If Amazon makes a new smartphone, can it avoid the mistakes of its 2014 Fire Phone? CC-licensed photo by Diego Gómez 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. Not smart. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Government’s “cheap fuel finder” stuck in the slow lane • The Times

Aubrey Allegretti, Ben Clatworthy and Laurence Sleator:

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Downing Street has been pressing for the service, named Fuel Finder, to be ramped up as quickly as possible but performance issues have delayed its full introduction.

Sources told The Times that 20% of petrol stations were not updating their prices weekly, despite the fact that many forecourts are changing their prices every day because of the volatility in the market. Some 15% of those signed up to the scheme have not reported a single pump price since regulations came into force in February. 

10% of petrol stations have also yet to be uploaded to the service, which is designed to monitor their costs in real time. Under the regulations, fuel retailers must update the government portal within 30 minutes of any change of pump price. 

Forecourt prices are expected to rise further next week, as the conflict enters its fourth week. Higher prices can take three weeks to feed through to the pumps because of the mechanism retailers use to buy oil.

…Fuel prices have surged in recent weeks as a result of the war in Iran and the wider Middle East crisis. Latest data from the RAC shows that the average price of a litre of petrol is now 144.51p and 166.24p for diesel. The prices have increased by 9% and 17% respectively since the start of the war.

…The Times understands that major motoring groups including the AA and RAC, as well as apps such as Google Maps, will not have integrated the data until much later in the year.

However, privately ministers are threatening to strip a contract worth nearly £2m from VE3 Global, the company responsible for the programme. The Times understands that the move has been planned and held in reserve as a contingency.

A motoring industry source who uses Fuel Finder daily said: “There is so much that is amateurish about the technology and the back end. When you first look at it, it appears superficially very good and if you stuck some screenshots on a PowerPoint or gave a minister a quick overview of it, they’d be impressed. But very quickly when you dig into it you find out what an absolute nightmare it is. There are so many basic errors.”

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Not to mention the plan floated by the last (and this) government to have a single parking app. How’s that going?
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My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America • Navigating the Drift

Steve Scherer:

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When I was moved to Canada by Reuters in 2019, I realized a professional dream. I had become a bureau chief in a G7 country, which is the bloc of wealthy countries that seeks a common stance on the main economic and political challenges facing the world. Both Italy and the United States are also members. After a couple years I convinced my Italian wife that we should apply for permanent residency, which would give us both the right to work in Canada indefinitely. All I had was a work permit allowing me to work for my news agency.

I hired an immigration lawyer to put everything together. After a year of bureaucratic delay, I was asked to apply in 2023. Canada’s immigration process is governed by a point system and is by invitation only.

A few months later I was fired amid budget cuts in the struggling news industry. My jobless status weakened my application, and I would never be asked to apply again. The great and kind Canada, the country where I thought I would settle at least until my children were adults, had chewed me up and spit me out.

I couldn’t legally work, not even for Uber. When I lost my job, my entire family lost state healthcare coverage, and there is virtually no private healthcare. We had no family doctor and, God forbid, any hospital visit would have to be paid for out of pocket. Despite having good local contacts, I couldn’t find an employer willing to sponsor me. The clock was ticking on our legal right to reside in Canada. We were no longer welcome.

In June of 2025 I sold my house, the first I had ever owned. Not knowing how long it would take me to find a job in Washington, I put my family on a plane in Montreal. They flew to Italy where they could live rent free in a family member’s home, where they were covered by state healthcare, and where the kids could go to high school. After I said goodbye to them, I wept uncontrollably in the airport parking lot, not knowing when I would see them again.

After a life spent both crossing borders and freely reporting on those who struggled to overcome them, I didn’t expect one to rise up beneath my feet.

«

And so Scherer became an Uber driver – the sort of job that he’d observed from the back seat while on his way to endless jobs in his previous life. There are plenty more articles at his Substack; he is optimistic of getting back onto the writing bus.
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A pro-Trump “Army girl” went viral online. Experts say she isn’t real • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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The beautiful Army blonde Jessica Foster has posed with an F-22 Raptor fighter jet, donned camouflage in the desert and walked a tarmac with President Donald Trump on the first day of the strikes on Iran.

The slew of photos and videos depicting the patriotic life of the MAGA dream girl have led her Instagram account to explode, gaining more than a million followers since she began posting four months ago.

But Foster is an illusion — a fake woman who experts say was probably created by an artificial intelligence image generator. There’s no public record of Foster’s military service and the account, despite not being labeled AI, is packed with indicators that she is fake. Between many of her pro-Trump posts, Foster also prominently displays her feet.

Foster’s viral takeoff highlights an increasingly prevalent strategy for winning online attention. A slew of right-wing accounts, peddling patriotism mixed with soft-core pornography, use fake women and convincing imagery to grab viewers across a distracted internet, monetize their interest and score political points.

Accounts showing AI-generated women masquerading as Trump-supporting soldiers, truckers and police officers have built surging audiences on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and X, where thousands of commenters have offered responses suggesting they believe the women are real.

A version of the strategy has also played out in recent weeks beyond the United States. Hundreds of AI-generated videos showing Iranian female soldiers and pilots cheering on the nation’s military have proliferated online, as the BBC first reported. One telltale sign they’re fake: Iran bans women from combat roles.

Sam Gregory, executive director of Witness, a video-advocacy group that researches deepfakes, said Foster exemplifies how deceptive AI video generators can be.

…By applying political trappings and current events to these characters’ fake lives, their creators probably hope to maximize their virality and stand out in an online crowd, Gregory said. Once they’ve got people’s attention, the creators can — as in Foster’s case — shunt them to a paid platform, where the user is told to pay up for more lurid scenes.

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What, you thought it was about something other than money?
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‘It’s stupid’: why western carmakers’ retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance • The Guardian

Alex Daniel:

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In the US, where trade barriers were erected to block the wave of Chinese EVs, Ford took a $19.5bn (£14.6bn) hit, killing off several future electric models and scrapping a battery venture.

These companies are “having a hard time”, said Julia Poliscanova, the director for EVs at the Brussels thinktank Transport & Environment. “They have tariffs in the US, they are nowhere in China [where homegrown brands are booming] … So they’re thinking: ‘Maybe at least in Europe, we can have a few years where we prioritise short-term profits selling petrol and diesel cars.’

“That is probably a valid business view if your term as a CEO finishes in two years,” she added. “That is a stupid view if you still want to be in the car market in 2035.”

At Stellantis, the pivot was especially sharp. Carlos Tavares, its former boss, was among the industry’s loudest champions of electrification, but he was forced out in late 2024. The automotive group has since announced a reset of its plans, giving customers’ “freedom to choose” petrol cars again and launching a fresh spending spree on hybrids, which combine an electric motor and a petrol or diesel motor.

“The only fundamental question for carmakers is how to curb emissions significantly,” Tavares told the Guardian by email. “Those who believe that EVs are not the solution have to explain the ‘how’ without EVs.”

Europe’s manufacturers have yet to do so convincingly. Instead, they blame weak consumer demand for the retreat. The argument goes that high costs and patchy charging infrastructure have slowed EV sales, which accounted for only one in five new cars sold in Europe last year.

…A Volkswagen spokesperson said the group was “clearly in favour of electric mobility” and had invested heavily in it. “However, this requires a reliable, long-term and binding political framework … the ball is now in the politicians’ court to create the necessary framework conditions to make electromobility a success,” they said.

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They’re all pointing to each other waiting for someone to create the nirvana for EVs. Not going to happen. Meanwhile the Chinese EV companies flood the markets with the cars they’ve made, and people buy them.
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Val Kilmer set to be be resurrected with AI for new film • The Guardian

Owen Myers:

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Val Kilmer will be the latest Hollywood star to be resurrected by AI. The acting legend, who died last year at age 65, will star in the drama As Deep As the Grave.

Kilmer was attached to the project prior to his death from throat cancer.

The late actor will play Father Fintan, a Native American spiritualist and Catholic priest. Speaking to Variety, director and writer Coerte Voorhees said that the role was designed around Kilmer, who was an advocate for Native American rights and claimed to have Cherokee heritage.

“He was the actor I wanted to play this role,” Voorhees said. “It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the south-west.” But Kilmer was unable to make it to set due to his battle with throat cancer.

The film-maker is working in conjunction with the late actor’s estate and his daughter, Mercedes, to bring Kilmer back to life with state-of-the-art, generative AI. Voorhees says that Kilmer’s son, Jack, an actor who starred alongside Rory Culkin in 2018’s Lord of Chaos, also supports the project.

“His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this,” Voorhees told Variety. “He really thought it was important story that he wanted his name on … Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.”

…The AI-generated version of Kilmer will appear in a “significant” portion of the film, Voorhees said. The film will use images of the actor taken throughout his life to re-create Kilmer through the decades.

In recent years, AI has begun to creep into Hollywood films, and in 2024 Brady Corbet’s Oscar-winning epic The Brutalist used AI to fine-tune actor Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent. Last year, Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine signed deals with startup ElevenLabs, allowing the company to create AI versions of their voices.

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Wedges always start realllly thin.
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Amazon’s smartphone would be ill-timed: IDC analyst • The Register

O’Ryan Johnson:

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Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.

“Amazon is unlikely to build a better smartphone than Apple, Samsung, or leading Chinese OEMs,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices with IDC told The Register via email. “Competing on hardware or traditional user experience is a losing game. On the other hand, according to IDC, the smartphone market is expected to contract 13% in 2026 due to the memory shortage crisis, making it the worst possible time to launch a new device.”

News of the Amazon smartphone was first reported by Reuters. It said that the phone is known internally as “Transformer” and would sync across other Alexa smart devices while also putting Amazon shopping at the center of the experience.

There was no price or a timeframe for when the phone might be released. Amazon had no comment.

BezosCorp’s previous foray into the smartphone race was the Fire, which released in 2014 to underwhelming sales and quickly got cancelled.

The new device is being developed by an internal Amazon unit known as ZeroOne, which has former Microsoft exec and early Xbox impresario J (no period) Allard at the helm.

The team is also reportedly working on a “dumb” version of the phone for customers who wish to scale down their screentime. One reference has been the LightPhone, which has a camera, phone, and GPS, but no browser.

Jeronimo said that while there is plenty of talk about digital detoxes, it appeals to a small cohort of customers and the actual number of units sold is “negligible.”

«

It’s hard to exaggerate how incredibly unusual it is for IDC to step up and say “nuh-uh, that’s a bad idea”. In decades of reading analyst comments, I can count on one hand – possibly one finger – the number of times I’ve seen any of them being negative about a product, especially a theoretical one. Let’s see if Amazon is listening, since it wasn’t in 2014.
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Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

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Here’s a mildly dystopian prompt I’ve been experimenting with recently: “Profile this user”, accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News.

Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there as author_username. Here’s a JSON feed of my (simonw) most recent comments, for example:

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_simonw&hitsPerPage=1000

The Algolia API is served with open CORS headers, which means you can access the API from JavaScript running on any web page.

Last August I had ChatGPT build me a simple tool for hitting that API for any user which fetches their comments and gives me a mobile-friendly “copy to clipboard” button. I’ve since tweaked it a few times with Claude.

I can then paste the whole lot into any LLM—these days I mostly use Claude Opus 4.6 for this—and prompt “profile this user” to see what it can figure out.

It’s startlingly effective! It feels invasive to quote the profile of another user here, so I’ll show you what it produces for me…

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What it comes back with definitely checks out for Willison. Of course now people are going to start using this aggressively against commenters they don’t like…
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The world energy shock is coming • New Statesman

Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk:

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It is unclear when the Strait of Hormuz might fully reopen to ship traffic, but one thing is certain – there is a blow coming for the global economy through the supply chain, no matter how soon the war ends.

European and US consumers are still, for the movement, relatively insulated, even if they already see elevated gasoline prices that bring a major cost burden to households. The full scale of the effects to come remain hidden in the complexity of the global supply network. Here is a sketch of what might be coming: inflation, redistribution shocks, shortages, stagflation and global financial instability.

So far only the prices of essential commodities – oil, gas, fertiliser etc – have shot up. Firms buying these inputs that can’t influence the price of their product must absorb the cost or stop producing, as many small-scale producers have done, like fishermen in the Philippines that can’t afford the doubly expensive fuel anymore.

However, most of today’s global economy is run by giant corporations that set their own prices, and our research shows that cost shocks helped them coordinate price hikes. They did not swallow the cost of pandemic and war but pushed it on to consumers, protecting their margins and lifting their bottom line in the process. This is sellers’ inflation. Corporations transmit price explosions in essential inputs across the whole economy through their own price setting, ultimately causing inflation.

Such corporate price hikes become even easier when inputs are not just more expensive but in short supply. This grants companies a temporary monopoly. During the Covid-era computer chip shortage, each car company could only produce as many cars as they had chips for, so customers waiting months for new cars could not escape high prices and waits by switching to another company, and the car companies reaped extraordinary profits. Furthermore, when input prices fall, consumer prices tend to stay up, or to fall by less, generating yet another round of windfalls.

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Weber and Semieniuk say that we’re presently in that breath-bated moment like February 2020, when you could see that Covid was affecting other parts of the world, but it hadn’t yet reached our shores. (No paywall on the article.)
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The Economist waves goodbye to its jet-setting disruptor • The Observer

Merissa Marr:

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How much more the Economist can expand its readership as a specialist publication is also unclear. The paper did an impressive job of conquering the US, which is now its biggest market, but like many legacy publications, it has struggled to attract younger readers, not least because of the decline in reading for pleasure and the rise of AI which is changing the way people search for news.

Yet the real crisis may lie in its liberalist roots. Founded by a Scottish hat maker to campaign for free trade, the Economist has stuck fiercely to that mission. Alexander Zevin argues in his book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist that the magazine has played such a big role in promoting liberalism that it shaped the world its readers inhabit. But it now finds itself at a crossroads as the modern world turns against liberalism – a trend the Economist has described as “profoundly worrying”.

“When the Economist was founded 175 years ago, our first editor, James Wilson, promised ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress’,” the Economist wrote in a manifesto to mark its anniversary. It concluded: “We renew our pledge to that contest. And we ask liberals everywhere to join us.”

Forester de Rothschild had no easy task to find a new shareholder for her [26.9%] stake in the magazine [which she sold for £300m]. There are strict guardrails put in place to protect the Economist’s independence, leaving shareholders with limited control, so those who do buy into the company are largely seeking the cachet or for philanthropic reasons. Whereas the landscape is littered with billionaires tinkering with media toys.

[Canadian billionaire Stephen] Smith claims he won’t be one of those tinkerers. The 74-year-old, who is investing through his Smith Financial Corp family holding, said in a statement that he has “full support for the Economist’s longstanding tradition of rigorous editorial independence.”

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The Economist has survived all sorts of ups and downs, and successfully made the transition to digital, but ownership and editor changes (the latter also being lined up) are always troublesome moments.
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Reading Socrates in Silicon Valley • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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“If you go back, like, 400 years ago it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said a great sage of Silicon Valley last week, during the modern-day equivalent of a Socratic dialogue (a podcast). “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” The sage was none other than Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, crypto enthusiast, devoted Democrat turned Donald Trump adviser, and author of the 2023 late-capitalist cry for help, the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (“love doesn’t scale . . . let’s stick with money”). The man who bet big on Web3 (remember that?) and NFTs (remember them?), and who once described criticisms of the metaverse as “reality privilege”. (Meta, on whose board Andreessen sits, announced this week it was all but pulling the plug on the metaverse.) 

The a16z founder was proudly explaining to Founders podcast host David Senra that he had “zero” levels of introspection. “Move forward. Go,” was his own anti-introspective mantra. “I’ve found that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” He went on to claim that the very concept of the individual was only invented a few hundred years ago and that it wasn’t until the start of the 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.

…My main issue with Andreessen is not so much that he’s wrong; it’s that he’s so confident about it. He sounded similarly confident when he told us that bitcoin represented a breakthrough akin to the internet, that Web3 was the future and that we shouldn’t fear AI because “the moral of every story is the good guys win”.

We seem to believe, as a society, that wealth, influence and confidence can be equated with wisdom. But Silicon Valley billionaires are not our sages; they’re our enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and making sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to think about why we are wasting our lives on their platforms.

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It’s a typically great column from Kelly, though one can fervently wish that the target of it might read it and indulge in some.. introspection?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The soybean planting season begins soon in the US – but fertiliser production has been seriously disrupted by the conflict around Iran, and especially the Straits of Hormuz. CC-licensed photo by United Soybean Board 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. Half-full? Perhaps? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The nitrogen trap • Shanaka Anslem Perera

Shanaka Anslem Perera:

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No country appears to maintain a fertilizer reserve system remotely comparable in scale, doctrine, or strategic importance to the petroleum reserve architecture built after the oil shocks of the 1970s. Today’s policy response to the Hormuz crisis is not a nutrient reserve release. It is an improvised attempt to rebuild shipping and insurance capacity on the fly. This structural asymmetry, now exposed with violent clarity, may prove to be one of the most consequential oversights in the history of modern statecraft.

The Strait of Hormuz, a 21-nautical-mile corridor of shallow water between Iran and Oman, does not merely carry 20% of the world’s oil. It carries a significant share of the molecular foundation underlying half the planet’s food supply. UNCTAD estimates that roughly one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz. The Fertilizer Institute separately estimates that exporters exposed directly or indirectly to the conflict account for nearly 49% of global urea exports, nearly 30% of global ammonia exports, and nearly half of global sulphur trade.

That combination makes Hormuz not merely an energy chokepoint, but one of the most concentrated nutrient chokepoints in the global food system. Since late February 2026, commercial traffic through that corridor has effectively collapsed. UNCTAD reports daily ship transits fell by approximately 97%. As of mid-March, neither belligerent has shown willingness to negotiate. Trump rejected allied efforts to launch ceasefire talks on March 14. Iran’s foreign minister stated on March 15: “We never asked for a ceasefire.”

And the spring planting clock is ticking toward a deadline that no diplomatic breakthrough can extend, because seeds do not negotiate, soil chemistry does not pause for geopolitics, and the quadratic yield response curve of cereal crops does not bend to the will of men who have never planted a field.

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Perera argues, in depth, that the events of the past few weeks have very serious implications for food planting that would affect millions of people around the world. This and the next couple of links aren’t comfortable reading. But we’re in just about the worst possible situation, short of someone dropping a nuclear bomb on the Qatar/Iran gas field.
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Long-haul Easter flights at risk due to fuel rationing • The Times

Oliver Wright and Ben Clatworthy:

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Airlines have been warned that they will face jet fuel shortages as soon as next month, risking flight cancellations to long-haul destinations at the end of the busy Easter holiday period.

Oil traders expect to see shortages of jet fuel from the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz within the coming weeks as reserve supplies are run down and not replaced.

This week, Vietnam became the first country to warn of possible flight cancellations from April after China and Thailand announced they were halting exports of fuel to maintain their own supplies.

Other countries are expected to follow suit in the coming days with industry experts warning that airlines could be forced to stop serving some long-haul destinations because they may not be able to get the fuel for the return journey.

Britain is also vulnerable to potential disruption if the conflict continues as the majority of the country’s imported jet fuel comes from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The UK only has the domestic refining capacity to meet a third of current demand, according to the government’s most recent security of supply report.

The price of jet fuel in Europe hit a record high on Tuesday. Prices are almost double what they were before the conflict started. The cost of jet fuel has risen substantially more than the cost of crude oil given the reliance on the region for exports.

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news… • Thread Reader App

Arnaud Bertrand:

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war – and the truth is that the world’s energy picture is probably changed forever.

This single facility produced roughly 20% of global LNG [liquefied natural gas] supply and, as of 2011, had taken $70bn to build.

What makes this even worse is that Iran’s strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world’s largest by far (9,700 km² – about the size of Qatar itself).

Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves – and is nearly six times bigger than the second biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it’s only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).

Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world’s largest reservoir simply won’t be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides – Qatar’s and Iran’s – has now been blown up.

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There’s a lot more to this – it’s a long thread of tweets, but none of them is good. What’s going on in the Middle East is extremely dangerous for the entire world economy.
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The 49MB webpage • thatshubham

Shubham Bose:

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If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB.

This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the past 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

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Bose points to The Guardian and The New York Times, but many people can think of far worse publishers. He’s right, though: many web news publications have become user-hostile, which is one reason why places like Substack – no adverts! No autoplay videos! – are so attractive to so many readers.
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Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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Finding out who owns land in England is to become much simpler because a paywall will be lifted from large parts of the Land Registry, the government is to announce.

A small number of landowners control the majority of land but finding out who owns what is difficult to piece together, even for government departments, owing to the way the Land Registry operates. Freeing up access will make it easier to determine ownership of key areas, such as river catchments, grouse moors and peatland.

The change comes as part of a major reform to the way England’s land is managed. The government’s long-awaited land use framework – to be unveiled by Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, on Wednesday afternoon – marks the first time that government has attempted to assess how best to use farmland, nature reserves and areas of degraded land to help balance competing needs for land for food production, housing, energy and industry.

For the first time, ministers will set out how much land is needed to meet the UK’s net zero target through growing forests and restoring peatland as “carbon sinks” and through energy generation from solar and windfarms. Only about 1% of land will be needed for renewable energy generation, according to the government’s new estimate, and much of the land required will still be used for food production, for instance through livestock grazing around windfarms and under solar panels.

New mapping will also make it easier to assess how the restoration of peatlands in upland areas could reduce flooding from rivers, which is expected to worsen as the climate crisis deepens.

Reynolds said: “It is more important than ever that we make the right decisions about our finite land, especially in the face of the dual threat of the climate and nature crises. The land use framework will hardwire climate resilience and nature-based solutions into our decision-making to ensure that we have safe homes for the future.”

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It’s slightly unclear but presumably the idea is that companies and organisations looking to make better use of land will be able to piece together this data? It’s taken a long time – 20 years! – but maybe the Free Our Data campaign is starting to pay off, subliminally.
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We have learned nothing • Colossus

Jerry Neumann:

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around 1500, the Swiss physician Paracelsus noticed that Galenic [medical] treatments did not actually make patients better, and that some treatments—like mercury for syphilis—worked even though they made no sense within humoral theory. Paracelsus began to advocate listening to evidence rather than deferring to the authority of the long dead: “The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.” In 1527, he even staged a public burning of Galen’s work. His vision took centuries to take hold—nearly 300 years later, George Washington died after an aggressive bloodletting—because people are more inclined to believe neat and simple stories like Galen’s than to confront messy and complex reality.

Paracelsus started with what worked and followed that to why. First-principles thinkers start with a hypothesized “why” and then insist it works, regardless of the results. Are our modern entrepreneurship thinkers more like Paracelsus, driven by evidence? Or more like Galen, sustained by the elegance of their own story? In the name of science, let’s look at the evidence.

Here is the official government data on U.S. startup survival.[3] Each line shows the survival likelihood of companies started in a given year. The first line tracks one-year survival, the second line two-year survival, and so on. What the chart shows is that between 1995 and the present, the percentage of companies surviving for one year is essentially unchanged. The same is true at two years, five years, and 10 years.

The New Pundits have been around long enough, and are widely known enough, that their relevant books have collectively sold millions of copies and are taught in virtually all university entrepreneurship courses.[4] If they worked, it would show up in the statistics. Instead, there has been zero systematic progress over the past 30 years in making startups more likely to survive.

…Success in a competitive market must be relative, which means what works must be different from what everyone else is doing.

The reductio ad absurdum makes this clear: if there were a flowchart that guaranteed a successful startup, people would churn out successful startups around the clock. It would be a perpetual money machine. But in a competitive environment, such a proliferation of new companies would cause most of them to fail. The premise that must be wrong is that such a flowchart can exist.

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Neumann argues that startups are in fact in a Red Queen’s race: everyone is running as fast as they can, so competitive advantage is short-lived, just like in competitive evolution.
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Android’s new sideloading rules are here, and they come with a 24-hour lock!

Adamya Sharma:

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When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding.

The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and if you’re someone who installs apps outside the Play Store, you’re going to feel it immediately, and you’re going to feel it deeply.

This isn’t a subtle tweak or another warning screen you can quickly tap past. Google is fundamentally changing how sideloading works on Android, especially for apps that come from “unverified developers.”

Google’s brand-new “advanced flow” for sideloading is designed specifically for what the company calls power users. It’s a deliberately slow and almost impossible-to-rush-through process that will allow advanced Android users to sideload apps from unverified developers, while giving them plenty of caution to keep them safe from malicious apps and bad actors. At the same time, the new process is designed to protect unassuming Android users who might be tricked or coerced into downloading unverified apps.

When Android’s new sideloading rules come into force, installing apps from developers without Google verification (more on that later) will become extremely tedious by design and require a 24-hour lock before users can install them.

«

This seems eminently reasonable, to be honest: the biggest problem with sideloading is the potential for people to be scammed. That potential still exists, because the apps can be scams, but at least it interposes something between the user and disaster.
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Stonehenge tunnel plan officially scrapped after £179m spent • LBC

Asher McShane:

»

A development consent order (DCO) for a tunnel, two junctions and a northern bypass near the world heritage site has now formally been revoked by the Department for Transport (DfT).

The scheme was originally greenlit in 2023 but was put on hold in 2024 after £179.2m was spent – after it emerged costs were expected to reach £1.4bn.

Local Reform MP Danny Kruger has called the decision “scandalous”.

Council member Martin Smith said: “This is a huge blow for Wiltshire, our communities and the wider South West region. SWe are extremely disappointed that the government has decided to revoke the DCO for the A303 Stonehenge tunnel.”

The DfT cited “exceptional circumstances”. It said the decision had been made by transport secretary Heidi Alexander and that it “no longer aligns with current strategic policy objectives”.

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Those policy objectives are probably “not spending ridiculous amounts of money on projects which aren’t necessary”.
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The longevity scam •The Atlantic

Jordan D. Metzl:

»

As a sports-medicine physician, I see the consequences of the modern longevity obsession up close. Patients arrive at my office convinced that the right peptides, cold plunges, or lab tests can meaningfully extend their lives. They’re almost certainly headed for disappointment—if not harm.

In many ways, the American people owe a debt of gratitude to the early champions of longevity medicine. Throughout the 20th century, Western physicians focused primarily on treating disease rather than preventing it. But over the past 15 years or so, a new generation of longevity-focused clinicians began emphasizing lifestyle changes such as sleep, exercise, and healthy diet as first-line strategies for disease prevention—not necessarily to extend life, but to improve health. More recently, private investment has poured into the field in pursuit of flashier claims about staving off death. Many longevity-focused clinics and influencers have drifted from prevention toward profit, selling an expanding menu of unvalidated treatments.

Some of the new advice is relatively harmless. Protein loading, for example, is unlikely to meaningfully extend one’s lifespan, but it is also unlikely to cause serious harm. Other trends are more concerning. I have seen patients experiment with drugs like rapamycin, an immunosuppressant medication prescribed for those who have undergone organ transplantation. Some health influencers claim, without convincing human-subject data to prove their point, that rapamycin slows cellular aging. Whether true or not, these claims have yet to be validated, but scientists do know that the side-effect profile of rapamycin includes an increased risk of infection and disease.

Other longevity enthusiasts are injecting or swallowing peptides, chains of amino acids that have been used in medicine for decades but are now becoming popular in their unregulated form. When prescribed by a physician, FDA-approved peptides such as insulin and GLP-1s can be remarkably effective. But no placebo-controlled human trials support the use of, say, “Wolverine” (scientific name BPC-157), a peptide that some influencers claim ramps up collagen production and aids tendon and ligament healing. Like many of the other non-FDA-approved peptides, anyone can order Wolverine online.

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The Wild West, now available in injectable or pill form. (Lots of people died of avoidable diseases in the Wild West.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Matter protocol for smart homes works great in theory (and diagrams). The practice, with Ikea’s products, is very different. CC-licensed photo by Smart Home Perfected 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. Unenlightened. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds in the metaverse • CNBC

Lola Murti:

»

In a community blog, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from VR on June 15. After that date, it will only be available on a standalone mobile app.

“We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in announcing the change.

The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company’s push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse.

The January cuts in Reality Labs also hit studios that were working on VR titles, including Ouro Interactive, an in-house studio that debuted in 2023 to build first-party content for Horizon Worlds.

When Meta changed its name from Facebook in October 2021 to cement the pivot to the metaverse, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next frontier.”

“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time when announcing the change.

«

How much has Reality Labs lost in Zuckerberg’s quixotic pursuit of something that wasn’t there (so absolutely perfectly quixotic)? Nearly $80bn between Q4 2020 and Q4 2025. And how much revenue? According to ChatGPT (asked to list the Reality Labs revenues by quarter and sum them; the numbers looked believable), $11.4bn.

It takes a special talent to lose $8 for every $1 you take in on a project that you then dump. Take a bow, Meta.
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Friendship, on demand • The Atlantic

Julie Beck:

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The robots befriended us remarkably fast.

Over the past year or two, AI has become not just a utilitarian tool but a technology that many people are turning to for connection and emotional support. One survey last year found that 16% of American adults had used AI for companionship, and a quarter of adults under 30 had. Social AI use seems to be growing rapidly around the world, according to several recent reports on the state of artificial intelligence. Raffaele Ciriello, who studies emerging technologies at the University of Sydney, told me that he once assumed AI companions would remain “niche”; he has been “surprised by how quickly that took over.”

Some people use apps that are explicitly made for companionship; they let you design a virtual character’s personality, appearance, and backstory. Popular such apps include Replika, which reportedly had 40 million users as of late 2025, up from 10 million in 2023, and Character.AI, which reported 20 million monthly users in 2025. Other people seek emotional support from all-purpose AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, even though they aren’t explicitly intended for social use. OpenAI’s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024, but by 2025, 73% of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. (The Atlantic entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024.)

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship.

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To anyone who knows the history of Eliza, the computer program created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1960s, this is no surprise. As Weizenbaum observed, seeing people become completely absorbed by the pretend psychologist represented by Eliza, “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” (Quote via John Naughton.)

It would be good if we didn’t have to rediscover things we already know every decade because people have no recollection of history. (Gift link to the article.)
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Ikea tried to build a smart home for everyone — here’s why it’s not working yet • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

Matter is an interoperability standard, but interoperability with Matter devices is still largely elusive. Rather than being a plug-and-play solution for manufacturers — make a Matter device, and it will just work with any platform — there remains a huge onus on each manufacturer to ensure its devices work properly with each platform before release. Which is basically the same problem they had before Matter launched.

Only now manufacturers have a playbook to follow that supposedly makes their devices work with everyone — easy, right? Apparently not. My theory is that it’s how the platforms interact with the devices that is causing many of these problems — something manufacturers have no control over.

This was somewhat implied by Thread Group, the organization that runs the Thread protocol, when I asked for comment on the issues users were seeing with Ikea’s Matter devices. “A seamless onboarding experience relies on orchestrating multiple components and layers within the smart home ecosystem, including the mobile app, application protocol, network protocol, platform software, and hardware design,” Ann Olivo, VP of marketing for Thread Group, told me via email. “While Thread provides a robust and secure foundation at the network layer, optimizing the end-to-end experience requires ongoing collaboration across all these interconnected components.”

That’s not to say Thread is blameless here. The protocol is frustratingly obtuse, and there are still too few troubleshooting solutions.

«

So: Thread is a protocol that runs over the Matter standard. Or rather, doesn’t. Six years ago I bought a ton of Ikea smart home products (mainly light bulbs) which use the Zigbee communication protocol: they are absolutely rock solid and integrate, via an Ikea hub, with Apple’s Home.

A couple of the light bulbs failed; I bought some of the newer Ikea Matter-standard bulbs. They integrate directly with Apple Home, but they’re unreliable (ignore timers, don’t respond) and they make Apple Home forget all the Zigbee Ikea products. That’s untenable. So I bought some of the (now discontinued) Ikea Zigbee bulbs on eBay, and it’s all fixed.

Matter is broken. Just like USB-C, it’s going to need a few years to mature.
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Actors, musicians and writers welcome UK U-turn on AI use of copyrighted work • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Actors, musicians and writers have welcomed the UK government’s decision to backtrack on plans to let AI firms use copyright-protected work without permission.

Technology secretary Liz Kendall said it no longer had a “preferred option” on copyright reform, having previously supported a proposal allowing tech companies to take copyrighted work – unless rights holders opted out of the process.

“We have listened,” said Kendall on Wednesday, “we have engaged extensively with creatives, AI firms, industry bodies, unions, academics and AI adopters, and that engagement has shaped our approach. This is why we can confirm today that the government no longer has a preferred option.”

The proposal had triggered a backlash from Elton John, who called the government “absolute losers” over the plans. Dua Lipa, Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, the actor Julianne Moore and the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among thousands of artists who voiced their concerns over the potential legal overhaul.

Creative industry organisations welcomed the new government stance. Equity, the actors’ trade union, said the move was “recognition that selling out the UK’s creative industries to benefit US tech companies would’ve been an act of national self-sabotage”.

UK Music, a trade body representing the UK music industry including the Musicians’ Union, said it was “delighted” but urged the government to rule out the proposal altogether. The Society of Authors said the announcement was a “hard-won” moment for writers and creators, while the News Media Association – whose members include the Guardian – said giving away the UK’s “goldmine” of creative content was not the way to drive economic growth.

Intellectual property has become a key battleground in the development of AI because the technology requires vast amounts of data, including copyright-protected work taken from the open web, to develop tools such as chatbots and image generators.

«

There’s a certain Canute-ish feel to all this. The government no longer having a “preferred option” doesn’t mean it’s going to find a way to force AI companies to not use copyrighted material. It just means it’s shrugging its shoulders. Which means the people creating content will lose out.
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Why lab coats are white • Asimov Press

Donna Vatnick:

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In the 1960s, David Chambers, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, instructed teachers to give children a blank sheet of paper and ask them to draw a scientist. Chambers repeated this experiment many times over eleven years, collecting more than 4,800 drawings. The results were surprisingly consistent: white lab coat, glasses, beakers, mysterious machinery, someone saying “eureka!” The study has since been repeated dozens of times. While some details have changed, with beakers replaced by rockets, microscopes by vaccines, or men by women (sometimes), the scientist always wears a white lab coat.

The white lab coat, however, only came to symbolize scientists in the 20th century. Before that, cartoonists satirized chemists by portraying their craft as sorcery whose practitioners wore long dark robes, and painters drew naturalists in waistcoats and breeches against backdrops of plants and landscapes. It was really surgery, more than any other scientific discipline, that gave us the white laboratory coat. Today, scientists don a variety of multicolored, specialized protective equipment to suit the needs of their field, but the fact that children still inextricably link white lab coats to “scientists” says everything about how a simple garment came to exemplify a profession’s public image.

To understand how the white lab coat arose, we have to go back to Victorian England to examine not the scientists, but rather the fashion of that time.

In mid-19th-century England, so-called “gentlemen of science” dressed in dark frock coats. In his 1885 portrait, Louis Pasteur stood in his laboratory, rabies sample in hand, in a black frock coat, waistcoat, and black cravat. Charles Darwin, whose personal home was his “laboratory,” sported a similar style. John Snow, the epidemiologist best known for tracing the source of London’s cholera epidemic, inspected the Broad Street pump while dressed like a banker, in a multipiece suit and tie.

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Like all the Asimov work, this is a great read.
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Microsoft weighs legal action over $50bn Amazon-OpenAI cloud deal • Financial Times

Stephen Morris, George Hammond and Madhumita Murgia:

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Microsoft is weighing legal action against Amazon and OpenAI over a $50bn deal that could breach its exclusive cloud partnership with the ChatGPT maker, setting up a clash between the Big Tech rivals.

The dispute centres on whether Amazon Web Services can offer OpenAI’s new commercial product, known as Frontier, without violating a longstanding agreement that requires all access to the startup’s models to be routed through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The arrangement is highly lucrative for Microsoft, with OpenAI’s products helping drive Azure revenues to record highs.

Amazon and OpenAI say they are building a system that works around the contract. Microsoft executives dispute this, saying the approach is not feasible and would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their agreement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ahead of Frontier’s launch, the companies were still in talks to resolve the dispute without litigation, they added.

«

Microsoft is essentially saying that it owns OpenAI, and everything it produces, and gets first dibs and power of refusal over what it does. That’s quite a veto power.
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Elon Musk’s xAI sued for turning three girls’ real photos into AI CSAM • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

A tip from an anonymous Discord user led cops to find what may be the first confirmed Grok-generated child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) that Elon Musk’s xAI can’t easily dismiss as nonexistent.

As recently as January, Musk denied that Grok generated any CSAM during a scandal in which xAI refused to update filters to block the chatbot from nudifying images of real people.

At the height of the controversy, researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok generated approximately three million sexualized images, of which about 23,000 images depicted apparent children. Rather than fix Grok, xAI limited access to the system to paying subscribers. That kept the most shocking outputs from circulating on X, but the worst of it was not posted there, Wired reported.

Instead, it was generated on Grok Imagine. Digging into the standalone app, a researcher in January found that a little less than 10% of about 800 Imagine outputs reviewed appeared to include CSAM. In an X post following that revelation, Musk continued rejecting the evidence and insisted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok,” emphasizing that he’d seen “literally zero.”

However, Musk may now be forced to finally confront Grok’s CSAM problem after a Discord user reached out to a victim, prompting law enforcement to get involved.

In a proposed class-action lawsuit filed Monday, three young girls from Tennessee and their guardians accused Musk of intentionally designing Grok to “profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.” They estimated that “at least thousands of minors” were victimized and have asked a US district court for an injunction to finally end Grok’s harmful outputs. They also seek damages, including punitive damages, for all minors harmed.

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Fuel rations and no air con: south-east Asian nations race to conserve energy • The Guardian

Rebecca Ratcliffe and Guill Ramos:

»

In Thailand, news anchors ditched their jackets on air as the government called on the public to reduce their use of air conditioning to save energy. In the Philippines, many government workers are now operating on a four-day week. In Vietnam, officials have urged employers to allow staff to work from home.

Across south-east Asia, governments are scrambling to find ways to conserve energy and shield the public from soaring costs as war in the Middle East causes what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

Asia, which relies heavily on imported energy, much of which passes through the strait of Hormuz, is acutely affected by the crisis. In the Philippines, which depends on the Gulf for 90% of its oil requirements, the government is introducing cash handouts for drivers of public transport vehicles, and has told government agencies to cut electricity and fuel use by between 10 and 20%.

The price increases are already causing misery for many. Elmer Carrascal, 58, who drives a jeepney, vehicles that make up the backbone of the country’s transport system, said his income has fallen dramatically, by more than half, since the war.

“Before, I spent 700 pesos [£8.80] on diesel and took home around 1,000 pesos per day. Now I only earn 400 pesos. It’s not even enough for food,” said Carrascal, who has plied the roads of Mandaluyong City, in the capital region, for 35 years.

“How far can your 400 go? Rice alone is 65 per kg.”

On Tuesday, the Philippine senate granted the president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, emergency powers to temporarily suspend or reduce excise taxes on oil, but has warned it is unclear how long the crisis will last.

“We are victims of a war that is not of our choosing,” Marcos said earlier this month. “But we control how we will protect the Filipino,” he said, as he announced a series of energy-saving measures.

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Trump’s impulsive attack on Iran (or do we blame Israel?) is having effects far beyond the Middle East.
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On the Wired renaissance • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

There’s been some murmuring among the tech barons about buying Wired magazine and turning it back into the magazine they remember from their youth. Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens wrote an X.com diatribe about this a couple weeks ago, where he complained that Wired still has good journalists, but they are focused on the wrong stories. “The building still has good people. The question is who owns the building.” (Anduril, you might recall, is the company building killer AI drones for the military. It’s run by weird creep Palmer Luckey. So I can see why its executives would rather Wired go back to writing VC glow-up profiles.)

YCombinator CEO Garry Tan (who likes to tell local politicians to “die slow”) loves the idea. In a blog post that was probably written by ChatGPT, Tan argues that “great tech journalism (…) doesn’t just cover technology. It creates the intellectual conditions for investment and progress. It puts a story in [an investor’s] head that sits there for nine years and then fires when the moment is right.”

Tan is a clown, but he isn’t wrong that the magazine has decisively moved away from its 90s techno-optimist roots.
Today’s New York Times features a profile of Katie Drummond, the magazine’s Editor in Chief. It’s a very good profile, well worth reading. Wired has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and, if I didn’t hate Polymarket and Kalshi, I would bet they’ll win it. The Katie Drummond era has been Wired at its finest.

And, given my documented history of reading entirely too many Wired magazines, I think that’s a nice excuse to write a bit about how the magazine has changed with the times.

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This is a good companion to yesterday’s article interviewing Katie Drummond, who has edited Wired for the past three years.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can find out how many people live within a given radius of you, or anywhere, with a new website. CC-licensed photo by Tomas 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. Crowded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Meta planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount • Reuters

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman:

»

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told ​them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke anonymously because they ​were not authorized to disclose the cuts.

“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.

If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company’s most ​significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency.” It employed nearly 79,000 people as ​of December 31, according to its latest filing.

The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, or around 13% of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.

…The company has said it plans to invest $600bn to build data centers by 2028. Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also spending at least $2bn to buy Chinese AI startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.

…Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks with its Llama 4 models last year, including criticism that it provided misleading results on the benchmarks it used for early versions. It abandoned the release of the largest version of that model, ​called Behemoth, which had been due out in the summer.

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This level of spending is not sustainable. It’s surely going to be cut back, especially with everything coming down the track as a result of the Iranian conflict.
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Arizona indicts prediction market Kalshi for running illegal gambling operation • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Stephanie Stacey and Oliver Roeder:

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Arizona’s attorney general filed criminal charges against prediction market Kalshi, accusing it of operating a gambling business without a license and offering illegal wagers on elections.

“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement on Tuesday.

While Arizona’s case is the first time criminal charges have been brought against the company, several other US states have alleged that Kalshi’s markets constitute illegal and unregulated sports betting.

“There’s clearly going to be a domino effect,” said Daniel Wallach, a lawyer who specializes in gaming law. “These are the first criminal charges filed against Kalshi anywhere in the US but they may not be the last.”

In a statement, Kalshi said: “Sadly, a state can file criminal charges on paper-thin arguments. States like Arizona want to individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to do it.”

Prediction market platforms such as Kalshi offer shares in binary outcomes, such as a certain team winning or losing a football match. Kalshi has argued that these contracts should continue to be regulated as derivatives by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, enabling it to bypass states’ sports-gambling bans or regulations by arguing that its regulatory status under the CFTC preempts state-level laws.

Arizona’s case focuses on betting contracts Kalshi offered on four separate elections, including the 2028 US presidential race and 2026 race for Arizona governor. Gambling on elections is illegal under Arizona state law.

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One can imagine this escalating all the way up to Supreme Court. Though given that that court gave gambling the green light, it’s hard to see Arizona prevailing.
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Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Researchers say they’ve discovered a supply-chain attack flooding repositories with malicious packages that contain invisible code, a technique that’s flummoxing traditional defenses designed to detect such threats.

The researchers, from firm Aikido Security, said Friday that they found 151 malicious packages that were uploaded to GitHub from March 3 to March 9. Such supply-chain attacks have been common for nearly a decade. They usually work by uploading malicious packages with code and names that closely resemble those of widely used code libraries, with the objective of tricking developers into mistakenly incorporating the former into their software. In some cases, these malicious packages are downloaded thousands of times.

The packages Aikido found this month have adopted a newer technique: selective use of code that isn’t visible when loaded into virtually all editors, terminals, and code review interfaces. While most of the code appears in normal, readable form, malicious functions and payloads—the usual telltale signs of malice—are rendered in unicode characters that are invisible to the human eye. The tactic, which Aikido said it first spotted last year, makes manual code reviews and other traditional defenses nearly useless. Other repositories hit in these attacks include NPM and Open VSX.

The malicious packages are even harder to detect because of the high quality of their visible portions.

“The malicious injections don’t arrive in obviously suspicious commits,” Aikido researchers wrote. “The surrounding changes are realistic: documentation tweaks, version bumps, small refactors, and bug fixes that are stylistically consistent with each target project.”

The researchers suspect that Glassworm—the name they assigned to the attack group—is using LLMs to generate these convincingly legitimate-appearing packages.

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Well isn’t that fun news.
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Wired’s new editor doesn’t care if the tech bros are mad • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

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In less than three years, [Katie] Drummond, 40, has transformed Wired from a fading magazine and website into a buzzy brand that has become a bright spot for Condé Nast, the publishing giant better known as the home of Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

She started its about-face by creating a politics team that landed major scoops about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including uncovering the young engineers given key roles in the project and revealing that members of DOGE’s staff had direct access to U.S. Treasury payment systems. The publication has recently been focusing on artificial intelligence, the war in Iran and the ties between technology companies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The edgier coverage has generated grumbles from parts of the tech community, including in recent weeks. Wired’s February print cover, for a feature titled “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia,” drew outrage online for its suggestive visual of two men shaking hands at crotch level through the flies of their pants. Trae Stephens, a prominent venture capitalist, argued on social media that Wired was “irreparably broken in its current form” and floated the possibility of buying it.

But Ms. Drummond’s approach appears to be working. Condé Nast does not disclose profits or losses for its publications, but Ms. Drummond said Wired had added more than 200,000 new paying subscribers in the past year, and subscription revenue increased 24% last year in the United States. Wired currently has more than 500,000 paid subscribers. It has a newsroom of around 80 people with plans to hire up to a dozen more this year, and was recently named a finalist for general excellence in the National Magazine Awards.

“We cover technology with a great deal of curiosity,” Ms. Drummond said, “with a great deal of skepticism as I think behooves any smart journalist, with an eye toward accountability, which I believe is of paramount importance in this moment.”

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How Europe and Canada can stay relevant in the AI wars • The Washington Post

Sam Winter-Levy and Anton Leicht are based at the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

»

The middle powers in the West — European countries and Canada — are increasingly hoping to chart a course through the artificial intelligence revolution independent of China and the United States.

At the Munich Security Conference last month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the rules-based order dead and laid out a road map for “a strong sovereign Europe.” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, declared that “our digital sovereignty is our digital sovereignty.” French President Emmanuel Macron, echoing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, called for “de-risking vis-à-vis all the big powers.” Days later, at an AI summit in New Delhi, the same impulse surfaced in explicitly technological terms. Delegates from over 100 countries discussed sovereign AI infrastructure and how to prevent the technology’s benefits from being captured by a handful of American firms. On paper, it was the most ambitious assertion of middle-power independence in years.

But all this hopeful and ambitious talk ignores a painful reality: It’s too late in the AI race for the middle powers to play catch-up. The leaders calling for autonomy in Munich and New Delhi are doing so at a moment in which the defining technology of the next decade is controlled by the very powers they seek independence from.

In other sectors, settling for developing homegrown second-best technology might be a viable strategy for preserving sovereignty. In AI, that’s a riskier bet. If the gap between cutting-edge and second-tier systems continues to widen, and especially if advanced AI accelerates scientific research and industrial innovation, access to the best systems could become decisive for economic growth.

…Today’s AI infrastructure projects determine tomorrow’s catch-up capacity, and middle powers lag far behind. The European Union’s up to five planned AI “gigafactories” are slated to come online between 2026 and 2027; in 2024, Elon Musk’s xAI built a cluster of comparable size in 122 days. Europe’s most ambitious AI infrastructure projects are two to three years behind the curve, an eternity in AI development. Canada has committed roughly $2bn to “sovereign AI compute” over five years; Microsoft will spend over $100bn, more than 50 times as much, on its biggest data center in Wisconsin.

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Population around a point • Tom Forth

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Human population within a distance, from any point in the world.

Select a radius and click on the map.

The data is the Global Human Settlement Layer population grid for 2025. This release was known to be less accurate for small areas, especially where there has been rapid change in population.

The bus stop, tram stop, and train/metro stop data is from Open Street Map from early 2023 and has errors. Many stops are missing, especially outside of Europe. Stops included rarely used or heritage service stops.

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Fun! Though also likely to get overloaded as everyone discovers it.
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Cuba begins restoring power after energy grid collapses in nationwide blackout • CBS News

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Officials in Cuba reported an island-wide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen. Cuba has blamed its woes on a U.S. energy blockade after President Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to it.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines noted on the social network X a “complete disconnection” of the country’s electrical system and said it was investigating. The ministry later said some “microsystems” were beginning to operate in various territories but did not go into further details.

It was the third major blackout in Cuba over the past four months. The cause was still unknown as of Monday night, Cuban state media said. 

President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Friday said the island had not received oil shipments in more than three months and was operating on solar power, natural gas and thermoelectric plants, and the government has had to postpone surgeries for tens of thousands of people.

A massive outage over a week ago affected the island’s west, leaving millions without power. In 2025, almost exactly a year ago, the country suffered a massive outage in western Cuba. 

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The US is effectively blockading Cuba, which has in the past relied on oil from Venezuela, along with Russia and Mexico. Though it can produce 40% of the petroleum it needs, that gap is the reason for the outages.
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Samsung discontinues its Galaxy Z TriFold after just three months • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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Samsung is preparing to axe its first three-panel foldable phone less than three months after launching the device in the US. Sales of the $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold will first be wound down in Korea and then discontinued in the US once remaining inventory has been cleared, an unnamed Samsung spokesperson told Bloomberg.

This follows a report from Korean media outlet Dong-A Ilbo on Monday that says the TriFold will be getting a final domestic restock today, March 17th. Samsung’s website stopped providing future restock updates for the foldable earlier this month, with the TriFold currently listed as “sold out” in the US.

It was only available to purchase directly from Samsung, with Dong-A Ilbo reporting that just 6,000 units have been stocked and sold domestically since the phone launched in Korea on December 12th. Meanwhile, Huawei is already on the second generation of its own trifold phone, but while the original Mate XT Ultimate eventually launched in other regions, the Mate XTs is still limited to China.

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Francisco Jeronimo of IDC sent out a press comment:

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“The Trifold was never intended to be a high-volume, mass-market device. It was conceived as a limited-production initiative, designed to test both technological feasibility and market reception. Samsung positioned it as an exploratory project, a forward-looking concept aimed at evaluating consumer interest, usage patterns, and design viability for next-generation form factors.

Production volumes were deliberately limited, and the initiative was not driven by short-term sales objectives but by longer-term innovation goals and learning. Reports of discontinuation should not be interpreted as a failure or a strategic withdrawal.”

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Perhaps it’s envy of Huawei, which IDC reckons has sold 1.2m trifold devices, generating $3.2bn in revenues – suggesting average prices of $2,666. There’s premium, and there’s premium.
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Why (and how) everyone is cold-calling the president • Semafor

Max Tani:

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The calls come in late at night, when the president can’t sleep. They come in when he’s watching TV in the evenings, and right after a game of golf, when he’s in a good mood. They come in early in the morning, as soon as he starts posting to Truth Social — but sometimes he’s a little snappy at that hour.

President Donald Trump’s iPhone won’t stop ringing because his Palm Beach number has become the ultimate status symbol in a town obsessed with proximity to power and influence.

This has produced a curious new form of journalism. In the two weeks since the US and Israel began military operations in Iran, Trump has done more than 30 cell phone interviews. He has become the presidential version of a drive-time radio host, picking up without screening his callers and conducting brief conversations with the public — in this case, journalists from outlets from The New York Times to Washington Reporter. One day earlier this month, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl and Rachel Scott each got separate interviews with Trump, in which he told them each how well the Iranian operation was going.

…When the president picks up, “he is often preoccupied, puts them on speaker in front of a large group of people, and he is loosely chatting and has fun messing with them,” said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to say something that reporters ought to realize: Trump isn’t taking these calls that seriously.

“Reporters who think they are being serious journalists by calling him are frankly doing themselves a disservice.”

…One television insider called the breathless Trump phone exclusives “shameless.” Another said they thought it was “silly and doesn’t add much value.” Another said the interviews were “useless.” Of course, all three acknowledged that they had at one point or another called Trump on the phone and reported out the details. But they suggested that the real offenders were others who were abusing the privilege for largely meaningless interviews and, let’s face it, clout.

“He’s having a good time and saying whatever he wants having gotten softball questions,” one journalist who has spoken to Trump told Semafor.

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So it’s a little like when everyone and their cousin had British PM Boris Johnson’s mobile number, though he might have been more coherent.
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Google Maps just got a major AI upgrade. Here’s how “Ask Maps” will work • PC Mag

Jibin Joseph:

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Google Maps can easily pull up nearby locations, but what if you’re not exactly sure what you need? A new Gemini-powered “Ask Maps” button in the app will let you ask natural-language questions about your surroundings. Plus, a dramatic 3D navigation upgrade will help you get there.

When available, the Ask Maps button will appear below the Search bar in Google Maps. The company touts its latest addition as “a new conversational experience that answers complex, real-world questions a map could never answer before.”

Tapping Ask Maps opens a chat interface familiar to Gemini users. Google says you can ask the chatbot questions like “My phone is dying — where can I charge it without having to wait in a long line for coffee?” or “Is there a public tennis court with lights on that I can play at tonight?”

You can also ask the AI to prepare an itinerary for your upcoming trip, and it will respond with details like directions, ETAs, and tips from users on how to explore a hidden gem, the best route to take, or ways to get free tickets.

Ask Maps taps into your Google Maps search and save history to provide personalized responses. If you search for a restaurant, for example, it may recommend vegan options if your past searches and saved places indicate that preference.

Each response option will include photos of the place, an AI-generated summary of user reviews, opening hours, and options to save the location or get directions. You can also share Ask Maps’s response with friends and family before deciding.

The other new Maps addition is supports for Immersive Navigation, which Google describes as the “biggest update in over a decade.” It gives you a 3D view of the buildings, overpasses, and terrain around you; video demos make it look like you’re in a driving game.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The (now Japanese-owned) company that runs car parks across the UK has fallen into administration over its unsupportable debts. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown 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. Reverse out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Car park firm NCP collapses with nearly 700 jobs at risk • BBC News

Mitchell Labiak and Emer Moreau:

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National Car Parks (NCP) has gone into administration, putting 682 jobs at risk.

The administrator, PwC, said demand for parking had not recovered to pre-Covid levels, pointing to “shifts in commuting and customer driving patterns”. It said NCP could no longer afford to pay its creditors after consistently losing money and was unable to scrap “long-term, inflexible” leases on loss-making sites.

PwC is looking to sell the business as the “best outcome” for those NCP owes money to. “All sites are open, staff remain in post, and trading continues as normal,” PwC added. “We will be engaging with landlords, employees, and other stakeholders as we explore all options.”

NCP was founded in 1931 and is one of the biggest car park operators in the UK. It runs 340 car parks across the country, including in airports, hospitals and train stations. The firm’s debts were £305m greater than the value of its assets, as of 30 September last year, according to a filing from its parent company.

Among the options to secure NCP’s future is to sell some or all of the company.

PwC said NCP had a “high concentration” of inflexible leases that prevented it from reducing costs or scrapping unprofitable car parks. Zelf Hussain, joint administrator and PwC partner, said the company had faced “a challenging trading environment” in recent years.

“Our priority on appointment is to ensure continuity of service while we undertake a detailed review of the business.”
NCP’s parent company, Park24, which is Japanese, said higher energy prices as a result of the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022 also put pressure on the business, adding to its operating costs.

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When you look at the financials, it actually made a slim operating profit (£7.6m on £233m) last year, and in 2024, but a hefty loss in 2023. But the leases and other costs dragged it into consistent losses.

NCP going bust is an eventuality I’d never have expected, based on the cost of parking there. But the trend to Work From Home has murdered it.
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Changes to UK working habits push car park group into administration • Financial Times

Megan Snaith, with some fabulous historical detail about NCP:

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The company was founded by Colonel Frederick Lucas in 1931 with a small car park in London.

It grew rapidly after it was bought by Donald Gosling and Ronald Hobson who combined it with their business, Central Car Parks, in 1959. They had spotted the opportunity of converting city bomb sites into car parks, having paid £200 for their first bomb site in Holborn, central London in 1948. NCP was sold to US company Cendant for £800m nearly 40 years later.

That deal almost broke down at the last minute after Hobson objected on the basis that he wanted to keep a single parking space for himself in central London off Oxford Street. He wanted to maintain his weekend habit of packing a flask of tea and driving there in his Bentley to try to predict where people would park.  

NCP has changed hands multiple times since then. In 2007, it was bought by Macquarie, which later sold it to its current owners, Japan’s Park24 in 2017.

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That detail about bomb sites as potential car parks always stuck for me. That’s a real “lemonade from lemons” insight.
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Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story • The Times of Israel

Emanuel Fabian:

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on X, I saw a user reply to a recent tweet of mine: “There are people saying that they have received word from you that the missile strike in Beit Shemesh on March 10th was in fact intercepted, is this true or did no such interaction occur?”

Another X user responded to my post with the video showing the Iranian ballistic missile impact in Beit Shemesh with: “was there any video of the actual impact.” (Clearly, he didn’t watch the video.)

Checking those X accounts, both appeared to be involved in gambling on the Polymarket betting site.

As far as I now understand, the emails I [had previously] received were intended to confirm whether or not a missile had hit Israel on March 10 in order to resolve a prediction on Polymarket.

Polymarket is one of the largest prediction markets in the world, where users can wager their money on the likelihood of future events, using cryptocurrency, debit or credit cards, and bank transfers. However, there are accusations that the site has been plagued by manipulation and insider trading.

The event that these people had bet on was “Iran strikes Israel on…?” More than 14 million dollars had been wagered on March 10.

The rules of the bet state: “This market will resolve to ‘Yes’ if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to ‘No’.”

However, there is a clause: “Missiles or drones that are intercepted… will not be sufficient for a ‘Yes’ resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage.”

My minor report on a missile striking an open area was now in the middle of a betting war, with those who had bet “No” on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 demanding I change my article to ensure they would win big.

More emails arrived in my inbox.

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I thought that Polymarket didn’t allow betting on wars. But of course it does. And whereas we used to think prediction markets would be a great way to guess at the future – on the “wisdom of crowds” principle – it turns out that giving people a financial interest in bending truth to match their prediction will distort them rather than give us the reading we wanted.
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Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice • The Guardian

Andrew Gregory:

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Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world.

The company had said its launch of “What People Suggest”, which provided tips from strangers, showed “the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe”.

But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision. A Google spokesperson confirmed “What People Suggest” had been scrapped. The move came as part of a “broader simplification” of its search page and had nothing to do with the quality or safety of the new feature, the spokesperson said.

The revelation comes as the company faces mounting scrutiny over its use of AI to provide millions of users with health information and advice. In January, a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk of harm by false and misleading health information in Google AI Overviews. The AI-generated summaries are shown to 2 billion people a month, and appear above traditional search results on the world’s most visited website.

Google initially sought to downplay the Guardian’s findings. The AI Overviews that alarmed independent experts linked to reputable sources and recommended seeking expert advice, the company said. Days later, Google removed AI Overviews for some but not all medical queries.

In March last year at an event in New York, Google said it planned to expand medical-related AI summaries in search. The company said it was adding a new feature, “What People Suggest”, which aimed to provide users with information from people with similar lived medical experiences.

On the day of “The Check Up” event, Karen DeSalvo, then Google’s chief health officer, wrote a blog post outlining why the company was launching the new feature, and how it would help users.

“While people come to search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences,” wrote DeSalvo. “That’s why we’re making it even easier to find this type of information on Search with a new feature labelled ‘What People Suggest’.

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Is it worth pointing out that this was always an astonishingly bad idea, but Google doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes?
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Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly “memorizing” its content with ChatGPT • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

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On Friday, Encyclopedia Britannica and dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that it used their copyrighted content to train its AI, then generated responses that were “substantially similar” to their content, as previously reported by Reuters.

According to Britannica, OpenAI repeatedly copied its content without permission, stating, “GPT-4 itself has ‘memorized’ much of Britannica’s copyrighted content and will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions on demand. The memorized examples are unauthorized copies that [OpenAI] used to train their models, including GPT-4.”

The lawsuit goes on to include examples of responses from OpenAI’s models side by side with Britannica’s text, in which entire passages appear to match word for word. Britannica also claims that OpenAI has been “cannibalizing” its web traffic by generating responses that “substitute, or directly compete” with Britannica’s content, rather than directing users to its website the way a traditional search engine would.

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Join the queue, Britannica, though its complaint does have some merit. The content of an encyclopaedia isn’t as random as the rest of the web’s contents; it’s filled with facts, but those facts are organised in a particular way.

The grumble that OpenAI isn’t sending clicks in the way that a search engine does: welcome to the new paradigm, people.
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AI agents are taking over contract negotiations • IEEE Spectrum

Michael Dumiak:

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Some of the world’s largest companies with the biggest supply chains—including Walmart, the global shipping giant Maersk, and the telecom servicer Vodafone—are now using bots powered by artificial intelligence to negotiate and maintain supplier contracts.

That these sophisticated AI systems were designed and built by a startup in Estonia is interesting; it’s even more notable that bots now routinely engage in automated contract negotiations for sprawling global enterprises. But what’s really eye-opening is that these AI agents aim to work autonomously. Which prompts a question: What will happen if the AIs start to haggle amongst themselves?

“In the future I can imagine all sorts of agents in the real physical world negotiating with one another,” says Tim Baarslag, a senior researcher in intelligent and autonomous systems at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. “Letting these bots run completely wild, I think, requires more research.”

Baarslag has wrestled with negotiation bot concepts for years (one of his peers has a running project called Pocket Negotiator). In 2017 he and his colleagues published “When Will Negotiation Agents Be Able to Represent Us?” They drew a sharp line between automated and autonomous negotiation. The difference is the freedom to negotiate independently.

The five-year-old Estonian startup Pactum is clearly marketing its bot as an autonomous agent. In addition to Maersk and Walmart, its client list now includes a wire and cable supplier and an electrical supply wholesaler (once part of Westinghouse). The startup landed a US $20m venture capital investment in July from backers including Maersk itself.

…Pactum calls its agent an autonomous negotiation suite. The system’s machine learning can analyze a massive set of complex contractual terms using historical and market data from both within and outside the company. It can send its analysis to a human user, such as a buyer or procurement officer—or, on its own, it can produce and forward a set of contract options to a vendor (mostly based on price, delivery dates, and billing cycles). The bot can take counteroffers and respond.

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Companies House vulnerability enabled company hijacking • Tax Policy

Dan Neidle:

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A major vulnerability in the Companies House website gave unauthorised access to the private dashboard of any of the five million registered companies for five months. It exposed directors’ home addresses and email addresses, and appears to have enabled attackers to change company and director details – and even file accounts.

This article sets out what we know, what we don’t, and what businesses should be doing to protect themselves.

What we confirmed: unauthorised access to any company’s dashboard; exposure of non-public personal data; submission of a change that generated a confirmation number.

What remains unconfirmed: whether the change was actually processed; how long the vulnerability existed; whether it was exploited by criminals; whether Companies House can identify affected companies.

The vulnerability is incredibly simple, and involves just pressing the “back” key at a particular time.

The vulnerability was discovered on Thursday 12 March by John Hewitt at Ghost Mail, a corporate services provider. He tried to contact Companies House immediately, but didn’t get a response – so he contacted us.

…John used the vulnerability to view the private Companies House dashboard of ClarityDW Ltd, a digital communications consultancy owned by Jonathan Phillips. Jonathan kindly gave us permission to do this.

John then used it to view the dashboard of a company I own, and to modify my own registered address. That appeared to work, as it generated a confirmation number. As you will hear, I was incredulous at what John showed me.

I then spoke to computer security specialists. To rule out the possibility that it was something specific to John’s computer, network or account, I tested the vulnerability myself… This shows the exploit revealing private information that’s not published by Companies House, such as personal email addresses and full dates of birth (and you can see that in the video, with Jonathan’s personal information masked).

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On Monday, Companies House released a statement acknowledging that “It may also have been possible for unauthorised filings — such as accounts or changes of director — to have been made on another company’s record.” So now every company just has to go through all those records and check they haven’t changed. The demand will probably overload the Companies House servers.
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Behind the curtain: Trump’s escalation trap • Axios

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen:

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Trump could pull out tomorrow. But the Iranians could keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and push oil prices so high that America would have to re-engage.

The Iranians have made it clear in private and in public that even if Trump decides to end the war, they could continue shooting missiles and rockets until they get guarantees that this is the end of the war, not just a temporary ceasefire.
Behind the scenes: Trump has grown accustomed to doing what he wants and then quickly improvising if things go south. But this time, some in his inner circle have what one official called “buyer’s remorse” — growing fears that attacking Iran was a mistake.

A source close to the administration said some key officials around Trump were reluctant or wanted more time. “He ended up saying, ‘I just want to do it,'” the source said. “He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops.”

The source said Trump was “high on his own supply” after last summer’s quick strikes in Iran and January’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: “He saw multiple decisive quick victories with extraordinary military competence.”

Reality check: Trump’s war of choice certainly looks like a military success so far. Iran’s missile and drone launches have greatly decreased, indicating it’s running out of weapons or the ability to fire them.

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I’m not sure about the reality check. Iran has an unknown number of drones, and mines, which it can use to harass transport in the Strait.
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Why Hormuz will haunt us long after this war ends • Financial Times

Gideon Rachman:

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The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most foreseen “unforeseen problems” in history. For decades, academics and game theorists have speculated about the possibility that, in wartime, Iran could choke off the narrow waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil exports pass.

Donald Trump was warned of the danger to the strait as America and Israel prepared to attack Iran. But the US president waved away these concerns, predicting instead that the Islamic republic would swiftly capitulate.

A conflict with Iran that started with vague war aims now has one clear and overriding objective: reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Ironically and infuriatingly, the only reason the strait is closed is because the US and Israel went to war in the first place.

It is not in Trump’s power to reopen this vital sea passage by declaring victory and walking away. Instead his war with Iran — and the particular issue of the Strait of Hormuz — will define the rest of his presidency and may haunt his successors.

That is because the strait’s closure creates both an immediate crisis and a long-term strategic quandary. The current problem is that the longer it is closed, the greater the threat of a global recession. The future dilemma is that Iran now knows that control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it a stranglehold over the world economy. Even if it relaxes its grip in the short term, it can tighten it again in future.

The difficulties of reopening the strait are already very apparent. Iran does not have to sink or impede every tanker that tries to pass through. The spate of attacks already carried out — and the threat of new ones — has been enough to persuade ship owners, crews and insurers to steer clear.

…Trump is now asking America’s allies to send their navies to break the Iranian chokehold on the strait. He has even appealed to Beijing. The UK, the EU and China do have a real interest in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But they will be understandably reluctant to put their own forces at risk to solve a problem that they did not create and that the US navy cannot fix on its own.

A year of tariffs, threats and insults from the Trump administration towards its European allies has also burned through goodwill towards Washington. They also know that any navy operating in the Strait of Hormuz would be very vulnerable to Iranian attacks — and might have to keep the operation up over many months.

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The Curse of the Long Boom • WIRED

David Karpf:

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Back in February I posted some reflections on what I’m looking for in the WIRED back catalog. Here’s how I phrased it then: “All of my best thinking comes from getting stuff wrong. That’s the angle from which I approach all social science research questions.” The whole point of making predictions, from this perspective, is to help yourself identify the limits of your own knowledge, leading to harder questions that improve your understanding of the world.

Credit to Dan Davies—his coinage [“if you don’t make predictions, you never know what to be surprised by”] is so much pithier.

He also provides a corollary: “If you don’t make recommendations, you won’t know what to be disappointed by.”

Let me offer a second corollary: “If you retrofit your predictions to insist they were right after all, you’ll never learn a single damn thing.”

I mention this because, as you might imagine, I run into a lot of incorrect predictions as I read through the WIRED archive. Back in the ’90s, WIRED was chock-full of a very particular style of futurism—one that has not aged especially well.

In keeping with Davies’ Law, this presents a lovely opportunity. I’m rereading the entire magazine back catalog to understand how emerging technologies looked, take stock of where people thought the world was headed, and draw lessons from the resulting surprises.

The thing that sets me back on my heels, though, is that a lot of those old WIRED techno-optimists are still out there making predictions today. And to hear them tell it, they were right all along.

Huh?

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The folks at Wired have been cheating to protect their Long Boom story for ages. Karpf has been detailing all Wired’s mad but also self-correcting predictions on his Substack, but has ceased writing there. (Thanks Lloyd W for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The number of human bank tellers has slumped dramatically since 2010 in the US. But it isn’t because of ATMs. So why? CC-licensed photo by Eric Lubbers 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. Telling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did • David Oks

David Oks:

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So what happened to bank tellers [whose numbers in the US have dropped precipitously since 2010]? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

The answer, I think, is complementarity.

In my last piece, on why I don’t think imminent mass job loss from AI is likely, I talked a lot about complementarity. The core point I made was that labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage: the relevant question for labor impacts is not whether AI can do the tasks that humans can do, but rather whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone. And I suggested that given the vast number of frictions and bottlenecks that exist in any human domain—domains that are, after all, defined around human labor in all its warts and eccentricities, with workflows designed around humans in mind—we should expect to see a serious gap between the incredible power of the technology and its impacts on economic life.

That gap will probably close faster than previous gaps did: AI is not “like” electricity or the steam engine; an AI system is literally a machine that can think and do things itself. But the gap exists, and will exist even as the technology continues to amaze us with what it can now accomplish.

But by talking about why ATMs didn’t displace bank tellers but iPhones did, I want to highlight an important corollary, which is that the true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms. …When a technology automates some of what a human does within an existing paradigm, even the vast majority of what a human does within it, it’s quite rare for it to actually get rid of the human, because the definition of the paradigm around human-shaped roles creates all sorts of bottlenecks and frictions that demand human involvement. It’s only when we see the construction of entirely new paradigms that the full power of a technology can be realized. The ATM substituted tasks; but the iPhone made them irrelevant.

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This is a very thoughtful, and insightful piece which offers a lot of food for thought. In the town where I live, there used to be at least five banks and two building society branches, with attendant staff (and five ATMs total); now there are two building societies, one bank, and two ATMs. I haven’t been into a bank branch for years; the last time I did was when I was trying to get some copper coins converted into their equivalent in pounds. (Two of the banks refused.)
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AI companies want to use improv actors to train AI on human emotion • The Verge

Hayden Field:

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If you’ve got strong creative instincts, the ability to authentically portray emotion, and are capable of staying true to a character’s voice throughout a scene, there’s a job listing calling for your experience.

The catch: You won’t be performing in a theater, a film studio, or an underground performance space. You’d be using your talents to train an AI model for “one of the leading AI companies,” according to the open role posted by Handshake, a company that provides training data to OpenAI and other labs.

Handshake AI is one of a handful of companies of its kind, scrambling to provide more and more niche or specific training data to AI labs in order to feed the models. AI models are often described as “jagged,” meaning they’re typically great at some surprisingly complex tasks but fail deeply at some simple ones. AI companies are trying to fix the gaps in their models’ knowledge with specialized data labeling, and companies like Handshake, Mercor, and Scale AI have adjusted accordingly, hiring professionals in a wide range of industries.

Handshake’s demand for training data tripled last summer, as The Verge reported in December, and the company surpassed a $150 million run rate in November, scrambling to keep up with demand. Handshake and its competitors have touted their networks of tens of thousands (or more) professionals in white-collar industries, from chemists and doctors to lawyers and screenwriters. Many of these professionals worry they’re training AI models in a way that will make their careers obsolete even quicker than may have happened otherwise.

And now the leading AI labs have come for sketch comics, improv actors, and more.

…it’s looking for people who can essentially “test the limits of the world’s top LLMs’ understanding” by teaching the models how to recognize or replicate human tone and emotions. “Emotional awareness” is one of the requirements, for instance, specifically the “ability to recognize, express, and shift between emotions in a way that feels authentic and human.” The job listing also called for “interactions that feel grounded, human, and fun to play.”

Handshake declined to comment, and the listing does not specify what the training data will be used for.

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LATENT: Learns Athletic humanoid TEnnis skills from imperfect human motioN daTa • Github

Li Yi et al, Tsinghua University:

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Human athletes demonstrate versatile and highly-dynamic tennis skills to successfully conduct competitive rallies with a high-speed tennis ball. However, reproducing such behaviors on humanoid robots is difficult, partially due to the lack of perfect humanoid action data or human kinematic motion data in tennis scenarios as reference.

In this work, we propose LATENT, a system that Learns Athletic humanoid TEnnis skills from imperfect human motioN daTa. The imperfect human motion data consist only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches, thereby significantly reducing the difficulty of data collection.

Our key insight is that, despite being imperfect, such quasi-realistic data still provide priors about human primitive skills in tennis scenarios. With further correction and composition, we learn a humanoid policy that can consistently strike incoming balls under a wide range of conditions and return them to target locations, while preserving natural motion styles.

We also propose a series of designs for robust sim-to-real transfer and deploy our policy on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our method achieves surprising results in the real world and can stably sustain multi-shot rallies with human players.

«

This is the paper. It’s going to be interesting to see how it learns to serve: one assumes it will be extremely consistent and hit it very hard. The question is how long it will take before this is playing at a serious standard. Train it on Alcaraz, you’ll see a hell of an improvement.

Definitely worth going to the page linked here to see the videos! I’ve seen worse from humans, to be honest.
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“This is not the computer for you” • Sam Henri Gold

Sam Henri Gold:

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There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.

The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews.

The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spinning rust. I was nine. I had no business doing this. I did it every day after school until my parents made me go to bed.

«

He’s absolutely right: there’s a terrible tendency for reviewers to say “I have decided that this machine is not correct for you, ethereal internet reader, and I will tell you which people it is correct for.” In reality, we use what we can. It’s actually quite rare to have the exact perfect machine for your needs.
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Memory crunch threatens to kneecap Chromebook shipments • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

Chromebooks, the low-cost computing option popular with education buyers, will be squeezed hardest this year as memory prices spiral out of control.

According to the mystics at Omdia, total global PC shipments are on track to decline 12% in 2026: desktop PCs by 10% to 53.2m units and laptops by 12% to 192.2m units.

…Omdia expects the entry-level bracket to experience the biggest slowdown. ChromeOS platforms are forecast to shrink 27.6% year-on-year in 2026, compared to 12.1% for Windows and 4.8% for macOS.

“The supply-driven downturn in 2026 will not affect all PC platforms equally,” said Kieren Jessop, research manager at Omdia.

“Chrome devices face the steepest decline at 28 percent, as the education-heavy platform is particularly exposed to tighter component allocation, lower margins, and the discontinuation of some memory and storage products.”

Apple’s “vertically integrated supply chain and premium positioning” mean it is comparatively sheltered from memory dynamics.

The forecast 12% drop in PC shipments, however, is based on an expected minimum 60% rise in memory and storage prices during the first quarter, with the hope that subsequent increases throughout 2026 will moderate as pressure eases. Things could deteriorate, pushing PC shipments toward a 15% decline, possibly even greater.

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Not that Apple intended it, but launching the Neo into a market where rivals are being squeezed might turn out to be a smart move.
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Buzzfeed has “substantial doubt” it can stay in business • CNN Business

Ramishah Maruf:

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Buzzfeed, the digital media company that took the mid-2010s by storm, said on Thursday it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business.

In an earnings report released Thursday, Buzzfeed said it has engaged in “strategic conversations” about relieving its liquidity issues.

“We believe there is a gap between the value of our individual assets and our market capitalization that suggests significant unrecognized upside,” founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said.

The company was $165m in debt three years ago; that’s been slashed by more than 65%, Buzzfeed said. But Matt Omer, Buzzfeed’s chief financial officer, said the company is still burdened by legacy commitments. Alongside its namesake, Buzzfeed also owns news site Huffpost and online food network Tasty.

“We’re exploring strategic options to complete the work we started years ago and position the Company to operate profitably on a sustainable basis,” Omer said in the earnings statement.

Peretti gave a hint of what that could look like in the statement: “In 2026, our focus is demonstrating the value of our brands, Studio IP, and new AI apps to the market.”

In 2025, Buzzfeed had a net loss of $57.3m, according to its earning report. The company noted it did not have enough resources to fund its cash obligations for the next year.

The decline of Buzzfeed’s digital empire, synonymous with viral videos and online quizzes, has been playing out since its IPO in 2021.

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Strong suspicion that this is going to get broken up for parts. Back in April 2023 there was a link here to “How Buzzfeed News went bust“. Now the parent seems to be heading the same way. It says a lot about the challenge of digital media nowadays. The old names – Guardian, etc – are still going, decades or centuries later. Meanwhile after 20 years Buzzfeed, which was feted by Ben Thompson back in March 2015 as “the most important news organisation in the world”, looks close to the edge.
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Australia releases six days’ worth of petrol and five of diesel from emergency stockpile • ABC News

Jake Evans:

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Australia will make available about six days’ worth of petrol from its emergency stockpile and five days of diesel, the first use of its fuel reserves since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Australia currently holds 36 days’ worth of petrol supply, 29 days’ worth of jet fuel and 32 days’ worth of diesel, according to the latest data.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the fuel would not flow immediately due to the complexities of supply chains, but it would give fuel retailers flexibility to manage their supply.

“The minimum stock obligation which was introduced … for this purpose, [for] the rainy day, is now necessary,” Mr Bowen said.

“There is a war. I think war ticks the boxes of crisis.”

Reserves for petrol and diesel already sit above the minimum requirements established by the government in 2023.

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A month’s worth of petrol supply? That doesn’t seem like a lot when the principal transport route is closed. As someone remarked, Australia is a couple of months away from Mad Max (the first one, with Mel Gibson).
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Bahrain’s Alba shuts 19% of aluminium capacity as Hormuz disruption continues • Reuters

Tom Daly:

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Aluminium Bahrain, known as Alba, said on Sunday it had initiated a shutdown of three aluminium smelting lines accounting for 19% of its capacity to preserve business continuity amid ongoing ​disruption in the Strait of Hormuz.

The closures are the latest impact ​on the Middle East aluminium sector, which accounts for around 9% of global supply, from the US-Israeli war on Iran. Fears of shortages ​propelled London Metal Exchange aluminium to a nearly four-year high of $3,546.50 per metric ​ton on Thursday.

Alba, which has smelting capacity of 1.62 million tons of aluminium per year, said in a statement it had initiated a “controlled and safe shutdown” of reduction lines 1, 2 ​and 3.

“This targeted, line-specific action is designed to optimise the utilisation of ​Alba’s existing raw materials inventory and prioritise operational stability across Reduction Lines 4, 5 and 6,” added Alba, which describes itself as the “world’s largest aluminium smelter on one site.”

The company had issued force majeure on March 4 since it was unable to ship metal to customers due to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The ​closure has also ​left Middle East smelters unable to bring in vessels carrying their key raw material, alumina.

Energy supply is another issue for smelters. Qatar’s Qatalum had ​begun a shutdown on March 3 due to a suspension ​of its gas supply but will now operate at 60% capacity.

«

The ripple effects of this completely unfocussed assault on Iran are going to go on and on.
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Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company – Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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Google Fiber, now officially called GFiber, is being sold to private equity firm Stonepeak and will be combined with cable-and-fiber firm Astound Broadband to create a larger Internet service provider.

Google owner Alphabet announced last Wednesday that it will keep only a minority stake in the fiber ISP that launched with grand ambitions in 2012 but scaled back its expansion plans in 2016. Alphabet and Astound owner Stonepeak announced “an agreement to combine GFiber with Astound Broadband, creating a leading independent fiber provider,” with the merged company to be “majority owned by Stonepeak, an investment firm specializing in infrastructure and real assets.”

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions, with an expected closing date in Q4 of this year. The sale price was not disclosed. The deal will help GFiber take “a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence” and obtain the “external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth,” the announcement said.

«

Google Fiber [sic] launched with the intention of being the “no data caps, no hidden fees, good prices, high speeds” provider which would shame rivals into improving their services.

With private equity taking over.. one doesn’t expect any of those to hold. Does Google just get bored with things? Or is its management not capable of looking after more than a certain number of things at once?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the past 20 years, Paris has cut car traffic in half, and expanded cycle lanes sixfold. Will the mayoral election reverse that? CC-licensed photo by PhotoLanda on Flickr.

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

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

My year as a degenerate sports gambler • The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Paris beat the car • Financial Times

Simon Kuper:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Katie Notopoulos:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Booth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Johnson:

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

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

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

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

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

Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss and Simon Evans:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Anderson:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Allen Frazier:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miles Klee:

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

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

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

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

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

Desalination plants are in widespread use in Gulf states, which rely on their output. But they haven’t been targeted in the latest conflict. Why? CC-licensed photo by GRID-Arendal on Flickr.

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

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

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

Juan Cruz Martinez:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joost Boer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And once that clicked, the weight lifted.

«

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

Daniel Dale:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Tim Harford:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Damien Gayle:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Chris Arnade:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connor Jones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

The A4 flyover at Brentford is more than 60 years old, and problems with it emerged almost immediately – and have only got worse since. CC-licensed photo by stevekeiretsu on Flickr.

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

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

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

Aisha Down:

»

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

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

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

Here are some of the key details at a glance.

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

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

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

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

«

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

Kate Knibbs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Chris Marshall:

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

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

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

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

»

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

«

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

»

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

«

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

«

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

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

Robert McMillan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Milmo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saahil Desai:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Graves:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isiah Poritz and Kurt Wagner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The maths behind mammograms is complicated – and the human stories they hide even more so. CC-licensed photo by Kristie Wells on Flickr.

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

Gone (almost) phishin’ • Ma.tt

Matt Mullenweg:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence. *Click*.

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

The Editors:

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

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

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

Timothy B. Lee, writing in April 2023:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mo Perry is a journalist and actor:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Peters:

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

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

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

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

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

Rory White:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon Goldman:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Randa:

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

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

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

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

Ben Spencer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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