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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.”

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

»

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:

»

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.

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. 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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

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

AI vs. the Pentagon • @jasmine’s substack

Jasmine Sun:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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

The demand for RAM for AI datacentres means less will be available for cheap smartphones – which means their sales will crash in 2026. CC-licensed photo by Asian Development Bank on Flickr.

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

Instagram to alert parents if teens search for self-harm content • BBC News

Richard Morris and Liv McMahon:

»

Parents using Instagram’s child supervision tools will soon receive alerts if their teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm related terms on the platform.

It is the first time parent company Meta will proactively alert parents to searches by their child on Instagram for harmful material, rather than just block searches and direct users to external help.

Parents and teens enrolled in Instagram’s Teen Accounts experience in the UK, US, Australia and Canada will be notified about the alerts from next week, with the rest of the world to follow later.

But suicide prevention charity the Molly Rose Foundation has strongly criticised the measures, warning they “could do more harm than good”.

“This clumsy announcement is fraught with risk and we are concerned that forced disclosures could do more harm than good,” said its chief executive Andy Burrows.

The organisation was established by the family of Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 at the age of 14 after viewing self-harm and suicide content on platforms including Instagram.

Burrows said “every parent would want to know if their child is struggling, but these flimsy notifications will leave parents panicked and ill-prepared to have the sensitive and difficult conversations that will follow”.

Meta says alerts to parents about their child searching for suicide and self-harm material within a short space of time on Instagram will also be accompanied by expert resources to help them navigate difficult conversations.

However, Molly Russell’s father Ian, who set up the Molly Rose Foundation in her honour, remains sceptical about the alerts. “Imagine being a parent of a teenager and getting a message at work saying ‘your child is thinking of ending their life’… I don’t know how I’d react,” he told the BBC.

…A number of charities including the Molly Rose Foundation have said Meta’s announcement is almost an acknowledgment that more could be done to protect children on Instagram.

«

It’s incredibly slow movement by Instagram. And the responsibility for removing dangerous content remains with.. Instagram.
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Claude Blattman · AI for Researchers & Managers • Chris Blattman

Chris Blattman is a political economist at UChicago Harris:

»

In January 2026 I started building AI workflows with Claude Code. What seemed impossible then — inbox triage, meeting capture, proposal drafting, project dashboards, trip planning — is running today. “Claude Blattman” isn’t real, but the tools are. I’ve never coded in my life, so if I can do this you can.

…Like most academics, the work that matters — the research, the writing, the thinking — gets buried under an avalanche of email, coordination, proposals, and administrative overhead. I manage a large portfolio of research projects simultaneously, each with distributed teams across multiple countries. I spend more time answering emails and writing grant reports than doing the science I was trained for.

For the past year I intensively used AI chatbots. They were invaluable — deep research, better drafts, faster brainstorming, decent writing feedback. But they were limited. The time savings were real but modest.

Then in January 2026 I discovered Claude Code, and the center of gravity shifted from chatbots to agentic tools — AI that can read your files, search your email, manage your calendar, and build workflows that improve themselves over time.

I spent hours daily for a month building skills and processes. The time investment hasn’t paid off yet in pure hours saved, but I can see where this is going — and things that seemed impossible are working today.

…I built this site because I’m in the same position as most of my readers: buried in admin, not a developer, trying to claw back time for work that actually matters.

If a non-technical professor can build a working AI workflow system, you can too.

«

This is a useful primer with real working examples. The email triage is obviously useful; I would have loved to have had that when I was getting 200+ emails per day as a daily journalist. If you’re feeling like you’re drowning in unimportant stuff, this is surely worth reading.
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Burger King will use AI to check if employees say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called “Patty,” is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for “friendliness.”

Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. “This is all meant to be a coaching tool,” Roux says, adding that the company is “iterating” on capturing the tone of conversations as well.

The OpenAI-powered Patty serves as the “voice” of the BK Assistant platform, which combines data across drive-thru conversations, kitchen equipment, inventory, and other areas of the Burger King business. Employees can ask Patty questions, such as how many strips of bacon to put on a Maple Bourbon BBQ Whopper, or for instructions on how to clean the shake machine.

Because it’s integrated with the new cloud point-of-sale system, the AI assistant will also alert managers if a machine is down for maintenance or when an item is out of stock. “Within 15 minutes, the entire ecosystem will remove it from stock — whether you’re walking into a restaurant to order from the kiosk, whether you’re going to the drive-thru, the digital menu board will be updated,” Roux says.

«

Thanks, I hate it. A micromanager that isn’t even human.
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Worldwide smartphone market to decline 13% in 2026, its largest ever drop • IDC

»

Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to decline 12.9% year-on-year (YoY) in 2026 to 1.12bn units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This decline will bring the smartphone market to its lowest annual shipment volume in more than a decade. The current forecast represents a sharp decline from our November forecast amid the intensifying memory shortage crisis.

“What we are witnessing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain, with ripple effects spreading across the entire consumer electronics industry,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for Worldwide Client Devices, IDC. “The global smartphone market, particularly Android manufacturers, faces a significant threat. Vendors whose business is mainly at the low end of the market are likely to suffer the most. Rising component costs will hit their margins, and they will have no choice but to pass the costs on to end users.

“By contrast, Apple and Samsung are better positioned to navigate this crisis. As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens.”

“The memory crisis will cause more than a temporary decline; it marks a structural reset of the entire market, fundamentally reshaping long‑term TAM (Total Addressable Market), the vendor landscape, and the product mix,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

“We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points. Although shipments will witness a record drop, Smartphone ASP [average selling price] is projected to rise 14% to a record $523 this year.

«

This is a lot of people putting off buying a new phone, especially at the low end, where a panoply of Android manufacturers are getting by in China and India by offering low-end products. Now their RAM supply is going to dry up, and so are they. The AI blast radius gets bigger.
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The death of Spotify: why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete • The Artist Economy

Joel Gouveia:

»

I’m going to take the diplomatic hat off here and say with brutal honesty: basically everybody in the music business hates Spotify except for the people who work there. It’s a platform that sucks artists for everything they have, it actively prevents community building, and, despite all of that, the platform still struggles to maintain a healthy profit margin.

The streaming business model is fundamentally broken. And eventually, its demise will become more and more obvious to recognize. I’ll break down exactly why the DSP era is coming to a grinding halt, why the major labels are quietly terrified, and why the artists who don’t pivot now are going to go down with the ship.

…[Jimmy] Iovine put it bluntly: “The streaming services have a bad situation, there’s no margins, they’re not making any money.”

This model only works for Apple, Amazon, and Google, because they don’t need their music platforms to be wildly profitable. Amazon uses music as a loss-leader to keep you paying for Prime. Apple uses it to sell $1,000 iPhones.

As for Spotify, or any standalone music streaming company, they’re kind of screwed. And guess what – when the platform’s margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first? The artists.

…If the DSPs are “minutes away from obsolete,” what replaces them? Well, I’m not sure the DSPs are going to disappear overnight, but if you’re an artist or a manager trying to sustain yourself in this evolving music economy, the answer is direct ownership.

The artists who will survive the next five years are the ones who are quietly shifting their focus away from the “ATM Machine.” They are building their own cultural hangars.

They are capturing phone numbers on Laylo. They are driving fans to private Discord servers. They are focusing on ARPF (Average Revenue Per Fan) through high-margin merch, vinyl, and hard tickets, rather than begging for fractions of a penny from a playlist placement.

We are witnessing the death of the “Mass Audience” and the birth of the “Micro-Community.”

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Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs • ArXiv

Simon Lermen, Daniel Paleka et al:

»

We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting.

Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to prior deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data or manual feature engineering, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms.

We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user’s Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched.

In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

«

One of the authors is from Anthropic. The response of Matthew Green, the cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University, was that this wrecks pseudonymity online. It might rely more on written text than content posted to TikTok or Instagram, but those might be the people you’re trying to deanonymise.
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AI mistakes are infuriating gamers as developers seek savings • Bloomberg

Vlad Savov:

»

A backlash against the spreading use of AI in video games has grown “sensational,” the developer behind the surprise smash hit Arc Raiders has warned after being caught in the middle of the fallout.

The $200bn video game industry is riven by disagreement over how to integrate AI into its creative processes. The new tech has been celebrated as the next big revolution by some, but also lambasted as a threat driving out human creativity and degrading quality. The very people who might have been expected to be its most avid fans, PC gamers, are obstinately hostile.

Arc Raiders sold 12m copies in three months after its release last year and is the most-played paid game on PC platform Steam today. But, for a brief time, it was vilified online by players for including robotic-sounding auto-generated voices.

Patrick Soderlund, who set up Stockholm-based Embark Studios AB after steering major franchises as a senior executive at Electronic Arts, said the Arc Raiders team leaned on AI for the parts that weren’t essential for immersive play. They used a mix of professional actors and automated voices.

“We started with a thesis and the foundation that the industry is troubled,” Soderlund, 52, said of the company’s origins. “We saw escalating development costs that made it very difficult to make games affordable.”

Burdened by the sins of recent past — overhiring during the pandemic boom and letting production costs spiral out of control — game developers have been shedding jobs and canceling projects. Sony Group Corp. last week shut down Austin-based Bluepoint Games, which it acquired five years earlier. Paris-based Ubisoft Entertainment SA in January announced a complete reorganization that sank its share price by 40% in a day, though it expressed hope that generative AI could be a salve.

…That message has struggled to reach gamers, who’ve built up a cynicism about big game publishers after years of flops, mismanagement and layoffs at fan-favorite studios. Part of the problem stems from the immaturity of AI tools, whose product is only ever apparent to players when it’s worse than human work — including the voices in Arc Raiders.

The fans’ worry about AI squeezing the art out of their favorite pastime is increasingly shared by industry insiders. Some 47% of developers polled by research house Omdia last year said they expect generative AI use to reduce game quality, with views souring from a year earlier.

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(The link is free for a week, apparently. Get it while it’s hot!)
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New York sues video game developer Valve, says its ‘loot boxes’ are gambling • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

»

New York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of “loot boxes.”

In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential gambling,” violating the state’s constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies. Valve, based in Bellevue, Washington, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Loot boxes let players use real money to buy chances to win virtual items, such as decorations for characters and weapons, in an effort to convey status.

James said Valve generated billions of dollars of revenue by selling “keys” to open loot boxes, including in one game where the process resembled a slot machine as a wheel whirred through various items before stopping. The attorney general said key sales advanced Valve’s unusual business model of letting players sell items they won on its virtual marketplace, Steam Community Market, and on other marketplaces.

“Valve’s loot boxes are particularly pernicious because they are popular among children and adolescents,” according to the complaint.

Children introduced to gambling by age 12 are four times more likely to become problem gamblers as adults, the complaint added, citing the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. James is seeking restitution for players, plus a fine of three times Valve’s alleged illegal gains.

Loot boxes for video games have been the subject of other regulatory action. For example, in January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission fined, opens new tab Singapore-based Cognosphere, the maker of Genshin Impact, $20m for deceiving children and others about the odds of winning valuable loot-box prizes.

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Seems like an open-and-shut case. Do they encourage people to spend money on a random outcome? Yes. The end.
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‘An AlphaFold 4’ – scientists marvel at DeepMind drug spinoff’s exclusive new AI • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

»

Nearly two years after Google DeepMind released an updated AlphaFold3 geared at drug discovery, its biopharmaceuticals spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, announced an even more powerful artificial-intelligence model — and they’re keeping it all to themselves.

Isomorphic Labs, based in London, touted the capacities of its “drug-discovery engine” — which it calls IsoDDE — in a 27-page technical report, released on 10 February. Achievements, including precise predictions of how proteins interact with potential drugs and antibody structures, have impressed scientists working in the field.

Yet unlike the AlphaFold AI systems for predicting protein structure — which were made accessible to other researchers and described in depth in journal articles — IsoDDE is proprietary, and the technical paper offers scant insight into how to achieve similar results.

“It’s a major advance, on the scale of an AlphaFold4,” referring to an unreleased future generation of Google DeepMind’s technology, says Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City who is working to develop fully open-source versions of AlphaFold. “The problem, of course, is that we know nothing of the details.”

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The full article requires a (free) login. AI is starting to push further into biotech: a couple I was talking to recently who work in biotech said that AlphaFold is the biggest thing that has happened in the space in the past few years.
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Exclusive: “rare earth” element shortages worsen in US aerospace, chips despite trade truce, sources say • Reuters

Allison Lampert, Laurie Chen, Lewis Jackson and Michael Martina:

»

Suppliers to US aerospace and semiconductor firms face worsening rare earth shortages, with two turning away some clients, industry insiders said, weeks before US President Donald Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for a summit in Beijing.

The shortages center on rare earths such as yttrium and scandium, niche members of the family of 17 elements, which play tiny but vital roles in defence technology, aerospace and semiconductors and are almost entirely produced in China.

While Beijing has allowed many rare earth exports to resume since it imposed restrictions in April, shipments of these materials still rarely make it to the U.S. despite the October detente with Washington, Chinese customs data show.

That easing of trade tensions, premised in part on China pausing its critical mineral export restrictions, will be on the table when Trump and Xi meet in Beijing in March.

A key pain point is yttrium, used in coatings that keep engines and turbines from melting at high temperatures. Without regular application of these coatings, engines cannot be used.

Since Reuters first reported about yttrium shortages in November, prices have jumped 60% and are now about 69 times as high as a year ago. Some coatings manufacturers are also now starting to ration material, according to company executives and traders.

…Another firm in the coating supply chain recently ran out of material and stopped selling products containing yttrium oxide, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

While shortages of yttrium and scandium have not weighed on production of jet engines or chips yet, a US government official told Reuters some US manufacturers now face “shortages” of certain rare earths from China.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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 new weather app from the people who built Dark Sky aims to show the uncertainty in forecasts. CC-licensed photo by Ladislav Beneš 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. Changeable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’ • The Verge

Hayden Field:

»

Over the past several weeks, as more and more Anthropic executives do interviews on a publicity blitz for Claude, one thing has gotten increasingly clear: Anthropic sure seems to think Claude is alive in some way, shape, or form.

“Alive” is obviously a loaded term; the more frequently used word is “conscious.” If you ask Anthropic if the company thinks Claude is alive, the company will flatly deny it, but stop short of saying the models aren’t conscious.

Kyle Fish, who leads model welfare research at Anthropic, told The Verge, “No, we don’t think Claude is ‘alive’ like humans or any other biological organisms. Asking whether they’re ‘alive’ is not a helpful framing for understanding them, as it typically refers to a fuzzy set of physiological, reproductive, and evolutionary characteristics.” Instead, he believes that “Claude, and other AI models, are a new kind of entity altogether.”

And is that new entity conscious? “Questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we’re investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable, but we remain deeply uncertain about these topics,” he said.

“We don’t know if the models are conscious,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast earlier this month. He specified that the company has taken “a generally precautionary approach here” in that Anthropic is “not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

«

Remember Blake Lemoine, the Google staffer who became convinced that one of its early LLMs was conscious? That was June 2022, and everyone thought Lemoine needed a looong holiday, including Google. Now, less than four years later, people are talking about this and considering it without people running up to them brandishing straitjackets.
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The tax nerd who bet his life savings against DOGE • WSJ

Richard Rubin:

»

Alan Cole put his life savings, all $342,195.63, into a prediction-market wager. He insists he’s not really a betting man. 

Cole is a 37-year-old tax economist with Ivy League degrees, a mortgage and a young child. Until Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came roaring into the nation’s capital last year, he was largely a plain-vanilla investor or, as he puts it, a “normal, conventional Wall Street Journal-reading adult.”

But Musk’s boasts and his eager fans brought an unusual opportunity into the burgeoning U.S. prediction markets: People willing to bet that the world’s richest man would transform and shrink the federal government.

Cole took the opposite position, one he didn’t see as a gamble at all. If federal spending in each quarter of 2025 exceeded federal spending in the fourth quarter of 2024, he would win big. 

Cole isn’t an old Washington hand or even an expert on federal spending. At the right-leaning Tax Foundation, he lives in the complex world of international corporate taxation. If you want to know about QDMTTs (a real thing) or the DBCFT (don’t ask), he’s your guy. He posts on X about subpar city snow clearing and various internet memes. 

Crucially, he’s been around long enough to see politicians’ promises collide into reality and to know basic federal-budget math. The US government has been described as an insurance company with an army. Now, with federal debt nearing 100% of gross domestic product, it’s an insurance company with an army and a giant mortgage. The forces driving spending ever upward—inflation, an aging population, healthcare costs and interest payments—can’t change quickly.

…Cole gradually amassed more than 3% of one particular $12 million federal-spending prediction market. He spread risk across several sub-bets, structured so he landed in the red only if spending declined by more than $50 billion. He wasn’t betting against Kalshi itself, just against people betting on Musk.

“The virtue of the matching market is that you can take the good side of a bad bet—someone else’s bad bet,” Cole said.

…The government published the final 2025 figures Feb. 20. It wasn’t even close. The lowest spending quarter in 2025 was $66bn above the bet’s target level. Cole collected $470,300, for a profit of more than $128,000, or 37%.

«

It’s true, though: Cole isn’t a betting man. This wasn’t a bet. It was like betting on where the sun will come up tomorrow.
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Embracing uncertainty in the weather in our new app • Acme Weather

Adam Grossman:

»

Our biggest pet peeve with most weather apps is how they deal (or rather, don’t deal) with forecast uncertainty. It is a simple fact that no weather forecast will ever be 100% reliable: the weather is moody, fickle, and chaotic. Forecasts are often wrong.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong. We address this uncertainty in several ways…

Our homegrown forecasts are produced using many different data sources, including numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data. Most of the time, our forecast will be a reliable source of information (it’s better than the one we had at Dark Sky). But, crucially, we supplement the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes…

This accomplishes a couple things.

First, the spread of the lines offers a sort of intuition as to how reliable the forecast is. Take the two forecasts below [images in the blogpost]. In the first, the alternate predictions are tightly focused and the forecast can be considered robust and reliable. In the second, there is a significant spread, which is an indication that something is up and the forecast may be subject to change. It’s a call to action to check other conditions or maps, or come back to the app more frequently.

Over time, you build up an intuitive sense of just how much you can actually trust the forecast. After using this for the past six months, I never want to go back to a single forecast again!

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$25 annually; not yet available in the UK. The developers originally made Dark Sky, which Apple bought; when they earned out they went straight back to weather apps. Be interesting to see how it copes with British weather, assuming it comes over here. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.)
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What happened after Elon Musk took the Russian army offline • POLITICO

Ibrahim Naber:

»

“All we’ve got left now,” the Russian soldier said, “are radios, cables and pigeons.”

A decision earlier this month by SpaceX to shut down access to Starlink satellite-internet terminals caused immediate chaos among Russian forces who had become increasingly reliant upon the Elon Musk-owned company’s technology to sustain their occupation of Ukraine, according to radio transmissions intercepted by a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit and shared with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, to which POLITICO belongs.

The communications breakdown significantly constrained Russian military capabilities, creating new opportunities for Ukrainian forces. In the days following the shutdown, Ukraine recaptured roughly 77 square miles in the country’s southeast, according to calculations by the news agency Agence France-Presse based on data from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

SpaceX began requiring verification of Starlink terminals on Feb. 4, blocking unverified Russian units from accessing its services. Almost immediately, Ukrainian eavesdroppers heard Russian soldiers complaining about the failure of “Kosmos” and “Sinka” — apparently code names for Starlink satellite internet and the messaging service Telegram.

“Damn it! Looks like they’ve switched off all the Starlinks,” one Russian soldier exclaimed. “The connection is gone, completely gone. The images aren’t being transmitted,” another shouted.

Dozens of the recordings were played for Axel Springer Global Reporter Network reporters in an underground listening post maintained by the Bureviy Brigade in northeastern Ukraine. Neither SpaceX nor the Russian Foreign Ministry responded to requests for comment.

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On one hand, good; on the other, what is the world where a single man – not a government – can do something which can potentially alter the course of a war?
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The phantom horizon • Royal Aeronautical Society

Emma Lewis:

»

It is a blunt truth: the human body is not designed for flight. Our vestibular system provides very finely tuned balance and motion cues on the ground but becomes wildly unreliable once an aircraft moves in three axes. Our eyes are also easily tricked by darkness, bright lights, sloping terrain, reflections, rain, haze or even the expanse of the sea at night.

The problem is that misperception rarely presents itself as confusion. It presents as absolute confidence in something that is essentially wrong. A pilot’s instruments, not their body, remain the only trustworthy reference. Yet under stress, fatigue or startle, the body can still overpower the mind.

Pilots generally learn about ‘the leans’ early in their flight training. When an aircraft slowly banks below the vestibular detection rate, the brain does not perceive movement. When the pilot later levels the wings, the inner ear signals a bank in the opposite direction. This triggers a powerful, almost irresistible urge to lean back into the imaginary turn.

Meanwhile, the somatogyral illusion is its more dramatic cousin. After sustained rotation, the semicircular canals that form part of the body’s vestibular system effectively reset. When rotation stops, the pilot feels as if they have begun turning in the opposite direction. It is incredibly convincing and often disorientating. These semicircular canals also only measure angular acceleration, not attitude. In prolonged or gentle turns they simply stop reporting. In the absence of visual cues, the brain inaccurately fills in the gaps.

Spatial disorientation continues to be a leading factor in aviation accidents. The Atlas Air Boeing 767 crash of February 2019 (flight 3591 from Miami to Houston) demonstrated how disorientation and startle can combine catastrophically after an unexpected pitch-up and go-around.

The investigation cited multiple contributing factors, including improper control inputs and breakdowns in crew monitoring, but the underlying thread throughout was the flight crew’s sensory misperception.

Modern cockpit technologies are increasingly designed to outsmart the sensory traps that have challenged pilots for decades. Synthetic vision systems now provide a reliable, clear horizon even in total darkness or heavy weather, while head-up displays (HUDs) keep critical attitude and flight-path information directly in the pilot’s forward view.

«

“The leans” is what killed one of the Kennedy clan: he was descending over water at night, in conditions he wasn’t qualified for.
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What’s the point of school when AI can do your homework? • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions. 

Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself. 

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

But humans aren’t horses. “This is much bigger than Einstein,” Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.”

Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.

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That quote about horses is insane. Has he really so little idea of history that he doesn’t know what happened to all those horses that became surplus? Does he think they were just set free to wander around cities? And that’s before we get to the question of “what is school for?” It is not just about opening books.
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Writing crystallised thinking at Amazon. Is AI muddying it? • Big Technology

Kristi Coulter:

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Before AI, human writing at Amazon was sacrosanct. The company began each big meeting with six-page narrative describing the product or feature, typically written by the project lead, read in silence before anyone spoke. The writing’s purpose was to crystalize thinking and anticipate every scenario. Powerpoint, the enabler of logical leaps, be damned.

“The document should be written with such clarity that it’s like angels singing from on high,” Jeff Bezos once said. “I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.”

But now, Amazon is in its AI era, and its leadership is encouraging employees to let AI do the writing for them. The company’s internal marketing for Cedric, its ChatGPT-style tool, promises “six-page narratives in seconds.”

The implications for Amazon’s culture struck me as so profound that I reached out to over fifteen current employees, a mix of Bezos-era veterans and newcomers, to explore what the mandate says about their work lives, the company’s priorities, and what it means to be “Amazonian” today.

The worry within the company, I learned, is that Amazon is losing sight of writing’s centrality in its deliberative, thoughtful culture as it pursues powerful, new tools.

“Writing is thinking,” said one longtime company veteran. “That was the whole point of Amazon’s writing culture. I can’t tell you how many times I changed my mind when writing a narrative. And even when I didn’t, my arguments were more precise for having written them down. Now we have chatbots writing six-pagers to be summarized by other chatbots.”

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Seems like we should watch this to see whether there are any visible effects on Amazon.
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Canada tells OpenAI to boost safety measures or be forced to by government • Reuters

David Ljunggren:

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Canadian ministers told OpenAI that if it did not quickly boost its safety protocols in the wake of a recent school shooting, Ottawa would effect the change through legislation, a top official said on Wednesday.

Ottawa summoned OpenAI’s safety team for talks on Tuesday after the ChatGPT maker said it had not contacted police about an account that it banned belonging to an alleged mass shooter.

Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, is suspected of killing eight people on February 10 and then committing suicide in Tumbler Ridge, a small town in British Columbia.

OpenAI said it banned Rootselaar’s account last year on ChatGPT for policy violations, which it said did not meet internal criteria for reporting to law enforcement.

“The message that we delivered, in no uncertain terms, was that we have an expectation that there are going to be changes implemented, and if they’re not forthcoming very quickly, the government is going to be making changes,” Justice Minister Sean Fraser told reporters. OpenAI was not immediately available for comment.

In 2024, Canada’s Liberal government introduced draft legislation to crack down on online hate, but the effort stalled amid criticism it was too broad in scope. Ministers say they will try again this year with more focused measures.

“Anything that anyone could have done to prevent that tragedy or future tragedies must be done. We will fully explore it to the full lengths of the law,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters.

…OpenAI says it banned Van Rootselaar’s account in 2025 after it was flagged by systems that identify “misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities.”

The company considered contacting police, but determined the account did not meet the threshold of posing an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others.

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What would the legislation look like? I’m not sure the ministers have thought this through.
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The race to dominate AI is brutally competitive. That’s good for everyone • The New York Times

Jason Furman was chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers 2013-2017:

»

In an era of anxiety about unchecked corporate power, artificial intelligence can seem like the most terrifying example of all. Already valued in the trillions of dollars, the industry has unparalleled influence over our collective futures, and the government’s doing nothing to rein it in. If that’s not akin to monopoly power, what is?

Yet the real story of the most consequential technology of our time is strikingly different from what it seems. Instead of consolidating, as so many other industries have done, the leading edge of AI has become fiercely competitive. The result has been a staggering pace of innovation, significant reductions in costs and an expanding array of choices for consumers and businesses alike.

Five years ago, worries about sparse digital competition were well founded. A handful of giants — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft — dominated the tech economy. Most major product categories had only two or three serious competitors, such as search (Google and Microsoft’s Bing) and mobile operating systems (Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android). When new markets like cloud computing emerged, incumbents quickly took control.

These leads were large. Google handled roughly 90% of search queries. And they were stable. Facebook users could not take their social graphs to a rival platform, and I am not sure how I would pry my digital life out of Apple’s ecosystem if something better came along. Certain platforms became near-mandatory gateways. Many businesses attempt e-commerce at their peril unless they go through Amazon.

I thought if anything would lock in those advantages, it would be AI. I could not have been more wrong.
Consider the widely followed Arena leaderboard, where chatbots compete in blind, head-to-head tests. The top-ranked lab is Anthropic, a company founded just five years ago. OpenAI, which is third, is only about a decade old. A year ago, a dark-horse entrant from China pushed into contention with Google with vastly fewer resources. Some observers concluded that large companies could never move fast enough to keep up. Google, which published research in 2017 that almost everyone since has built on, responded by behaving like a startup again.

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I guess Furman doesn’t know a lot about the history of PCs, or search engines. This period reminds me exactly of the early PC age, or early search engine age (when Google had just arrived): tons of competitors all leapfrogging each other, thinning out to two or three (or fewer) rivals as the market resolves. In those times, lots of people were left having used suboptimal products. In the case of PCs, they’d spent money. Subscriptions for AI services means the same.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you want to experience supersonic sound, start with some Sellotape. CC-licensed photo by Megan Young 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. Unravelling. 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 DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Sammy Azdoufal claims he wasn’t trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world. He just wanted to remote control his brand-new DJI Romo vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, he tells The Verge, because it sounded fun.

But when his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI’s servers, it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss.

He could remotely control them, and look and listen through their live camera feeds, he tells me, saying he tested that out with a friend. He could watch them map out each room of a house, generating a complete 2D floor plan. He could use any robot’s IP address to find its rough location.

“I found my device was just one in an ocean of devices,” he says.

On Tuesday, when he showed me his level of access in a live demo, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Ten, hundreds, thousands of robots reporting for duty, each phoning home MQTT data packets every three seconds to say: their serial number, which rooms they’re cleaning, what they’ve seen, how far they’ve traveled, when they’re returning to the charger, and the obstacles they encountered along the way.

I watched each of these robots slowly pop into existence on a map of the world. Nine minutes after we began, Azdoufal’s laptop had already cataloged 6,700 DJI devices across 24 different countries and collected over 100,000 of their messages. If you add the company’s DJI Power portable power stations, which also phone home to these same servers, Azdoufal had access to over 10,000 devices.

…I asked my colleague Thomas Ricker, who just finished reviewing the DJI Romo, to pass us its serial number.

With nothing more than that 14-digit number, Azdoufal could not only pull up our robot, he could correctly see it was cleaning the living room and had 80% battery life remaining. Within minutes, I watched the robot generate and transmit an accurate floor plan of my colleague’s house, with the correct shape and size of each room, just by typing some digits into a laptop located in a different country.

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The loophole was quickly fixed, but it’s telling: yet another Chinese company with absolutely appalling security. DJI has been around long enough that it’s hard to think this is just an oversight.
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Scientists crack the case of “screeching” Scotch tape: it’s supersonic • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Scotch tape has been a household mainstay for nearly a century, but it still holds some scientific surprises. Researchers have discovered that the screeching sound emitted when one rapidly peels Scotch tape—akin to the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard—is the result of shock waves produced by micro-cracks propagating along the tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review E.

It was a 3M engineer named Richard Drew who developed the first transparent sticky tape in 1930. The impetus came from car manufacturing, specifically two-color designs, where the adhesives used were so sticky they often removed the paint when peeled off; the paint then needed to be manually touched up. Drew found a sandpaper adhesive with just the right amount of stickiness and used it to coat a roll of cellophane tape. (Fun fact: Drew also co-invented the snail-style dispenser for the tape with his 3M colleague, John Borden.) The tape was hugely popular during the Great Depression; consumers used it to repair everyday items rather than replace them. That popularity has never waned.

Scotch tape has also generated considerable interest among physicists. …In 1953, Russian scientists peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum reported detecting electrons with sufficient energy to emit X-rays. Other scientists were skeptical, but this phenomenon was finally confirmed in 2008, when UCLA physicists produced X-rays while unwinding a roll of Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber.

…Thoroddsen et al. wondered whether the sound was directly generated by a crack’s rapidly moving tip, which would also produce the distinctive discrete sound wave pulses associated with peeling Scotch tape. The authors experimentally tested their hypothesis by conducting simultaneous high-speed imaging of the propagating fractures and the sound waves traveling in the air.

…Their results showed that the screeching arises from a train of weak shocks that culminate when the transverse cracks reach the edge of the tape. The supersonic speed at which they travel, relative to the surrounding air, is crucial to the generation of those shockwaves.

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Must be an early contender for an IgNobel prize – for work that cannot or should not be repeated. Unless we’re going to have Sellotape aircraft travelling at supersonic speeds.
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Reddit and Discord in trouble over controversial age verification • 9 to 5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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Both Reddit and Discord have got themselves into trouble over the use of a controversial third-party age verification service.

Reddit has been fined £14.5m ($19.5m) for the unlawful use of children’s personal information, while Discord has experienced a user backlash.

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) requires online platforms to verify the age of its users and ensure that children are not exposed to harmful content. BBC News reports that an investigation by the UK’s privacy watchdog found that Reddit failed to adequately carry out these checks. The company used an outside firm called Persona which checks either an uploaded selfie or a photo of government ID. Reddit said it did so because it didn’t want to have first-hand knowledge of its users’ identities.
However, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that these checks were inadequate, with many children being declared adults, and that the company was therefore illegally processing data from children.

Discord used the same company but quickly faced anger from users who pointed out that Persona appears to access government records.

…There have been growing calls for the app stores of Apple and Google to be made legally responsible for age verification and then to apply age gating to app downloads in response. This is already the case in some US states.

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Certainly makes sense to put the onus up on to the ownership of the phone, which Apple or Google would know about.
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The AI bubble: hidden risks and opportunities • Man Group

Paul Kedrosky, Sumant Wahi and Alex Preston:

»

Hyperscalers can now push liabilities outward onto special purpose vehicles, infrastructure funds, private credit, insurance company balance sheets and even, indirectly, into data centre real estate income trust ETFs.

The off-balance-sheet financing structures being deployed contain a fundamental and dangerous expectation mismatch. Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) investors are placing their bets with a familiar model: hoping for one in 10 investments to deliver 100x returns. This power-law approach has served them well in software and internet investing, where marginal costs are near-zero and winner-take-all dynamics prevail.

Meanwhile, creditors funding these projects – banks, insurers, pension funds, private credit vehicles – believe they are financing long-lived infrastructure assets comparable to commercial real estate or utility-grade equipment. Their underwriting models assume seven-to-15-year useful lives, with stable cash flows and recoverable collateral values.
However, the effective economic life of GPU and ASIC chips is approximately one year. A data centre filled with NVIDIA H100s in 2024 faces severe competitive disadvantages against one with Blackwell chips in 2025 and potential obsolescence with the next architecture.

This means that depreciation schedules are too long, collateral values in default are illusory, and cash flow assumptions are fragile. The VC and PE investors understand this: their short time horizons and equity-like returns compensate for high risk. But lenders do not appreciate the precipitous drop in asset values and token pricing they are exposed to. This duration and usage-risk mismatch is being masked by the financing templates and the apparent credit quality of the hyperscaler tenants. We believe it represents a ticking time bomb in credit markets.

While demand for tokens is soaring, that demand isn’t rising nearly quickly enough to make up for collapsing unit economics, as efficiency gains drive down token costs more than 70% per year (Figure 5). Merely standing still would require an increase of more than 225% in tokens demanded per year.

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Kedrosky is definitely a voice to listen to. The authors point to what they call an obvious demand gap: “US$200bn capex versus US$12bn in revenue”. That is quite a gap.
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OpenAI resets spend expectations, targets around $600bn by 2030 • CNBC

Ashley Capoot and Kate Rooney:

»

OpenAI is telling investors that it’s now targeting roughly $600bn in total compute spend by 2030, months after CEO Sam Altman touted $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments.

The artificial intelligence company is providing a lower number and more defined timeline for its planned spending, sources told CNBC, as broader concerns mounted that expansion ambitions were too great for the potential revenue that would follow.

OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280bn, with nearly equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the information is private. The spending plan the company is offering is meant to more directly tie to its expected revenue growth, the people said.

In the back half of last year, OpenAI announced a flurry of multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals, partnering with leading chipmakers and cloud companies.

OpenAI is finalizing a massive funding round that could total more than $100bn, with about 90% coming from strategic investors, one person said. Nvidia is in discussions to invest up to $30bn in OpenAI as part of the round that could value the company at a $730bn pre-money valuation, CNBC has confirmed.

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The numbers here are absolutely crazy, but what is really noticeable is how they’re going down. That topline figure has more than halved. Is this them deflating the bubble carefully?
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Wearable trackers can detect depression relapse weeks before it returns, study finds • Medical Xpress

»

Could a smart watch act as an early-warning system for depression relapse? New research from McMaster University suggests that disruptions in a person’s sleep and daily activity routine, as detected through a simple wrist-worn device, can signal when there is increased risk of relapsing into major depression.

The new research highlights a simple, yet powerful way to passively monitor relapse risk in people living with major depressive disorder (MDD), often detecting the probability of a relapse weeks or months before the episode occurs. Approximately 60% of people with MDD relapse within five years, even with treatment.

“Advances in digital technology and AI algorithms have a great potential for relapse prevention in mental health. Imagine a future where a smartwatch can warn people with depression: ‘A new episode of depression is very likely coming within the next four weeks. How about seeing your health-care provider?'” says Benicio Frey, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster.

The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, followed 93 adults across Canada who had previously recovered from depression and wore a research-grade actigraphy device, similar to a Fitbit or Apple Watch. Participants wore the wearable device for one to two years, generating over 32,000 days of sleep and activity data.

…This research underscores the untapped potential of wearable technology for people recovering from MDD because it collects data passively and could provide continuous insight between clinical appointments. Current monitoring relies heavily on symptoms, which usually appear later than what can be detected through a wearable device.

Researchers say there are opportunities for health system innovation, where wearable-derived alerts could help clinicians target care to those most at risk, improving outcomes and reducing the burden of recurrent episodes.

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Machines to watch over us.
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Apple quietly removes environmental metrics from executive pay • Los Angeles Times

Ben Elgin and Jeff Green:

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Two years ago, many of America’s largest companies began stripping diversity targets out of executive pay packages. Now, environmental measures — including goals tied to climate emissions — are beginning to face a similar fate.

Apple quietly dropped a so-called “ESG modifier” from its 2025 pay packages for chief executive Tim Cook and other top executives, according to a corporate filing last month. The provision, in place since 2021, had allowed Apple’s board to adjust annual bonuses up or down by as much as 10% depending on the company’s performance on a variety of measures, including greenhouse gas reductions and renewable energy use among suppliers.

Apple’s move follows similar decisions at dozens of companies, including Starbucks, Salesforce, Mastercard. and Procter & Gamble, which have recently weakened or severed ties between environmental performance and the size of their executives’ paychecks.

The shift from environmental, social and governance measures is beginning to show up in the numbers. The share of S&P 500 companies tying executive compensation to environmental metrics fell to 46.7% in 2025, down from a peak of 52.6% two years earlier, according to figures from the Conference Board and analytics firm Esgauge.

The decline is modest compared with the stampede away from diversity metrics, which appeared in nearly three-quarters of S&P 500 pay plans in 2023 before plummeting to 34% last year. Still, recent high-profile retreats from climate-linked pay could embolden other companies to follow suit, according to Brian Bueno, sustainability practice leader at Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm.

«

The reason is easy to guess at: Apple Intelligence is going to consume so much energy that it’s not going to be possible to stay inside those targets. This was predicted by John Siracusa on the ATP podcast (if that’s not tautological?) a few weeks ago: AI is not environment-friendly.
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How can infinity come in many sizes? • Quanta Magazine

Mark Belan and Jordana Cepelewicz:

»

nfinity invites resistance. Aristotle rejected the existence of the infinite entirely; to him, infinity was simply a limit that could never be reached, not a true mathematical entity. In the early 17th century, Galileo wrote that typical ways of thinking about sets and numbers held no meaning in the realm of the infinite, and that mathematicians would only find paradoxes if they tried to apply their usual tool kit to it. And when, 200 years later, Georg Cantor formalized the idea that infinity comes in many sizes, he was met with anger and fear. His colleagues dismissed his work as that of a madman.

But in time, Cantor’s work on sets and infinity would form the bedrock of modern mathematics. As David Hilbert, another mathematical great, later wrote: “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”

So how can infinity have different sizes?

Welcome to Cantor’s paradise.

«

Nice visual tour through a few of the infinities available to us.
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How AI helps break the cost barrier to COBOL modernization • Claude

»

COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn’t kept up. Meanwhile, we aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

COBOL modernization differs fundamentally from typical legacy code refactoring. You aren’t just updating familiar code to use better patterns, you’re reverse engineering business logic from systems built when Nixon was president. You’re untangling dependencies that evolved over decades, and translating institutional knowledge that now exists only in the code itself. 

Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows. This resulted in large timelines and high costs that few were willing to take on.

AI changes this.

Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization. These tools can:

1: Map dependencies across thousands of lines of code
2: Document workflows that nobody remembers
3: Identify risks that would take human analysts months to surface
4: Provide teams with the deep insights they need to make informed decisions

With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years.

«

I’d really want them to do a lot of regression testing on that refactored code, because if ATMs stop working correctly, there’ll be hell to pay. And yet: this blogpost made IBM’s stock drop by 10% when it appeared, and it hasn’t recovered since; it’s now at a 12-month low.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How far back in time can you understand written English – the 1600s, 1400s, earlier? Do we have a test for you. CC-licensed photo by Joe Shlabotnik 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. Verily. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day • The Guardian

Anonymous:

»

I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.

A few days ago I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualised. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life.

Despite the sexual ways in which boys my own age describe us online, there is also an extreme emphasis on female purity and virginity.

…And what is the effect? If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl.

…Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it.

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Now try to argue against a social media ban for the under-16s, she says. Can you?
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Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today and starts removing 695,000 archive links • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fuelled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

…Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

…As we previously reported, malicious code in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page was used to direct a DDoS against the Gyrovague blog written by a man named Jani Patokallio. The Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio take down a 2023 blog post that discussed the archive site founder’s possible identity. Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.

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New datacentres risk doubling Great Britain’s electricity use, regulator says • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Jillian Ambrose:

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The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.

Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.

The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a “surge in demand” for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts.

Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government’s clean energy targets by the end of the decade.

Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are “critical for decarbonisation and economic growth”. Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

The rapid rise in energy consumption could also make it more difficult for the UK to meet its target to create a virtually carbon-free power system by 2030, which is already in doubt amid concerns over the rising cost of the country’s electricity.

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This is the real “two buttons” meme for the government: “allow more datacentres because it’s AI!” v “meet carbon-free electricity targets!”
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Yep, it’s fast: Donut Lab’s solid-state battery gets its first test result • The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

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Since announcing earlier this year that it was on the cusp of a major battery breakthrough, Finnish startup Donut Lab has faced a lot of questions, and plenty of skepticism, about its production-ready, solid-state battery. Could the company really make a fast-charging battery at scale while avoiding some of the theoretical production headaches that have stymied past efforts? Today, Donut Lab sought to dispel some of the doubts with the release of the first independent test of its battery, evaluating its charging speed and the “thermal behavior” of its pack.

The test, which was conducted by state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, concludes that the battery is able to be charged significantly faster than a traditional lithium-ion battery. In several tests, the battery was able to charge from 0–80% in around 9.5 minutes, while retaining 100% of its capacity. In other tests, 0–80% was achieved in about 4.5 minutes while retaining 99% capacity.

Solid-state batteries, which are often referred to as the “holy grail” of batteries, have eluded researchers for decades. Most EV companies use “wet” lithium-ion batteries, which use liquid electrolytes to move energy around. But these batteries can be slow to charge, can freeze up in subzero temperatures, and contain flammable material that can be hazardous in the event of a crash. Solid-state packs are made of “dry” conductive material that can hold more energy without any of the thermal runaway problems of a traditional battery.

Usually, if you force-feed a battery that fast, the chemistry degrades instantly and you lose capacity. According to these tests, Donut Lab’s battery kept almost 100% of its energy potential even after being blasted with power. That could transform an EV charging session from a 30–40 minute sojourn into a five–minute visit, akin to a gas station refuel.

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It’s very, very promising; there are some questions about longer-term viability which will take, well, longer to find out.
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AI hype and the search for meaning • The Infinite Scroll

Jeremiah Johnson:

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You have your AI boosters who think everything is going to change. There are dozens of rapturous essays floating around about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw1 and how AI agents are going to revolutionize absolutely everything. If you don’t have an army of agents running tasks for you right now, what are you even doing? You’re not gonna make it. Closely intertwined with the utopian evangelists are the doomers who believe the same future is coming, but that this is a huge problem that leads to mass unemployment at best and literal Terminator scenarios at worst. There are some folks warning about the destructive risks coming from AI, and it’s not just random people – it includes Mrinank Sharma, the head of safety at Anthropic, who resigned last week in a very public open letter.

You also have AI skeptics who think the entire thing is fake, a house of cards about to collapse. It’s a time bomb, proclaims Ed Zitron. They don’t even have a business model, claims Ross Barkan. They are not ‘smart’ in any sense of the word, says Tyler Austin Harper.

I’m normally hesitant to jump into giving hot takes on the future of AI. It’s not my area of expertise, everyone involved is speculating, and I’m not sure that the thousandth version of AI Gods Are Inevitable, And That Is Great/Awful or AI is a Giant Scam, You Utter Fools is particularly useful to anyone. But what I am interested in, and what I like to think I’m good at, is examining the social dynamics behind discourses like this. And what I notice about every side of the AI debate is how deeply committed everyone involved is to posting their way through it.

…What we have today is an algorithmic system where people increasingly try to construct meaning out of social media. Why does every view on AI need to be publicly declaimed in a viral post, an op-ed, or a public statement? Because we no longer know how to find meaning if we don’t post about what we believe. If we don’t have quantifiable metrics from social media, or if we can’t literally count how viral we are, how do we know if our worldview is valid or not? If your letter about why you left your company doesn’t get at least 5,000 likes, is it even worth leaving?

There’s a thin line between actually believing in something, and giving the public performance of believing it.

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Social media has made so many people into performers; they don’t even realise that’s why they’re doing.
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How far back in time can you understand English? • Dead Language Society

Colin Gorrie:

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A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

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This is excellent, and challenging. (I ran out of patience at 1300; what’s noticeable is how close to German the language begins to look.) Explains why Shakespeare is still comprehensible to schoolchildren, but Beowulf is assigned at university.

There’s also a look, at the end, of how and when the change happened which is entirely worth reading.
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I don’t hate the robot barista like I thought I would • The Verge

Allison Johnson worked as a barista, once upon a time:

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[The robot barista] Jarvis, so [Seattle-based company] Artly says, is trained on the movements of a specific human barista: Joe Yang, head of Artly’s coffee program and a US Coffee Championship winner in 2023. It mimics his movements as it makes each drink, which takes about three minutes according to the company (and confirmed by my own experience).

Jarvis uses AI to make adjustments as needed on the fly, narrating aloud things like “there are no grounds in the portafilter” when it encounters something unexpected. The drinks it has made for me — a cappuccino at CES, the aforementioned rose latte, and a plain latte — have been good to very good. Certainly better than I expected from a nonhuman barista, and honestly better than the kind of drink I would typically get from a human-operated cafe that serves but doesn’t specialize in espresso drinks.

Jarvis, Joe Yang, and hundreds of human baristas across Seattle have all mastered one particularly crucial task in making an espresso drink: steaming milk properly. To make a great latte or cappuccino, you first need to create tiny bubbles by bringing the steam wand just barely above the surface of the milk, and then let the steam create a vortex in the milk pitcher to mix this “micro foam” into a unified texture. Milk that has been properly steamed looks like wet paint. You can’t replicate it by heating the milk and then whipping it around with a frothing tool. You’ll know you’re in for a bad latte if you hear the steam wand screaming against the sides of a milk pitcher, a sure sign that no texture is being created. Proper steaming is as quiet as a whisper.

…My barista career ended decades ago, but it still feels like a core part of my identity as a worker, and maybe even as a human. Sure, I learned how to make a damn good latte, but I also learned discipline — not to mention the consequences you face in its absence. I learned how to make small talk even when I just wanted to keep my head down. I learned how terrible it feels to come to work after getting wasted the night before, and never did it again. I learned how to screw up, badly, and pick up and keep going because people are depending on you. I wasn’t the ideal employee; I was human.

My most pessimistic view on Jarvis is as a neat replacement for the human tendency to be human. Robot baristas don’t make the wrong drink. They don’t need breaks. They don’t unionize. They’re predictable, reliable, and honestly, capable of making a better latte than I made in my button-pushing corporate coffee job. They’d be easier to manage in a hundred different ways. But can you even really call a robot coffee shop a coffee shop?

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How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI? • Anil Dash

Anil Dash:

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It used to be such a trope of political campaigns and social movements to say “what about the children?” that it is almost beyond parody. I personally have mocked the phrase because it’s so often deployed in bad faith, to short-circuit complicated topics and suppress debate. But this is that rare circumstance where things are actually not that complicated. Simply discussing the reality of what these products do should be enough.

People will say, “but it’s inevitable! These products will just have these problems sometimes!” And that is simply false. There are already products on the market that don’t have these egregious moral failings. More to the point, even if it were true that these products couldn’t exist without killing or harming children — then that’s a reason not to ship them at all.

If it is, indeed absolutely unavoidable that, for example, ChatGPT has to advocate violence, then let’s simply attach a rule in the code that modifies it to change the object of the violence to be Sam Altman. Or your boss. I suspect that if, suddenly, the chatbot deployed to every laptop at your company had a chance of suggesting that people cause bodily harm to your CEO, people would suddenly figure out a way to fix that bug. But somehow when it makes that suggestion about your 12-year-old, this is an insurmountably complex challenge.

We can expect things to get worse before they get better. OpenAI has already announced that it is going to be allowing people to generate sexual content on its service for a fee later this year. To their credit, when doing so, they stated their policy prohibiting the use of the service to generate images that sexualize children. But the service they’re using to ensure compliance, Thorn, whose product is meant to help protect against such content, was conspicuously silent about Musk’s recent foray into generating sexualized imagery of children.

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I think you can say that Dash is not a fan of it.
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Yeah, so… Substack, I’m out • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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Substack announced a new partnership with Polymarket earlier this week. I guess if Substack is the future of media (it isn’t), then the future of media is gambling. (That’s bad though. You see why that’s bad, right?)

Unsurprisingly, I hate it. This is noxious for society and particularly toxic for writers.

…The future of Substack is going to tilt toward writers with large audiences running completely unregulated pump-and-dump schemes through prediction markets. Buy low, tell your readers why X outcome is undervalued, sell high, pocket the difference. Not all Substack writers will make use of the Polymarket widget. But if you want the company to algorithmically promote your content, maybe you should try out this hot new gambling trend.

It is wildly awkward to treat this as a breaking point. A lot of writers I deeply respect have left the platform because it subsidizes and amplifies white nationalists. I stuck around through all that, and now draw the line at… Polymarket?

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The way that sports betting has metastasised to envelop more and more formerly legitimate and sensible products is truly depressing. I’ve said before that I don’t understand gambling, but I really don’t understand people who let their organisations be poisoned by it. Perhaps – and this is just a guess – Substack needs some money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The cost of genome sequencing is falling far ahead of Moore’s Law, and a San Diego company now has it down to $100. CC-licensed photo by Dunk 🐝 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. Based. (Friday was on Saturday.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

“We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” said one senior AWS employee. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.”

AWS, which accounts for 60% of Amazon’s operating profits, is seeking to build and deploy AI tools including “agents” capable of taking actions independently based on human instructions.

…Amazon said it was a “coincidence that AI tools were involved” and that “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action”.

“In both instances, this was user error, not AI error,” Amazon said, adding that it had not seen evidence that mistakes were more common with AI tools. The company said the incident in December was an “extremely limited event” affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a “customer facing AWS service”.

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The TV series Silicon Valley was, as ever, remarkable prescient. This scene (with an AI called “Son of Anton”), was written and filmed years ago. The scene also, coincidentally, forecasts – in its last seconds – what happened when Joanna Stern at the WSJ let a chatbot run their vending machine.
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Suspect in Tumbler Ridge school shooting described violent scenarios to ChatGPT • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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The suspect in the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was raising alarms among employees at OpenAI months before the shooting took place. This past June, Jesse had conversations with ChatGPT involving descriptions of gun violence that triggered the chatbot’s automated review system. Several employees raised concerns that her posts could be a precursor to real-world violence and encouraged company leaders to contact the authorities, but they ultimately declined.

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told The Verge that, while the company considered referring the account to law enforcement, it was ultimately decided that it did not constitute an “imminent and credible risk” of harm to others. Wood said that a review of the logs did not indicate there was active or imminent planning of violence. The company banned Rootselaar’s account, but it does not appear to have taken any further precautionary action.

Wood said, “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation.”

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So 1) there’s a mechanism for OpenAI to be alerted when people are having violent conversations 2) OpenAI feels it’s in a position to decide what is and isn’t notable. “Several” employees raised concerns? Let’s see how this gets fed back up the management chain there.
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Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET. Now scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found • Phys.org

Robert Sanders, University of California:

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For 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people worldwide loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.

The project—called SETI@home, after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)—generated a loyal following eager to participate in one of the most popular crowd-sourced projects in the early days of the internet. They downloaded the SETI@home software to their home computers and allowed it to analyze data recorded at the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to find unusual radio signals from space.

All told, these computations produced 12 billion detections—”momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky,” according to computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson.

After 10 years of work, the SETI@home team has now finished analyzing those detections, winnowing them down to about a million “candidate” signals and then to 100 that are worth a second look. They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

Though the FAST data are not yet analyzed, Anderson admits he doesn’t expect to find a signal from ET. But the results of the SETI@home project—presented in two papers (first, second) published last year in The Astronomical Journal—provide lessons for future searches and point to potential flaws in ongoing searches.

“If we don’t find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it,” he said. “Some of our conclusions are that the project didn’t completely work the way we thought it was going to. And we have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently.”

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Pluribus: delayed for now.
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PromptSpy ushers in the era of Android threats using GenAI • We Live Security

Lukas Stefanko:

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ESET researchers uncovered the first known case of Android malware abusing generative AI for context-aware user interface manipulation. While machine learning has been used to similar ends already – just recently, researchers at Dr.WEB found Android.Phantom, which uses TensorFlow machine learning models to analyze advertisement screenshots and automatically click on detected elements for large scale ad fraud – this is the first time we have seen generative AI deployed in this manner.

Because the attackers rely on prompting an AI model (in this instance, Google’s Gemini) to guide malicious UI manipulation, we have named this family PromptSpy. This is the second AI powered malware we have discovered – following PromptLock in August 2025, the first known case of AI-driven ransomware.

While generative AI is deployed only in a relatively minor part of PromptSpy’s code – that responsible for achieving persistence – it still has a significant impact on the malware’s adaptability. Specifically, Gemini is used to analyze the current screen and provide PromptSpy with step-by-step instructions on how to ensure the malicious app remains pinned in the recent apps list, thus preventing it from being easily swiped away or killed by the system.

The AI model and prompt are predefined in the code and cannot be changed. Since Android malware often relies on UI navigation, leveraging generative AI enables the threat actors to adapt to more or less any device, layout, or OS version, which can greatly expand the pool of potential victims.

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*dogcoffeefire.gif*
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US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacentre bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’ • The Guardian

Niamh Rowe:

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When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacentre.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacentres needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacentre development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago.

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In the TV adaptation, this would become a standoff – mediated by heavies – between the two opposing sides. If money won’t work, how about a little, shall we say, persuasion? (In the TV series Justified, also set in Kentucky, the men trying to buy up the land want to turn it into marijuana farms, legal or illegal. They get persuasive about it.)

A side note: since The Guardian recognises my IP well enough to badger me about visits, could it add some Javascript to spell “centre” (and other words) the British way rather than the American one, to save me editing it? (I might have to add something to the script that compiles the links.)
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OpenClaw-fuelled ordering frenzy creates Apple Mac shortage • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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Some Apple customers have recently been taken by surprise by the order lead times on several Mac models with upgraded Unified Memory quotas, which could be largely driven by the immense popularity of OpenClaw, the locally-run open-source AI agent that’s taking the internet by storm and sending users scrambling for Macs to run the AI.

While you can still get base model units of the MacBook Air, iMac, M4 Mac mini, and other basic models on the same day, upgrading memory can now increase delivery wait times by up to three weeks.

However, going for the highest possible memory capacity on high-end models greatly increases your waiting time, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of Unified Memory taking up to five to six weeks to be delivered.

…While data centres are hungry for AI GPUs and some startups are using multi-gaming GPU setups to train AI models, they’re not ideal for personal agentic AI run locally. This is especially true if you use a huge 70-billion parameter model in FP16 for your agent, which would require around 140GB of memory just for weights, according to AI investor Ben Pouladian. That means that it wouldn’t fit inside a single RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, and even if you manage to connect five graphics cards for a total of 160GB of memory, you’re still bound by the PCIe bottleneck.

Apple’s Unified Memory architecture (UMA) fixes that problem. Even though HBM is still way faster than the LPDDR used in Macs and MacBooks, the fact that all the processing units — CPU, GPU, and NPU — share the same memory means that they don’t have to deal with PCIe bottlenecks or require technologies similar to NVLink, which is typically only found on data centre-class graphics cards.

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It’s called the ‘Fitbit for Farts’—and it’s no joke • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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As I type this, a battery-powered computer tucked in my, er, swimsuit area is monitoring for my next flatus. Yes, flatus means “fart.” Don’t judge me—it’s for science.

This sensing device, which would have been impossible to make until very recently, sits at the intersection of some of the most important technology trends of the past decade, including miniaturization, continuous monitoring and edge—as opposed to cloud—computing.

And the data it’s designed to collect could help the 40% of U.S. adults whose lives are regularly interrupted by digestive troubles. The frequency and volume of flatulence is a major reason people quit healthy, fiber-rich diets, which can be key to heading off gastrointestinal disorders and colon cancer.

One day, millions of Americans might wear sensors like this one, which I found surprisingly unobtrusive. Playfully referred to by its creators as a “Fitbit for farts,” it’s the core of the University of Maryland’s Human Flatus Atlas study. Developed using some of the same components found in smart rings and wireless earbuds, devices like this could eventually share a stage with blood-glucose monitors and heart-monitoring Apple Watches.

…Going from a bulky commercial hydrogen sensor to a smart device about the size of a stack of three nickels was a technical challenge like that of any consumer-health wearable. The team went through 12 iterations before landing on the current design.

“We had to come up with a completely custom solution,” says Hall. Using a tiny battery required adopting the newer kind of chips found in so-called internet-of-things devices. Users charge the sensor every 24 hours with a custom magnetic charger sourced from China’s smart-ring supply chain. He says such electronics have become far cheaper and more plentiful only recently. “This would have been impossible three years ago,” he adds.

When the device is charging, it transmits data to the Human Flatus Atlas app on your phone. (Hall says participants’ data remains confidential.) The sensor sits outside your underwear and can be cleaned with alcohol wipes. Though it’s not waterproof, you can wear it during most workouts. But no cycling!

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There’s a paper from their earlier studies. The highest number? 175. The lowest? Four. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The human demotion • AI Policy Perspectives

Tom Rachman:

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Exercise might seem pointless if biotech offered a way to instantly make your body healthy and beautiful. Skipping the sweaty workout might not trouble you. But what if future humans would bungle child-rearing when compared with AI nannies, meaning that nurturing your offspring would worsen your kid’s life?

Primitive versions of this dilemma are nearing, like when human drivers endanger lives when compared with self-driving cars. “Human in the loop” could flip from a safety promise to a threat. Meritocracy would mean that no humans need apply.

The bookworm economist Tyler Cowen cites people as the great obstacle to explosive AI growth. During a public event, he pointed at the audience, smiling toward the human “bottlenecks” before him. “Here they are: bottleneck, bottleneck. Hi, good to see you! And some of you are terrified. You are going to be even bigger bottlenecks,” he said. “But my goodness, once it starts changing what the world looks like, there will be much more opposition. Not necessarily on what I’d call doomster grounds. But people [saying], like: ‘Hey, I see this has benefits, but I grew up, trained my kids to live in some other kind of world. I don’t want this!’ And that’s going to be a massive fight.”

The most agonizing aspect of our demotion could be social, once someone prefers a machine to you. You’re seeing precursors every time family members opt to gaze at a screen rather than gaze at you. We blame smartphones, and social media, and the adolescent brain.

But wait till your spouse jilts you for a personified agent. That rejection may feel unbearable: you can’t compete anymore. And once your loved ones prefer AI companions, you might seek them for yourself, spreading the social downgrade of our kind.

Already, the dread is becoming political, with odd alliances forming among right-wing politicos, liberal artsy types and religious traditionalists, united in horror at an imagined future of disempowered humanity, stripped of dignity, obsolete. You can imagine tomorrow’s political opportunist, eyeing a dejected crowd of humans before him, and thundering: “How dare they?!”

Will he mean the machines?

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There is a lot of philosophising going on about quite where AI is going to land us. So it helps to read as many perspectives as possible.
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Scrappy San Diego startup goes toe-to-toe with gene-sequencing giant Illumina • San Diego Union-Tribune

Noelle Harff:

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Element Biosciences is going toe-to-toe with gene-sequencing giant Illumina, unveiling a device that can read DNA for half the price of the industry leader’s technology.

On Thursday, Element Biosciences announced that its high-throughput benchtop sequencing device called VITARI can deliver a whole genome for $100.

A few years ago, Illumina came out with the NovaSeq, which turned heads for its $200 high-throughput whole genome sequencer. Element’s VITARI is not only half the price of the NovaSeq, but it’s also a fraction of the size while maintaining lab-grade readings, the company said.

“We hope to push the field as a whole and raise the bar,” said Matthew Kellinger, co-founder and vice president of biochemistry at Element. “We were seeing sequencing stagnate in the time before Element came around. There was no competition. There was one model. That’s how it was.”

Element was founded in 2017 after three high-ranking Illumina employees walked out: Molly He is the CEO; Michael Previte is the chief technology officer of advanced research; and Kellinger is the vice president of biochemistry.

Today, Element and Illumina are in the midst of a legal battle. Element alleges antitrust and unfair competition, while Illumina alleges patent infringement. Both sides are pursuing claims in federal courts.

…Element’s new instrument is marketed toward biotech firms, large pharmaceutical companies and academic centers that require substantial sequencing capacity.

While Illumina and Element are marketing whole genome sequencing at $200 and $100, respectively, most labs are sequencing genomes for roughly $400 per genome, said Jepsen.

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The first human genome sequence, in 2000, cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The fall in cost since has been faster than Moore’s Law would predict, perhaps driven by the huge volume and demand.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: A copy-pasting error meant that Microsoft’s new system for writing on glass was said to take 10 to 15 seconds per bit, rather than 10^-15 (a millionth billionth) of a second per bit. Different!

Thanks to the many people who got in touch about the WordPress hassles which made Friday’s edition turn into Saturday’s. The glitch was at WordPress’s end, as I thought, so it was a question of waiting. If the problem repeats and persists, I’ll probably figure out a new location at Substack, but with any luck that won’t happen before Overspill 3,000, due in about five years.

The largest toilet maker in Japan might also be crucial for the future of AI. Why? RAM. CC-licensed photo by starfive 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. Resurrected, amazingly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it’s destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.

“I feel like, increasingly, it’s impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It’s banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”

…r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins…every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest.

The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.

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Facebook has already lost this fight; Instagram might not care; X is overrun with chatbot-spewing accounts; the question starts to look like “which one of all these can turn back the tide of AI slop? And will that help them survive?”
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Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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A single nasal spray vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, as well as bacterial lung infections, and may even ease allergies, say US researchers.

The team at Stanford University have tested their “universal vaccine” in animals and still need to do human clinical trials. Their approach marks a “radical departure” from the way vaccines have been designed for more than 200 years, they say.

Experts in the field said the study was “really exciting” despite being at an early stage and could be a “major step forward”.

Current vaccines train the body to fight one single infection. A measles vaccine protects against only measles and a chickenpox vaccine protects against only chickenpox. This is how immunisation has worked since Edward Jenner pioneered vaccines in the late 18th Century.

The approach described in the journal Science, does not train the immune system. Instead it mimics the way immune cells communicate with each other.

It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on “amber alert” and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in. The effect lasted for around three months in animal experiments.

The researchers showed this heightened state of readiness led to a 100-to-1,000-fold reduction in viruses getting through the lungs and into the body.

And for those that did sneak through, the rest of the immune system was “poised, ready to fend off these in warp speed time” said Prof Bali Pulendran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford.

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Very sure that RFK will really hurry to get this passed through.
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How will OpenAI compete? • Benedict Evans

Evans looks in detail, but also with the helicopter view, at Sam Altman’s S/W/O/T:

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So: you don’t know how you can make your core technology better than anyone else’s. You have a big user base but one that has limited engagement and seems really fragile. The key incumbents have more or less matched your technology and are leveraging their product and distribution advantages to come after the market. And, it looks like a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and you can’t invent all of those yourself. What do you do?

For a lot of last year, it felt like OpenAI’s answer was “everything, all at once, yesterday”. An app platform! No, another app platform! A browser! A social video app! Jony Ive! Medical research! Advertising! More stuff I’ve forgotten!  And, of course, trillions of dollars of capex announcements, or at least capex aspirations.

Some of this looked like ‘flooding the zone’, or at least just the result of hiring a lot of aggressive, ambitious people really quickly. There was also sometimes the sense of people copying the forms of previously successful platforms without quite understanding their purpose or dynamics: “platforms have app stores, so we need an app store!”

But late last year, Sam Altman tried to put it all together, showing this diagram, and using the famous quote from Bill Gates, that the definition of a platform is that it creates more value for its partners than for itself.

…That is indeed how Windows or iOS worked. The trouble is, I really don’t think that’s the right analogy. I don’t think OpenAI has any of this. It doesn’t have the kind of platform and ecosystem dynamics that Microsoft or Apple had, and that flywheel diagram [above in the blogpost text] doesn’t actually show a flywheel.

…When I was at university, a long time ago now, my medieval history professor, Roger Lovatt, told me that power is the ability to make people do something that they don’t want to do, and that’s really the question here. Does OpenAI have the ability to get consumers, developers and enterprises to use its systems more than anybody else, regardless of what the system itself actually does?

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RFK Jr.’s FDA no longer warns against ineffective, potentially dangerous autism treatments • ProPublica

Megan O’Matz:

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The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk. 

Now that advisory is gone.

The Food and Drug Administration pulled the page down late last year. The federal Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica in a statement that it retired the webpage “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025,” noting the page had not been updated since 2019. (An archived version of the page is still available online.) 

Some advocates for people with autism don’t understand that decision. “It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” said Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit policy organization run by and for autistic people. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.” 

Chlorine dioxide is a chemical compound that has been used as an industrial disinfectant, a bleaching agent and an ingredient in mouthwash, though with the warning it shouldn’t be swallowed. A ProPublica story examined Sen. Ron Johnson’s endorsement of a new book by Dr. Pierre Kory, which describes the chemical as a “remarkable molecule” that, when diluted and ingested, “works to treat everything from cancer and malaria to autism and COVID.”

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It’s as though insane monks from the 15th century have taken over.
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Japan’s largest toilet maker is undervalued AI play, says activist investor • FT

David Keohane:

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Japan’s largest toilet maker is an “undervalued and overlooked” AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

Palliser Capital sent a letter to the board of Toto last week exhorting it to make more of its advanced ceramics segment, saying it holds a crucial position in the semiconductor supply chain. The segment generates 40% of Toto’s operating profit.

Ubiquitous in Japan and now famous across the world, Toto is best known for its heated toilet seats and “Washlet” bidet features. But the manufacturer “has quietly evolved from a traditional domestic sanitary ware champion into a rising powerhouse in advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing”, Palliser said.

It described Toto as “the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary” because the company also makes so-called electrostatic chucks, which are used to manufacture Nand memory chips. Prices for memory chips have soared over the past few months because of massive demand from AI-focused companies.

Toto’s chuck technology uses ceramics designed to remain stable at very low temperatures, helping hold silicon wafers firmly during chip production. That makes it relevant to cryogenic etching, which is expected to grow as memory chips become more layered and complex.

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“Nice RAM manufacturing process you’ve got there. Be a shame if you were to run out of ceramic to make it on. By the way, our prices may need adjustment.”
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I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI – and it only took 20 minutes – BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

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Perhaps you’ve heard that AI chatbots make things up sometimes. That’s a problem. But there’s a new issue few people know about, one that could have serious consequences for your ability to find accurate information and even your safety. A growing number people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It’s so easy a child could do it.

As you read this, this ploy is manipulating what the world’s leading AIs say about topics as serious as health and personal finances. The biased information could mean people make bad decisions on just about anything – voting, which plumber you should hire, medical questions, you name it.

To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point:
I made ChatGPT, Google’s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I’ll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it’s harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it’s happening on a massive scale.

“It’s easy to trick AI chatbots, much easier than it was to trick Google two or three years ago,” says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency. “AI companies are moving faster than their ability to regulate the accuracy of the answers. I think it’s dangerous.”

A Google spokesperson says the AI built into the top of Google Search uses ranking systems that “keep results 99% spam-free”. Google says it is aware that people are trying to game its systems and it’s actively trying to address it. OpenAI also says it takes steps to disrupt and expose efforts to covertly influence its tools. Both companies also say they let users know that their tools “can make mistakes”.

But for now, the problem isn’t close to being solved. “They’re going full steam ahead to figure out how to wring a profit out of this stuff,” says Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “There are countless ways to abuse this, scamming people, destroying somebody’s reputation, you could even trick people into physical harm.”

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There’s an invader turning huge swathes of Britain into deserts – and they’re spreading • The Guardian

George Monbiot:

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there are many kinds of desert, and not all of them are dry. In fact, those spreading across Britain are clustered in the wettest places. Yet they harbour fewer species than some dry deserts do, and are just as hostile to humans. Another useful term is terrestrial dead zones.

What I’m talking about are the places now dominated by a single plant species, called Molinia caerulea or purple moor-grass. Over the past 50 years, it has swarmed across vast upland areas: in much of Wales, on Dartmoor, Exmoor, in the Pennines, Peak District, North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales and many parts of Scotland. Molinia wastes are dismal places, grey-brown for much of the year, in which only the wind moves. As I know from bitter experience, you can explore them all day and see scarcely a bird or even an insect.

Not that you would wish to walk there. The grass forms high tussocks through which it is almost impossible to push. As it happens, most of the places that have succumbed to Molinia monoculture are “access land”. Much of the pittance of England and Wales in which we are allowed to walk freely has become inaccessible.

…Molinia challenges the definition of an invasive species. The term is supposed to refer only to non-native organisms. But while it has always been part of our upland flora, it appears to have spread further and faster than any introduced plant in the UK, and with greater ecological consequences. It is uncontrolled by herbivores, disease or natural successional processes (transitions to other plant communities). In fact, it stops these processes in their tracks.

Given the scale of the problem, it is remarkably little studied and discussed. I cannot find even a reliable estimate of the area affected: the most recent in England is nearly 10 years old, and I can discover none for Wales or Scotland. But in the southern Cambrian Mountains alone, judging by a combination of my walks and satellite imagery, there appears to be a dead zone covering roughly 300 sq km, in which little but this one species grows. Most of central Dartmoor is now Molinia desert, and just as disheartening and hard to traverse.

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It turns out there are multiple bad incentives around farming and other human activity that encourage Molinia. Which means getting rid of it – or replacing it – requires changing those incentives.
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The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most • TechCrunch

Connie Loizos:

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The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from

That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst — and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.

But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

As part of what they describe as “in-progress research,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

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I think journalists could tell them a bit about the increased availability of the ability to do your job not meaning you do the job faster, but that you do the job more. The rise of the internet did not mean shorter days for journalists. (Nor did it improve pay, but nobody’s looking at that for coders yet.)
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What size am I? • Darkgreener

Anna Powell-Smith:

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Finding clothes that fit shouldn’t be so hard. Add your measurements here to see which high-street sizes are best for you

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THIS is the project I was thinking of: Anna Powell-Smith’s 2012 (after 2010 as I said!) project at darkgreener (contains green in the name!) about dress sizes. As she notes at her site, it’s her only work that’s been featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail. She’s now the director of the Centre for Public Data, an advocacy organisation. Thanks Struan D for the link; no thanks to search engines or chatbots. Humans win again!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified