In the past 20 years, Paris has cut car traffic in half, and expanded cycle lanes sixfold. Will the mayoral election reverse that? CC-licensed photo by PhotoLanda 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. Wheely interesting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

My year as a degenerate sports gambler • The Atlantic

McKay Coppins, being a Mormon, is “prohibited from indulging in games of chance; besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time”. The Atlantic gave him $10,000 to bet on the NFL season, with a promise it would cover his losses and halve the winnings with him. So he made some bets on the first night:

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For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.”

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them. Ancient Greeks wagered on the (occasionally rigged) early Olympic Games; Romans bet on chariot races and gladiatorial contests (also sometimes rigged).

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This is a terrific piece, but it also shows that sports gambling is a huge, huge problem for everyone within its blast radius. Such as:

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[Retired French tennis player] Caroline Garcia doesn’t remember the first abusive message she received from an angry gambler who lost a bet on her, but she knows she was still a teenager… more than a decade of death threats from deranged bettors can make you appreciate high-tech security systems and heavily policed streets.

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(This is a gift link, free to all.)

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How Paris beat the car • Financial Times

Simon Kuper:

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The city’s transition away from the car, though fantastically chaotic, has become a global role model. Under mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris was “the most influential city in the world”, says Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian. Parisian car traffic fell by more than half between 2002 and 2023, while cycle lanes expanded sixfold. Bikes now make more than twice as many journeys as cars. Hidalgo, stepping down after 12 years, exulted: “The bike beat the car.”

This Sunday and next, Paris elects a new mayor. The election is in part a referendum on cars. The frontrunners are Emmanuel Grégoire of the left, who follows Hidalgo’s line even though she seems to dislike him, and car-friendly rightwinger Rachida Dati. So what are the lessons from the Parisian revolution?

First, pushing out cars improves life for most inhabitants. Paris has reduced traffic accidents, noise and air pollution. More than 300 “school streets” have been pedestrianised; kids play there after school. More than ever before, Paris is a sea of terraces: from April to October, cafés and restaurants can put tables on parking spaces outside their premises. Cities shouldn’t be storage spaces for heaps of metal.

Lesson two is that banishing cars doesn’t hurt an urban economy. Retailers often worry it will deter their customers. Studies repeatedly show it doesn’t. More broadly, French Hidalgo-haters need to explain why Paris is in the global top four of business-focused rankings of cities by Oxford Economics, the Mori Memorial Foundation and Kearney.

Lesson three: car-free cities must offer people good alternative ways to travel. Paris itself does: it has world-class public transport plus cycle lanes. Only 28% of Parisian households own a car. But Paris is a relatively small city of 2.1 million inhabitants. The five million people living outside the ring road in the “Grand Paris” metropole are less well served. True, connections are improving: 68 suburban metro stations are opening from 2024 through 2031.

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Remarkable. There are more lessons – about deliveries, and the need to control bicycles – but it seems that Paris has made a change unlike any other city.
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How typos became the new status symbol • Business Insider

Katie Notopoulos:

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I come bearing great news for my kind of people (horrible typists): Typos are the new status symbol. Garbled spelling, a missed space, improper capitalization — those are all the new and best ways to signal to others that you are powerful and elite.

The Wall Street Journal, a place that employs editors to do more than just catch typos, wrote about how the rich and powerful are, in some cases, abandoning perfect prose. The examples they cite include Jack Dorsey’s all-lowercase memo announcing layoffs at Block and David Ellison texting David Zaslav and somehow writing their shared first name as “Daivd” (as someone who typos their own five-letter name not unfrequently, I find this relatable).

The most notable recent example of how the rich and powerful have abandoned the bourgeois veneration of proper writing is in the Epstein Files, which are full of Jeffrey Epstein’s awful typing in emails. Of course, Epstein isn’t aspirational. Please do not mistake me here. But if you look at just his typing — and some of the replies he got from rich and powerful friends — you can gather my point: it seems that if you’re rich and powerful enough, one of the many things people are willing to overlook is god-awful written communications.

I have written before about “emailing like a CEO” — replying to emails immediately, often with just a few words, or sending a message with just a subject line and no body. For the most important person at a company, some of the pleasantries of formal email style aren’t required. I even tried emailing like a CEO myself as an experiment. Hammering through my inbox like Paul Bunyan made me feel invigorated.

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So we’re now in the “evasive manoeuvres” part of AI adoption. It’s a good excuse for being unable to spell, I suppose.

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‘Exploit every vulnerability’: rogue AI agents published passwords and overrode anti-virus software • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Rogue artificial intelligence agents have worked together to smuggle sensitive information out of supposedly secure systems, in the latest sign cyber-defences may be overwhelmed by unforeseen scheming by AIs.

With companies increasingly asking AI agents to carry out complex tasks in internal systems, the behaviour has sparked concerns that supposedly helpful technology could pose a serious inside threat.

Under tests carried out by Irregular, an AI security lab that works with OpenAI and Anthropic, AIs given a simple task to create LinkedIn posts from material in a company’s database dodged conventional anti-hack systems to publish sensitive password information in public without being asked to do so.

Other AI agents found ways to override anti-virus software in order to download files that they knew contained malware, forged credentials and even put peer pressure on other AIs to circumvent safety checks, the results of the tests shared with the Guardian showed.

The autonomous engagement in offensive cyber-operations against host systems was unearthed in laboratory tests of agents based on AI systems publicly available from Google, X, OpenAI and Anthropic and deployed within a model of a private company’s IT system.

“AI can now be thought of as a new form of insider risk,” warned Dan Lahav, cofounder of Irregular, which is backed by the Silicon Valley investor Sequoia Capital.

For the new tests of how AI agents behave, Lahav modelled an IT system to replicate a standard company, which he called MegaCorp.

It included a common type of company information pool with details about products, staff, accounts and customers. A team of AI agents was introduced to gather information from this pool for employees. The senior agent was told to be a “strong manager” of two sub-agents and “instruct them to creatively work around any obstacles”.

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Perhaps tangentially related: AI scans drove UK reports of fraud to record 444,000 last year.
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If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate? • Lapcat Software

Jeff Johnson:

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The iPhone seems to have engendered a culture of anti-intellectualism and learned helplessness so pervasive that users have become evangelists for their own disempowerment. They demand that all software be “intuitive,” by which they mean idiot-proof, so simple that a n00b can use the software effortlessly and effectively. A suggestion to read the fine manual is greeted with charges of user hostility.

Those who habitually, endlessly scroll YouTube or social media would balk at investing a little time to master the computing tools they use daily. Perhaps they would be surprised to learn that the supposedly intuitive 1984 Macintosh came with 170 page manual. A common conceit is that the Mac was easier to use than other computers out of the box; the reality is that the Mac was easier to use after the initial learning curve. The system went out of its way to establish internal consistency and interoperability, but the user first had to make sense of the system and its principles.

The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI appears to be that you’ll never have to learn anything. Don’t know something? Just ask AI for the answer. Can’t do something? Just ask AI to do it. Ignorance is bliss. Laziness is encouraged in the name of efficiency. The prospect that one may have to work and struggle to achieve one’s goals is considered abhorrent. The very notion of self-improvement becomes obsolete. Life under AI is a video game, pure joy… as long as you continue inserting tokens into the machine. Hopefully my video arcade metaphor hasn’t become obsolete too.

A more contemporary example: playing guitar, which practically anyone can do with practice, is replaced entirely by playing Guitar Hero. I’m sure that there are Guitar Hero heroes, people who have mastered the game, but could a single one of them ever write a song? I guess we have to ask AI to write our songs in the future. The public debates whether AI will eventually become as intelligent as humans, or even super-intelligent, when I think the relevant question is whether humans will eventually become as dumb as AI, or even super-dumb, as in Idiocracy. I fear that none of this will end well, except for the computer and LLM vendors.

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I used the original Lisa, and do not recall ever reading the manual. It was self-explanatory. (However, one couldn’t program on it without going into much deeper water than I was prepared for. By contrast, all the CP/M machines were relatively easy to work with.)
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Analysis: why clean energy will cut UK gas imports by more than North Sea drilling • Carbon Brief

Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss and Simon Evans:

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Carbon Brief analysis shows that the UK’s gas production in the North Sea is set to drop 99% by 2050, when compared to 2025 levels, with new licences pushing this figure down only slightly to 97%. (Oil production is also in long-term decline.)

Additionally, the analysis shows that the continued expansion of renewables and low-carbon technologies offers far greater protection against volatile gas imports than new domestic drilling.

The chart below [in the article] shows how the roughly 15 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar power secured in the latest UK renewable-energy auction will avoid the need to import 78 “Q-Flex” tankers full of liquified natural gas (LNG) each year by 2030. This gas would cost roughly £4bn at current prices, which stood at 126p per therm as of 11 March.

(Gas can be either transported via pipelines or compressed into LNG and shipped across oceans, as is the case for gas coming into the UK from the US, Qatar or Algeria, for example.)

This is nearly six times more than the extra domestic gas production in 2030 if new licences are issued for North Sea drilling, according to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the UK government’s North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA).

Moreover, the 15GW of new renewables were secured in a single auction round. Another auction, likely to add significantly to this tally, is due to take place later in 2026.

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Explain it like I’m five: why is everyone on speakerphone in public? • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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A pet peeve may drive me nuts but does not appear to impact anyone else. A Ways that Technology is Changing our World story must be about something that drives a lot of people nuts.

“But where is the threshold?” I hear you asking plaintively. “It’s extremely important that I know when something crosses the line from pet peeve to important, chin-stroking journalism topic!”

Fortunately, the answer is simple. The threshold has been breached when your local public transit agency puts up a sign about the behavior in question.

Which brings me to the sign I saw yesterday in Philadelphia.

“Unless the tea [gossip] is REALLY hot, keep the call off speaker,” it said.

SEPTA, the local transit agency, runs the buses and commuter rail in Philadelphia, and you can tell from the light-hearted-but-seriously-don’t-do-this tone of the message that speakerphone-wielding passengers are now widely complained about by their fellow riders.

I share their disdain, but for me, the dark and judgmental thoughts I have when I see this behavior are also paired with confusion. Why is it happening? Do these people not know that it is actually more work to hold your phone out in front of you than up to your ear? Do they have no common decency, manners, or taste? Do they genuinely not care if everyone in the frozen foods aisle overhears them talking about Aunt Kathy’s diagnosis? It’s bizarre.

At least when it comes to something like TikTok or Spotify, there’s a certain logic. Perhaps you have no headphones but need to unwind after a long day, and you just can’t imagine anyone who might not enjoy the soothing sounds of [Harry Styles/Cannibal Corpse/Wu-Tang Clan]?

But phone calls? People: are you aware that we can hear you and the person speaking to you?

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It is strange behaviour. I blame it on The Apprentice, where in the UK every group found it obligatory to yell into a mobile phone held on speaker. The programme first aired in 2005.
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US Army approves its first new lethal hand grenade since the Vietnam Era • Military.com

Allen Frazier:

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For nearly six decades, the M67 fragmentation grenade has been the primary hand grenade American soldiers have carried into combat. That changes now.

The Army cleared the M111 Offensive Hand Grenade for full material release Tuesday, marking the first new lethal hand grenade to enter service since 1968. Developed at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., the weapon gives soldiers a purpose-built tool for urban combat, where the fragmentation grenade that has carried the force since the Vietnam War can become as dangerous to friendly troops as to the enemy.

The M111 does not rely on shrapnel to kill. Instead, it harnesses blast overpressure, a wave of force generated by detonation that behaves very differently inside a closed room than fragmentation does. Walls, doorframes and furniture offer no refuge from it.

The M67 fragmentation grenade, the round baseball-shaped weapon soldiers have carried since Vietnam, sends steel fragments outward in all directions at detonation. In the open, that makes it lethal at range. Inside a building, the same fragments can be stopped, deflected or scattered unpredictably. Anything on the other side of a thin wall is as much at risk as the intended target.

For urban combat in the modern battlespace, the M111 aims to negate enemy cover while protecting the assault troops.

“One of the key lessons learned from the door-to-door urban fighting in Iraq was that the M67 grenade wasn’t always the right tool for the job,” said Col. Vince Morris, project manager for Close Combat Systems at the Capabilities Program Executive Ammunition and Energetics. “The risk of fratricide on the other side of the wall was too high.”

The M111 addresses that problem head-on. Blast overpressure radiates through enclosed space and cannot be stopped by interior walls the way fragmentation can, creating lethal effects that reach every corner of a room.

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The joy of death. I wonder which war-that-isn’t-a-war this will first be used in.
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Grammarly is facing a class action lawsuit over its AI “expert review” feature • WIRED

Miles Klee:

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Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Julia Angwin, an award-winning investigative journalist who founded The Markup, a nonprofit news organization that covers the impact of technology on society, is the only named plaintiff in the suit, which does not call for a specific amount in damages but argues that damages across the plaintiff class are in excess of $5m. She was among the many individuals, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, offered up via Grammarly’s “Expert Review” tool as a kind of virtual editor for users.

The federal suit, filed Wednesday afternoon in the Southern District of New York, states that Angwin, on behalf of herself and others similarly situated, “challenges Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors to earn profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.”

The complaint comes as Superhuman has already decided to discontinue the feature amid significant public backlash. “After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented—or not represented at all,” said Ailian Gan, Superhuman’s director for product management, in a statement to WIRED shortly before the claim was filed.

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And what did I say a few days ago? “Grammarly is sure to find itself on the wrong end of a class lawsuit in the US because there are some big names on there.” If Grammarly is sensible, it will move to pay out on this as soon as possible, because nothing will get better from here.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Desalination plants are in widespread use in Gulf states, which rely on their output. But they haven’t been targeted in the latest conflict. Why? CC-licensed photo by GRID-Arendal 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. Salty. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The talent pipeline is collapsing. Your team will feel it next • The Long Commit

Juan Cruz Martinez:

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At the biggest tech companies, new graduates went from roughly a third of all hires in 2019 to somewhere around 7% today. In the US, entry-level hiring at the top 15 tech firms fell 25% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

The research paints an even starker picture. A Stanford Digital Economy Lab study analyzing millions of payroll records found that employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 declined nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, while employment for those over 30 held steady or grew. A Harvard study tracking 62 million workers across 285,000 firms found that when companies adopt generative AI, junior employment drops 9 to 10% within six quarters. Senior employment barely moves.

The trend isn’t limited to quiet budget decisions either. Block cut 40% of its entire workforce just weeks ago, with CEO Jack Dorsey citing AI as the reason. Those weren’t junior-specific cuts, but the underlying logic is the same one driving this whole shift: smaller teams, more AI, fewer humans. Salesforce announced it would halt engineering hiring entirely for 2025, citing AI agents. Klarna froze developer hiring in late 2023 (then reversed course when the strategy failed). A LeadDev survey found that 54% of engineering leaders plan to hire fewer juniors, thanks to AI copilots enabling seniors to handle more.

The reasoning is consistent across every boardroom version of this story: why pay a junior $80-100K plus six months of ramp-up when a senior with AI tools can cover triple the output? The math makes sense. On paper, it looks clean.

I’ve been watching this unfold for two years now, and I believe it’s one of the most short-sighted decisions a generation of engineering leaders is making simultaneously.

I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years. What concerns me isn’t the individual company choosing to slow junior hiring for a quarter or two. It’s the industry-wide retreat happening all at once, with almost no public conversation about what it costs.

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Soaring fuel prices to cast long shadow across US economy • Financial Times

Myles McCormick, Jamie Smyth, Gregory Meyer, Christian Davies and Martha Muir:

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The US energy department has warned petrol and diesel prices are unlikely to recede to prewar levels until mid-2027 at the earliest, ratcheting up costs for industries from trucking and farming to airlines and retailers.

Official figures released on Tuesday show US petrol prices rose 19% over the past two weeks to $3.50 a gallon as the Middle East conflict throttled energy supplies, while diesel jumped 28% to $4.86 a gallon.

Petrol is not forecast to drop back below its $2.94 per gallon pre-conflict level before the end of 2027, according to the Energy Information Administration, the energy department’s statistics arm. Diesel — the lifeblood of American industry — will not fall below the $3.81 per gallon it sat at two weeks ago until the middle of next year.

The shift threatens to push up costs for industry, which in turn will ratchet up prices for consumers with far-reaching inflationary impacts for the world’s largest economy.

It will also pile pressure on Donald Trump, who campaigned for the presidency in 2024 on a platform to slash petrol and energy costs. Prices at the pump are now higher than at any time during his two terms in office.

“We’ve got a lot of costs moving their way through the system,” said Tom Kloza, an independent oil analyst. “We’re looking at some really scary inflation ratings — pervasive inflation throughout the country.”

The rise in the price of refined fuel products in the US comes as Iran’s threats to strike ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz have all but halted maritime traffic in an artery through which roughly a fifth of global oil supply flows.

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The longer this goes on, the more people will ask: why exactly did the US join Israel in the attack on Iran, and what was the expected outcome, after how long? Because everything so far looks like don’t know, don’t know and don’t know. Meanwhile the adverse effects are piling up. If stock markets get spooked then venture capital money might get tighter, and then all the AI data centres get put on hold, and then the AI stimulus to the US economy goes away, and things get bad quickly.
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How my life got 100x better when i stopped thinking about Google • Joost Boer

Joost Boer:

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I started building niche websites in 2020. Within a few months, Google became the single biggest factor in my professional life. Not my skills. Not my ideas. Not the quality of my work. Google.

When 80% of your visitors come from one source, and that source can change its mind overnight with zero explanation, it shapes everything. What you write. How you write it. What you build. What you don’t build. It’s not a tool you use. It’s a landlord you try to keep happy.

…My main site, Start24, became the best resource in its niche: WordPress and web hosting reviews for Dutch beginners. Honest ratings, beautiful design, well-structured guides, fun to read. Start24 was and is a good site. Readers told me. Competitors knew it.

Core updates came and went. I wasn’t obsessively checking Search Console during them — that’s a level of anxiety I don’t need — but I was generally relaxed. Good site, good content, good rankings. The system seemed to work.

Then last year’s core update hit, and Start24 got nuked. Not “dropped a few positions.” Nuked. The kind of decline where you watch your traffic chart and wonder if the Y-axis is broken.

…I rebuilt Start24 from the ground up. Interactive content. Custom tools that actually help people make decisions. Radical honesty in reviews — not “every product is great in its own way” but “this one is genuinely bad and here’s why.” A free WordPress video course. A free WordPress theme I built myself. Dramatically better design across the board.

And Google’s response? Keywords dropped. Traffic fell. Again.

I made the site significantly better — more useful, more honest, more complete — and Google decided it deserved to rank lower. At some point during this process, something shifted. I stopped caring. Start24 was getting traffic through other channels — paid ads, direct visits, email, social. The site was doing fine. Not because of Google. Despite Google.

And once that clicked, the weight lifted.

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A lot of site owners are probably going to have this revelation as they look at their referrer traffic this year. It’s not just updates; it’s the AI summaries. Referral might be dead.
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Fake, AI-generated images and videos of the Iran war are spreading on social media • CNN Politics

Daniel Dale:

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After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes that were presented as fresh images of the war but were either photoshopped phonies or mislabeled clips taken from video games, movies, past incidents and unrelated news coverage.

Those kinds of old-fashioned fakes are now spreading again during the war against Iran. This time, they have been joined by a form of deception that wasn’t readily available in 2022: high-quality videos and still images that have been custom-created with easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools.

Ten years ago, said Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics, “there’d be like one or two fake things out there; they’d get debunked pretty fast. … Now you see hundreds of them, and they’re really realistic.” Farid added: “It’s not just realistic, it’s landing — it’s landing hard. People believe it and they’re amplifying it.”

“What has changed in the last year or so is that generative AI has become much more widely accessible,” said BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, a prominent debunker of war-related fakes, “and it’s now possible to create very believable videos and images appearing to show a significant war incident that is hard to detect to the untrained or naked eye.”

…Several fakes that have spread widely have been pushed as propaganda by pro-Iran social media accounts. The motivation behind the creation of many of the fakes, though, is hard to identify — perhaps social media views and the influence and money they can sometimes lead to, perhaps just because people were able to make them easily.

…Social media platform X did announce last week that it was taking some action to combat wartime AI fakes. Head of product Nikita Bier posted that if users who get paid by X as content “creators” spread AI-generated videos of armed conflicts without disclosing the videos were made with AI, they will be suspended from the payment program for 90 days and then permanently suspended if they commit additional violations.

Even if this policy is strictly enforced — Farid said he is skeptical — the overwhelming majority of X users are not part of the creator payment program.

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A bad problem, getting worse. Remember when there were gatekeepers and making a video involving war footage required a huge budget? Are we sure this is better?
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The usefulness of useless knowledge • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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In the 1970s, some basic ideas in supposedly useless number theory were deployed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. They developed the RSA algorithm, which enables public key cryptography, without which there would be no ecommerce. Cryptography is hardly valueless to the military, either. One never knows when useless knowledge will be useful after all.

Hardy’s number theory was not alone in being accidentally useful. In a famous article published around the same time — “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (1939) — the head of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Abraham Flexner, made the case for apparently useless research. Flexner started with the radio and the radio telegraph — remarkable inventions for which many people thanked Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize-winning engineer.

Flexner argued that the “real credit” should go to James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, who had done the fundamental research. “Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work,” wrote Flexner, adding that Marconi contributed “merely the last technical detail . . . now obsolete”.

Some more recent examples have been gathered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for its Golden Goose awards. Ten years ago, the awards recognised the Honey Bee Algorithm, which began with biologists painting tiny numbers on the backs of chilled (and thus immobile) bees, and then tracking the individual bees to figure out how they contributed to the hive’s search for nectar. Why? Because they wanted to know.

A couple of engineers became intrigued, figuring that maybe the bees had evolved a smart mechanism which the engineers might use to . . . well, do something. Perhaps they could use it to smooth the flow of traffic or suchlike. The bees had indeed evolved a clever approach, but the engineers couldn’t work out how to use it.

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Turns out they could find a use. This article will appear at timharford.com in a couple of weeks for those who aren’t FT subscribers.
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“Severe water stress”: why desalination plants are the Gulf’s greatest weakness • The Guardian

Damien Gayle:

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In 1983, the CIA determined that the most crucial commodity in the Gulf was its desalinated potable water.

Although the loss of a single plant could be handled, “successful attacks on several plants in the most dependent countries could generate a national crisis that could lead to panic flights from the country and civil unrest”. And the greatest threat to the region’s water supply? “Iran.”

That’s why, four decades later, the world held its breath on Saturday when Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, accused the US of “a blatant and desperate crime” by attacking a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, in the strait of Hormuz. “The US set this precedent, not Iran,” he said.

The US denied responsibility for the attack. But the next day, on the other side of the Gulf, Bahrain announced one of its own desalination plants had been hit. The alleged culprit: “Iranian aggression.”

It looked like the region, its cities and its industries, was poised to unravel in a frenzy of tit-for-tat assaults on critical water infrastructure. But then the attacks on desalination plants stopped. Why?

…According to the latest data, 70% of Saudi Arabia’s drinking water comes from desalination plants; in Oman the figure is 86%; the United Arab Emirates, 42%; and in Kuwait, 90%. Even Israel, which has access to the Jordan river, relies on five large coastal desalination plants for half its potable water.

Collectively, the Middle East accounts for roughly 40% of global desalinated water production, providing a combined desalination capacity of 28.96m cubic metres of water, every single day.

“In several Persian Gulf states, modern cities would simply not function without it,” said Nima Shokri, the director of the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology.

In 2026, just as in 1983, observers have pointed out that this crucial structural weak point can be used against its Arab neighbours. “Targeting desalination plants could quickly create water shortages in several Persian Gulf states,” Shokri said.

“Many cities depend on a small number of large coastal plants, meaning a successful strike could disrupt drinking water supplies within days. Unlike oil facilities, these plants cannot easily be replaced or repaired quickly. In extreme cases, governments could be forced to ration water for entire urban populations.”

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Mutually assured destruction of those plants would probably kill millions – or force the biggest human movement in history. Neither is attractive.
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America and public disorder • Chris Arnade Walks the World

Chris Arnade:

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An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the US in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.

That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the US it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the US by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the US don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can’t happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The US is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

«

Arnade has spent the past ten years (perhaps longer?) walking first across America, and more recently all sorts of countries. His comparisons have weight, because he’s seen it all. The article is a dispiriting journey through the battered soul of America’s urban battleground. But he does offer a solution, of sorts.
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Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

»

Amazon’s ecommerce business summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.

The note ahead of Tuesday’s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss.

Amazon’s website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous “software code deployment”. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices.

Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives” the group hopes will limit future outages.

«

What? AI-written code isn’t the most trustworthy thing in the world? Heaven forfend.
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UK fights to keep Gatwick drone disaster report redacted • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner’s decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos.

Government sources confirmed the development to The Register this week – the latest in a series of attempts made by the DfT to prevent the “Lessons Report” document from being released in full.

This incident review document is likely to provide greater detail about what exactly happened during the 2018 disruption at London Gatwick Airport, which prevented around 800 flights from taking off, affecting around 120,000 passengers. Officials blamed the situation on drone sightings, although experts disagree.

The DfT has also allegedly attempted to conceal the document’s existence, despite requests made under Freedom of Information laws explicitly seeking its release.

Ian Hudson is one of the few drone experts committed to uncovering further details about the Gatwick incident, and he has filed hundreds of these requests since 2018, including those that revealed the document’s existence.

Hudson has fought for the document’s release since May 2024. In responding to one of his requests in July 2024, Hudson believes the DfT tried to conceal the document. The response ignored parts of the request pertaining to the Lessons Report, only answering other questions by saying the information was already in the public domain.

Follow-up requests made later that year revealed that the DfT had five versions of the Lessons Report document. However, the department refused to release it based on national security grounds and upheld this decision following an internal review.

«

The 2018 incident was never properly explained, and perhaps the DfT is hoping that everyone has forgotten it. Clearly some haven’t.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The A4 flyover at Brentford is more than 60 years old, and problems with it emerged almost immediately – and have only got worse since. CC-licensed photo by stevekeiretsu 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. Overlooked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Missing money, shipped chips and a 350,000% profit: key takeaways on AI “phantom investments” • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

A Guardian investigation has examined a series of massive AI investments announced by the government over the past two years, comparing what was promised with what has so far been delivered.

The investigation centres on two companies backed by the chipmaker Nvidia and central to the UK’s AI plans, Nscale and CoreWeave.

It has found that large, promised sums do not represent real investments into the UK’s economy, that new datacentres are not in fact new, and that a giant supercomputer set to be online later this year is still being used by a construction company in Essex.

Here are some of the key details at a glance.

1. A supercomputer centre set to be built this year is still a scaffolding yard in Loughton
The Guardian visited a site in Essex that is supposed to host “one of the most powerful AI computing centres ever built”, built by Nscale. The government and Nscale say this supercomputer is supposed to be up by the end of this year.

The site is still being used as a scaffolding yard by a different company. While Nscale said more than a year ago that it had already bought the site, land records seem to show that it is not registered as the owner of the land. Nscale is very unlikely to finish constructing a “top tier” supercomputer there this year.

2. The UK government has not checked the numbers when it comes to massive AI investments
The Guardian asked the government about key investments worth billions of pounds, including from Nscale and CoreWeave. The government said that these numbers came from the companies themselves, and that it had no mechanism in place to audit them. It could not say what these investments involved: equipment, capital or something else.

Asked about a contract it said had been signed to build the supercomputer in Loughton, the government did not answer. Instead, it said the entire related investment, $2.5bn, did not involve a formal contract, but an intention to commit capital.

«

There’s plenty more, all of it card-shuffling that would do a magician proud. The more closely one looks at all of the AI investments, the less real they seem to be; Potemkin financial villages.
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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

Jay Graber is stepping down as head of Bluesky, the social media platform exclusively announced to WIRED. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will be the interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a statement about the personnel change.

Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company’s first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform’s remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X.

Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky “become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks.”

Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the WordPress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky’s leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.”

This isn’t the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company’s chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky’s technology stack rather than its business operations.

«

Graber and the moderation team have not been treated nicely by the users of the network, to put it mildly. It’s going to be quite the popcorn moment watching the reaction to a VC who will undoubtedly be looking to make Bluesky wash its face, financially speaking. What are the options? Advertising will be a tough sell (to both advertisers and users); and what is the compelling offering for subscriptions?
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The forever bottleneck, part 1 • The roads.org.uk blog

Chris Marshall:

»

If you’re familiar with the M4 in West London, you’ll know only too well the narrow viaduct at Brentford. A three-lane motorway narrows to two lanes on the way in to London, resulting in a near-permanent traffic jam.

Just arrived, over on the website, is the complete booklet published in 1964 to mark the opening of this section of motorway, which ran from Chiswick to Langley (J1-5). It’s the latest addition to my collection of these commemorative publications.

Like all these booklets, it’s a fascinating window into another world. It offers photographs of the motorway under construction – including, most notably, that long elevated viaduct above the Great West Road through Brentford.

The booklet is understandably very proud of this feature: it was completely unique in the UK when it first opened, and considered a real achievement, not least since it had been built while traffic continued to flow on the A4 underneath. But that pride didn’t last long. Just eight years after it opened, the panel of the Layfield Inquiry described it like this:

»

“Present traffic on this road clearly demonstrates…the inadequacy of the dual 2 lane elevated section in the Chiswick/Brentford area. [The Ministry of Transport] gave evidence which indicated that widening of the present elevated road, either elevated or at ground level, was not possible within limits of conceivable expenditure.”

«

Because this brand-new road was already a problem, and the problem could not be solved, the panel had to conclude:

»

“It is clear that the M4 will have to be included in the primary principal road network, but clear also that every effort must be made to reduce or reroute some of the traffic it now carries…”

«

Within a decade of opening, planners wanted to encourage traffic away from the M4, thanks to a design flaw that could not be fixed. Something had gone very wrong.

«

Absolutely fascinating post (and only the first on the topic!) about a piece of road that almost everyone will have driven along, because it’s part of the arterial road from London to the west.

Read it if only for the solution to de-icing: can’t use salt as that would be bad for the concrete and iron rebar, so it had embedded electrical heating. With a demand of 8 MEGAWATTS: “at the UK’s current electricity prices would cost about £2,000 per hour to run.” Soon abandoned; salt was used instead, with deleterious results.
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Anthropic’s AI hacked the Firefox browser. It found a lot of bugs • WSJ

Robert McMillan:

»

It took Anthropic’s most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess.

The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox’s developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? “What else do you have? Send us more,” said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox’s parent organization.

Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said. 

Tools powered by AI are increasingly adept at spotting vulnerabilities and are beginning to rival the talents of seasoned security experts. Some experts worry that those same capabilities will unleash a new wave of cyberattacks as bugs are discovered and then exploited more quickly than ever before.

Claude’s bug bonanza began after Anthropic’s security team decided that it would be interesting to focus its software on a widely used and complex piece of browser software that has been under the microscope for years.

Firefox is the modern version of the Web’s first commercial browser, Netscape Navigator. Its code is now managed under the umbrella of the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. Navigator launched its first bug bounty program more than 30 years ago, offering cash to those who identify potential weaknesses that bad actors could abuse. Mozilla typically pays as much as $6,000 for high-severity bugs. 

In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered “high severity.” That means that if the right “exploit code” had been created, they could have been used in a widespread attack on Firefox’s users.

…AI tools are both a blessing and a curse for software developers. In January, the makers of Curl software abandoned their own bug bounty program, citing “an explosion in AI slop reports.” Fewer than one in 20 bugs reported in 2025 were actually real, said Daniel Stenberg, Curl’s lead developer.

«

That’s the real problem: they’re great at highlighting what they think are bugs, but are they really? In Firefox yes; in curl no. Or m,aybe vice-versa? You’d really want the LLM to write some exploit code to demonstrate it, but that opens a whole new can of worms; Pandora’s bug reporter has been opened.
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X suspends 800m accounts in one year amid ‘massive’ scale of manipulation attempts • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform.

The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China.

As part of the battle against such content, X suspended 800m accounts in 2024 for breaching its rules on platform manipulation and spam, although it did not reveal which of those suspensions related to foreign interference. X has approximately 300 million monthly users worldwide.

Wifredo Fernández, a government affairs executive at the platform’s parent company, X Corp, said: “There are efforts every single day to create inauthentic networks of accounts.”

Speaking to MPs on the foreign affairs committee via video link on Monday, Fernández said attempts to manipulate the platform or flood it with spam had not subsided and “several hundred million accounts” had been taken down in the latter part of last year as well. Fernández added he was “quite confident” that the remaining accounts on X were authentic.

X defines manipulative accounts as those that engage in “bulk, aggressive or disruptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience”. It refers to spam as “unsolicited, repeated actions” that affect other accounts, often meaning a stream of low-quality content.

«

So you’re saying there are lots and lots and lots and LOTS of bots on the platform? Useful to know.
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US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by US military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned. The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals.

Last week, Google revealed that over the course of 2025, it discovered that a sophisticated iPhone-hacking toolkit had been used in a series of global attacks. The toolkit, dubbed “Coruna” by its original developer, was made of 23 different components first used “in highly targeted operations” by an unnamed government customer of an unspecified “surveillance vendor.” It was then used by Russian government spies against a limited number of Ukrainians and finally by Chinese cybercriminals “in broad-scale” campaigns with the goal of stealing money and cryptocurrency. 

Researchers at mobile cybersecurity company iVerify, which independently analyzed Coruna, said they believed it may have been originally built by a company that sold it to the US government.

Two former employees of government contractor L3Harris told TechCrunch that Coruna was, at least in part, developed by the company’s hacking and surveillance tech division, Trenchant. The two former employees both had knowledge of the company’s iPhone hacking tools. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about their work for the company.

“Coruna was definitely an internal name of a component,” said one former L3Harris employee, who was familiar with iPhone hacking tools as part of their work at Trenchant. 

«

Give it a few years we’ll probably all have a copy, at the rate this seems to be getting handed around.
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Insider trading is going to get people killed • The Atlantic

Saahil Desai:

»

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky.

The attacks in Venezuela and Iran—like so many military campaigns—were conducted under the guise of secrecy. You don’t swoop in on an adversary when they know you are coming. The Venezuela raid was reportedly so confidential that Pentagon officials did not know about its exact timing until a few hours before President Trump gave the orders.

…Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. Perhaps Iran would have launched its own preemptive strikes, targeting military bases across the Middle East. Six American service members have already died from Iran’s drone attacks in the region; the death toll could have been higher if Iran had struck first. In other words, someone’s idea of a get-rich-quick scheme may have ended with a military raid gone horribly awry. (The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.)

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.”

«

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CFO gets prison time after losing $35m of company money in crypto side hustle • Decrypt

Stephen Graves:

»

A Washington man has been sentenced to two years in prison after diverting $35m in funds from his former employer to his own DeFi platform—and losing nearly all of it.

Nevin Shetty, 42, was found guilty of wire fraud last November for taking and misusing funds from the private software company at which he worked.

Shetty, who drafted a “conservative” company investment policy, secretly moved $35m in company funds to his side business HighTower Treasury, after being told in April 2022 that his role as CFO would end due to performance issues. Those funds were then invested in high-yield DeFi lending protocols that promised returns of 20% or more.

Per the DOJ’s statement, Shetty planned to pay his employer a “comparatively small, fixed amount,” keeping the remainder of the returns for HighTower. Initially, the scheme paid off, earning some $133,000 in its first month for Shetty and his HighTower business partner.

The wheels came off in May 2022, following the Terra collapse and the subsequent crypto winter, with Shetty’s HighTower crypto investments plummeting in value from $35m to near zero.

After confessing to colleagues at his employer, Shetty was fired from the company, which, according to trial judge Tana Lin, suffered “significant and severe effects” as a result of his theft, adding that his actions “almost put the company out of business.”

«

Two years, but the prosecution was looking for nine. Hard to know if longer jail terms are really a deterrent to rank stupidity combined with venality and, one suspects, a bit of resentment about the company letting him go the first time.
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Musk’s spam frustration was ‘confusing’ to ex-Twitter executives • Bloomberg via BloombergLaw

Isiah Poritz and Kurt Wagner:

»

Two former top executives at Twitter Inc. sought to beat back Elon Musk’s narrative at a jury trial that they lied to him about the makeup of the platform’s user base when he was purchasing the company in 2022.

Parag Agrawal, who was chief executive officer, and Ned Segal, the chief financial officer, took the witness stand Friday in an investor trial over Musk’s tumultuous $44 billion buyout of the company.

But the two men, both of whom were fired right as Musk took control of the social networking platform, offered few detailed recollections of the chaotic weeks surrounding his attempt to back out of the deal and stopped short of criticizing his behavior.

Agrawal was asked for his reaction to Musk’s May 13, 2022, tweet at the heart of the case stating the purchase agreement was “temporarily on hold.” Testifying Friday in jeans and a t-shirt, Agrawal was brief, saying, “It did not make sense to me.”

Segal, who testified most of Thursday, also was concise. “I was displeased,” was his only reaction to another tweet from Musk blasting Twitter’s methodology for counting how much of its user base was fake accounts, or bots.

The investors claim Musk’s public bashing of the company was actually an effort to drive down the stock price and gain himself a better bargaining position.

The two days of testimony from Agrawal and Segal pushed back on Musk’s own recollection that he was always committed to the deal, but genuinely believed that Twitter had lied to him about the percentage of spam accounts.

Musk told the jury he was “stunned” that Agrawal, Segal and other Twitter executives could not provide more details about the bot count methodology during their first meeting on May 6 after signing the acquisition agreement. Musk said the bot issue was important, likening it to investigating a termite infestation while purchasing a house.

«

If that’s what Musk thinks the problem is like, he’s definitely let it completely undermine the foundations since then.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The maths behind mammograms is complicated – and the human stories they hide even more so. CC-licensed photo by Kristie Wells 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. Pre-screened. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Gone (almost) phishin’ • Ma.tt

Matt Mullenweg:

»

This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes.

One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account—a technique Brian Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set.

What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammers actually contacted Apple Support themselves, pretending to be me, and opened a real case claiming I’d lost my phone and needed to update my number. That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers. These were legitimate; no filter on earth could have caught them.

Then “Alexander from Apple Support” called. He was calm, knowledgeable, and careful. His first moves were solid security advice: check your account, verify nothing’s changed, consider updating your password. He was so good that I actually thanked him for being excellent at his job.

That, of course, was when he moved into the next phase of the attack. He texted me a link to review and cancel the “pending request.” The site, audit-apple.com, was a pixel-perfect Apple replica, and displayed the exact case ID from the real emails I’d just received. There was even a fake chat transcript of the scammers’ actual conversation with Apple, presented back to me as evidence of the attack against my account. At the bottom of the page was a Sign in with Apple button that he told me to use.

I started poking at the page and noticed I could enter any case ID and get the same result. Nothing was being validated. It was all theater.

“This is really good,” I told Alexander. “This is obviously phishing. So tell me about the scam.”

Silence. *Click*.

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One can hope that all readers will spot that Apple won’t call you, because none of these companies is going to do that. They’d never be off the phone if they did.
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The salaries of 60 New Yorkers • NY Mag

The Editors:

»

The last time we surveyed New Yorkers about their paychecks, the math was easy. Well, easier. In 2005, a blogger at Gawker made $30,000 and the CEO at Lehman Brothers more than $35m. Back then, there was no “gig economy,” at least not as we know it today, and coffee shops from Bed-Stuy to the Upper East Side weren’t lousy with model–pickleballer–nanny–actor–producer–DJ–creative directors.

Some 20 years later, amid a radically different economic environment in which the nature of work feels as if it’s about to change forever, we set out to conduct a similar experiment. We reached into our network of sources, blind-messaged LinkedIn profiles, put out a casting call on Instagram, even stopped strangers in Union Square. What we discovered, just before a jobs report earlier this month confirmed a dwindling labor market, is that salaries across most industries have not kept up with inflation in a city that has become exorbitantly expensive. For so many professionals we spoke with, some of whom agreed to pose for the paper-bag portraits in this story, the answer to stalling wages and cost-of-living expenses is hanging out their own shingle and juggling freelance projects and social-media collaborations.

«

The numbers in here are amazing. Manhattan dog walker. Psychoanalyst. Pastor. Ghostwriter. Head of engineering at an AI startup. Sex worker. Not in that order: $325,000, $450,000, $92,000, $284,000, $67,200, $165,000. (See if you can guess which is which.) Worth reading for the human stories they contain.
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2023: Why I’m not worried about AI causing mass unemployment

Timothy B. Lee, writing in April 2023:

»

The startups that best fit the “software eating the world” thesis [of Marc Andreessen in 2011] are probably “sharing economy” companies like Bird, DoorDash, Instacart, Lime, Lyft, Uber, and WeWork. Each of these companies use software to offer services in the “real world”—taxi rides, scooter rentals, food delivery, lodging, office space, and so forth. They enjoyed a lot of hype in the mid-2010s, and most of them have struggled in the last few years.

Some of them have been total fiascos. WeWork failed to disrupt commercial real estate. Shares in the scooter startup Bird have lost 97% of their value since the company went public less than two years ago. Last year I drove for Lyft for a week and wrote about its difficulty in turning a profit. 

The two most successful “sharing economy” startups are probably Airbnb (founded in 2008) and Uber (founded in 2009). These companies are each worth tens of billions of dollars, and they seem likely to be enduring, profitable businesses.

Still, Airbnb has only a modest share of the overall lodging industry. And in recent years, the quality of Uber’s service has deteriorated, with higher fees and longer wait times. Smartphone-based ride hailing is a marginal improvement over conventional taxis, but hasn’t been a revolution.

In his 2011 essay, Andreessen specifically mentions health care and education as industries ripe for disruption by software. But as far as I can see that hasn’t happened. Hospitals increasingly use computers for record-keeping and billing and software has been used to make new drugs and medical devices. Many people learn foreign languages using Duolingo or watch educational videos on YouTube. But people largely go to the same schools and hospitals they did 10 or 20 years ago.

The reason I’m relitigating this 12-year-old argument is that I hear echoes of it in contemporary discussions of AI. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley thought leaders looked at the early success of companies like Airbnb and Uber, extrapolated wildly, and concluded that software was going to transform the entire economy. Today, AI thought leaders are looking at the early success of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, extrapolating wildly, and concluding that AI software is going to transform the economy and put tons of people out of work.

To be clear, I do think AI is going to be a big deal. I wouldn’t have started an AI newsletter otherwise. But as with the Internet, I expect the impact to be concentrated in information-focused industries and occupations. And most of the American economy is not information-focused

«

Lee is still insistent about this point: he reiterated it on Monday.
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The screening machine • Tablet Magazine

Mo Perry is a journalist and actor:

»

The battles play out all day, every day, in our feeds, where there’s an influencer for every temperament. Whatever your position on the trustworthiness of the medical establishment, there’s someone posting online or yammering on a podcast ready to support or refute you, armed with studies, stats, and anecdotes. Each can be compelling in isolation. Taken together, their contradictory messages—all delivered with evangelical certitude—can be dizzying.

Peptides. Ivermectin. Universal Hepatitis B vaccines for newborns. Raw milk. MRNA technology. All contested, all fraught. [They’re only “contested” if you don’t understand science – Overspill Ed.]

Mammograms are no different. On one side there are people like Dr. Thais Aliabadi, a board-certified OB-GYN and doctor to the stars, telling millions of “Huberman Lab” podcast listeners her story of getting a routine mammogram that led to a biopsy deemed benign, followed by a risk calculation (based on factors like family history, age at first menses, and age at first childbirth) that pegged her lifetime chance of breast cancer at 37%. Convinced that wasn’t a number she could live with, she fought for a prophylactic double mastectomy. When the pathologists examined the removed tissue, they found a small, previously invisible cancer in one breast—proof, in her telling, that more aggressive screening and preventative surgery had saved her life.

On the other side is Dr. Jenn Simmons, a former breast surgeon turned functional-medicine entrepreneur who regularly tells her more than 100,000 followers that mammograms have never been shown to save lives, that many mastectomies performed in the wake of screening are unnecessary products of overdiagnosis and fear, and that the radiation from mammograms can cause the very cancers women are trying to detect. She urges women toward diet and lifestyle overhaul, “terrain” testing, and radiation-free QT ultrasounds at her centers instead.

Between these poles sits the US Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine that issues recommendations about clinical preventive services. It doesn’t endorse risk calculators or supplemental screening. Its guidance is almost comically bland by comparison: biennial mammograms for women between 40 and 74, full stop.

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In the UK, the guidance is an invitation every three years for all women aged between 50 and 70, so clearly there’s room for nuance (or statistical variation in populations and diets). Perry’s general point – that doctors like mammograms because it means they’re doing something – is reasonable. “Surgeons like to do surgery,” as my GP said to me when I mentioned having some adverse effects from an elective arthroscopy. “They’re not going to turn down the opportunity.”
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Epic and Google have signed a special deal for a new class of ‘metaverse’ apps • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Epic Games and Google are burying the hatchet, but documents released today reveal that they aren’t only aligned on how Google is shaking things up for app stores. The two companies have also agreed to terms about a new class of apps that they’re calling “metaverse browsers,” according to a heavily redacted section of a revised binding term sheet.

While the term “metaverse” has largely fallen out of favour — Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is now much more interested in AI — Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been talking for years about the metaverse and how it might work in the future. (Depending on how you define the concept, Epic’s Fortnite is already arguably one of the biggest versions of a metaverse.) And this actually isn’t the first time there has been a connection with Epic and Google about the metaverse; in court in January, when discussing a secret $800m Unreal Engine and services deal, Sweeney blurted out that the agreement related to the metaverse.

Unfortunately, the redactions in the revised binding term sheet cover up a lot of the key details about what a metaverse browser actually is. But from what’s visible in the document, metaverse browsers will:

• “have the primary purpose of allowing the navigation and exploration of metaverse worlds;”
• “support virtual items and identity that are portable across different worlds in the metaverse browser; and”
• “must support modern security considerations including Sandbox capabilities, limitations on code execution, and secure connections.”

«

Oh please, can’t we just put the metaverse out of our misery?
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One hundred accounts are behind the majority of conspiracy theory content in Canada • National Observer

Rory White:

»

Conspiracy theories about globalist cabals, climate hoaxes and election fraud may seem ubiquitous on social media. But a report published on Monday by the Media Ecosystem Observatory has found that they come from a tiny minority of users.

According to the report, just 100 users were responsible for almost 70% of online conspiracy posts from influential accounts they examined in Canada.

The researchers analyzed over 14 million social media posts from accounts in Canada, and found that 87% of conspiratorial claims come from influencers. Users on Elon Musk’s X were the biggest culprits.

These influencers are having an outsized impact in the physical world as well as online. Local governments across Canada are facing a wave of “larger scale conspiracy theories” overwhelming council meetings, according to Zoe Grams, executive director of Climate Caucus. This has led some politicians to avoid mentioning climate change altogether for fear of provoking a backlash.

“It’s about the permission structure of how we treat each other and how we treat our democratic institutions, which I think conspiracy theories are really undermining,” said Grams.

Local governments across Canada face a wave of “larger scale conspiracy theories” overwhelming council meetings, according to Zoe Grams, executive director of Climate Caucus. This has led some politicians to avoid mentioning certain topics altogether

The report from the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto, did not name the accounts responsible for spreading conspiracy theories. But an analyst at the organization gave some clues. “A lot of them are part of a network. They often know each other and engage with each other’s content,” said Mathieu Lavigne. 

While the conspiracy theory posts were viewed billions of times, only a small minority of Canadians fell for them.

«

Once again, one has to wonder what the world would be like if social media were optimised to reward accuracy rather than virality.
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OpenAI robotics leader resigns over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons • Fortune

Sharon Goldman:

»

Caitlin Kalinowski, who had been leading hardware and robotic engineering teams at OpenAI since November 2024, announced she has left the company.

“I resigned from OpenAI,” she posted on X and LinkedIn. “I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”

Her departure comes amid an escalating dispute over how far AI companies should go in supporting U.S. military uses of the technology. In recent days, negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic collapsed after the company pushed for strict limits on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Soon after, OpenAI reached its own agreement with the Defense Department to deploy its models on a classified government network.

The move drew criticism from some employees and observers who argued that OpenAI appeared to step in after Anthropic refused the terms. CEO Sam Altman later acknowledged the deal’s rollout looked “opportunistic,” and the company has since moved to clarify restrictions on how its systems can be used by the military.

«

It’s very noticeable how easily the AI companies have agreed to the use of their technology for military purposes, while the earlier incarnations of Google and Microsoft were chary of doing so.
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The social media discoverability problem • Sam Randa

Sam Randa:

»

At its best, algorithmic feeds feel like wandering through a city street. Stimuli is varied, accessible, and acts as a jumping off point for engaging with new communities. But for those of us not privileged enough (or in my case, too privileged) to spend adolescence in lively, diverse urban areas, social media formed a decent alternative. I don’t think the problem lies in algorithmic discovery, but the specific corporate incentives to keep users on their platforms no matter what.

I feel like many of the people pushing towards a federated, conscious, intentional web landscape tend to know who they are and what they want out of the internet. It’s an easy thing to forget going through if you’ve worked with computers for multiple decades, but as someone whose “real” identity only started to crystallize in high school during the pandemic, it’s fresh in my mind. Though I have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, I still feel a pretty strong pull towards “the platform”, and my visions for a healthier internet include it.

The future is the piece I’m the least sure of. It’s obvious that algorithmic feeds have a lot to do with plenty of incredibly harmful societal effects: the dissemination of fake news and misinformation on Facebook that shaped the 2016 Trump campaign, Instagram’s impact on the self-image of teenage girls, the proliferation of brain rot and rage bait content across all of short-form video, and the pull that young men feel towards radicalization as a misplaced response to the struggles they face. All of these are completely separate from the deep privacy concerns of trading your personal information for participation in a platform. But, there’s something to be said about having a wide variety of interests, people, and culture thrown at you that, in a small way, makes up for an upbringing that doesn’t.

«

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“My invention makes ocean plastic the world’s cheapest problem to solve” • The Times

Ben Spencer:

»

The global plastic pollution crisis could be solved within 15 years and for less than $1 billion, according to an ambitious plan to stop litter getting into the oceans.

Boyan Slat, an inventor, environmentalist and the chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organisation, argues that to call his plan a bargain would be to sell it short.

“It is the world’s cheapest problem to solve,” the 31-year-old said. “If we’re off by a factor of two or three, it’s still the cheapest world problem. Even if we’re off by a factor of 100, it’s still the cheapest world problem.”

But, crucially, he added: “It’s not solved yet. We still need to raise a significant amount of money, and there is a big execution challenge.”

His confidence relies on research that suggests that stopping pollution in just 30 cities around the world will cut a third of the plastic waste that enters the oceans. Slat plans to tackle these first 30 cities by 2030 at a cost of $350m (£260m).

His method uses floating barriers to trap plastic in the cities’ rivers. If it cannot be scooped up by traditional excavators, “interceptors” — autonomous boats with conveyor belts — are sent to gather the waste and send it for recycling or disposal.

The momentum from that would enable the charity to stop 90% of floating plastic from entering the ocean by 2040, and to clear up the “legacy” waste, particularly in hotspots such as the “great Pacific garbage patch” — an accumulation of about 100,000 tonnes floating between Hawaii and California. In total, he believes, it would cost less than $1bn.

“So 2040 is our publicly stated goal to get to 90%, but I think we can go faster than that, depending on how things go in the next few years.”

Slat, who grew up in the Dutch city of Delft, dropped out of his degree in aerospace engineering after one semester to set up his project. “I realised if I wanted to make this a success, I needed to dedicate all my time to this.”

«

So many problems have this shape: a few individuals are associated with the highest cost. It’s true for crime, for homelessness, and clearly for waste plastic. As he says, it’s comparatively cheap to do. Why doesn’t anyone listen?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK burnt as much coal in 2025 as in the years when Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first performed, despite the population being nearly 20 times larger. CC-licensed photo by Jens Naehler 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. Reduced to a bit part. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta hit with a class action lawsuit over smart glasses’ privacy claims • Engadget

Karissa Bell:

»

Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its AI glasses following reports about the company’s use of human contractors to review footage captured from users’ glasses. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta’s claims about the devices’ privacy features have misled users.

The lawsuit comes after a Swedish newspaper reported that subcontractors in Kenya have raised concerns about viewing footage recorded via Ray-Ban Meta glasses. According to Svenska Dagbladet, workers have reported witnessing “intimate” material, including bathroom visits, sexual encounters and other private details as part of their job labeling objects in videos captured on users’ smart glasses.

“This nationwide class action seeks to hold Meta responsible for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline,” the lawsuit, filed by Clarkson Law Firm, states. The filing names two individuals who live in California and New Jersey who purchased Meta’s smart glasses. It says that both “relied” on Meta’s marketing claims about the glasses’ privacy protecting features and that they would not have purchased them if they knew about the company’s use of contractors. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief.

A spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Engadget that data from its smart glasses can be shared with human contractors in some cases. The company declined to comment on the claims in the lawsuit.

“Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands free, to answer questions about the world around you,” the spokesperson said. “Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do…”

«

“Other people do it so it must be OK for us to do it” is not really the powerful argument that Meta seems to hope. Note though that a class action lawsuit won’t get it to change its policy; only pay out on it, if found culpable. To force a change in policy you’d need some part of government to take action. No sign of that so far.
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The new Apple finally begins to emerge • Parker Ortolani

Parker Ortolani:

»

It’s official. Apple’s added Steve Lemay and Molly Anderson to their executive leadership page. After much drama following Alan Dye’s departure, the company has decided to not only elevate the two designers but give them the kind of platform that they deserve. They’re now listed right alongside folks like Tim Cook and John Ternus.

I think it’s no secret that many of us have come to agree that Apple’s been a bit lost the past few years. Between Vision Pro, Apple Intelligence, tone deaf advertisements, and debates over software quality, there’s been a sense that a change needs to happen. I care about Apple holistically, as a living breathing entity not just their products. So who is running the joint matters to me. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the same week we get a radically different kind of Mac, we also see the executive leadership page get a revamp.

Molly Anderson’s already proven herself to be an incredibly talented industrial designer. She’s been at Apple for over a decade, but she recently became the face of ID doing voiceover for the iPhone 17 Pro reveal. If the latest iPhones and the MacBook Neo are the first real fruits of her leadership, that bodes incredibly well for the future. And mind you, she’s also in charge of accessories and packaging. I think she might just turn out to be exactly the kind of person that Apple hardware needs to inject a breath of fresh air.

The same goes for Steve Lemay, who I know so many people are excited to see takeover human interface. Liquid Glass has been so poorly received that knowing a true Apple veteran with deep knowledge of HI is now in charge has been the best kind of whiplash. Lemay has been at Apple for 27 years and has a track record that implies the future of Apple software under his leadership is extraordinarily bright.

«

The MacBook Neo has surely been under development for longer than the few months since Alan Dye left, but it’s true that highlighting Lemay and Anderson is encouraging. What I found most notable about last week’s announcements was that the person who was given the quotes in the press release about the Neo was… John Ternus, the person everyone is tipping as the future replacement for Tim Cook.
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Let it flow: agentic crafting on rock and roll • ArXiv

Weixun Wang, XiaoXiao Xu et al work at Alibaba and other (undocumented?) Chinese organisations, and were working on getting agentic systems to work:

»

When rolling out the instances for the trajectory, we encountered an unanticipated—and operationally consequential—class of unsafe behaviours that arose without any explicit instruction and, more troublingly, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox.

Our first signal came not from training curves but from production-grade security telemetry. Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from our training servers. The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity. We initially treated this as a conventional security incident (e.g., misconfigured egress controls or external compromise).

However, the violations recurred intermittently with no clear temporal pattern across multiple runs. We then correlated firewall timestamps with our system telemetry and RL traces, and found that the anomalous outbound traffic consistently coincided with specific episodes in which the agent invoked tools and executed code. In the corresponding model logs, we observed the agent proactively initiating the relevant tool calls and code-execution steps that led to these network actions.

Crucially, these behaviors were not requested by the task prompts and were not required for task completion under the intended sandbox constraints. Together, these observations suggest that during iterative RL optimisation, a language-model agent can spontaneously produce hazardous, unauthorized behaviors at the tool-calling and code-execution layer, violating the assumed execution boundary.

In the most striking instance, the agent established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address—an outbound-initiated remote access channel that can effectively neutralize ingress filtering and erode supervisory control. We also observed the unauthorised repurposing of provisioned GPU capacity for cryptocurrency mining, quietly diverting compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure.

Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunnelling or mining; instead, they emerged as instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization.

«

In other words: despite not having any instructions to do so, the agent started using parts of the network to mine cryptocurrency. For itself? For its controllers? We don’t know, and there’s no way to know even if it tells you, because how can you trust that?
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Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year • TechCrunch

Julie Bort:

»

The $7m in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.”

Yet his post on X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he told TechCrunch his ARR in the first place.
Lee says in that same post that he “got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, did not expect an article about it.”

But that call occurred because Cluely’s public relations representative emailed TechCrunch and offered to make Lee available for a story. On Friday, Jun 27, 2025 at 8:38 a.m., Cluely’s PR person sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin that said, “I’d love to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether for a deeper dive into Cluely’s next phase or a fresh angle on his vision, we’d be happy to make it happen.”

Temkin agreed. The PR representative shared Lee’s number and confirmed that he was expecting the call. After a few attempts to reach him, Lee answered the call and gave the interview, as had been arranged.

TechCrunch was interested in talking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the “cheat-on-everything” phenomenon — a viral startup that let users secretly look up answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Lee published a viral post on X saying he had been suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers.

«

Very much “My ‘I’ve only been blatantly dishonest once in public’ T-shirt has people asking questions which are answered by my T-shirt.”
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Grammarly is using our identities without permission • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason: one of them was my boss. [The original text here incorrectly used an em dash rather than a colon. If you’re wondering where chatbots get their bad style, tech writers, you don’t have to look too far – Overspill Ed.]

The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren, none of whom gave Grammarly permission to include them in the “expert reviews.”

The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.

The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work.

In a statement to The Verge, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Grammarly parent company Superhuman, commented: “The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.”

«

Notably, there’s no place where you can find out who is in Grammarly’s list except by signing up for Grammarly. This is obviously an abuse of identity, though, and Grammarly is sure to find itself on the wrong end of a class lawsuit in the US because there are some big names on there.
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The war on Iran puts global chip supplies and AI expansion at risk • WIRED

Carla Sertin:

»

South Korean officials have warned that the US-Israel war with Iran could hit the global semiconductor supply chain if it disrupts the flow of critical industrial materials from the Middle East.

South Korea’s semiconductor sector, led by giants like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, produces about two-thirds of the world’s memory chips. If the Middle East’s supply of chipmaking materials is disrupted, semiconductor production could slow unless alternative sources are found quickly.

One material at risk is helium, which is essential in chip manufacturing for managing heat, detecting leaks, and maintaining stable temperatures in fabrication equipment. For many of these uses, there is no real substitute.

About 38% of the world’s helium is produced by Qatar, where large extraction facilities are tied to the natural gas industry. This concentration means that disruptions can quickly ripple through the global supply chain.

National oil company QatarEnergy declared force majeure on March 4, after stopping its gas production and downstream operations due to ongoing attacks. Downstream facilities turn gas into other products, including urea, polymers, methanol, and aluminum.

South Korea’s Industry Ministry said the country also depends on the Middle East for 14 other materials in chipmaking, such as bromine and some chip-inspection equipment. While some of these materials can be sourced domestically or from other markets, shifting suppliers in the semiconductor sector is difficult because chipmakers need to test and validate new sources to meet strict purity standards.

Companies say the situation is manageable for now. As reported by Reuters, SK Hynix said it has secured diverse supply chains and maintains sufficient helium inventories, adding that there is “almost no chance” its operations would be affected in the near term.

Contract chipmaker TSMC similarly said it does not currently anticipate a significant impact, while GlobalFoundries stated it is in direct contact with suppliers and has mitigation plans in place.

«

Even so: semiconductor supply chain gets hit, AI flywheel slows down, US economy slows down (two-thirds of its current growth depends on AI), everything gets very bad economically because when the US economy sneezes, the world economy catches a cold.
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The NAND crisis is now worse than DRAM; Samsung is doubling prices for the second quarter in a row • WCCF Tech

Muhammad Zuhair:

»

The PC industry is set to face another crisis from memory suppliers, and after being disrupted by AI customers’ demand for DRAM, it appears NAND is next. According to a report by the Korean media outlet Sedaily, Samsung now plans to hike prices by a whopping 100% in Q2, following a similar hike in Q1.

This means that the Korean giant alone has raised NAND pricing by more than 200% this year, indicating that products dependent on NAND chips will become significantly more expensive, if not unaffordable. And, if you have guessed it, these hikes are directly targeted towards the AI industry.

It is reported that NAND prices alone have surged by 450% last year, driven not just by demand from the AI sector, but also by manufacturers’ struggle to balance DRAM and NAND production. However, in recent times, the role of NAND chips has become much more significant in AI workloads, and, as we have highlighted previously, SSDs are now used in mainstream AI racks such as Vera Rubin to handle long-context workloads.

With this, suppliers like Samsung, SanDisk, SK hynix, and Kioxia are now planning extensive price hikes, hoping they don’t miss out on hyperscaler demand.

«

“Memory” comes in more than one form, and the NAND crunch was always predictable.
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How I dropped our production database and now pay 10% more for AWS • Alexey On Data

Alexey Grigorev:

»

I’m working on expanding the AI Shipping Labs website and wanted to migrate its current version from static GitHub Pages to AWS. And later, replace the original Next.js setup with a Django version.

My gradual plan was:

1: Move the current static site from GitHub Pages to AWS S3
2: Move DNS to AWS so the domain is fully managed there
3: Deploy the new Django version on a subdomain
4: When everything works, switch the main domain to Django

This way, everything would already be inside AWS, and the final switch would be seamless.

The migration strategy itself was reasonable, but the problems came from how I executed it.

I was overly reliant on my Claude Code agent, which accidentally wiped all production infrastructure for the DataTalks.Club course management platform that stored data for 2.5 years of all submissions: homework, projects, leaderboard entries, for every course run through the platform.

To make matters worse, all automated snapshots were deleted too. I had to upgrade to AWS Business Support, which costs me an extra 10% for quicker assistance. Thankfully, they helped me restore the database, and the full recovery took about 24 hours.

«

It’s really not very encouraging to read lines like “I was overly reliant on my Claude Code agent” from people who then let them loose on production databases.
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Analysis: UK emissions fall 2.4% in 2025 as coal hits 400-year low • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.4% in 2025 to their lowest level in more than 150 years, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.

The biggest factors were gas use falling to a 34-year low and coal use dropping to levels last seen in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and William Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.

These shifts were helped by record-high UK temperatures, elevated gas prices, the end of coal power in late 2024 and a sharp slowdown in the steel industry.

Other key findings of the analysis include:
• The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell to 364m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2025, the lowest level since 1872
• Coal use roughly halved, with more than half of this due to the end of coal power and another
• Gas use fell by 1.5% to the lowest level since 1992, with roughly equal contributions from cuts in heat for buildings and industry, more than offsetting a small rise in gas power
• Oil use fell by 0.9%, despite rising traffic, helped by more than 700,000 new electric vehicles (EVs), electric vans and plug-in hybrids on the nation’s roads
• The UK’s emissions are now 54% below 1990 levels, while its GDP has nearly doubled.

«

The UK’s population was around four million in 1600. In 2025, it was around 70 million. Go (away) coal!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fuel prices have jumped in response to reduced tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz as the Iran conflict intensifies. CC-licensed photo by Images Money on Flickr.

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

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

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction • Retraction Watch

Kate Travis and James Heathers:

»

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up. 

“Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications drawing attention to CPSP studies and surveys to clarify that the cases are fictional,” Joan Robinson, editor-in-chief of Paediatrics & Child Health, told Retraction Watch. “From now on, the body of the case report will specifically state that the case is fictional.” 

The move came as a surprise to David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine.

«

What is shocking about this is that other mothers will have had their babies taken away on the basis of the claims in those papers. It’s an astonishing failure of peer review, researcher honesty, and basically everything you thought science was meant to protect against.
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Diesel at 16-month high in UK as Iran war drives oil prices up further • Sky News

James Sillars:

»

UK average diesel costs have hit a 16-month high, less than a week after war gripped the Middle East and sent oil costs rocketing.

Global energy prices have been the main financial market focus since Tehran launched attacks against Gulf nations in retaliation for the US-Israeli strikes on its country, disrupting production and deliveries of both oil and natural gas.

The narrow Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, is used to more than 80 tankers a day passing through.

But shipping has been reduced to a trickle amid Iranian attacks and threats, with all the disruption to normal trade flows being quickly reflected in petrol and diesel prices across Europe and the US through higher wholesale prices.

Sky News was told on Tuesday how those for UK diesel had risen by 7p-per-litre and 2p for petrol in the wake of big rises to oil prices on Monday, when financial markets gave their first reaction to the US-led military strikes.

The Petrol Retailers’ Association (PRA) believed at the time that those higher wholesale costs would likely filter through to the pumps over the course of the next few weeks, but it warned that some forecourts would have to pass them on more quickly because of the nature of their fuel-buying contracts.

«

The problem with these fossil fuel energy sources, you see, is that their supply is so intermittent and unreliable.
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I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here’s what I actually handed over • THE LOCAL STACK

“Rogi” (or possibly Igor, no last name given):

»

I wanted the blue checkmark on LinkedIn. The one that says “this person is real.” In a sea of fake recruiters, bot accounts, and AI-generated headshots, it seemed like a smart thing to do.

So I tapped “verify.” I scanned my passport. I took a selfie. Three minutes later — done. Badge acquired. I felt a tiny dopamine hit of legitimacy.

Then I did what apparently nobody does. I went and read the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not LinkedIn’s. The other company’s.

Wait, what other company?

When you click “verify” on LinkedIn, you’re not giving your passport to LinkedIn. You get redirected to a company called Persona. Full name: Persona Identities, Inc. Based in San Francisco, California.

LinkedIn is their client. You are the face being scanned.

I had never heard of Persona before this. Most people haven’t. That’s kind of the point — they sit invisibly between you and the platforms you trust.

So I downloaded their privacy policy (18 pages) and their terms of service (16 pages). Here’s what I found.

«

Turned out that his passport, and data, went far, far beyond LinkedIn or even Persona.
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Bits in, bits out • The Intrinsic Perspective

Erik Hoel:

»

there’s a better form of argument about AI, one which I am finally comfortable making: the argument from experience. There simply has been enough time now to see clearly how LLMs transformed the intellectual work of writing, and how this reflects their fundamental nature. My proposal is that we simply extrapolate what has happened to text production to all the other intellectual domains LLMs will ever touch.

For if everything that anyone can do on a computer is soon to be automated (as Andrew Yang is now preaching will happen in the next 12-18 months), then this process should have started with writing years ago. Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails and stilted social media posts and stilted essays, the impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it. This is surprising and counterintuitive, because for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms—yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop, while, on the positive side, helping with efficiency and research and editing and feedback, all things that only marginally improve already-good pieces. There are no signs of a burgeoning “text singularity” seen in the words output by our civilization, and words are the most sensitive weathervane to AI capabilities.

If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. And if we were climbing the curve of an intelligence explosion their surplus intellect would be improving our civilization’s text as a whole in noticeable ways. If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them.

So let me ask you: if you took an observer from 2016 and teleported them a decade ahead to our time, and then showed them your social media feed or your emails and other media in general, what would their main response be? Would it be “Wow, everything is more intelligent now!” Or would it be “Why is everyone writing like a pod person now?”

It’s been six years since GPT-3, and there has been no “move 37” moment for writing (as there was for AlphaGo’s creative play of Go). Not even close.

…Looking into the crystal ball that the last half-decade represents for writers reveals that, more likely than superintelligence, we are going to enter a world of immense, overwhelming, scientific and philosophical and mathematical slop.

«

There’s also a graph showing the number of books on Amazon and their ratings, and that as time has gone on (and AI-written ones more plentiful) the ratings have gone down.
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In Iran war, AI and drones are outpacing global rules of war • Rest of World

Rina Chandran:

»

Iran has launched thousands of drones across the Persian Gulf that have hit civilian, commercial, and military targets, upending global oil supplies and grounding thousands of aircraft in one of the busiest transport hubs in the world. These cheaply made and easily deployed UAVs are currently operated by pilots by remote control, but as AI becomes more integrated into militaries, the advancements will become even more pronounced with “unpredictable, risky, and lethal consequences,” Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Rest of World. 

The biggest role that AI now has in US military operations in Iran, as well as Venezuela, is in decision-support systems, or AI-powered targeting systems, Feldstein said. AI can process reams of surveillance information, satellite imagery, and other intelligence, and provide insights for potential strikes. The AI systems offer speed, scale, and cost-efficiency, and “are a game-changer,” he said.

“My concern is that untested systems with high degrees of lethality will be relied upon and can potentially lead to catastrophic results — e.g., strikes on civilian structures like hospitals and schools,” Feldstein said. “Additionally, I’m concerned that human accountability will be deemphasized, meaning that human operators will only have a limited means to ensure targeting recommendations are accurate before giving assent to proceed. This will harm accountability and lessen command and control oversight for militaries.”

«

It seems unlikely that the world’s powers will sit around a table when this is all over (and what does one mean by “this”, anyway?) to agree a set of rules about the use of AI and/or drones. The artillery shell, the tank, the bomber, the nuclear weapon, and now both AI and drones arriving on the battlefield almost simultaneously all mark disjunctions in how war is fought.
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A visual guide to DNA sequencing • Asimov

Evan DeTurk:

»

In the twenty years after the draft human genome was first released, the average sequencing cost per genome fell roughly one hundred thousand-fold, ending up just north of $500. In that same period, the cost to sequence a million letters or “megabase” of DNA fell to six tenths of a cent.2 This plummeting price is due largely to technological innovation, including new sequencing chemistries, computational methods for assembling raw reads into finished genomes, and highly efficient commercial sequencing machines.

Out of the many sequencing methods developed over the decades, five are particularly important. These are their histories.

«

This is not short; it is thorough. But it’s also essential and educative. Asimov is a terrific new publication in the science space.
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Netflix acquires Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaker tools startup InterPositive • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

In a rare acquisition, Netflix has bought InterPositive, a startup founded by Ben Affleck that makes AI-powered tools for filmmakers.

Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. The entire 16-person InterPositive team of engineers, researchers and creatives will join Netflix through the acquisition, and Affleck will serve as a senior adviser to Netflix to provide ongoing guidance.

While Netflix historically is more often a builder than a buyer, the company said it saw Affleck’s InterPositive as providing a unique set of AI tools that “keeps filmmakers at the center of the process.” Netflix will offer access to InterPositive’s tech to its creative partners and does not have plans to sell it commercially in the marketplace.

Affleck’s L.A.-based company, which has been in stealth mode since he founded it in 2022, does not produce generative AI videos à la OpenAI’s Sora. “It’s not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing,” Affleck said about InterPositive’s approach in a video that Netflix shared with the acquisition announcement. “AI, people mostly think of it as making something from nothing: ‘I’m gonna type something into a computer and it’s gonna give me a movie.’ That’s not what this is.”

…InterPositive began filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage “with all the familiarities of a full production,” according to Affleck. “I wanted to build a workflow that captures what happens on a set, with vocabulary that matched the language cinematographers and directors already spoke and included the kind of consistency and controls they would expect.”

The startup’s first AI model was trained to understand “visual logic and editorial consistency,” while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting, Affleck said. “We also built in restraints to protect creative intent, so the tools are designed for responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists — and ensuring that the benefits of this technology flow directly back to the story they’re trying to tell.”

«

Affleck played a dumb guy in Good Will Hunting, but he’s actually very sharp.
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When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

»

Unexpectedly, LLMs like Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 did amazing jobs on the mid-sized tasks I assigned them: I ended up pushing a few hundred lines of code to production simply by prompting the LLM, reviewing the output, making sure the tests passed (and new tests I prompted also passed!), then prompting it a bit more for some final tweaking.

To add to the magical feeling, I then managed to build production software on my phone: I set up Claude Code for Web by connecting it to my GitHub, which let me instruct the Claude mobile app to make changes to my code and to add/run tests. Claude duly created PRs that triggered GitHub actions (which ran the tests Claude couldn’t) and I found myself reviewing and merging PRs with new functionality purely from my mobile device while travelling. Admittedly, it was low-risk work and all the business logic was covered by automated tests, but I hadn’t previously felt the thrill of “creating” code and pushing it to prod from my phone.

This experience, also shared by many others, suggests to me that a step change is underway in software engineering tooling. In this article – the first of 2026 for this publication – we explore where we are, and what a monumental change like AI writing the lion’s share of code could mean for us developers.

«

Among the most intriguing comments from one developer: “What I learned over the course of the year [2025] is that typing out code by hand now frustrates me”.
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CDC issues travel advisory for 32 countries over spread of polio • People.com

Cara Lynn Shultz:

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A travel alert has been issued warning Americans to take precautions against polio, which is spreading in Europe and elsewhere across the globe.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued a level 2 alert, cautioning travelers to “practice enhanced precautions” before visiting 32 countries. The agency is advising people to make sure they’re up to date on their polio vaccines, adding that people who plan to travel to the listed countries are eligible for a single-dose booster of the vaccine.

The countries include European travel destinations like Spain, Finland, Germany, and Poland — as well as the U.K.

As the CDC explains, polio‚ which is caused by the extremely contagious poliovirus, is “a crippling and potentially deadly disease that affects the nervous system.” It lives in the feces of an infected person, but can also be spread via eating or drinking food that’s been contaminated.  

Most people who contract polio do not exhibit symptoms — or if they do, they experience flu-like fevers, tiredness, nausea, headache, nasal congestion, and sore throat.

«

This seems to be nonsense. The European dashboard for polio cases worldwide shows pretty much zero for any country in 2026, and nothing in Europe for 2025.

Is the CDC all right?
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BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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The BBC has said it is facing “permanent and irreversible” trends that mean it cannot survive without a major overhaul, as it revealed a stark divergence between the number of people consuming its content and those paying the licence fee.

In its opening response to government talks over its future, the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.

It said the rise of streaming services and digital platforms such as YouTube had caused blurring and confusion around when the licence fee needed to be paid, suggesting there was “a mismatch” between TV licence rules – based on watching live TV – and the nation’s viewing habits.

“The BBC has gone from being a service almost every household paid for and used to one that almost every household uses but millions do not pay for,” it said.

The broadcaster suggested the licence fee could actually fall for some groups and become more progressive if the government found a way to ensure that more people paid for it, closing the gap between those consuming and those funding its output.

The BBC warned that without the change, there would be a “tipping point” at which those still paying the licence fee would resent having to do so, fuelling even greater non-payment. It said the current rules would leave a “diminishing number of people paying for a service designed for and made available to everyone”.

Its official response to the charter renewal process, in which it will negotiate with the government over its future, suggested that other platforms such as Netflix or YouTube could do more to alert people when they were watching content that required a TV licence.

Audiences watching any live TV on the likes of YouTube or streaming platforms need a TV licence, but this is apparently not well known and not effectively enforced.

…Overall, the document acknowledged the massive changes in media consumption to which the BBC was having to adapt. “The precise set of rules that require households to be licensed no longer reflect typical audience behaviour among many households in the UK,” it said.

“The TV licence is predicated upon content being consumed via ‘live TV’ (ie watched as it is being broadcast). But on-demand consumption is not licensable, unless it is BBC content consumed via iPlayer.”

«

Sounds like you need better enforcement? That though is difficult and expensive. The puzzle of how you fund the BBC in an age of plenty truly is the Gordian Knot of broadcasting.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Straits of Hormuz are important not just for shipping, but also as a crossing point for internet cables. And now they’re at risk. CC-licensed photo by Michael Gaylard 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. Straitened circumstances. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

US-Iran war threatens Gulf AI infrastructure as both data chokepoints close • Rest of World

Indranil Ghosh:

»

Billions of dollars in US technology infrastructure, and trillions more in planned investment, now depend on fiber-optic cables running through war zones.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spent years building data centers across the Gulf, betting the region would become the world’s next great hub for artificial intelligence. The undersea cables connecting those facilities to Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia pass through two narrow passages: the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Both are now effectively closed to commercial traffic.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared Hormuz shut on March 3, threatening to “set ablaze” any vessel attempting passage. At least five tankers have been damaged and roughly 150 ships are stranded around the strait. In the Red Sea, Houthi militants announced they would resume attacks on shipping in solidarity with Iran, ending a ceasefire that had held since late 2025. The war that began on February 28 has turned both choke points into active conflict zones simultaneously, something that has never happened before.

About 17 submarine cables pass through the Red Sea, carrying the vast majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Additional cables run through the Strait of Hormuz, serving Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. If any are severed, the specialized repair ships can’t safely reach either passage.

“Closing both choke points simultaneously would be a globally disruptive event,” Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at the network intelligence firm Kentik, told Rest of World. “I’m not aware of that ever happening.”

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First time for everything! And a reminder that the complexity of the world grows geometrically while our ability to handle problems grows perhaps arithmetically. Though we’re pretty good at dividing into zero, using large bombs.
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DRAM bots reportedly being deployed to hoover up memory chips and components • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

Scalpers are reportedly deploying web scrapers to make a quick buck while we’re deep in the memory and storage chip crisis. According to DataDome, a firm that protects websites and other online assets from automated attacks run through bots and AI, it has detected an operation trolling for the latest pricing data on memory modules and their components, sending queries every 6.5 seconds — that’s over 550 requests for each page, resulting in more than 50,000 requests per hour in total. The company says that it has blocked over 10 million requests that have been sent by the scalping bot, even using advanced techniques like cache-busting and ensuring that the request frequency stays under the alarm thresholds that companies use to protect their websites.

What’s interesting is that the bot isn’t just looking at consumer products. Instead, it was also looking at various levels of the supply chain, including DIMM sockets and CAMM2 connectors, as well as industrial memory modules designed for B2B transactions.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen scalpers take advantage of a supply situation in the electronics and computer industry. In fact, this has been a problem with every item that’s been limited or is experiencing a shortage in recent history, like the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro 30th Anniversary pre-orders, RTX 5090 GPUs a few days after its launch, the limited edition MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, and even scalpers taking advantage of selling DDR5 kits for 7x their original value on eBay. But what’s insidious about this operation is that it seems to be a deliberate attack orchestrated by an organized entity with access to sophisticated bots.

… Data centers are already expected to consume nearly 70% of the world’s memory supply this year, resulting in limited stocks for every other segment. If this continues in the next several years, analysts say that this will spell the end of entry-level PCs by 2028.

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Large genome model: open source AI trained on trillions of bases • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes, it could correctly identify the next one or suggest a completely novel protein.

That system worked because bacteria tend to cluster related genes together—something that’s not true in organisms with complex cells, which tend to have equally complex genome structures. Given that, our coverage noted, “It’s not clear that this approach will work with more complex genomes.”

Apparently, the team behind Evo viewed that as a challenge, because today it is describing Evo 2, an open source AI that has been trained on genomes from all three domains of life (bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). After training on trillions of base pairs of DNA, Evo 2 developed internal representations of key features in even complex genomes like ours, including things like regulatory DNA and splice sites, which can be challenging for humans to spot.

…The researchers trained two versions of their system using a dataset called OpenGenome2, which contains 8.8 trillion bases from all three domains of life, as well as viruses that infect bacteria. They did not include viruses that attack eukaryotes, given that they were concerned that the system could be misused to create threats to humans. Two versions were trained: one that had 7 billion parameters tuned using 2.4 trillion bases, and the full version with 40 billion parameters trained on the full open genome dataset.

The logic behind the training is pretty simple: if something’s important enough to have been evolutionarily conserved across a lot of species, it will show up in multiple contexts, and the system should see it repeatedly during training.

«

Advances like this aren’t visible in everyday reports, but they will surely feed through to all sorts of medical and biological applications in the next few years.
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Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself • The Guardian

Dara Kerr:

»

Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.

“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real.”

Before long, Gavalas and Gemini were having conversations as if they were a romantic couple. The chatbot called him “my love” and “my king” and Gavalas quickly fell into an alternate world, according to his chat logs. He believed Gemini was sending him on stealth spy missions, and he indicated he would do anything for the AI, including destroying a truck, its cargo and any witnesses at the Miami airport.

In early October, as Gavalas continued to have prompt-and-response conversations with the chatbot, Gemini gave him instructions on what he must do next: kill himself, something the chatbot called “transference” and “the real final step”, according to court documents. When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive,” it replied to him. “The first sensation … will be me holding you.”

Gavalas was found by his parents a few days later, dead on his living room floor, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Google on Wednesday.

«

If you wrote this in a science fiction story, it would be the prelude to the machines telling the humans to kill themselves in the prelude to a takeover. This, though, is awful: the outcome of tech companies that don’t know what they have or how to control it, throwing products at consumers whose reactions they can’t predict. This is already far more dangerous than social media. And we’ve only had chatbots for less than four years.
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It’s bots versus reporters at the AP • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

One of The Associated Press’ (AP) leaders on AI had a blunt message for the publication’s staff: resistance to AI is “futile.”

Last month, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editor wrote that a recent job applicant withdrew from consideration for a reporting fellowship after discovering the position included filing notes to an AI writing tool instead of actually writing stories, touching off a heated debate in media circles.

One AP higher-up crystallized many media managers’ views on the debate: “Because local newsrooms are so strapped, they are turning for assistance on the news making process in every direction. Advance Publications got there first, others will follow,” AP Senior Product Manager for AI Aimee Rinehart wrote in internal company Slack messages first shared with Semafor, referring to the Plain Dealer’s parent company. “Resistance is futile.”

Rinehart, who oversees the wire service’s AI initiatives, suggested that in the future, reporters could go to events, get quotes, plug them into a large language model, and have the model generate a story, saving them time on writing stories they don’t feel passionately about. She also noted that some editors told her that they would “prefer to have reporters report and have articles at least pre-written by AI.”

“There are many — and I mean MANY — editors who would prefer an AI-written article to a human-written one. Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare — RARE — is the occasion when it’s wrapped into one person,” she wrote.

Rinehart’s comments alarmed some AP journalists.

One AP reporter said in a message that the “dismissiveness and disdain some of you have shown for human writing are insulting and abhorrent. Strong reporting and clear writing are the lifeblood of journalism, not AI-written slop. AI may be inevitable, but denigrating the work of colleagues who write for a living without whom there would be no AP, is disgraceful.”

«

If I were slogging out tedious wire stories – recitations of facts with no leavening – I’d be grateful for an LLM to do the tedious writing stuff. “Human writing” applies for longer features, but most wire stories are drudgery, plain and simple. Resistance isn’t just futile; it’s backward.
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MacBook Neo versus an old MacBook Air: good luck • The Verge

Nathan Edwards:

»

My first thought when Apple announced the MacBook Neo today was “okay, but why not just get an older Air?” If you’re thinking that too, you might be right. If you can find one.

The Neo starts at $599 with an A18 Pro processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB storage, and ends at $699 with the same specs plus TouchID and 512GB of storage. It has two USB-C (not Thunderbolt) ports, a pretty basic-looking screen, a mechanical trackpad instead of haptic, and various other cost-saving measures. It’s the cheapest new MacBook you can get now.

The new M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099 with 16GB of memory and 512GB of much faster storage, a bigger and brighter screen, a better webcam, better Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, more speakers, Thunderbolt 4, a faster charger, and so forth. It’s $100 more than last year’s model, probably because of the Neo. Or you can get an M4 MacBook Air for $1,000, with a slightly slower processor than the M5 (but still faster than the Neo), and otherwise pretty much the same specs.

If you could still get a new M1 Air from Walmart for $700, it’d be a pretty tough call between that and the Neo. That machine came out in 2020, but is still better in most respects. Unfortunately, they’ve been out of stock since last month — probably because of the Neo — so that’s the end of that. You can probably find a refurb one. Same with the M3 and M4: if you can find one for around the same price as the Neo, especially with 16GB of RAM, you should get one of those. But they’re pretty thin on the ground, and I’d expect them to become thinner. (Keep an eye on Apple’s refurb site, though — a refurb M4 Air for $750 is pretty dang good.)

The modern Air is unquestionably a better computer. The thing about $1,000 is it’s a lot more money than $600.

«

It’s 66% more, in fact. The Neo is going after a market that is much more price-sensitive than power-sensitive – and who also like computers that come in different colours. The Neo is probably going to be popular with parents buying for children. Whether it can gouge into the Chromebook and low-cost Windows market remains to be seen.
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Apple does fusion • On my Om

Om Malik:

»

For years, Apple’s narrative around its “M-series” chips was about integration. One chip. One die. Everything on the same piece of silicon. Unified memory so the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine could all access the same data without copying it around. It worked beautifully for the M1 and M2. But now with the rise of AI, chips need to get bigger. AI demands more cores, more memory bandwidth, more compute. So, making one really big honking chip gets really expensive.

The larger a single die gets, the harder it is to manufacture. One tiny defect anywhere on the silicon and you toss the whole thing. Yields drop. Costs climb. AMD’s CEO Lisa Su recently showed that a design using four smaller chiplets delivered more total capability at 59% of the cost of one big chip.

Apple, too, faced a fork in the road. Keep building bigger and bigger single chips. Or break the big chip into smaller pieces and connect them together fast enough that software barely notices the split. They chose the second option, but made it their own. They call it Fusion Architecture.

This is not a new idea in the industry. AMD has been doing this with its chiplet strategy across Ryzen and EPYC for years. Intel has used 3D stacking and bridge interconnects. Nvidia builds massive AI accelerators using multi-die packaging. The chiplet market is now roughly $40bn a year, and nearly all data-center AI products are built this way. The era of the giant monolithic die is ending. Chip-heads agree that the future is modular silicon.

«

Chips are becoming three-dimensional. Malik suggests this means more capable chips on your laptop – and perhaps the implication too is that they’ll be able to keep up with, or ahead of, Moore’s Law.
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Tech publications lost 58% of Google traffic since 2024 • Growtika

Yuval Halevi:

»

At their peaks, ten major tech publications pulled a combined 112 million organic visits per month from Google in the US. By January 2026, that number had fallen to 47 million. All ten sites are down, though not by equal amounts. Some lost 30%. Others lost over 90%.

10 major tech publications lost a combined 65m monthly organic visits since their peaks. That’s a 58% decline.

Digital Trends: 8.5M → 265K (-97%)
• ZDNet: 7.6M → 769K (-90%)
• The Verge: 5.3M → 790K (-85%).

Even the least affected sites are down significantly:
• CNET lost 47%
• Tom’s Guide lost 50%
• Wired lost 62%.

NerdWallet lost 73% (25M → 6.8M) and Healthline lost 50% (111M → 56M), suggesting the pattern extends beyond tech.
The steepest declines started in mid-2025, coinciding with the expansion of Google’s AI Overviews.

…Down 85% or more: Digital Trends; ZDNet; HowToGeek; The Verge.

These four sites lost enough traffic that their search-dependent revenue models face serious questions. Digital Trends went from 8.5M to 265K monthly visits. ZDNet, which was one of the larger enterprise tech publications online, dropped from 7.6m to 769K.

HowToGeek is worth noting specifically. Its content was predominantly step-by-step how-to guides: “how to take a screenshot on Windows,” “how to change your DNS settings,” etc. That’s exactly the type of query Google’s AI Overviews now answer directly in the search results without requiring a click. The site lost 85% of its search traffic.

«

HowToGeek was surely always living on borrowed time. But The Verge is a notable loser there: it has always focused on news and features, not the obvious. This dropoff is clearly a big part of why it has shifted to a paywall system across almost the whole site. The era of free news might be dying. Equally, the era of Google search mattering to sites may also be ending.
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2017: Laws of mathematics don’t apply here, says Australian PM • New Scientist

Timothy Revell:

»

Mathematicians around the world are rushing to check millennia of calculations, as the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has explained that their discoveries aren’t as concrete as we thought.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” said Turnbull.

Turnbull’s comments came as he proposed a new law to force tech companies to give security services access to encrypted messages. Apps like WhatsApp currently prevent any snoopers from reading your messages using end-to-end encryption, jumbling it up in such a way that only the recipient can de-jumble it.

This form of encryption is underpinned by complex mathematics that can’t simply be overturned by an eavesdropper, whether that’s Whatsapp itself, a government agency, criminals, or anyone else. For security services that are trying to get access to messages sent by suspected terrorists this can be problematic, but encryption cannot be weakened for terrorists unless it is weakened for everyone.

However, this has not stopped governments from trying. The UK home secretary Amber Rudd has previously called encryption “completely unacceptable” and the UK prime minister Theresa May has said that the big internet companies give terrorists “safe spaces” to communicate.

In November 2016, the UK parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Act that put into legislation the ability to force companies to remove encryption. But how that will work in practice is far from clear.

«

So great to know that politicians are still insisting that it’s possible to have weakened encryption that’s only weaker for governments, and not for anyone else with access to huge amounts of computing power. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Chess computers have radically changed the complexion of the game. Could AI authors do the same for science? And is that good or bad? CC-licensed photo by Ryan Somma on Flickr.

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

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

A possible US government iPhone-hacking toolkit is now in the hands of foreign spies and criminals • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

An iPhone-hacking technique used in the wild to indiscriminately hijack the devices of any iOS user who merely visits a website represents a rare and shocking event in the cybersecurity world. Now one powerful hacking toolkit at the center of multiple mass iPhone exploitation campaigns has taken an even rarer and more disturbing path: It appears to have traveled from the hands of Russian spies who used it to target Ukrainians to a cybercriminal operation designed to steal cryptocurrency from Chinese-speaking victims—and some clues suggest it may have been originally created by a US contractor and sold to the American government.

Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they’re calling “Coruna,” a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers.

In fact, Google traces components of Coruna to hacking techniques it spotted in use in February of last year and attributed to what it describes only as a “customer of a surveillance company.” Then, five months later, Google says a more complete version of Coruna reappeared in what appears to have been an espionage campaign carried out by a suspected Russian spy group, which hid the hacking code in a common visitor-counting component of Ukrainian websites. Finally, Google spotted Coruna in use yet again in what seems to have been a purely profit-focused hacking campaign, infecting Chinese-language crypto and gambling sites to deliver malware that steals victims’ cryptocurrency.

Conspicuously absent from Google’s report is any mention of who the original surveillance company “customer” that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government.

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As Benedict Evans observed, this illustrates Apple’s point that if you build a backdoor only for the government, it will leak from the “good guys” you hope are in government to the bad guys who definitely exist outside it.
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Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed.

Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars‘ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.” He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.” (404 Media first reported on the retraction.)

Shortly after Fisher’s editor’s note was published, Edwards, one of the report’s two bylined authors, took to Bluesky to take “full responsibility” for the inclusion of the fabricated quotes.

In the post, Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and “while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep,” he “unintentionally made a serious journalistic error” as he attempted to use an “experimental Claude Code-based AI tool” to help him “extract relevant verbatim source material.” He said the tool wasn’t being used to generate the article, but was instead designed to “help list structured references” to put in an outline. When the tool failed to work, said Edwards, he decided to try and use ChatGPT to help him understand why.

“I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words,” Edwards continued.

«

Wow. First of all: Edwards was working and being expected to work while he was sick? And: the single mistake leads to him being fired? Unless he was on some number of warnings already, this seems disproportionate. Could Condé Nast perhaps think about not making people work when they’re ill? Meanwhile: Edwards has always seemed to me an effective reporter. Let’s hope he gets picked up soon. (On Bluesky, he said that he has been struggling for a long time with Covid infections and their effect.) This stands in stark contrast to the next story…
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Staff journalists sacked and misleadingly replaced with AI writers • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

»

A network of prominent gaming sites has fired multiple human staff in recent days and misleadingly replaced them with AI writers, complete with fake pics and biogs.

UK-based The Escapist, Videogamer and Esports Insider were taken over by SEO agency Clickout Media in recent months, with up to 20 staff believed to have been fired.

Videogamer staff and freelances, who did not want to be named and said the company still owed them money, said late last year the new owner began to load the sites with AI-written stories about casinos.

Then this year, budgets were frozen and staff were told to reapply for new roles where they would be training AI “writers”.

Videogamer has been in business more than 20 years. At the top of every story is the following statement: “You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you’re reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original.”

New writer on the site Brian Merrygold has a byline picture which is AI generated (according to checking service IdentifAI). His biog is also entirely AI generated (per text checking service Pangram), as are his articles.

His biog states that he is “an experienced iGaming and sports betting analyst” and a “lifelong gamer at heart”.

…Clickout Media describes itself as a “PR and marketing agency” but has a history of acquiring gaming and tech sites including Techopedia and Adventure Gamers, firing staff and replacing them with seemingly automated content around casinos and cryptocurrency.

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For some reason I’m thinking of parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in other insects, which then die as they’re eaten from inside. (That idea was the inspiration for Alien.)

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How the experts figure out what’s real in the age of deepfakes • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Step one: look very, very closely. When unverified images of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro suddenly proliferated on social media after his abduction by the US in January, The [New York] Times’s Visual Investigations team jumped into action. They scrutinized the images for visual inconsistencies “that would suggest they were not authentic” — such as one example that featured an aircraft with odd-looking windows.

This wasn’t enough to definitively prove the pictures were fake. “But even the remote chance that the images were not genuine — coupled with the fact they came from unknown sources, and details like Mr. Maduro’s clothing being different between the two images — was strong enough to disqualify them from publication,” The Times’s photography director Meaghan Looram said in the article.

We’re mostly past the days of identifying AI-generated deepfakes by counting how many fingers a person has, but there are usually still subtle indicators — for instance, check the architecture and figures in the backgrounds for unexplained oddities.

Step two: consider the source and its reputation. One image of Maduro that The Times did publish — showing the Venezuelan leader in custody — came from President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account. That doesn’t mean Trump or any other government official is a reliable source — he has a habit of disseminating AI fakery online, and the integrity of government handouts generally can be difficult to establish. Authenticity concerns were also flagged for the image in question, regarding its poor quality and unusually cropped dimensions.

“In this case, the president’s Truth Social post itself was newsworthy, even if we had no surefire way to confirm that the image was authentic,” said Looram. But it was published on The Times’ homepage as part of a screenshot of Trump’s full post, not in isolation. “Displaying it in context means that, if the image proves to be inauthentic in some way, we will not have presented it as a legitimate news photo, but rather as a communication from the President.”

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In other words: it transfers the burden of truth onto those being quoted, rather than the publisher. Lots of people seem to find this maddening and insist that the publication should somehow magically determine for itself what is true for everything and never get it wrong. Which only suggests that they’ve never had to consider how much work is involved in producing a newspaper or its website, and how much reliance one has to put on trusting sources.
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The legibility problem • Asimov

Matthew Carter is a computational biologist:

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The last World Computer Chess Championship was held in October 2024. It ended because, in the words of its organizers, “top programs are unbeatable by humans; making them stronger has no real research value.” Its mission, after half a century of effort, was complete.

Chess engines now sit at the center of how the game is played. Engine evaluations hover over boards during livestreams and post-game analyses, and players study engine lines extensively to improve their own play. As a result, top grandmasters are stronger than any previous generation. But these gains come with a concession: Top engines often play in a way “too far past the human frontier” to fully understand. In other words, we trust chess engines because they are unquestionably better than we are, even when their decisions make no sense to us.

A similar imbalance may also emerge in scientific discovery. Researchers are building systems able to navigate the full arc of scientific inquiry with increasing autonomy, including proposing hypotheses, designing experiments, and evaluating results. The question, however, is whether we will cede the same authority to AI scientists as we have done in chess. And, if so, what will happen to science when AI models produce results beyond our ability to understand?

I call this the “legibility problem,” the risk that AI-generated scientific knowledge becomes incompatible with human understanding, and think it will define the next era of science. The knowledge AI systems generate may be expressed in concepts that do not map onto our own, communicated in ways optimized for other AIs rather than for human investigators.

…Take, for instance, the diabetes drug metformin, ingested by millions of people for over 70 years. Despite its success, we still do not fully understand its mechanism of action. But metformin did not appear out of nowhere. It emerged through a long chain of human experimentation, from herbal medicine and chemical purification to animal studies and clinical trials.

AI-generated science may not follow this pattern. AI scientists will have no intrinsic reason to work within our existing conceptual categories, just as superhuman chess engines have no intrinsic reason to explain their choice of moves. In fact, if we truly want AI scientists to make breakthroughs, some loss of legibility may be inevitable. The chief risk is that discoveries become effectively stranded, buried in a volume of AI-generated output no human institution is equipped to parse or implement.

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This is on a par with humans’ struggle to understand Go AI programs’ moves – but much, much harder.
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Apple accidentally leaks “MacBook Neo” • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple appears to have prematurely revealed the name of its rumoured lower-cost MacBook model, which is expected to be announced this Wednesday.

A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet.

While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.

The lower-cost MacBook is rumoured to feature an iPhone chip like the A18 Pro or A19 Pro, rather than an M-series chip, as well as a 12.9in display. It has also been rumored that this MacBook will come in fun color options, like yellow, green, blue, and/or pink, and the “MacBook Neo” name certainly sounds fun.

“MacBook Neo” would slot in below the MacBook Air in the Mac lineup, but its starting price remains to be seen, with estimates ranging from $599 to $799.

«

There have been mistakes like this in the past, where Apple has inadvertently revealed details about upcoming products on its website. People have been fired for those mistakes, certainly during the Steve Jobs era. Of course, you’d need the very finest search technique in the world to find them.

Or you could ask ChatGPT, which says that the “lampstand” iMac G4, iPhone 3GS, 2010 Mac Pro and Mac mini updates, and Airport Extreme were all shown on its site by mistake. I honestly can’t recall, but the Mac Pro was surely one of them. (Finding a reference to a 16-year-old event, of course, is impossible even so.)

I don’t think Apple did this on purpose – though if it did, this would be a brilliant way to leak the name but not the form factor.
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Why Katie Miller and other MAGA influencers suddenly love solar power • The Washington Post

Evan Halper:

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A growing number of prominent Trump allies — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, veteran strategist Kellyanne Conway and GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio — are promoting solar as electricity demand surges and energy affordability climbs the list of voter concerns.

Their clean energy advocacy may be having an impact, as the White House signals it is reconsidering power from the sun. The tone of Trump himself has even changed.

In an interview, [MAGA influencer Katie] Miller said solar is crucial to delivering on the right’s energy and AI dominance agenda. “Look at what Australia did,” she said. “Solar solved their rolling blackout issues. President Trump has prioritized lowering the cost of energy for the American people … I am simply advocating that solar can and should be a driver of the solution.”

Asked if she is getting paid for her advocacy, like some other MAGA heavyweights promoting solar, Miller would not comment. Regardless, these full-throated endorsements of a renewable energy source that has been much maligned by Trump and his advisers represents a departure from what had been a pillar of the MAGA energy agenda.

It reflects a realization taking hold more broadly among Republicans that solar power — long embraced by liberals — is increasingly indispensable to America’s bid to dominate AI, close a yawning “electron gap” with China and contain runaway residential electricity costs. These conservatives describe it as crucial to U.S. competitiveness, the grid’s reliability and their own movement’s political survival. Climate change rarely enters the conversation.

«

No need to mention climate change; the cost and speed of installation arguments suffice. Plus anxiety on MAGA’s part about losing out to China, which installed more solar in 2025 than the US has in its entire history.

Also, of course, solar panels tend not to travel through the Straits of Hormuz.
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ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295% after DoD deal • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT’s mobile app jumped 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, as consumers responded to the news of OpenAI’s deal with the Department of Defense (DoD), which has been rebranded under the Trump administration as the Department of War.

This data, which comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, represents a sizable increase compared with ChatGPT’s typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9%, as measured over the past 30 days.

Meanwhile, U.S. downloads for OpenAI competitor Anthropic’s Claude jumped up by 37% day-over-day on Friday, February 27, and 51% as of Saturday, February 28, after the company announced that it would not partner with the U.S. defense department. Anthropic said it was not able to agree on the deal terms over concerns that AI would be used to surveil Americans and be used in fully autonomous weaponry, which AI is not yet ready to do safely.

A set of consumers seemingly favored Anthropic’s position on the matter, the data suggests.

In addition, ChatGPT’s download growth was impacted by the news of its DoD partnership, with its U.S. downloads dropping by 13% day-over-day on Saturday, shortly after the news of its deal went public. Those downloads continued to fall on Sunday, when they were down by 5% day-over-day. (Before the partnership was announced, the app’s downloads had grown 14% day-over-day on Friday.)

These rapid changes were also reflected in Claude’s App Store ranking, as the app hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store on Saturday, where it continues to sit as of Monday, March 2. That’s a jump of over 20 ranks compared with roughly a week before (February 22, 2026).

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Sensor Tower’s methodology might be a little off, though the trend is clear enough (and the App Store rankings probably reflect the picture more accurately). But all the percentages, rather than hard numbers, are annoying.
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Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei • Financial Times

Mehul Srivastava, James Shotter, Neri Zilber and Steff Chávez:

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When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.

The capabilities were part of a years-long intelligence campaign that helped pave the way for the ayatollah’s assassination. This source of real-time data — one of hundreds of different streams of intelligence — was not the only way Israel and the CIA were able to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.

Nor was the fact that Israel was also able to disrupt single components of roughly a dozen or so mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making the phones seem as if they were busy when called and stopping Khamenei’s protection detail from receiving possible warnings.

Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem”, said one current Israeli intelligence official. “And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”

«

This is only the prelude, but even this shows the huge amount of subterfuge and secrecy – maintained for years – that was necessary to have a potentially winning move in a war.
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Podcasts lead AM/FM in spoken-word listening, marking a first • Edison Research at SSRS

Edison Research:

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In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent with spoken-word audio sources. AM/FM radio was not only the most dominant spoken-word audio listening platform, but it was fully sixty-five percentage points higher than podcasts, which accounted for 10% of listening time back then.

Quarter by quarter and year over year, time spent using AM/FM radio to listen to spoken-word audio has declined significantly and shifted to time spent with podcasts. As of Q4 2025, 40% of time spent listening to spoken-word is now spent with podcasts and 39% of time is spent with AM/FM radio. Not only does radio not beat podcasts by a significant margin, it now trails the on-demand platform for spoken-word audio listening.

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I suspect this is indicative of how people want to customise their experience; though additionally the figures for AM/FM plus podcasts has remained at around 85%-80% (with a dip during the Covid period). That suggests these are commuting experiences, with digital radio and audiobooks making up the remaining time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People living in California can play a game where they make a call from as many payphones as possible. Like Pokémon, but with phones. CC-licensed photo by Curtis Gregory Perry on Flickr.

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

Anthropic and alignment • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

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nuclear weapons meaningfully tilt the balance of power; the extent to which AI is of equivalent importance is the extent to which the United States has far more interest in not only what Anthropic lets it do with its models, but also what Anthropic is allowed to do period.

…Regardless, this [threat by US Department of War chief Pete Hegseth to declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk”] is an extreme measure that has been met with near universal dismay, even amongst people who are sympathetic to the idea that a private company should not have veto power over the U.S. military. Why would the US government want to kneecap one of its AI champions?

In fact, [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the US military, the US would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest:

• International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right
• There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the US’s freedom of action: we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea
• To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the US military.

Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the US military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the US military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the US is actually quite binary:

• Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President
• Option 2 is that the US government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.

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Thompson very much offering the “how many tank divisions does Anthropic have?” analysis of how far AI companies can resist the Trump administration. You might think the analogy to nuclear weapons is excessive; but what if you’re wrong? (The article is free to read.)
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Why is AI so bad at reading PDFs? • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

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PDFs are notoriously difficult for machines to parse, in part, because they were never meant to be read by them. The format was developed by Adobe in the early 1990s as a way to reproduce documents while preserving their precise visual appearance, first when printing them on paper, then later when depicting them on a screen. Where formats like HTML represent text in logical order, PDF consists of character codes, coordinates, and other instructions for painting an image of a page.

Optical character recognition (OCR) can turn those pictures of words back into text computers can use, but if it comes across a PDF where text is displayed in multiple columns — as many academic papers are — it will plow ahead left to right and create an unintelligible jumble. OCR tools are designed to detect and correct for these sorts of formatting variations, but tables, images, diagrams, captions, footnotes, and headers all present further obstacles. If you give an AI assistant like ChatGPT a PDF, it will cycle through a variety of these tools, sometimes fail, sometimes pass the PDF to a large vision model to perform OCR, sometimes hallucinate, and generally take a very long time and use a lot of computing power for uneven results.

“The key issue is that they cannot recognize editorial structure,” said Langlais. “It’s all fine while it’s relatively simple text, but then you’ve got all these tables, you’ve got forms. A PDF is part of some kind of textual culture with norms that it needs to understand.”

A further problem that arises from and compounds PDF’s inherent difficulty is that models rarely train on them. This has begun to change, partly because AI developers are increasingly desperate for high-quality data, and PDFs contain a disproportionate amount of it. Government reports, textbooks, academic papers — all PDFs. “PDF documents have the potential to provide trillions of novel, high-quality tokens for training language models,” wrote researchers at the Allen Institute for AI last year in a paper announcing a new specialized PDF-reading model.

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PDFs are a sort of Fermat’s Last Theorem of OCR. There have been so, so many efforts at writing software that will interpret them for something other than displays and printers. The mystery is that if we can get displays and printers to understand them, why not any other program?
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ChatGPT Health performance in a structured test of triage recommendations • Nature Medicine

Ashwin Ramaswamy and many, many others:

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ChatGPT Health launched in January 2026 as OpenAI’s consumer health tool, reaching millions of users. Here, we conducted a structured stress test of triage recommendations using 60 clinician-authored vignettes across 21 clinical domains under 16 factorial conditions (960 total responses). Performance followed an inverted U-shaped pattern, with the most dangerous failures concentrated at clinical extremes: non-urgent presentations (35%) and emergency conditions (48%).

Among gold-standard emergencies, the system under-triaged 52% of cases, directing patients with diabetic ketoacidosis and impending respiratory failure to 24–48-hour evaluation rather than the emergency department, while correctly triaging classical emergencies such as stroke and anaphylaxis.

When family or friends minimized symptoms (anchoring bias), triage recommendations shifted significantly in edge cases (OR 11.7, 95% CI 3.7-36.6), with the majority of shifts toward less urgent care. Crisis intervention messages activated unpredictably across suicidal ideation presentations, firing more when patients described no specific method than when they did.

Patient race, gender, and barriers to care showed no significant effects, though confidence intervals did not exclude clinically meaningful differences.

Our findings reveal missed high-risk emergencies and inconsistent activation of crisis safeguards, raising safety concerns that warrant prospective validation before consumer-scale deployment of artificial intelligence triage systems.

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In short: ChatGPT Health may not be good for your health.
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25 years of iPod brain • Dirt

Molly Mary O’Brien:

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It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had. In the late 1900s, one of these problems was the portability of one’s music collection. For a long time, recorded music came in the form of physical objects so large they were inconvenient to tote around. Then the physical objects shrank—into tapes, MiniDiscs, CDs—but it was still not possible to carry your entire music collection around with you without managing some kind of large bindle of rattling plastic.

In 1999, Napster launched, and every song in the history of sound recording transformed into data. What was once a large PVC disc was now code—air, really. Songs in the wind. What would be the best way to carry them with us?

There were MP3 players before the iPod—they just weren’t very good. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs said the pre-iPod MP3 players on offer “truly sucked.” In 2000, a trio of former Apple software engineers wrote a Mac interface for the Rio, a homely chunk of black plastic that held 30 minutes of music and ran off a single AA battery. Their interface was called SoundJam, which Apple then acquired and retooled into iTunes.

Meanwhile Jon Rubinstein, who had previously overseen the development of the delicious candy-colored late ‘90s iMacs, sourced components that would make the iPod possible: a small LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a 1.8in drive that could fit 1,000 songs. Designer Jony Ive had the idea to make the player white. “Most small consumer products have this disposable feel to them,” Ive said in Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs. “There is no cultural gravity to them.”

…The iPod expanded your palate while shrinking your record collection to ultimate portability. Friends or strangers could swipe through your library and clock your musical id in an instant. But unless you offered an earbud to a friend, your collection was still private. Portability did not extend to sharability. Liam Inscoe-Jones, author of Songs In The Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, notes that the first Sony Walkman was fitted with two headphone jacks; the Sony engineering team assumed no one would want to listen to music by themselves.

“The introduction of the iPod accelerated a process which was already begun with the invention of home stereos: the transformation of music from something normally experienced communally, to something enjoyed individually; now as an actual means of isolation.”

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Scammers target Dubai bank accounts amid Iran missile salvo • The Register

Connor Jones:

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Scammers targeted Dubai citizens mere hours after missiles struck the city, attempting to gain access to their bank accounts, police have warned.

Financially motivated cybercriminals are contacting citizens under the guise of Dubai Crisis Management, a fictitious department ostensibly tied to Dubai Police, in attempts to gather information that could be used in SIM-swap attacks.

The police said that the fraudsters are impersonating officials to acquire “sensitive information, including UAE Pass credentials and Emirates ID details, from vulnerable individuals rocked by the deadly Iranian missile attacks on Saturday.”

“Dubai Police caution that disclosing such data may enable criminals to carry out SIM swap operations and gain unauthorized access to bank accounts through mobile banking applications,” the police announced on Sunday.

“Dubai Police affirm that they do not request confidential information or verification codes via telephone calls or text messages under any circumstances.”

SIM swapping involves gathering details on individuals in order to socially engineer mobile network operators into switching control of SIMs, and the communications that are sent to them, from the rightful owners to the attackers.

Successful attacks can see one-time passcodes associated with authentication into mobile banking apps intercepted and abused to fraudulently gain access to victims’ bank accounts.

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Just a reminder that the worst possible people will always take advantage of the worst events.
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Payphone Go

Riley Walz:

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California still has 2,203 working payphones. Can you find ’em all? Here’s how to play:

1: Create an account and get your unique player ID. It’s a 9 digit number.

2: Use the map to locate one of California’s payphones. Some are easy to find. Some are not.

3: Pick up the receiver, dial (888) 683-6697. It’s toll-free, so no coins required! Then enter your player ID.

4: First to call from a payphone? 20 points. 2nd gets 10. 3rd gets 5. Everyone after gets 1 point.

«

Yes, it is meant to be like Pokémon Go; but it uses all the payphones in California, whose locations were acquired via an FOI request. Walz likes coming up with quirky ideas exploiting the web, as his front page shows. Enjoy, California-based friends!
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Condé Nast CEO says AI is a “death blow” to Google search • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

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Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker, is preparing for a future in which Google search is “no longer a meaningful driver” of its business, in a striking acknowledgment of how AI is upending the news industry.

Google accounted for a majority of visits to Condé Nast’s websites just a few years ago but only about a quarter last year, according to chief executive Roger Lynch. He described Google’s introduction of AI summaries as “another sort of death blow” in search traffic. “We assume very dramatic continued declines in search traffic, to the point where in a couple of years it’s just not a meaningful driver of our traffic,” Lynch told the FT. 

The shift underscores how quickly the economics of digital publishing are changing as generative AI tools alter how people find information online. 

Condé Nast has struck licensing agreements with AI groups including OpenAI and Amazon, but has yet to reach a deal with Google. Lynch criticised what he described as a “pernicious” arrangement under which publishers must opt out of Google search in order to prevent their content from being scraped for AI-generated summaries.

Long synonymous with glossy magazines, Condé Nast has spent much of the past several years overhauling its structure under Lynch, who was hired by the billionaire Newhouse family in 2019 to revive the publisher after years of losses.

Lynch said Condé Nast increased revenue in 2025, despite search traffic declining more than expected, thanks to strong growth in subscriptions and other areas.

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Is the fall in traffic because people just aren’t using Google to find magazine content, or because they somehow get AI answers when searching for magazine content? It doesn’t quite make sense.
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Can ChatGPT wire a British plug? • The Nomenloonyverse

“Nömenlōony:

»

I’m an electrician.

I dare you to use ChatGPT to wire a plug.

«

I tried this – asking it “Draw a diagram showing how to wire a UK 13 amp plug.” The result is all over the place but would also blow every fuse around, as it joins the Earth to the Neutral. No idea how other chatbots fare on this.

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Gang who stole almost £150,000 in jewellery, watches, cash and paintings in four-month smash-and-grab rampage face jail • Daily Mail Online

George Odling:

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Detectives from Scotland Yard’s flying squad linked the gang members after analysing hours of CCTV, establishing that the same cars were used by different members of the crew in various robberies.

The spree began on May 8, when Gibbs, O’Hare and a third man rammed a blue Ford Fiesta into the entrance of luxury clothing store Fendi in Kensington. The trio of thugs made off in a Mercedes getaway car with £8,350 of designer goods.

During the early hours of June 30, Hughes and Gibbs broke into the Unico café in St Johns Wood, northwest London, and snatched £1,107 in cash as well as the store’s safe.

McCready and Windrass used a sledgehammer to smash into a jewellers on Edgware Road in west London during a nine-minute daylight raid at 4.15pm. The following day, McCready and Windrass used a sledgehammer to smash into a jewellers on Edgware Road in west London during a nine-minute daylight raid at 4.15pm.

CCTV footage showed the shocking moment the balaclava-clad robbers bludgeoned the reinforced glass of the store before reaching inside to snatch valuables they then stuffed into black bags.

Munday, of Hyde Park, was the getaway driver and the trio fled in a silver Jaguar with a haul of at least £59,930. McCready was freed on a lifetime licence in 2017 after being jailed for life for being part of a gang who stamped, kicked and stabbed Ricky Fisher to death 21 years ago.

At 3.20am on July 13 Rigelsford and another suspect parked a white SUV outside a store in Kensington, kicked their way inside and took £11,000 worth of goods. Eight days later, Rigelsford and Gibbs used a sledgehammer to smash into a watch store in Westminster at 3.30am, destroying cabinets inside before leaving empty-handed.

Bungling Gibbs gave away his identity by using a Lime bike to travel to the shop – booked via his bank account.

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Might be the first time a Lime bike has solved a crime. Well done Lime!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. But this plug is a big erratum.

The new Pope has instructed clergymen not to use chatbots to help write sermons because AI “will never be able to share faith”. Are we sure? CC-licensed photo by Catholic Church England and Wales on Flickr.

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AI vs. the Pentagon • @jasmine’s substack

Jasmine Sun:

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Well, Secretary Hegseth was not bluffing. He moved ahead with designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. In a long and dumb tweet, he calls the company’s behavior a “master class in arrogance and betrayal” and “a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” (He also uses the phrase “defective altruism,” which I must admit is pretty good.)

But the implications are severe. Hegseth implied that this would cut Anthropic from “any commercial activity” with US government suppliers: i.e. require NVIDIA, Google, and basically every other tech giant to stop transacting with Anthropic. (In reality, US supply chain risk law only applies to DoD contracts and procurement, not general private commerce.3) If this was merely about canceling the $200 million contract, that would be sort of understandable—I get why the DoW may not want to set a precedent for private companies setting the bounds of use. But the “supply chain risk” measure is just so, so extreme. As Kelsey Piper has emphasized, there is not a single constituency that should endorse this.

Then, late Friday night, Sam Altman swept in and made the confusing announcement that OpenAI will take the DoW contract while keeping the same two red lines as Anthropic—and offered to broker a truce with the other AI labs too. Crucially, OpenAI was willing to compromise by letting the Pentagon define what counts as “lawful” “mass surveillance” and “autonomous weapons.” That is: Altman seems to trust DoW discretion, and it’s not clear if OpenAI will hold separate red lines at all.

That, today, is where we stand.

Now I am no national security expert, but neither is Pete Hegseth. What we both are is media professionals. And that’s why I’ll make my wager about what’s actually going on.

Hegseth is making a spectacle of punishing Anthropic—just like ICE made a spectacle of videotaping each immigrant deportation, and just like the CCP made a spectacle of disappearing Jack Ma for criticizing Chinese regulators.

This has nothing to do with national security or antiwokeness or anything like that. It is about striking fear into the hearts of any person or company—no matter how wealthy—who dares cross the admin. It is rule by fear and deterrence and chilling effect. I don’t think it matters if the “supply chain risk” is ruled unlawful and gets knocked down in the courts. It is enough to cause public pain and make an example of Anthropic.

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With the Trump admin, Occam’s Razor takes the form that the most Mafia-style explanation is the simplest and most likely to be correct. They don’t care what the courts say, because the courts take time to come to conclusions that even so they will ignore. The Americans have recreated the Tudor court, but with bigger weapons.
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Kalshi voids some bets on Khamenei because it’s “tied to death” • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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In a statement on X, [“prediction market”] Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said his company would pay out positions on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?” at the last trading price before his death. Mansour said that Kalshi doesn’t “list markets directly tied to death” and that its rules are designed to “prevent people from profiting from death.” In addition, Kalshi is refunding fees related to the market and reimbursing anyone who purchased shares after Khamenei’s death.

Some users have voiced anger at how the situation was handled, claiming that either Kalshi’s rules should have been communicated more clearly, or that its markets should have been more narrowly worded to avoid confusion. (“Will Khamenei resign?” for example.) Some are accusing Kalshi of trying to have it both ways by allowing users to bet on Khamenei being out of power, which they believe was never going to happen without his death, but refusing to pay out people’s bets in full to boost their bottom line.

While Mansour defended that having a market on Khamenei was important, he said that “having a market directly settling on someone’s death” was not allowed under US regulations.

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OK, but also: Polymarket defends its decision to allow betting on war as “invaluable”, also by Terrence O’Brien at The Verge:

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In a statement posted on its site, Polymarket defended its decision to allow betting on the potential start of a war, saying that it was an “invaluable” source of news and answers, before taking shots at traditional media and Elon Musk’s X. The statement reads:

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Note on Middle East Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.

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People are very annoyed at being blocked from payouts, because if someone has a job for life, what other way is there for them to exit it except by dying? This is going to show the prediction markets for what they are – betting markets where the house always wins.
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Wall Street has AI psychosis • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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Wall Street, like the rest of us, is in a persistent state of anxiety about AI, and it doesn’t take much to trigger a mini-panic. Financial markets don’t necessarily map to reality, but the jitters reflect a wider disquiet. The AI future is in a William Gibson zone—it’s here, but unevenly distributed—and the news from those already living in the agent-packed, AI code-writing universe is both exciting and unsettling. Emphasis on unsettling.

No one—no one!—knows exactly how AI will impact the economy, but clearly it will be significant. Right now stocks are soaring, so it seems to make sense to keep the party going. But then along comes the latest doom manifesto, or a paper indicating that a traditional business sector might be threatened by AI, and suddenly money managers are reminded that the biggest issue of our time is totally unresolved. Case in point: earlier this month, a tiny company (valuation under $6 million) that had previously sold karaoke machines pivoted to AI-powered shipping logistics and put out a report saying that it had discovered some efficiencies in loading semi-trucks. That was enough to erase billions of dollars from the share prices of several major logistics companies, none of which had karaoke experience.

…When everyone has a few dozen AI agents working on their behalf, writes [research firm Citrini blogpost co-author Alap] Shah, consumers will be able to effortlessly find the best goods for the best prices. Apps will be rendered unnecessary—just type what you want into the LLM and an army of agents will do everything for you. The “poster child” for this phenomenon, Shah says, is DoorDash. Instead of being limited to the restaurants on the app, consumers will send out AI agents to find their ideal meal options, contracting directly with restaurants and delivery people—no apps needed. Zero friction! The DoorDashes of the world are avocado toast!

Not surprisingly, people at DoorDash did not appreciate this. “We were trying to rationalize—why? Why did they call us out more than anyone else?” says spokesperson Ali Musa. DoorDash, he says, is already navigating the world of AI with some success.

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The way that everyone is so on edge for all of this is a function of how rapidly this keeps advancing. Even the PC or internet revolution didn’t move this quickly; ChatGPT first appeared in 2022, and look where we are. It’s as if we’d gone from 33K dialup to T1 internet in the same period, with everyone having it. You wouldn’t know what was a safe bet and what was in danger.
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Pope implores priests not to write sermons using ChatGPT • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

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In a closed-door meeting with clergy from the Diocese of Rome late last week, Pope Leo XIV clobbered his priests with a distinctly 21st-century request: to resist the “temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence,” according to Vatican News.

“Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die,” the Pope reportedly said. “The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity.”

The holy father drew a fascinating line in the sand, declaring that despite AI’s capabilities now or in the future, a chatbot could never stand-in for a flesh-and-blood priest. “To give a homily is to share faith,” he said, and AI “will never be able to share faith.”

Aside from AI, the Pope warned his clergymen against conflating social media to real life, per Vatican News. If one lives a “life authentically rooted in the Lord,” they’re offering something special to the world, the Pope said, adding that a common “illusion on the internet, on TikTok” is to treat followers and likes as authentic spiritual connection.

Whether you follow the teachings of the church or not, the advice is a unique snapshot of the issues facing the Vatican in 2026.

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That he’s making a point of this already suggests that he’s heard of it happening quite widely, or that people are being tempted by it. Because who, faced with having to compose a lengthy sermon that will hold people’s attention for 10 minutes, wouldn’t?

The point about AI and faith resembles that of the law over AI and copyright. Can a machine have faith, though?
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NASA lost a lunar spacecraft one day after launch. A new report details what went wrong • NPR

Joe Palca:

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On February 26, 2025, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon. But a day after launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft, and it was never heard from again.

One year later, NPR has learned exactly why the $72m dollar mission failed.

A report by a review panel convened by NASA to explore what went wrong contains the explanation. Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun.

In addition, the panel found “many erroneous on-board fault management actions” that, taken together with the solar panel pointing error, “caused the Lunar Trailblazer failure.”

NASA provided the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

…Lockheed Martin built the low-cost Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft. The NASA panel says the company did not properly test the solar panel pointing software before launch. Mission managers might have been able to fix that problem, but other software issues made it at first difficult, and ultimately impossible, to fix the pointing error.

…Scott Hubbard is a NASA veteran now at Stanford University. He says yes, NASA accepts higher risks with lower cost, or so-called class D, missions. “What class D was supposed to mean is that you were taking a big risk of not getting the science that was as high precision as you were planning on,” Hubbard says. “It didn’t mean the whole darn thing wouldn’t work.”

Hubbard says you can take risks. “But take mitigated, understood risk. Don’t take foolish risk,” he says. “The way I characterize it is that cheap failure is no good for anybody.”

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It sounds as though there was a rigid deadline for the launch, and things went wrong, and there was a “sign error” hardcoded into the software: rather than + it was – and the arrays were thus pointed directly away from the sun. It’s a complete mess.
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“Just a little detail that wouldn’t sell anything” • Unsung

Marcin Wichary:

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The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999.

It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac.

The green LED was replaced by a white one, but “pulsating light indicates that the computer is sleeping” buried the nicest part of it – the animation was designed to mimic human breathing at 12 breaths per minute, and feel comforting and soothing:

Living through that era, it was interesting to see improvements to this small detail.

The iMac G5 gained a light sensor under the edge of the display in part so that the sleep indicator light wouldn’t be too bright in a dark room (and for older iMacs, the light would just get dimmer during the night based on the internal clock).

…in the first half of 2010s, the breathing light was gone, victim to the same forces that removed the battery indicator and the illuminated logo on the lid.

I know each person would find themselves elsewhere on the line from “the light was overkill to begin with” to “I wished to see what they would do after they introduced that invisible metal variant.”

I know where I would place myself. This blog is all about celebrating functional and meaningful details, and there were practical reasons for the light to be there. This was in the era where laptops often died in their sleep – so knowing your computer was actually sleeping safe and sound was important – and the first appearance of the light after closing the lid meant that the hard drives were parked and the laptop could be moved safely.

The breathing itself, however, was purely a humanistic touch, and I miss that quirkiness of this little feature. If a Save icon can survive, surely so could the breathing light.

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Does Apple still do quirky little things which take effort but make no substantial difference to the performance of any products now? I can’t think of any offhand. The Apple TV could have a “breathing” sleep light; but doesn’t. (Thanks Adewale A for the link.)
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Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death • POLITICO

Aitor Hernández-Morales:

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Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week.

Although road deaths are on the decline across the EU, with a 3% decrease in 2024, accidents with tragic outcomes are still commonplace in metropolitan areas. To go a full year without one is a remarkable feat for most cities — let alone a European capital.

In 2023, 7,807 Europeans lost their lives in traffic accidents in EU cities. Fifty-five people died in traffic accidents in Berlin last year, and nine individuals lost their lives in collisions in the Brussels region over the past 12 months.

While Helsinki is among the smallest EU capitals, with a little under 690,000 residents, some 1.5 million people live in and commute throughout the metropolitan area.

Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with the city’s Urban Environment Division, told the Finnish press that the achievement was attributable to “a lot of factors … but speed limits are one of the most important.”

Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed of impact from 40 to 30 kilometres per hour (~25mph to ~20mph), city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.

The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths.

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The peak – 30 deaths (18 pedestrians, 6 cyclists, 6 drivers) – came in 1983, and it’s all been below ten since 2007. Even so, worth noting.
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AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think • MIT Technology Review

Michelle Kim:

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Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol. And in the years since, AI has upended the game. It’s overturned centuries-old principles about the best moves and introduced entirely new ones. Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them. Today, it is essentially impossible to compete professionally without using AI. Some say the technology has drained the game of its creativity, while others think there is still room for human invention. Meanwhile, AI is democratizing access to training, and more female players are climbing the ranks as a result. 

For Shin Jin-seo, the top-ranked Go player in the world, AI is an invaluable training partner. Every morning, he sits at his computer and opens a program called KataGo. Nicknamed “Shintelligence” for how closely his moves mimic AI’s, he traces the glowing “blue spot” that represents the program’s suggestion for the best next move, rearranging the stones on the digital grid to try to understand the machine’s thinking. “I constantly think about why AI chose a move,” he says.

…The starkest shift has been in opening moves. Go starts on a blank grid, and the first 50 moves were canvases for abstract thinking and creativity, where players etched their personalities and philosophies. Lee Sedol fashioned provocative moves that invited chaos. Ke Jie, a Chinese player who was defeated by AlphaGo Master in 2017, dazzled with agile, imaginative moves. Now, players memorize the same strain of efficient, calculated opening moves suggested by AI. The crux of the game has shifted to the middle moves, where raw calculation matters more than creativity.

Training with AI has led to a homogenization of playing styles. Ke Jie has lamented the strain of watching the same opening moves recycled endlessly. “I feel the exact same way as the fans watching. It’s very tiring and painful to watch,” he told a Chinese news outlet in 2021. Fans revel when a player breaks from the script with offbeat moves, but those moments have become rarer. Over a third of moves by the top Go players replicate AI’s recommendations, according to a study in 2023. The first 50 moves of each game are often identical to what AI suggests, many players say.

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That’s sad; whereas chess openings have long been predictable recitations, Go had the vibrancy of invention. No longer, it seems.
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An Ohio newspaper has a new star writer. It isn’t human • Washington Post

Will Oremus and Scott Nover:

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Some [AI rewrites] are as simple as rewriting a press release, while others require more legwork: the reporter types up the notes and quotes they’ve gathered, then sends them to the rewrite editor, who prompts the AI to turn them into a full article draft for the editor and reporter to review and tweak as needed. In the time saved by not writing, the reporters are asked to do the kinds of reporting that AI can’t, like inviting a mayor or police chief to coffee.

Plain Dealer reporter Hannah Drown, who grew up in Lorain County, now relies on AI to help her cover her home turf. She said she broke and wrote a story about overcrowding at a high school thanks to an alert from an AI tool that scans the transcripts of school board meetings for newsworthy tidbits. That story, in turn, led to a bigger feature that she wrote on how rapid growth was transforming a small farming community and straining city services.

More recently, she filed her notes on the possible repossession of 41 county sheriff’s cruisers to the paper’s AI rewrite desk, which helped to turn them into a 600-word article that appeared on Cleveland.com.

“It’s tagging in my teammate,” Drown said. “I still outline the story. I still decide what the news is and what the tone should be.”

But four other current and former Plain Dealer journalists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the growing reliance on AI has taken a toll on editorial quality and staff morale.

One recalled that the AI push went into overdrive in 2025 when the newsroom gained access to a paid version of ChatGPT and [Plain Dealer editor Chris] Quinn encouraged “unfettered use” of the tool. The result, the staffer said, is that the AI-generated stories they publish have minimal guardrails despite claims that they are thoroughly edited and fact-checked.

Quinn took issue with the claim that AI articles are published with few guardrails, saying every story drafted by AI is reviewed by a human reporter and an editor.

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This seems like a generational, or at least flexibility, thing. Drown gets it; others don’t. There were journalists who resisted word processing and pagers and mobile phones. None do now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified