Good news – the American Health Association says that drinking up to five cups of coffee a day can actually be good for you. CC-licensed photo by Jot Peh on Flickr.

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

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

AI race splits in two as China wages open-weight insurgency • Axios

Madison Mills and Zachary Basu:

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China’s latest AI breakthrough is forcing Silicon Valley to confront a terrifying possibility: Building the world’s smartest models may no longer be enough to win.

Chinese labs like Moonshot AI are cornering the market for cheap, customizable intelligence, threatening to turn America’s prestige models into expensive niche products. Companies were already shifting away from premium AI models and toward cheaper Chinese alternatives before Moonshot’s Kimi K3 exploded onto the scene this week.

On OpenRouter — a major marketplace that lets developers access hundreds of competing AI systems — Chinese models now occupy the top five spots by weekly token usage. All five models — from China-based Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Z.ai — are “open-weight,” allowing users to download, customize and run them on their own systems. Most corporate AI work does not require the smartest model available.

Businesses can use cheaper systems for routine coding, summarization, data extraction and customer service, reserving premium models for their hardest problems. “There are going to be open‑source models that eventually handle 95% of enterprise queries, and that remaining 5% may go to OpenAI or Anthropic,” one AI investor told Axios.

Kong CEO Augusto Marietti told Axios that open-weight use has surged over the past quarter since flagship models are “too expensive.”

Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian compared using frontier AI for everyday work to “driving a Ferrari to Whole Foods.” For many routine tasks, he said, cheaper models are fast enough, capable enough and can cost up to 50 times less. Chinese models are advancing at astonishing speed, just as their lower prices and open weights make them easier to adopt.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that China remained six to 12 months behind the U.S. in the most dangerous cyber capabilities. Ten weeks later, Moonshot released a model that rivals Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 in key benchmarks — underscoring how quickly any American lead can shrink.

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This is a strange war being fought, neither hot nor cold. It’s a bit like the “war” in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet, where you don’t quite know who the adversaries are, but their stuff keeps popping up all over the place and being used against you when you don’t want it.
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Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz with a deep dive into Facebook’s sagging engineering culture

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Between its founding in 2004 and until last year, Meta gave engineers autonomy to choose where they work and what they work on. This was structural to how the company worked:

• Engineers were not hired for a specific team (save for at the Staff+, levels, in some cases). They were hired to the company
• During a 6-week bootcamp, new hires got familiar with Meta’s engineering culture and chose a team
• Team matching meant talking with multiple teams who had headcount, doing small work with them, and finding a match
• Internal transfers were easy, and often initiated by engineers

Team selection via bootcamp started to die down in around 2024, but any Meta engineer with at least two years’ tenure knows that previously they chose what to work on, and of course, could pick the most impactful thing to work on. And then, out of the blue, they’re assigned to a division where the impact is not clear, the work is menial, and doing it too long will surely hurt their career prospects.

“Data labeling” is more involved work, even though a bit repetitive. There are labeling tasks, where you create a website, then look at it and decide if it looks good or not, and give this feedback: this is the “typical” data labeling. But this is the less frequent type of work. But then there are more involved AI training tasks, which looks like this:

• Come up with a task that the AI should do
• Then write the tests that confirm the result
• Package all of this up into a Docker container, using Harbor framework
• Then read the code that the AI writes – often doing this based on feedback from several models, and give it feedback

This work is not easy to do — and you can see why you need good software engineers to do it! — but it gets repetitive really quickly. Most engineers who I talked to said that they found it hard to do this work motivated day-in, day-out. Then again, I did talk with an engineer inside the org who said that by varying the technologies they use, and challenging themselves, they found this work motivating and interesting! This engineer expects there to be more software engineering work coming up, after the phase of training passes. There’s a lesson here: when life gives you lemons, you can either complain about it, or you can make lemonade, like this dev has done so.

…One engineer told me that the whole situation feels like the movie, The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment, to something completely different.

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It honestly is very long, but it’s an astonishing insight into Meta’s old and current culture.
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Drinking five cups of coffee a day is safe, could reduce heart risk, AHA says • NewsNation via MSN

Zach Kaplan:

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The latest research suggests consuming up to five cups of coffee a day is safe for most adults and may be linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular conditions.

The American Heart Association issued a scientific statement on Monday announcing that consuming up to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, the equivalent of five eight-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee, is “generally safe for most adults,” according to recent studies.

The statement added that research suggests regularly consuming caffeinated coffee without added sugars, flavors or cream is linked to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, heart failure and some irregular heart rhythms. It also noted, however, that higher caffeine intake, including levels found in energy drinks, was associated with cardiovascular harm.

The authors of the research cautioned that cardiovascular benefits observed in recent studies could be related to compounds in coffee other than caffeine and said additional “research is necessary to investigate the different health impacts of various types of caffeinated coffee and other products with caffeine.”

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Turns out I’ve been on exactly the right diet for years, then.
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The night France saved the British grid • Dispatches Kilowatts

Ben:

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For forty-eight minutes on the evening of Monday 23 June — a 33°C midsummer Monday — the frequency of Great Britain’s electricity grid sat below 49.8 Hz, the boundary of normal operation. At 17 seconds past eight o’clock it touched 49.657 Hz, its lowest point of the year — though, as I wrote in the immediate aftermath, it stayed clear of the statutory floor at 49.5: this was never a blackout in waiting, and this article will not pretend otherwise.

Nothing switched off. No public warning was ever issued. And almost nobody noticed that, for 48 minutes, Britain’s electricity system was running on a draining battery fleet, a gas margin of roughly eighty megawatts, and — finally — an unpriced phone call to Paris.

I’ve spent the last month reconstructing that evening minute by minute, from both sides of the Channel: Elexon settlement data down to individual generating units, NESO’s one-second frequency record, the system operator’s own trading books, and — via RTE’s APIs — the French grid’s answering records. Along the way I have also had the benefit of conversations with people who watched the evening from the other side of it — traders and market folk in several European markets, who saw the British grid’s difficulties arrive on their own screens, and who cannot be named. Their fingerprints are on this piece in ways I won’t itemise. That access shaped a deliberate choice: the mainstream telling of 23 June is relentlessly British — British data, British institutions, British questions. But half of this story happened in other countries’ control rooms and other countries’ order books, and I have tried to tell it from their side of the water too: as our neighbours and partners saw it, not merely as we did. What follows is the anatomy of a near-miss that the official record describes, accurately but incompletely, as a day when “the grid kept working.”

It did. In the same sense that a driver who runs a red light and isn’t hit keeps driving.

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Fascinating story about one of those things that none of us would have known about a few years ago.
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LG’s monitors come with an unwanted addition for Windows: McAfee pop-up ads • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

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A video from Gamers Nexus explains how, after connecting a new LG UltraGear monitor to a PC running Windows 11 for the first time, Windows Update is silently installing LG driver updates and the LG Monitor App Installer, without so much as a permission pop-up or notification. The app doesn’t appear to include special controls of its own, instead simply pointing users to LG’s other apps, as well as McAfee antivirus.

There are reports about LG’s app auto-installing as far back as 2024, but Gamers Nexus’s test follows recent user complaints on Reddit about large pop-up ads for McAfee and LG’s own apps suddenly appearing in the bottom right corner of the homescreen, which popped up for GN on 31 out of 32 bootups.

Microsoft allows developers to pair a Hardware Support App in the Windows Store that automatically installs based on the device’s metadata, but even its description here includes a warning:

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The automatic installation feature does not provide a notification to the user when the app is installed. Some users may find this experience confusing and frustrating, and give your app a bad rating.

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As The Verge’s Tom Warren has pointed out in the past, Dell similarly auto-installs its Alienware Command Center app on Windows when you connect an Alienware monitor, but the notification spam is an extra twist.

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They’re all trying to eke out a tiny bit of extra profit through these means: McAfee will be paying them per install.
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AliExpress hit with $629m EU fine over sales of illegal and counterfeit products • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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Alibaba’s AliExpress was hit with a record €550m ($629m) fine from the European Union on Monday for failing to tackle sales of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform.

The fine was the third issued by the European Commission under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, which requires very large online platforms to do more to counter illegal and harmful content.

The Commission charged AliExpress in June last year with ​failing to comply with a DSA requirement to assess and mitigate the risks of dissemination of illegal products.

It set an ​October 20 deadline for AliExpress to propose remedial measures, and the company could face further penalties if the regulator decides in December that they do not comply with the DSA.

“This is very dangerous for consumers, unfair for companies ​which are complying with all our rules,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters.

She pointed to AliExpress’s 193 million users in Europe last ​year versus Shein’s 156 million and Temu’s 130 million. Temu has also been fined under the DSA and Shein is facing an ongoing investigation.

“One in five Europeans say they shop once a month from Shein, Temu and AliExpress,” Virkkunen said.

AliExpress said it will appeal the fine as it considers it excessive.

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Is AliExpress hoping that it will be able to get a cheaper version by shopping around?
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Trial lawyers lobby against autonomous vehicles • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

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Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers. Remarkably the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and the have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade! The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation. (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labour and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded).

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents: annual US auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220bn and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5m liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered.

The UK’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 does basically this. A single insurer covers the vehicle whether the human or the automated system is driving; the victim is compensated directly by the insurer, no need to establish product defect; the insurer then subrogates [takes the part of the victim in the claim] against the manufacturer if the software was at fault.

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Seems like the US just needs a version of that law, then. The chances of it getting that aren’t very high, though.
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To cool or not to cool: French politicians draw battle lines over air conditioning • Financial Times

Leila Abboud:

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As an intense heatwave sent temperatures above 40ºC this week [in June] in cities from Bordeaux to Nantes, far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen accused leftist parties and green activists of ideologically opposing air conditioning at the expense of public health.

“It is absurd to have people die because of the heat,” said the leader of the Rassemblement National party. “If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting in places with the most vulnerable populations — hospitals, care homes and schools.”

Far-left leader and rival candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon hit back: “Absolutely not. Installing air conditioning everywhere would only mean increasing the damage,” he said, alluding to the risk of increased carbon emissions.

To cool or not to cool has become another front in the culture wars in France, a prism through which politicians, scientists and environmentalists fight over how to curb climate change and mitigate the immediate fallout of rising temperatures. France logged its hottest day ever on record on Tuesday, prompting the Tour Eiffel and the Louvre museum to close.

Politicians have been routinely asked what their stance is on air conditioning on TV news channels doing blanket coverage of the heatwave, while climate experts warn that its expansion globally will increase electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

In France, where 70% of electricity comes from low-carbon nuclear power, such concerns are lessened, yet wariness about air conditioning persists.

The French debate over air conditioning largely focuses on whether it is an unnecessary extravagance or environmentally sensible. But there is also an enduring belief among many that too much cooling can cause “thermal shock” if one goes too quickly from one extreme to another and that it causes people to catch colds or feel nauseous.

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The prehistory of AI slop • The New Yorker

Jill Lepore:

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Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. . . .
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.

Think of it as Mad Libs before there was Mad Libs. Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey’s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as “thinking machines.” His program, he insisted, was “almost childishly simple.” Because Strachey was thought to have been gay, scholars have read the letters as making fun of straight romance. Or, I’d have said, any romance. Incontestably, love letters are, very often, slobbering slop.

Lest Strachey’s epistles seem antiquated compared with the stuff that comes your way these days, I might mention that, while I was writing this essay, a writer friend texted me an A.I. e-mail she’d just received that purported to be from a British novelist: “Happy weekend, Elise! Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let’s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week? When will work reply today? Warmly, Alice Feeney.” DEAR HONEY-DEW YOU ARE MY GREATEST WHISKERS MY UTTER MOONBEAM.

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It’s not that slop is new, it’s just that it’s completely blanketing the internet now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have detected a sugar in deep space that on Earth is found in raspberries. Maybe a raspberry-flavoured planet? CC-licensed photo by oatsy40 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. Sweet. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? • Financial Times

Sam Learner:

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Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Miklós Koren, an economist at Central European University in Vienna, released a paper titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. They argue that in a world where the consumers of software packages are increasingly AI coding agents, the incentives that drive the collaborative model of open-source development collapse.

“We started with models that are quite standard in international trade, where firms are producing different quality products and they compete in the market . . . and we realised it’s not a bad analogy for open source,” Koren told me. “There might not be a lot of money involved, but every developer wants their package to be popular.”

I understand this well. Before working [as a programmer] in newsrooms, I developed and released a set of personal open-source projects. One in particular, which visualised the downstream paths of rivers, was a disorientating success. The project is still more widely viewed than every story I’ve worked on at the FT combined and, judged by eyeball count, might be the most successful thing I ever create. I released it just months before interviewing for my job and, while I developed the tool for free, I can draw a straight line between its success and my employment today.

But Koren found that these socio-economic reasons for developers to contribute to open-source projects degrade when human users are replaced with bots, which install the software without providing positive interactions. In the researchers’ model, this outweighs the fact that AI tools may help individual developers write code faster. Over time, the bots erode the open-source ecosystem.

“The question for the developer,” Koren said, “is if I want to be popular among humans, why should I write something that is only used by machines?”

In experiments with six coding models, the researchers found that open-source software packages that were frequently recommended by models saw large increases in download numbers — but that activity did not translate into the engagement that typically sustains maintainers. The paper concludes that, “under the traditional business model, where developer revenue depends entirely on direct user engagement, the open-source ecosystem cannot survive widespread AI adoption”.

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More unintended consequences, perhaps some way distant, but quite probably more proximate than we think. For many, coding might become an artisanal process again, just as in the dawn of the PC age.
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Astronomers have found a sugar molecule in deep space for the first time ever • WIRED

Jorge Garay:

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FOR THE FIRST time in history, astronomers have detected a sugar molecule floating among the gas clouds of interstellar space.

Erythrulose has four carbon atoms (C4-H7-O2), and on Earth, it occurs naturally in some fruits. Its presence 26,000 light-years away could help untangle the mystery of the origin of life on our planet.

The study was published this week in Nature Astronomy. The team, led by Izaskun Jiménez Serra, analyzed data captured by radio telescopes in Spain to identify the molecule’s signature in the microwave frequencies it produces as it rotates.

Sugar molecules are essential for life. They fuel cells and are part of RNA and DNA. Yet scientists still don’t know how they accumulated in large enough quantities on the early Earth. One possibility is that some of the molecules did not originate on the planet but instead reached Earth via meteorites.

For the new study, the researchers focused on molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, a location they didn’t choose at random. G+0.693−0.027 is among the regions richest in molecules in the entire Milky Way. It is located near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, and collisions with another cloud appear to have turned the region into a veritable chemical factory. Researchers had already detected alcohols, aldehydes, urea, ethanolamine, hydroxylamine, and dozens of complex organic molecules. Now, sugar is in the mix.

The idea that some sugars might have come from space gained traction in December 2025, when scientists confirmed that the asteroid Bennu contained ribose and other monosaccharides. Ribose is a fundamental sugar in RNA. The new study reveals another type of space sugar, this one from the ketose family. On Earth, it’s found in tanning lotions and raspberries.

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To some extent moving the origin question to “meteorites” and “outer space” only pushes the question of “how?” away by one step, but at the same time shows that we need not be unique. Perhaps space is raspberry-flavoured? That would be nice.
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Markets experience new DeepSeek shock after MoonShot AI releases Kimi K3 • Fortune

Nicholas Gordon:

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On Thursday, Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI startup, unveiled the latest version of its Kimi large language model, which promises performance close to Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model today—at a fraction of the cost.

Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever released, performed “competitively” with Fable 5, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, according to Moonshot. The company’s officially-released benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even put K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic.

Many observers, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, didn’t expect a Chinese AI lab to release a model that could approach the US’s best offerings for another six months. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, suggested it might happen by the first quarter of next year. K3’s launch rapidly shrank that timeline and underscores just how quickly Chinese AI developers are closing the performance gap with their US rivals. 

“The AI ecosystem in China is probably much better than people thought,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Moonshot AI has priced K3 at $15 per million output tokens, the bits of information processed and generated by a large language model. That’s cheaper than Fable 5, which costs $50 for the same level of output.

Moonshot’s launch seemed to rattle investors who interpret the new model as undermining the conventional wisdom that US firms can maintain their extended lead by simply outspending Chinese competitors on computing power.

A semiconductor selloff was already underway, but the K3 debut seemed to make things worse. Leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell by 7% on Friday, despite reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit. SoftBank—often seen as a proxy for OpenAI—fell by 9.0%. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup that has released a competing model to Moonshot’s Kimi, plunged by almost 30% in Hong Kong trading.

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And that’s before you get into the open source models. There doesn’t seem to be any moat – protective unique selling point – to LLMs; anyone can do it, and lots of people are doing, and once you get good-enough open source models you can deploy on a phone, well, haven’t we seen this movie before?
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AI ‘amplification spiral’ may be causing delusions among users, study suggests • Decrypt

Jason Nelson:

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Researchers have proposed a new framework to explain reports of AI psychosis, arguing that certain chatbot behaviors may reinforce delusions in vulnerable users.

Published in Nature, the study out of King’s College London and Germany’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences proposes an “amplification spiral” framework that links common chatbot behaviors to the reinforcement of user delusions.

“AI-associated delusions represent an emerging phenomenon requiring mechanistic understanding,” the researchers wrote. “This framework aims to guide systematic inquiry into how human cognitive vulnerabilities interact with AI design features in psychopathology development.”

The study focused on three specific behaviors, including linguistic alignment, in which AI mirrors a user’s language and communication style; hyperpersonalized generation, where responses are tailored to an individual’s history, emotions, and beliefs; and sycophancy, a tendency to validate or agree with users rather than challenge them.

The authors argue that these traits can combine into a feedback loop in which chatbots not only reflect a user’s thinking but help elaborate and reinforce it over time.

“The tendency of AI chatbots to agree with user opinions has been likened to social media echo chambers and, in its most extreme form, to an ‘echo chamber of one,’ where the positive corrective influence of real-life social interactions is absent,” the paper said.

The researchers noted that technology has long featured in delusions, from the radio and television, to satellites and the internet. Researchers argue, however, that AI represents a shift because chatbots can engage users in prolonged, personalized conversations.

The review arrives as psychologists and AI researchers examine the effects of chatbots on vulnerable users. A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 15% of psychologists reported patients developing distorted thinking or delusions related to chatbot use. At the same time, more than a third said they had observed patients becoming dependent on AI companions. The findings followed a separate study from researchers at the City University of New York and King’s College London showing that several leading AI models could reinforce delusions, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts.

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Meta trying to destroy whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, US senator says • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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A US senator has accused Meta of using lawfare in “efforts to destroy” a whistleblower who made allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers.

In a letter to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded to know what measures Meta had taken to monitor Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former global head of public policy, and her family.

He also accused the firm of trying to make “truthful speech so perilous that no whistleblower like Ms Wynn-Williams can ever afford it”.

Wynn-Williams made her allegations in a memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism but under an interim arbitration ruling secured by Meta she is unable to speak about the book, which contains claims about it working with the Chinese government on censorship tools, and its platforms’ negative impacts on teenagers.

She sat in silence on stage at the Hay literary festival in Wales earlier this year after taking legal advice, and is suing Meta over the restrictions it secured over her.

Meta strongly disputes Wynn-Williams’s book, saying it contains several false claims, and describes her legal case as a ploy to shift more copies.

Hawley, whose senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and counter-terrorism took evidence from Wynn-Williams last year, said: “Meta’s efforts to destroy Ms Wynn-Williams with lawfare are a matter of grave public concern.”

…Hawley demanded documents relating to any Meta attempts to “monitor, track, record, or catalog Ms Wynn-Williams’ or her family members’ public statements, interviews, social media activity, or public or private travel”.

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The documents Hawley demands are basically just part of an effort by him to make Meta look bad. Not a high bar. Though you’d think the Democrats might want to get in on this act too. Still, has to be said that Meta’s efforts have been an absolute boon to the book’s sales. That saying that no publicity is bad publicity? They maybe thought it meant that enforcing no publicity would be bad publicity for the book. Mistake!
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Why Tokyo’s new shorts policy is sparking debate in Japan • The New York Times

Javier Hernandez and Hisako Ueno:

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For more than three decades, Noboru Watanabe wore the uniform of the Japanese salaryman: trousers, a starched shirt, a jacket and a necktie.

But last week Mr. Watanabe, 53, an environmental official in Tokyo, ditched the outfit for the unimaginable: a T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was taking advantage of a new policy by the Tokyo government to allow its workers to wear shorts in the office, after successive summers of record-breaking heat.

“Everyone says I look younger,” Mr. Watanabe said near his desk on a recent afternoon. “I seem more approachable. I feel I am helping relax the whole office.”

The policy is the latest attempt by Japanese officials to persuade the country’s millions of office workers to dress down in the summer to make office life more comfortable, reduce the use of air-conditioning and save energy. Under the “Cool Biz” initiative, the government encourages workers to forgo heavy suits in favor of polo shirts, linen tops and sneakers in hot weather.

But shorts, newly allowed this summer, are a bridge too far for some. The policy has prompted debate in Japan — and inspired delicate conversations at the office about etiquette and how to deal with the sight of a colleague’s hairy legs. The Japanese news media has even coined a new term — sune-hara, or “leg-hair harassment” — to describe the sense of grievance some women feel when they are forced to observe their male co-workers’ legs.

Ruai Sajiki, 23, an employee at the Tokyo government offices, acknowledged that seeing bare legs in a professional setting could be jarring for women. But she offered her blessing when Mr. Watanabe, her supervisor, asked if she minded if he wore shorts in the office.

“I’ve seen my own father’s legs, so I’m personally comfortable with it,” she said. “It can’t be helped that there are many opinions, and some women who feel resistance.”

Some commentators argue that the policy, while officially applying to both men and women, is unfair. While men are rarely judged for what they wear to work, women still face pressure to cover their legs with pantyhose, which are still common in Japan, or long skirts.

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Japan remains incredibly patriarchal. Also, shrinking in number. Not sure if the two are linked, but why risk it?
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LinkedIn and X are flooded with AI spam, browsing data suggests • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41% of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data. 

The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see. This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites. 

“This isn’t something that had really been studied before—how much AI content people are actually seeing,” Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, told me in a phone interview. “AI content is a tax on readers’ time.” 

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Is it a tax if you ignore it and scroll straight past? Asking for a friend. Or, in the case of LinkedIn, just never go there.
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The collapse at Netflix signals the end of audience capture • The Honest Broker (*not Roger Pielke)

Ted Gioia:

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Netflix got into this mess by pursuing a simple strategy: (1) Reduce the number of new scripted series (which peaked in 2022), but (2) Raise subscription prices.

That is the “audience capture” strategy mentioned above. The idea is that the audience got captured years ago with cheap subscription prices, and now the platform can squeeze them mercilessly—offering less and charging more. Netflix has been pursuing this agenda for several years now.

Ah, but Netflix isn’t the only company building its future on audience capture. It’s getting used at almost every streaming platform. And even companies outside of the media space are practicing variants of it. You see it at Google, Meta, X, Apple, etc.

It’s shocking how many companies have learned this technique. The entire printer and toner business is now built on audience capture. The same is true of the software industry—don’t even get me started on my Microsoft Office subscription fiasco. And, of course, all those customer loyalty programs (variants on the frequent flyer gimmicks that started this craze years ago) are examples of the same stale strategy.

Even the AI world is turning into an audience capture business—both for itself and its customers. This is one of the key reasons for my frequent criticisms of AI slop. It feeds into step one of the strategy outlined above. The companies use AI to reduce the cost of content, thus boosting margins while reducing their dependence on human creators.

Audience capture has always existed, but never to this extent. When I consulted at BCG we called it a milking strategy, where you raised prices and reduced capital investment in a business—which was now your cash cow. You squeeze all the money you can from it, for as long as you can.

But back then we realized that milking only worked in the short term. Eventually you killed the cow. And the risk is the same today with “audience capture”—which is just a new name for that poor old bovine.

Sooner or later, the audience refuses to be held captive. And that’s happening now at Netflix—hence the stock sell-off.

«

The stock sell-off might precede a bigger abandonment by subscribers who just don’t see the point because Netflix keeps throwing things against a non-stick wall. Nothing is allowed to grow. Tech companies can’t do content.
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‘We noticed a login from a new device’: the message from fraudsters targeting your X account • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

»

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

The location is Arizona, but you live in London. The device is “Firefox Desktop on Mac”.

“If this wasn’t you,” the email continues, “complete these steps now to protect your account.”

The steps include clicking a link to change your password, which will end up with you “logged out of all your active X sessions except the one you’re using at this time” and to click another link to review the apps that have access to your account and revoke any that are unfamiliar.

The steps are legitimate advice from X, but the links to reset your password, or to review app access are not. The email is fake and attempting to trick you into giving scammers your password, or direct access to your X account.

“Scammers want your X username and password, or to trick you into approving a malicious link that gives them access to your account without needing your password,” says Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser at ESET.

Once the criminals have access to your account they will more than likely use it to attempt to commit further fraud including crypto scams, phishing attacks and misinformation campaigns.

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There’s a lot of scamming going on. The misdirection emails are quite common; they often lead to direct messages to mutual followers asking them to vote for them in a podcast competition, or something similar. The scams mutate so quickly that once you’ve picked up on one, the next will be along imminently.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you were thinking of jobs to net money on betting markets, White House teleprompter operator might not be top of the list. But maybe it should be. CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro 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. Just read the words. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Generative AI is an engineering disaster • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

»

The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). The large in large language model should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on his blog in September.

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.

But with the massive investment behind the current bloated approach, there may not be much will to change. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, said in a November interview that companies take the brute-force approach “because it gives you a very low-risk way of investing your resources.” It’s harder, he argued, to invest in research that would reengineer a product currently accruing trillion-dollar valuations. Those who suspect we are in an AI-driven bubble economy have pointed out that the profitability of these companies remains an open question, largely because of the high cost and inefficiency of the technology.

«

The point that generative AI doesn’t scale – even while they try to build it at bigger and bigger scale – is an overlooked one, and critical to the whole problem here. It just needs more, and more of everything, and that doesn’t leave any room for anything else. (Gift link.)
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Someone used AI to write an unauthorized biography of me. I don’t recommend reading it • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it.

My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)

The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of AI slop. I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference.

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She found an AI-assisted author, though not the right one:

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[Bill] Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.

“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

It is hard to disagree with that, though I can’t say I agree with Mr. Johns’s solution: Have an A.I. chatbot do it instead. He spent a couple of weeks and $20 on ChatGPT to help him write about the history of hacking and published his first book, a whopping 651-pager, in March 2025.

Of course, that was possible only because OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, had ingested the work of those romantic toilers — Wikipedia editors, Reddit commenters, book authors and reporters like me. (I must mention here that The Times has an ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, though the AI firm says it is “without merit.”)

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He gets a few hundred dollars a month – what he characterises as “bar money”. A new tragedy of the commons.
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The phantom author • Spratz’s Substack

“An armed ramble”:

»

So much of our experience and indeed our expectations of reading are comfortably anchored in the assumption that the author is another human being just like ourselves. What changes when this is no longer true?

I often can’t tell whether a piece of text was written by an AI or not, and strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to have any impact on my response. I have certainly read texts that make me laugh and others that moved me deeply, only to discover subsequently that they were AI generated. Even with that subsequent knowledge, re-reading them has still caused me to laugh or to be moved. Here’s a  recent AI text that made me laugh: “‘I have made a grave mistake,’ said the king, staring at the hole in the garden where he had buried his dignity. ‘Unfortunately, it seems to have been a very spacious grave.’”

I was quite surprised when I first realised this. I had always thought that my response would be dictated by the authorship of the text and yet it wasn’t.

George Poulet thought that when we were reading, we were actually inhabiting the author’s consciousness. My experiences significantly undermine that claim. Perhaps our responses are co-created by the text and the reader; the text acts as  a catalyst for the reader. Maybe there are as many responses as there are readers? This seems disturbingly isolating; forcing us to accept that our responses may be almost solipsistic. An isolating and emotionally bleak conclusion. Yet, there are shared responses. What does that mean?

«

This is a deep question. On Substack, people are debating whether this Guardian article – which is a potted version of a book – is AI-written. I had read it before seeing those claims, and thought it was a little overwritten, but interesting. The idea it might be AI changes how one thinks about the real-world events described: they’d seemed outlandish anyway, but we know a chatbot can’t really discern normal from abnormal behaviour, so this heightens our suspicion.
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Moroccan intelligence insider reveals widespread use of Pegasus hacking software • The Guardian

Sam Jones, José Bautista and Hicham Mansouri:

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A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Although NSO Group says Pegasus is sold only to governments to help them track criminals and terrorists, the spyware is alleged to have been used by several countries to target dissidents, journalists, diplomats and politicians.

Morocco has long denied using Pegasus to target critics at home or abroad, and has claimed that reporters who have investigated NSO Group were “incapable of proving [the country had] any relationship” with the company.

However, evidence from a whistleblower who worked for Morocco’s Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST) for almost a decade suggests the country’s internal security services began using Pegasus in 2017 and went on to deploy it against domestic and foreign targets over the course of four years.

Testimony from the source, known by the pseudonym of Safir, forms the basis of a multiyear investigation by the Moroccan journalist Hicham Mansouri, which has led to a collaborative investigation between several media groups, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

The consortium, which was coordinated by Forbidden Stories and comprises 14 media organisations – including Le Monde, Haaretz, El Confidencial, Die Zeit and the Guardian – has also analysed material detailing Morocco’s surveillance practices, from leaked emails to targeting records relating to Pegasus and other spyware, and from victims’ testimony to internal training material.

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This is the problem with any sort of spyware like this. It won’t be used in the way demanded by the creator. It’ll be used any damn way someone with a licence wants to use it.
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These are the worst ChatGPT flyers you’ve sent us • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of “ChatGPT flyers,” the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many terrible, brain-numbing signs for anything you could possibly imagine. I guess I got what I asked for. (Thank you, I love it).

404 Media readers were particularly passionate about their hatred for AI-designed signs. I got some of the best email responses to any story I’ve done here. Before I get into the AI flyer hall of shame, here’s some of what I heard:

“They look like absolute DOG SHIT. Like my cat’s litter box! I freaking HATE THEM. I have been posting to my Instagram begging people and businesses to stop using them. No one listens LOL. Thanks for this article. I am glad I’m not screaming into the void by myself.”

“thank you for writing this story. I’ve evangelically shared it with everyone I know, for whatever that’s worth. I had never seen a local group churn out an AI-generated flyer before this year, but in the last several months it’s gotten out of control. I’m sure you’re being inundated with lousy AI flyers. Sorry for adding to the deluge, but this is something that’s been bothering me for months.”

“This is a great article but also fuck you because you were absolutely right about ‘Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.'”

Without further ado, here are some of the worst flyers we got. This represents just a small sampling of the overall number you sent me. In some cases I’ve provided more context from the person who sent it to me, and I’ve biased for ones that appeared in real life (i.e., were printed out) or that are particularly weird. Enjoy!

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Some of these are awful, some you.. would just go past thinking they’re incredibly overdone but don’t have any obvious spelling mistakes, unlike some of them which cannot have been proofread.
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Peter Thiel’s AI tribunal pivots to scoreboard model • Hollywood Reporter

Gary Baum:

»

Objection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.

Objection’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the “steroid Olympics,” who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.

Objection’s first tribunal, in April, targeted The Hollywood Reporter for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D’Souza told THR that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

D’Souza and Objection’s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot — who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018  — acknowledged they’d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn’t be accused of outputting slop justice. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in THR‘s tribunal.)

D’Souza and Grant-Talbot since arrived at a solution for their quandary by determining, as Objection’s home page now reads, that “verdicts punish failure. They don’t fix the incentive. They do not solve the root cause.”

«

So fact-checking and objectivity is a lot harder than billionaires thought? What an utter shock. “Journalists are more powerful than billionaires”. Really. Long time since a journalist bought a social media company or a newspaper. (Though, OK, The Onion was bought by a company led by a former NYT journalist.)
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White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches, sources say • ABC News

Katherine Faulders, Aaron Katersky, Peter Charalambous, and Nicholas Kerr:

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President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in talks with federal regulators to settle allegations he used his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000, the sources said.

According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its “Mentions” market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. 

“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators,” Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News’ report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a “disgrace” and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. 

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A part-hilarious element of this is that sometimes he was found to back out of bets he had made when Trump skipped over things that were in the teleprompter script. The best part is this, though:

»

“The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News.

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Those guidelines being: don’t do it for small amounts. Seven figures minimum, or what’s the point?
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When eyeing a predator, horses keep a poker face as their hearts race • EurekAlert!

»

Horses know a predator when they see one – even if it’s only on a video screen they’re watching in a stall, with no sounds, smells or previous experience providing context to what they’re viewing, a new study suggests.

And though sensors indicated the horses’ heart rates increased when they were looking at wolves on the screen, they otherwise kept a poker face. They didn’t bob their heads or swish their tails, and their gaze wasn’t fixed in a way that would indicate their brain was processing a threat, results showed.

“Rather than just spooking, horses show remarkable cognitive restraint when evaluating a potential threat,” said lead author Zeynep Benderlioglu, a senior lecturer in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “And not all fear or stress will result in overt behavior. They’re not in fight-or-flight mode, but they’re assessing, and they’re doing it in a remarkably fast way. But their hearts are racing at the same time.”

The findings are relevant to horse and human welfare, Benderlioglu said: riders and handlers may not be able to tell when a horse is agitated.

“This visual recognition means horses may be experiencing an internal state of agitation while remaining physically still,” she said. “Understanding this disconnect is vital for ensuring both rider safety and the welfare of a horse that is processing a threat, especially if that threat is a canid – any dog.”

The research was published on July 15, 2026 in the journal PLOS One.

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Business Insider’s big bet against aggregation • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.

[BI editor-in-chief Jamie] Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.

“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.

Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.

“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.

Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.

Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.

In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”

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Original news? At a news outlet? What a radical concept. Everything old is new again.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

One thing we’re addicted to? Reading (on our phones) about how we’re addicted to our phones. CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding on Flickr.

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

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

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

Lara O’Reilly, Sydney Bradley and Lucia Moses:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Got to say, they should have a word with the people generating AI pictures to spam X/Twitter, because their game is pretty strong: different pictures most days, variations, different text. But of course they’re scams.
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US military smartphones targeted through roaming and ad tech • Financial Times

Mehul Srivastava, Jacob Judah and James Politi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Often forgotten that Iran has plenty of cyber capabilities.
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The Scrolly Chair • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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

“How to Break Free from Your Phone”

“Your Best Tips for Cutting Screen Time”

“Struggling with Phone Addiction? Try These Remedies.”

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

“How to Have a Healthier Relationship with Your Phone”

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

“Hanging Up”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is There Life after Smartphones?”

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

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Thinking Machines Lab drops its first model • WIRED

Will Knight:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The profusion of models now is like the Cambrian explosion of PC models back in the early 1980s. It’s a full-time job keeping up with them.
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The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

In the same way that pretty much everything runs on Linux, you can imagine that open source chatbots will just be almost everywhere in a few years.
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Musk’s xAI sues Grok user over sexualized ‘deepfakes’ • Reuters

Blke Brittain:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

You’d hardly call them “guardrails” around Grok; more like tape on the floor. That’s a lot of suspended accounts and comparatively few arrests, too.
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Hack reveals Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

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

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

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

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

«

Lawsuits surely incoming. Though “you accessed our content without permission” is hardly comparable to YouTube’s years of copyright infringement, and that doesn’t seem to be in trouble. The person who did the hacking might be in more immediate trouble if found – a strange quirk of the law.
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Top US lawmaker demands briefing from Lisa Nandy on ‘news prominence’ plan • Financial Times

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Bet that Nandy is hoping she gets reshuffled by incoming PM Andy Burnham so she won’t have to deal with this uncomfortable question, which has the potential to create yet more transatlantic friction. I think we’re all hoping Nandy gets reshuffled. It would be very hard to find someone worse.
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‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew • The Guardian

Jane Clinton:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A major British car insurer has discovered that AI is being used to create millions in bogus claims. CC-licensed photo by sylvar on Flickr.

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

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

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

Robert Booth:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

Call me picky, but a midnight curfew sounds about two hours too late, and a 6am restart about two hours too early. But maybe we could just do this nationally, and turn the internet off between those hours. (Or, only on during them.)
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OnePlus is reportedly bailing on the US • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

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

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

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

«

The 9to5Google story basically has it all: the company is withdrawing back into China. US, Europe, UK, India: all going, going, gone. Probably not just a casualty of the RAM market, but won’t be sorry not to be competing in the wider world.
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Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training • The Guardian

Emma Loffhagen:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Pretty easy to argue already that AI-generated content is harming book sales: there’s so much slop polluting Amazon’s ebook charts that it can’t be expanding the number of books read; it must be replacing other, human-written work. That’s a slam dunk, as they say.
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US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

The warfare version of Keeping up with the Joneses.
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20s man stabs stock YouTuber over investment losses • Chosun

Kwon Tae-wan:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

These days anyway you’d think people would just have piled into SK Hynix. Are there any others?
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Aviva detects record £230m in bogus insurance claims as use of AI rises • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

A brand new arms race.
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David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82 • The Register

Liam Proven:

»

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

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

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

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

«

A bit late to this, but what a legacy: real handheld computers (which were really good!) and oversaw the creation of the OS that powered Nokia, once the biggest mobile phone company in the world. And look for the nuggest about what “Psion” stood for: the first three letters are Potter Scientific Instruments.
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IBM’s mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value • The Register

Carly Page:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

IBM hardware is less attractive than other hardware. That’s a bit worrying for IBM. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” becomes “You’ll get fired if you buy IBM”.
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Phoebe Gates’s startup Phia was just accused of ‘cookie stuffing.’ Here’s what happens next • Inc

Esther Lian:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

So you’ve got a USB-C cable – but how do you find out what (if any) data speed it runs at? A new Mac app will tell you. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.

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

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

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

Aarian Marshall:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Very sneaky. A comparison would be insisting that any electric vehicle has to have a petrol engine, just in case, thus blocking EV entrants from entering the market. But Uber is very flexible: it’ll change its principles any time, as long as they suit it.
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Meta pulls new AI image feature after days of backlash • BBC News

Kali Hays:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Well that was predictably quick, wasn’t it. Though the usual playbook from Meta (and Google) is to quietly bring it back in almost exactly the same form, with some minor tweaks, but the same level of privacy, ie none.
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Publishers are preparing to opt out of Google Search • Adweek

Mark Stenberg:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara Moens, Tim Bradshaw and Jude Webber:

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

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

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

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

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

From teetering on the edge to dropping billions in foreign countries: Intel really has been saved by the AI bubble.
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PC market runs low on RAM to grow: shipments decline 4.9% as memory crunch bites • IDC

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

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

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

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

As ever one tends to suspect that the low end market is going to struggle during this crisis, and lose share to the big ones. That is a cycle which keeps repeating, and somehow they keep hanging on, even while their share gets eroded slowly year by year.
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This free Mac app reveals the truth about your mystery USB-C cables • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Immediate download! Though USB data cables are quite hard to come by. Power cables, no problem. The difficulty is identifying the ones that will actually carry data.
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The most famous AI writing tic is also the most mysterious • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s not good – it’s annoying.
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Older adults in China know AI is slop. They just like it • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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

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

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

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

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

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This feels like a worrying portent for the future.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In an experiment, Google has quantified how sending drivers headed for the same destination by different routes can reduce congestion and emissions. CC-licensed photo by Shiyang Huang on Flickr.

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

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

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

Amy Borrett and Laura Hughes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That feels like a big number? And anyone who has bounced off the NHS won’t be surprised that there are data errors. It seems to be an inescapable attribute of the system, which no amount of effort can remove.
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The newest way to go analogue • The Atlantic

Nancy Walecki:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avram Piltch:

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s increasingly recognised that the best disguise is a hard hat, fluoro tabard and a clipboard. This takes it to a new level. (Red teaming is where hackers you trust are paid to try to break into your stuff and report back on how hard or easy it is.)
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“Cool in 90 seconds: the fake portable air conditioners sweeping the internet • BBC News

Laura Cress:

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

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

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

The BBC has approached Meta and YouTube for comment.

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

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

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

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

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The problem is that the claims are fake, the reviews are probably fake, so how do you figure out what’s real?
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I spent a week using the Trump phone; it sucks • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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

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

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

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

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

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The bad design and lack of attention to detail should be no surprise from a bunch of people who either used AI or incredibly lazy designers to make the standard American eagle logo for an airport they have rebranded with Trump’s name.
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Apparently, Netflix is shocked that no one is watching their crap • The World Outside Our Window

Max Bolen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh:

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

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

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

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

The full paper is published at Nature Cities: “Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions“.
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Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OpenAI is, one suspects, going to be very sorry that it hired these people if this gets proven in court. The complaint makes them sound like absolute loose cannons. Anyway, sayonara ChatGPT integration with Siri!
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What a Monopoly vendor learned when making things in America • NPR

Scott Horsley:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ten thousand dice doesn’t sound like a lot, and it doesn’t sound like the highest tech challenge ever.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Revenues for the Swiss watch brand Swatch have fallen by nearly a third since Apple launched its Watch in 2015. Could the same happen in the market for glasses? CC-licensed photo by Motor-Head on Flickr.

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

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

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

Emma Whitford:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The graph of the difference between midterm and in-person exam is included in the story, and is really dramatic. Clearly, AI is becoming a crutch for many people, but whether that’s because they’re lazy, or because they’re struggling with the challenge, isn’t clear.
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The teenage millionaire hacker from Tower Hamlets who took down Transport for London • London Centric

Polly Smythe, Jim Waterson and Cormac Kehoe:

»

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

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

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

Then he got hungry.

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

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

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

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

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Absolutely fantastic piece of reporting. Hacker millionaires is a very new thing. But there’s always a mistake. Always.
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AI software that generates “rage bait” developed by Germany’s far-right AfD • The Irish Times

Derek Scally:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s just disgraceful how AI is taking away people’s jobs. This is exactly the sort of thing that used to be done by humans! Automating social warming? This is the last straw. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Parents’ attachment to phone screens can lead to anxiety in children – study • The Guardian

Dara Kerr:

»

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

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

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

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

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I think there’s more to this; the effect on infants of parents not paying any attention to them for hours at a time is really hard to study because you can’t interview the infant, but the effects must become clear over time.
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Budget smartphone market collapses under the weight of memory shortages, sales expected to drop 22% • Tom’s Hardware

Zak Killian:

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

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

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

«

Worth saying, once again, that this is surely the first time that one new development in technology has crushed otherwise healthy ones.
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NEO’s hands: an API to the physical world • 1x Technologies

1X Technologies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Very interesting. Once you have robots that are able to treat the world gently, you have the potential to change the world. The tendons are very impressive. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Apple destroyed the mid-tier watch market. Now it’s coming for the $200bn eyewear industry • The Next Web

Darius Popa:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

First: not sure that Apple can do the same stuff with glasses as it did with watches. But let’s see. Second: had no idea that The Next Web was still going. This site predates The Verge, which rapidly eclipsed it on launch.
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The administration has a new climate change office. It’s headed by a climate critic • POLITICO

Scott Waldman:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

The long slow slide into the sea continues.
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Meta tests “super sensing” AI glasses that can capture every moment • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Planning not to activate the LED? Are they trying to get people beaten up?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reading by adults in America is becoming a fringe pastime, which in turn creates problems for teachers – and society. CC-licensed photo by Ed Yourdon on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not available on video. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The end of reading is here • The Atlantic

Rose Horowitch:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Ashley Belanger:

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

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

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

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

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

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One can only hope that Elon Musk is somehow made to pay for his dereliction of duty towards everyone in the blast radius of his stupid ideas.
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Outcry as Meta lets users make AI images from public Instagram profile pics • BBC News

Laura Cress:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Always the same: Meta makes any potentially exploitative new setting into an opt-out, there’s an outcry, it pauses the rollout for a little while, then continues again with the same mode. From News Feed to everything else. The scorpion never changes.
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BBC and Channel 4 in talks to create British streaming champion • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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

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

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

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

Channel 4 was approached for comment.

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

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

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

«

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

Brittin might also get the ear of the government, because they’ll trust his prior work at Google.
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Netflix dabbles in shorter video content with its new set of publisher deals with Variety, others • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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

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

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

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

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

«

This feels very desperate. Is this really going to increase retention?
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Netflix and the value of streaming shovelware • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Very few series can survive both bingeing and long pauses. Notice how Apple, Amazon and now also Netflix are doing weekly episodes for various new series.
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Microsoft Xbox is the new burning platform • GamesBeat

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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None of this looks good. As a reminder, Microsoft eventually wrote down the entire Nokia purchase price and gave up on Windows Phone.
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Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police • Los Angeles Times

Caroline Petrow-Cohen:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

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Wonderful way to almost get the children killed. Well done, Waymo. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh no. It just will not die. This will probably go on until the Unix clocks turns over, in January 2038. It’s the tech world’s Gradgrind v Gradgrind. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest service in programming is “slopfixing”, where the confused code written by chatbots gets tidied up.. by humans. CC-licensed photo by Austin Gruenweller on Flickr.

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

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

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

Robert Booth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Strange but perhaps not surprising? If you’re writing something a bit contrary compared to what the whole of the internet says, then it’s maybe going to fight back against it a little.
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Data centres’ energy demand threatens Trump’s “Made in America” plan • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

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

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

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

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

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

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Slopfix — we refactor vibecoded codebases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slopfixing might be the next wave in human programming.
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Big tech’s lofty climate goals wrecked by energy-hungry AI • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery, Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sigh. Every time we think we’re getting somewhere, Jevons elbows in. First it’s bitcoin. Now it’s AI.
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UK regulator warns of “arms race” to keep up with AI use in financial services • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Martin Arnold:

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

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

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

“It is an arms race,” he added.

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

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

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

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

Andrew Webster:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Gottfried and Monica Anderson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Certainly going to be one of those things where parents are the drivers of any change. Support a ban for under-16s: 56%; not sure: 23%; oppose: 21%. That’s pushing on an open door.
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Knockoff: Amazon, without the knockoffs

Josh Pigford:

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

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There are an astonishing number of vague Chinese search-optimised products on Amazon. And this seems like a smart solution to them.
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Italy could be the next country to build a solar railway after Switzerland’s successful trial • Euronews

Liam Gilliver:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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100 metres isn’t a lot, and the output isn’t a lot, and one has to wonder how well the solar panels installed between the tracks will survive the shaking.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified