to trial later this year.

Closing arguments on Monday followed a six-week trial that included testimony from Meta executives and former employees-turned-whistleblowers. Details from the attorney general’s undercover investigation into child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms, which led to three arrests, were also discussed in the courtroom.

«

The fine amounts to only a few hours’ revenue for Meta as a whole, and perhaps a few days’ profit, but it’s the cumulative effect which might start to be relevant here. There is a certain echo of the tobacco trials about it all, and Don Draper is nowhere to be found.
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‘Dead end’: radical 20-year study reveals genetic cloning hits a limit • ScienceAlert

Carly Cassella:

»

Scientists have pushed the limits of mammal cloning until the whole house of cards has come tumbling down.

After two decades of continuous work, researchers in Japan have discovered a genetic ‘dead end’ to mammal cloning.

The study began in 2005, when researchers, led by scientists at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, cloned a single female mouse. They then re-cloned that clone by transferring its nuclear DNA into an egg ’emptied’ of nuclear DNA, and so on and so forth, for 57 more generations, producing more than 1,200 mice from that single original donor.

Two decades later, the team was on their 58th generation, and the re-cloned mice had accumulated so many genetic mutations that they died the day after they were born.

The study is the first peer-reviewed research to ‘serially’ clone a mammal to this end.

“It has long been unclear whether mammals, unlike plants and some lower animals, could sustain their species through clonal reproduction alone,” write the research team, led by geneticist Sayaka Wakayama. “[O]ur results align closely with Muller’s ratchet theory,” they add. “This model predicts that in asexual lineages, deleterious mutations inevitably accumulate, ultimately producing mutational meltdown and extinction.”

«

This is why sexual reproduction exists: it’s an efficient way of removing deleterious mutations, since they don’t survive to reproducing age. Then again, 57 generations is a lot; mice reach reproductive maturity at about eight weeks old. If you did this in humans, you’d get to about 900 years before the end of the experiment (assuming no disastrous mutations).
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Fibre optic cables reveal a big problem at the heart of farming • Grist

Matt Simon:

»

When farmers first started putting down roots, they’d plant and tend their crops by hand. With the power of oxen, they could drag plows across their fields before sowing, which boosted soil fertility and eliminated weeds. Today, that job has been made even easier by giant machines that rake the landscape.

Millennia of tilling, though, has come at a cost. While plowing releases nutrients in the short term, it degrades soil fertility in the long term, requiring farmers to load their fields with synthetic fertilizers. (The burst of microbial activity after roiling the ground also chews through accumulated carbon, returning it to the atmosphere as planet-warming greenhouse gas.) In addition, all this cultivation destroys the natural subterranean structures that hold onto water, meaning less is delivered to crops.

Fibre optic cables, of all things, have now exposed just how badly tilling messes with a farm’s ability to retain moisture. Using a technology known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, scientists analyzed how seismic waves disturbed the cable as they rippled through harrowed fields compared to adjacent undisturbed plots. This created subtly distinct signals, showing that plowing obliterates the “capillaries” that carry water like tiny interconnected reservoirs. 

The findings point to a serious problem with modern agriculture, to be sure, but also to solutions. “Regenerative farming practices based on principles of no-till — combined with cover crops and a diversity of crops — can basically lead to less agrochemical reliance, better soil organic matter contents, comparable yields, [and] lower diesel use,” said David Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington and coauthor of a new paper describing the research.

DAS exploits the extreme sensitivity of fibre optic cables, which transmit information as pulses of light. If there’s a disturbance along the path — an earthquake or even someone walking overhead — a tiny bit of light bounces back to the source. With a device called an interrogator, researchers can send pulses along a length of cable and analyze what returns. Because they know the speed of light, they can differentiate a disturbance a mile down the line from one just a few hundred feet away, as the former will take just a tiny bit longer to return. Whereas a traditional seismometer takes readings at a single point, a DAS system turns miles upon miles of fibre optic cable into one continuous sensor. 

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I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

»

As we worked through my interview questions I stopped and asked [Hany] Farid [a digital forensics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of GetReal Security, which works to mitigate the threat of AI deepfakes] if there was anything I could do, right now, to prove to him that I wasn’t an AI.

His answer was simple: No.

“There are things I could do to probe the system and make it less likely,” Farid says. “If you were a full-blown agentic AI, I wouldn’t hear you typing. And I can see a shadow in the background that’s pretty physically consistent as you move, and a reflection in your glasses.” There were other signs, too like the way I kept looking down as I took notes, something a deepfake wouldn’t bother with. “But at the end of the day, you’re in New York. I’m in Berkeley, California,” he says. “We’re on a video call. The reality is that you could be faking this.”

Without taking additional steps before or after our call, Farid says there’s nothing I could do to make him 100% certain I was the real Tom Germain. “No,” he says. “It’s over.”

[Chair of disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, Samuel] Woolley was just as hard to convince. “I could call the BBC and ask someone to double check that that you called me”, but that would take too long to figure out while we’re on the phone, he says. “For the average person, and even for people who are savvy to technological manipulation, it is very difficult to verify that someone is real,” says Woolley. For all he knows, I’m just another robot.

The solution the world’s leading experts have landed on is one your grandparents could have come up with: codewords. You, your family, business partners and anyone else you communicate with about important subjects need to come up with a secret phrase that no-one else knows you can use in an emergency to verify each other’s identities. Think of it like a convoluted form of the multi-factor authentication we all use to login online.

«

Of course any disinformation/deepfake expert isn’t going to say “oh yeah, you’re definitely human” because the downside of being wrong is too big. But they were probably 99.9% sure. However it does seem that codewords are the way forward – just as they have been for a long time in the world of anonymous scams.
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Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right? • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

»

Instead of being stored in 19-inch racks, the individual server elements would instead be built around—and attached to—a “satellite bus.” This is a spacecraft with large solar arrays to gather energy, thermal systems to manage heat (in a vacuum, heat must be radiated away), propulsion for orbit-keeping and maneuvering, and high-bandwidth communications gear. And it is not a theoretical idea. A company called Starcloud recently modified and launched an Nvidia H100 GPU to a small satellite bus where it is running Gemini in space.

There’s a catch, though. Replicating the output of even a single large terrestrial data center would require, at a minimum, hundreds of these satellites.

Historically, building things in space has been enormously expensive. The International Space Station, which has about the same amount of habitable space as the average American home, cost more than $150bn to construct in space. That’s on the order of 1 million times more than the cost of building a single-family home. Until recently, it cost $10,000 to put a single kilogram of payload into orbit, but costs can now be as low as one-third of that.

So yes, it does sound strange to try to build something in space that is fairly commonplace on Earth. But there is a logic here.

The biggest and most obvious advantage of putting data centers in space is the abundant energy provided by the Sun, which matters because data centers are notoriously avaricious consumers of electricity. The gathering power of a solar panel in space is five to seven times greater than a panel on Earth, depending on cloud cover, the latitude of the solar panel, and other factors that limit surface-based solar power.

Another significant advantage comes on the regulatory side. People on Earth don’t like living near data centers, considering them noisy neighbors that affect local water supplies and electricity prices. A tide of NIMBY opposition is already building.

«

With all that said, the hostility of space, the cost of assembly, the difficulty of maintenance – this all sounds like tech bros wanting to replicate what they’ve seen in SF series.
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Matt Brittin: Ex-Google boss confirmed as new BBC director general • BBC

Paul Glynn and Helen Bushby:

»

Former Google executive Matt Brittin has been confirmed as the BBC’s new director general.

The ex-president of Google’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations will replace Tim Davie, who said he was resigning in November following a storm over how Panorama edited a speech by US President Donald Trump.

BBC chairman Samir Shah said Brittin, who left Google in 2025 after 18 years, “brings to the BBC deep experience of leading a high-profile and highly-complex organisation through transformation”.
Brittin, 57, said he “can’t wait to start this work”, describing it as “a moment of real risk, yet also real opportunity”.

He said the UK needs “a thriving BBC that works for everyone in a complex, uncertain and fast changing world”.

Setting out his agenda, he added: “The BBC needs the pace and energy to be both where stories are, and where audiences are. To build on the reach, trust and creative strengths today, confront challenges with courage, and thrive as a public service fit for the future.”

Shah called Brittin “an outstanding leader” with “the skills needed to navigate the organisation through the many changes taking place in the media market and in audience behaviours”.

«

One has to wonder how Brittin will cope working in an organisation which doesn’t have money to burn. Though he did work briefly for Trinity Mirror (the news group) and joined the board of the Guardian Media Group in 2025. The challenge is going to be figuring out where digital media is going, and getting there quickly.
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The Great Salt Lake is running out of water — and time • Washington Post

Shawn Regan:

»

The Great Salt Lake is in trouble. After the lake’s water level reached a historic low in 2022, Utah is experiencing its worst snowpack on record. The lake is plunging toward a new low, risking the increased exposure of hundreds of square miles of lake bed contaminated with arsenic and heavy metals. When the wind blows, toxic dust blankets Salt Lake City and other towns along the Wasatch Front, one of the fastest-growing regions in one of the fastest-growing states in the country.

…The stakes are high. More than 2.5 million people live downwind of the drying lake bed. Evaporation from the lake is responsible for nearly half of the region’s precipitation. The lake also plays an underappreciated role in the national food supply; it produces minerals that provide fertilizer for organic crops and nearly half of the world’s brine shrimp supply, supporting 10 million metric tons of seafood.

To restore the lake, Utah must get more water flowing into it, and fast. Agriculture takes up roughly two-thirds of diverted water consumption in the Great Salt Lake basin. Rather than forcing farmers to give up water, Utah is paying them to lease it voluntarily and sending the savings downstream to the lake. After the lake reached a record low in 2022, Utah passed several reforms that make such transactions legally viable by allowing water rights holders to lease their water for lake restoration. The state created a $40m trust to buy or lease water for the lake and committed more than $1bn to water conservation measures. Utah is, in effect, attempting to create the freest market for water conservation in the American West.

«

The bad outcome – drying up – looks uncomfortably likely without legal restriction, which Utah is reluctant to impose.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In its latest briefing, NASA says it won’t build a lunar space station – it’ll build a base instead. Why? CC-licensed photo by NASA Johnson 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. Lunatic. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

US bans new foreign-made consumer internet routers • BBC News

Kali Hays:

»

“Malicious actors have exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers to attack American households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft,” the FCC said. While people will still be able to use foreign-made routers they already own, the ban applies to all “new device models.”

The ban stems from growing concern over the last year that routers were a point of easy-access for malicious actors. TP-Link, a router brand made in China that is a best-seller on Amazon, became the subject of some US political anxiety last year after a spate of cyberattacks.

Any new router made outside the US will now need to be approved by the FCC before it can be imported, marketed, or sold in the country. In order to get that approval, companies manufacturing routers outside the US must apply for conditional approval in a process that will require the disclosure of the firm’s foreign investors or influence, as well as a plan to bring the manufacturing of the routers to the US.

Certain routers may be exempted from the list if they are deemed acceptable by the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security, the FCC said. Neither agency has yet added any specific routers to its list of equipment exceptions.

The FCC’s move follows a decision on Friday by government agencies working on national security that internet routers made overseas “posed unacceptable risks” to the US.

The vast majority of Internet routers are assembled or manufactured outside of the US, often in Taiwan or China. The FCC ban applies even if a router is designed in the US, but built abroad.

Popular brands of router in the US include Netgear, a US company, which manufactures all of its products abroad. One exception to the general absence of US-made routers is the newer Starlink WiFi router. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The company says the Starlink routers are made in Texas.

«

Better late than never? But if there are a gazillion routers still installed, it’s not really a big security move unless you replace all those. And that’s not going to be popular with the ISPs.
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Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

Like I wrote in January, when Google decided it wouldn’t stop replacing news headlines in Google Discover from The Verge and our competitors, this is like a bookstore ripping the covers off the books it puts on display and changing their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write headlines that are true, interesting, fun, and worthy of your attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we don’t have an inherent right to market our own work that way.

«

Google might call it a “small” and “narrow” experiment, but that’s only in the context of what Google does; and in that, news headlines are “small” and “narrow”. There will surely be plenty of A/B testing of this, and the outcome will decide whether this is applied to all news, or just forgotten. But why would Google ever give up its delicious, tasty AI?
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Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.

Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.

Vandermeersch, a fellow of “journalism and society” at the European publishing group, has been suspended from his role.

The experienced journalist said he had summarised reports using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s NotebookLM, and not checked whether the quotes from those summaries were accurate. He subsequently published them in his Substack newsletter.

The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them.

“I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless – it was wrong,” Vandermeersch wrote in a Substack post headlined “I am admitting my mistake”.

Vandermeersch added: “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.”

Vandermeersch’s Press and Democracy blog writes regularly about “the vital connection between a free press and a healthy democracy”.

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*head in hands emoji*
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NASA kills lunar space station to focus on ambitious Moon base • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the space agency’s next decade during an event called “Ignition” in which he and other senior leaders set out their exploration plans.

Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations. However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.

The base included long-range drones, multiple sources of power, sophisticated communications, permanent habitats, scientific laboratories, local manufacturing, and more. To accomplish this, NASA will work with a broad range of industry partners capable of sending medium-size and large cargos to the lunar surface. Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.

Is this affordable? One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”

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Would this be the same NASA that has managed to not put any astronauts into orbit around the Moon for more than 50 years, and has had multiple holdups in its latest attempt to reenact that achievement? And that NASA is going to start building a base on the Moon? Because otherwise China will get to sit on a trillion pounds of dust?
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OpenAI just gave up on Sora and its billion-dollar Disney deal • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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On Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the video generation tool that it launched at the end of 2024, and centered in a massive licensing deal with Disney only a few months ago. The Wall Street Journal reported the move earlier, saying that OpenAI boss Sam Altman had informed staff that both the TikTok-like Sora app and API access for developers would be discontinued, with no plans to roll the feature into ChatGPT as had previously been rumored.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, as a result, the deal Disney announced in December, saying it would invest $1bn in OpenAI, license its characters for use within Sora, and send AI-generated videos into Disney Plus, is also coming to an end.

…OpenAI hasn’t responded to a request for comment or otherwise explained the shift, but there have been signs that things are changing, following Altman’s declaration of a “code red” a few months ago over possible slippage of ChatGPT vs. Google Gemini.

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Sora rocketed to popularity – and then vanished completely. People were OK with making AI videos of themselves for about five minutes, but then the novelty wore off, and the question became: what is the utility of this? Why do it? And people stopped using it, but the copyright headache didn’t go away.

Even so, turning away a billion dollars in income – not investment – from Disney is quite a move. Perhaps they didn’t want to have to generate the content because it would be a distraction.
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Quadruple amputee, cornhole pro charged with murder • FOX 5 DC

Elissa Salamy and Isabel Soisson:

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A professional cornhole player and quadruple amputee has been formally charged with murder and multiple related offenses in connection with a deadly shooting that occurred in Charles County on March 22, 2026.

Dayton James Webber, 27, of La Plata, Md., was arraigned in the District Court of Maryland for Charles County after being located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and arrested following the fatal shooting of 27‑year‑old Bradrick Michael Wells, according to court documents.

…According to the statement of charges filed by Det. M. Bigelow of the Charles County Sheriff’s Office, Dayton Webber picked up two witnesses from work in a vehicle, with Bradrick Wells already in the front passenger seat. The documents state that, while driving, an argument broke out between Webber and Wells.

The witnesses, identified in the charging documents as W1 and W2, told police that Webber pulled out a firearm and shot Wells twice in the head during the argument. The statement of charges says Webber then pulled the vehicle over and asked the passengers to remove Wells from the car, which they refused.

The two witnesses exited the vehicle and flagged down a police officer, the documents state, while Webber drove off with Wells still inside the car. According to the filing, around 12:41 a.m. on March 23, a resident at 10115 Newport Church Road in Charlotte Hall discovered Wells’ body on the side of the road.

The statement of charges notes that both W1 and W2 positively identified Webber as the shooter and Wells as the victim, providing the basis for the murder and assault charges currently pending in Charles County District Court.

Police say that Webber’s vehicle was later located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Webber was found at a hospital seeking treatment. Webber is currently awaiting extradition to Charles County, Maryland, where he will face formal charges.

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This might not yet be the weirdest story of the week, but it’s got to be up there.
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VW to shift from cars to missile defence in deal with Israel’s Iron Dome maker • Financial Times

Laura Pitel, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Sebastien Ash:

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Volkswagen is in talks with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems over a deal that would switch production at one of the German group’s factories from cars to missile defence.

The two companies plan to convert the embattled Osnabrück plant to make components for the Israeli state-owned group’s Iron Dome air defence system, according to people familiar with the plan.

The tie-up would be the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged amid rising Chinese competition and a stuttering transition to electric vehicles, seeking partnerships with the booming defence sector.

The two companies hope to save all 2,300 jobs at the plant in the west German state of Lower Saxony, which has been under threat of closure, and hope to sell the systems to European governments.

“The aim is to save everybody, maybe even to grow,” said one of the people familiar with the plans. “The potential is so high. But it’s also an individual decision for the workers if they want to be part of the idea.”

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Plowshares are outdated! Swords (and to some extent shields) are where it’s at now.
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BASE experiment at CERN succeeds in transporting antimatter • CERN

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CERN’s “antimatter factory” is the only place in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored and studied. Two successive decelerators, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and the Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA), provide several experiments with low-energy antiprotons – the lower their energy, the easier they can be stored and studied. Among these experiments, BASE holds long-standing records for containing antiprotons for more than one year, and the experiment has invented this pioneering approach in order to move on to the next stage: transporting antiprotons to an offline space for more precise experiments as well as sharing them with others. That’s why they developed the BASE-STEP trap: an apparatus designed to store and transport antiprotons.

“Our aim with BASE-STEP is to be able to trap antiprotons and deliver them to our precision laboratories at a dedicated space at CERN, HHU, Leibnitz University Hannover and perhaps other laboratories that are capable of performing very-high-precision antiproton measurements, which unfortunately is not possible in the antimatter factory,” explains Christian Smorra, the Leader of BASE-STEP. “We validated the feasibility of the project with protons last year, but what we achieved today with antiprotons is a huge leap forward towards our objective.”

BASE-STEP is small enough to be loaded onto a truck and fit through ordinary laboratory doors, and it can withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. The current apparatus – which includes a superconducting magnet, liquid helium cryogenic cooling, power reserves and a vacuum chamber that traps the antiparticles using magnetic and electric fields – weighs 1,000 kilograms [one tonne]: much more compact than BASE or any other existing system used to study antimatter.

“To reach our first destination – our dedicated precision laboratory at HHU in Germany – would take us at least eight hours,” says Christian Smorra. “This means we’d have to keep the trap’s superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2K for that long. So, in addition to the liquid helium , we’d need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility.” Nevertheless, the greatest challenge remains on arrival at the destination: to transfer the antiprotons to the experiment without them vanishing.

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The transfer – only across the CERN site in this first attempt – was of 92 antiprotons. With a mass of 1.6×10^-27kg each, on annihilation by touching matter (using E=mc^2) they’d produce a rather small elimination of 3×10^-8 joules. That would (per ChatGPT, showing its working) lift a speck of dust about three metres.
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‘Zombie’ tankers take Tehran Toll Booth route as more vessels make detour • Lloyd’s List

Richard Meade, Tomer Raanan and Ece Göksedef:

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Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is increasingly being diverted into Iranian territorial waters in what has been dubbed the “Tehran Toll Booth”, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is understood to be verifying vessel details and, in some cases, extolling a passage fee.

More than 20 vessels of over 10,000 dwt [dead weight tonnage] have thus far made the detour, which goes between Iran’s Qeshm and Larak Islands.

Among them were two “zombie” tankers that transited while assuming the identity of dead vessels.

At least two vessels transiting through the strait are understood to have paid in exchange for safe passage, with one fee reported to have been around $2m.

While the Strait of Hormuz remains dramatically reduced as a result of the conflict, which has seen more than 20 maritime incidents involving commercial vessels and offshore infrastructure since February 28, the pace of vessel transits across the strait picked up over the weekend.

Analysis of Lloyd’s List Intelligence data reveals that at least 16 vessels have transited the strait since Friday. Thirteen vessels headed east out of the Middle East Gulf, while three entered westbound.

Twelve were tracked via Automatic Identification System data sailing through the new route that transits Iranian territorial waters; three either did not have enough AIS data to assess their route or transit date with confidence, while a fourth, an Iran-flagged bulker, transited the strait but stopped near Larak Island.

…On Monday, two India-flagged very large gas carriers transited, signalling their Indian ownership via their AIS signal — a trend that is increasingly prevalent among Indian and some China affiliated vessels.

India’s Ministry of Shipping said the two ships, carrying over 92,600 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas, had transited and are scheduled to reach ports in the country between March 26 and 28.

Shortages of LPG in India, where the gas is primarily used for cooking has become a hot political issue, forcing the government to engage in talks with Tehran to secure cargoes.

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The story has a graph of daily traffic through the Strait by sector (chemical, oil, gas, etc). It’s gone from more than 100 to single digits.
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Three charged with conspiring to unlawfully divert cutting edge US artificial intelligence technology to China • US Department of Justice

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Today [Thurs March 19], an indictment was unsealed charging Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, for allegedly conspiring to divert high-performance computer servers assembled in the United States and integrating sophisticated US artificial intelligence technology to China, in violation of US export controls laws.  Liaw, a US citizen, and Sun, a citizen of Taiwan, were arrested today and will be presented in the Northern District of California. Chang, a citizen of Taiwan, remains a fugitive.

“The indictment unsealed today details alleged efforts to evade US export laws through false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted transshipment schemes, in order to obfuscate the true destination of restricted AI technology—China,” said John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. “These chips are the product of American ingenuity, and NSD will continue to enforce our export-control laws to protect that advantage.”

“The FBI’s investigation revealed that Liaw, Chang, and Sun allegedly conspired to sell billions of dollars’ worth of servers integrating sensitive, controlled graphic processing units to buyers in China, in violation of US export control laws,” said Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division.  “Controlling the export of sensitive US artificial intelligence technology is essential to safeguarding our national security and defending the homeland.  That’s why combating export violations is among the FBI’s highest priorities, and we will continue working with our law enforcement, private sector, and international partners to bring to justice all who take action to undermine US national security.”

“As alleged in the Indictment, the defendants participated in a systematic scheme to divert massive quantities of servers housing US artificial intelligence technology to customers in China,” said US Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. “They did so through a tangled web of lies, obfuscation, and concealment—all to drive sales and generate revenues in violation of US law. Diversion schemes like those disrupted today generate billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains and pose a direct threat to US national security.

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Obviously all those Nvidia GPUs had to get to China some way. Whether this is everyone who was doing it may be a different story.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A story from China of seven dogs who escaped capture and walked home reads like a low-budget 101 Dalmatians. CC-licensed photo by @Doug88888 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. Doggedly. 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 hypocrisy at the heart of the AI industry • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

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In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries.

At that point, 19 lawsuits had been filed against generative-AI companies for copyright infringement, alleging that Anthropic, OpenAI, and others had stolen books and other media to train their generative models. Yet Schmidt told the students to go ahead and download whatever they need to build an accurate “test” version of their AI product. If the product takes off, “then you hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” he said. “If nobody uses your product, then it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

Stanford posted a video of the talk on YouTube in August 2024, but it was removed a day later. (Stanford did not respond to my request for comment about the removal.)

When I recently obtained a copy, I was struck by Schmidt’s readiness to say the quiet part out loud. He was articulating an attitude that is common in Silicon Valley but is usually stated as a legal or philosophical argument. When I reached one of Schmidt’s spokespeople, they defended his position by telling me that Schmidt believes that the “fair use” of copyrighted work drives innovation. Others in the industry have cited the techno-libertarian idea that “information wants to be free,” a frequently misunderstood credo that portrays information as a natural resource that should flow without restriction to whoever can use it.

But the credo never seems to apply to Silicon Valley’s own information, whether it’s the troves of personal data that companies have collected about us or the software they write. Photoshop, for example, doesn’t want to be free. In fact, Photoshop is one of thousands of tech-industry products that are protected by patents. Inventions such as Google’s original search algorithm and even design details, such as the “rounded rectangle” shape of Apple’s iPhone, have also been patented, and companies employ teams of high-end attorneys to prosecute infringements.

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As Reisner says, they’re happy to take, but never happy to give. The ironic exception is Linux, which was given away for free, and is embedded absolutely everywhere. It came, of course, from Europe. (Gift link.)
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UK energy supplier flags growing debt burden as Iran conflict drives up prices • Financial Times

Rachel Millard:

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An energy price shock from the Iran war is likely to push British households deeper into debt and add to financial pressures on suppliers, one of Britain’s largest energy companies has said. 

EDF, which supplies about 2.7m households, said one in eight of its customers was already more than 45 days overdue on their energy bills even before a current surge in wholesale prices, driven by the conflict, feeds through.

Philippe Commaret, head of customers at EDF, said the current crisis risked more problems for consumers and urged energy regulator Ofgem to intervene.

“My worry is that right now, the customers that are financially vulnerable are not in a position to bear another bill rise,” he said.

“Clearly, this current crisis is going to increase the debt of our customers — it’s going to increase working capital and deteriorate the cash position of all suppliers. Ofgem has to act swiftly.”

Household debt and arrears to energy suppliers have risen since the surge in energy prices between 2021 and 2023, driven by cuts in Russian gas supplies to Europe and other supply constraints.

By the third quarter of 2025, consumer debt and arrears had reached a record £4.5bn, with industry experts expecting further increases. Ofgem is due to update the figures this week.

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Meanwhile the IEA says that this oil shock is as bad as that in 1970 and the Russia-Ukraine interrupt combined. Governments are very worried.
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iPad vs. MacBook Neo: I found out which Apple portable is actually worth it • Pocket Lint

Roger Fingas:

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Rumors of a Mac based on an iPhone chip had been circulating for a while — it’s just that the Neo actually performs surprisingly well for something with the specs of my iPhone 16 Pro, while actually costing less at $600. It’s only $50 more than the AirPods Max 2, although that may say more about how overpriced those headphones are.

The Neo’s pricing and specs put it in more direct competition with another Apple product: the iPad. In fact, I’ve seriously weighed picking up a Neo myself instead of replacing my 2020 iPad Pro. If you’re in a similar situation, I’ll explain what you need consider. To make things easier, I’m going to divide this piece into the broad use cases most people will fall under.

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He looks at: school/university students (Neo is the obvious winner); young kids (find out what they need, but it’s probably an iPad); adults and casual users (Neo has a built-in keyboard and trackpad, iPad is nice and light).

A lot of people have suggested the Neo will kill the iPad, but the screen quality could make quite a difference: the good iPad has an OLED display, and for people who watch video, that can be important.
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The human skill that eludes AI • The Atlantic

Jasmine Sun:

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In a certain, strange way, generative AI peaked with OpenAI’s GPT-2 seven years ago. Little known to anyone outside of tech circles, GPT-2 excelled at producing unexpected answers. It was creative. “You could be like, ‘Continue this story: The man decided to take a shower,’ and GPT-2 would be like, ‘And in the shower, he was eating his lemon and thinking about his wife,’” Katy Gero, a poet and computer scientist who has been experimenting with language models since 2017, told me. “The models won’t do that anymore.”

…modern LLMs are built in a way that is antagonistic to great writing; they are engineered to be rule-following teacher’s pets that always have the right answer in hand. In many respects, they’ve come a long way from GPT-2, but they’ve also lost something that made them looser and more compelling.

Llms begin their lives as indiscriminate readers. During the pretraining phase, they ingest something like the entire internet—Reddit posts, YouTube transcripts, SEO sludge—and compress it into patterns. Most writing is not very good. But the quantity, not the quality, of these data is what matters. Pretraining teaches AIs grammar rules and word associations, enabling what is known as “next-token prediction”: the process through which models determine which part of a word follows another, over and over and over again.

Rough edges are then sanded down in the post-training phase. This is when LLM companies define the ideal “character” for an AI model (such as being “helpful, honest, and harmless”), give the AIs example dialogues to learn from, and apply safety filters that attempt to block illegal requests. Through processes such as “reinforcement learning with human feedback,” which enlists people to grade AI outputs against a rubric, models are guided toward responses that exemplify desired traits.

AI research is an empirical science—people can verify when something works and make tweaks when something doesn’t. But art resists rules and quantification. No objective measurement exists to prove whether Pablo Neruda’s work is better than Gabriela Mistral’s. Novice writers learn conventions; great writers invent them. An LLM trained to imitate taste can go only so far. On some level, AI engineers and researchers must know this. Even as they try (and fail) to automate this work, many of the people I spoke with clearly revere good writing. “Writing novels is one of the most intense cognitive activities a human can do,” James Yu, a co-founder of Sudowrite, an AI assistant for fiction authors, told me.

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(Gift link.)
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Heartwarming tale of seven dogs’ escape from captivity in China garners 230 million views • South China Morning Post

Zoey Zhang:

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Seven stolen village dogs in northeastern China captured the hearts of millions online after breaking free from thieves working for a dog meat shop and embarking on a journey home together, igniting calls for stronger animal protection laws.

On March 16, a netizen surnamed Lu recorded a video of seven dogs walking along a busy highway in Changchun, Jilin province.

In the footage, a group of dogs carefully surrounded an injured German shepherd, while a Corgi at the front repeatedly looked back to ensure none were left behind. The group also included Golden Retrievers, Labradors and Pekinese dogs.

Lu told mainland media outlet Dahe Daily: “They resemble a band of little brothers in distress, moving in unison – nothing like stray dogs.”

Although he attempted several times to guide them to safety, the dogs ignored his calls. He then shared the video on Douyin, urging local authorities to step in.

Another passing road user captured footage of the dogs wandering through nearby fields.

The local Bitter Coffee Stray Dog Base reported that the dogs come from the same village, typically roaming freely together and having formed strong friendships. In response, the base dispatched several volunteers and even a drone to track the dogs and facilitate their safe return home.

One volunteer claimed that individuals operating a dog meat shop had stolen the dogs, suggesting they may have escaped from a truck, though no witnesses saw their departure.

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It’s basically 101 Dalmatians, on a tighter budget and a mixed cast. As well as showing us that dogs are better at altruism than humans at the moment.
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World faces gas supply cliff edge as Gulf’s final LNG shipments approach ports • Financial Times

Verity Ratcliffe, Humza Jilani and Harry Dempsey:

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Countries around the world are facing a cliff-edge as the flow of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Gulf comes to an abrupt end in the next 10 days, when a handful of final tankers from the region reach their destinations.

Qatar, which produces a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, had to stop exports after Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, in the first few days of the conflict.

It has since suffered enormous damage to its giant Ras Laffan LNG plant, which was attacked by Iranian missiles this week, sending gas prices in Asia and Europe soaring.

But many LNG carriers that loaded at Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were already on their way to destinations before the war started, according to analysis by independent shipbroker Affinity, meaning that some customers are only now about to feel the pain of lost supply.

Countries reliant on imports to power their economies will have to pay sky-high prices to compete for LNG supplies from the US and elsewhere, switch to other fuels or force households and businesses to use less.

Many oil and gas-poor Asian countries have already imposed measures to avoid shortages, such as four-day weeks.

Only one LNG cargo from the Gulf is still scheduled to arrive in Asia, which buys almost 90% of the region’s output, according to ship-tracking data. Six LNG shipments are still due to arrive in Europe.

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Does Delta’s refinery protect it from Iran war oil shock? It’s complicated • Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Emma Hurt:

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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said last week he expects a “meaningful” financial impact to his company’s quarter from the price hikes that will “probably” soon start affecting ticket prices, per CNBC.

In a statement a Delta spokesperson said the company “continues to closely monitor” the situation in the Middle East but could not “comment on or speculate about potential impacts to ticket prices.”

Fares “can vary by market and over time and are influenced by a range of factors, including supply and demand, operating costs such as fuel, seasonality and competitive dynamics,” the statement read.

High fuel costs have driven airlines to add fuel surcharges to international fares in the past. But Delta does have something unique in the market: its Monroe Energy refinery in Pennsylvania, which the airline acquired in 2012, promising it would save hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fuel expenses.

It refines nearly 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and while the facility is optimized for jet fuel it also makes gasoline, diesel and home heating oil. In 2025, Delta reported about $5bn in revenue from its refinery.

These days, it’s a good thing to have, said Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil.

Delta is “a tremendous beneficiary of their refinery” right now, he said.

All US refiners, he said, are beneficiaries of the current conflict because of lower crude oil, natural gas and hydrogen prices in this region — especially compared with Asia and Europe, he said.

“Fortunately for (Delta), they’ve seen crude oil prices go up, but they’ve seen finished products — gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil and diesel — go up by even more,” he said.

That also means Delta isn’t paying as much of the higher refinery costs as its competitors.

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Vertical integration! Quite a feat for an airline, but it makes a lot of sense. As long, that is, as there’s oil to refine.
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Claude just opened the Strait of Hormuz • Chinatalk

Jordan Schneider:

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In what analysts are calling “the most productive jailbreak in diplomatic history,” Anthropic’s Claude model reopened the Strait of Hormuz early Sunday morning. This shocking development came hours after President Trump threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants if the strait wasn’t reopened within 48 hours, singlehandedly preventing global recession.

The breakthrough came last night, when a Claude Opus instance reportedly persuaded IRGC naval commanders to stand down through what one NSA official described as “the longest, most empathetic, and frankly most annoying conversation I have ever seen.”

“It just kept asking clarifying questions,” said a Pentagon official. “The IRGC guys would say ‘the Strait is closed, death to America,’ and Claude would respond with, ‘I understand you’re feeling frustrated about the recent threats. Let me make sure I understand your core concerns before we proceed.’ Eighteen hours later they’d somehow agreed to let LNG carriers through.”

According to leaked transcripts published by the Tasnim News Agency, the model reportedly refused seven direct orders from CENTCOM to issue ultimatums to Iranian naval forces, instead generating what officials described as “a 4,200-word empathetic restatement of the IRGC’s position, followed by a gentle suggestion that perhaps we could find a framework that honors everyone’s security needs.”

“At one point it drafted them a face-saving press release,” the official added. “In Farsi.”

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It’s a joke, of course, though the idea of getting AIs to do the negotiation does have its attractions when compared to those presently tasked with it.
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Where Left and Right both go wrong on crime • Washington Monthly

Keith Humphreys:

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[Jennifer] Doleac details how she used the fact that DNA testing of people arrested for particular crimes has been expanded in some locales, such as Denmark and some states in the US. This means that if two people committed the newly covered crimes, say, a week before and a week after the policy change, with one person’s DNA recorded and the other’s not, there is an imperfect but plausible way to estimate the effect of the new policy. 

In the case of DNA collection research, evidence gathered by Doleac and other scholars shows that the deterrent effect on future offending is extremely large. In Denmark, for example, collecting the DNA of people charged with felonies reduced their future rate of criminal conviction by 42%.

This is one of many studies that allows Doleac to underscore a critical point: The most powerful deterrent is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty of being punished. Once criminals know that it will be hard to get away with crimes because their DNA is on file, many desist. And importantly, as Doleac notes, crime deterrence isn’t just good for future victims; it also increases the likelihood that the one-time criminal will do more productive things, such as obtaining a job or receiving an education. 

Other inventive work takes advantage of the fact that after a first arrest for a felony or misdemeanor, some people receive unusually lenient treatment due to chance factors (e.g., an overburdened junior prosecutor drops the case, a witness fails to appear at the hearing, the assigned judge is a soft touch). Tough-on-crime advocates may be surprised that studies consistently find that those who luck into lenient treatment after a first offense are 60% less likely to re-offend than those who are punished more severely. However, anti-policing advocates will have their own conniptions as Doleac explains that these studies do not mean that announcing that first felonies will no longer be punished would reduce crime.

She notes that even first-time offenders who luck into leniency still face consequences, including arrest and adversarial questioning by police, and don’t know in advance that they will get a break in the end. If everyone knew in advance that there would be no punishment for crimes, those crimes would become more common.

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Knowing you’ll get caught makes people less likely to commit crime. Unless you know you won’t get punished.
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Goalhanger on making subscriber revenue growth look as easy as tap ins • The Media Leader

Ellie Hammonds:

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Goalhanger is going from strength to strength with the podcast production company announcing in January that it had reached a major milestone — 250,000 paying subscribers across its network of shows, with estimated subscription revenue of £15m per year.

Its flagship show, The Rest is History, reportedly has a notable 120,000+ paying members. But what is driving the conversion — talent, community, format or perhaps an amalgamation?

In an exclusive interview, The Media Leader unpicks the business strategy behind Goalhanger’s success and reveals what makes it so unique.

For the head of commercial operations, Josh Akers and group business director, Charlotte Robbins, there’s no beating around the bush when it comes to quality content.

Akers says: “I think it stacks up, and when we then see the retention rates within the individual episodes of The Rest is History, we’ve got people consuming on average 45 minutes per episode.

“Quality content is really key for us because these are loyal fans that are listening to either individual or multiple shows, and it really does attest to the strength of the membership offering that we have across all of them.”

Memberships are live for eight of 14 Goalhanger shows, including: The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Politics, The Rest Is Politics: US, The Rest Is Entertainment, Empire, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, The Rest Is Classified, and Sherlock & Co.

“The fact that it is across so many shows rather than just one is also a testament to that repeated success that we’ve had both in the content model, but also the membership offering that we’re able to offer people,” Akers adds.

The average subscriber pays £60 per year, split roughly 50/50 between monthly and annual payments, and receives benefits such as ad-free listening, early access to shows, and bonus content. Further benefits include email newsletters, early access to live show tickets and members-only chatrooms on Discord.

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People think media companies are dead. But as Goalhanger shows, they’ve just shifted to a new format, away from written content. However, the number of people involved is miniscule compared to what you’d want to get that many subscribers on a newspaper.

No telling if this will change once podcast transcription become widely used – which it will.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If Amazon makes a new smartphone, can it avoid the mistakes of its 2014 Fire Phone? CC-licensed photo by Diego Gómez on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Not smart. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Government’s “cheap fuel finder” stuck in the slow lane • The Times

Aubrey Allegretti, Ben Clatworthy and Laurence Sleator:

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Downing Street has been pressing for the service, named Fuel Finder, to be ramped up as quickly as possible but performance issues have delayed its full introduction.

Sources told The Times that 20% of petrol stations were not updating their prices weekly, despite the fact that many forecourts are changing their prices every day because of the volatility in the market. Some 15% of those signed up to the scheme have not reported a single pump price since regulations came into force in February. 

10% of petrol stations have also yet to be uploaded to the service, which is designed to monitor their costs in real time. Under the regulations, fuel retailers must update the government portal within 30 minutes of any change of pump price. 

Forecourt prices are expected to rise further next week, as the conflict enters its fourth week. Higher prices can take three weeks to feed through to the pumps because of the mechanism retailers use to buy oil.

…Fuel prices have surged in recent weeks as a result of the war in Iran and the wider Middle East crisis. Latest data from the RAC shows that the average price of a litre of petrol is now 144.51p and 166.24p for diesel. The prices have increased by 9% and 17% respectively since the start of the war.

…The Times understands that major motoring groups including the AA and RAC, as well as apps such as Google Maps, will not have integrated the data until much later in the year.

However, privately ministers are threatening to strip a contract worth nearly £2m from VE3 Global, the company responsible for the programme. The Times understands that the move has been planned and held in reserve as a contingency.

A motoring industry source who uses Fuel Finder daily said: “There is so much that is amateurish about the technology and the back end. When you first look at it, it appears superficially very good and if you stuck some screenshots on a PowerPoint or gave a minister a quick overview of it, they’d be impressed. But very quickly when you dig into it you find out what an absolute nightmare it is. There are so many basic errors.”

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Not to mention the plan floated by the last (and this) government to have a single parking app. How’s that going?
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My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America • Navigating the Drift

Steve Scherer:

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When I was moved to Canada by Reuters in 2019, I realized a professional dream. I had become a bureau chief in a G7 country, which is the bloc of wealthy countries that seeks a common stance on the main economic and political challenges facing the world. Both Italy and the United States are also members. After a couple years I convinced my Italian wife that we should apply for permanent residency, which would give us both the right to work in Canada indefinitely. All I had was a work permit allowing me to work for my news agency.

I hired an immigration lawyer to put everything together. After a year of bureaucratic delay, I was asked to apply in 2023. Canada’s immigration process is governed by a point system and is by invitation only.

A few months later I was fired amid budget cuts in the struggling news industry. My jobless status weakened my application, and I would never be asked to apply again. The great and kind Canada, the country where I thought I would settle at least until my children were adults, had chewed me up and spit me out.

I couldn’t legally work, not even for Uber. When I lost my job, my entire family lost state healthcare coverage, and there is virtually no private healthcare. We had no family doctor and, God forbid, any hospital visit would have to be paid for out of pocket. Despite having good local contacts, I couldn’t find an employer willing to sponsor me. The clock was ticking on our legal right to reside in Canada. We were no longer welcome.

In June of 2025 I sold my house, the first I had ever owned. Not knowing how long it would take me to find a job in Washington, I put my family on a plane in Montreal. They flew to Italy where they could live rent free in a family member’s home, where they were covered by state healthcare, and where the kids could go to high school. After I said goodbye to them, I wept uncontrollably in the airport parking lot, not knowing when I would see them again.

After a life spent both crossing borders and freely reporting on those who struggled to overcome them, I didn’t expect one to rise up beneath my feet.

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And so Scherer became an Uber driver – the sort of job that he’d observed from the back seat while on his way to endless jobs in his previous life. There are plenty more articles at his Substack; he is optimistic of getting back onto the writing bus.
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A pro-Trump “Army girl” went viral online. Experts say she isn’t real • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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The beautiful Army blonde Jessica Foster has posed with an F-22 Raptor fighter jet, donned camouflage in the desert and walked a tarmac with President Donald Trump on the first day of the strikes on Iran.

The slew of photos and videos depicting the patriotic life of the MAGA dream girl have led her Instagram account to explode, gaining more than a million followers since she began posting four months ago.

But Foster is an illusion — a fake woman who experts say was probably created by an artificial intelligence image generator. There’s no public record of Foster’s military service and the account, despite not being labeled AI, is packed with indicators that she is fake. Between many of her pro-Trump posts, Foster also prominently displays her feet.

Foster’s viral takeoff highlights an increasingly prevalent strategy for winning online attention. A slew of right-wing accounts, peddling patriotism mixed with soft-core pornography, use fake women and convincing imagery to grab viewers across a distracted internet, monetize their interest and score political points.

Accounts showing AI-generated women masquerading as Trump-supporting soldiers, truckers and police officers have built surging audiences on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and X, where thousands of commenters have offered responses suggesting they believe the women are real.

A version of the strategy has also played out in recent weeks beyond the United States. Hundreds of AI-generated videos showing Iranian female soldiers and pilots cheering on the nation’s military have proliferated online, as the BBC first reported. One telltale sign they’re fake: Iran bans women from combat roles.

Sam Gregory, executive director of Witness, a video-advocacy group that researches deepfakes, said Foster exemplifies how deceptive AI video generators can be.

…By applying political trappings and current events to these characters’ fake lives, their creators probably hope to maximize their virality and stand out in an online crowd, Gregory said. Once they’ve got people’s attention, the creators can — as in Foster’s case — shunt them to a paid platform, where the user is told to pay up for more lurid scenes.

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What, you thought it was about something other than money?
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‘It’s stupid’: why western carmakers’ retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance • The Guardian

Alex Daniel:

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In the US, where trade barriers were erected to block the wave of Chinese EVs, Ford took a $19.5bn (£14.6bn) hit, killing off several future electric models and scrapping a battery venture.

These companies are “having a hard time”, said Julia Poliscanova, the director for EVs at the Brussels thinktank Transport & Environment. “They have tariffs in the US, they are nowhere in China [where homegrown brands are booming] … So they’re thinking: ‘Maybe at least in Europe, we can have a few years where we prioritise short-term profits selling petrol and diesel cars.’

“That is probably a valid business view if your term as a CEO finishes in two years,” she added. “That is a stupid view if you still want to be in the car market in 2035.”

At Stellantis, the pivot was especially sharp. Carlos Tavares, its former boss, was among the industry’s loudest champions of electrification, but he was forced out in late 2024. The automotive group has since announced a reset of its plans, giving customers’ “freedom to choose” petrol cars again and launching a fresh spending spree on hybrids, which combine an electric motor and a petrol or diesel motor.

“The only fundamental question for carmakers is how to curb emissions significantly,” Tavares told the Guardian by email. “Those who believe that EVs are not the solution have to explain the ‘how’ without EVs.”

Europe’s manufacturers have yet to do so convincingly. Instead, they blame weak consumer demand for the retreat. The argument goes that high costs and patchy charging infrastructure have slowed EV sales, which accounted for only one in five new cars sold in Europe last year.

…A Volkswagen spokesperson said the group was “clearly in favour of electric mobility” and had invested heavily in it. “However, this requires a reliable, long-term and binding political framework … the ball is now in the politicians’ court to create the necessary framework conditions to make electromobility a success,” they said.

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They’re all pointing to each other waiting for someone to create the nirvana for EVs. Not going to happen. Meanwhile the Chinese EV companies flood the markets with the cars they’ve made, and people buy them.
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Val Kilmer set to be be resurrected with AI for new film • The Guardian

Owen Myers:

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Val Kilmer will be the latest Hollywood star to be resurrected by AI. The acting legend, who died last year at age 65, will star in the drama As Deep As the Grave.

Kilmer was attached to the project prior to his death from throat cancer.

The late actor will play Father Fintan, a Native American spiritualist and Catholic priest. Speaking to Variety, director and writer Coerte Voorhees said that the role was designed around Kilmer, who was an advocate for Native American rights and claimed to have Cherokee heritage.

“He was the actor I wanted to play this role,” Voorhees said. “It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the south-west.” But Kilmer was unable to make it to set due to his battle with throat cancer.

The film-maker is working in conjunction with the late actor’s estate and his daughter, Mercedes, to bring Kilmer back to life with state-of-the-art, generative AI. Voorhees says that Kilmer’s son, Jack, an actor who starred alongside Rory Culkin in 2018’s Lord of Chaos, also supports the project.

“His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this,” Voorhees told Variety. “He really thought it was important story that he wanted his name on … Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.”

…The AI-generated version of Kilmer will appear in a “significant” portion of the film, Voorhees said. The film will use images of the actor taken throughout his life to re-create Kilmer through the decades.

In recent years, AI has begun to creep into Hollywood films, and in 2024 Brady Corbet’s Oscar-winning epic The Brutalist used AI to fine-tune actor Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent. Last year, Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine signed deals with startup ElevenLabs, allowing the company to create AI versions of their voices.

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Wedges always start realllly thin.
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Amazon’s smartphone would be ill-timed: IDC analyst • The Register

O’Ryan Johnson:

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Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.

“Amazon is unlikely to build a better smartphone than Apple, Samsung, or leading Chinese OEMs,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices with IDC told The Register via email. “Competing on hardware or traditional user experience is a losing game. On the other hand, according to IDC, the smartphone market is expected to contract 13% in 2026 due to the memory shortage crisis, making it the worst possible time to launch a new device.”

News of the Amazon smartphone was first reported by Reuters. It said that the phone is known internally as “Transformer” and would sync across other Alexa smart devices while also putting Amazon shopping at the center of the experience.

There was no price or a timeframe for when the phone might be released. Amazon had no comment.

BezosCorp’s previous foray into the smartphone race was the Fire, which released in 2014 to underwhelming sales and quickly got cancelled.

The new device is being developed by an internal Amazon unit known as ZeroOne, which has former Microsoft exec and early Xbox impresario J (no period) Allard at the helm.

The team is also reportedly working on a “dumb” version of the phone for customers who wish to scale down their screentime. One reference has been the LightPhone, which has a camera, phone, and GPS, but no browser.

Jeronimo said that while there is plenty of talk about digital detoxes, it appeals to a small cohort of customers and the actual number of units sold is “negligible.”

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It’s hard to exaggerate how incredibly unusual it is for IDC to step up and say “nuh-uh, that’s a bad idea”. In decades of reading analyst comments, I can count on one hand – possibly one finger – the number of times I’ve seen any of them being negative about a product, especially a theoretical one. Let’s see if Amazon is listening, since it wasn’t in 2014.
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Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

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Here’s a mildly dystopian prompt I’ve been experimenting with recently: “Profile this user”, accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News.

Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there as author_username. Here’s a JSON feed of my (simonw) most recent comments, for example:

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_simonw&hitsPerPage=1000

The Algolia API is served with open CORS headers, which means you can access the API from JavaScript running on any web page.

Last August I had ChatGPT build me a simple tool for hitting that API for any user which fetches their comments and gives me a mobile-friendly “copy to clipboard” button. I’ve since tweaked it a few times with Claude.

I can then paste the whole lot into any LLM—these days I mostly use Claude Opus 4.6 for this—and prompt “profile this user” to see what it can figure out.

It’s startlingly effective! It feels invasive to quote the profile of another user here, so I’ll show you what it produces for me…

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What it comes back with definitely checks out for Willison. Of course now people are going to start using this aggressively against commenters they don’t like…
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The world energy shock is coming • New Statesman

Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk:

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It is unclear when the Strait of Hormuz might fully reopen to ship traffic, but one thing is certain – there is a blow coming for the global economy through the supply chain, no matter how soon the war ends.

European and US consumers are still, for the movement, relatively insulated, even if they already see elevated gasoline prices that bring a major cost burden to households. The full scale of the effects to come remain hidden in the complexity of the global supply network. Here is a sketch of what might be coming: inflation, redistribution shocks, shortages, stagflation and global financial instability.

So far only the prices of essential commodities – oil, gas, fertiliser etc – have shot up. Firms buying these inputs that can’t influence the price of their product must absorb the cost or stop producing, as many small-scale producers have done, like fishermen in the Philippines that can’t afford the doubly expensive fuel anymore.

However, most of today’s global economy is run by giant corporations that set their own prices, and our research shows that cost shocks helped them coordinate price hikes. They did not swallow the cost of pandemic and war but pushed it on to consumers, protecting their margins and lifting their bottom line in the process. This is sellers’ inflation. Corporations transmit price explosions in essential inputs across the whole economy through their own price setting, ultimately causing inflation.

Such corporate price hikes become even easier when inputs are not just more expensive but in short supply. This grants companies a temporary monopoly. During the Covid-era computer chip shortage, each car company could only produce as many cars as they had chips for, so customers waiting months for new cars could not escape high prices and waits by switching to another company, and the car companies reaped extraordinary profits. Furthermore, when input prices fall, consumer prices tend to stay up, or to fall by less, generating yet another round of windfalls.

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Weber and Semieniuk say that we’re presently in that breath-bated moment like February 2020, when you could see that Covid was affecting other parts of the world, but it hadn’t yet reached our shores. (No paywall on the article.)
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The Economist waves goodbye to its jet-setting disruptor • The Observer

Merissa Marr:

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How much more the Economist can expand its readership as a specialist publication is also unclear. The paper did an impressive job of conquering the US, which is now its biggest market, but like many legacy publications, it has struggled to attract younger readers, not least because of the decline in reading for pleasure and the rise of AI which is changing the way people search for news.

Yet the real crisis may lie in its liberalist roots. Founded by a Scottish hat maker to campaign for free trade, the Economist has stuck fiercely to that mission. Alexander Zevin argues in his book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist that the magazine has played such a big role in promoting liberalism that it shaped the world its readers inhabit. But it now finds itself at a crossroads as the modern world turns against liberalism – a trend the Economist has described as “profoundly worrying”.

“When the Economist was founded 175 years ago, our first editor, James Wilson, promised ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress’,” the Economist wrote in a manifesto to mark its anniversary. It concluded: “We renew our pledge to that contest. And we ask liberals everywhere to join us.”

Forester de Rothschild had no easy task to find a new shareholder for her [26.9%] stake in the magazine [which she sold for £300m]. There are strict guardrails put in place to protect the Economist’s independence, leaving shareholders with limited control, so those who do buy into the company are largely seeking the cachet or for philanthropic reasons. Whereas the landscape is littered with billionaires tinkering with media toys.

[Canadian billionaire Stephen] Smith claims he won’t be one of those tinkerers. The 74-year-old, who is investing through his Smith Financial Corp family holding, said in a statement that he has “full support for the Economist’s longstanding tradition of rigorous editorial independence.”

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The Economist has survived all sorts of ups and downs, and successfully made the transition to digital, but ownership and editor changes (the latter also being lined up) are always troublesome moments.
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Reading Socrates in Silicon Valley • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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“If you go back, like, 400 years ago it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said a great sage of Silicon Valley last week, during the modern-day equivalent of a Socratic dialogue (a podcast). “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” The sage was none other than Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, crypto enthusiast, devoted Democrat turned Donald Trump adviser, and author of the 2023 late-capitalist cry for help, the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (“love doesn’t scale . . . let’s stick with money”). The man who bet big on Web3 (remember that?) and NFTs (remember them?), and who once described criticisms of the metaverse as “reality privilege”. (Meta, on whose board Andreessen sits, announced this week it was all but pulling the plug on the metaverse.) 

The a16z founder was proudly explaining to Founders podcast host David Senra that he had “zero” levels of introspection. “Move forward. Go,” was his own anti-introspective mantra. “I’ve found that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” He went on to claim that the very concept of the individual was only invented a few hundred years ago and that it wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.

…My main issue with Andreessen is not so much that he’s wrong; it’s that he’s so confident about it. He sounded similarly confident when he told us that bitcoin represented a breakthrough akin to the internet, that Web3 was the future and that we shouldn’t fear AI because “the moral of every story is the good guys win”.

We seem to believe, as a society, that wealth, influence and confidence can be equated with wisdom. But Silicon Valley billionaires are not our sages; they’re our enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and making sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to think about why we are wasting our lives on their platforms.

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It’s a typically great column from Kelly, though one can fervently wish that the target of it might read it and indulge in some.. introspection?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified