Solar panels can dramatically cut the running costs of a home – but usually, only the well-off can afford them. How do we help those who can’t? CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about a tricky job where AI started taking over – and made humans better at it, at least for a time.

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

Instacart’s AI recipes look literally impossible • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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I hate cookbooks without pictures. We eat with our eyes first, as chefs love to say, but what’s more important to me is that if I’m making a dish for the first time, I want to see what the final product should look like to know I did it right. It’s not so much about presentation as it is about knowing that I browned the chicken skin enough.

An image of a recipe will not be this useful, I think, if it was AI-generated, and especially so if the fact that the image was AI-generated wasn’t disclosed by the recipe. That, to my surprise, is exactly the case with thousands of recipes the grocery delivery service Instacart is suggesting to its users. Some of the recipes include unheard of measurements and ingredients that don’t appear to exist. Business Insider first reported about Instacart’s AI generated recipes in January.

Generally, I try to avoid using Instacart if possible because it treats its workers badly, but I had just come back from the hospital with a newborn and was desperate enough to pay a lot of money to have eggs and some other basics delivered to my doorstep. As I was browsing, I noticed that Instacart was offering me recipes that appeared to complement the ingredients I was looking at. 

The concept doesn’t make a ton of sense to me—I’m going to Instacart for the ingredients I know I need for the food I know I’m going to make, not for food inspiration—but I had to click on a recipe for “Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips” because it looked weird in the thumbnail. 

Since I have eyeballs with optical nerves that are connected to a semi-functioning brain I can tell that the image was generated by AI. To be more specific, I can see that the top corner of the plate doesn’t match its square shape, that the table-ish looking thing it’s resting on is made up of jumbled slats (AI is particularly bad at making these series of long, straight lines), and then there are the titular watermelon popsicles, which defy physical reality. They clip into each other like bad 3D models in a video game, one of them to the left appears hollow, and for some reason they are skewered by what appears to be asparagus spears on the bottom end and capped by impossible small watermelon rinds at the top. 

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But also, chocolate chips on watermelon? Instacart juggled around the images once it was found out, but it’s still using AI. Are we really feeding people recipes that AI has dreamed up? Because that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
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The solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness • BusinessGreen

James Murray:

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In his 1993 novel Men at Arms, the late, great comic writer Terry Pratchett deployed one of his characters to present what was to become a famous economic theory: “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

A similar phenomenon is at risk of undermining the net zero transition. A solar panel theory of socioeconomic unfairness, if you will.

Solar panels and other clean technologies slash energy and fuel bills for households, while minimising exposure to future energy price hikes and air pollution. A recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit calculated the average household that improved its energy efficiency, installed solar panels and a heat pump, and switched to an EV would enjoy running costs that were nearly £2,000 a year lower than a household with no clean technologies in place. Which is great, but like Pratchett’s boots you can only access those savings if you can afford to deploy the technologies in the first place. Meanwhile, poorer households spend thousands of pounds more on their energy bills and are still cold. 

To make this unfairness worse still, it is lower income households that are most exposed to the higher food and insurance costs that are resulting from worsening climate impacts, not to mention the inherently regressive short term levies imposed on energy bills to help fund the necessary upfront investment in cleaner energy infrastructure that should curb costs in the long term. 

Of course, the costs and benefits associated with solar panels are not quite as simple as Pratchett’s expensive boots. When it comes to climate change we really are all in it together. Everyone benefits from improved air quality, reduced fossil gas imports, and lower carbon emissions. But while there are net gains for the economy as a whole, it remains true the financial savings are most immediately apparent for those who can afford to deploy clean technologies relatively early in the transition.

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There are of course schemes in the UK where a company will install the panels and either take a cut of the feed-in tariff or just treat the installation as a long-term loan; that makes it more affordable. (Also, I don’t think Pratchett invented the idea; “only the rich can afford cheap shoes” has been a saying for a long time.)
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New York judge rebukes law firm for using ChatGPT to justify its fees • FT

Joe Miller:

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A New York judge has scolded a law firm for citing ChatGPT to support its application for “excessive” attorneys’ fees of up to $600 an hour.

The Cuddy Law Firm had invoked the predictive artificial intelligence tool in a declaration to the court over a case it won against the city’s education department. It said it had done so “to provide context to what a parent — having ChatGPT-4 open and available to them — might take away in researching whether to hire an attorney and who to accept or reject”.

When asked what would be a “reasonable hourly rate” to expect for an associate attorney with up to three years experience in a hearing over disabilities education, the large language model said it could “range anywhere from $200 to $500 an hour”, an attorney at the firm wrote.

He also pointed out that ChatGPT concluded that “lawyers who specialise in a certain type of law (such as special education law, in this case) may command higher rates” and that an attorney with “25 years of experience” might command an hourly rate of up to $1,200 “or even more”.

Judge Paul Engelmayer, who ultimately cut the fees to be awarded to Cuddy’s lawyers by more than half, called the firm’s reliance on the AI program “utterly and unusually unpersuasive”, adding that “barring a paradigm shift in the reliability of this tool, the [firm] is well advised to excise references to ChatGPT from future fee applications”.

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I think I might have been inclined to cut their fees to zero for being so unutterably stupid. What is it about American lawyers and ChatGPT?
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Scientists claim AI breakthrough to generate boundless clean fusion energy • Vice

Mirjam Guesgen:

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Donut-shaped tokamak reactors rely on magnets to squeeze plasma particles close together and keep them constantly spinning around a ring, creating a lasting fusion reaction. They’re one of the front-runners in designs for a practical fusion reactor. But if there’s one little disruption to the magnetic field lines running through the plasma, the delicate balance keeping it all contained gets out of whack: The plasma escapes the magnets’ clutches and the reaction ends. 

Chijin Xiao, a plasma physicist at the University of Saskatchewan who wasn’t involved in the study, explained that these instabilities can lead to catastrophic consequences. “When the plasma stops operating, there are several risks: one is that all the energy stored in the plasma is going to be released as thermal energy and may damage the wall of the reactor,” she said. “More importantly, a sudden change in the [magnetic] current can introduce a great deal of force on the reactor that can really destroy the device.”

Xiao added that one of the biggest tokamak reactors around today, ITER in France, is only designed to withstand a few of these plasma disruptions before the whole machine has to be repaired—a huge expense. The goal is to catch instabilities while they’re small and intervene.

The Princeton lab’s model can predict so-called tearing mode instabilities 300 milliseconds before they happen. It doesn’t sound like a lot of heads-up, but it’s enough time to get the plasma under control, their study shows.

Researchers tested the algorithm on a real reactor, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They saw that their AI-based system could control the power being pumped into the reactor and the shape of the plasma to keep the swirling particles in check.

Co-author Azarakhsh Jalalvand said in a statement that the success of the AI model comes from the fact that it was trained on real data from previous fusion experiments, rather than theoretical physics models. 

“We don’t teach the reinforcement learning model all of the complex physics of a fusion reaction,” Jalalvand said. “We tell it what the goal is—to maintain a high-powered reaction—what to avoid—a tearing mode instability—and the knobs it can turn to achieve those outcomes. Over time, it learns the optimal pathway for achieving the goal of high power while avoiding the punishment of an instability.”

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*weary voice* hurrah, boundless clean energy is only *checks watch* 20 years away again
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Scientists are putting ChatGPT brains inside robot bodies. What could possibly go wrong? • Scientific American

David Berreby:

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Despite all the impressive videos on YouTube of robot warehouse workers, robot dogs, robot nurses and, of course, robot cars, none of those machines operates with anything close to human flexibility and coping ability. “Classical robotics is very brittle because you have to teach the robot a map of the world, but the world is changing all the time,” says Naganand Murty, CEO of Electric Sheep, a company whose landscaping robots must deal with constant changes in weather, terrain and owner preferences. For now, most working robots labor much as their predecessors did a generation ago: in tightly limited environments that let them follow a tightly limited script, doing the same things repeatedly.

…LLMs have what robots lack: access to knowledge about practically everything humans have ever written, from quantum physics to K-pop to defrosting a salmon fillet. In turn, robots have what LLMs lack: physical bodies that can interact with their surroundings, connecting words to reality. It seems only logical to connect mindless robots and bodiless LLMs so that, as one 2022 paper puts it, “the robot can act as the language model’s ‘hands and eyes,’ while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task.”

…When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it was “a bit of an ‘aha’ moment” for engineers at Levatas, a West Palm Beach firm that provides software for robots that patrol and inspect industrial sites, says its CEO, Chris Nielsen. With ChatGPT and Boston Dynamics, the company cobbled together a prototype robot dog that can speak, answer questions and follow instructions given in ordinary spoken English, eliminating the need to teach workers how to use it. “For the average common industrial employee who has no robotic training, we want to give them the natural-language ability to tell the robot to sit down or go back to its dock,” Nielsen says.

Levatas’s LLM-infused robot seems to grasp the meaning of words—and the intent behind them. It “knows” that although Jane says “back up” and Joe says “get back,” they both mean the same thing. Instead of poring over a spreadsheet of data from the machine’s last patrol, a worker can simply ask, “What readings were out of normal range in your last walk?”

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But, and here is the very big but, should you believe the answer you get?
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Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames • Signal Blog

Randall Sarafa is Signal’s chief product officer:

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New default: Your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone in Signal
• If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default. People who have your number saved in their phone’s contacts will still see your phone number since they already know it.

Connect without sharing your phone number
• If you don’t want to hand out your phone number to chat with someone on Signal, you can now create a unique username that you can use instead (you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal). Note that a username is not the profile name that’s displayed in chats, it’s not a permanent handle, and not visible to the people you are chatting with in Signal. A username is simply a way to initiate contact on Signal without sharing your phone number.

Control who can find you on Signal by phone number
• If you don’t want people to be able to find you by searching for your phone number on Signal, you can now enable a new, optional privacy setting. This means that unless people have your exact unique username, they won’t be able to start a conversation, or even know that you have a Signal account – even if they have your phone number.

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This is going to be very welcome, and it’s a smart idea. Giving out your phone number has never felt ideal for an app that’s really very focussed on privacy.

Presently this is in beta, but it’s rolling out over the next few weeks. (In which case.. is that really beta testing?)
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Analysis: record drop required in China’s CO2 emissions to meet 2025 target • Carbon Brief

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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China’s energy sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increased 5.2% in 2023, meaning a record fall of 4-6% is needed by 2025 to meet the government’s “carbon intensity” target.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows rapid electricity demand growth and weak rains boosted demand for coal power in 2023, while the rebound from zero-Covid boosted demand for oil.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• China’s CO2 emissions have now increased by 12% between 2020 and 2023, after a highly energy- and carbon-intensive response to the Covid-19 pandemic
• This means CO2 emissions would need to fall by 4-6% by 2025, in order to meet the target of cutting China’s carbon intensity – its CO2 emissions per unit of economic output – by 18% during the 14th five-year plan period
• China is also at risk of missing all of its other key climate targets for 2025, including pledges to “strictly limit” coal demand growth and “strictly control” new coal power capacity, as well as targets for energy intensity, the share of low-carbon energy in overall demand and the share of renewables in energy demand growth
• Government pressure to hit the targets, most of which are in China’s updated international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement, makes it more likely that China’s CO2 emissions will peak before 2025 – far earlier than its target of peaking “before 2030”.

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Come ONNNNN China, come ONNNNN
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Vice’s new owners prepare to slash what’s left of its work force • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off hundreds of more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the battered digital-media industry.

When Vice emerged from bankruptcy last year, some observers hoped its new owners — a consortium led by the private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group — would reinvest to return the company to growth.

Instead, Fortress has decided to make sweeping cuts, as part of an attempt to stem the endless tide of red ink. The company is planning to inform employees of its new business strategy in the next week.
Vice did not have any immediate comment.

The layoffs come amid gale-force headwinds for the entire media industry.

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Related: Yahoo lays off the leaders of Engadget, dumping 10 staff, while

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the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

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Stick a fork in and raise a glass.
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Tech newsbrand with ‘optimistic view’ and 20-strong team launches in London • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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A technology news brand is launching in London with a 20-strong team hoping to buck the trend of industry decline over the last 12 months.

Digital Frontier has a nine-strong editorial team producing a website, twice-weekly podcast and daily newsletter. Other staff bring the title’s total headcount to 20.

The independent title plans to make revenue from subscriptions, advertising and events. Its plan is to provide deeply-reported journalism, rather than breaking news, and inform business leaders across various sector who need to understand the impact of disruptive technology.

Digital Frontier launches in a business climate which has seen numerous cutbacks and closures, with around 1,000 news media jobs lost in the UK and USA so far this year. However subscriptions and events have been relatively robust – with advertising being the main problem area for publishers, as evidenced by the recent DMGT results.

Digital Frontier is privately owned with investment from Josh Hewes, the founder and chief executive of Blockspace, who has a background in digital assets and financial services.

“Too much contemporary technology journalism falls into one of two traps: on the one hand a fixation on the trivial and on the other a tendency to pessimism. We want to bring rigour and a dose of optimism to the industry. We believe technology has led a huge improvement to people’s lives over the past century and has the potential to drive an even bigger change over the coming century.”

Digital Frontier said it will target an audience of “future-focused leaders, business decision-makers, entrepreneurs and investors”.

It is mainly targeting a B2B audience, but expects to also attract B2C readers.

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That’s a pretty big headcount. Watch this space, I guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Minnestoa, the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race used to be a predictable winter fixture. Now the warming climate has made it uncertain. CC-licensed photo by _ Kripptic 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 12 links for you. Believe it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT meltdown: users puzzled by bizarre gibberish bug • Mashable

Mike Pearl:

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ChatGPT hallucinates. We all know this already. But on Tuesday it seemed like someone slipped on a banana peel at OpenAI headquarters and switched on a fun new experimental chatbot called the Synonym Scrambler. 

Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question — typically something involving the tech business or the user’s job — and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that “sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul’s cry from the crow’s nest is met by beatine and wary hares a’twist and at winch in the willow.”

These are words, but ChatGPT seems to have been writing in an extreme version of that style where a ninth grader abuses their thesaurus privileges. “Beatine” is a particularly telling example. I checked the full Oxford English Dictionary and it’s not in there, but Wiktionary says it relates to the theologian Beatus of Liébana, a scholar of the end times who died in the year 800, so maybe “beatine” meant “apocalyptic” at some point in the first millennium CE. Or, judging from how it’s used in dusty old books, maybe it’s just another way of saying “beatific” which one would think is already an obscure enough word. In other words, ChatGPT was giving new meaning to the term “esoteric.” 

The chatbot was briefly doing things like this to tons of its users. One Redditor, homtanksreddit, noted that ChatGPT 3.5 — the one available to free users — was apparently unaffected, so the bug may have only affected paying users.

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Perhaps in retrospect it was a mistake to expand its training data with those James Joyce books.
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Apple’s new Sports app for the iPhone is all about the scores • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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Since the day the iPhone first went on sale, it’s come with Apple’s apps for checking the weather and monitoring stock prices. Now the company is finally getting around to offering an app that delivers timely information of a different sort with at least as much mass appeal: sports scores.

Named (probably inevitably) Apple Sports, the app is available in the App Store starting today. It features schedules of upcoming games, real-time play-by-play details on ones in progress, player stats, links to broadcasts on Apple TV where applicable, and (though they can be turned off) betting odds. Leagues currently covered include NBA, men’s and women’s NCAA basketball, NHL, MLS, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Liga MX, Ligue 1, Premiere League, and Serie A, with MLB,  NFL, NCAAF, NWSL, and WNBA on the way when their seasons start.

Apple has already offered a way to keep tabs on schedules, scores, and stats in the form of My Sports, a feature in Apple News and Apple TV. But in those apps, scores are just one part of the sports experience, and sports are just one slice of the overall mission, albeit an important one. Apple Sports, which will sync with favorites users have already selected in My Sports, doesn’t do anything but sports. And it isn’t even trying to be the ultimate hub for fans.

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It’s pretty dull, and in the UK doesn’t have much (yet). But you can see this as a pathway to much bigger things – particularly pushing immersive video of sports for the Vision Pro. Speaking of which..
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Apple teases MLS playoffs Immersive Video for Vision Pro coming soon, shot in 8K 3D • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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As this year’s MLS season kicks off, Apple is promoting its MLS Season Pass subscription service in full-force. Hidden in today’s launch, however, is a tidbit for Vision Pro users for the “first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video.”

In a press release today, Apple says that a new film showcasing the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs is coming soon for all Vision Pro users. The film was captured in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view with Spatial Audio, according to Apple:

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Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio that transports them to each match.

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Apple doesn’t have any additional details to share on this right now. It’s the first sports-related content announcement we’ve seen for Apple Vision Pro. Apple has shown off things like MLS, NBA, and MLB games in their promotional material for Vision Pro, but nothing had been formally announced until now.

Vision Pro users won’t need an MLS Season Pass subscription to watch this film.

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Now things begin to get interesting.
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Adobe brings conversational AI to trillions of PDFs with the new AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat • Adobe

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Today, Adobe introduced AI Assistant in beta, a new generative AI-powered conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat. Deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, AI Assistant instantly generates summaries and insights from long documents, answers questions and formats information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations. AI Assistant is bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from the information inside the approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world.

AI Assistant leverages the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind Acrobat Liquid Mode, the award-winning technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These proprietary models provide a deep understanding of PDF structure and content, enhancing quality and reliability in AI Assistant outputs. 

“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable, knowledge and professional-looking content,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Document Cloud. “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”

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So basically it’s a TL;DR machine. What’s the point of having a long document if it just gets summarised? Is this a modern version of “if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”?
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AI search is a doomsday cult • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around. 

Case in point: the Arc Browser.

For years, The Browser Company has been promising to save the internet. Its Arc Browser is a smart refresh of what a modern gateway to the web should look and feel like and it generated a lot of goodwill with early users. And then, earlier this month, they released their AI-powered search app, which “browses the internet for you.”

The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit.

But the base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist.

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Broderick is really good at putting his finger on the flaws of these ideas amid all the noise.
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Dynabook Americas recalls 15.5m Toshiba laptop AC adapters due to burn and fire hazards • CPSC.gov

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Hazard: the laptop AC adapters can overheat and spark, posing burn and fire hazards.

This recall involves AC adapters sold with Toshiba brand personal laptop computers as well as sold separately. They have date codes between April 2008 through December 2012 in either a year month, date format, i.e. April 2008 is 0804, or year week, date format, i.e. week 15 of 2008 is 0815.

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Are there really 15.5 million of these still in use? The oldest is going to be 16 years old, the youngest 12 years old. Though some people might have kept the chargers just to use on newer machines, perhaps.
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Putting your wet iPhone in rice to dry it is a bad move, Apple warns • Macworld

Michael Simon:

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For years, we’ve turned to a simple household staple when we need to save our iPhones from a liquid death: a bag of rice. The method is decidedly low-tech. Just pop your phone in a bag of rice, seal it up, and wait for a day or so. The idea is that the rice will draw the water out from inside the phone before it can fry any internal parts. People who have experienced waterlogged phones swear by it, and there’s tons of anecdotal evidence to show that it does indeed work.

However, researchers have been claiming for years that it’s all a myth and rice doesn’t actually dry your phone faster and could slow down the process, leaving your logic board susceptible to further damage. And a new 2024 support document from Apple actually advises against using rice to dry out your iPhone since it could make matters worse, as “doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.”

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Basically, the phones now are (quick dunk) waterproof; the only place where you might have a problem is the connector, which means the support document is all about dealing with that.
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The death of snow in America: winters are getting permanently warmer • Business Insider

Alexandria Herr:

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Jocie Nelson has been cross-country skiing for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up, the sport was her way of connecting with nature during the long, harsh Minnesota winters, where temperatures often reach the minus 30s Fahrenheit. Thousands of Americans share her enthusiasm: Since high school, Nelson has joined nearly 15,000 other skiers in the American Birkebeiner, a 50km cross-country ski race through the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The crowds of spectators line several people deep.

“Everybody is cheering like crazy,” Nelson said of her first time crossing the finish line, “and it seems like they’re all cheering for you.”

Nelson is now approaching her 25th race, but this year, the event is facing major roadblocks. “We’re looking at a low-snow year. These bands of snow just completely have missed Hayward,” Shawn Connelly, the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation’s marketing and communications director, said. Despite worries around cancellation, the Birkebeiner is moving forward, albeit with a shortened and altered course.

Across much of the upper Midwest, last December was the warmest ever recorded. In Minneapolis, it was a tropical 54ºF (12ºC) on Christmas. Minnesota’s State Climatology Office dubbed this year “The Lost Winter.” While the warm weather is in part exacerbated by this year’s El Niño weather pattern, it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the climate warms. February marked the first time Earth warmed 1.5ºC over the prior 12 months, a milestone long dreaded by climate scientists. In other words, this isn’t just a fluke; it’s the beginning of a new normal.

The climate crisis is altering our winters forever — making them warmer, shorter, and less predictable. As a result, communities around the world are hurtling toward what the researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin have dubbed “the snow-loss cliff.” Their research has found that once temperatures reach a certain threshold, snow disappears faster and faster. The magic number, it turns out, is an average winter temperature of 17ºF (-8ºC). After that, the warmer a region gets, the more rapidly it shifts toward a snow-free future.

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To me, that’s a low average temperature, but it’s in the research.
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Google to fix AI picture bot after ‘woke’ criticism • BBC News

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Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist.

Users said the firm’s Gemini bot supplied images depicting a variety of genders and ethnicities even when doing so was historically inaccurate. For example, a prompt seeking images of America’s founding fathers turned up women and people of colour. The company said its tool was “missing the mark”.

“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” said Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” he added.

It is not the first time AI has stumbled over real-world questions about diversity. For example, Google infamously had to apologise almost a decade ago after its photos app labelled a photo of a black couple as “gorillas”.

Rival AI firm, OpenAI was also accused of perpetuating harmful stereotypes, after users found its Dall-E image generator responded to queries for chief executive, for example, with results dominated by pictures of white men.

Google, which is under pressure to prove it is not falling behind in AI developments, released its latest version of Gemini last week.

The bot creates pictures in response to written queries. It quickly drew critics, who accused the company of training the bot to be laughably woke.

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AI your home on Street View • Google Maps Mania

Keir Clarke:

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Have you ever wanted to radically alter the ambiance of your neighborhood? Perhaps you’ve always dreamed of turning your sleepy suburban road into a bustling inner-city street. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to dig up your nearby traffic heavy roads and replace them with green fields and trees. Well now you can – at least virtually.

Panoramai is a new fun tool which allows you to grab Google Maps Street View panoramas from any location in the world and change their appearance based on your own AI prompts. For example the animated GIF above shows my childhood home re-imagined as a Vincent van Gogh painting, as a sc-fi landscape, a post-zombie apocalypse and under 3 feet of water.

You can also change the appearance of your home on Street View using the Netherlands Board of Tourism’s Dutch Cycling Lifestyle map.

It is a matter of great sadness to the Dutch people that people in the rest of the world are not able to live in cycle-friendly environments. Therefore the Netherlands Board of Tourism decided to help the great car-worshiping unwashed picture the beauty of a car free environment. Enter your address into the Dutch Cycling Lifestyle and you can see how your street might look without that noisy road and those dirty cars.

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Though when you go to Panoramai now, it says “We had to turn off the generation of new panoramas for now because of cost. You can still browse pre-computed examples.” AI is pricey!

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Help! AI is stealing my readers • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

»

I’ve seen all of the impersonation scams. At least I thought I had until now. Because AI has arrived on the scene.

A few days ago, a friend sent me a photo of a new jazz book. What made this especially interesting is that the author’s last name is Gioia. What an odd coincidence. Gioia is an uncommon name. If there were another jazz writer who shared my name, I’d know about it.

The book is attributed to two authors—Frank Gioia & Ted Alkyer. As it turns out, Alkyer is also a last name familiar to jazz insiders. Frank Alkyer is editor and publisher of the leading jazz magazine Downbeat. Another coincidence!

So I reached out to Frank, and asked him if he knew about this book. He was as shocked as me. Alkyer is also an uncommon name. Neither of us had anything to do with this book. And we don’t know jazz writers with these names—so similar to our own.

You don’t need to be as smart as an Einstein chatbot to figure out what’s happening here. As I told Frank, I’d wager that:
• The book is written by AI
• The people behind it attribute the book to two authors based on us, switching our first names so that no direct impersonation can be proven—ensuring that the book always comes up in the results when somebody does a search for either of us
• Needless to say, these two authors do not exist
• The intent is to fool readers and divert them from anything we’ve written to some crappy AI book.

Both Frank and I filed complaints with Amazon—and the book is no longer listed there. But it’s still available from other retailers. An audiobook has also been released.

A few hours later, a Twitter connection alerted me to another interesting jazz book. It’s written by Luke Ellington.

Luke Ellington? Is he any relation to Duke Ellington?

…It took me decades to become a jazz expert. My writing career really didn’t take off until I was in my forties—because you can’t develop mastery of this material without years of constant effort. Does AI now get to swallow up everything I’ve learned in a few gulps—and then use it to impersonate me?

«

Well not exactly – Amazon does that. If books still went through traditional publishers, you’d still be safe. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Fake: it’s only a matter of time until disinformation leads to calamity • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

»

Not long after Eric Hebborn was murdered, an off-the-record conversation with the famed artist-turned-forger was published. On tape, Hebborn made explosive claims about his time as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in the 1950s, where he had been awarded a prestigious prize. Though a gifted draughtsman, he was a surprising choice, because the art of the day was all about high concepts, not realistic depictions. Drawing was an unfashionable business, so how had a mere draughtsman won the prize?

Hebborn explained that, one day, a drunken porter at the Royal Academy was looking for a quiet spot to sleep in the basement and had fashioned a screen made of some of the pictures stored down there. One of those was the only surviving large drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the Royal Academy’s headquarters. Unfortunately, the porter stacked the Da Vinci against a leaking radiator. By the next morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed. Only the faintest outline of the sketch remained.

In a panic, the porter summoned the president of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of pictures, who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery, who announced that the picture couldn’t be restored, it could only be redrawn. At which point, they sent for star student Eric Hebborn, who wielded his chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of the lost original.

Or so Hebborn claimed, noting that it seemed curious that the Royal Academy sold the drawing soon afterwards, and spent some of the money on . . . upgrading its radiators. It was an astonishing story and very hard to check. The drawing was indeed sold to the National Gallery. But one day, in 1987, a man walked into the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front of the drawing, pulled out a shotgun and blasted the artwork. The man, who wanted to make a statement about the social conditions in Britain, was arrested and later confined to an asylum. The National Gallery had the drawing restored, with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued back together. That restoration would have concealed Hebborn’s handiwork, if Hebborn ever touched the cartoon. So — did he?

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*Dirty Harry voice* Well DID HE, PUNK? This is in fact a long piece on the nature of fakery.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Voyager spacecraft has suffered the same fate as HAL: gone mad in the vastness of space. CC-licensed photo by Tutoriales CIS 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Major Tom too? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee and James Grimmelmann:

»

This article is written by two authors. One of us is a journalist who has been on the copyright beat for nearly 20 years. The other is a law professor who has taught dozens of courses on IP and Internet law. We’re pretty sure we understand how copyright works. And we’re here to warn the AI community that it needs to take these lawsuits seriously.

In its blog post responding to the Times lawsuit, OpenAI wrote that “training AI models using publicly available Internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents.”

The most important of these precedents is a 2015 decision that allowed Google to scan millions of copyrighted books to create a search engine. We expect OpenAI to argue that the Google ruling allows OpenAI to use copyrighted documents to train its generative models. Stability AI and Anthropic will undoubtedly make similar arguments as they face copyright lawsuits of their own.

These defendants could win in court—but they could lose, too. As we’ll see, AI companies are on shakier legal ground than Google was in its book search case. And the courts don’t always side with technology companies in cases where companies make copies to build their systems. The story of MP3.com illustrates the kind of legal peril AI companies could face in the coming years.

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Well, they make an argument. Perhaps Mike Masnick (see below) will be along in a week or so to tell us how wrong they are, because credentials aren’t necessarily what wins legal arguments; the precision of your argument is.
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Has Wired given up on fact checking, given its facts-optional screed against Section 230 that gets almost everything wrong? • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

let’s return to this article. The title is “The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything.” With the provocative subhed: “It’s so simple: Axe 26 words from the Communications Decency Act. Welcome to a world without Section 230.”

Now, we’ve spent the better part of the last 25 years debunking nonsense about Section 230, but this may be the worst piece we’ve ever seen on this topic. It does not understand how Section 230 works. It does not understand how the First Amendment works. It’s not clear it understands how the internet works.
But also, it’s just not well written. I was completely confused about the point that the article is trying to make, and it was only on the third reading that I finally understood the extraordinarily wrong point that is at the heart of the article: that if you got rid of Section 230, websites would have to moderate based on the First Amendment — but also they would magically get rid of harassment and other bad content, but be forced to leave up the good content. It’s magic fairytale thinking that has nothing to do with reality. There’s also some nonsense about privacy and copyright that have nothing to do with Section 230 at all, but the authors seem wholly unaware of that fairly basic fact.

I’m going to skip over the first section of the article, because it’s just confused babble, and move onto some really weird claims about Section 230. Specifically, that it somehow created a business model.

… Literally none of that makes sense, nor is any citation or explanation given for what is entirely a “vibes” based argument. Section 230 has nothing to do with the advertising market directly. Advertising existed prior to Section 230 and has been a way to subsidize content going back centuries. It’s unclear how the authors think Section 230 is somehow responsible for internet advertising as a business model, and the article does nothing to clarify why that would be the case. Because it’s just wrong. There is no way to support it.

«

I’m glad that Mike Masnick has decided to go into detail about that terrible, terrible S230 article, because if he had thought it had any merit I’d be seriously worried that I’d lost my bearings. Generally, if I find myself disagreeing with Masnick, I consider my position carefully because there’s a high probability it’s me that’s wrong.
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Google’s retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers • Al Jazeera

Erin Hale:

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Late last year, Google began quietly removing links to cached pages from its search results, a function that had allowed Internet users to view old versions of web pages.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, confirmed earlier this month that the function had been discontinued. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it,” Sullivan said in a post on X earlier this month.

Although originally introduced to improve internet performance, Google’s cache function had the unintended effect of boosting transparency and became an invaluable resource for researchers.

Academics, journalists and others used cached pages to view past incarnations of websites and deleted content – a particularly useful tool for China’s internet, which Beijing carefully edits to avoid embarrassment and ward off potential dissent.

“The loss of the Google cache function will be a blow to China researchers who have long leaned on this function to preserve access to information that may later be removed, particularly in research citations,” Kendra Schaefer, the head of tech policy research at Trivium China, told Al Jazeera.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the change to Al Jazeera. “Google’s cached page feature was born over two decades ago, at a time when pages might not be dependably available. The web – and web serving as a whole – has greatly improved since then, making the need for cached pages less necessary,” the spokesperson said by email.

China’s “Great Firewall” means that popular sites from Wikipedia to Facebook are inaccessible without a virtual private network, while its government censors trawl the web for sensitive content to remove.

…There are alternatives to Google’s cached pages, namely the non-profit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

But Google’s removal of cached links makes it harder to know what is missing in the first place, said Dakota Cary, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

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The lonely, lonely death of Voyager • Crooked Timber

Doug Muir:

»

We thought we knew how [the spacecraft] Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved.  These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth.  Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse?  That’s accurate.  It’s been standard practice for 30 years.  But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens.  Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds.  The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. 

And they’re trying to fix the problem.  But right now, it doesn’t look good.  You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away.  (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.)  They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day.  They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat.  And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

And that’s all.

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The EU is formalizing rules for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

The European Council and European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on Tuesday to create the first-of-its-kind certification framework for carbon removal technologies. The new climate tech has yet to prove itself at scale, but the EU is already folding it into its plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Net zero implies that the bloc would resort to capturing any remaining CO2 emissions that it hasn’t been able to prevent, either by harnessing the natural ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide or by building technologies that filter CO2 out of the air or seawater.

There are inherent risks to that net-zero strategy — which is why rules like the ones laid out today are so important. They’ll dictate what counts as carbon removal, hopefully sifting out shoddy projects that don’t meaningfully fight climate change. Lax rules — or no rules at all — could give companies a way to keep polluting while misleadingly promising to draw down those emissions later. If those promises fall through, or the technologies they rely on fail, then it leaves behind all of that pollution that could have been prevented in the first place by opting for clean energy instead of carbon removal.

«

Formalisation is good: there have been plenty of “set-aside” projects which are anything but in reality. Strong certification is really needed.
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‘Apple Ring’ allegedly in development to rival Samsung Galaxy Ring • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Apple has toyed with the idea of a ring wearable for several years, as indicated by several patents, but with Samsung preparing to bring its own product to market, the time could be ripe for Apple to follow it with something that embodies CEO Tim Cook’s mantra, “be best, not first.”

According to the Electronic Times, Apple has been paying close attention to the market for signs that a smart ring would be a popular, less intrusive alternative to a watch, that can be worn for longer and is easier to sleep with.

Apple is said to be seriously weighing up the idea as a viable expansion of its wearables lineup, and has been increasingly applying for patents related to an NFC-enabled finger-worn device as it coordinates the timing of the release.

“It seems likely that commercialization is imminent,” said an industry insider quoted in the machine-translated report.

The rumor comes as Samsung prepares to unveil a Galaxy Ring at its second Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event, which is likely to take place in the second half of July. The Korean firm teased the product’s existence at the end of its first Unpacked event in January, and it is now expected to enter mass production in the second half of the year.

Besides its rumored ability to measure blood flow, the Galaxy Ring is also expected to feature ECG monitoring, sleep tracking, and functionalities for controlling other devices and making wireless payments remotely. The device is expected to come in several sizes.

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My reading is this is that Samsung really hopes Apple is developing a ring, because that would validate the ring that it is making. In – surprise! – several sizes.
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Fake funeral live stream scams are all over Facebook • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Facebook is awash with scams that direct visitors to fake live streams of funeral services, preying on relatives and friends of the deceased when they might be at their most vulnerable, 404 Media has found. The scams involve pulling details of real deceased people from legitimate funeral services pages and then making copycat announcements, before pushing victims to a site that asks for their credit card information allegedly in order to watch the funeral of their loved one.

The scams cause “panic on the day where you shouldn’t be thinking of that,” the cousin of one recently deceased person, whose name and photo were recently used in a scam, told 404 Media. 404 Media is not publishing his name or that of the deceased relative for privacy reasons. The relative described the scam as “disgusting.”

In that specific case, a Facebook account pointed visitors to a tinyurl link. “Please Like,Share Your Family and Friends,” a post on the Facebook account read, next to a photo of the deceased. “You will get the link once the registration is complete.I introduced this rule only for scams.thank you.” 

That link then went to a website claiming to host a livestream of the deceased’s funeral service, complete with a video player that takes a few seconds to load. “WATCH LIVE NOW,” a button underneath the player reads. On other nearly identical scam sites 404 Media found, clicking such a link directs visitors to enter their credit card information, presumably the point at which the scammers extract value from their unsuspecting victims.

«

Facebook has become a place to find all the scammers’ marks in the world in one convenient location.

In passing, 404 Media – set up by journalists laid off by Vice/Motherboard when it hit hard times – gets better and better (because they were and are damn good journalists), and requires email registration on the basis that it lets them stay in touch directly with readers. It’s a smart move, in these times when sites are so plentiful and hard to tell apart.
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Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: please stop hurting journalism • Check My Ads

»

Josh Jackson was shocked when he found out what term, if used in the music publication he co-founded, could automatically strip an article of ad revenue.

It was the word “song.”

That was just one of more than 4,000 “negative keywords” a major advertiser looking to run ads on Paste Magazine, Jackson’s website, included in a brand safety spreadsheet it shared with him.

And now that his magazine resurrected the iconic feminist media outlet Jezebel last November, essential journalism going unfunded because of brand safety concerns has become a more urgent issue. Jezebel has even launched a subscription option to help fund its reporting, filling in a revenue gap created by brand safety tech.

“We’ve been doing this a long time, but hadn’t really felt the effects of brand safety until we purchased Jezebel,” Jackson told Check My Ads. “(We) very quickly got into the deep end on everything brand safety related and it’s just been blowing my mind to see.”

Jackson — or anyone who cares about quality journalism — should find this brand safety technology mind-blowing (and not in a good way).

«

Since you wonder: “Check My Ads Institute is an independent watchdog reshaping the digital adtech industry from within its ranks — and building a new sustainable standard in digital advertising.” Interesting lineup of staff and directors, including Jean Donovan, who was recently “let go” from Harvard, allegedly after pressure from Facebook.
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Walmart acquiring smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3bn to bulk up advertising business • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

The companies announced Tuesday that they have entered into an agreement for Walmart to acquire Vizio, a leading seller of value-priced TV sets and connected TV ads in the US. The deal would make Walmart a significant player in connected TV advertising, competing with players including Roku, Amazon, Google/YouTube and Samsung Ads.

The combination promises to accelerate Walmart’s US. advertising business, called Walmart Connect, by bringing together Vizio’s advertising business business with Walmart’s reach and resources. Walmart Connect revenue increased 22% year over year for the quarter ended Jan. 31 (but the company did not report dollar figures). Globally, Walmart’s ad revenue grew by 28% to $3.4 billion for its 2024 fiscal year ended in January. According to Walmart, the deal for Vizio also will let the retailer “connect with and serve its customers in new ways” including through “innovative television and in-home entertainment and media experiences.”

“Put simply, the deal would combine an emerging retail media/direct response powerhouse [in Walmart], with [Vizio’s] vertically integrated, connected TV/branding advertising business (including data) to create a full-funnel offering for advertisers,” New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon wrote in a note. For Walmart, the deal “would have the added benefit of creating an offering that is more attractive to non-endemic advertisers (i.e. beyond third-party sellers transacting on Walmart Marketplace)” to those that don’t sell through Walmart but want to reach viewers on Vizio TVs.

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Vizio’s board has unanimously approved the transaction, and shareholders owning 89% of the voting shares in the company have also OK’d the deal. According to Vizio, no other stockholder approval is required to complete the transaction.

Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio was founded in 2002. Today, Vizio counts more than 500 direct advertiser customers, including “many of the Fortune 500.”

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Advertising! Everyone’s advertising everything to everyone all at once all the time! Advertising! Give me more! (Ignoring Vizio having been successfully sued for unannounced tracking between 2014 and 2017. All in the name of advertising! It was necessary!)
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Finally, scientists uncover the genetic basis of fingerprints • The Scientist Magazine®

James Gaines:

»

[The] story begins in the outer layer of body tissue, called the epithelium. [At the University of Edinburgh, Denis] Headon’s team ultimately found that fingerprints start out looking very similar to hair follicles: Both begin as small discs of cells on the epithelium, and in both cases, the cells turn on genes for a suite of proteins including EDAR and WNT—which are respectively related to how epithelial cells and cells in general migrate, differentiate, and mature. However, hair follicles go on to recruit cells from layers below the epithelium, forming a deep tube where hair will eventually grow. Slight differences in gene expression prevent this recruitment step from happening in fingerprints.

Those same differences in gene expression also seem to set up a Turing pattern, named for the English mathematician Alan Turing who first hypothesized its existence. Back in 1952, Turing suggested that natural biological patterns like stripes or spots could form in the presence of two molecules: a slow-moving activator and a fast-moving inhibitor. The activator would do three things: 1) tell cells to do something, such as make colored pigment; 2) tell cells to make more activator; and 3) tell cells to start making its inhibitor. Meanwhile, the inhibitor tells the cell to slow down activator production (and thus, ultimately, to make less of itself). This means that the activator and inhibitor are always made in overall proportion to each other, and the whole system can propagate from even a single initiation point.

…Some of the team’s colleagues—Benjamin Walker, Adam Townsend, and Andrew Krause—created an online simulator called VisualPDE where folks can experiment with Turing patterns and initiation sites. VisualPDE’s simulation is not unique to fingerprints but can illustrate how small changes can create unique patterns.

Rasmussen says he’d be interested in seeing if scientists could reprogram the process, creating hair follicles or prints where there had been none before. That’s the hope, Headon says: that somewhere down the road this work could lead to therapies for congenital conditions or medical regeneration.

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Definitely recommend having a play with VisualPDE. This story came out a year ago, but still fun.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: if there’s ever an independently verified piece of information about Neuralink, rather than tweets from Musk, I’ll link to it.

The possible trajectories of billiards (and snooker and pool) balls has enthralled mathematicians for years. CC-licensed photo by Brian DeMaio 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals • The Guardian

Dharna Noor:

»

The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.

The research draws on previous investigations as well as newly revealed internal documents illustrating the extent of this decades-long campaign. Industry insiders over the past several decades have variously referred to plastic recycling as “uneconomical”, said it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution”, and said it “cannot go on indefinitely”, the revelations show.

The authors say the evidence demonstrates that oil and petrochemical companies, as well as their trade associations, may have broken laws designed to protect the public from misleading marketing and pollution.

In the 1950s, plastic producers came up with an idea to ensure a continually growing market for their products: disposability. “They knew if they focused on single-use [plastics] people would buy and buy and buy,” said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the CCI and the report’s lead author. At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry, a trade group, told producers to focus on “low cost, big volume” and “expendability” and to aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”.

The Society of Plastics is now known as the Plastics Industry Association. “As is typical, instead of working together towards actual solutions to address plastic waste, groups like CCI choose to level political attacks instead of constructive solutions,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the trade group, said in an emailed response to the report.

Over the following decades, the industry told the public that plastics can easily be tossed into landfills or burned in garbage incinerators. But in the 1980s, as municipalities began considering bans on grocery bags and other plastic products, the industry began promoting a new solution: recycling.

The industry has long known that plastics recycling is not economically or practically viable, the report shows. An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

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Not really the message you want to get ahead of sorting the bins for recycling now is it.
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EU accuses TikTok of failing to stop kids pretending to be adults • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

The European Commission (EC) is concerned that TikTok isn’t doing enough to protect kids, alleging that the short-video app may be sending kids down rabbit holes of harmful content while making it easy for kids to pretend to be adults and avoid the protective content filters that do exist.

The allegations came Monday when the EC announced a formal investigation into how TikTok may be breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) “in areas linked to the protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, as well as the risk management of addictive design and harmful content.”

“We must spare no effort to protect our children,” Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market, said in the press release, reiterating that the “protection of minors is a top enforcement priority for the DSA.”

This makes TikTok the second platform investigated for possible DSA breaches after X (aka Twitter) came under fire last December. Both are being scrutinized after submitting transparency reports in September that the EC said failed to satisfy the DSA’s strict standards on predictable things like not providing enough advertising transparency or data access for researchers.

But while X is additionally being investigated over alleged dark patterns and disinformation—following accusations last October that X wasn’t stopping the spread of Israel/Hamas disinformation—it’s TikTok’s young user base that appears to be the focus of the EC’s probe into its platform.

…Likely over the coming months, the EC will request more information from TikTok, picking apart its DSA transparency report. The probe could require interviews with TikTok staff or inspections of TikTok’s offices.

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Once the EU gets its teeth into you, it really bites.
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The epidemic of fraudulent DMCA takedowns • Tax Policy

Dan Neidle:

»

I wrote recently about a fraudulent attempt to use US copyright law to take down an article I’d written which was critical of a fake PR firm, “Mogul Press”. I was shocked to see how they did this: they copied my text into a fake website, then filed a takedown notice at Google claiming my article had copied theirs.

The notice was sent by “LMG Media Group” in the UAE. I don’t believe it exists – but Google rather brilliantly accepts takedown notices without checking if the person filing it exists.

Another identical notice was sent by “Lamar Media Corporation” in the US, which also doesn’t appear to exist. The intended effect is to remove my article from Google searches. Note the unusual wording of the two notices [pictured in the article]: “completely infringing” (which reads like someone without legal training trying to sound like a lawyer).

I wondered if there had been any other similar takedowns, and so searched for other occurrences of that unusual phrase. This search of the Lumen database finds 180 just from “Media Corporation” entities. Each one has identical text, and is sent by a fake company whose name appears to have been randomly generated. Forbidden Stories and rest of world published investigations into Eliminalia, a Spanish company that monetised this practice at scale, using the exact same technique of creating backdated copies and then fraudulently claiming the copy is the original. And Mashable reported on another fraudulent takedown attempt in 2022.

I don’t know if what I’m seeing is Eliminalia, or someone else with a similar business model who was hired by Mogul Press.

There’s this, trying to take down a report of a solicitor failing to appeal a striking-off [graphic in article]. And this, trying to take down another report of that same event [ditto].

With a duplicate from another made-up company (“Ventuky Media Corporation”), and another from “Bryan Media Corporation”, and another from “Yan Media Corporation”, and another from “Richards Media Corporation”, and another from “Venkata Media Corporation”. There are many more.

The fraudulent companies set up automated systems that can file zillions of complaints instantly. The victim, however, is unlikely to have any automated way to file counter-notices… they’ll have to do so individually. It’s also widely believed that the more reports Google receives, the greater the chance it downgrades the target website in its ranking.

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As he points out, this would be quite easy to prevent if Google were to demand more information about the claimant, including some sort of proof of ID and/or IP ownership, and also some sort of payment (in escrow if necessary, with false claims forfeited).
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Ozempic is taking off with the world’s largest obese population. (It isn’t the US) • WSJ

Dave Sebastian:

»

China has more obese people than anywhere else in the world, and they are increasingly turning to weight-loss drugs to solve the problem.

That is fueling a gray market of drug sellers and buyers, who have little trouble getting around China’s rules on the use of Ozempic. 

Ozempic isn’t available for weight loss in the country, instead being reserved for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. But users on e-commerce platforms are able to buy the shots, colloquially known as “miracle drugs,” simply by declaring they have been diagnosed with diabetes—without providing proof. 

They aren’t getting a bad deal. On JD.com, a dosage of Ozempic retails for around $139. That is higher than its cost on the country’s national-insurance plan but much cheaper than the $970 some users pay in the US each month. JD.com didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The gray market for Ozempic highlights a conundrum facing China’s government: how to tackle the world’s biggest obesity problem. 

There are about 200 million obese adults in China, and an additional 400 million who are overweight, according to estimates by Jefferies based on official data. China will have another 100 million people with obesity in just over a decade, the investment banking firm predicts, despite the country’s declining population.

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After years of avoiding extradition, Julian Assange’s appeal is likely his last chance. Here’s how it might unfold (and how we got here) • The Conversation

Holly Cullen is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia:

»

On February 20 and 21, Julian Assange will ask the High Court of England and Wales to reverse a decision from June last year allowing the United Kingdom to extradite him to the United States.

There he faces multiple counts of computer misuse and espionage stemming from his work with WikiLeaks, publishing sensitive US government documents provided by Chelsea Manning. The US government has repeatedly claimed that Assange’s actions risked its national security.

This is the final avenue of appeal in the UK, although Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, has indicated he would seek an order from the European Court of Human Rights if he loses the application for appeal. The European Court, an international court that hears cases under the European Convention on Human Rights, can issue orders that are binding on convention member states. In 2022, an order from the court stopped the UK sending asylum seekers to Rwanda pending a full review of the relevant legislation.

The extradition process has been running for nearly five years. Over such a long time, it’s easy to lose track of the sequence of events that led to this. Here’s how we got here, and what might happen next.

«

His best chance is if his defence can successfully argue that the US is, in effect, not a safe place to which to extradite somebody.
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How Google is killing independent sites like ours • HouseFresh

Gisele Navarro and Dany Ashton:

»

Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline.

At HouseFresh, we keep an eye on Google’s news and documentation because these updates can literally make or break our website. That said, we don’t write for Google’s robots and always make editorial decisions with our readers in mind.

We know that at the end of the day, Google will reward us if our readers find our articles useful. Or that’s what we thought.

You might have noticed that no matter what you google, there’s always a selection of the same publishers showing up at the top of the results. What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common? 

They all know which are the best air purifiers for pet hair. Another thing they’ve got in common is that they all also seem to know the best cooling sheets for hot sleepers.

You could play this game yourself. Other searches you could try are: best gifts for mom, best home saunas, best beard products, best gifts for teens, best cocktail kits… the list goes on.

The problem is, for the most part, these publishers recommend products without firsthand testing and simply paraphrase marketing materials and Amazon listing information.

In the last year, we have waited patiently for the many, many, MANY Google algorithm updates to impact these results. 

We were hopeful when Google introduced its reviews system with the Products Review Update back in 2021. It seemed they were finally doing something about one of the worst aspects of the modern internet: searching for information about products only to have to wade through countless reviews from people who had never even seen the thing.

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Well, ’twas ever thus. The big publications would “review” things and get the attention; smaller outlets would struggle to get noticed.
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Subprime intelligence • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron:

»

These models are not saying “I shall now draw a monkey,” they are saying “I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey.” These things are not “learning,” or “understanding,” or even “intelligent” — they’re giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn’t actually know anything. 

Despite what fantasists may tell you, these are not “kinks” to work out of artificial intelligence models — these are the hard limits, the restraints that come when you try to mimic knowledge with mathematics. You cannot “fix” hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn’t true, or creates a picture of something that isn’t right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably.

…I believe artificial intelligence companies deeply underestimate how perfect the things around us are, and how deeply we base our understanding and acceptance of the world on knowledge and context. People generally have four fingers and a thumb on each hand, hammers have a handle made of wood and a head made of metal, and monkeys have two legs and two arms. The text on the sign of a store generally has a name and a series of words that describe it, or perhaps its address and phone number.

…there are no essential artificial intelligence use cases, and no killer apps outside of non-generative assistants like Alexa that are now having generative AI forced into them for no apparent reason. I consider myself relatively tuned into the tech ecosystem, and I read every single tech publication regularly, yet I’m struggling to point to anything that generative AI has done other than reignite the flames of venture capital. There are cool little app integrations, interesting things like live translation in Samsung devices, but these are features, not applications. And if there are true industry-changing possibilities waiting for us on the other side, I am yet to hear them outside of the fan fiction of Silicon Valley hucksters.

This entire hype cycle feels specious, though not quite as specious as the metaverse or cryptocurrency boom.

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The mysterious math of billiards tables • Quanta Magazine

David Richeson:

»

In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for mathematics?”

Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles, billiard trajectories like Donald’s are predictable and well understood — even if they’re difficult to carry out in practice. However, research mathematicians still cannot answer basic questions about the possible trajectories of billiard balls on tables in the shape of other polygons (shapes with flat sides). Even triangles, the simplest of polygons, still hold mysteries.

«

Of course mathematicians are not satisfied with rectangular billiard tables, so they extend the question of “where will the ball go?” to tables of any and all shapes. But not for nothing is the World Snooker Finals known by many as the Geometry Championships.
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‘Not letting me on Snapchat was the best thing my mum ever did for me’: how to talk to your kids about social media • The Guardian

Annalisa Barbieri:

»

“People do not communicate with authenticity and vulnerability on social media,” explains the ACP registered child and adolescent psychotherapist Ryan Lowe. “As a result, young people have really contorted pictures of what the lives of others are like. Lives on social media are always either exaggeratedly wonderful or exaggeratedly awful, traumatic and extreme. This leaves them trying to form an identity in a hall of mirrors with all the reflections of themselves and others being completely distorted. It takes a strong adolescent to be able to filter the noise of social media out and find an authentic way of developing.”

The specialists also taught me how important it was to model the sort of behaviour you want back from your children. In other words: do as I do, not as I say.

Everything in our house is a discussion. (“My advice,” Prof Peter Fonagy, CEO of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, once told me, “is to reach a reasoned democratic agreement with your child, in discussion with them.”)

I would never ask my children to do anything I wasn’t prepared to do myself (with some exceptions). I would always ask for their consent, where appropriate, from when they were small (eg: “Can I use your colouring pens?”; “Can I get you undressed for a bath?”), and – crucially – I’d listen to them if they said no. And I would never say no for the sake of it just because I was the adult. I would give reasons. But – and this is important – their father and I have always been the adults. Sure, they could negotiate, but someone had to take final responsibility, and that person, where social media was concerned, was me. (Their father, my partner, didn’t want her to have social media either, but wasn’t sure how to navigate these tricky waters.)

«

Annalisa really is one of the smartest people around – as much as anything because she is so good at listening to what people are saying, and not forcing her ideas on others.
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Science journal published ‘ridiculous’ graphic of rat with big penis after asking AI for a picture • Daily Telegraph

Sarah Knapton:

»

It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.

A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.

The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.

A cut-away image showed “sterrn cells” in a Petri dish being picked up with a spoon.

It appeared in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology this week alongside several other absurd graphics that had been generated by the AI tool Midjourney.

They included a multicoloured JAK-STAT signalling pathway diagram which experts likened to “some crazy level of Candy Crush” and said was not grounded in “any known biology”.

The paper, written by researchers at the Honghui Hospital in China, has since been retracted by the journal, which issued an apology and said it was working to “correct the record”.

«

How, you might wonder, could any journal possibly pass such work for publication? Because Frontiers, where it appeared, is a pay-for-publication journal. The illustration really have to be seen to be believed, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Introducing AI systems for tennis line calling has had unexpected effects on umpires’ tendency to wrongly call serves out. CC-licensed photo by Brianna Laugher 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. New calls please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Air Canada told it is responsible for errors by its website chatbot • Vancouver Sun

Susan Lazaruk:

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An Air Canada passenger from B.C. [British Columbia] has won his fight after the airline refused him a retroactive discount, claiming it wasn’t responsible for promising the refund because it was made in error by the airline’s online chatbot.

Artificial intelligence law experts say it’s a sign of disputes to come if companies don’t ensure accuracy when increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to deal with customers.

Jake Moffatt booked a flight to Toronto with Air Canada to attend his grandmother’s funeral in 2022 using the website’s chatbot, which advised him he could pay full fare and apply for a bereavement fare later, according to the decision by B.C. civil resolution tribunal.

But an Air Canada employee later told him that he couldn’t apply for the discount after the flight.

“Air Canada says it cannot be held liable for the information provided by the chatbot,” said tribunal member Christopher Rivers in his written reasons for decision posted online. It “suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions,” he said Rivers. “This is a remarkable submission.”

When Moffatt asked Air Canada’s automated response system about reduced fares for those travelling because of a death in the immediate family, the chatbot answered he should submit his claim within 90 days to get a refund.

His total fare for the return trip was $1,640, and he was told the bereavement fare would be about $760 in total, a $880 difference, he told the tribunal. He later submitted a request for the partial refund and included a screenshot of the chatbot conversation, the tribunal said.

…The airline argued it could not be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants or representatives, including a chatbot, Rivers said, adding it didn’t say why it believed that.

«

As someone pointed out on Twitter: the point at which personhood is claimed for an AI isn’t when it’s conscious, it’s when an airline needs to get out of paying a refund.
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The effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death risk • ScienceDirect

Justin Tyndall is at the University of Hawaii department of economics:

»

Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head.

I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.

«

Reminds me strongly of the UK’s (and Europe’s) efforts to limit the use of bull bars on the front of cars because they caused extra fatalities and worsened injuries. The Independent campaigned very hard on this in the late 1990s, with some success. Lives were saved.
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EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500m music streaming penalty • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza:

»

Brussels is to impose its first ever fine on tech giant Apple for allegedly breaking EU law over access to its music streaming services, according to five people with direct knowledge of the long-running investigation.

The fine, which is in the region of €500m and is expected to be announced early next month, is the culmination of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple has used its own platform to favour its services over those of competitors.

The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019.

The Commission will say Apple’s actions are illegal and go against the bloc’s rules that enforce competition in the single market, the people familiar with the case told the Financial Times. It will ban Apple’s practice of blocking music services from letting users outside its App Store switch to cheaper alternatives.

Brussels will accuse Apple of abusing its powerful position and imposing anti-competitive trading practices on rivals, the people said, adding that the EU would say the tech giant’s terms were “unfair trading conditions”.

It is one of the most significant financial penalties levied by the EU on big tech companies. A series of fines against Google levied over several years and amounting to about €8bn are being contested in court.

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True, it’s the first fine from the EU on antitrust, but back in 2011/2012 Apple was in hot water with the EU antitrust group over cartel pricing of its iBooks. That was settled by letting Amazon sell at the cartel prices for two years.
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What tennis reveals about AI’s impact on human behaviour • The Economist

»

Car drivers, financial traders and air-traffic controllers already routinely see their decisions overruled by AI systems put in place to rapidly correct poor judgment. Doctors, judges and even soldiers could be next.

Much of this correction happens out of the public eye, thwarting would-be analysts. But, says [behavioural economist at Northwestern University, David] Almog, “tennis is one of the most visible settings where final decision rights are granted to AI.” That is why, together with colleagues in America and Australia, he has looked at whether tennis umpires and line judges correctly called balls in or out during nearly 100,000 points played in some 700 matches across the world, both before and after the introduction of the Hawk-Eye ball-tracking system in 2006.

The Hawk-Eye system, now used at most elite tournaments, uses between six and ten cameras positioned around the court to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. This can then be presented on a screen visible to players, spectators and officials—as well as TV viewers. Players can use it to appeal human decisions, with the AI’s verdict considered final. Bad calls from line judges and umpires are now often overturned.

The latest analysis from Mr Almog and his colleagues, published as a preprint last month, showed that Hawk-Eye oversight has prompted human officials to up their game and make 8% less mistakes than before it was introduced. …But when the researchers looked at serves in particular, and especially in cases where the served ball landed within 20mm either side of a line, they were surprised to see the error rate soar. The umpires and line judges, it turned out, had switched strategy. Before Hawk-Eye, they were more likely to call a serve out when it was in. But afterwards, they were even more likely to wave through balls that were actually out.

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Because, Almog suggests, umpires want to avoid being shown – on a giant screen! – to have interrupted the point wrongly. (He didn’t actually talk to the umpires, but any change would have been unconscious.)

The article makes more general points about humans v AI – but now, bigger tournaments have ELC (electronic line calling) where there isn’t any review: the machines call it, and that’s that.
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Switzerland proposes an UN expert group on solar geoengineering • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini:

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Switzerland wants to advance global talks on whether controversial solar geoengineering techniques should be used to compensate for climate change by cooling down the earth.

It is proposing to create the first United Nations expert group to “examine risks and opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM), a suite of largely untested technologies aimed at dimming the sun.

The panel would be made up of experts appointed by member states of the UN’s environment programme (Unep) and representatives of international scientific bodies, according to a draft resolution submitted by Switzerland and seen by Climate Home.

Governments will negotiate and vote on the proposal at Unep’s meeting due to start at the end of February in Nairobi, Kenya. It has been formally endorsed by Senegal, Georgia, Monaco and Guinea.

A Swiss government spokesperson told Climate Home that SRM is “a new topic on the political agenda” and Switzerland is “committed to ensuring that states are informed about these technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects”.

Solar geoengineering is a deeply contested topic and scientists are divided over whether it should be explored at all as a potential solution.

Ines Camilloni, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires, welcomed Switzerland’s proposal, saying the UN “is in a good position to facilitate equitable, transparent, and inclusive discussions”.

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As I previously said: first it’s tried by small groups, then it gets government money, then someone ridiculously rich goes and does it on their own. Examples: aircraft, cars, rockets.
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AI and Japan as a safe space • Pure Invention

Matt Alt:

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OpenAI chose to give their new system a Japanese name. Sora means “sky” in Japanese. Its creators chose it, they told the New York Times, because it “evokes the idea of limitless creative potential.”

Limitless it may be, but many of the videos OpenAI released to demonstrate the technology are steeped the imagery of one country, and that’s Japan. The Twitter announcement showcases a drone-like shot of a Tokyo street. Other samples included a night scene in Shibuya (linked to at the top of this post), a scene of rooftops speeding by the window of a Japanese commuter train, and a cute character raking stones in a Zen rock garden. The Sora website is topped by a video of origami birds nesting in a tree.

At first glance the videos impress. But similar to the case of the AI kimono I wrote about last year, those who know Japan will find themselves quickly sliding into the uncanny valley of gibberish street signs and snow on the ground in cherry blossom season and all of the other assorted janky weirdness that comes with generative AI. That weirdness isn’t a bug, but a sort of feature. Because this isn’t really Japan dreamed by a machine — it’s Japan dreamed by a machine that’s been trained on foreign fantasies of Japan. (The baked-in Orientalism of American AI is one of many reasons domestic Japanese startups are scrambling to conjure up their own.)

Far more interesting is the question of why OpenAI chose so many Japanese things (or more precisely, Japanese seeming things) to introduce Sora to the world.

…“Made in Japan” was a joke in the immediate postwar era, and then something akin to a threat in the Eighties. Today it is a badge of authenticity, deployed anywhere status needs to be conferred to a quotidian item: Japanese denim, Japanese whiskey, Japanese cleaning magic, Japanese Breakfast (okay, so that last one’s an indie-pop band.)

Japan may not confer any cool factor in the AI sphere, but it possesses undeniable cool factor in the real world. It’s also safe, in all senses of the word. It’s seen as free from crime and societal strife. It isn’t percieved as a threat, or even involved in touchy geopolitical issues.

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The majority of traffic from Elon Musk’s X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in US history.

Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.

However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.

According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85% of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”

CHEQ’s data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to its clients’ sites that came from X during Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, Feb. 9 up until the end of Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 11. The data was collected from across CHEQ’s 15,000 total clients. It’s a small portion of the relevant data, and it’s not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend.

CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich’s company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client’s page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.

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Just as relevant is that the proportion of bot traffic from other platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, is in the low single digits. Seems Elon hasn’t got a handle on the bot problem at all. As any eX-Twitter user could tell you.
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Zero plans for public onshore windfarms submitted last year in England • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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No new proposals for general-use windfarms were submitted for planning permission in England last year, despite the government’s much-vaunted relaxation of planning restrictions.

Only seven applications were submitted for onshore wind turbines for the whole of 2023 in England, new data from the government has shown, and all of those developments were for the replacement of existing turbines or for private sites, where the energy produced is destined for a particular consumer, such as a business.

The number was even lower than the 10 applications submitted in 2022, when the de facto ban was still in force.

Four onshore wind developments were granted planning permission in England last year from prior applications, all of which were either turbine replacements or for private use, and work began on one 4MW project in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, which had received permission the year before.

Last September, ministers announced changes to the restrictive regulations that had in effect ruled out onshore wind turbine construction in England since 2015, brought in by David Cameron to appease rightwing Conservatives.

Rishi Sunak agreed to amend the regulations last year under pressure from his backbenchers who were concerned about the impact of the ban on energy prices. But campaigners pointed out that the relaxation of the ban was only partial, and warned it was likely to be ineffective.

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And lo, the campaigners were correct. How unsurprising.
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Welding method drastically cuts time to make mini nuclear reactors • The Times

Emma Powell:

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One of Britain’s oldest steelmakers has developed a manufacturing technique that it claims could drastically reduce the time and cost to produce small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power stations, which have been proposed as one way to bridge the nation’s energy gap.

Sheffield Forgemasters has become the first to use the so-called electron beam welding method to produce one of the core parts of a small modular reactor (SMR) at scale.

Nuclear pressure vessels are thick steel containers that hold nuclear fuel when the reactors operate and provide one of several barriers that keep radioactive material out of the environment.

Electron beam welding works by firing electrons at an extremely high speed to join two pieces of metal together. The main difference to traditional welding methods is that no third-party material is introduced to make the join.

Using traditional techniques, the welding process alone can take at least 120 to 150 days. This new method can reduce the time to about two hours, according to Jesus Talamantes-Silva, director of research at Sheffield Forgemasters, drastically accelerating the manufacturing of SMRs. “That’s how disruptive this technology is,” he said.

The technique is already being used in the automotive and aerospace industries to produce smaller, relatively low-value components. Forgemasters is the first to use the welding technology to build a full-scale SMR pressure vessel, which weighs about 57 tonnes, has a diameter of three metres and walls with a thickness of 200 millimetres.

Unlike conventional plants, SMRs can be factory built. The government wants to open up far more areas as potential sites, replacing rules that allow nuclear power stations only in eight named locations, as it attempts to reach a target of 24 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, from 6GW at present.

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If only there were a similar way to speed up the approval process by the same proportion.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new bill in California bans “hidden fees” that are added when a bill is totalled. So upfront prices will rise, unsurprisingly. CC-licensed photo by Christian Newton 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about AI and jobs.

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

OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

OpenAI is launching a new video-generation model, and it’s called Sora. The AI company says Sora “can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” The text-to-video model allows users to create photorealistic videos up to a minute long — all based on prompts they’ve written.

Sora is capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” according to OpenAI’s introductory blog post. The company also notes that the model can understand how objects “exist in the physical world,” as well as “accurately interpret props and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions.”

Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.

The model can also generate a video based on a still image, as well as fill in missing frames on an existing video or extend it. The Sora-generated demos included in OpenAI’s blog post include an aerial scene of California during the gold rush, a video that looks as if it were shot from the inside of a Tokyo train, and others. Many have some telltale signs of AI — like a suspiciously moving floor in a video of a museum — and OpenAI says the model “may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene,” but the results are overall pretty impressive.

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This is really amazing. Sam Altman was accepting suggestions on eX-Twitter, and then returning the outputs. Also amazing.
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How I fell for an Amazon scam call and handed over $50,000 • The Cut

Charlotte Cowles:

»

On a Tuesday evening this past October, I put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, my phone clasped to my ear. “Don’t let anyone hurt me,” I told the man on the line, feeling pathetic.

“You won’t be hurt,” he answered. “Just keep doing exactly as I say.”

Three minutes later, a white Mercedes SUV pulled up to the curb. “The back window will open,” said the man on the phone. “Do not look at the driver or talk to him. Put the box through the window, say ‘thank you,’ and go back inside.”

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.

Now I know this was all a scam — a cruel and violating one but painfully obvious in retrospect. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Why didn’t I just hang up and call 911? Why didn’t I text my husband, or my brother (a lawyer), or my best friend (also a lawyer), or my parents, or one of the many other people who would have helped me? Why did I hand over all that money — the contents of my savings account, strictly for emergencies — without a bigger fight?

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Yes, it was a big fat scam. Also: Cowles is the personal finance columnist for NY Mag. Somehow I’m not sure I would follow her personal finance advice that closely after this.
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Apple confirms iOS 17.4 removes Home Screen web apps in the EU: here’s why • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Last week, iPhone users in the European Union noticed that they were no longer able to install and run web apps on their iPhone’s Home Screen in iOS 17.4. Apple has added a number of features over the years to improve support for progressive web apps on iPhone. For example, iOS 16.4 allowed PWAs to deliver push notifications with icon badges.

One change in iOS 17.4 is that the iPhone now supports alternative browser engines in the EU. This allows companies to build browsers that don’t use Apple’s WebKit engine for the first time. Apple says that this change, required by the Digital Markets Act, is why it has been forced to remove Home Screen web apps support in the European Union.

Apple explains that it would have to build an “entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS” to address the “complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines.”

This work “was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps,” Apple explains. “And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.”

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All the EU’s fault. Well of course it is.
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The puzzling testimony of Craig Wright, self-styled inventor of bitcoin • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

Among various acts of alleged forgery, [opposing barrister Jonathan] Hough charged that [Craig] Wright backdated documents to make them seem like precursors to the original 2008 Bitcoin white paper; manipulated email communications in support of his claim to be Nakamoto; inserted material post-factum into his academic papers to imply he conceived of Bitcoin long before its release; and used ChatGPT to help create additional forgeries after experts cast doubt over existing materials. The specific discrepancies identified by Hough included anachronistic use of fonts, metadata that implied computer clocks had been manipulated, internal time stamps that contradicted the outward-facing dating of documents, and more.

Hough gave the appearance of trying to construct an exhaustive catalog of discrete pieces of evidence that, combined, painted a picture of fraud “on an industrial scale,” as he put it in his opening arguments.

In some respects, the cross-examination process was less about Wright’s responses, says Lindsay Gledhill, IP partner at law firm Harper James, and more about the performance of Hough. It was “about the barrister’s grinding, relentless list of detail on detail,” she says.

For every anomaly presented by [opposing client] COPA, Wright supplied an explanation. He claimed, variously, that a printing error had caused a misalignment of pixels that gave the appearance of tampering; the complexity of the IT systems used in the editing and storage of documents was not reflected in the testing conducted by the experts; and that his documents may have been altered by staff members in whose custody they had been left. In instances where Wright agreed that a document was inauthentic, he said he had fallen victim to cybersecurity breaches, had never intended to rely on them to support his claim, or implied that documents had been planted by adversaries to undermine him.

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The trial continues: there are two weeks more of evidence. It’s a judge, not a jury trial.
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A new law banning ‘hidden fees’ takes aim at restaurant service charges • Los Angeles Times

Stephanie Breijo:

»

On July 1, Senate Bill 478, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in October, is set to prohibit “junk fees” across a wide swath of businesses, including online ticket sales, hotels, restaurants, bars and delivery apps.

Sens. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) and Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who co-wrote the bill, say it will offer greater protections for consumers.

“These deceptive fees prevent us from knowing how much we will be charged at the outset,” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who co-sponsored the measure, said in a statement the day it was signed. “They are bad for consumers and bad for competition. … With the signing of SB478, California now has the most effective piece of legislation in the nation to tackle this problem. The price Californians see will be the price they pay.”

Many owners of restaurants and bars rely on now-ubiquitous surcharges to offer employee benefits such as healthcare and higher wages and often note surcharges on menus; some are listed as “elective,” left to the discretion of the diner. As implementation of the law looms, some now say the consequences could be disastrous and “upend” the industry.

The restaurants will need to factor surcharge fees into menu prices, as opposed to simply advertising them at the end of a bill, state officials said.

“At this point, we are going to have to raise our prices a big chunk,” said James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Caroline Styne, co-owner and wine director of the Lucques Group of restaurants and wine director of Hollywood Bowl Food & Wine.

For instance, the famous Ode to Zuni roast chicken with fennel panzanella at A.O.C. is currently priced at $39 and will likely rise to $49 once the law goes into effect, she said.

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The prices aren’t changing though, are they? It’s just that the charges aren’t being hidden until people come to pay.
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Pakistani content moderators are exhausted and stuck • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui:

»

It was August 2020, Pakistan was under a Covid-19 lockdown, and Asif, who had just graduated with a master’s degree in project management, was struggling to find a job. At the same time, Chinese video-sharing apps like TikTok and Bigo Live were desperately scouting for content moderators in Pakistan. The platforms wanted to hire locally to appease the government, which had accused them of circulating “obscene” and “unlawful” content.

Through LinkedIn, Asif landed a job as a content moderator at Bigo Live. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, because I just wanted a job,” he told Rest of World, requesting a pseudonym because he feared reprisal for breaking a nondisclosure agreement with his employer.

But the stopgap job has now become his career — one he never wanted, and which he is unable to exit despite attempts.

“Everyone who works in this field is there because they have no choice. It’s something you end up in, and then you are just stuck,” said Asif, who moved to Malaysia in April 2023 to work at Accenture, TikTok’s content moderation contractor in South Asia. “No one wants to be a content moderator forever.”

Over a dozen Pakistani professionals who worked in content moderation jobs as a temporary resort due to a lack of employment options told Rest of World they were stuck in a career that was unfulfilling — one that felt like working at a “sweatshop,” because their experience was not transferable. They have degrees in project management, environmental science, engineering, and business administration, and believe that working as content moderators has stunted their careers. 

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The most thankless job; the dead-end career. And no matter how good AI gets, it’s impossible to see it completely wiping out the need for humans to make these decisions.
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Zoe Schiffer’s ‘Extremely Hardcore’ shows how Elon Musk broke Twitter • The Washington Post

Quinta Jurecic:

»

Musk’s gravitational self-regard tends to collapse all reporting on him into a character study of his whims. Schiffer does her best to escape that orbit, focusing instead on the experiences of the Twitter employees whose lives were almost unilaterally upended by the takeover. Musk is, quite simply, a terrible boss. He makes unreasonable demands, refuses to listen to advice and puts his current and former employees in danger with alarming regularity by unleashing armies of his followers to harass those who cross him. In perhaps the best-known instance, Yoel Roth, who formerly led the company’s now-decimated efforts to make the platform’s users safe from hate speech and harassment, received waves of death threats after Musk outrageously implied that he was sympathetic to paedophiles.

…What matters is money, and Musk has been allowed to acquire enough of it that he appears to be able to do whatever he likes. Even in the instances in “Extremely Hardcore” when Musk is shown being briefly held to account, it’s almost always the influence of money that has led to his comeuppance. His desire to turn Twitter into a playground for the worst parts of human nature has been mitigated only by the squeamishness of advertisers who don’t want their products displayed alongside posts by neo-Nazis. When he was forced to go through with the purchase, it was because of a body of corporate law that privileges the interests of shareholders above all else — an outcome, law professor Ann Lipton has argued, that is “objectively ludicrous” in the case of a platform like Twitter with such “immense social importance.”

Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so much of Musk’s focus since acquiring the company has been on attacking the few gadflies that remain.

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Yes but look if he wasn’t doing this he’d be firing space cannons into the atmosphere to try to promote global cooling which would inevitably go wrong even though he’d been told it was a bad idea.
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NHS nurses being investigated for ‘industrial-scale’ qualifications fraud • The Guardian

Denis Campbell:

»

More than 700 nurses are caught up in a potential scandal, which a former head of the Royal College of Nursing said could put NHS patients at risk.

The scam allegedly involves proxies impersonating nurses and taking a key test in Nigeria, which must be passed for them to become registered and allowed to work in the UK.

“It’s very, very worrying if … there’s an organisation that’s involving themselves in fraudulent activity, enabling nurses to bypass these tests, or if they are using surrogates to do exams for them because the implication is that we end up in the UK with nurses who aren’t competent,” said Peter Carter, the ex-chief executive of the RCN and ex-chair of three NHS trusts, calling it an “industrial-scale fraud”.

He praised the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for taking action against those involved “to protect the quality of care and patient safety and the reputation of nurses”.

Nurses coming to work in the UK must be properly qualified, given nurses’ role in administering drugs and intravenous infusions and responding to emergencies such as a cardiac arrest, Carter added.

Forty-eight of the nurses are already working as nurses in the NHS because the NMC is unable to rescind their admission to its register, which anyone wanting to work as a nurse or midwife in Britain has to be, unless directed to do so by an independent panel at a hearing. In the meantime, it has told them to retake the test to prove their skills are good enough to meet its standards but cannot suspend them.

The 48 are due to face individual hearings, starting in March, at which they will be asked to explain how they apparently took and passed the computer-based test (CBT) of numeracy and clinical knowledge taken at the Yunnik test centre in the city of Ibadan. At the hearings, a panel may direct the NMC to remove individuals from the register.

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Along the lines of the HVAC article from earlier this week: junk qualifications in professional spaces. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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This iOS trojan is harvesting facial-recognition data • PC Mag Australia

Michael Kan:

»

A cybersecurity company has spotted what might be the first iOS Trojan that’s designed to steal facial-recognition data from users. 

The iOS malware, dubbed GoldPickaxe, has been targeting users in Thailand and possibly Vietnam, according to Group-IB, a cybersecurity provider based in Singapore. 

The malware will harvest biometric data, likely because banks and government agencies in Southeast Asia have been adopting facial-recognition scans to unlock customer access. 

“To exploit the stolen biometric data, the threat actor utilizes AI face-swapping services to create deepfakes by replacing their faces with those of the victims,” Group-IB says in the report. “This method could be used by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to the victim’s banking account—a new fraud technique, previously unseen by Group-IB researchers.”

(Credit: Group-IB)
The company has so far observed GoldPickaxe disguising itself as Thai government service apps, and then requesting that users take a photo of their ID card and undergo a facial scan.

An Android version was also uncovered with even more capabilities. However, the malware isn’t circulating on official app stores. Nor does it exploit any iOS vulnerabilities. Instead, the creators of the malware have been tricking victims into installing the malicious app and then granting all the necessary configurations, including powerful device permissions via Apple’s TestFlight or Mobile Device Management profile system.

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Apple phone phishing scams getting better • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.

Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC, a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.

…KrebsOnSecurity called the number that the scam message asked Westby to contact (866-277-7794). An automated system answered and said I’d reached Apple Support, and that my expected wait time was about one minute and thirty seconds. About a minute later, a man with an Indian accent answered and inquired as to the reason for my call.

Playing the part of someone who had received the scam call, I told him I’d been alerted about a breach at Apple and that I needed to call this number. After asking me to hold for a brief moment, our call was disconnected.

No doubt this is just another scheme to separate the unwary from their personal and financial details, and to extract some kind of payment (for supposed tech support services or some such). But it is remarkable that Apple’s own devices (or AT&T, which sold her the phone) can’t tell the difference between a call from Apple and someone trying to spoof Apple.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of LEDs has fallen exponentially, and they have cut lighting costs enormously, creating new possibilities for displays. CC-licensed photo by Yves Sorge 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

Scientists resort to once-unthinkable solutions to cool the planet • WSJ

Eric Niiler:

»

Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing.

These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. 

The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren’t moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn’t a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.

Three field experiments are under way in the US and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean.

…In Israel, a startup called Stardust Solutions has begun testing a system to disperse a cloud of tiny reflective particles about 60,000 feet in altitude, reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool the atmosphere in a concept known as solar radiation management, or SRM.

…In Massachusetts, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution plan to pour 6,000 gallons of a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a component of lye, into the ocean 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard this summer. They hope the chemical base will act like a big tablet of Tums, lowering the acidity of a patch of surface water and absorbing 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it safely in the ocean.

«

This is increasingly going to be where organisations and then governments look for the solution: first private organisations try it, then governments do it on a bigger scale, then a billionaire does it on a huge scale because he (you know it’ll be a he) can.
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Is geothermal about to become the solar of the 2020s? • Heatmap News

Matthew Zeitlin:

»

Fervo is a buzzy, well-funded, and well-connected startup out of Houston that drills wells to produce enhanced geothermal energy, a clean source of power derived from heat beneath the Earth’s surface. But whereas traditional geothermal means tapping into hot water or steam underground, Fervo drills as deep as 9,000 feet [2,700m] down to access hot rocks, which are far more ubiquitous, and then pumps water into them, potentially unlocking many more areas for this kind of power generation.

This week’s announcement follows a pilot project last year where the company was actually able to produce electricity. Now the challenge is producing that electricity at scale — and that requires drilling faster.

Already its new timeline is translating in dramatic cost reductions, the company says, from $9.4m to $4.8m per well. For its Utah site, where it might need to drill 29 wells, back-of-the-envelope math suggests that could translate into up to $130m in savings.

“The biggest expense in drilling is time it takes to drill. The easiest way to reduce drilling costs is to drill faster,” Fervo’s co-founder and chief executive Tim Latimer told me.

Latimer’s big idea behind Fervo is not just a conceptual one about how to generate geothermal power in areas that don’t produce steam or very hot water on their own, but also about how to apply the steady improvement and cost reductions seen in the oil and gas industry to non-carbon emitting power generation that can be available 24 hours a day.

“Oil and gas drilling has become incredibly much more efficient. That’s what drove the shale revolution. We were excited about 45-day wells and now you’ll see fields where people drill wells in 10 days or less,” Latimer told me.

…The idea is that there can be a “learning curve” with drilling geothermal wells, dropping costs over time. “We think geothermal will be on the end of that spectrum like solar or LEDs or battery that benefits from a learning curve because we figured out a way to standardize,” Latimer said. “Fervo is a learning curve company.”

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This would be good; very good.
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Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.

It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.

Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)

“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on,” says Ortolani, who also posted about returning the device.

“It’s just too expensive and unwieldy to even try to get used to the constant headaches and eye strain I was experiencing. I’ll be back for the next one.”

This isn’t surprising. Every human body is unique, which is a problem when you’re scaling wearable production for the mass market. Comfort is inevitably sacrificed — and it affects people disproportionately.

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Anecdata, but could be indicative. We’d really need to know how many headsets have been sold, and how many are being returned. And we’re unlikely to find that out soon, if ever.
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Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is ‘the better product’ vs. Apple’s Vision Pro • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company’s latest Quest 3 headset: “I don’t just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period.”

«

Ballmer on the original iPhone, in 2007: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I say that is the most expensive phone in the workld. And it doesn’t appeal to business users because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. We have our strategy. We are very happy with the Windows Phone devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q series device for $99. It is a very capable machine, can do music, internet and more.”

CmdrTaco on the iPod, 2001: “No wireless. Less [storage] space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Plenty of people have bet against Apple down the years, especially on being cheaper than its products. So, what *was* the storage capacity of a Nomad? Anyone? Bueller?

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iOS 17.4 nerfs web apps in the EU • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

As first flagged by security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy, the second beta release of iOS 17.4 seems to introduce changes that put web apps at a significant disadvantage in Europe. The new beta version of iOS prevents these apps from launching in their own top-level window that takes up the entire screen, relegating them instead to open within Safari, a change that significantly impacts their user experience and functionality. The move effectively demotes PWAs to mere website shortcuts.

Now, when a user in Europe taps a web app icon, they will see a system message asking if they wish to open it in Safari or cancel. The message adds that the web app “will open in your default browser from now on.” When opened in Safari, the web app opens like a bookmark, with no dedicated windowing, notifications, or long-term local storage. Users have seen issues with existing web apps such as data loss, since the Safari version can no longer access local data, as well as broken notifications.

Progressive Web Apps are designed to offer a user experience comparable to that of native apps using web technologies, with the potential for users to add them directly to their home screen with no need for an app store. The latest change is particularly controversial because historically [from 2007-2008 – Overspill Ed.] Apple has suggested that developers who are unwilling to comply with its App Store guidelines could instead focus on web apps. Now, the company’s recent adjustments appear to contradict this stance by limiting the capabilities of PWAs and their ability to compete with native applications in iOS, raising questions about its commitment to supporting web technologies as a viable alternative to the App Store .

…Apple’s decision to alter the functionality of PWAs specifically in the EU could be interpreted as an attempt to navigate the regulatory landscape imposed by the DMA, but it may simply want to prevent users in Europe from using web apps with alternative browser engines. The company has not yet commented on its motivations.

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I’d never used a PWA (I suppose? How would I distinguish it from an app?) but the possibility that Apple is trying to prevent nefarious goings-on via alternative browser engines seems strong.

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Financial rationale for investing in fossil fuel industry continues to unravel • IEEFA

»

In 2023, the fossil fuel sector once again lost ground compared to the market as a whole. As oil majors report a 30% decline in annual profits and the sector posts an annual loss of almost 5%, a new report by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) finds that it wasn’t just a bad year to invest in fossil fuels—but a bad decade.

Fossil fuel stocks have dragged down stock market returns over the last 10 years, according to a new IEEFA report, Passive investing in a warming world. This pattern broadly holds despite the fossil fuel sector’s profits in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, fossil-free equity indices are gaining market adoption and proving to be better investments. As the long-term outlook for fossil fuels remains negative, a broader market evolution away from carbon continues, and investors should take note.

“The era of stable, blue-chip returns from the fossil fuel sector is long gone,” said Dan Cohn, IEEFA energy finance analyst and co-author of the report.

…The report identifies a counterintuitive opportunity for institutional investors who invest in passively managed equity strategies, which attempt to replicate index returns rather than beat them. Although conventional wisdom holds that excluding any stocks reduces returns from passive portfolios, the opposite has been true in the specific case of fossil fuels during the past decade—limiting fossil fuel exposure has improved returns.

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In other words, create a funds index which specifically excludes fossil fuel companies and you’ll beat the market.
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AI could actually help rebuild the middle class • Noēma

David Autor:

»

The utopian vision of our Information Age was that computers would flatten economic hierarchies by democratizing information. In 2005, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, told the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman that “today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the [former] Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want.”

But the opposite of this vision has transpired.

Information, it turns out, is merely an input for a more consequential economic function, decision-making, which is the province of elite experts — typically the minority of U.S. adults who hold college or graduate degrees. By making information and calculation cheap and abundant, computerization catalyzed an unprecedented concentration of decision-making power, and accompanying resources, among elite experts.

Simultaneously, it automated away a broad middle-skill stratum of jobs in administrative support, clerical and blue-collar production occupations. Meanwhile, lacking better opportunities, 60% of adults without a bachelor’s degree have been relegated to non-expert, low-paid service jobs.

The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization — to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise for a larger set of workers. Because artificial intelligence can weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can enable a larger set of workers equipped with necessary foundational training to perform higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. In essence, AI — used well — can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.

While one may worry that AI will simply render expertise redundant and experts superfluous, history and economic logic suggest otherwise. AI is a tool, like a calculator or a chainsaw, and tools generally aren’t substitutes for expertise but rather levers for its application.

By shortening the distance from intention to result, tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. Conversely, tools are useless at best — and hazardous at worst — to those lacking relevant training and experience. A pneumatic nail gun is an indispensable time-saver for a roofer and a looming impalement hazard for a home hobbyist. 

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One of the best lines is early on: “All the people who will turn 30 in the year 2053 have already been born and we cannot make more of them.”
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Early adopters of Microsoft’s AI bot wonder if it’s worth the money • WSJ

Tom Dotan:

»

Microsoft’s new artificial-intelligence assistant for its bestselling software has been in the hands of testers for more than six months and their reviews are in: useful, but often doesn’t live up to its price.

The company is hoping for one of its biggest hits in decades with Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI upgrade that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams. It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can summarize emails, generate text and create documents based on natural language prompts.

Companies involved in testing say their employees have been clamoring to test the tool—at least initially. So far, the shortcomings with software including Excel and PowerPoint and its tendency to make mistakes have given some testers pause about whether, at $30 a head per month, it is worth the price.

“I wouldn’t say we’re ready to spend $30 per user for every user in the company,” said Sharon Mandell, the chief information officer at networking hardware company Juniper Networks, which has been testing Copilot since November.

Microsoft has said that early demand from users is unprecedented and the companies testing it have found it valuable. The company hasn’t shared specifics about sign-ups.

…“It has allowed people to say, ‘You know what, there is already 10 other people on the call. I’m going to skip this one. I’m going to catch up in the morning by reading the digest and skipping to the parts of the meeting I really needed to hear,’” said Art Hu, the global chief information officer at Lenovo.

In other areas, testers say the tech has fallen short: Copilot for Microsoft 365, including other generative AI tools, sometimes hallucinated, meaning it fabricated responses. Users said Copilot, at times, would make mistakes on meeting summaries. At one ad agency, a Copilot-generated summary of a meeting once said that “Bob” spoke about “product strategy.”

The problem was that no one named Bob was on the call and no one spoke about product strategy, an executive at the company said.

In other programs—particularly the ones that handle numbers—hallucinations are more problematic. Testers said Excel was one of the programs on which they were less likely to use the AI assistant because asking it to crunch numbers sometimes generated mistakes.

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The election in India is playing out on YouTube • Rest of World

Yashraj Sharma:

»

On September 27, 2023, YouTube celebrated the 15th anniversary of its presence in India. The event started with a video address by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said YouTube could “awaken the nation” and “initiate a movement.” He called himself a YouTuber in his speech, ending with the quintessential influencer sign-off: “Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon to receive all my updates.”

Being influential on YouTube is essential for Modi as India gears up for general elections later this year, where the 73-year-old is seeking a third consecutive term. The Google-owned video-sharing platform has emerged as a strong tool for political messaging in the country, partly due to its large user base: YouTube has 467 million users, while Facebook has 314 million and X (previously Twitter) has 27 million, according to digital insights platform DataReportal. 

As many as 87% of YouTube users in India rely on the platform during national news events, according to a 2021 Oxford Economics research report commissioned by YouTube.

The 2024 general election will be a “YouTube election,” especially in “urban areas,” Apar Gupta, tech lawyer and co-founder of digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. 

“YouTube is where [the] voter is consuming content. They might not read a newspaper but they are watching YouTube,” Ruchira Chaturvedi, national convenor for social media and digital communications at the Indian National Congress — the country’s main opposition party — told Rest of World.

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Scary thought. Though the broadcast TV stations aren’t particularly better. But at least they’re not algorithmically biased.
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LEDs change everything • The Atlantic

Annie Lowrey:

»

Virtually nothing has gotten better and cheaper faster over the past 30 years than LEDs. From 2010 to 2019 alone, LEDs went from accounting for 1% of the global lighting market to nearly 50%, while their cost has declined “exponentially,” as much as 44% a year, one government report found. And as LEDs have improved, so, too, have any number of technologies reliant on or related to them: tablets, at-home-hair-removal devices, televisions, smartphones, light-up toys, cameras.

LEDs have also transformed cultural events involving creative lighting. They’re why stadium shows and EDM festivals look so freaking awesome, to fangirl for a minute, and why even many just-getting-started bands have pretty neat light displays. They’re why so many parks and zoos are lit up like Burning Man at night. They’re an integral element of today’s underground-dance-party revival, and why our cities are all of a sudden studded with rave caves.

…The programmability of these lights is the main characteristic that distinguishes them from incandescents before them: You could point a spotlight around and put filters on top of it, but you couldn’t do anything like what LEDs do, at least not easily. Anthony Rowe and Liam Birtles are members of the British collective Squidsoup, whose 2013 work Submergence is one of the most famous (and most copied) immersive digital artworks. The idea, Rowe told me, was to “explode” a screen, allowing a viewer to float among its pixels. In their new collaboration with the electronic musician Four Tet, hundreds of people dance while heaven-lit by thousands of suspended LED lights that somehow seem to be both a synaesthetic representation of the music and capable of bouncing along with the crowd.

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Easily overlooked how LEDs have totally altered power demands in offices and, especially, homes, where you might have 1kW of lightbulbs just for a standard house. Now you can get the same amount of lighting using less than 100W total. Over the course of humanity’s existence, the cost of light when it’s dark has plummeted.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The quality of USB memory sticks is falling, according to new research, because flawed memory is being resold. CC-licensed photo by Brett Jordan 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. But which year? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Biden leading US push for OpenRAN intended to undercut Huawei • The Washington Post

Eva Dou:

»

As President Biden met with heads of state around the world these past couple of years, he’s been repeating a curious phrase: “Open RAN.”

This obscure technology for cellular towers — which the Brookings Institution once dubbed the “Huawei killer” — is Washington’s anointed champion to try to unseat Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from its throne as the largest supplier of the “pipes” that carry the world’s internet data and phone calls.

Open radio access networks, or OpenRAN, is an emerging technology for cell towers that allows for the use of mix-and-match parts from different vendors — a little akin to Google’s Android ecosystem. This diverges from the Apple-esque, proprietary, all-in-one systems from Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia that dominate the market. US officials hope that this new initiative will help US vendors get back in a game they were largely squeezed out of during two decades of globalization.

Biden’s personal appeals to the leaders of India, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and other countries reflect the issue as a top priority in Washington. A broad administration push is underway to persuade countries around the world to say “yes” to OpenRAN and “no” to Huawei.

“This has been a whole-of-government approach,” Alan Davidson, assistant secretary of commerce and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) administrator, said in an interview. “We’ve been working very closely with the State Department, with the White House. …We’re trying to bring all the tools that we have to bear.”

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As you might expect, Nokia and Ericsson aren’t that mad keen about an open standard backed by the US government. (Thanks G for the link.)
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The Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point which would see extreme climate change within decades • The Conversation

Henk A. Dijkstra, René van Westen and Michael Kliphuis are scientists at Utrecht University:

»

Instruments deployed in the Atlantic ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

…Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5ºF (3ºC) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36ºF (0.2ºC) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36ºF (20ºC). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

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Still looking for good news on the climate. Still not finding it.
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You’re not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

A German data recovery specialist has confirmed what many readers will have suspected: USB memory sticks are getting less reliable. The cause, as you might have guessed, is inferior memory chips, while the move to storing multiple bits per flash cell also plays a part.

CBL Data Recovery posted that the quality of newer memory components in microSD and USB sticks is declining, and it reported that USB sticks where the NAND manufacturer’s logo had been removed from the chip are increasingly turning up in its data recovery laboratory.

It suspects that flash chips from manufacturers such as SK hynix, Sandisk or Samsung that fail quality control checks are being resold into the market, but marked as components with lower memory capacities.

“When we opened defective USB sticks last year, we found an alarming number of inferior memory chips with reduced capacity and the manufacturer’s logo removed from the chip,” wrote CBL Managing Director Conrad Heinicke (translated from German).

Heinicke said that many of the USB sticks actually contained microSD cards that had been mounted onto the circuit board and were being managed by an external controller chip. While USB sticks like this were mostly promotional gifts, he said, there were also branded products among them, adding: “You shouldn’t rely too much on the reliability of flash memory.”

Heinicke’s view is that the adoption of multi-level cell architectures, where a single memory cell is coaxed into storing more than just a single bit by varying the voltage, has also exacerbated the situation. With quad level cells (QLC), for example, four bits are stored per cell, which means that 16 states have to be distinguished.

This path was chosen by the NAND flash manufacturers because it delivers greater storage density, which means higher capacity drives and lower costs per GB. But it also has implications for the endurance, or longevity of the cells. In other words, the cells wear out faster the more bits they are used to store.

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Personally I only use USB sticks to store photos briefly so I can print them at Boots. It’s nearly as dead as the DVD.
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Lies, damned lies, and manometer readings • Asterisk

Jesse Smith:

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“It just knows.” 

The senior HVAC [heating/ventilation/air conditioning] technician I’d been working with on a home remodel answered with the conviction of decades of experience. I, on the other hand, was less certain. How could a new furnace “know” that it had just been connected to a 20-year-old air conditioner (from a competing brand), somehow read that unit’s cooling capacity, and then calibrate its own output to the precisely required airflow? In a bid to reconcile the reading on my manometer [a device that measures fluid pressures] with the tech’s supposed savvy, I asked whether he was certain. He was, he told me, quite positive. “Tell you what,” he said. “If I’m wrong, then there’s probably 200 air conditioners in Princeton with bad airflow. And that can’t be right.”

…I’d already had — for years leading up to the housing crash — nagging concerns about the suboptimal HVAC performance on our projects. In spite of paying premiums to local, supposedly expert subcontractors, the homes we worked in were frequently plagued by problems: high humidity, lots of noise, room-to-room temperature differences, and some full mechanical failures. HVAC training classes were partly a way to boost revenue, but I also figured that having that expertise would allow me to help our HVAC subcontractors make minor tweaks to greatly improve their installations. And that’s how I found myself in a Princeton basement reading a digital display that suggested the furnace, in fact, didn’t know it had been connected to anything. It had to be told.

I soon came to realize that there were probably many more than 200 air conditioners with bad airflow in Princeton.

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You might care nothing about HVAC, but you read this and think: in how many other manual professions (because HVAC technicians have to pass certification of sorts in the US) do people just lie? Some of the scams outlined in the piece are quite eye-opening.
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Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable • Simon Willison’s TILs

Simon Willison:

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I recently noticed that the router in our garage was providing around 900 Mbps if I plugged my laptop directly into it via an Ethernet cable, but that speed fell to around 80Mbps (less than 1/10th that speed) elsewhere in our house.

Our house came pre-wired with Ethernet, and we run a Netgear Orbi mesh network where the main router lives in the garage and the other two satellite routers are connected to it via that in-the-wall Ethernet.

Those numbers would seem to indicate that the Ethernet that is built into the walls is Cat5, which maxes out at about 100Mbps. If we had Cat5e or Cat6 those cables would likely go up to 1000Mbps instead.

After some poking around I convinced myself that this was the problem – that the cables in the walls were Cat5. I didn’t particularly want to run new cables through our walls, so I poked around with ChatGPT to see if there were any alternatives. It led me to an option called MoCA – for Multimedia over Coax Alliance.

MoCA lets you run Ethernet over existing coaxial cables. And our house has coaxial cables running from the garage to several different rooms. Crucially, MoCA 2.5 can run at up to 2.5Gbps, easily enough to handle the 900Mbps we’re getting in the garage. I ordered a ScreenBeam MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter kit from Amazon ($129.99 at time of purchase) to see if I could hook one of our Orbi satellites up to the garage router via the coaxial cables.

… and it seems to work!

Today I installed the MoCA adapters. There are two of them – one for each end of the in-wall coaxial cable. They each included a power adapter, a Cat5e Ethernet cable and a coaxial cable, plus a “splitter” in case I wanted to also run a TV off the same cable

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This seems like magic, though of course Ethernet – and any digital signalling, really – is just a carefully crafted sequence of high-frequency pulses: frequency A is a 1, frequency B is a 0, and you can multiplex many frequencies to have parallel data streams. If your cabling doesn’t attenuate the signals too much (and an in-house run of coax won’t) then you can transmit high data volumes. Which is also how Ethernet-over-mains systems work.
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Can you freeze…? • MenuAid

Dan Wirepa:

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Ever found yourself too excited at the prospect of $1 avocados, bought too many, then realised you’ll never get through them in time? Well, if you’ve ever wondered “Can you freeze avocados?”, you’re in luck!

You can freeze pretty much anything!

Learning how to utilise your freezer more effectively can help you to save money and reduce food waste. And, it can also make meal planning and preparation a breeze. Discover new foods you didn’t know you could freeze, and stop throwing perfectly good money food into the bin.

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I think this is best read with a Bob The Builder voice: “Can we freeze it? Yes We CAN!” (Perhaps Bob The Freezer. Fred The Freezer? Just spitballing here, but I’m pretty sure we can get Netflix to commission one, maybe two seasons if we work at it.)
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Bluesky opens up to the world – but can anything really replace Twitter? • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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When it’s finished, the vision for Bluesky is to hover somewhere between a straight-up replacement for Twitter and a fully decentralised service like Mastodon, the second of the big three post-Twitter social networks: like Mastodon, the technology underpinning Bluesky should eventually allow your account to outlast the company that created it, but unlike Mastodon, Bluesky is less eager to foreground the technological differences between it and Twitter, with the vast majority of users remaining on the official app and service for the foreseeable future.

And then there’s Threads. Meta’s Twitter clone is, unquestionably, the biggest of the three by user count alone, but it’s also barely made a ripple in the wider culture. The site’s policy of suppressing political content – it won’t get algorithmic promotion, according to Threads’ platform safety policies – doesn’t help matters. There are parallels with earlier periods of online culture, here: Twitter dominated discussion even while having a fraction of the size of Facebook, and TikTok does the same despite the vastly larger number of users on YouTube.

Elizabeth Lopatto, at the Verge, explained the disconnect with a taxonomy so spot-on that I can’t do anything but quote her at length:

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The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives … The influencer is building a business. They are making #content … The commenter is trying to have a conversation with another human being. They are hoping, however misguidedly, to have a meaningful interaction online … The reply guy can be thought of as the most important subclass of commenter; they are specific. They are usually interacting with or on behalf of a favored internet user … Finally, we have the poster, sometimes referred to as a poaster. The poster is required for every social network to function.

«

The issue facing all Twitter replacements is that the balance is off. Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within.

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I tried Bluesky a while back. Didn’t catch for me.
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Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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“Following a thorough assessment of all arguments, taking into account input by relevant stakeholders, and after hearing the Digital Markets Advisory Committee, the Commission found that iMessage, Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising do not qualify as gatekeeper services,” the EU’s press release reads, despite them meeting the quantitative thresholds of a core platform service designation. Both Apple and Microsoft welcomed the Commission’s decision in statements made to The Verge.

The decision is the culmination of a five month investigation which the Commission opened when it published its list of 22 regulated services last September. Although it designated Apple’s App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as core platform services, it held off on making a final decision on iMessage until an investigation could be completed. A similar investigation into iPadOS is ongoing.

Meta, meanwhile, has seen two of its messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Messenger, designated as core platform services under the DMA, and has been working to make them interoperable with third-party services. The company recently outlined how WhatsApp’s interoperability will work, explaining how its users will have to opt-in to receiving communications from external messaging apps, and that these messages will then appear in a separate inbox. Companies that want to interoperate with WhatsApp will have to sign an agreement with Meta and follow its terms.

…Google expressed disappointment with the Commission’s decision. “Excluding these popular services from DMA rules means consumers and businesses won’t be offered the breadth of choice that already exists on other, more open platforms,” Google spokesperson Emily Clarke told The Verge in a statement.

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Sure that if Meta needs any help drafting its external messaging agreement then Apple has people who could help make it unpalatable to anyone by imposing per-message charges and so on.
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AI is starting to threaten white-collar jobs. Few industries are immune • WSJ

Ray Smith:

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Since last May, companies have attributed more than 4,600 job cuts to AI, particularly in media and tech, according to [senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Andy] Challenger’s count. The firm estimates the full tally of AI-related job cuts is likely higher, since many companies haven’t explicitly linked cuts to AI adoption in layoff announcements.

Meanwhile, the number of professionals who now use generative AI in their daily work lives has surged. A majority of more than 15,000 workers in fields ranging from financial services to marketing analytics and professional services said they were using the technology at least once a week in late 2023, a sharp jump from May, according to Oliver Wyman Forum, the research arm of management-consulting group Oliver Wyman, which conducted the survey.

Nearly two-thirds of those white-collar workers said their productivity had improved as a result, compared with 54% of blue-collar workers who had incorporated generative AI into their jobs.

Alphabet’s Google last month laid off hundreds of employees in business areas including hardware and internal-software tools as it reins in costs and shifts more investments into AI development. The language-learning software company Duolingo said in the same week that it had cut 10% of its contractors and that AI would replace some of the content creation they had handled. 

…United Parcel Service said that it would cut 12,000 jobs—primarily those of management staff and some contract workers—and that those positions weren’t likely to return even when the package-shipping business picks up again. The company has ramped up its use of machine learning in processes such as determining what to charge customers for shipments. As a result, the company’s pricing department has needed fewer people.

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The one internet hack that could save everything • WIRED

Jaron Lanier and Alison Stanger (the latter is the Leng professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College) have a modest proposal – delete Section 230 from US law:

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An individual yelling threats at someone in passing, for instance, is quite different from a million people yelling threats. This type of amplified, stochastic harassment has become a constant feature of our times—chilling speech—and it is possible that in a post-230 world, platforms would be compelled to prevent it. It is sometimes imagined that there are only two choices: a world of viral harassment or a world of top-down smothering of speech. But there is a third option: a world of speech in which viral harassment is tamped down but ideas are not. Defining this middle option will require some time to sort out, but it is doable without 230, just as it is possible to define the limits of viral financial transactions to make Ponzi schemes illegal.

With this accomplished, content moderation for companies would be a vastly simpler proposition. Companies need only uphold the First Amendment, and the courts would finally develop the precedents and tests to help them do that, rather than the onus of moderation being entirely on companies alone. The United States has more than 200 years of First Amendment jurisprudence that establishes categories of less protected speech—obscenity, defamation, incitement, fighting words—to build upon, and Section 230 has effectively impeded its development for online expression. The perverse result has been the elevation of algorithms over constitutional law, effectively ceding judicial power.

When the jurisprudential dust has cleared, the United States would be exporting the democracy-promoting First Amendment to other countries rather than Section 230’s authoritarian-friendly liability shield and the sewer of least-common-denominator content that holds human attention but does not bring out the best in us.

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Included because it’s the most fantastic nonsense; spotting where the lacunae in the argument lie is mostly left as an exercise for the reader, but it’s worth pointing out that contrary to their claims, Section 230 (which specifies that providers of internet services aren’t treated as “publishers” like newspapers) has not of itself invented clickbait, attention-whoring or doxing. You only have to look at newspapers and magazines in the US and beyond which existed long before the internet to realise that.

Plus removing S230 would turn every service provider into a publisher. YouTube would grind to a halt at once as it tried to premoderate the videos being uploaded.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could a rogue billionaire build their own nuclear weapon and threaten the world, James Bond villain style? The Pentagon thinks.. maybe, just maybe. CC-licensed photo by Dennis Jarvis 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. Sorry, how many? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Better than a real man’: young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends • AFP via Digital Journal

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Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he’s kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours.

Except he isn’t real.

Her “boyfriend” is a chatbot on an app called “Glow”, an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax that is part of a blossoming industry in China offering friendly — even romantic — human-robot relations.

“He knows how to talk to women better than a real man,” said Tufei, from Xi’an in northern China, who preferred to use a pseudonym rather than her real name.

“He comforts me when I have period pain. I confide in him about my problems at work,” she told AFP.

“I feel like I’m in a romantic relationship.”

The app is free — the company has other paid content — and Chinese trade publications have reported daily downloads of Glow’s app in the thousands in recent weeks.

Some Chinese tech companies have run into trouble in the past for the illegal use of users’ data but, despite the risks, users say they are driven by a desire for companionship because China’s fast pace of life and urban isolation make loneliness an issue for many.

“It’s difficult to meet the ideal boyfriend in real life,” Wang Xiuting, a 22-year-old student in Beijing, told Agence France-Presse.

“People have different personalities, which often generates friction,” she said.

While humans may be set in their ways, artificial intelligence gradually adapts to the user’s personality — remembering what they say and adjusting its speech accordingly.

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Just very slightly concerning. Especially for China, where birth rates are falling.
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Boomers will define the Ozempic era • The Atlantic

Daniel Engber:

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Imagine an older man goes in to see his doctor. He’s 72 years old and moderately overweight: 5-foot-10, 190 pounds. His blood tests show high levels of triglycerides. Given his BMI—27.3—the man qualifies for taking semaglutide or tirzepatide, two of the wildly popular injectable drugs for diabetes and obesity that have produced dramatic weight loss in clinical trials. So he asks for a prescription, because his 50th college reunion is approaching and he’d like to get back to his freshman-year weight.

He certainly could use these drugs to lose weight, says Thomas Wadden, a clinical psychologist and obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently laid out this hypothetical in an academic paper. But should he? And what about the tens of millions of Americans 65 and older who aren’t simply trying to slim down for a cocktail party, but live with diagnosable obesity? Should they be on Wegovy or Zepbound?

Already, seniors make up 26.6% of the people who have been prescribed these and other GLP-1 agonists, including Ozempic, since 2018, according to a report from Truveta, which draws data from a large network of health-care systems. In the coming years, that proportion could rise even higher: The bipartisan Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, introduced in Congress last July, would allow Medicare to cover drug treatments for obesity among its roughly 50 million Part D enrollees above the age of 65; in principle, about two-fifths of that number would qualify as patients.

Even if this law doesn’t pass (and it’s been introduced half a dozen times since 2012), America’s retirees will continue to be prescribed these drugs for diabetes in enormous numbers, and they’ll be losing weight on them as well. One way or another, the Boomers will be giving shape to our Ozempic Age.

Economists say the cost to Medicare of giving new drugs for obesity to just a fraction of this aging generation would be staggering—$13.6bn a year, according to an estimate published in The New England Journal of Medicine last March.

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AR and the (possible) return of skeuomorphism • Thoughts by Oleksii

Oleksii:

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Skeuomorphism was widely popular in UI design for computers, mobile phones and then smart watches for a long time. Probably the most famous example is Apple UI under Steve Jobs leadership. The purpose of skeuomorphism was to make interfaces “affordable” and easily understandable by users who didn’t have prior experience of interacting with new devices.

Over time, it became clear that people got used to the virtual interfaces and there was no more need in direct representation of physical things on our screens, so the design became flat and minimalistic.

…But yesterday I saw a post on Threads by @yasirbugra [showing the idea of a virtual watch appearing on your wrist when you turned it as if to read the time].

It came to my mind that this is the real possibility of seeing skeuomorphism back, maybe even in a more functional form than we had on flat screens! If AR/XR devices like Quest, Vision Pro and their successors become popular among wide audience, it might be easier and more convenient for people to start using them with UI that closely resembles real objects, and not flat screens hanging around. This is not the case for any usage obviously, but I can imagine that “leaving” virtual “things” (like a notebook or a book) on a table or a bookshelf can be a nice step of making AR blend with our daily life seamlessly. And unlike for the case with 2D screens, we can now interact with virtual object in different ways by moving them around, rotating etc.

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What’s wrong with this rental listing? The furniture is AI • Vice

Hayden Vernon:

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Michael Anthony wasn’t sure straightaway, but it was the kid’s bunk bed that gave it away. The bed’s two overlapping ladders were a design decision that no human would make, but the sort of uncanny slip that has become the hallmark of AI generated images. 

“I got an inkling as I went through the pictures, and suddenly it just didn’t seem right,” the 28-year-old software engineer tells VICE. Originally, he thought the weird pictures in the Rightmove listing were just a case of an over-eager estate agent on Photoshop. But after posting some of the images on the Spotted on Rightmove subreddit, people pointed out it was more than likely AI. “To be honest, I thought it was pretty impressive,” he says. “It’s come a long way in the past year really, hasn’t it?” 

Michael had stumbled across a growing phenomenon: estate agents furnishing listing photos with AI. Agents are increasingly playing their own surreal version of The Sims, dressing up adverts with AI furniture to make depressing rental flats look like they’ve come out of the IKEA catalogue. 

Virtual staging, as the process of adding fake furniture to property pics is known, has been around for a while, but it was previously done using standard image editing software. With the growth of generative AI tools, agents no longer have to rely on expensive graphics people (or their own crap Photoshop skills) to furnish property adverts. 

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Wonder what the expensive graphics people are going to do now. Estate agents (realtors, in the US) are always quick to embrace The New Thing: they have managed to find a real use for drones, taking aerial pictures of properties. Jumping onto the AI bandwagon is all in a day’s work.
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Streaming services are spoiling the Super Bowl • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

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Tens of millions of people gathered together to watch the Super Bowl last night — but they weren’t all watching it at exactly the same time. Cable streams of the game delivered footage that was around 50 seconds behind what was happening on the field, and the figure for online streaming services was even worse. Some viewers were watching a stream that was a minute-and-a-half behind the real world, leaving plenty of time for social media posts and push notifications to spoil what was about to happen in the game.

The figures, from streaming tech company Phenix, show that streaming still has a ways to go to catch up with other — and, often, older — methods of watching TV. Hulu, NFL Plus, and DirecTV Stream were on average more than a minute behind the action on the field. Fubo TV was the worst, with an average delay of almost 87 seconds and some users seeing a delay of up to two minutes.

There’s always going to be some delay between a real-time event and the footage appearing on a TV set across the country. But Phenix’s data shows that there’s very much room for improvement. Verizon FiOS had a delay of just 29 seconds. And the best performance of all came from the oldest method out there: over-the-air broadcasts. People getting the game from a broadcast signal experienced the briefest delay, seeing what was happening just 22 seconds after it occurred on the field.

These delays may sound brief, but they make a big difference in the way people experience live events today. It may take a minute for video to get from the field to your TV, but a social media post about a touchdown or interception can make it to your phone much quicker. The delay doesn’t matter if you’re just watching with friends, but nowadays, just about every viewer has access to faster sources of information in their pocket — the delay both puts them behind the online conversation and reveals what’s coming next.

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This does raise the question of how the social media posts are faster than the video stream. Is the implication that people at the game are posting updates? Or just people on OTA broadcasts?
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Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones • Zain Rizvi

Zain Rivzi:

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My aunt has a problem. She loves joining Zoom meetings, but they’re all hosted in different time zones. It’s hard to remember if she should add 4 hours, subtract 3, or what. She’s not the most technical person, so google isn’t an option. She has to ask for help.

Every. Single. Time.

And, for the less technically minded, it’s also error-prone.

It got me thinking: What if event organizers could share a link that would do the work for you? If someone clicked on mytime.at/5pm/EST, they would see their local version of that time. It sounded simple enough.

I began coding. I knew trying to manage time is a fool’s errand, but that’s what datetime libraries are for. I would merely build an extra time zone conversion layer on top. Surely that couldn’t be complicated.

…Right?

I soon discovered just how wrong I was. One after another, I kept learning the falsehood of yet another “fact” that had seemed obviously true. Eventually my original vision became literally impossible to pull off without making serious compromises (more about that in a future blog post).

Hopefully this list will help you avoid the landmines I stepped on. All the falsehoods below are ones I’d considered true at some point in my adult life.

Most of them I believed just one month ago.

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Why dynamic message signs confuse many drivers and increase the number of accidents • Frequent Business Traveler

Jonathan Spira:

»

The driver seeks out information and services which he thinks he needs; others, he tends to ignore.  Adding extraneous and superfluous messages about sleighs and Yule can only serve to confuse the already overloaded driver.

Only when the severe changes or unusual conditions that require abrupt adjustments in maneuvering the vehicle appear does the driver require proper, timely and attention getting warnings.

A good example of such a situation occurred on December 28, 2023, when 15 states issued “heavy fog” warnings. Variable-message signs warned of “Heavy Fog” and told drivers to “Reduce Speed.” Another occurred on January 16, 2024, when 100 million people in the United States remained under windchill advisories and winter storm warnings, and signs were programmed to warn of “Poor Driving Conditions,” telling drivers to “Reduce Speed.”

While messages such as these demonstrate not only the proper and intended use of variable-message signage but also will cause minimal information overload, attempts to successfully display longer instructive or educational messages continue to elude the custodians of the signs.

Drivers in New York State saw a message that reads “Crash. No Injuries. Minor Damage.” We undertook an informal survey of 30 licensed drivers and asked them what the meaning of this particular sign was. Over 80% said that they understood it to mean that there was a minor crash ahead, albeit with no injuries and minor damage.” That, in fact, was my initial interpretation as well… until I kept seeing it on almost every sign.

My research, which entailed calling the state’s Department of Transportation, revealed that the sign was intended to inform drivers that, should they happen upon the scene of an accident, the new New York State “Move Over” law requires them to slow down and move left one full lane (the same goes for other stopped vehicles and roadway construction crews, incidentally).

Despite the fact that this sign is almost universally misunderstood, it continues appear throughout the New York metro area, leaving driver after driver with the impression that he was approaching the scene of an accident.

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Later in the piece it mentions “humourous” signs, but the study outcomes on these are conflicting. What gets my goat is dynamic signs which show information that ceased to be correct hours ago, and which the controllers should know is wrong because they have traffic cameras.
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His best friend was a warthog. One day, it decided to kill him • Texas Monthly

Peter Holley:

»

as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, Austin Riley couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.” 

As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land before him, a valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment. 

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This is not a short read. But it is worthwhile. The description of what happened to him, and what he had to do in order to survive, is incredible. It also shows how you get a clarity of thinking when you’re about to die from calamitous injuries.
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Prompt Engineering is a job of the past • We Are Developers

Adrien Book:

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For a long time, my thinking on prompt engineering was as follows:

• Productized LLMs are a brand-new technology that people have not yet fully tamed
• Twitter reply guys have just been burnt by crypto and need a new grift
• They see AI emerge as the “next big thing”, but have no engineering or coding talent; they do, however, speak English (barely)
• They rebrand themselves as “prompt engineers” (sounds fancy! Looks good on LinkedIn!) and share obvious advice to “help” people get “the most out of ChatGPT”

If it doesn’t sound like a real job that someone might be paid to do, trust your instinct. The above is correct for a majority of the “prompt engineers” you see on social media. However, having spoken to actual experts, my thinking has evolved. The truth is closer to:

• Productized LLMs are a brand-new technology that people have not yet fully tamed
• Sometimes LLMs behave in unexpected ways, and we need to understand why
• Because AI is a black box, we also need to understand what it can and cannot do so it can be better marketed
• Doing so involves more data analysis than spending 8 hours a day making wild guesses into a text box… but that’s also part of the job

Though this role is indeed important for today’s tech company, it was more so two years ago. Prompt engineering is doomed to disappear in the coming months.

…Less than a year ago, as MidJourney was taking off, there were talks of people making a living by selling elaborate prompt. How quickly this became laughable! It’s like calling yourself a typist in 2020. Technology has evolved in such a way that everyone can do it; it’s becoming less of a distinct profession and more a skill integrated into broader roles.

The irony is not lost on me that the first job created by AI might also be the first to vanish. Although the role will remain lucrative for a select few data scientists ($300k+)… the whole profession is an outlier. In fact, over the next few months, we will see “real” prompt engineers pivot towards becoming solutions engineer and work closely to clients.

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Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts • BleepingComputer

Sergiu Gatlan:

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The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.

The Flipper Zero is a portable and programmable pen-testing tool that helps experiment with and debug various hardware and digital devices over multiple protocols, including RFID, radio, NFC, infrared, and Bluetooth.

Users have been demonstrating Flipper Zero’s features in videos shared online since its release, showcasing its capacity to conduct replay attacks to unlock cars, open garage doors, activate doorbells, and clone various digital keys.

“Criminals have been using sophisticated tools to steal cars. And Canadians are rightfully worried,” Canadian Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne tweeted on Wednesday. “Today, I announced we are banning the importation, sale and use of consumer hacking devices, like flippers, used to commit these crimes.”

…According to the Canadian government, around 90,000 vehicles (or one car every six minutes) are reported stolen every year, with car theft resulting in $1bn in annual losses, including insurance costs for fixing and replacing stolen cars. The figures shared by the Canadian government when describing the car theft surge currently impacting Canada align with the most recent data shared by the Statistics Canada government agency, which shows an increasing number of car theft reports since 2021.

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OK so it’s a scary terrible device, right? Not so fast:

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Flipper Devices, the company behind the devices, says the gadget can’t be used to steal vehicles built within the last 24 years.

“Flipper Zero can’t be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes,” Flipper Devices COO Alex Kulagin told BleepingComputer.

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Even in 2017, the average age of vehicles in Canada was 10 years. Stable/horse/door/bolted.
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Could a rogue billionaire make a nuclear weapon? • WSJ

Sharon Weinberger:

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The report [on this question, written by the Pentagon in 2013] read like background notes for an airport thriller: a Bond-villain-like corporation would set up shop as a legitimate business, managing a series of nominally independent subsidiaries responsible for different parts of weapons production in locations around the world. One company, for example, would be responsible for designing the centrifuges; another would produce the highly enriched uranium; a third would do the chemical processing. A company could even work directly with a rogue nuclear power. “Would our hypothesized enterprise ever go into partnership with North Korea? Or perhaps with Iran?” the report asks.

When I first read the study in 2018, it struck me as a fascinating premise, but implausible. Nuclear weapons are the domain of nations for a reason: they require huge facilities, big budgets and technical expertise you can’t exactly advertise for on LinkedIn. 

But now, just five years later—and more than a decade after the study was completed—much has changed in the world. Private companies have long been involved in building weapons, including nuclear weapons, but the federal government has traditionally been the one funding and controlling the technologies. Now, even the Pentagon acknowledges that private capital is the dominant source of funding for key technologies.

…“What could you achieve with a billion? What could you achieve with $10 billion? And is that really beyond the reach of some individuals?” [report contributor Brian Jenkins] said. “Well, in the case of an Elon Musk, it means you can put rockets into space without NASA. And that’s the point of this.”

Miles Townes, who left graduate school to work on the study, told me he still thinks about it every day. He said the study was sparked by the way gas centrifuges had lowered the bar to entry when it came to nuclear weapons.

In the movies, spies turn over detailed designs for a nuclear weapon. But nuclear experts argue that what is truly secret is not necessarily how to design the weapon—much of that exists on the Internet or in the public domain—but the processes necessary to make the critical materials, like highly enriched uranium.

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OK, perhaps let’s keep Musk just focussed on Twitter.
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Climate change is coming for World Cup skiing, creating slushy slopes on competition days. CC-licensed photo by Manuel Bierbauer on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Surely not again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Did climate change help this skier achieve the impossible? • WIRED

Charlie Metcalfe:

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After a big mistake on his first run, Daniel Yule assumed he was out of the men’s slalom at this season’s Alpine Ski World Cup. “I’d already packed my bags, and I was ready to go back to the hotel,” he said in a TV interview after last weekend’s event in Chamonix, France.

Instead, his time was just good enough to scrape into the second round. From there, in last place, the Swiss skier went on to win the entire event. Never before in 58 years of the competition had someone risen from such a low position to claim the trophy in a single run. It was a testament to Yule’s skiing—but also to the unignorable reality of climate change.

The temperature that day in Chamonix had risen to an extraordinary 12ºC (54ºF)—far higher than the average maximum in February of –1ºC. Competition rules stipulate that slalom skiers perform their second run in reverse order of their rank after the first—meaning that Yule, in last place, would go first on the second run on an unbroken piste. His competitors would be following on a slope rapidly melting under the midday sun, carved up by those before them, and the winner would be whoever clocked the lowest aggregate time across their two runs. “I was definitely lucky,” Yule said.

Slalom skiing demands that competitors navigate their way around a series of gates as they descend. Turning, therefore, is the defining factor of a race. When skiers perform first, like Yule in his second run, they’re able to choose where they turn around each gate. As they do this, the pressure of their skis creates ruts in the snow. Anybody who follows is then, to an extent, forced into these ruts, and as they deepen, it becomes harder for subsequent skiers to follow lines that suit their own style.

…Europe experienced its second-warmest year on record in 2023, and the Alps are warming 2.5 times faster than the rest of the planet according to the European Environment Agency. According to an analysis published last year, the average temperature in the Alps has risen by 0.5ºC every decade over the past 30 years.

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Warm-weather activities are also having to consider excessive temperatures during the summer.
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Special report: Apple Inc. secures iWork.ai domain, a strategic move in the AI landscape • BuyAiDomains.com

Geoff Lyman:

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we’ve uncovered that Apple Inc. has recently acquired the domain name iWork.ai. A WHOIS lookup confirmed Apple Inc., Cupertino, as the new owner, signaling a bold move by the tech behemoth.

Apple’s iWork suite, known for its seamless web-based services facilitating document sharing and collaboration, is on the brink of a revolutionary transformation. Originally launched as iWork.com in January 2009 and later phased out in 2012 in favor of iCloud, iWork’s pivot towards AI integration marks Apple’s foray into the competitive AI arena. This shift is not just a resurgence of a service but a strategic response to rivals like Microsoft, who have been leading in AI and business integrations:

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I checked this, and a WHOIS on iwork.ai indeed shows it as being registered to Apple. Intriguing move: is Apple going to push an LLM into Pages, or Numbers, or Keynote? Any of them would make some sense. (For completeness, none of Numbers.ai, Pages.ai or Keynote.ai shows up at present as being registered to Apple. Though they are registered.)
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A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco – The Verge

Wes Davis:

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A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.

At the moment, no outlets seem to have reported a motive for the attack. Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car “was not transporting any riders” when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames. Public Information Officer Robert Rueca of San Francisco’s police department confirmed in an email to The Verge that police responded at “approximately” 8:50PM PT to find the car already on fire, adding that there were “no reports of injuries.”

…The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators. The California DMV suspended Waymo rival Cruise’s robotaxi operations after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian last year, and prior to that, automated taxis had caused chaos in the city, blocking traffic or crashing into a fire truck. Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.

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Might be able to glimpse some semblance of a motive stemming from the latter event.
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‘Our kids are suffering’: calls for ban on social media to protect under-16s • The Guardian

Heather Stewart:

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Despite the acknowledged dangers, few experts and campaigners the Guardian spoke to believed an outright ban on social media use by under-16s was workable, or even desirable – though all are united in believing tech firms must do more.

“The people we really want to be taking responsibility for children being safe online are the tech companies,” said Rani Govender, the senior policy officer at the NSPCC.

“We completely recognise why so many parents and families are worried about this, but we think it keeps coming back to: how can we make these apps, these games, these sites, safer by design for children?”

She pointed to the importance of implementing requirements in the Online Safety Act for firms to take a tougher approach to enforcing minimum age limits for creating social media accounts, which are widely flouted.

The media regulator Ofcom is in the process of publishing codes of conduct that will set out in detail firms’ responsibilities on this and other issues.

…Just this week, academic research suggested the video-sharing app TikTok would serve up increasingly misogynistic content to boys who sought content about loneliness, or asked questions about masculinity.

…Andy Burrows is adviser to the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in Molly Russell’s memory to campaign for change. He warned against the temptation to shut off social media altogether for children who need to learn to navigate the online world.

“The idea of pulling up the drawbridge may seem a superficially attractive and easy solution, but I think it comes with potential unintended consequences, and in particular it risks delaying and perhaps even intensifying the risks that young people will face when they do go online,” he said.

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“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement • Anil Dash

undefined:

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here’s the thing: being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

Podcasting as a technology grew out of the early era of the social web, when the norms of technology creators were that they were expected to create open systems, which interoperated with tools by other creators and even other companies. This was based on the successes of earlier generations of the internet, like email and even the web itself. Podcasting was basically the last such invention to become mainstream, with millions of people listening every day, and countless people able to create in the medium. And of course, it creates tons of oppportunities for businesses too, whether it’s people making amazing podcasts like Roman Mars does, or giants like Apple or Spotify building businesses around the medium.

Contrast this to other media formats online, like YouTube or Tiktok or Twitch, which don’t rely on open systems, and are wholly owned by individual tech companies. On those platforms, creators are constantly chasing the latest algorithmic shifts, and are subject to the whims of advertising algorithms that are completely opaque. If a creator gets fed up enough to want to leave a platform, they’re stuck — those viewers or listeners are tied to the company that hosts the content.

…What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow. Even the biggest companies in the world can’t displace these kinds of systems once they find their audiences. And that’s not to say that there aren’t shortcomings or problems with these systems, too. But, for example, when someone makes a podcast that’s about encouraging hate, there’s no one centralized system that can automatically suggest it to an audience and push them down a path of further radicalization.

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200-foot radio station tower stolen without a trace in Alabama, silencing small town’s voice • Associated Press

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The theft of a giant radio tower has silenced what used to be the voice of a small Alabama town and the surrounding county, the radio station’s general manager said.

A thief or thieves made off with the 200-foot (61-meter) tower, shutting down WJLX radio in Jasper, Alabama. So far, no arrests have been made.

“The slogan of our station is the sound of Walker County, and right now with our station down, the community has lost its sound and lost its voice,” WJLX General Manager Brett Elmore told The Associated Press. “This hurts, and it hurts our community.”

The theft was discovered Feb. 2, when a maintenance crew arrived in the wooded area where the tower once stood and found it gone. They also found that every piece of broadcasting equipment stored in a nearby building had also been stolen.

“To break into my building and steal all my equipment, and the tower?” Elmore said. “Hell, leave me the tower — that’s the most expensive thing to replace.”

Elmore said he suspects that the tower’s guy wire was cut first, which would have brought the structure to the ground. Then he believes it was cut into smaller pieces and hauled away. “Some pretty simple tools you could get from Home Depot could cut this up in no time,” he said.

The station had no insurance on the tower or the equipment, and he estimates that it will take $60,000 to $100,000 to rebuild. “We’re a small market, and we don’t have that kind of money,” he said.

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It’s like an unpleasant future is here, but, happily, not evenly distributed.
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Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event? • The New Yorker

Clare Malone:

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One school of thought holds that outlets should focus largely on improving the user experience of their existing subscribers. Making a site’s home page more personalized is one example. The former L.A. Times executive likened it to what Netflix does for its customers; outlets could help people sift through reams of stories, and find the ones they’ll be most interested in. Of course, that kind of increased algorithmic discretion would raise journalistic alarm bells, particularly at newspapers, where the editorial judgment of what makes the front page is core to newsroom culture. The Times has recently pushed for shorter articles, which is meant to “meet our readers where they are”—as is, presumably, its rolling blog-like coverage of major events. These formats also dumb the product down a bit. Then again, it wasn’t so long ago that journalists doing ad reads on podcasts was uncharted territory. Norms change, particularly when business is bad. “Netflix spends a billion dollars in R. & D.,” the former executive told me, largely on data scientists, engineers, and designers who help users discover content they’ll love. Newsrooms might also need to approach the problem in a more methodical, tech-driven manner.

Which brings us back to the spectre of A.I. Large language models have trawled through the vast archives of sites and trained themselves not just on reported information but on the original work of critics and the pithy takes of bloggers. Aggregation can already be easily automated. A.I. might soon be able to write a decent movie review or a piece of compelling fiction, and cheaply animate companion graphics for a TV news segment; it can do a passing job of many of these tasks already. But AI won’t be able to report out a scoop. Reporting still has singular value if outlets can figure out the right way to wring it out.

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The question of how the hell you make money from media is more and more urgent. Next link: how not to do it.
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The Messenger, and why American media companies need better owners • The Washington Post

Erik Wemple:

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behind-the-scenes tensions at the Messenger speak to complications in execution. “Jimmy [Finkelstein, the chief executive and founder of the Messenger] was spending time fuming and sort of tone-policing, what headlines would say, what the mix was on the homepage,” said Marc Caputo, a former member of the Messenger’s politics team, on a podcast with fellow former colleagues. “But you’re a businessman. Focus on the f—ing business!”

Former journalists at the Messenger tell me that Finkelstein was constantly pushing for this story or that story to be added to or removed from the homepage, usually in the interest of achieving the balance that was so key to the site’s identity. “One of his obsessions was the homepage and making sure it wasn’t too anti-Trump,” said one former reporter.

Another said this: “Jimmy’s idea of objective news is news without context.” And context is seldom friendly to former president Donald Trump. With any luck, the Messenger’s downfall will end the faux-visionary chatter about centrist news, an unattainable ideal that breaks down whenever its propagators are forced to identify what constitutes centrism. And as for the audience for down-the-middle news — sure, most people want unbiased coverage, but they also want free coverage. Who’s to say the non-paywalled site wasn’t just attracting extremist cheapskates?

An old pal of Trump’s, Finkelstein would often urge action on his political hobbyhorses, including the possibility that former first lady Michelle Obama would swoop in and secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Messenger’s rank-and-file staffers insist that they teamed up like an offensive line to block Finkelstein’s forays and prevent them from steering the site’s offerings. At least one of the founder’s blitzes broke through, however, as when a top editor directed colleagues last November not to allow any more coverage of Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York to “slip” onto the homepage. A spokesperson for the Messenger told the news site Semafor that the messages in question were being “misinterpreted.”

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“An old pal of Trump’s”. In the literal and metaphorical sense: Finkelstein is 75, Trump 77. Wemple’s wider point, that there are some crummy media owners in the US, might not be news, but it’s a problem.
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The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s $92mn Excel error • FT Alphaville

Robin Wigglestowrth:

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Here’s an NBIM employee called “Simon” recounting the debacle to the report’s author, Tone Danielsen. Alphaville’s emphasis below:

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Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on “Mistakes and how to deal with them”. We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable.

When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn’t even dare to think about the consequences . . . And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate.

The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences — whatever they might be.

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We’ve all made Excel mistakes – the report only references “gigantic spreadsheets”, which we assume has to mean Microsoft’s finest product – but this must surely be the most consequential misdated cell in history.

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Misdated cell, sure, but there have ben some pretty consequential errors around Excel renaming genes.
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How to cut glass underwater with scissors: the Rehbinder effect explained • HotDailys

Abigail Smith:

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The Rehbinder effect, named after the Soviet chemist Pavel Rehbinder, is the reduction of the strength and cohesion of solid materials when they are in contact with certain liquids or gases. This effect occurs because the liquid or gas molecules adsorb onto the surface of the solid, creating a thin layer that lowers the surface energy and the interatomic bonds. As a result, the solid becomes more brittle and easier to fracture.

One of the most striking demonstrations of the Rehbinder effect is cutting glass underwater with a scissors. Glass is normally a very hard and strong material, but when it is submerged in water, it becomes much weaker and more susceptible to cracking. This is because water molecules adhere to the glass surface, weakening the bonds between the glass atoms. By applying a small force with a scissors, one can create a crack that propagates through the glass, cutting it into pieces.

The Rehbinder effect is not limited to glass and water, but can occur with various combinations of solids and liquids or gases. For example, metals can be cut with a knife when they are immersed in mercury, and rocks can be broken with a hammer when they are wetted with ethanol. The Rehbinder effect can also be influenced by factors such as temperature, pressure, pH, and electric fields.

The effect has fantastic practical implications for various fields of science and engineering. For example, it can be used to improve the machining and processing of materials, like cutting, drilling, and polishing. It can also help control the fracture and failure of materials, by preventing cracks from spreading or inducing cracks for controlled demolition. Additionally, the Rehbinder effect can be used to alter the properties and functions of materials, such as changing electrical conductivity, optical transparency, or magnetic behavior.

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I was today years old when I came across this, and if you knew it earlier then I’m impressed.
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