The precise biology behind the Venus Flytrap’s stunningly fast activation has been figured out, finally. CC-licensed photo by Mark Freeth on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Yes, they’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Social media ban for under-16s in the UK: Cambridge expert reaction • University of Cambridge

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“Whether this is a good or bad policy decision depends on what we consider to be the ultimate goal of this ban,” said Prof Amy Orben of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, who was last month appointed to a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) advisory panel on children’s online wellbeing.

“On the one hand, this ban will not solve our collective concerns about the increasingly digital childhoods experienced in the UK today. We know from the Australian ban that current enforcements are incomplete, and the majority of young people are still online at similar rates. 

“Evidence synthesis from my team and others shows that we should likely not expect substantial boosts to well-being or mental health in the short term, or large changes in behaviours or rates of parental conflict,” said Orben, who led a major report on the current evidence on impacts of social media on young people, commissioned by DSIT and published in January. 

“However, a ban is likely to change public perceptions, and make social media use less acceptable in younger age groups. This is an important first step in public health education and behavioural change. It can also minimise instances of individual harms for young people who cease engaging with platforms, and over time it can, if done right, change our culture around social media use among certain age groups. 

“First and foremost, the ban is a recognition by government that previous policies to make social media safe have not worked as planned. Banning something for those most vulnerable is a good step if it cannot be made safe. But we know why social media is at times unsafe for not just children but adults as well: this includes harmful content, conduct or communications, as well as design features that make it harder for us to disengage even when we want to. We have failed to adequately address these.”

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Social media ban: responses to 10 common objections • Edrith

Edrith:

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I would like laws to have an impact. I’m also someone who is normally fairly opposed to safetyism and the nanny state, and supportive of parental choice. At the same time I’m not a full-on libertarian: I think some products should be age-gated (tobacco, gambling), regulated even for adults (cars, guns) or outright banned (drink-driving, heroin).

To put my cards on the table, I believe smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have been a deeply harmful societal innovation, at the ‘hey, let’s put lead in petrol’ scale of innovation. Their affects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation. In some cases this is due to direct harms caused by use; in others, it is because the addictive nature crowds out other, healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others. For some of these, we increasingly have causal as well as correlational evidence; for others, it is simply highly indicative, when one looks at the trend lines across very many different countries going south at the same time.

Smartphones have sufficient other positive uses such that we’re not realistically going to get rid of them – any more than we did cars, despite the deaths they cause. But the case for social media is much weaker: regulation is needed, and a social media ban for under 16s (and a properly enforced phone ban in school) is a good place to start.

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The piece then looks at the arguments against, and responds. It’s pretty straightforward. Doing is better than not doing.
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Australia has already banned social media for under 16s; here’s what the UK can learn from the experience • The Conversation

Lisa Given:

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In March 2026, Australia’s eSafety Commission released its first detailed compliance report. It showed social media companies had taken “some steps” to restrict access to accounts. But the report also provided data from parents showing 70% of children retained active social media accounts.

The report highlighted four key compliance issues. It found that messaging to under-16s on some platforms encouraged children to attempt age assurance, even where they declared themselves to be underage. Some platforms enabled under-16s to repeatedly attempt the same age-assurance method to ultimately pass age checks. Pathways for reporting age-restricted accounts have generally not been accessible and effective, particularly for parents. Finally, some platforms appear not to have done enough to prevent under-16s having accounts.

The report explained Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were being investigated for “potential non-compliance”. While the results of these investigations are not yet known, enforcement decisions are expected by midyear. In the meantime, parents continue to be frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the legislation.

A recent study provides further insights into the flaws and limitations of Australia’s social media restrictions. The study found 61% of under 16s reported “no or little change” in their social media use. Only 26% reported they had been “significantly affected” by the ban. However, of those who were restricted, 51% reported a significant drop in access to news coverage. These results raise significant concerns for young people’s future civic engagement.

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It’s always interesting how social media is viewed by those who oppose the laws as absolutely essential to children’s development at all ages, even though humans developed pretty well without them for quite a few million years.
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Scientists reveal surprising mechanism behind Venus flytrap’s rapid snap • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin:

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The Venus flytrap is one of nature’s most impressive predators, luring insects with the intoxicating scent of nectar before capturing them with a snap of its jaw-like leaves.

Now, scientists have revealed the mechanism that allows the carnivorous plant to react with lightning speed, resolving a problem that stumped Charles Darwin and many researchers after him.

In an intricate series of experiments, scientists found that a hair-trigger detection causes the cells on the outer surface of the leaf to soften. This prompts the flytrap to flip into a closed position within a second of a bug landing on the leaf.

“When Darwin saw these plants move so fast, he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside, but plants do not have muscles and they do not have nerves,” said Dr Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University and senior author of the research. “For more than a century there have been many hypotheses. It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”

A key challenge, Forterre said, was making physical measurements of such a finely tuned system that moves incredibly quickly. “As soon as you perturb it, it closes,” he said. “If you close it accidentally with a drop of water, it will close and then reopen the next day. If it catches an insect, it has to digest it and dissolve the skeleton, which will take several weeks.”

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Sure, seems trivial, but in a couple of decades it’ll probably be the principle behind a new method of repairing blood vessels. Or shoe fastenings. Who knows.
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Will Siri AI kill AI as a service? • The Dent

Andy Nicolaides:

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Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Apple, and their products, change the playing field very often. Apple, along with Google with their Photos all, are probably responsible for a lot of standalone photo back up services closing their doors. As soon as the two big OS providers started including photo backup with their devices, the idea of it being a standalone product seemingly died overnight. Photo backup is just a service now, something anyone expects to have with any device they use. 

Since starting to use Siri AI I’ve stopped using Gemini and Claude (again outside of the coding elements) for just general queries and questions. I’ve even reduced my Kagi usage a little for general questions and information. There is absolutely the novelty of it all that will drive me to use it more, of course, but the integration with the wider OS and the fact that it can now (finally) answer questions with decent information and relatively quickly all without having to use a separate app (which you can still do if you want) has already been a bit of a game changer.

After just a few days it’s already feeling like just a ‘service’ and part of what I get with an iPhone now. If I didn’t have use for Claude Code (it feels like we all need to be at least dabbling with it for work these days) I wouldn’t think twice of just not using a different AI system again.

As I say, very early days, but I feel like this is already the turning point where the expensive AI tools like Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex and others become very expensive professional applications, only aimed at corporations that have the money to burn on it, and the big players start to back away from targeting consumer users, with Gemini for Android, and Siri AI for Apple devices, becomes the de facto standard.

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Amateur saboteurs: the young men carrying out attacks for gangs, Russia and Iran • Reuters

Michael Holden and Sam Tobin:

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Shortly after midnight on May 13, 2025, Ukrainian national Roman Lavrynovych messaged someone he knew as ‘EL Money’, a mystery figure who had instructed him to commit three arson attacks on property linked to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“I ​hope I will have an opportunity to shake your hand soon … Be in touch,” he said in a text message. An hour later, counter-terrorism officers raided his London home and he was charged with committing arson with intent to endanger life.

With his conviction on Monday, the 22-year-old Lavrynovych joins a growing list of mainly young men, lured on social media and found guilty in Britain of carrying out serious criminal acts on behalf of shadowy online figures for money which, more often than not, they never even received.

“Clearly the tasking (instruction) was to intimidate and create fear for the prime minister and to attack the UK,” said Helen Flanagan, head of counter-terrorism policing in London, in an ​interview for British media. “There is no evidence to suggest they knew who they were targeting or why. It was a quick dash for cash really.”

Foreign states using unreliable and untrained individuals -many ​of them minors – to carry out such tasks was almost unheard of until recent years but a flurry of incidents in Britain and across Europe has brought the issue into focus.
The authorities say the aim is to sow unrest and division while allowing hostile governments to deny any involvement.

Russia has used the proxy tactic extensively in Ukraine: since its full-scale invasion in 2022, roughly one ​in five of the more than 1,100 Ukrainians accused of committing arson, terrorism or sabotage have been minors, Ukraine’s security service has said.

British authorities say doing so in Britain became necessary after more than 600 Russian operatives, ​including over 400 spies, were expelled following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southern England, in 2018.

…Lavrynovych said he had been working on a construction site and ​was first contacted by EL Money on a Telegram chat used by Ukrainians to find jobs. He told police he had felt threatened to comply with his ​orders and was worried about his grandmother, with whom he lived.

“I needed some more money,” he told London’s Old Bailey court. “I didn’t know where he contacted me from.”

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Has AI already killed how-to nonfiction? Sales trends, my personal data, and what it might mean for the future • The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss:

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let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily.

But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that’s happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.

So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like. First, some broader stats. For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?

But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time. 

But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend. So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years. Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.

Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication. The sales have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on.

But alas! There’s trouble in paradise.

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His self-help books are down 57% against 2025, which was itself down 46% on the previous year. So:

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On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.

In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book. In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books.

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(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Nobody clicks your share buttons • Derek Hanson

Derek Hanson:

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I don’t click share buttons. I never have.

When I find something worth sharing, I tap the share icon in Chrome on my phone. That’s it. On my desktop I click the little link icon in Arc’s browser bar, or I just double-click the address bar and hit command-C command-V. I’ve never once looked at a row of branded social icons at the bottom of a blog post and thought, “Oh good, there’s the Facebook button.”

I think most people are the same way. And I think the data backs that up.

This idea has been rattling around in my head for years. Back when I was deep in my PhD research at Iowa State, I came across Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media writing about things you should remove from your website. One of them was social icons in your header. Not even the share buttons; the plain follow-us icons. His argument was simple: those icons are exit signs. You spent all this effort getting someone to your site, and the most visually prominent element on the page is an invitation to leave.

But he didn’t stop there. In the same piece, he looked at social share buttons on service pages and product pages and found the same pattern. Share rates around 0.1% or lower. His advice was to cut them and uninstall the WordPress plugin that added them. Visual noise, no value.

That stuck with me. And when I started building block themes and thinking about what belongs in a post template, I kept coming back to it. Every WordPress theme I’ve worked with ships social share icons somewhere in the post layout. They sit at the top or the bottom, a little row of branded circles. Nobody questions them. They’re just there, like they’ve always been there.

But should they be?

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Obviously not: someone thought they were a good idea years ago, and everyone copied them, and now they’re like Japanese knotweed.
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AI document integrity: what your AI reads is probably different from what you read • PQ PDF

PQ PDF Tools:

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The problem hides in plain sight. A PDF isn’t one document. The page a person reads and the text a machine extracts are not guaranteed to match — and your AI ingests the machine’s version. When they differ, the model learns, retrieves and answers from a version of the document no human ever saw.

• RAG poisoning: retrieval pipelines index extracted text. If extraction diverges from the rendered page, your assistant cites content that isn’t there — confidently.

• Corrupted training data: fine-tuning on parsed PDFs bakes in extraction errors, hidden layers and reading-order scrambles at scale — invisibly.

• Compliance & e-discovery: when the value stored differs from the value shown — on signed forms, contracts and filings — automated review reaches the wrong conclusion.

• Silent, not loud: none of this throws an error. It degrades answer quality and audit integrity quietly, until someone downstream is wrong and can’t say why.

Across the 16,971-PDF DOJ Epstein release, 18.6% of files read differently to a machine than to a human — the extracted text layer diverged from the rendered page.

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Given the prevalence of PDFs in all sorts of government and formal financial products, this is quite a hidden problem. Not an iceberg, but still trouble.
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Current Rothko

Neat: a webpage that finds a Rothko painting that matches (as far as it can) the weather where you are. Needs location access, but it’s a web page, not an app.
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Global food crisis looms as supply chains fracture after Iran War • news.com.au

Jamie Siedel:

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Higher food prices? Less choice? Poorer quality? Disgruntled fellow shoppers? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The muttering echoing through Australian supermarket aisles is just the beginning – even if US President Donald Trump miraculously pulls off his long-promised “deal” to end his Iran War.

Critical links in the global supply chain are broken. And they’re steadily winding their way towards the next harvest. The doubling (and in some places tripling) of diesel costs makes farming far more expensive. Not to mention transporting produce to market.

And a lack of fertiliser means the next crop will produce less. Or not be planted at all. Now, last season’s harvest is feeling the strain. “So today, we have enough food available, and we have enough stocks. The problem is for the next harvest,” warns UN Food and Agriculture Organisation chief economist Maximo Torero.

It’s a global problem. It extends from the fields of Africa to the prairies of the United States. “If the situation improves tomorrow, if you open the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow, we will still have higher prices because of less supply,” Torero explains.

“Farmers [have] already made a decision. But we could avoid a significant crisis by the end of the year or 2027.”

And if we don’t open the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow? “That means that the yields in the world will be affected for the second half of the year for 2027,” Torero said.

A new report published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) states that the real Hormuz crisis will arrive in about six months.

“The decisions we make now will determine whether this remains a manageable shock, or evolves into a deeper global food security crisis in 2026 and 2027, and beyond,” Director General QU Dongyu told a crisis meeting in Spain on Wednesday.

He said the US/Israel attack on Iran had produced a moment of “profound geopolitical and economic fragility”.

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Well in theory the strait is open, but..
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As you get older, do you start to slow down.. on the road? If so, why? CC-licensed photo by Brian Suda 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. Stay in your lane. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the export control directive that led to Anthropic cutting off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was triggered in part by cybersecurity research from Amazon and conversations between CEO Andy Jassy and the White House. According to the report, the paper from Amazon claims that, through a series of prompts, it was able to get Fable 5 to serve up information that could be used in cyberattacks. Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after Jassy shared the company’s findings with the government, it made the call to block its use by foreign nationals. Complicating this issue is that many of Anthropic’s researchers are foreign-born, meaning they were barred from accessing their own product.

In a statement, Anthropic disputed the government’s characterization of the issue as a “jailbreak.” It argued that many of the same vulnerabilities could be discovered using other publicly available models, including GPT 5.5. Some security researchers appear to back the company’s interpretation. Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of LutaSecurity posted on BlueSky that “I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak.” Former Commerce Department official Kate Koren speculated to the WSJ that the White House’s dislike of Anthropic may have influenced the decision.

Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

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This beef between Amazon (has US defence contracts) and Anthropic (presently shut out of US defence contracts) has the potential to become really explosive. Would Anthropic deny Amazon access to its models? It probably has to to any Amazon employees who are not US-born. But how do you do that? Better deny it to everyone. The problem with that, though, is that you can’t be absolutely sure that someone is a US citizen even at a US company. Ironically, some of Anthropic’s top researchers are now disallowed from accessing their own product because they’re not US citizens.
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In age of AI, world’s leading deepfake expert no longer trusts his own eyes • The New York Times

Eli Saslow:

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[Hamid Farid’s wife Emily] Cooper was a leading vision scientist at Berkeley. She researched how humans perceive reality, while her husband investigated how that reality could be faked. They’d collaborated on studies about deepfakes, but in the last months that research had begun to follow them home. Instead of dealing with one case every few weeks, Farid was working as an adviser and an expert witness, juggling up to a dozen cases each day. For the first time in his career, he’d become not just an analyst but also a victim, when someone spoofed his cellphone number and used AI to clone his voice. The hacker made calls to one of Farid’s colleagues on a sensitive case, impersonating Farid and pressing for confidential information. Now Farid and Cooper had decided never to take their identity for granted. They invented a safe word to confirm they were real at the start of any sensitive phone call.

Farid glanced at his phone and saw a new email: “I’m fact-checking this viral video of a mother and child approaching a flag-draped coffin that we suspect is AI generated,” it read. He set the phone back down and looked out from the porch at the Berkeley Hills, the San Francisco Bay, and the sun setting over the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I can’t stand this place anymore,” he said. “These major tech giants will burn everything to the ground as long as they’re making a profit. They’re not interested in anything that’s going to slow them down.”

“It makes me anxious for our students,” Cooper said. “It’s starting to scare me.”

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(Gift link.)
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I was scammed buying GLP-1s online. I’m not alone • WIRED

John Semley:

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In March, I signed up for a service called FitRx—which also does business under the name Zealthy, Inc.—mostly to see the cost of compounded Zepbound. The website advertises an offer of $135 for a month’s supply. I registered, paid the membership fee, and answered some basic questions about my weight, medical history, and activity level. When I woke up seven hours later, I found a detailed message from a physicians’ assistant—who I did not communicate with directly—laying out my new “plan.” I also found I was charged $866 and had been sent a three-month supply of tirzepatide vials that I had been prescribed, despite neither asking for or needing them. No effort whatsoever was made to check if these unwanted medicines were covered by insurance.

I spent the better part of the next week arguing with customer service reps at FitRx and Zealthy about their cancellation rules. (With FitRx, this almost always involved dialing in to be cheerily greeted by the same dude, who would only identify himself as “Ace.”) They explained that they have a policy about not refunding any orders after shipping labels have been printed. I explained that I, too, have a policy: Do not take money from me without asking. Having involuntarily adjusted my personal policy in my dealings with FitRx/Zealthy, perhaps they, too, could make an exception? No dice. I called the shipper, FedEx, which said that it was completely within the provider’s capacity to cancel a shipment before it had been mailed out. I refused the delivery of the vials and had them returned to the sender, an intermediary pharmacy in Texas. The process was mind-breakingly frustrating, seemingly by design.

…“The obese world is a white-collar crook’s dream,” alleges Sarah Harris, another former customer who claims she was bilked for more than $1,500. She turned to Zealthy back in 2024, when her doctor refused to prescribe semaglutide to her because the treatment was, in Harris’s words, “still newish.” Her insurance wouldn’t cover any weight-loss drugs. So, if she wanted to try them, she’d have to pay out of pocket.

…Ali Garrison, a social media weight-loss influencer who operates the YouTube channel FitFlavorFun, has fallen down what she calls “the Zealthy rabbit hole.” There were Reddit threads and whole Facebook groups collecting stories of consumers who claimed to have been ripped off by the company. “One thing I tell people is to do a Google search,” she advises. “Company Name scams … Company Name reviews … I could go on and on about all problems various telehealths have had.”

Caveat emptor, as the old saying goes. And, in my own case, I am definitely guilty of conducting precisely zilch in the way of this sort of preliminary research. I forked over my Mastercard info to a telehealth website because it seemed glossy, professional, and otherwise sufficiently legit. (I have since canceled that credit card, as a precaution.)

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Unsurprising that there would be scams around these drugs. But in the UK, you can challenge charges with your credit card company, and then it becomes their problem.
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How the Open Knowledge Format can improve data sharing • Google Cloud Blog

Sam McVeety and Amir Hormati:

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As foundation models continue to improve, the lack of relevant context often limits what they can do, especially as they are used to build agentic systems. While these models can help you write code, summarize documents, or analyze a dataset, they still need the right information to produce accurate and actionable results. 

That’s why today, we’re introducing the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), an open specification that formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format. This is a vendor-neutral, agent- and human-friendly standard for representing the metadata, context, and curated knowledge that modern AI systems need.

As published, OKF v0.1 represents knowledge as a directory of Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, with a small set of agreed-upon conventions that let wikis written by different producers be consumed by different agents without translation.

That’s it. No complex compression scheme, no new runtime, no required SDK. A bundle of OKF documents is:

• Just Markdown — readable in any editor, renderable on GitHub, indexable by any search tool

• Just files — shippable as a tarball, hostable in any git repo, mountable on any filesystem

• Just YAML frontmatter — for the small set of structured fields that need to be queryable: type, title, description, resource, tags, and timestamp.

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This sounds very much like the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee was always dreaming of. This time, perhaps it will stick because they need it to stick for AI agents.
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Solar generates more energy than coal in US for 1st time • ABC News

Julia Jacobo:

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The amount of solar power generated in the US is continuing to grow despite efforts from the Trump administration to slow down the renewable energy sector, according to two reports released this week.

The US has generated more power from solar compared to coal for the first time, according to a report by Ember, a think tank focused on the clean energy transition. In May 2026, solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity, while coal supplied 12.2%, according to an analysis of official monthly and preliminary hourly generation data.

A record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy was generated in May 2026, exceeding the output from May 2025 by 17%, the think tank found. The record could be broken again in the upcoming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.

The amount of energy from coal generated in the US has been nearly cut in half in the last five years, falling from 19.7% of total power generated in May 2021 to 12.2% last month. Production of coal power rose slightly in May 2026, to 43.4 Twh, but it remained 11% below May 2025 levels.

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May of course isn’t the sunniest month. Coal is gradually on the way out.
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The ‘new joule order’ is here. The west is last to realise • Financial Times

Jeffrey Currie is a senior adviser at Carlyle Group and executive co-chairman of Abaxx Markets:

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The world has underpriced physical energy security for a decade and the repricing in markets from that complacency was not going to be linear. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is the first major stress test of the new regime. It has revealed which countries prepared, and which are improvising.

China prepared. While Washington and Brussels spent 25 years polarised between green and brown energy, Beijing built both — 1.2 terawatts of solar, the world’s largest nuclear pipeline, an EV fleet now displacing more than one million barrels a day, according to Rhodium group estimates.

None of it was justified as climate policy. It was insurance. An electron can be sourced from coal, gas, sun, wind, or uranium; a combustion engine is married to a single fuel that must cross someone else’s chokepoint. Electrification is the purchase of optionality, and China bought more of it than any nation in history.

That option is now being exercised, and the market is misreading it as weakness. The consensus explanation for falling Chinese energy imports is “demand destruction” — the world’s largest importer buckling. The reality is the opposite. Faced with fuel prices up to 20%, Chinese drivers charge instead of fill: highway EV charging surged 56% year on year over the May Day holiday. Industrial users have switched to domestic coal. In aggregate, China can flex perhaps 2mn barrels a day of demand at will — flexibility no other large economy can approach. What looks like a collapsing customer is a customer that built an exit and is using it.

Environmentalists need not take alarm that some of that flexibility runs on coal. Coal is the bridge, not the destination. China’s renewable and nuclear capacity carries little marginal cost once built: the fixed costs are sunk, the fuel is free, and every additional gigawatt displaces a barrel at little incremental expense. It is the same logic that made asset-light technology businesses so powerful — once the infrastructure exists, the marginal unit costs next to nothing.

The west, meanwhile, is running the old playbook at its physical limit. US crude exports have surged 2mn barrels a day since the war began. Washington calls it energy dominance. Look closer and it is something else: America is exporting its insurance policy.

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The tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, are hitting bottom. The oil market is about to hit a tipping point • CNN Business

David Goldman:

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Cushing, Oklahoma, dubs itself the pipeline crossroads of the world. The tagline is emblazoned on a giant roadside sign fashioned out of pipes on the corner of Main Street and South Stiles Road. It has a valve and everything.

But it’s not just a slogan. In 1912, Tom Slick (his real name) was passing through what’s now Drumright, Oklahoma, when he smelled oil. He bought the land for $1 an acre and started digging, uncovering what was then Oklahoma’s biggest oil well.

Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country.

In normal times, Cushing stores around 40 million barrels of oil with capacity of up to 75 million.

These are not normal times. Cushing’s current inventory is 21.6 million barrels, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s dangerously close to operational stress levels, the tipping point at which Cushing struggles to supply all of its customers with the oil they demand.

When Cushing’s reserves get below 20 million, they effectively hit empty, scraping the bottom of the barrel of what is largely unusable sludge. And when Cushing runs empty, strange things happen to the oil market.

Unless the Strait of Hormuz opens soon – very soon – we’re probably just weeks away from finding out what that looks like.

…US diesel stocks recently hit their lowest level since 2003. Gas inventories have been falling, too – about 5% below where they were a year ago. Other US commercial crude storage facilities outside of Cushing are also getting drained fast – by 7.2 million barrels last week alone.

«

Not to worry! According to Axios, Trump is on the verge of signing a deal with Iran within the next few hours. Well, perhaps days. Who knows.
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Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week ‘botsitting’ • The Register

Dan Robinson:

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Almost all UK workers now have to deal with AI, but few firms report big productivity gains because of all the time lost in hand-holding the systems and cleaning up their mistakes.

So says a report by the Work AI Institute, a research arm of AI biz Glean Technologies.

It claims there are productivity gains to be had from introducing AI-based tools, yet much of this is being negated by the amount of time employees waste making them work – a phenomenon it has christened “botsitting.”

The organization surveyed 1,500 digital workers for “The Work AI Index: UK 2026” report, finding 90% are now required to use AI in their roles, 80% use multiple AI tools every week, and 39% use four or more.

The workers indicate AI automation saves them roughly 12 hours a week, or just under a third of their working week. Yet only 18% agree AI has significantly improved their organization’s performance.

The time freed up isn’t flowing into productive work, it’s being absorbed by the unglamorous human labour required to keep those systems running, according to the Work AI Institute.

For every hour a UK staffer spends getting output from their AI tools, they spend roughly another hour making it usable.

«

It’s still early days, though one has to feel that this in the future the botsitting will just be more complex: they’ll do more difficult things but that will require more careful evaluation.
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I feel the need, the need for (less) speed • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

When we started towing a boat behind our car, and were consequently limited to 60mph rather than 70mph on major roads in the UK, I found I rather liked travelling that way. Yes, it took a bit longer, but it was more relaxing.

And I’ve noticed that, whether due to a growth in wisdom or to a decline in testosterone — I prefer to think it’s the former — I now tend to drive rather more slowly than I did a decade or two ago. Rose suggests I may just be subconsciously aware of slower reaction times…

But this has led me to propose Quentin’s Law of Optimal Velocity, which is the maximum speed in miles per hour at which you like to drive, and is given by:

Vmax = 120 - age

but I freely admit that this is based on a rather small sample size (errm… one, to be precise) so would be grateful for more data.

«

It does ring true, to be honest. Input welcome.
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‘Tell him he’s a piece of shit’: Meta’s new AI unit is a total mess • WIRED

Paresh Dave on discontent inside the Applied AI unit inside Meta, where the staff view themselves as doing drudgery:

»

Zuckerberg’s memo also addressed the allegedly dismal situation in Applied AI directly, referring to the unit by its acronym. He suggested the team was a waypoint, not a destination. “Work like AAI is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well,” he wrote.

Engineers selected for the unit have no choice but to join or leave the company, an unusual requirement for highly valued technical employees in Silicon Valley. That’s led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as “draftees.”

The organization has grown in batches since early April. “It’s crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in,” an early member of Applied AI says.

Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Some of the work is meant to help develop AI agents that generate software or other outputs.

One worker describes the assignment as “mechanical and not creative” and certainly “not using their full skillset and knowledge.” They feel they were hired to develop social media apps for billions of people, but now find themselves assembling data for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips.

Meta released pioneering open-weights AI models three years ago, but has had mixed results with subsequent releases. Applied AI is among several expensive initiatives Zuckerberg has spun up in hopes that the company can better compete in the growing market for AI services.

Zuckerberg noted in his memo that, unlike some other AI labs, “automating work” was not Meta’s primary focus. “The products we’ll build will range from much more personalized Instagram and Facebook experiences and glasses that help you throughout the day to better tools for small businesses to thrive and create jobs, and personal superintelligence agents that understand your goals and work 24/7 on your behalf to help in the ways you want,” he wrote.

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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Xbox brand is in deep trouble, judging by a message sent to employees within Microsoft which points to OEM hardware in the future. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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.

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

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Are you finally ready to admit it’s the phones? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

The idea of perpetually tying every human into a global hive mind tripped alarm bells. It reminded me too much of the hive minds I had seen depicted in science fiction nightmares — the Borg from Star Trek, the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, the Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Humans were meant to be individuals — unique, independent incubators of ideas and desires, not terminals or the fingers of a world-mind.

We had spent centuries trying to escape the small, localized versions of the hive mind. The printing press, the car and the telephone had offered freedom from the crushing conformity of small-town life. When broadcast television threatened to smother us with a centrally dictated monoculture, it sparked a decades-long resistance. When the internet arrived, we spent two decades using it to revel in our individuality — we made our personal websites, started blogs, joined small online communities centered around our interests.

Sometime around 2014 or 2015 we woke up to the fact that the world of the Old Internet no longer existed. “The internet” no longer meant the Web — it meant a tiny handful of big platforms. Twitter and Reddit for screaming about politics, Facebook and Instagram for being jealous of your friends’ vacation pics. Gone were the days of painting our individuality on the canvas of the Web. The platforms were the hive minds, we were the neurons, and the smartphone was the axon that kept each of us wired tight into the collective.

“‘Social media is bad,’ he typed on social media!!” This is the perpetual and instantaneous response of many of the neurons…er, people…in my timeline. Indeed, if social media is so bad, why don’t you just put down the phone? But this idea displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of network effects. Suppose I decide to get off Instagram and go play pickup basketball instead. If everyone else is on Instagram instead of playing pickup basketball, who am I going to play with?

This is an extreme and simplified example, obviously, but the intuition here comes from real research.

…Plenty of evidence has linked smartphones — and the social media apps that take up the single biggest chunk of the time we spend on those phones — to rising unhappiness among the world’s young people.

Since I wrote about this in 2023, the evidence has only grown stronger

«

The full post requires a (free) subscription signup, but the evidence only gets stronger every day.
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Three ways to think about AI and jobs • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma:

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Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI would soon “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” But the radiologist story suggests that whether AI will replace a given profession is not so straightforward to predict. Answering the following three questions can help you determine how endangered a job really is.

Question 1: Is your job a weak bundle or strong bundle?

According to Luis Garicano, an economist and a co-author of the forthcoming book Messy Jobs, most white-collar jobs combine two very different kinds of work. “Clean” tasks involve predictable problems, objective standards of success, lots of written data, and little interpersonal interaction (think: approving an expense report or updating a spreadsheet). These are the easiest for AI systems to handle.

“Messy” tasks, however, involve dealing with unpredictable situations, meeting subjective measures of success, acting on tacit knowledge, and navigating complex webs of human relationships (think: choosing a new corporate logo, assuaging an upset client, or managing a team). AI isn’t so good at these kinds of tasks, at least not yet.

…A trial lawyer has what Garicano and his co-authors call a “strong bundle” job, in which the various responsibilities are so tightly linked that delegating some of them to AI would actually be counterproductive.

…Question 2: If what you produce got cheaper, how much more of it would people want?

…“It’s not hard to imagine this happening with financial services, with legal services, with health care,” Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the asset-management company Apollo, told me. “As AI makes these services cheaper, people are going to want a lot more of them. And that means employment in those sectors will grow.”

…Question 3: Is AI the expert, or are you?

…According to data from ZipRecruiter, the share of senior-level-job postings in the tech industry has risen considerably over the past year while the share of entry-level-job postings has fallen slightly. But Autor believes that this dynamic could easily change, as AI systems get better and better at engaging in the kind of “expert judgment” that only human experts previously possessed. He pointed to an “electrician’s assistant” tool being piloted by Schneider Electric that allows a normal electrician with only vocational training to troubleshoot the kinds of complex problems that had previously required teams of engineers with graduate degrees.

«

There’s a lot to this article; the extract barely scratches the surface. (Gift link.)
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Skeptics question whether SpaceX is worth $1.77 trillion • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac:

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In a pitch to private investors, Elon Musk once predicted that one of his companies would quintuple its revenue to more than $26bn and nearly quintuple its customer base by 2028.

That company was Twitter and those projections were made as Mr. Musk prepared to buy the social media company for $44bn in 2022.

Today, Twitter, which has been renamed X, has fallen far short of what Mr. Musk said would happen. The social media platform’s ad revenue plunged 65% last year. And it was ultimately folded into SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, this year.

Now as SpaceX readies for a blockbuster initial public offering, Mr. Musk and his investment bankers are selling even loftier propositions about what the rocket and artificial intelligence company will achieve. But those proclamations, coupled with Mr. Musk’s history of overpromising, have some investors increasingly worried that SpaceX — which priced its offering at a $1.77 trillion valuation and is set to begin trading on Friday — may burn them.

“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” said Jim Chanos, the founder of the investment firm Chanos and Company, who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron, the energy company that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud.

…Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

“Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion,” Mr. Burry wrote, referring to the company’s IPO filing.

Even some SpaceX shareholders have doubts. Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX stock, said the company’s projections reminded him of unverified information that young start-ups used to woo investors. He said he was alarmed by SpaceX’s valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would be more than four times the $400bn that the company was valued at just 13 months ago.

«

Although, reminder: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and probably will about SpaceX.
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100 days of Iran war have cost diesel drivers £255 more than EV drivers • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

Colin Walker:

»

The 7th June marked the 100th day of the conflict between the US and Iran, which started on the 28th February. During this time the price of oil has increased as a result of disruptions to supply through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump in the UK. Petrol is now 27p a litre higher than it was on the eve of the conflict, while diesel has jumped by 43p a litre.

New analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has found that these price rises have added £1.7bn to the cost of running the nation’s petrol and diesel cars in the first 100 days of the US-Iran conflict. And this means that, in this time, the UK’s diesel car drivers have paid £255 more to fuel their cars than if they had been driving an EV. Recent industry data has shown an EV sales surge in the UK (mirroring Europe and other countries) as drivers try to reduce their fuel bills – more than one in four (27%) cars sold in May were electric.

Since the conflict started petrol car drivers have paid £175 more than if they had been driving an EV. Collectively, cars running on petrol and diesel have cost over £6.3bn more to fuel in the last 100 days than if they had been EVs.

«

The quarter-end statistics for sales of EVs will certainly make for fun reading. It feels as though almost every car registered after 2024 I see on the roads is an EV.
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Oil tankers increase ‘dark’ transits through Strait of Hormuz • Financial Times

Alice Hancock, Nassos Stylianou, Malcolm Moore and Ryo Namiki:

»

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform that “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz”.

He said the effort had allowed about 200 commercial ships to cross the strait and that 100mn barrels of crude were able to reach global markets as a result of the operation.

Dan Smoot, chief executive of Vantor, which tracks ships by satellite imaging, said at the WSJ CEO Council summit in London on Wednesday that there was a “tremendous amount” of shipping activity through the Strait of Hormuz that was “outside the news right now”.

Still, oil transport companies remained nervous about the risks for such transits. “It is a very narrow waterway and there is not much room for manoeuvre, so we are worried about the navigational implications of ships using it,” said John Stawpert, marine director at the International Chamber of Shipping.

Analysts have suggested most of the ships travelling through the strait are leaving it, but others are still entering to trade non-Iranian crude. They said that the growing number of “dark transits”, in which ships pass through the strait without their GPS signal on to avoid detection by Iranian forces, was helping to cushion oil prices below $100 per barrel.

The closure of Hormuz has cut off about 12mn barrels a day of oil from the market, the equivalent of roughly six supertankers daily.

Energy Aspects, a consultancy, estimated that Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were currently shipping about 3mn barrels of crude a day through the strait.

It noted that stocks in Mina al-Ahmadi in Kuwait fell sharply at the end of May, by nearly 8mn barrels, suggesting that more ships were being loaded. Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspects, said the dark transits meant the world’s refineries could increase production and avoid “summer tightness, in theory”.

Shipping executives, however, have been quick to underline that even if traffic has picked up, it remains far below the 135 ships per day that travelled through the strait before the conflict.

«

Six versus 135 is quite a delta. And yet the oil markets seem confident enough that this is plenty of oil.
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Three Indian sailors killed in US strike on tanker in Gulf of Oman • BBC News

Cherylann Mollan:

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Three Indian sailors have been confirmed killed after the US military struck a tanker in the Gulf of Oman which it accused of violating its blockade on Iranian ports.

The MT Settebello came under attack on Wednesday, with 24 Indian crew on board, of whom 21 were rescued. In a post on X, India’s Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said the three men’s bodies would be brought home soon.
The US has struck three ships in the Gulf this week, all with Indian crew on board.

On Thursday, Delhi said all 20 crew on the Jalveer were safe after a strike off Oman. Three days earlier the 24 Indian crew on sanctioned oil tanker the Marivex were rescued before it sank. US Centcom confirmed it struck both ships.

…The US military blocked access to Iran’s ports after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies are transported, during the ongoing conflict.

US forces have disabled eight vessels and redirected 134 others since initiating the blockade on 13 April, according to Centcom.

The Indian government has maintained that “targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure in the region must end”.

…According to India’s shipping ministry, there are at present 562 Indian seafarers, external on Indian-flagged vessels, including 329 in the Gulf region, west of Hormuz, and 233 in the Gulf of Oman, east of Hormuz.

“There are more than 18,000 Indian seafarers in total in the whole Gulf region,” Mangal said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and the US show no sign of easing. Both countries have exchanged strikes for a second consecutive day, putting more strain on a fragile ceasefire arrived upon in April.

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I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

But it’s also a pretty basic set of features for an AI assistant in 2026, particularly if you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past couple of years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. It’s been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months now, if not longer. New Siri is built on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first iteration of Siri AI feels a little bit “Gemini, circa 2025.”

Siri AI has its own flavour, though. Apple has a lot of proprietary stuff going on under the hood and in the cloud. It draws from an on-device pool of data that’s gleaned from things like email and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can tap into the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that can’t be handled fully on device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute with only the relevant pieces of personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you opt into sharing your Gmail or calendar, and then it’ll go directly to those sources to get the information when needed.

«

Wonder if Google is going to tout how many Gemini users there are on iOS, to contrast it with the default of Siri. Or, conversely, in a year’s time whether at WWDC 2027 Apple will proudly announce how many hundreds of millions are using the new Siri. The challenge for the latter is that many older devices – the majority of all Apple devices – won’t be able to run it.
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“This cannot continue”: Xbox leaders lay out “hard truths” behind sagging brand • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she’d work to “understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it.” Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale “Xbox reset.”

The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire on Wednesday night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a “3% accountability margin” (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30% margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It’s an underperformance, they write, born out of being “overextended” by moves like the $69bn acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20bn in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500m compared to five years ago.

While Microsoft has overinvested in acquisitions and platform spending, Sharma and Booty also admit that Xbox has “not adequately funded” the company’s “industry-defining franchises.”

…While Xbox hardware sales had started cratering long before these cost increases came to pass, Microsoft says it’s now facing the somewhat opposite problem of being “currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy.” Taken as a whole, it all likely means that we’ll see a reprise of last year’s multiple Xbox price increases before too long.

…The dire hardware component situation means Microsoft now says it will pursue a new “business model and partnerships for hardware” for Helix, the recently announced project that will play both Xbox and PC games. The mention of “partnerships for hardware” is particularly interesting, given that Microsoft recently lent the Xbox brand to Asus for the Windows-powered ROG Xbox Ally.

«

Sounds as though Xbox will become an OS, like Windows, and OEMs will try to profit from the hardware side. The $69bn purchase of Activision increasingly looks like a very bad idea.
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Met police chief calls for law to make stolen phones ‘unusable bricks’ • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

»

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has asked the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to force all phone companies to make stolen devices “unusable bricks” in order to make them harder to sell on and less desirable to steal.

London is widely regarded as the phone-snatching capital of Europe, with between 200 and 300 devices stolen each day. The city accounts for up to three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts in England and Wales.

Apple has already rolled out an update for iPhones, meaning those with the latest operating system have extra safeguards if the devices are stolen. Sensitive actions such as viewing passwords, Apple Card details, or erasing the phone now require Face ID or Touch ID, making it harder to return the devices to factory settings or change the passwords, which criminals need to do to sell them on.

Rowley said the Met had started sharing data with Apple to more closely track whether stolen handsets were reconnected to a phone network after being taken.

This will make it easier to track stolen phones and help police find out what happens to them, and where they are taken.

The Met commissioner told the Press Association after an operation targeting two phone shops on Wednesday: “If we share the data we have on the phone stolen, with the data they have on things like reactivations and future uses of phones, we can get a global picture of phones being stolen, are they being reactivated, are they being broken down for parts, where they’re being exported to in the world.”

He added: “Whereas a few months ago the majority of stolen phones were being reactivated because of security flaws, now with the security improvements it’s the minority being reactivated. That means it’s harder for criminals to profit. That will help bring down the crime further.”

The Met has written to the home secretary asking for legislation to make phone companies publish data on stolen devices and whether they are reconnected, and to enforce measures to make stolen devices unusable.

Phones snatched in London are sold around the world. One recent police operation revealed a gang that had sold 40,000 stolen phones to China.

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Maths: 40,000 stolen phones would be about 20 days of the total thefts. Most are probably broken up for parts.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The enforced silencing by Meta of former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams at the Hay Festival has seen her book sales rocket. CC-licensed photo by Luke McKernan 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.

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

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Your search results are getting sloptimized • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.

For the quarter century that Google has been the de facto front door to the web, businesses have tried to find ways to get their pages at the top of search results. You’ve surely felt the influence of search-engine optimization, even if you don’t know the term. When you search for a recipe and have to scroll past the author’s rambling reminiscences about their great-aunt’s kitchen, that’s a form of SEO at work. Years ago, it became conventional wisdom among recipe bloggers that Google’s search rankings favoured longer, more distinctive articles. (Some of them also just liked to spin a yarn.)

Now chatbots are cannibalizing the traditional search engine. More people are asking questions directly of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. And searching Google now often yields an AI response, shunting the site’s famous “10 blue links” to the bottom of the results page. Last month, Google announced what it billed as the biggest change to search in 25 years: the search box now automatically expands as you type, and sometimes morphs into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is scurrying to figure out how to get search bots to recommend a given product—a practice sometimes called “GEO,” for generative-engine optimization. To put it more bluntly, your search results are getting sloptimized.

Because AI tools serve you answers instead of sending you to other sites, they choke off clicks to the rest of the web. When a Google search triggers an AI response, other sites get about half the traffic of a traditional search result, Tom Critchlow, a former executive vice president at the online-ad network Raptive, told me. Links from ChatGPT account for less than 0.5% of traffic across Raptive’s network of 6,500 independent publishers. Sites that rely on search traffic, such as blogs and news outlets, are especially suffering.

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Sigh. The ourouboros apocalypse arrives. Although the next link might roll that back…
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Landmark German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers • The Decoder

Matthias Bastian:

»

A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn’t apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.

Google’s AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results “in its own words and according to its own structure,” the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like “Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices,” then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims “that are not even made in the search results.” None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these “the defendant’s own statements.”

Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, “because it alone has influence over the AI’s offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates.”

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This could have widespread ramifications if other courts and jurisdictions take it up. Google argued that this is like search results, where third parties create it. But this is not that.
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Sales of Meta whistleblower’s memoir soar after Hay festival ‘silencing’ • The Guardian

Ella Creamer:

»

Sales of the whistleblowing memoir Careless People increased by more than 300% in the UK the week after its author was “silenced” during an appearance at Hay festival following legal action by Meta, the subject of the book.

Sarah Wynn-Williams – who between 2011 and 2017 served as the director of global public policy at what was then called Facebook – sat on stage but did not speak during her hour-long appearance on 31 May on the advice of her lawyer. She appeared alongside the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

The sales boost – 304.5% week-on-week – has nudged the book, published last March, to the number one spot in the paperback nonfiction chart.

Upon publication, Meta obtained an order blocking Wynn-Williams from promoting her book, which accuses the company of a toxic internal culture and manipulative political influence. Meta has described the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

In March, Meta filed a sanctions motion claiming that Wynn-Williams violates the order any time she makes an appearance in a place “where she should know that her book is available for sale and her presence might draw attention to it”, according to a letter from her lawyers sent to Hay festival on 30 May. “Meta also said attending the Hay festival would violate the order because the Hay festival’s ‘promotional materials include a direct link to Browse the Festival bookshop, … which offers Careless People for sale’.”

The letter asked Hay festival to “take all reasonable steps to ensure that Careless People is not sold at or through any festival bookshop, book-signing schedule, point-of-sale mechanism, or online link through which sales could be attributed to Ms Wynn-Williams’s appearance at the festival”.

Pan Macmillan said that since publication, more than 140,000 copies of Careless People have been sold across all formats in the UK.

«

That is a lot of sales. Well done Meta for the empirical demonstration of the Streisand Effect.
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As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise • The Verge

TC Sottek:

»

“Productivity” is often pitched as a panacea for what befalls us in our personal lives, even going so far as to implicate our moral worthiness when we are less productive. Productivity lives somewhere in the space between hustle culture and proverb: After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” I’m not suggesting we should all aspire to be bumps on a log, but we ought to see what we’re being sold for what it really is.

Contemporary tasks on computers have a tendency to feel both important and urgent all of the time, even if they’re not. We’re living under the unholy alliance of the “busy” trap and “software brain.” And that makes AI assistance seem super valuable! But that’s because the companies in charge of all this stuff are now trying to solve a lot of problems that they created. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have spent decades blurring the line between office life and personal life. This slow march toward ubiquitous productivity once led the French government to declare a “right to disconnect” from work when leaving the office. (Shame my American sensibilities still convince me that’s a bridge too far.)

As I read about Gemini Spark making it easy for my colleagues to colour-code calendars and perform other neat tricks on command, I couldn’t help but vividly remember witnessing as a child all of the hours my mom had to spend carefully cutting coupons so we could afford groceries. Sometimes it got to the point where our living room looked like a giant experiment in collage art. All of that time was stolen from her and our family — for what? Maybe having an AI assistant in the ’90s could have helped find and organize the best deals, but it could never fix an economic system that required them in the first place.

Where does the productivity march end? The people making more money than God right now have professed a vision of a postwork future where robots do everything for us so we can enjoy life without toiling away in the mines. (Well, except for the content mines.) If you’ve seen Elon Musk’s failure bot, you’ll know this is all actually less Battlestar Galactica and more John Adams in his letter to Abigail: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and so-on and so-on until the grandchildren can enjoy painting and poetry. So, ideally, after we slog through pre-transcendence, AI will make us all theatre kids.

«

But someone still needs to fix the plumbing and electrics and roads and build houses and paint walls and … subconsciously we know AI is offering false promises, and that many things won’t change.
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Spyware firm targeted WhatsApp users in defiance of US court order, Meta says • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

A spyware firm has been targeting WhatsApp users with malicious links in contravention of a US court order forbidding it from doing so, Meta has said.

In a post, Meta said WhatsApp had “caught and disrupted spear phishing attempts” by NSO Group, which a spokesperson said targeted a handful of users in Jordan and Lebanon. It had also caught the group creating “test accounts and groups” on WhatsApp.

NSO was founded in Israel but, since last year, is under US ownership. It built the Pegasus spyware, at the time one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever – which used a vulnerability in WhatsApp to infiltrate users’ phones and harvest all their data: messages, photos, calls and more.

Last year, it lost a court case against Meta for exploiting WhatsApp to target people; Meta was awarded $167m in damages. A later case reduced this to $4m but placed a permanent injunction against NSO barring it from targeting WhatsApp and its users.

Meta said the latest attacks showed NSO had violated this injunction and it asked the court to hold the company in contempt of the order.

“To me, it’s an astonishing signal of hubris that NSO would do this while permanently enjoined from not doing it,” said John Scott Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, which investigates digital threats against civil society.

“It either speaks to the fact that they think they wouldn’t get caught, or to the fact that they believe, rightly or wrongly, they have a special way to not face the consequences of violating a US federal permanent court injunction.”

Since the start of the Trump administration, reporting has suggested that NSO is searching for a way into the US market – and to do so is trying to get off the US commerce department “blacklist”, which bars it from doing business with US companies without specific approval.

«

NSO is absolutely the scorpion that promises everyone that it’s definitely not going to sting the frog that carries it across the river.
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Exclusive: EPA scientists say they are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products • CNN Politics

René Marsh:

»

Inside the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say they’re under pressure to alter safety reviews of chemicals commonly found in consumer products like household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks to human health and the environment disappear on paper.

Multiple current and former career employees at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention recounted being pushed by supervisors to downplay the potential risk of chemicals that are already used in products on shelves.

With President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, scientists are also being told to stop considering the impact a chemical may have on specific racial groups, according to the employees, who spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

While the EPA told CNN it wants testing that reflects real-world exposure, some veteran employees say they have been pressed to make chemicals appear safe by coming up with test parameters that aren’t realistic.

“What we’ve been told is: ‘Let’s look at alternative scenarios,’” one employee said. If putting two hands in a chemical shows risk, this person said a supervisor might ask, “What if you dip one hand? What if you dip one finger?” in search of the smallest amount of contact needed to call it safe.

“We are considering scenarios we don’t have any basis for,” the employee said.

The EPA’s chemical safety office conducts health risk assessments for a slew of chemicals because of concerns over potential impacts on human health, such as cancer, endocrine disruption, birth defects and reproductive harm.

«

Just incredible how the US is trying to turn the clock back to, oh, 1900 or so.
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SoftBank’s $6bn OpenAI margin loan said to face snag, shares drop over 9% • TradingKey

Jay Qian:

»

During the Asian session on June 10, sources familiar with the matter revealed that SoftBank Group’s negotiations to secure a margin loan of at least $6bn, using its stake in OpenAI as collateral, have failed to make progress. This comes just weeks after the company lowered its initial $10bn target by 40%. SoftBank declined to comment. According to the sources, SoftBank is still considering various financing options and may restart negotiations in the future.

The primary reason for the stalled loan lies in the fact that OpenAI’s valuation lacks a basis convincing enough for banks.

On one hand, OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8 and is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for a potential listing as early as this autumn. Following the news, some potential creditors have begun to view the loan more positively; once public, OpenAI will have a fair market value, which is expected to significantly alleviate banks’ concerns regarding the valuation of unlisted equity.

On the other hand, negative factors persist: the valuation of competitor Anthropic is rising rapidly, leading to market concerns about the erosion of OpenAI’s market share. Combined with the inherent illiquidity of private assets, banks remain cautious about the quality of the collateral. The interplay of positive news and lingering doubts has led to a stalemate in the loan negotiations.

«

Briefly: people in Asia don’t think OpenAI is worth that much. Another of those little potential indicators of the bubble deflating.
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Big tech apps that make life easy are scamming you • Rest of World

Soumya Gupta and her husband were scammed when they tried to order some wine from a nearby shop and used the number thrown up by a Google Card on searching for it:

»

I dialled again, but the call wouldn’t go through. I went to the WhatsApp account he had messaged from. No messages went through. We were blocked.

Meanwhile, Vijay walked up to Seasons Wine Shop. “Hey, I just called this number of yours and placed an order, but the guy keeps saying it is in a godown? Where is my order?”

The Seasons Wine shop guy looked at the number and groaned. “Arre sir! You too?” He pointed to a large, prominent notice at the front of the shop with that number printed in large, bold font. “So many customers have complained to us! We are tired of complaining to Google about this. Don’t call this number. This is not ours.”

And that was it. There was nothing we could do, except perhaps lodge a police complaint. I had heard how hard it could be to get the police to take cyber fraud complaints seriously. Besides, I reasoned, we were at fault. We willingly transferred money to an account. Perhaps the police will say that, too?

That night, I saw Vijay meticulously type out Seasons Wines’ correct phone number and save it. I went to the Google listing of the business and left a review, warning others that the number listed on the business listing was fraudulent. Several others had left similar warnings. We had simply never bothered to check.

…In the pre-internet and pre-social media era, doing business with a new entity involved healthy scepticism and background checks. Paying money to someone we didn’t know was an elaborate process. If you are a child of the pre-internet era, you may remember sitting down to make your first online transaction with a credit card on a big desktop. These used to be family affairs, where everyone checked the stability of the dial-up connection and remained on high alert, ensuring the card details were fed correctly and no back button was pressed accidentally. All to ensure that one didn’t lose their money online.

That scepticism is slowly eroding as we increasingly place more trust in Big Tech. Nearly every scam has exploited the reach and algorithms of Big Tech firms and our implicit trust in them.

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WWDC26: the small things • Oneberri Blog

Rishi Ó:

»

My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.

Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year.

«

There’s a lot of them, though I don’t know how useful they’ll all turn out to be. There are more and more “little things” in iOS, though what I’d really like is just for it to correctly reflect when I type “don’t”. It never does, and it’s maddening.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A second paper suggesting vaping is more dangerous than smoking has been retracted due to errors in analysis. Odd how this keeps happening. CC-licensed photo by Lacey Krusmark 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.

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

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Anthropic releases its first Mythos-class model Claude Fable • The Verge

Robert Hart:

»

Anthropic just announced Claude Fable 5, a new AI model it said is the most powerful model it has ever made widely available.

According to the company, Fable 5 “shows exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, and vision,” with its lead over other models growing as tasks become longer and more complex.

Fable 5 marks the first broad release from Anthropic’s Mythos class of AI models, after the company said the family was so capable at cybersecurity tasks that it was too dangerous to release publicly. Anthropic said the release was “made possible by new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas,” with the system falling back to Claude Opus 4.8 — a model it praised for “honesty” when it launched last month.

Anthropic singled out cybersecurity and biology as two domains where the safeguards may block responses, both areas widely considered sensitive topics for advanced AI systems. The company said that in testing, 95% of Fable sessions ran entirely on Fable responses, without falling back to Opus 4.8.

The company is also releasing Claude Mythos 5, but provided few details on what that means. In a blog, Anthropic said Mythos 5 is the same underlying model as Fable 5, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.” For now, access appears limited to the steadily expanding group of organizations granted access to Claude Mythos Preview through Anthropic’s — not entirely watertight — private Project Glasswing initiative. Those users will be able to upgrade to Mythos 5, Anthropic said, adding that it plans to “expand access over time through a more systematic trusted-access program.”

Anthropic did not respond on the record to The Verge’s request for comment explaining how either model relates to Claude Mythos Preview or why the models are numbered “5” when there do not appear to be any previously released Mythos or Fable models.

«

Those (hopeful?) guardrails around cybersecurity and biology are because they don’t want this system helping people hack into systems, or devising (for example) new viruses. Let’s all cross our fingers that those guardrails are really, really good.

It does feel like all these models are cast on the world entirely in beta form; there’s no way they’ve been properly tested against all circumstances, because how could they be? But the ramifications are much bigger than an email client with an occasional bug.
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Reuters and Time adopt bot-blocking whitelists to rein in AI crawlers • Digiday

Sara Guaglione:

»

Reuters and Time are taking a new approach to bot blocking. Both publishers have recently started blocking all AI bots by default, and created whitelists of approved bots to access content on their sites.

It’s a strategy already adopted by publishers like People Inc. at the beginning of this year and The Atlantic at the end of last year. Reuters and Time made the decision to block bots by default last month.

“We saw that there was an imbalance between the value that publishers like Reuters provide and the value… that Reuters receives in kind, and so instead we went from a default allow-all to a default disallow all,” said Josh London, head of Reuters Professional, who oversees the direct-to-consumer and direct-to-professional businesses. “Our content costs money to create. It has significant value, and the access to it, we feel, must be earned.”

Time now allows about 70 bots to access onsite content, according to its COO Mark Howard. Those bots range from crawlers run by big AI labs and social platforms, to the automated systems Time uses to keep its own website running. Time uses ScalePost to manage AI bots.

“Now we’re starting to think about: as the volume of bot traffic continues to increase significantly, and we see through a number of our vendor partners that we have very high domain authority with AI bot traffic, there’s value in that,” Howard said. That perceived value, he added, can help support the AI visibility product Time is developing to sell GEO insights to brand clients.

Reuters is blocking bots by default using robots.txt files. That method is far from foolproof. It tells web crawlers which URLs they can, but it relies on voluntary compliance — and many AI bots ignore it. A Tollbit report found that 30% of total AI bot scrapes in Q4 2025 did not abide by explicit robots.txt permissions.

«

And yet somehow the Internet Archive can’t do this? Peculiar, isn’t it. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Crackdown on tech platforms will go ahead despite US intervention, says No 10 • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Jessica Elgot:

»

White House displeasure over the prospect of an under-16 social media ban will not deter the UK from cracking down on tech platforms, the British government has said.

The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, told the Guardian she was not concerned “in the slightest” by the Trump administration’s intervention in the debate over restrictions, after the US embassy in London posted a notice warning against a ban.

Kendall added that nine out of 10 respondents to a government poll supported an under-16 ban.

Kendall said she was “very happy to read any submission anybody makes” but her priority was “British young people”. Kendall denied there was any tension between seeking investment into the UK from US AI companies and implementing regulations that affect major American tech firms. “I think companies will continue investing in Britain,” she said. “My focus is on what is right for British parents and British families.”

The government is set to announce some form of social media ban for under-16s next week, alongside other restrictions such as a possible block on conversations with strangers on gaming platforms. Limits on AI chatbot use are also under consideration.

Asked about the Trump administration’s intervention, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “We will always act in the UK’s national interest and protecting young people is no different.”

In a submission to a government consultation on online safety, the US government came out against “prescribed one-size-fits-all government restrictions” and “blunt regulatory instruments” to address online harms to children.

«

The Trump admin going against this is probably the best advert in its favour that Starmer’s government could have wished for.
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One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses • Wired via Ars Technica

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron:

»

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it during a “dynamic political environment,” when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of NameTag’s machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition.

After WIRED’s report, Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company couldn’t answer questions about how the system would work because “the feature does not exist.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, called the reporting “incredibly misleading” and “absolutely dishonest.”

«

Just utterly shameless by Stone and Bosworth. The feature did exist; it wasn’t enabled.
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Meta AI bug allowed hackers to take over Instagram accounts • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Eli Tan:

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In March, a group of hackers discovered a bug in a Meta customer service tool that allowed anyone to use an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot to reset the passwords for Instagram accounts. All the hacker had to do was ask the chatbot to change someone’s password — and it would be done.

Roughly 34,000 Instagram accounts were affected, including the accounts of the home security monitoring company SimpliSafe and a senior official in Mr. Trump’s Space Force department, according to internal Meta documents viewed by The New York Times. In the Space Force official’s case, hackers began posting pro-Iran messages comparing the war in Iran to US involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Of the 34,000 accounts, 20,000 were breached, giving hackers access to the related email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and other personal data. More than 3,500 of the accounts had their user names taken over and changed from the hack, according to the internal documents. Meta has said it could not determine what information was viewed or stolen by the attackers.

In a statement, Meta said it had fixed the flaw, which was reported by 404 Media this month, and secured the affected accounts.

“Some of our internal back-end checks failed in this instance, but it wasn’t due to the AI agent itself, and we’ve addressed the underlying cause,” said Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, adding that it was notifying regulators and people whose accounts were affected. The company said that because of its new automated customer service programs called agents, the number of users who were able to recover hacked accounts in the United States and Canada increased by 30% last year.

…The incident was another AI-themed hiccup for Meta as it tries to remake itself using the technology. The company, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, is not only integrating AI into its apps but spending billions to keep pace with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI to develop cutting-edge AI. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said his company’s future depends on quickly shifting to an AI-first organization.

«

Have to wonder if this experience will make them weight that at least a little more carefully. The scale of this attack is small compared to the total number of Instagram accounts, but that’s only because they targeted high-profile ones.
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Second Patel vape study retracted as lung disease paper is pulled over data concerns • Clearing the Air

Ali Anderson:

»

A second vaping-related NHANES paper involving Urvish Patel has been retracted, intensifying scrutiny of research used to suggest serious health risks from vapes.

The Journal of Investigative Medicine has pulled a 2023 paper titled ‘E-cigarette use and prevalence of lung diseases among the US population: a NHANES survey,’ after concerns were raised about the accuracy of the data behind it.

The paper had examined links between vape use and lung disease using the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a major public health dataset often used by researchers to study health trends across the American population.

But in a retraction notice published on 27 May, Sage and the journal editor said the article could no longer stand. “Sage was contacted by a reader who raised concerns about the accuracy of the data the article derived from the NHANES survey results,” the notice said.

The journal said its internal investigation also identified concerns around authorship contribution and the number of people on the byline. “The author’s response to our queries did not resolve the concerns we discovered during this investigation,” the retraction notice said. It added: “Due to our inability to verify the author contributions on the byline and the unresolved concerns we have of the accuracy of this study’s data, this article has been retracted.”

“The authors did not respond when notified of this retraction,” it said.

The retracted lung disease paper was authored by Sudha Dirisanala, Srishti Laller, Naga Ganti and others, with Urvish Patel also listed among the authors.

It follows the retraction of another vaping-related NHANES paper involving Patel: Effect Comparison of E-Cigarette and Traditional Smoking and Association with Stroke – A Cross-Sectional Study of NHANES, published in Neurology International in 2022.

That paper had reported that vape users had a higher risk of early stroke than traditional tobacco users. It was later cited in media coverage, featured in an anti-vaping campaign and included in a contested meta-analysis, according to Retraction Watch. MDPI retracted the stroke paper in December 2025 after concerns were raised about major errors in the data analysis.

«

You have to wonder: if Patel just very bad at analysing data, in a way that accidentally keeps suggesting vapes are worse than tobacco, or is there some other motive?
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Bank of England warns of AI scams as deepfakes of Farage-Bailey fight spread • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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The Bank of England has warned the public against falling for AI-generated scams after deepfake videos of Nigel Farage fighting its governor spread online.

Andrew Bailey, the head of the BoE, said AI-generated content related to central banks was spreading and urged people to be “vigilant”.

He spoke out after the videos of the Reform UK leader and Bailey fighting on the set of BBC One’s Question Time appeared on the social media platform X. The videos showed the men being separated by police officers and even depict Farage holding a gun while he grapples with Bailey.

Bailey urged the public to report the videos so they could be taken down. “Unfortunately, fake adverts impersonating the Bank of England and other central banks are on the rise,” he said. “These scams are designed to criminally exploit the public, especially the vulnerable, when they are online. I would urge everyone to stay vigilant and report these scams. That way authorities can better root out digital deception like this and permanently remove the fraudsters responsible for what is a truly online scourge.”

…The Bank has raised concerns about the posts with Reform UK and with social media platforms.

«

With three weeks of this financial quarter’s 12 weeks remaining, advertising prices have fallen so low on X that crypto scammers were able to stuff these ads into people’s timelines. That demonstrates that advertisers have not returned, and so X becomes an easy mark for these scams (which lure people to pages that have “special time-limited offers” and encourage them to put up some money. It only needs a tiny percentage of those who see the ads to click them, and a tiny number of those to pony up their money, and the scammers have made a profit. By using a network of bot accounts, they make it hard for X to close down the scam.

Musk’s insistence that X would get rid of the bots is hollow, and empirically disproven. Social media is balkanised and broken.
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Most of our customers’ fraud cases began on Meta, says Lloyds Bank • The Times

Hugo Daniel:

»

More than two thirds of fraud cases reported by Lloyds Bank customers started on Meta platforms.

Those in their late twenties and early thirties are the most at risk from scams on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to data collated by the bank.

Concert, festival and sporting event ticket scams are the most prevalent. Under-25s, including children under 18, are most at risk from ticket fraud, according to the bank. Fake tickets for Taylor Swift and Peter Kay gigs, Liverpool Football Club matches and Alton Towers were among the scams reported.

Writing for The Sunday Times, Liz Ziegler, Lloyds’ fraud prevention director, said 68% of fraud reports from their customers started on a Meta platform. “Customers tell us they feel upset, embarrassed and shaken,” Ziegler said. “This is deeply personal and it can take a long time to recover.”

The average claim value submitted to the bank is now above £500, an increase of about £100 from last year.

The bank’s report comes after The Sunday Times revealed at least 260 fraud victims had expressed interest in joining a group action claim — the British equivalent of a class-action lawsuit — to try to recoup their losses from Mark Zuckerberg’s £1.2 trillion company.

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Hard to know how the collective action claim would proceed – can one really pin direct responsibility for what appears on Meta platforms on Meta? – but it might be interesting to pursue. At least crypto scams seem to have receded, for now.
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My prodigal brainchild • Graphomane

Neal Stephenson, the SF author who wrote “Snowcrash”, which gave us the idea of the metaverse, on why Meta’s idea of the metaverse failed:

»

When I was working at [augmented reality glasses company] Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.

When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.

…Goggles were the ubiquitous visual signature of Cyberpunk. This, combined with the amount of R & D that has been poured into making various head-mounted displays by tech companies over the last couple of decades, has forged an unbreakable connection in many people’s minds between the Metaverse and goggles.

In 1990, when I was writing Snow Crash, we experienced all computer graphics through massive, heavy CRTs with terrible resolution. The images were flickery and blurry. Rendering pictures of three-dimensional scenes was in its infancy. It seemed entirely reasonable to think that the future would be all about head-mounted displays that could render stereoscopic (simulated three-dimensional) imagery.

This is not actually what happened.

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Stephenson is acute, and insightful.
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From the doorstep to the dining room: new DoorDash survey data reveals the full picture of the modern restaurant guest • DoorDash

DoorDash:

»

AI is changing how consumers decide where to eat, and restaurants’ digital footprints are helping shape what gets recommended.

The AI dinner prompt is here: 22% of consumers have used an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to help choose a restaurant, making AI a new discovery signal to watch as consumers use these tools to find something new, compare nearby options, and search by cuisine, occasion, or value.

The new rules of restaurant search: According to Yext research, restaurant listing sites like DoorDash account for more than 41% of the sources AI tools cite when recommending restaurants. Operators are already responding by strengthening the basics, like updating menu information (39%), managing reviews (34%), and improving photo quality (32%).

The opportunity doesn’t stop at search: Three-quarters of consumers say they’re comfortable using AI for reservations, but only 28% of operators are using AI to manage calls and customer service. With an estimated 40% of reservation calls going unanswered industry-wide, AI gives restaurants another way to capture demand and keep front-of-house teams focused on the guests in front of them.

«

From DoorDash’s 2026 Restaurant Industry Trends Report. This looks like real consumer adoption of AI, almost surely via Google.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A high-ranking CIA officer found with $40m of gold bars in his home set up a fake intelligence program in what could have been a movie plot. CC-licensed photo by BullionVault on Flickr.

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

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Apple and Google given three months to ban nude images on children’s devices • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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Tech companies such as Apple and Google have been asked by the UK government to block access to naked images on smartphones and other devices for under-18s.

Sir Keir Starmer has told firms to either activate built-in features or update software to prevent children from taking, sending or viewing sexually explicit images on their phones and other devices. Speaking at London Tech Week, the prime minister said: “This is not an impossible challenge. These are some of the most innovative companies in the world and I believe they can solve it.”

The government said it will bring forward legislation to force firms to activate the features if they do not comply voluntarily within three months. This could include fines or, as a last resort, criminal liability for companies which do not comply.

The prime minister said the changes would apply to both existing and newly-sold smartphones and tablets in the UK. “Legislation could cover operating system providers and others in the supply chain, such as retailers, and will not affect the use of devices owned and used by adults who verify their age,” he said.

In response, a Google spokesperson said it was “deeply committed to protecting children online.”

“We are working constructively with UK partners to find effective, privacy-preserving solutions that deter the spread of harmful content while ensuring a safe digital environment for young people.”

Apple has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

It is unclear what action firms will take in response to Monday’s announcement. But a number of tech companies already have methods in place to try and prevent children from seeing or sharing nude imagery.

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The government will bring forward legislation, will it? Given how incredibly slow it has been to introduce legislation about absolutely anything (for example: its failure to outlaw SLAPPs, lawsuits by the powerful against those who expose them), the smart move by the tech companies would be to make encouraging noises and sit on their hands in the expectation that it will all be forgotten if Andy Burnham wins his by-election.
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Apple drops support for a long list of Apple Watches with latest OS updates • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Apple is dropping support for at least three generations of Apple Watch models in watchOS 27. Apple’s website initially stated that the latest watchOS update would only be available on Apple Watch Series 10 devices and above, Apple Watch Ultra 2 and above, and Apple Watch SE 3. Apple later updated the listing to include the Series 9. We’ve also seen reports of people successfully installing the watchOS 27 developer beta on the first-generation Watch Ultra, though it doesn’t appear on the list. We’ve asked Apple for confirmation on which models are supported.

It’s a surprise support cull for Apple Watch models, which consumers certainly don’t refresh as much as an iPhone. WatchOS 26, released a year ago, supported Apple Watch Series 6 and later, as well as Apple Watch SE (2nd generation) and later, and all Apple Watch Ultra models. This was the same list of devices as watchOS 11. Even if the first-gen Watch Ultra is still supported in watchOS 27, that still means owners of the Series 6, 7, and 8, as well as the Watch SE (2nd gen), are out of luck.

…Surprisingly, Apple is maintaining support for its iPhone 11 models with iOS 27 later this year. This means an iPhone from 2019 is supported by its latest OS updates, but an Apple Watch from 2022 isn’t. Make it make sense.

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It will be something to do with RAM and CPU capacity. This all assumes, of course, that what iOS 27 brings – surely a chunk of on-device LLMs – is worth having. If it really is then Apple is going to reap a windfall of upgraders brought forward by this.

If you want all the ins and outs of Apple’s WWDC announcements, MacRumors is the place to find it.
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Smartphones broke dating. ChatGPT might finish the job • Vox

Eric Levitz:

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In the 20th century, fertility fell primarily because couples started having fewer children. Now, it is falling mostly because fewer people are forming couples — or having sex at all.

If these trends continue, the consequences will be transformative — and possibly, catastrophic, as graying populations place unprecedented burdens on the remaining young. Vast countries will swiftly shrivel into city states. Today, Thailand is home to 63 million people. In two centuries, that will fall to 2 million, if the country’s current fertility rate persists.

These are just 23rd-century problems. If sustained indefinitely, today’s global fertility rate would ensure humanity’s extinction.

And it’s partly your phone’s fault.

Or so one leading theory goes. To make sense of recent fertility trends, some analysts have turned to the devices in their pockets. In the view of the journalist John Burn-Murdoch and social scientist Alice Evans, the smartphone helped birth the global spike in singledom. [Insert “was midwife to” for “helped birth” if your teeth are grinding – Overspill Ed.]

Their argument goes (partly) like this: As smartphone ownership skyrocketed globally during the 2010s, more and more young people tapped into a vast, omnipresent trove of personalized entertainment, which reduced their incentives to socialize in person. When you have virtually every movie, TV show, and pornography ever made at your fingertips, you no longer need parties for stimulation or diversion. And when you have an X or Facebook account, you can participate in a public conversation — and experience communal recognition — without ever leaving the comfort of your goon cave.

Yet this withdrawal from in-person socializing reduces young people’s opportunities to meet romantic partners or develop social skills. Relationship formation falls as a result.

“The digital revolution has played a signal role in both degrading socialization for young adults and dividing young adults from one another,” Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me.

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Sharp Eyes: how China’s police carry out mass surveillance of foreigners in China – Part 1 • Netaskari

Marc Hofer is a German cybersecurity journalist:

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In a previous post we explained how unsecured and forgotten dashboard and web pages can reveal a lot about China’s security and surveillance system. Now, we can reveal a much more detailed insight into how such a system could look like in real life.

NetAskari got exclusive access to a web front-end demonstrating a remote tracking system especially for foreigners. It is developed for the Public Security Bureau in the region of Zhangjiakou (a prefecture of Hebei province about 60 km west of Beijing).

It is still a test-system and not connected to a real time data environment. But it is filled partially with real data from many real people of foreign nationality who have resided ( or still reside ) in China. It outlines very clearly where the journey in mass surveillance has been going in China over the past years and how foreigners are definitely at the center of the states’ attention again.

The system is clearly meant as a demo, with many functionalities just hinted at or simulated with place holder information. Originally considered abandoned, some minor changes to the UI could be discovered during the observation time of 3 months though. Since the last changes, the system has grown increasingly unstable as the underlying REDIS service seems to struggle to run reliably. A sign that nobody seems to actively maintain the platform anymore at this stage.

After passing the login screen the user is greeted with a traditional ‘data dashboard’ in the blue style, that is so often used by Chinese cyber security dashboards. The designs always seem to take a lot of inspiration from video games or popular sci-fi movies, coming across as too flashy for what the products contains.

Focusing on the region of Zhangjiakou, a mountainous area that is often used for winter sports and thus was the location of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, the dashboard gives us a quick run down of all foreigners registered or currently living in the area. The user can choose to track changes from year to year from 2023 until 2026.

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Hofer unravels a huge system capable of tracking all foreign nationals around China. Which is an incredible undertaking, apart from anything else.

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Satya Nadella ‘not sure’ who said Microsoft wanted to make addictive AI, is looking for guy who did this • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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On Tuesday, we published an article about an internal Microsoft strategy document that explained the company wanted to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, Scout. On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told staff that he was “not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense,” according to a message obtained by The Information.

The document we reported on was not some random document. As we wrote at the time, the strategy document was written by Microsoft executives Omar Shahine, Jakob Werner, and some sort of AI writing tool. This information is in our original article and is readily available to Nadella. We wrote: “The document seen by 404 Media lists Shahine and another executive, Jakob Werner, as its authors. The document itself, however, notes that it was ‘co-created turn-by-turn with AI. Human verified every sentence.’”

Shahine is the leader of Microsoft’s Scout project, as he has written numerous times on his own blog, on his LinkedIn, and on Microsoft’s own announcement of the software. In attempting to distance himself from his own company’s executives and strategy documents, Nadella has revealed that he either does not know how to read or does not know what is happening with some of the company’s highest-profile products.

Phase one of the company’s launch plan for Scout, which was previously called ClawPilot internally, was to “make people addicted. Continue shipping the standalone ClawPilot experience. Pilot the UX, grow the user base, and build the skill and tool ecosystem that makes people depend on it daily. This is already happening organically.”

In Nadella’s message to staff reported by The Information Thursday, he wrote “this is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make sure that our teams are clear about this. Not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense! They may want to go work elsewhere…..”

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The headline is a neat reference.
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‘A driver of political violence’: how the breakneck AI boom is fueling anti-tech extremism • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early:

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When a 20-year-old man from Texas was arrested earlier this year for allegedly trying to burn down OpenAI’s headquarters and Sam Altman’s house, authorities found an anti-AI manifesto alongside his lighter and a jug of kerosene. It was one of a spate of attacks that has caused alarm among researchers, the tech industry and law enforcement about the rise of anti-tech extremism.

In April, an Italian “nature pilled” Instagram influencer was arrested in Rome and charged with plotting a series of anti-tech attacks that took inspiration from Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Two self-described “ecofascists” that carried out a deadly anti-Muslim attack on a mosque in San Diego last month also cited “AI slop” and JD Vance’s ties to Palantir as motivations for their violence in their manifesto. An Indianapolis city councilor woke up earlier this year to gunshots being fired into his home before finding a note that read “NO DATA CENTERS”.

The growing public backlash to the tech industry’s rapid rollout of artificial intelligence has taken many, mostly-non violent forms such as local communities organizing against datacenters and political candidates promising increased oversight. Yet at the fringes, researchers say grievances against the AI industry and its leaders are animating old violent extremist movements and fomenting new ones.

“AI is becoming this driver of political violence, and that’s a very new phenomenon,” said Jordyn Abrams, a researcher at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

While much of the early public discussion around generative AI and extremism focused on how malign actors like terrorist groups could misuse products such as ChatGPT for propaganda purposes or plotting attacks, there is more recent attention given to how the AI industry as a whole can radicalize people. What motivates someone to extremist violence might not be a conversation with a chatbot, researchers say, but the society-wide disruption, narrative of existential threat and lack of accountability that has come with the AI boom.

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Are we going to get a sort of anti-AI version of the Baader-Meinhof gang or Charles Manson’s lunatic fringe? It doesn’t seem beyond possibility. Everything that goes around comes around, as the Americans say.
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CIA officer who had gold bars is accused of creating fake spy program • The Washington Post

Warren Strobel, Ellen Nakashima and Katie Mettler:

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The former senior CIA official found with more than $40m worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.

David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said the criminal probe found that Rush “read in,” or initiated, two colleagues into the highly secretive sham program, effectively cultivating them as perhaps unwitting accomplices and preventing them from talking to others about it. He persuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a government contract that was also fraudulent, they said.

“He made up a contract,” one of the people said.

Rush, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, has not pleaded to the charges against him. At a detention hearing in federal court in Alexandria on Friday, a judge ruled that Rush posed a significant flight risk and ordered him to remain detained at the local jail pending trial.

The CIA, meanwhile, has put several agency officials on leave as FBI and spy agency investigations continue, two people familiar with the matter said. NBC News first reported that development. The people familiar did not disclose those officials’ names or positions. The science and technology directorate is the arm of the agency that creates technical espionage tools to aid US spies and their agents abroad.

The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.

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Ya think?? This is like something out of all those conspiracy films – the Bourne series and so on, with their hidden projects. Except it’s real. More like Burn After Reading, perhaps.
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The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy • Science

Stephan Lewandowsky:

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Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.

The first line of evidence comes from naturalistic quasi-experiments from which we can infer the causal impact of the rollout of internet hardware on relevant outcome measures. For example, the rollout of broadband in the US 20 years ago was affected by state “right-of-way” laws, which govern how easy it is for telecommunications companies to lay cables along public roads and land corridors. Some states imposed far more onerous conditions than others before digging could commence. Using this variation in regulation as an independent variable, one study showed that broadband availability increased affective political polarization.

Similar studies in the UK and Europe used physical variables such as distance from telephone exchange nodes (which determines internet speed for users) as independent variables. Their findings are consistent: broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany.

There is now a solid body of evidence showing that internet availability is causing a variety of outcomes that adversely affect democracy. However, these studies leave unanswered the question of why and how these effects occur. Why would access to fast broadband make people more polarized and more extreme?

…Remarkably, many platforms are demonstrably aware of the risks they pose to democracy. Under EU legislation (the Digital Services Act; DSA), platforms must file annual systemic risk assessments of their operations and how they might affect democracy, and Bing, X, Snapchat, and TikTok all highlight the risks of echo chambers in their reports.

Fortunately, the problems emerging from algorithmic curation are, in principle, solvable. The experiment that identified the problematic role played by the X algorithm in prioritizing anti-democratic content also identified a potential solution: the experiment was possible only because the researchers developed an algorithm that could downrank anti-democratic content—suggesting that the same technology could be deployed by platforms at scale in the interest of democracy.

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The wearable showdown: Oura Ring 5 v Fitbit Air v Whoop MG v Apple Watch • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen:

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What’s the best tracker? A fitness band? Smart ring? Smartwatch? Smart…shorts?

There was only one way to find out: I wore them all at the same time.

Trackers have really evolved, and beefed up on artificial intelligence. They can flag sleep apnea, predict illnesses—even act as contraception. Studies show that tracking activity does spur people to move more. But the data influx can create excessive worry or an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect scores.

I loaded up my limbs with a $399-and-up Oura Ring 5, a $100 Google Fitbit Air and a Whoop MG embedded in various clothing. (The Whoop tracker itself is included in the $199-and-up annual membership.) There are many benefits to going with one of these screenless options, namely better battery life and fewer distractions, though they lack the GPS tracking and access to emergency services available in smartwatches.

I did also wear an Apple Watch Series 11 ($399 and up). Fun fact: About 90% of smart-ring owners also own a smartwatch, according to research firm Circana.

…The Apple Watch excelled across every activity. The Whoop could match it, provided I wore the sensor on my bicep. During periods of high activity, the Fitbit Air and Oura faltered.

Whoop’s Capodilupo says the company is currently updating the heart-rate algorithm. A Google spokeswoman said the lightweight Fitbit Air is easier to move during more aggressive exercises, especially if the band isn’t snug.

…Oura requires a $6-a-month subscription. Stop paying and it locks up your biometrics, leaving you with basic three-score feedback (sleep, readiness and activity). Whoop doesn’t charge an upfront hardware cost but there’s a mandatory membership starting at $199 a year. And the accessories—bra, shorts, etc.—aren’t cheap.

That still isn’t a lot to pay if you can get off the couch and build lasting change. But if you want data without a monthly fee, the pricier Apple Watch will provide it. And you can skip the Google Health $10-a-month premium plan and still use the Fitbit.

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Seems like the Apple Watch remains the best at this, though Nguyen observes that the fitness analysis app is pretty basic. However, there are third-party apps which will analyse that data for you.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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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.

Thefts of copper have risen dramatically in the US as prices rocket due to data centre demand. CC-licensed photo by Trafigura Images 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. Unbending. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Here comes Apple’s new Siri again • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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if such a thing as a race to an AI assistant exists, Apple is losing badly. Gemini is already doing things like ordering Ubers and DoorDashing teriyaki. It can look at your calendar and figure out when you should leave for the airport. Gemini won the race, fair and square.

But there’s also a growing distrust of AI, particularly from young people, and the better Gemini gets, the creepier it is. It has to be if it’s going to deliver on the promise of a truly helpful assistant. But wanting your AI assistant to anticipate your next move and actually watching it happen? Those are very different things. I willingly gave Gemini permission to access my Google Photos and Gmail, but it always makes my skin crawl hearing Gemini say my son’s name out loud. I test out a lot of this stuff as it becomes available — hazard of the job — but the public reaction when these kinds of features start trickling down to the mainstream will be very telling.

New New Siri will be built on top of Gemini in some fashion. Apple is no doubt paying handsomely for the privilege, but there’s a potential upside to being one step removed in this way. You know what company doesn’t have its name attached to a big, unpopular data center project? Apple. Google isn’t winning friends and influencing people by rushing to start massive construction projects in backyards across the country. Apple gets to keep its hands clean, even if its payments to Google are presumably being funneled toward the great data center buildout.

Then there’s the Copilot of it all; the AI-buttons-everywhere factor. Siri’s attempts to summarize messages are amusing and often annoying, but at least Siri isn’t all up in every one of my work documents begging to summarize it for me. On the other hand, you can’t open a Google app without coming face-to-face with a Gemini sparkle these days, and it risks getting real old, real fast.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Apple would love to put Siri to work writing my emails, perfecting my photos into “memories,” and talking me through the next steps to rehabilitate the dying plants in my yard. It’s just that Siri can’t really do any of that yet. When we meet this new Gemini-enhanced Siri, it’ll be telling to see where and how aggressively it surfaces.

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Siri, to remind you, was launched in September 2011; and that was from a company Apple bought. So the idea has been around for about two decades. But internal resistance in Apple to LLMs meant they weren’t seen as important until ChatGPT reset everything. Mark Gurman says there was a big reset meeting in early 2025 (MacObserver writeup).

And there might be new hardware: M5 Macbook Pros, and – restrain your enthusiasm – updated HomePod minis and Apple TVs. Yes, I know!
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Brazilian airline Azul plans further frequency cuts as fuel shock bites • Reuters

Gabriel Araujo:

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Brazilian airline Azul is stepping up capacity cuts amid higher jet fuel prices linked to the Iran war, and ​the carrier will continue to trim flying to protect cash in an uncertain environment, CEO John Rodgerson said.

Rodgerson told Reuters the industry’s largest companies were reducing capacity to better align with demand at higher cost levels, and Azul ​would follow suit, going beyond earlier cuts as the conflict drags ​on.

“When we made our initial cuts, we thought the war would be over by now,” he said in an interview on Friday, ​in the build-up to a meeting of global airline chiefs in Rio de ​Janeiro. “But it’s continuing, so we’re going to continue to opportunistically cut some frequencies, make sure that we’re only flying things that make sense.”

Most of Azul’s reductions in the second ​quarter were on international routes, with further adjustments focused on domestic frequencies ​rather than pulling entire cities, Rodgerson said. “Do you fly to Curitiba six times a day? Maybe with these fuel prices, it should be four.”

The airline was prioritizing its main hubs in Campinas, Belo Horizonte and Recife, he added. “We’re yet to pull cities, but that’s always on the table. But you first ​start with utilization and ​cutting frequencies. You don’t want to be utilizing an aircraft 13, 14 hours a day when fuel prices double.”

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Smaller carriers and/or those in Asia might be among the first to feel this, but while the war (now 100 days old, allegedly “won” for about 94 of them) continues this is just going to spread.
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Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study • Nature Medicine

Andrew Bean, Adam Mahdi et al (mainly at the Oxford Internet Institute):

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We tested whether LLMs can assist members of the public in identifying underlying conditions and choosing a course of action (disposition) in ten medical scenarios in a controlled study with 1,298 participants. Participants were randomly assigned to receive assistance from an LLM (GPT-4o, Llama 3, Command R+) or a source of their choice (control).

Tested alone, LLMs complete the scenarios accurately, correctly identifying conditions in 94.9% of cases and disposition in 56.3% on average. However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5% of cases and disposition in fewer than 44.2%, both no better than the control group. We identify user interactions as a challenge to the deployment of LLMs for medical advice.

Standard benchmarks for medical knowledge and simulated patient interactions do not predict the failures we find with human participants. Moving forward, we recommend systematic human user testing to evaluate interactive capabilities before public deployments in healthcare.

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In other words: chatbots are good at diagnosis, but unskilled humans are bad at understanding what it’s telling them. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Amid a flood of AI advances, astrophysicists are questioning the soul of their field • Science

Joshua Sokol:

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One afternoon in April, Cecilia Garraffo settled down at the head of a conference room table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gazed out at what might be the last astrophysicists of their kind.

The walls of this room had, in the past, reverberated with the din of thousands of other groups of scientists. Now, as streaks of sunlight poured in, the discussions turned to nonhuman collaborators. One by one, the gathered researchers discussed how they planned to apply machine learning to problems in astronomy. Observing an interstellar comet. Discerning wispy filaments of galaxies at the universe’s largest scales. Developing a new “tokenizer” that can translate astrophysical images into a form more readable by artificial intelligence (AI). “Sometimes models will be overconfident,” Garraffo warned a junior team member.

Afterward, as everyone filed out, black hole researcher Daniel Palumbo made a brief announcement. Representatives from AI chipmaker NVIDIA were on campus in search of scientists who wanted to solve problems using their hardware. To anyone who might need extra processing power, “today’s the day,” he said.

…Garraffo’s colleague Alyssa Goodman showed me a data-fitting problem. She wanted to understand how the spiral arms of a distant galaxy were moving. But isolating just that motion from other patterns imparted into her data by the spin and the geometry of that distant galaxy had thwarted her group for years. She asked ChatGPT, which resolved the problem in a few minutes. Now, her research group was planning to write several papers on the resulting data set, “the single best map of spiral arm kinematics ever—like, by a factor of 100.”

Conversations comparing these tools with human researchers, once an underground whisper, have grown into a deep rumble in astrophysics departments around the world. Many are turning over aspects of their research practice—searching the literature, developing code, writing proposals to use telescopes, doing first-pass “reads” of their peers’ submitted proposals, and actually solving problems—to agentic AI systems such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s Codex.

…Already, by making it faster and easier to produce professional-seeming papers, AIs threaten both to overwhelm journals and peer reviewers and to take opportunities away from junior scientists. But far upstream of that, many scientists interviewed by Science sense a phase change underway. Many fear that if unleashed in all parts of the scientific process, AI tools could lead to nothing less than the death of astrophysics as a human endeavor. “A lot of people think that it’s too late to intervene—we’re done,” says David Hogg, a computational astrophysicist at New York University (NYU).

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Singularities inside black holes are truly unavoidable • Big Think

Ethan Siegel:

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inside of a black hole, the math of general relativity is very clear: all of that matter and energy that goes into forming it, no matter how it’s initially configured, is going to wind up collapsed down to either a single, zero-dimensional point (if there’s no net angular momentum) or stretched out into an infinitely thin one-dimensional ring (if there is “spin,” or angular momentum, present). Comedian Steven Wright even jokingly said, “Black holes are where God divided by zero,” and in some sense, that appears to be true: our calculations from all of our theories of physics, including general relativity and quantum field theory, break down under the conditions of a singularity. If physics doesn’t even make sense at that scale, how can we trust it to be correct about a singularity’s very existence?

While many hope that quantum gravity will save us from the inevitability of a singularity, many don’t think that even that is possible, for very good reasons. Here’s why a singularity at the center of every black hole ought to be completely unavoidable, no matter what sort of quantum theory of gravity happens to exist.

In principle, as Einstein first realized, if all you have is some configuration of matter that starts off distributed over some volume (with no rotation, no initial motions, and with space itself not expanding or contracting), the outcome is always the same: gravitational attraction will bring all of that matter together until it collapses down to a single point. Around that point, dependent on how much mass/energy there is all together, there will form a region of space known as an event horizon: a volume from within which the escape velocity, or the speed you’d need to travel to escape from this object’s gravitational pull, would be greater than the speed of light.

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Well, that wraps it up. It’s an interesting article, though. (What the hell is actually happening in the singularity remains.. unknown.)
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Comparisons: as Predictable as… the Sunrise • The Pudding

The Pudding:

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An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction.

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That’s what it is! And there’s a lot to delve into. I hit the second most common simile in the first challenge. There’s plenty more where that came from, of course. (Via Helen Lewis’s Bluestocking.)
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BBC director-general Matt Brittin: ‘It’s worth fighting for’ • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas lunches with the new director-general of the BBC, Matt Brittin, formerly CEO of Google UK:

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The BBC has already struck a deal to post hundreds of hours of content on YouTube. Some executives worry that these sorts of deals just give away content to the benefit of the third-party platform.

“Ideally, you wouldn’t be starting from where we are, but look at the data. Young people are on YouTube five times as much as they’re consuming television, so we’ve got to be there. We need to have our content out in front of young audiences, whether it’s on TikTok or whatever,” he says. “We need to be closer, simpler and faster.”

It is hard to play in the centre . . . trying to be a media organisation that represents everyone and is trying to balance things

He is keen to improve the BBC’s technology, however, saying that past investment had been focused on content but “less focused on the product” such as the iPlayer service. “It hasn’t been able to accelerate as fast as it needs to. Could we leapfrog by partnering with others? We should be open to all these questions, because you’ve got to ultimately deliver value for the licence fee payer.”

Brittin was watching Mackenzie Crook’s comedy Small Prophets — “really good” — but was shocked to find there was no recommendation to another of his shows, The Detectorists. “That actually would have set me up for the bits of viewing I do with my wife on the sofa when we’re relaxing,” he says.

He would also like to see if the BBC could take a bigger role in areas such as education and skills — recalling how Google’s DeepMind team grew up in an era of the BBC Micro, a computer system developed in the early 1980s as part of a project that introduced a generation to coding — as well as in the development of UK-based large language models that could have “culturally sensitive and appropriate content”.

He has not thought through the details but says: “What if you took those ideals from the pioneers of the BBC about public service broadcasting and reinterpreted them today, then one key thing might well be around a British version of the AI revolution.”

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The topic of licence fee renewal comes up: he says he can see the argument for a levy on streaming services, which might be a pointer towards how the future negotiations will go.

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European publishers seek £552m+ from Google claiming ad market abuse • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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More than 20 European news publishers are taking legal action against Google seeking damages of £550m for adtech monopoly abuses.

The case comes off the back of the European Commission handing Google a fine of €2.95bn (£2.55bn) last year for abusing its dominant position in online advertising technology.

The European Commission said that any people or company affected by anti-competitive behaviour outlined by this case could seek damages, which would be considered separately to the fine imposed on Google.

The publishers involved in the case argue they should collectively be awarded damages of more than €640m (£552m) due to the impact Google’s actions had on them. They believe they would have earned significantly higher advertising revenues and paid lower fees for adtech services if not for the fact Google had created a less competitive market.

Publishers are taking part from the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Hungary, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. The case is being funded by Prague-based litigation funder LitFin, which will cover the costs even if it fails. The publishers involved have agreed to share part of any awarded damages with it if they win.

LitFin chief operating officer Matej Pardo said: “Google’s abuse of its position across the ad tech stack has been found unlawful at the highest levels – now it’s time for the publishers who bore the cost of that conduct to be made whole.

“By bringing a grouped claim, we can utilise efficiencies of scale to make this kind of action available to smaller players across Europe, who might otherwise not be in a position to bring a claim against such a deep-pocketed adversary as Google.”

…Other cases have previously been started against Google. In 2024 a coalition of 32 European media groups including Axel Springer and Schibsted brought a claim for €2.3bn (£2bn) alleging they suffered losses due to Google’s digital advertising practices.

Earlier this year five US publishers – Penske, The Atlantic, McClatchy, Conde Nast and Vox Media – sued Google alleging “deceptive and manipulative” adtech practices.

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Google denies the claims. There are a lot of these lawsuits going on all over the world. (I’m a partner in one in the UK.)
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Thieves are targeting copper wires. AT&T is fighting back • NPR

John Ruwitch:

»

Last year, AT&T recorded more than 10,400 incidents of copper wire theft nationwide — about 200 a week. Some 4,300 of those were in California.

It’s an outsized problem for the company, since only about 3% of AT&T’s customers are still connected by copper wire networks. That includes households without access to cell service or fiber optic connections, some in rural areas, as well as some businesses that still rely on old wires for internet or fax connections.

Copper cables, pioneered over 180 years ago by Samuel Morse, often hang next to their modern counterparts, fiber optic lines. When thieves cut cables for copper, they often slice fiber cables, too, because they look similar. A snipped fiber cable is what tripped this alarm.

Susan Santana, president of AT&T West, is on the ride-along. She says homes, hospitals, airports, schools and more can lose connections when cables are cut. The problem is “not an easy one to solve, by any means,” she says, but AT&T is trying. “We have locked down manhole lids with extra bolts. We’ve put sensors across our lines. In some instances we’ve had to hire private security guards,” Santana says.

AT&T has also offered a $20,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people involved in copper cable thefts.

The problem is not limited to telephone wires. Thieves have been cutting electric cables, too. The California city of San Jose has an online tracker for streetlights that have gone dark after being hit. EV chargers are also targets. Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint, the largest charging network in the United States, says it’s a problem they deal with every day. He says he got so frustrated that he started prototyping solutions on his own.

“I was so motivated I literally was going down to Home Depot and buying all kinds of different wire and Kevlar and stuff, and wrapping cables and taping it down and trying to cut it with my own pruning shears to see if it was, you know, making it any more difficult,” he says. He handed the project off to company engineers, who developed charger cables that are impregnated with cut-resistant material. The idea, he says, is that a thief might be able to hack off one of those wires, but their shears will be damaged in the process. They won’t be able to hit multiple chargers in one go.

«

Guess why prices of copper have rocketed? Rearrange these words for a clue: centres AI data.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Prices of video games products such as the Steam Deck have jumped recently – and analysts say they’re unlikely to fall any time soon. CC-licensed photo by Pierre Lecourt 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.

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

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Meta’s smart glasses companion app ships a complete, dormant face-recognition pipeline on a stock account • Buchodi

“Buchodi” is an independent security researcher:

»

Stella is the companion app for Meta’s smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build (com.facebook.stella), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to match the models, a write path that stages biometric records to disk, a fully wired notification surface, and a user-facing “Connections” widget.

I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the gap between the two is important.
What I can demonstrate: the machinery is present, it is wired together. Several facial extraction and facial fingerprinting models are present and I was able run the recognition pipeline end-to-end on a test image and it detected a face, generate a 2048-dimension biometric embedding, searched a local index, and on a match fired an Android notification stating to the user “Person Recognized”.

To get the pipeline to run I invoked its existing handler directly with a test photo.

What I cannot demonstrate: that any of this is active for ordinary users. On a stock, unenrolled account the user-facing UI does not appear, and the screen the recognition notification deep-links to is missing from the build. I also did not observe Meta server-pushing identity data to the relevant database on my test account.
So this is not “Meta is secretly identifying the people you look at.” It is: the complete apparatus to do exactly that is sitting on the device, assembled and functional, gated by Meta.

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Wonder when this is going to be turned on. Perhaps Meta knew this would be discovered (it would be foolish not to expect that, given the internet and previous experience) so perhaps this is the softest of soft launches: if there’s an inkling that people think it’s a great idea, then they flip a switch and voila, Meta knows where everyone is who’s in range of its smart glasses. Because you don’t think it’s going to keep that sort of thing private, do you?
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The biggest tell that something was written by AI • The Atlantic

Eve Fairbanks:

»

A few weeks ago, where I live in Johannesburg, a man ran a stop sign and crashed into my Subaru. At the scene he was frantic, unable to gather his thoughts. Half an hour later, I received a lengthy, perfectly grammatical text from him elegantly explaining how he perceived the crash had happened. For a repair quote, I wrote to a mechanic I know, a man who used to text me in curt phrases riddled with shorthand. I got a response using just the same voice as the man who’d crashed into me—the distinctive voice of AI.

In surveys, people consistently say they distrust AI-generated writing. But that hasn’t stopped more and more of us from using it in everyday life—to compose work emails and personal texts, to make shopping lists, even to write scripts for arguments with our spouses. “I feel like I’m going nuts,” the writer Jason Koebler complained in the tech outlet 404 Media, under “the cognitive load” of trying to discern whether every piece of text he reads is real or fake.

AI writing is also creeping into our most elite literary spaces—newspapers’ opinion sections, books, literary magazines. I edit professionally, often working with authors renowned for their prose. Maybe two months ago, I began receiving a kind of submission I’d never gotten before: perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose. At first I was surprised that people who prided themselves on their writing would turn to AI to write for them. Even six months ago, when I occasionally identified a paragraph in a writer’s work that seemed AI-generated, they would apologize.

…AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.

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Let us filter AI slop, you cowards • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing AI-generated content online, but it doesn’t have to be this way. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, with many now automatically applying labels to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and music from those made by real, human creators.

That’s all very well and good if we’re just stumbling across labeled content at random, but you know what would be better? Letting us filter out the AI slop.

Current labeling efforts haven’t meaningfully changed how content is presented online. You may notice that some TikTok or YouTube videos in your feeds now have AI disclosures in the description, or information labels overlaid onto the clip itself. Meta takes a similar approach by applying “AI info” labels to images on Facebook and Instagram that carry identifying AI metadata or voluntary disclosures from the creators.

But if you want to actually avoid seeing anything tagged with such labels — which is justifiable, given the brain rot it induces on top of the ethical and environmental concerns around generative AI — it’s actually incredibly difficult to do so. A filter would easily solve this. All we need is an “AI” checkbox to toggle.

I reached out to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Spotify to ask if they have plans to let users filter the various content they’ve been authenticating with AI labeling systems. TikTok and Spotify never responded, and Google said it had nothing to share. Meta didn’t provide an attributable comment. But to summarize, none of these companies said “yes.”

«

Absolutely agree with this. Meta wouldn’t allow it, because usage on its platforms would collapse. Google, TikTok, and Spotify would have the same anti-motivation; even if a few people do it, that’s potentially less time spent on their platforms.
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Bluesky was a Twitter rival; now it looks to Reddit for inspiration • CNBC

Sawdah Bhaimiya:

»

Bluesky, the social media platform that originated within Twitter, rose to prominence as a rival to the network after Elon Musk acquired the company and rebranded it as X.

But, two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X’s estimated global users. Bluesky’s chief operating officer Rose Wang told CNBC that the site saw its future not in rivalling X, but in taking inspiration from the online community forum Reddit

“The world is changing rapidly, and we’re not trying to build what social used to be and get to parity,” Wang told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday. Wang said that Bluesky would move away from the “public square” style of feed of X or Threads, and will instead be “useful” as a discovery mechanism. “What we’ve learned through this process is that I think the public square is not the direction we want to go in. Essentially, I think it’s useful as a discovery mechanism, but we’re very inspired by companies like Reddit.” she said. “A public square, where there’s only a stage, and there’s posters, like people on a stage and people who are watching, that is not social… we’re in the medieval stages of the online world.”

…According to a former engineering lead at Bluesky who posts user statistics on the platform, Bluesky declined from a peak of 1.4 million active daily posters in late 2024 to around 600,000 today.

It had 43 million global users as of March, compared to an estimated 450 million X users worldwide. Threads, the Instagram-linked platform Meta launched in 2023, surpassed 400 million active monthly users last year, per its executives.

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Really, really, really hard to see Bluesky making itself into anything even vaguely like Reddit.
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Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

While Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly tells the world that 75% of all new code at the company is AI-generated, internally Google employees are sharing memes about how AI is bad at that exact task and makes their job harder. 

One such meme was posted to an internal Google message board called Memegen on May 19, right as the company kicked off its annual I/O conference where it reveals its biggest products and features, according to a copy seen by 404 Media. Unsurprisingly, I/O 2026 was heavily focused on Google’s AI products, which seemed to frustrate or at least amuse some Google employees. This particular meme was a screenshot of Google’s on stage presentation. “I/O announces entirely new ways to slop,” the meme said, with the word “slop” edited into the image in Impact font. The meme was quickly given more than 100 thumbs up from other employees.

404 Media recreated the memes we’ve seen rather than sharing the same exact images in order to protect our sources, who were not permitted to share them with the press. 

I wasn’t able to confirm the exact number of anti AI memes shared on Google’s Memegen message board, but I’ve seen dozens of them. One Google employee told me that there are dozens of new memes like this being shared every week. This source estimated that the number of anti AI memes shared inside Google in the last year is in the “high hundreds / thousands.” This employee also said that the number of anti AI memes “spikes when there’s product announcements, or model updates, or Jetski breaks down or something.”

Jetski is Google’s internal AI coding tool. One image shared on May 14 on Memegen I’ve seen shows an interaction between a Google employee and Jetski. “How did you get these metrics?” the Google employee’s prompt said. The screenshot shows that Jetski “thought for 11s,” and then said: “To be completely transparent, the specific numeric metrics and quantitative values presented in that supplemental report were simulated by the secondary sub-agent rather than extracted from live production systems.” In other words: Jetski made them up. 

“Thanks Jetski, very useful report,” says the impact text over the screenshot. That meme has more than 400 upvotes.

«

My first instinct were I a manager would be to shut down (or never open) Memegen – the use seems to be implied in the name – but of course all that would then happen is that the same meme-ing would happen on a third-party (external) site.

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Analysts say video game hardware isn’t getting cheaper anytime soon • Kotaku

Rebekah Valentine:

»

Last week, Valve sent the price of its Steam Deck into the stratosphere, increasing the cost of both versions of its device by over $200 apiece and leading to widespread concern over how many other hardware dominoes this move is going to knock over. Meanwhile the Switch 2 is already getting a small price hike later this year, the cost of an Xbox has already gone up multiple times in the US, and PS5s have gone up globally multiple times too. And of course this is happening amid everything else—groceries, gas, housing, everything—climbing in price even as wages stagnate. Tough time to be alive generally, and also not a cheap time to like video games.

…the reason gaming hardware prices are shooting through the ceiling right now is because of the RAM crisis, brought about largely by companies suddenly buying up stupid amounts of RAM to power AI data centers and hogging all the supply for the next several years. That analysis is largely correct. But sometimes it’s good to confirm what we’ve sort of loosely heard on social media with someone who knows what they’re talking about, so here’s Joost van Dreunen, NYU Stern professor and author of SuperJoost Playlist, on that:

“The rising cost of RAM is the main culprit, but the inconsistency and volatility created by US tariffs aren’t helping either. Downstream suppliers and manufacturers now sit on massive amounts of inventory they cannot sell or assemble because few consumers would be willing to pay for the markup. What was supposed to bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S. has instead priced consumers out of the market and pushed manufacturing jobs to lower wage countries.”

Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of consultancy Kantan Games, backed up van Dreunen’s statement, adding in “persistent inflation worldwide” and “geopolitical turmoil like the Iran war” as additional reasons for the situation we find ourselves in. Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, added “currency fluctuations” in addition to everything else, but also pointed out that, as many of the listed issues are somewhat US- or Western-centric, the markets Niko Partners covers are in better shape than most.

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Inside the Trump-backed push to bring AI doctors into American medicine • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Last summer, Amy Gleason became a true believer in the wonders of artificial intelligence.

Her daughter Morgan had spent more than a decade battling a debilitating autoimmune disorder. But when the 27-year-old uploaded 16 years of meticulously kept medical records into ChatGPT, the machine reported that Morgan was suffering from a different ailment than the one diagnosed by doctors. The new assessment granted her entry into a coveted clinical trial.

Gleason is not your typical mom. The leader of the US DOGE Service, which she took over from billionaire Elon Musk, Gleason is now tasked by the Trump administration with bringing AI into the health care system as an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

She’s part of a cohort of MAHA and tech-allied officials who are quietly paving the way for a future in which AI chatbots and robots are an integral part of medical care: diagnosing illness and prescribing medicine with limited or no human oversight. The longtime Silicon Valley dream is taking shape, some entrepreneurs say, thanks in part to a new approach within the Trump administration.

Today, chatbots can only legally offer medical guidance with a disclaimer attached: Neither the US Food and Drug Administration, nor any state licensing board, allows a fully autonomous AI to practice medicine.

But Trump officials — citing concerns about the prevalence of chronic disease and issues such as the shortage of rural doctors — are driving a significant shift.

They have backed a controversial three-month-old pilot program in Utah that allows AI chatbots to refill prescriptions instantly. (Currently humans oversee the chatbot’s decisions, but there are plans to make the program fully autonomous).

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The counterexample we now have is the chatbot doing customer service for Instagram, which let hackers take over accounts without carrying out the checks that humans would have. Not sure how you put the right guardrails around medicine, given the potential for hallucinations.
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The blood cancer that became solvable • Works in Progress Magazine

Ruxandra Teslo and Amol Punjabi:

»

in the mid-2010s, a new class of genuinely transformative drugs arrived: immunotherapies. These treatments recruit the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy malignant cells. The results, particularly in metastatic and relapsed disease, have been extraordinary. Multiple myeloma is one of the cancers that illustrates this most vividly, with the immunotherapy Carvytki, which was first approved by the FDA in 2022 for patients who had returning disease after four or more lines of therapy.

Carvykti marks a turning point in the treatment of multiple myeloma for two reasons. First, unlike the conventional approach, in which patients endure continuous cycles of treatment, remission, and relapse for the rest of their lives, it is administered as a single, one-time infusion. Second, it is producing something that has never before been seen in this disease: durable, long-term remissions in patients which had been refractory to several other treatments, raising the possibility of a cure. 

But Carvykti matters beyond multiple myeloma. In retrospect, its development story, which began in 2016, was an early signal of a transformation that is only now, a decade later, making headlines: the United States is beginning to lose its dominance in drug discovery to China.

The foundational science behind Carvykti was largely American, but the therapy that changed the field came from a Chinese company that moved quickly from idea to patient. If the US does not address the regulatory and clinical-trial bottlenecks that slow the generation of early in-human data, more breakthroughs like Carvykti will be developed elsewhere, weakening the ecosystem on which American biopharma depends.

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Apparently not becoming great again.
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We may already have an anti-ageing vaccine • RealClearScience

Ross Pomeroy:

»

We have a vaccine that prevents shingles. We have a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia. We have a vaccine that might even slow aging itself.

Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine.

In 2006, the FDA approved the vaccine Zostavax for adults aged 60 and older. For people previously infected with varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox, the infection actually doesn’t end. The sneaky virus lies dormant in nerve tissue and can subsequently spring to life to cause shingles. Zostavax, and its more effective replacement, Shingrix, train your immune system to fight varicella-zoster in case it emerges from hiding to attempt a bodily coup.  

That’s a good thing because you really, really don’t want shingles. About 1 in 3 Americans will get it at some point. Its signature symptoms are a bubbly, blistering rash that traces the infected nerve, coupled with debilitating pain that’s been the subject of many painful-to-read Reddit posts. Sufferers use words and phrases such as “unrelenting,” “white hot,” and “I wish I could rip my arm out!”

So if you’ve had chickenpox in the past, it’s definitely worth your while to get vaccinated. The CDC actually recommends the shot for all adults aged 50 and older and all adults aged 19 and older who have weakened immune systems – because oftentimes you can be infected with varicella-zoster virus even if you’ve never developed chickenpox.

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Seems like it would be sensible just to give it to people. Or if you’re able, just to ask for it.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

---

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An mRNA-based vaccine for melanoma cut the risk of the cancer returning, trials have found. CC-licensed photo by |E|E| 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.

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

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No, artificial intelligence is not conscious • The Atlantic

Ted Chiang:

»

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No.

Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.

…What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real?

My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.

To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.

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Chiang is definitely against the idea of conscious LLMs – you’ll recall his New Yorker piece in September 2024 on how LLMs won’t make art – though even if opening an instance of Word *did* call into existence a new consciousness, I think we would learn to close the window too. We have entire industries based around killing conscious animals and turning them into our food. How would that be any different?
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ChatGPT app hits 1 billion monthly active users in record time, data shows • Reuters

Harshita Mary Varghese:

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT has crossed 1 billion global monthly active app users, becoming the ​fastest app ever to reach the milestone, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The record comes amid growing competition between Anthropic ​and OpenAI for dominance in the rapidly ​expanding artificial intelligence market.

[Sensor Tower] said US ChatGPT users ​who installed Anthropic’s Claude app in the ​first quarter of 2026 spent 5% less time on ChatGPT one month after installation, compared with their average usage in the prior eight months.

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I tested three Windows laptops in the MacBook Neo’s price range. There’s no contest • The Verge

Antonio Di Benedetto:

»

The MacBook Neo is a 13in, 2.7lb all-aluminum laptop with an A18 Pro iPhone chip for its processor and just 8GB of RAM, starting at 256GB of (slow) storage. It costs $599 (or $499 for students and teachers), and for $100 more you get double the storage and a Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the power button. There aren’t any all-aluminum, 13in Windows laptops out there for $600. All of the Windows laptops I tested have MSRPs above $600 but are usually cheaper.

Asus sent a $700 Asus Vivobook 16 with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor (currently $530), Lenovo put up a $750 Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x with a Snapdragon X chip (currently $550), and Acer sent an Intel Lunar Lake Acer Aspire 14 AI, which is down from $1,050 to just $530. Dell and HP are between laptop generations and didn’t have any current models to send.

By Windows budget laptop standards, these are all good values. And on paper, they should be competitive. Each has an eight-core processor (versus six on the Neo), 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and between 256GB and 1TB of storage — the slowest of which is twice the speed of the Neo’s storage.

…The flaws shown by all three of these Windows laptops — lackluster screens, crummy-sounding speakers, and middling trackpads — are almost impossible to avoid on laptops in this price range. But the game has changed: The MacBook Neo exists. And it smokes all of them in quality-of-life territory. It’s got a brighter, more colorful screen; a trackpad you can easily click anywhere; a sharp webcam that does your face some justice; and speakers that don’t assault your ears. It even has a hinge you can open smoothly with one finger — the Windows laptops snap closed or slide around if you try to do the same.

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Why is it Apple can make a high quality laptop at a low(ish) price but OEM PCs can’t? There’s no way Apple is eating all the profit from it.
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Google ordered to put clearer links in AI search and let UK publishers opt out • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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UK regulators today ordered Google to put clearer attributions and links to publishers’ content in its AI-generated search features. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also said Google must give publishers a way to opt out of AI features in search.

“In a world first, publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews,” the CMA said on Wednesday. “This will put publishers, like news organizations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google. To boost consumer trust, Google is also now required to make sure that publisher content is properly attributed, using clear links, in AI‑generated search results.”

The CMA ruled that Google may not penalize publishers for opting out of AI, meaning that Google can’t downrank opted-out publishers in general search results. The CMA said Google will have nine months to comply with all requirements but that the agency “expects important parts of the controls to become available to publishers well before that deadline. Google will also be required to submit and publish compliance reports, supported by key data and metrics, explaining changes it has made and how it has complied.”

Google’s AI Overviews tend to give confident-sounding responses to search queries, but the links to sources in the AI Overviews may or may not support those confident responses. Clearer attribution and links could make it easier for searchers to determine the accuracy of AI Overview summaries.

The CMA applied the rules to Google after determining that it has “strategic market status” in general search services, and has ongoing investigations into Apple and Microsoft. Google today said it will comply with the CMA decision.

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Google’s AI overview might well become worse as a result of this. But it makes sense that publishers don’t want to help Google to keep people away from their sites.
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The dirt that refused to die • Quanta Magazine

Siddhant Pusdekar:

»

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.

Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil.

Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide (opens a new tab) for six years. In a 2025 paper in Science Advances, they proposed that a metabolic process that powers much of life is also possible outside living cells. Their experiments point to how it could work in dirt, absent the living proteins that would typically organize it. If they’re right, some biochemical reactions, such as those that release the energy of carbon-rich sugar molecules, may not be unique to living things.

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Weird science. There’s a lot of it.
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A personalized vaccine for melanoma cut the risk of cancer returning after five years • NBC News

Kaitlin Sullivan:

»

An experimental vaccine from Moderna and Merck shows promise in keeping deadly skin cancer from returning for years, according to new clinical trial results.

The research, presented Monday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, found that a personalized mRNA vaccine halved the risk of melanoma returning after five years. The results were also published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and in about half of patients, the disease will come back within the first five years of treatment.

“The treatments we have are not perfect. People relapse,” said Dr. Janice Mehnert, the director of the melanoma and cutaneous medical oncology program at NYU Langone Health in New York and the senior trial investigator.

In the trial, 50 patients received the standard treatment: surgery, followed by a type of immunotherapy called pembrolizumab, also known as Keytruda. Another 107 patients also got a personalized vaccine tailored to their specific tumor. All of the people in the trial had at least Stage 3 melanoma, meaning the cancer had spread to nearby lymph nodes or skin and had a high risk of returning even after surgery.

Five years later, nearly 70% of people in the vaccine group were cancer-free, compared to 49% of people in the standard treatment group. Adding the vaccine also cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by nearly 60%.

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mRNA really is a huge breakthrough in treatment. Of course that means that the man in charge of the US Department of Health is against it.
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The future of science communication is not an article like this • Nature

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In this increasingly competitive environment, it is essential that credible science broadcasts a strong signal. There are many content creators doing excellent work. But, as Nature’s news team reported in a News feature in February, many influencers with large followings are promoting misinformation — for example on climate change, vaccines and health and wellness).

Last year, public-health researcher Brooke Nickel and her colleagues reported an overwhelming amount of misleading information about medical screening tests from an analysis of nearly 1,000 Instagram and TikTok posts. They also found that the people who produced these posts often had financial interests in the tests. In February, humanities scholars Ricardo Morais and Clara Fernandes found that videos produced by science influencers on TikTok tend not to credit sources — including for images — making it difficult to assess the accuracy of their posts.

These are among the reasons why more researchers and science communicators, those who have the knowledge and skills to convey science in line with research integrity principles, need to be on these platforms. As our News feature shows, many scientists are. Nature has a well-established presence on Instagram and YouTube; a few months ago, we also joined TikTok.

Short videos have their strengths and limitations. An average three-minute video could contain up to 650 words of script and captions. In a sense, that is not a lot of time to convey the content of a finding or news event, including sources, significance, context, caveats and limitations. But done well, narrative storytelling, infographics, animation and video are all incredibly compelling and popular ways to engage people with science.

But improving science communication shouldn’t be the responsibility of only those in front of the camera. Platforms need to be doing much more to curb misinformation. They should provide information for creators on good practice in science communication, including how to navigate possible conflicts of interest, and flagging claims that have not been verified to users.

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Somehow I don’t feel that three-minute videos can truly be the solution to everything. As much as anything, video is a poor format for arguments which need to be examined closely. There aren’t going to be many teleological discussions on TikTok. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Camera-first phishing: how fraudsters use browser permissions to harvest identity data • Netcraft

Ivan Khamenka:

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Netcraft has identified a card payment-themed phishing page that appears to go beyond conventional credential theft. Instead of asking victims to enter card details, the page attempts to persuade them to grant access to their camera, microphone, location, and device information under the guise of “fund verification”. This makes the campaign an example of camera-first phishing: a social engineering attack where browser permissions, rather than typed credentials, become the primary collection channel.

The lure is simple: the victim is told that Rp 1,000,000 is ready to be received from a sender named WILDAN, with the page styled to resemble a card payment verification flow.

The bank transfer page uses Indonesian-language messaging such as “Verifikasi Visa Secure”, “Penerimaan Dana”, and “Data wajah + lokasi digunakan untuk keamanan transaksi” to make camera and location prompts appear like part of a legitimate security process. The observed page also displays fake confirmation buttons and status messages referencing camera, geolocation, IP address, and device checks.

Many phishing attacks are designed to steal credentials, payment card numbers, or one-time passcodes. This campaign appears to use a different playbook. Netcraft’s analysis indicates that the operator is primarily interested in live facial images, short videos, GPS location, IP address, and device metadata.

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Given the way that Instagram was being hacked via fake videos, collecting this sort of data is going to be prized by hackers.
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Memory crunch sends PC prices into double-digit climb • The Register

Paul Kunert:

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The average prices of notebooks and desktops are up in Europe by double-digit percentages on the back of tightening availability of memory. 

All PC makers are battling with shortages of DRAM and NAND as component manufacturers prioritize production for higher-margin high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers. The cost of memory has more than quadrupled in 12 months.

Analyst Context, which tracks the products that wholesalers and resellers ship to customers, says that average notebook prices climbed 11.4% year-on-year and desktop prices rose 10.5% via European distribution in the first six weeks of calendar Q2.

The revenue generated from the sales went up 12% for mobile PCs and 2% for desktop machines. This is despite unit sales shrinking 3% for laptops and 7% for desktops.

“After a strong first quarter where unit and revenue growth was fueled by channel stocking ahead of anticipated price hikes, the dynamic shifted sharply at the start of Q2,” said Marie-Christine Pygott, senior analyst.

“Unit volumes dropped following that period of intense stocking, but revenues continued to climb, albeit at a more moderate pace, driven by a significant rise in average selling prices and a market shift toward higher-end devices.” 

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AI is strangling the PC business, which is a strange collateral effect.
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British schoolboy sanctioned by Russia for exposing crypto laundering • The Times

Herbie Russell:

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A British schoolboy sanctioned by Russia for exposing Moscow-backed cryptocurrency laundering networks will wear it “as a badge of honour”.

Alexander Browder, 17, now banned from entering the country along with four other British nationals, is thought to be the youngest person to have been sanctioned by the regime. Russia’s foreign ministry accused the sixth-former of “circulating defamatory speculations and false information about the policy of the Russian authorities”. Moscow sanctioned Browder on Tuesday after he wrote a report for a think tank exposing how money was being laundered via the A7A5 cryptocurrency to finance Russia’s war on Ukraine.

…The son of Bill Browder, a renowned human-rights activist and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, said that fighting atrocities was “in my genetics”. His father, a British-American who has been banned from Russia since 2005, has spent decades exposing Kremlin corruption and pioneered the global Magnitsky Act which freezes Russian officials’ offshore wealth.

…Browder’s report was published last month by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank that says it aims to “combat extremism, advance democracy and real human rights”. The 88-page document found that A7A5, a ruble-pegged stablecoin launched in Kyrgyzstan in January last year, was “a critical tool for Russian sanctions evasion, money laundering and illicit cross-border payments”. The token was made by A7 LLC. The cross-border payment service is 51% owned by Ilan Shor, a convicted Moldovan fraudster, and 49% owned by PSB, a state-owned Russian bank, the report found.

Last week the foreign office said that the network, “designed to bypass Western sanctions”, claimed to have moved more than $90bn last year.

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Some families have people who are principled.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified