Overall, airlines are a lossmaking business. Yet there’s plenty of money to be made. Why doesn’t the industry work? CC-licensed photo by Can Pac Swire 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. Primed for takeoff. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Americans oppose AI data centres in their area • Gallup

Jeffrey Jones:

»

Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centres for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favour these projects, with 7% strongly in favour.

These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data centre construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. These data centres house computing equipment that helps power AI technology used by businesses, universities and other institutions. The centres cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.

The data centre question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data centre construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.

The March survey asked people to rate their level of concern about the environmental impact of AI data centres: 46% say they worry a great deal and 24% a fair amount, largely mirroring the degrees of opposition to data centre construction.

…Americans who favour the building of a data centre in their area mostly cite the potential economic benefits. Opponents of data centres have more varied reasons for their position, but they focus mostly on environmental concerns.

Half of opponents mention data centres’ excessive use of resources, including 18% each mentioning their use of water and energy; 16% mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution.

«

Opposition is higher than it ever was for a nuclear power plant. That’s quite an achievement for something which has absolutely minimal risk and should be income- and job-generating for an area: the tech bros have utterly pissed in the pool. Yet concern about future job losses or Terminators is minimal – single-digit percents.

Even so, these concerns won’t go away by saying “don’t worry”. The tech bro industry has a problem.
unique link to this extract

Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz – Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Iran claims it will charge US tech companies fees for using undersea Internet cables that run beneath the contested Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes. The war has already halted multiple projects and led to the suspension of cable repairs in the region—and the latest Iranian threats may accelerate efforts by Big Tech and Gulf countries to find alternative routes for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz’s digital chokepoint.

The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We will impose fees on internet cables”, Zolfaghari wrote in a May 9 post. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters.

But Tasnim and Fars, both Iranian state-linked media channels, laid out more detailed proposals on how Iran could charge license fees to US tech giants for the use and maintenance of undersea cables carrying regional Internet traffic, according to The Guardian. For example, the Tasnim plan described charging tech companies—specifically naming Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—license fees for cable usage while also claiming that Iran alone has the right to repair and maintain the subsea cables.

More than 99% of international Internet traffic runs through the global network of undersea cables that crisscross various oceans, connecting continents and islands. The major active cables running through the Strait of Hormuz primarily serve the Gulf countries in the region. They include the Asia Africa Europe-1, FALCON, and the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research organization.

«

The Iran “war” – really, an unprovoked attack by the US and Israel on the country in the hope of decapitating the regime, an aim that utterly failed – will be seen in the future as having finally shifted the balance of power away from the US. Suddenly, everyone’s the Mafia, pointing out that you’ve got a nice undersea cable there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
unique link to this extract

The strange reason nearly all humans are right-handed • The Brighter Side of News

Hannah Shavit-Weiner:

»

Roughly nine out of 10 people favor their right hand, a pattern so common it can feel almost invisible. Yet in evolutionary terms, it is deeply strange. No other primate species comes close to showing such a strong, consistent population-wide bias.

A new analysis suggests that this familiar human trait may have grown out of two of the biggest changes in our evolutionary history: standing upright and growing a larger brain.

Researchers led by the University of Oxford examined handedness across 41 species of monkeys and apes. They drew on data from 2,025 individuals. Their results, published in PLOS Biology, suggest humans no longer look like an outlier once two factors are taken into account. These two factors are brain size and the relative length of the arms compared with the legs, a standard marker tied to bipedalism.

That matters because human handedness has long resisted easy explanation.

Scientists have spent years tracing its roots in genes, brain specialization and development. Hand preference seems to begin early, possibly even before birth, and it becomes more established over time. But none of that has fully answered the bigger question of why humans, unlike other primates, ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed in the first place.

«

The PLOS paper basically boils down to “we dunno, maybe it’s this, because primates with smaller brains that aren’t upright don’t do this”. There doesn’t seem to be any clear gradient in handedness as one moves through the primates. Handedness remains a mystery: it seems to be a combination of genetics, biology and environment. Which genes, which biology, what environment? We don’t know.
unique link to this extract

Sam Altman backs “micropayment” model for AI agents to compensate publishers • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

Late last month, Sam Altman sat down with Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, for a podcast episode of Re:think, the publication’s marketing and branded content studio. One clip has been making the rounds on social media the past couple days. In a rare moment, Altman was asked point blank by a media executive what he thinks the future of publishing will look like on the web. His answer, in short: micropayments. To be clear, payments made by AI agents, not readers directly (Elon Musk and others have proposed that idea before, and there are a lot of reasons it hasn’t taken off).

In a caveat at the top of the conversation, Thompson said he would leave many of the most “controversial issues” that he wanted to ask Altman about to “journalists at The Atlantic.” But for one brief moment, Thompson did ask the OpenAI co-founder how he thought media companies can survive the decline of traditional search, and the rise of AI agents, who may browse the web on a human’s behalf.

…The micropayments model is not merely a hypothetical, but one already being explored by a host of Silicon Valley startups and more established Internet infrastructure companies. Tollbit collects “digital tolls” for AI bots, monetizing every access and scrape. Prorata.ai compensates publishers proportionally for how much their IP shows up in AI answers. And last summer, Cloudflare launched its pay-per-crawl marketplace to facilitate these transactions for the roughly 20% of all websites that use its services.

Altman’s answer is an indication that OpenAI may be moving toward these emerging business models for news publishers.

«

I still do not think that micropayments for publishing will ever work. The reason is simple: you’d get a race to the bottom (my site is cheaper! My site is even cheaper! Wait, my site is free, with ads!) and the malware which would extract money or sign people (or agents) up to subscriptions on the sly would explode. It’s yet another of those things that I believe Won’t Happen Despite Being Extremely Desirable, and it goes into the drawer alongside nuclear fusion and quantum computing. (OK, the desirability of quantum computing isn’t that obvious.)
unique link to this extract

ArXiv to ban researchers for a year if they submit AI slop • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

»

ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. 

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”

Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. 

Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule—meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned—but that decisions will be open to appeal.

…AI-generated, fabricated citations are a huge problem in research. A recent study by Columbia University researchers examined 2.5 million biomedical papers across three years, and found that one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 contained fabricated references; In 2023, it was one in 2,828, and in 2025, one in 458.

«

This is going to be fun to watch. Will there be time to go back over submitted research to see whether those contain AI slop too?
unique link to this extract

The three cylinder problem: when AI models choose beauty over truth • Rabdology

Robert Ghrist et al:

»

Here is a problem that a good geometry student can solve in twenty minutes. We gave it to four of the world’s most advanced AI models and watched what happened. Three of them got it wrong — and the way they got it wrong tells you something different about the state of AI mathematical reasoning than the usual benchmarks.

Consider a cube of side length 2, aligned with the coordinate axes. Place three cylinders inside it, each of height 2 and radius R, each aligned with some coordinate axis. The cylinders may not intersect. What is the maximal R?

The problem is clean; the setup is elementary. You could explain it to anyone who has taken geometry.

If you assign one cylinder to each axis — one along x, one along y, one along z — you get a beautiful configuration. The three cylinders nestle into the cube like the bones of a Steinmetz solid, each touching the other two tangentially, each grazing the cube’s faces. The maximal radius under this arrangement is R = 1/2. The geometry is tight, symmetric, and satisfying. Every constraint binds simultaneously. It is the kind of answer that makes you think you are done.

You are not.

«

This was tested against AI models in January and February; they didn’t get the optimal solution. By May, they did. The blog is the work of Rabdos, which seems to be founded by high-level mathematicians.
unique link to this extract

‘The Future of Truth’ contains quotes made up by AI • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

»

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in the statement. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”

“The Future of Truth” was published by an imprint of BenBella Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. BenBella Books, which operates independently of Simon and Schuster, did not respond to a request for comment. Simon and Schuster declined to comment.

«

We’re in the early stages of this sort of thing, so of course you’re going to get the egregious egg-on-face examples. But really, you’d think that–oh, never mind. Of course he didn’t. And here’s where it got really bad: one of the made-up quotes was attributed to Kara Swisher, the doyenne Silicon Valley journalist. That’s a mistake on a par with calling a Great White shark vegetarian to its face.
unique link to this extract

Why airlines are always going bankrupt – David Oks

David Oks:

»

…explanations that cite shocks or bad management [for airlines’ inability to make money, collectively, in the long term] either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

…One of the central ideas in the study of cooperative games is the idea of the core. The “core” of a game is simply the set of outcomes that no coalition of players can improve upon by breaking away and dealing among themselves. If an outcome is “in the core,” it’s stable, such that nobody can propose a side deal that makes every member of some subgroup better off; if the core is “empty,” then every arrangement is vulnerable to being undercut by some side-coalition, and the market has no resting point, no stable equilibrium. It cycles, destabilizes, and, without outside intervention of some kind, eventually breaks down.

Airlines are the classic example of an “empty core” industry: an industry that is structurally incapable of reaching competitive equilibrium. But why is it that airlines have an empty core, while other industries—ones that also have plenty of competition, but converge on healthy margins and stable prices—don’t?

«

The answer is subtle, but seems to boil down to: the industry can’t support an integer number of airlines. X is too few; X+1 is too many. Whatever X happens to be. (Via John Naughton.)
unique link to this extract

Google’s Android-powered laptops are called Googlebooks, and they’re coming this year • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Google says it designed Googlebooks from the ground up with Gemini Intelligence, and it all starts with the cursor. Google calls this the Magic Pointer. Just wiggle the cursor back and forth, and it will activate a full-screen Gemini experience. The AI will see what’s on your screen so it can make contextual suggestions and pull in data from multiple apps.

What can you do with that? Well, it’s all a bit vague. Google’s demos show how Magic Pointer can be used to select multiple images and instantly combine them with Nano Banana. Google also says you can use the cursor in AI mode to do things like suggest a calendar appointment simply by pointing it at the date in an email. Magic Cue, which has been available on Pixel phones since last year, will also be part of Googlebooks. This feature can recommend actions and surface information based on context like messages and emails.

There’s definitely a problem with discoverability in AI features, but it’s uncertain how many useful things generative AI can do with screen context. The best Microsoft could manage was Recall, and we all know how that went. So far, Google’s Magic Cue on phones hasn’t been a game changer—in fact, it rarely shows up at all. Can a laptop do any better?

«

Open question. Also, who’s using laptops these days, and to do what? Also: do schools, which have been a major buyer of Chromebooks, really want this stuff built in to distract pupils?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The collective noun for owls is a “parliament” – but how did they, and other animals, get their collective nouns? CC-licensed photo by Heather 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. Thinking about it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Jury rejects Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

»

A federal judge dismissed all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI on Monday after a jury found that he exceeded the statute of limitations in a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company.

The decision is an outright win for OpenAI in a trial that pitted Musk against the maker of ChatGPT and two of the men with whom he co-founded the company in 2015: OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after a conflict with Brockman and Altman over who would control the organization. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

After a three-week trial in Oakland, California, that featured hundreds of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Musk, Altman and a parade of former OpenAI executives and board members, the jury deliberated for just two hours.

…“It is a major pie in the face for the world‘s wealthiest man. He had top legal counsel, and to lose on statute-of-limitations grounds is extremely embarrassing,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a corporate litigation lawyer who was not involved in the case. “Conversely, this is a massive win for Altman, who went toe-to-toe with the world’s wealthiest man and won.”

OpenAI had argued in court that Musk’s lawsuit was motivated in part by a desire to hurt a competitor to his own, for-profit AI venture, xAI, founded in 2023.

Hours after the verdict was read, Musk criticized the judge’s decision in a post on X, his social media platform, and said he would appeal. “This illustrates why the ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent,” he wrote. “She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”

«

Except that the jury accepted OpenAI’s argument that Musk had known about the proposed change since 2021, which gave him plenty of time to raise proper objections. Musk’s Trumpian whining is absolutely typical: do it wrong, and complain.
unique link to this extract

Tipping point looms for global energy crisis • Financial Times

Malcolm Moore, Sam Fleming and Jonathan Vincent:

»

Nearly 80 countries have now introduced emergency measures to protect their economies as the world approaches a new, more dangerous phase in the energy crisis driven by the Iran war.

Governments are stepping up their responses ahead of a looming tipping point, when traders warn that oil prices could jump again sharply unless more fuel trapped in the Gulf can be exported through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

Paul Diggle, chief economist at fund manager Aberdeen, said his team was now examining a scenario where Brent crude rockets to $180 a barrel, causing surging inflation and recessions in a host of European and Asian countries.

“We are taking that outcome very seriously,” he told the FT, adding that it was not yet his base case. “We are living on borrowed time.”

Demand for air conditioning and holiday travel at the start of the northern hemisphere’s summer will put further strain on supplies of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, when global stocks are already falling at the fastest rate on record.

Australia has pledged to spend $10bn to boost its fuel and fertiliser stockpiles, while France has said it will “change the scope and scale” of its support to shield its economy from the crisis. India has urged the public not to buy gold or holiday abroad as it tries to shore up its reserves of foreign currency.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the number of countries that have already been forced into emergency measures has reached 76, up from 55 at the end of March.

Economists and traders warn the next phase of the crisis could bring another sharp jump in energy prices, broader fuel rationing, industrial shutdowns and a significant slowdown in global growth. 

If the Middle East conflict “does not end in the coming weeks and we don’t have the reopening of the Hormuz strait, I’m afraid a world recession could be on the table”, the EU’s transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas told an FT conference in Athens on Thursday.

«

The crunch will come with holiday long-haul flights, surely.
unique link to this extract

BBC staff strike as new director general warns of ‘tough choices’ on his first day • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director general, has warned staff that “tough choices are unavoidable” under his tenure, as his first day coincided with a strike by a group of the corporation’s journalists.

Brittin, formerly Google’s most senior executive in Europe, arrived at the corporation’s New Broadcasting House while a group of journalists from the World Service’s Newshour and Radio 4’s The World Tonight were picketing in response to a plan to increase their workloads.

…Brittin, who will address staff on Tuesday, has been spending the last few weeks visiting various parts of the BBC. Insiders say he has shown particular interest in the costs of production as he begins the task of finding budget cuts of 10%.

In a message to staff, Brittin – who replaces Tim Davie – said his visits had “underlined just what an extraordinary, priceless asset the BBC is for all of us”.

However, he also suggested he would push for the BBC to make some dramatic changes in how it delivers its programming as digital platforms such as YouTube and TikTok become more prominent.

“The BBC has proved throughout its history how quickly it can reinvent itself to serve the needs of audiences – from restructuring for World War II to repurposing during Covid to spinning up services in conflict zones,” he said. “We need, collectively, to call on that sense of urgency now. That means moving with velocity and clarity.

“Excellence at the BBC has always been founded on great, creative storytelling and brilliant, independent journalism. Today it also means making sure we get the right stories in the right formats on the right platforms.”

«

That “stories/formats/platforms” quote is going to become a mantra, without doubt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that means lots more short video posted on social platforms, and AI doing the “writing” of textual content that goes on the website based on the transcript. The atomic unit of journalism is going to become the camera-captured video short.
unique link to this extract

Everything’s probably fake now • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Using N3on’s video metrics we can do some back of the napkin math and say that it currently costs about $1 million a month to generate around 600 million combined views across 35,000 videos. Roughly, $28 a video or about $1 per 600 views, depending on how you want to look at it.

Which is a much bigger budget than what mainstream media outlets can spend on their own shortform video. Probably why the glut of pearl-clutching clipping features from big outlets sound so panicked.

…Over the weekend, I came across what looked like, to me, a tweetdecking or clip-sharing operation run out of Rwanda. A group of Verified users all sharing random viral videos with one-line captions that, almost always, don’t make any sense. I reached out to a few accounts and one user, going by @whotfisrw, actually got back to me.

@whotfisrw identifies online as a student at the University of Rwanda, but they told Garbage Day that sharing video clips is their job. They said they often get paid to post videos and that the bulk of those offers come from AI companies. “Usually it’s either a fixed payment per post or a short-term promo arrangement depending on reach and engagement,” they said. They declined to share how much they’re making from sharing videos. Their X account is tagged with Ryne AI, a “humanizer” that can “pass” AI detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero. They said it’s more of “affiliation,” rather than “a full corporate thing.”

They said they got Verified “mainly for credibility and branding” because they wanted their account to look more “established and trustworthy.” As for where they get the videos they’re sharing, aside from paid posts, they said they usually just reshare whatever they see on X. “I mainly post directly on X, though sometimes I source clips or inspiration from other platforms and communities,” they said. “I do interact and collaborate with other accounts sometimes — mostly through reposting each other’s content, sharing ideas, or helping boost posts.”

It’s all, ultimately, not that deep. “If you’re underemployed and you’re just spending all your time watching the internet all day anyway, like this is a con. This is like a way you can make money, for sure,” Bernstein said.

But also none of this even new. Shadowy digital marketing firms and scammers and propagandists have been flooding the zone with shit — and been paid to do so — for over a decade now. The only thing thing that is new, I’d argue, is that there are more users now like @whotfisrw than there aren’t and, apparently, a whole bunch of young internet users who seemed to have been believing everything they saw on their video feeds up until like a week ago.

«

Big media organisations like the BBC, though, might have a faint chance in this?
unique link to this extract

More than 100 UK datacentres plan to burn gas to generate electricity • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

»

More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.

British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an “interesting question” about the UK’s climate targets.

“There’s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,” said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem. “Clearly that’s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn’t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.”

Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.

Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions. Silvia Simon, the head of research at Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK’s natural gas suppliers, said the group had received “more than 100” requests for gas connections from datacentre operators in the past two years.

These requests amounted to more than 15 terawatt hours of energy each year, she said: enough to power London for roughly four and a half months. “Gas networks are seeing a lot of interest from datacentre developers looking to secure a gas connection,” she said. “Not just for resilience, but for primary supply. So this is already an indication that they’re really struggling to get through to the electricity networks.”

Governments and big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into a frenzied and ambitious AI programme.

«

It feels like we just about got past bitcoin and all the other proof-of-work cryptocoins, and saw the threat they posed to our electricity mix ameliorated, and now we have this – far worse, and with the eager approval of governments which think buildings full of computers are a brilliant job creation scheme. How can people be this daft?
unique link to this extract

Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

The AI systems approved for Ontario healthcare providers routinely missed critical details, inserted incorrect information, and hallucinated content that neither patients nor clinicians mentioned, according to a provincial audit of 20 approved vendors’ systems.

The findings come from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, Canada, and are included in a larger report about the state of AI usage by public services in the province. They specifically address the AI Scribe program, the Ontario Ministry of Health initiated for physicians, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals across the broader health sector.

As part of the procurement process, officials conducted evaluations using simulated doctor-patient recordings. Medical professionals then reviewed the original recordings alongside the AI-generated notes to evaluate their accuracy.

What they found was, frankly, shocking for anyone concerned about the accuracy of AI in critical situations. 
Nine out of 20 AI systems reportedly “fabricated information and made suggestions to patients’ treatment plans” that weren’t discussed in the recordings. According to the report, evaluators spotted potentially devastating incorrect information in the sample reports, such as no masses being found, or patients being anxious, even though these things were never discussed in the recordings.

Twelve of the 20 systems evaluated inserted incorrect drug information into patient notes, while 17 of the systems “missed key details about the patients’ mental health issues” that were discussed in the recordings. Six of the systems “missed the patients’ mental health issues fully or partially or were missing key details,” per the report. 

«

And of course this is inherent in the systems. This isn’t what they’re intended to do. So they don’t do it.
unique link to this extract

A parliament of owls and a murder of crows: how groups of birds got their names, with wondrous vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith • The Marginalian

Maria Popova:

»

I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?

Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species — “a fall of woodcock” references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, “a watch of nightingales” pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth’s most musical bird, and “a gaggle of geese” turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler’s mother could be tried for witchcraft, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality — an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: “a murder of crows” alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

«

Barnes basically made many of these up, as far as anyone can tell; there’s no obvious etymology that connects them. For flamingos, you can choose between “a stand” or “a flamboyance”.
unique link to this extract

The case against quantum computing • IEEE Spectrum

Mikhail Dyakonov:

»

We’ve been told that quantum computers could “provide breakthroughs in many disciplines, including materials and drug discovery, the optimization of complex systems, and artificial intelligence.” We’ve been assured that quantum computers will “forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape.” We’ve even been told that “the encryption that protects the world’s most sensitive data may soon be broken” by quantum computers. It has gotten to the point where many researchers in various fields of physics feel obliged to justify whatever work they are doing by claiming that it has some relevance to quantum computing.

Meanwhile, government research agencies, academic departments (many of them funded by government agencies), and corporate laboratories are spending billions of dollars a year developing quantum computers. On Wall Street, Morgan Stanley and other financial giants expect quantum computing to mature soon and are keen to figure out how this technology can help them.

It’s become something of a self-perpetuating arms race, with many organizations seemingly staying in the race if only to avoid being left behind. Some of the world’s top technical talent, at places like Google, IBM, and Microsoft, are working hard, and with lavish resources in state-of-the-art laboratories, to realize their vision of a quantum-computing future.

In light of all this, it’s natural to wonder: When will useful quantum computers be constructed? The most optimistic experts estimate it will take five to ten years. More cautious ones predict 20 to 30 years. (Similar predictions have been voiced, by the way, for the last 20 years.) I belong to a tiny minority that answers, “Not in the foreseeable future.” Having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed-matter physics, I’ve developed my very pessimistic view. It’s based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work.

«

I was writing articles about quantum computing about 25 years ago, when we were assured it was definitely just five or ten years away. Maybe 15. And it still is. I’m with Dyakonov here. Quantum computing is like fusion: all that promise, kept out of reach by damnable physics. Perhaps it’s one of those “40 to 45 years” things, as in this fabulous Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse sketch.
unique link to this extract

Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire? • The New Stack

Darryl K. Taft:

»

A new report on the state of the PHP programming language shows that there is an emerging skills gap as fewer early-stage developers have PHP knowledge.

Although PHP continues to be a popular open-source language for web application development, the recently released Perforce 2026 PHP Landscape Report indicates that there is increasingly a struggle for organizations to find and retain skilled PHP talent.

The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.

In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

One industry analyst agrees. “We’re also seeing a skills gap as a serious risk for companies that are increasingly leaning on agentic processes to generate and maintain operational code,” Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group, tells The New Stack.

“This isn’t just a PHP problem. It’s an open source problem,” said Matthew Weier O’Phinney, principal product manager at Perforce Zend and OpenLogic, in a statement. “Organizations depend on PHP for mission-critical applications, but as experienced developers retire or move on, replacing that expertise is becoming increasingly difficult.”

«

Once upon a time it was COBOL. Now it’s PHP, which has taken over that role as the underpinnings of daily life. I’m sure AI coding will be able to fix all the bugs though! 🤞
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The city of Wellington, NZ, is as far from the Equator as which famous US city? Now you can find out. CC-licensed photo by DVincentNZ 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. Return to base. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Fire and ‘sheer volume’: how Britain’s 6m-vape problem is putting recycling under strain • The Guardian

Sarah Marsh:

»

It is 2pm and Ana, 47, has just started the afternoon shift at the Suez recycling plant near Birmingham city centre, standing beneath a sign reading “Non-ferrous sorting station” with a bucket of vapes in front of her. Sorting and dismantling them is part of her job as a site operative.

Recycling them is not simple. Each bucket holds between 40 and 50 devices, and over the course of a shift, she gets through about half a bucket. Using a hammer, she has to smash each vape open, pry out the batteries and separate each component into a different container.

Single-use vapes were banned in June last year, but more than 6m vapes and vape pods are still being discarded every week in the UK. Waste management companies say the sheer volume is straining recycling systems, while hidden lithium-ion batteries inside the devices are causing fires.

As Ana works, a burst of sugary scent fills the air; she doesn’t worry about the vapes exploding, she says, it’s never happened to her yet. But while vapes may not be hazardous at this stage of the sorting, they can become dangerous when crushed or damaged, such as during waste collection and storage.

In 2025, there were 670 fires at Suez’s UK sites. Of those, 368 were confirmed to be caused by batteries or vapes, with a further 176 suspected to be linked. Those working at the sites say people simply do not understand that vapes cannot be thrown away, or think – wrongly – that they can be recycled alongside household products. Instead, they need to be taken to dedicated electrical recycling points.

“Vapes were suspected as the cause of over 80% of the reported fires across our sites last year, with the numbers and trend continuing so far in 2026,” says Dr Adam Read, the chief sustainability and external affairs officer at Suez.

“This is despite the ban on disposable vapes coming into effect halfway through 2025. With more than 6m vapes still thrown away every week, it is clear that the perception on these items remains that they are a throwaway item. The problem is that people often don’t realise the danger that batteries cause when not disposed of correctly, and think they are doing the right thing by putting them in with their recycling.”

«

My guess is that more disposable vapes are thrown away than put into recycling, and that both numbers far outweigh the correctly done set.
unique link to this extract

Pancreatic cancer just met its match • Works In Progress

Ruxandra Teslo:

»

For most of the last half-century, a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76% reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.

A few days after Sasse’s interview, in April 2026, Revolution Medicines announced Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib showing the drug had roughly doubled survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer compared to standard chemotherapy. For a disease where median survival has long been measured in months and where little had changed for decades, that result represents a genuine turning point.

But the significance extends beyond pancreatic cancer. Daraxonrasib is among the first drugs in an emerging generation designed to target RAS, a protein implicated in roughly a quarter of all human cancers and long considered beyond reach, in all its mutant forms. And it belongs to a broader class of medicines, molecular glues, that are beginning to show what becomes possible when drugs no longer depend on finding a ready-made pocket in their target. Several compounds in this class are now in clinical development, each probing a different protein that previous generations of drugs could not touch.

«

This is enormously encouraging. Quietly, we are making huge strides in treating previously unbeatable diseases. Pancreatic cancer is a fast killer: normally it’s six months from diagnosis to death. (Steve Jobs had a different form from the rapid killer version.)

And this is also very good science writing – of the kind that one used to hope to find in colour supplements and science magazines, but probably wouldn’t nowadays.
unique link to this extract

Checkmate in Iran • The Atlantic

Robert Kagan:

»

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [from those in Vietnam or Afghanistan]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf states; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.

…As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

«

Kagan has long been a notorious hawk, which means that this admission by him of all the failures of Trump’s misadventures in Iran carry more weight. And it boils down to: Iran now wields significant power in the Middle East; China is rising fast.

And the strait of Hormuz is still not open. (Gift link.)
unique link to this extract

Welcome to the personal software revolution • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.

AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.

Robin Sloan, an author and technologist, wrote a blog post in 2020 entitled “An app can be a home-cooked meal.” The post has been shared widely in AI circles over the last couple of years, though Sloan wrote it well before the crop of generative AI tools. In it, he explains why he built a simple messaging app for his family. “There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us,” he wrote. “It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision.” Five years later, in late 2025, Sloan updated his post: “I have changed literally nothing in the app, and it’s glorious.”

«

Sloan’s blogpost is worth reading too, because it captures a desire we all feel when we use an app: why does this have so many other things I don’t need? Why can’t I strip this down to just what I want? And the idea that you can just throw together something for a few people’s use is very attractive.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI feels “burned” by Apple’s crappy ChatGPT integration, insiders say • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

OpenAI is reportedly exploring legal options after Apple’s ChatGPT integration into its products didn’t live up to the AI firm’s expectations.

When the deal was announced, Apple likened features linking Siri to ChatGPT to its now-infamous deal embedding Google search in the Safari browser, insiders granted anonymity to discuss the “strained” partnership told Bloomberg. And the promise of that excited OpenAI, which expected the deal “could generate billions of dollars per year in subscriptions,” an OpenAI executive granted anonymity to discuss the partnership told Bloomberg.

Instead, OpenAI suspects Apple intentionally failed to promote the integration and fears that the deal may have damaged the ChatGPT brand, sources said.

Specifically, OpenAI hates how Apple designed the integration, sources said. Particularly bad was the choice forcing Apple users summoning Siri to also “specifically invoke the word ‘ChatGPT’ when speaking or typing a command,” sources said. That makes it harder for users to access the features, OpenAI apparently feels. And Apple’s other choices, like using small windows providing limited information when responding with ChatGPT outputs, seems to ensure that users can easily ignore the features, sources said.

As the OpenAI executive explained, Apple didn’t fully explain how the integration would work when the deal came together, so OpenAI took a “leap of faith” it now appears to regret.

“When we heard about this opportunity, it sounded amazing: being able to acquire a giant number of customers and have distribution in such a big mobile ecosystem,” the executive said, attempting to explain why OpenAI was willing to enter the arrangement blind. Since then, efforts to renegotiate the deal have “stalled,” Reuters reported. And, supposedly due to feeling “burned,” OpenAI has declined to enter other partnerships to work on Apple’s AI models, Bloomberg reported.

«

The problem for OpenAI is that shunning Apple is unlikely to give it better access. It’s going to struggle to get ahead of Gemini, and for smartphones, that leaves.. Apple. Suing Apple isn’t likely to make that go any better either.
unique link to this extract

Parallel Cities

Admit it: you’ve always wanted to know which cities were on the same parallel (latitude) across the globe, and also which ones were on the exactly opposite distance from the Equator.

And now you can find out! The results for London, both “same as” and “opposite” surprised me. And who would have guessed that New York is the same vertical distance from the Equator as.. Wellington, New Zealand?
unique link to this extract

Google denies breaching law by promoting suicide forum linked to 164 UK deaths • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK, where it is supposed to be banned.

The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.

However, a link to the website still appears in Google’s search results allowing users with basic software to circumvent the block and access screeds of advice on suicide methods.

Google’s promotion of the site, not named by the Guardian, was raised by the Molly Rose Foundation, an online safety campaign. Its chief executive, Andy Burrows, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you search for it by name it will still come up in search results – a clear-cut breach of the act, but on that matter Ofcom has so far declined to take action.”

The site listed by Google was the second entry beneath a link to Samaritans. The associated url links to a page where the forum’s operators say access has been “voluntarily restricted to users in the United Kingdom due to legal risks associated with the UK Online Safety Act 2023”.

However, it includes the website’s address, which can then be used to access the full site using VPN software that simulates being a computer based in a different country.

When set to simulate internet access from the US, Germany and France, the full forum was easily accessible, including detailed advice on the efficacy of various methods of suicide.

…Adele Zeynep Walton, whose sister Aimee Walton took her life after accessing the site, said: “Families like mine have been agonisingly waiting for action against the website that took our loved ones and at least 164 UK lives. While we’ve waited, further lives have been lost and we’ve had to fight every step.”

«

unique link to this extract

My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.

But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)

«

Prodigy probably thought there was no positives that could come out of responding to that. And it was right. (Gift link.)
unique link to this extract

Software developers say AI is rotting their brains • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed. 

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. 

«

There’s a certain irony to this, no? The people cutting away the ladders for all the other professions feel they’re doing exactly that to themselves.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price of the resin used in printed circuit boards (PCBs) has risen dramatically due to shortages caused by, guess what, the Iran war. CC-licensed photo by David Lenker on Flickr.

The Overspill will be on a two-week break from next week. Next edition Monday May 18, if all goes to plan.

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

AI outperforms doctors in Harvard trial of emergency triage diagnoses • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency department doctors have long been popular heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up the scrubs?

A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and death moments when people are first rushed to hospital.

The results were described by independent experts as showing “a genuine step forward” in the clinical reasoning of AIs and came as part of trials that tested the responses of hundreds of doctors against an AI.

The authors said the results, published in the journal Science, showed large language models (LLMs) “have eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical reasoning”.

One experiment focused on 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read – typically including vital sign data, demographic information and a few sentences from a nurse about why the patient was there. The AI identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of cases, beating the human doctors, who were right only 50%-55% of the time.

It showed the AIs’ advantage was particularly pronounced in triage circumstances requiring rapid decisions with minimal information. The diagnosis accuracy of the AI – OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model – rose to 82% when more detail was available, compared with the 70-79% accuracy achieved by the expert humans, though this difference was not statistically significant.

«

Going to make for a very boring TV series, though. Still a role for paramedics, at least.
unique link to this extract

The Pulse: token spend breaks budgets – what next? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

»

Last week, we covered the slightly perverse trend of “tokenmaxxing” across the industry, where devs run agents with the sole aim of boosting their personal “token stats” in an effort to rank higher on internal token leaderboards, and not be seen as a Luddite who doesn’t use AI tools enough compared to peers.

This week, I spoke with a software engineer at a large company and another at a seed-stage place. Both shared almost identical stories: at their latest all-hands, company leadership expressed concerns about the fast-rising costs of tokens. At both places, token spend has increased by ~10x in the last six months – with no signs of slowing down.

I wanted to find out about this trend, so I talked to devs at 15 businesses. Below is what I learned about what’s happening in workplaces of all sizes. Names are anonymized.

…Fintech company, US+Europe, late stage, ~5,000 people. Staff engineer: “Some developers are now spending $500 a day (!!) on Claude Code. Practically speaking, this means that employee costs have doubled. Productivity has increased, in my view, but now the bottleneck is code reviews. AI can spit out code quite quickly, but we still have human reviews in place. Leadership encourages using AI for code review, but my team will not blindly trust AI.

“The push from AI is coming from the top. This year’s performance review had a section on AI, rating devs by how well they used AI, so this is another reason everyone just uses it as much as they can.”

…Series A, US, ~50 people. Principal Engineer: “About 15 devs are heavy users of AI and costs are rising very fast. Almost everyone uses Claude and Claude Code. We are considering four potential options: Increase AI budget, and start measuring more. Continue doing what we are, but allow devs to use more tokens instead of hiring limits. The precise ROI is hard to quantify, but we’ll start to measure and track both AI adoption and impact. Optimize token consumption. Use cheaper models for simpler tasks, review token usage, and see where we can cut usage. Downside: this approach could become one with diminishing returns, fast. Integrate more AI providers in the company. Find wrappers to abstract LLMs. The problem is: how do you replace Claude Code, for instance? Or pivot to local models: such as Kimi, Qwen, and so on. The problem is it’s a big investment in high-end hardware or cloud GPUs. Upside: it offers better long-term cost control, once done.

«

The post is full of such stories. The demand is there. But let’s see what happens once the new set of prices come in. But “the precise ROI is hard to quantify”? Not the most encouraging phrase.
unique link to this extract

Iran war disrupts the circuit board supply chain, raising costs for tech firms • Reuters

Che Pan, Liam Mo and Hyunjoo Jin:

»

The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supplies of crucial raw materials and pushed up prices of the printed circuit boards (PCB) used in almost all electronic devices, from smartphones and computers to AI servers, industry sources and executives said.

The disruption is a fresh blow to electronics manufacturers which are already grappling with soaring memory chip costs and highlights the broadening impact of the ​Iran war that has wreaked havoc on supply chains, plastics, and oil supplies.

Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex in early April, ​forcing a halt in production of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin — a critical base material used to manufacture PCB laminates.

SABIC, which accounts for approximately 70% of the world’s high-purity PPE supply and operates in the Jubail complex on ​the Gulf coast, has been unable to resume output, severely tightening the availability of the material worldwide, according to one source. Shipping ​in and out of the Gulf has also been severely disrupted by the war.

PCB prices have been climbing since late last year, driven by a growing appetite for AI servers. Demand has been accelerating sharply since March as manufacturers scramble to secure raw material supplies and soften the impact ​of skyrocketing costs, three industry sources told Reuters.

In April alone, PCB prices surged as much as 40% from March, Goldman Sachs ​analysts said in a recent note. Cloud service providers are willing to accept further increases as they expect demand will outstrip supplies over the coming years, they added.

The global PCB industry is projected to increase by 12.5% to reach $95.8bn in 2026, according to a recent report from Prismark.

Daeduck Electronics, a South Korean PCB maker whose customers include Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and AMD, has begun discussions with customers over price increases, a senior executive at the company told Reuters.

«

Inflation in the price of technology components is just going mad. None of this helps it at all. Prediction: the strait of Hormuz doesn’t open before July. (That’s eight weeks away. So far it’s been closed eight weeks. Good explainer from June 2025 about its relevance.)
unique link to this extract

How AI killed student writing (and revived it) • The New York Times

Dana Goldstein:

»

In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.

Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.

This transformation is happening across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League.

The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative AI is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since AI has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.

Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. Over the past year, AI use has become ubiquitous among American students. Between May and December of 2025, the share of American middle school, high school and college students who reported regularly using A.I. for homework increased from 48% to 62%, according to polling from RAND — even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills. A third of the students reported using AI to draft or revise writing.

…“The standard curriculum was a thesis-driven research essay that students completed on their own time outside of class,” said Marc Watkins, who directs the AI Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi. “That is, unfortunately, gone.”

…One April afternoon in her AP literature class, Ms. [Jessica] Binney read aloud “XIV,” a poem by the St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. It describes the poet and his brother as children, trekking into the Caribbean forest to listen at the feet of a traditional storyteller.

Walcott’s language is lush and challenging. Students marked up paper handouts of the text, underlining and scrawling in the margins. Then they took out notebooks and began to draft essays analyzing literary devices.
“I want you to write out a really rough, terrible draft in your writers’ notebooks,” Ms. Binney told them. “And then I want you to scratch it out and rewrite it.”

There was nary a laptop or tablet in sight. For these juniors and seniors, who have been taught on screens for much of their schooling, Ms. Binney’s class can be a welcome break.

“It’s a relief,” said Cassady Tondorf, 17. “There’s less distraction.”

«

unique link to this extract

Dispute over fate of Kenyan workers who saw Meta AI glasses films • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

»

Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya-based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses.

In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.

Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.

Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out. Meta has not addressed that allegation but told BBC News in a statement it had “decided to end our work with Sama because they don’t meet our standards”.

Sama has defended its work.

“Sama has consistently met the operational, security and quality standards required across our client engagements, including with Meta,” it said in a statement. “At no point were we notified of any failure to meet those standards, and we stand firmly behind the quality and integrity of our work.”

In late February, Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Goteborgs-Posten (GP) published an investigation which included the accounts of unnamed workers who had been asked to review videos filmed by Meta’s glasses. “We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker reportedly said.

At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI. It said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.

However, the revelations have prompted regulators to act.

«

One suspects that the standards Sama didn’t meet were those saying “don’t let your staff tell the press about our astonishing invasion of privacy that might get regulators involved”. The leopard doesn’t change its spots.
unique link to this extract

Senators introduce bipartisan bill to ban Chinese vehicles and auto parts • NBC News

Allan Smith:

»

A bipartisan Senate duo introduced a bill on Wednesday to ban the importation of Chinese-made vehicles and auto parts, weeks ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Sens. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., introduced the Connected Vehicle Security Act, which would ban automobiles, parts and vehicle software made in China or in partnership with China, as well as other adversarial nations, from the US market.

The Commerce Department last year issued a rule that restricted such vehicles and parts from the US market, but both Moreno and Slotkin spoke of the importance of codifying the effort into law. On Tuesday, more than 70 House Democrats signed a letter urging Trump to block Chinese automakers from the US market ahead of his meeting with the Chinese leader next month. In January, Trump suggested an openness to allowing Chinese automakers into the US market during a speech before the Detroit Economic Club.

In an interview, Slotkin said Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi was the impetus for introducing the legislation now.

“We are watching very closely what deals come out of that summit,” she said.

Moreno, who touted Trump’s support for US automakers, said he did not expect this effort to be on the agenda for Trump’s meeting with Xi, which is slated to take place in mid-May.

«

You can understand not wanting to give up the entire vehicle manufacturing business to China, but without some subsidies it’s going to be a losing battle trying to sell abroad as EVs take over, which will mean a shrinking market inside the US. Blocking partnerships just seems perverse. The Chinese are now far ahead of the Americans with this generation of vehicles.
unique link to this extract

Knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients, study suggests • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin:

»

A common knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients and may lead to worse outcomes, a 10-year trial suggests.

The study tracked outcomes for patients treated for a meniscus tear, who were given a partial meniscectomy, one of the most common orthopaedic surgeries. Their trajectories were compared with patients who had randomly been assigned to receive “sham surgery”, in which no procedure was carried out.

Patients who had undergone the surgery, which involves trimming frayed meniscus tissue, did not appear to benefit and scored worse on a range of measures designed to measure knee function, pain and progression of symptoms.

Prof Teppo Järvinen, an orthopaedic surgeon and researcher at the University of Helsinki who led the study, said: “Our findings suggest that this may be an example of what is known as a medical reversal, where broadly used therapy proves ineffective or even harmful.”

The meniscus is a C-shaped, rubbery pad of cartilage in the knee joint that acts as a shock absorber between the thigh bone and shin bone. There are two in each knee.

A meniscus tear, in which the edges of the tissue become frayed, can occur due to a sudden twist of the knee while playing sport. Damage can also occur gradually over time and MRI scans often reveal meniscal tears in healthy people with no symptoms.

“We now know that these meniscal tears are very frequently found in patients with no symptoms,” said Järvinen. “Over the past 20 years, evidence has accumulated to suggest that most of these findings on MRI are purely incidental.”

«

There have been previous papers which suggested this, also with randomised placebo/treatment trials, but this 10-year followup suggests that a lot of surgery is just pointless. (Apart from enriching surgeons.) As my GP said to me when I was discussing various pains, “surgeons like doing surgery”. It’s something to bear in mind, and to research carefully before going under any knife.
unique link to this extract

Meta lost 20 million users last quarter • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for “Family daily active people” — the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger — declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months.

Meta attributes this fall to “internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia.” It’s up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across all its platforms, we can’t tell which ones are most impacted. If I wanted to obscure that a leading social platform was potentially haemorrhaging daily users, that’s certainly what I would do.

This drop comes as Meta says it’s increasing its projected capital expenditures for 2026 to a range of $125-145bn, $10bn more than previous estimates. This increased spending is driven by expectations for higher component pricing and, “to a lesser extent,” additional costs for future data centre capacity. This is a course correction, according to Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li, who said in the investor call that Meta had “underestimated our compute demand in the past.”

«

The Reality Labs – remember wearables and VR? – had an operating loss of $4bn over the period. It’s an absolute money pit.

But the bigger question is: what’s all this AI compute for? It can’t be for social networks. That’s an honestly trivial use, and there are plenty of users who are bringing their own to that. So it must be that Zuckerberg thinks there’s an overarching need for AI, and particularly for Meta to control that AI, which would have to be somewhere completely outside what we think of as Meta’s ambit. When will we find out what that is?
unique link to this extract

Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

[Elon] Musk spent a lot of [Wednesday] painting this heroic picture of himself, and this morning, near the end of his direct examination, said, “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people.” He said he might have called someone a “jackass,” but only in the spirit of saying something like, “don’t be a jackass.”

Immediately afterward, [OpenAI’s defence lawyer William] Savitt baited him into being petty, irritating, and generally hard to deal with. At one point, we all watched Musk lose his temper. He spent hours quibbling over simple questions. Again and again, Savitt referred back to Musk’s deposition, where he’d answered questions slightly differently, calling Musk’s accounts into question. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.

Savitt’s cross-examination left the distinct impression that Musk quit his quarterly payments to OpenAI because he wasn’t going to get full control of the company, then tried to kneecap it and fold it into Tesla. Initially, Musk wanted four board seats and 51% of the shares. The other cofounders would get three seats, together, to be voted on by shareholders (including other employees). Though Musk said that the eventual plan was to expand to 12 seats, it was obvious that Musk had full control on the initial board of seven.

…He accused Savitt of asking questions that were “designed to trick me,” and we got multiple versions of this:

»

Musk: You mostly do unfair questions.
Savitt: I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best.
Musk: That’s not true.

«

Musk was trying to make this as painful as possible for Savitt, but he also made it as painful as possible for everyone else, including the jury. Watching him simply refuse to answer questions during cross he’d easily answered during direct was annoying. Watching him refuse to admit he understood the nature of linear time — and therefore the fact that he was still a director of OpenAI’s board before he resigned in 2018 — was infuriating. It made him look dishonest.

«

Juries are meant to decide on the facts, but they’re human. Annoy them enough, and you’ll lose them in spite of everything. It’s not as if Musk has the greatest case anyway.
unique link to this extract

Phony whistleblowers, fake journalists and cyber spies: ICIJ network targeted after China Targets probe • ICIJ

Scilla Alecci:

»

In May 2025, Kuochun Hung, the chief operating officer of the Taiwanese media outlet Watchout, received an email from someone purporting to be Yi-Shan Chen, a well-regarded local reporter.

“Chen” claimed to be working for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and was requesting an interview with Hung on a range of topics: then pending impeachment proceedings against Taiwan’s president, the island’s divided government, and Watchout’s planned events with members of civil society groups.

Hung, whose media outlet monitors information manipulation, found the email unusual.

“The topic and questions in the invitation email [were] too entry-level for a senior journalist,” Hung told ICIJ. What’s more, Chen’s name was spelled in English, instead of the original Chinese, and the email address didn’t include ICIJ’s official domain.

Hung decided to find out more and started interacting with “Chen” on LINE, a popular messaging app in Taiwan.

The person, who used Chen’s name and photo in their handle, told Hung that an American journalist from ICIJ would meet him in Taipei for the interview and sent a link to what looked like an ICIJ webpage with the reporter’s photo. Hung noticed it wasn’t ICIJ’s real website. The fake Chen also sent Hung another link she said would direct him to a list of questions, adding: “For journalists, information security is truly very important,” a warning most journalists would find superfluous.

Hung didn’t click.

“I played stupid,” he said. “And then she gave up.”

…Now, an investigation by ICIJ, with the help of cybersecurity analysts at Toronto University’s Citizen Lab, has found that the incident was part of a sophisticated offensive strategy against ICIJ and its network following the 2025 publication of China Targets. The ICIJ-led exposé, in collaboration with 42 media outlets, revealed Beijing’s tactics to threaten, coerce and intimidate regime critics overseas.

«

Being suspicious always rewards you in situations like this. The routine use of spyware – which that link almost certainly led to – is on a par in spying with the use of drones in hot wars.
unique link to this extract

Copy Fail: 732 bytes to root on every major Linux distribution • Xint

»

A single 732-byte Python script can edit a setuid binary and obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017.

The kernel never marks the corrupted page dirty for writeback, so the file on disk remains unchanged and ordinary on-disk checksum comparisons miss the modification. However, the page cache is what actually gets read when accessing the file, so the corrupted in-memory version is immediately visible system-wide. A local unprivileged user can turn this into root by corrupting the page cache of a setuid binary. The same primitive also crosses container boundaries because the page cache is shared across the host.

This finding was AI-assisted, but began with an insight from Theori researcher Taeyang Lee, who was studying how the Linux crypto subsystem interacts with page-cache-backed data. He used Xint Code to scale his research across the entire crypto subsystem, and Copy Fail was the most critical finding in the report.

«

Xint is a security company (“AI-Powered Vulnerability Discovery for Source Code and Live Apps”) and this is a colossal discovery – probably in line with Heartbleed and similar open source vulnerability discoveries. There is a fix, but people need to apply it. Now there will be a race between those looking to fix, and those looking to exploit.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

In Japan, humanoid robots will be trialled for baggage handling at Tokyo’s Haneda airport amid a shrinking population of workers. CC-licensed photo by Bernal Saborio 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.

After this week, The Overspill will be on a break for two weeks. Plan accordingly.

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

Humanoid robots start sorting luggage in Tokyo airport test amid labor shortage • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Humanoid robots are getting a new gig as baggage handlers and cargo loaders at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport—part of a Japan Airlines experiment to address a human labour shortage as airport visitor numbers have surged in recent years.

The demonstration, set to launch in May 2026, could eventually test humanoid robots in a wide range of airport tasks, including cleaning aircraft cabins and possibly handling ground support equipment such as baggage carts, according to a Japan Airlines press release. The trials are scheduled to run until 2028, which suggests that travellers flying into or out of Tokyo may spot some of the robots at work.

This marks the latest foray for humanoid robots after they have already begun pilot-testing in workplaces such as automotive factories and warehouses. Most robotic productivity so far has relied on robotic arms and similarly specialized robots that perform the same predictable tasks on assembly lines and in warehouses. By comparison, humanoid robots face a much stiffer challenge in dealing with more open and unpredictable work environments, and it remains to be seen whether the latest robotic software and hardware will be up to the task.

Japan Airlines is interested in testing whether humanoid robots powered by some of the latest AI models can adapt more readily to human work environments—such as airports—without requiring dedicated work stations or other significant workplace modifications. The airline’s subsidiary, JAL Ground Service, has teamed up with GMO AI & Robotics Corporation to oversee the demonstration.

The Japanese companies will test the G1 robot and Walker E robot from Chinese companies Unitree Robotics and UBTECH Robotics, according to The Asia Business Daily. Humanoid robots still typically cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit despite Chinese robotics manufacturers scaling up mass production, although the Unitree G1 robot costs as low as $13,500 for the baseline model.

«

Japan’s population is shrinking and ageing – with about a million more deaths than births among its 120 million-odd population – so this is a logical move. Perhaps the baggage handlers can run marathons at the weekends.
unique link to this extract

Two million electric vehicles registered in the UK • Transport and Energy

James Evison:

»

More than two million electric vehicles (EV) have been registered across the UK, according to new Department for Transport statistics.

The figures show that the Electric Car Grant (ECG) has assisted more than 100,000 drivers save up to £3750 off a new EV.

EV registrations are up 15% on last year, with March 2026 seeing the highest demand ever recorded.

Electric cars are now cheaper to buy, on average, than petrol models for the first time, according to recent figures from Autotrader.

The UK Government said it is also investing £7.5bn to support businesses in the transition to EVs, and there has “never been a better time to switch” due to the ECG, it added.

Included in the top five EVs sold under the ECG were the Ford Puma Gen-E, Vauxhall Frontera Electric, Renault 5, Skoda Elroq and Volkswagen ID.3.

The UK Government also added that renters, landlords and businesses can also claim up to £500 off an electric charger, covering around half the cost of installation. This means drivers can save up to £1,400 a year on running costs, as compared to a petrol car when accessing cheaper domestic electricity rates.

«

There are about 34m cars on the road in Great Britain, so that’s just 6%, but this – especially with the Hormuz crisis – could really trigger the upward shift of the S-curve of adoption.
unique link to this extract

How OpenAI’s $500bn data centre venture Stargate has shifted shape • Financial Times

George Hammond, Stephen Morris, David Keohane and Tim Bradshaw:

»

OpenAI’s $500bn Stargate plan to secure computing power is being reworked and, in places, abandoned. Yet its willingness to strike whatever deals are necessary to secure capacity has given it an edge in the race to build AI infrastructure.

In recent weeks, the group has halted planned data centres in the UK and Norway, declined to expand its flagship site in Abilene, Texas and seen several senior figures tied to Stargate leave for rival Meta.

Originally announced in early 2025 by Donald Trump as a $500bn joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, Abu Dhabi fund MGX and Japan’s SoftBank, Stargate was designed to finance and build dedicated data centres for OpenAI’s use. The idea was to pool capital to tackle the cost and complexity of AI infrastructure.

That concept has rapidly given way to a more flexible approach, with OpenAI increasingly relying on third-party providers, leasing capacity rather than building and owning its own facilities.

“I don’t know what ‘Stargate’ means at this point,” said a person who was involved in the data centre buildout at the outset. “I think it is a completely antiquated line right now.”

…Oracle has played the most prominent role, agreeing last year to supply OpenAI with 4.5GW of computing capacity under a five-year, $300bn agreement.

…Questions remain over whether it can afford its huge infrastructure spending. On Tuesday, a report that OpenAI had missed internal targets for revenue and user growth led to share price falls at companies linked to the start-up including SoftBank, Oracle and CoreWeave. OpenAI said in response that its business is “firing on all cylinders.”

«

The first cracks starting to show.
unique link to this extract

Spending millions of dollars to be completely irrelevant • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

I am surprised by how completely and totally depressed short-form video clipping has made me. I can’t really think of something I’ve covered as a reporter over the last 15 years that has put me in as dark a place as reporting on the state of short-form video has this month. In fact, I think I’m slowly losing interest with the internet as a concept.

Bloomberg has a big piece out this week on the industrial clipping complex, picking up a lot of what we’ve covered here in Garbage Day. It features an interview with Anthony Fujiwara, the head of Clipping, the company responsible for the torrent of Kick clips invading feeds right now. “In the case of Clavicular, we take advantage of every single social media algorithm so he’s unavoidable,” Fujiwara told Bloomberg. All but admitting this whole thing is rigged. Also, worth mentioning here is that the company that owns Kick also owns the casino app Stake and almost all of these clips are not-so-covert ads for Stake.

But it’s not just that all of the views on all of these viral clips are completely inflated, whether by Kick itself or a company like Clipping. Though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also the content that’s in the clips that’s making me feel so insane. Spending the last few months consuming short-video gutter culture has made me seriously question if the internet is even a place I want to be anymore. I started putting stuff online to get away from these kinds of people!

At the very bottom of the algorithm across every platform right now, you basically only see a couple kinds of videos:
• AI slop
• The occasional meme, usually from years ago
• Movie and TV clips, with subtitles, AI voiceovers, and anti-piracy watermarks
• Softcore porn (and hardcore porn on X)
• Gambling ads
• Celebrity podcast clips
• And, of course, livestreamers

Viewing the world through clips is, frankly, awful. I would rather stare a wall in a dark room than spend my time watching the endless parade of sweaty vape store-tier sweatpants men sitting around staring at their phones in unfurnished McMansions, playing dorm room icebreaker games with bored OnlyFans models. An unceasing portal into a desolate Other America dictated by Bang Bus physics. I wouldn’t even say that Streamer World is part of the Zynternet. It’s something dumber and more hideous than that. A 12-year-old boy’s psychosexual fever dream of what life must be like outside of his gamer nest.

«

Feels like Ryan needs a holiday.
unique link to this extract

Sam Altman and Elon Musk sure dislike each other • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong on the big trial in Oakland, California:

»

[Elon] Musk is asking that [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of allegedly “ill-gotten gains”—some $150bn—which Musk says would go to OpenAI’s charitable trust. Outside legal experts say that Musk is unlikely to win all or even much of this. His argument is confusing: OpenAI has certainly evolved from a nonprofit lab to a revenue-chasing, consumer behemoth, and a chorus of critics has alleged that it has deviated from its original mission of ensuring that AGI benefits humanity.

But Musk himself appears to have insisted that OpenAI couldn’t keep up as a nonprofit—for instance, in early 2018, he wrote an email to OpenAI leadership saying that merging the firm with Tesla “is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.” And even before he sued, Musk launched a rival for-profit company, xAI. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit is a pageant of hypocrisy,” William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, told the jury today, later adding that Musk had “sour grapes.” (OpenAI, which declined to comment, wrote yesterday that the lawsuit is “a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor.” Musk’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment.)

The substance of these claims is important to the AI industry as a whole. The ramifications of this lawsuit go beyond any company or executive: The conflict between Musk and Altman has itself directly shaped the course of the AI industry. It is, in effect, the AI boom’s founding feud. The next few weeks of the trial will illuminate tensions about the development of AI that have grown only more urgent—between profit and social good, and over who can be trusted with this technology.

…The trial makes the AI boom seem sordid and small. In his sworn deposition, Altman wrote that Musk used to message him complaints that he wanted more credit for the success of OpenAI and took offense at not being included in an anniversary photo. Altman has also said, of Musk and his lawsuit, “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy.” In the courtroom, Altman sat stone-faced next to Brockman and departed right before Musk took to the witness stand.

Musk, for his part, has said that he would drop his lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to “ClosedAI.” Yesterday, as jury selection began, Musk began furiously posting on X and repeatedly called his co-founder “Scam Altman.” Before the start of opening arguments today, Gonzalez Rogers admonished Musk and Altman for their social-media use, asking them to limit their “propensity” to post about the trial; both meekly assented, “Yes.”

«

unique link to this extract

10,000 litres of water for one litre of ethanol: India fuel push to worsen water crisis • India Today

Aryan Rai:

»

India’s push to mix ethanol with petrol, something pitched as a clean energy fix, is deepening the country’s water crisis.

At the heart of the problem are crops that already drink more water than almost anything else grown in India, like maize, sugarcane, and the country’s favourite grain, rice.

“Ethanol blending can worsen India’s water crisis mainly because most of the raw material—sugarcane and increasingly maize—is extremely water-intensive to grow and process,” said IPCC author Anjal Prakash.

Ethanol blending means mixing a plant-based alcohol, called ethanol, into petrol to reduce India’s dependence on imported crude oil.

The country has been aggressively scaling this programme, and rice has become a key raw material. The government allocated 5.2m tonnes of rice for ethanol production in 2024-25, and is now targeting 9m tonnes in 2025-26.

To free up this grain, it plans to reduce the share of broken rice distributed to the poor under the public distribution system from 25% to 10%, diverting the savings straight to distilleries to be used to facilitate ethanol blending.

Producing one litre of ethanol from rice requires around 10,790 litres of water, which includes water used for irrigation during cultivation, according to Food Secretary Sanjeev Chopra, who shared the data at a global conference in Delhi in 2024.

«

This shows how bonkers these “clean fuel” schemes are. You use water that people need, and rice (or farmland production) that people could eat, and you divert it into feeding cars, which then burn it and put it beyond use. Couldn’t make the case for electric vehicles charged from renewables more clearly, to be honest. And that’s before you consider that water crisis India may face this year due to low snow levels in the Himalayas.
unique link to this extract

Apple reportedly questioning whether iPhone should drop MagSafe • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

[Weibo leaker] Instant Digital claims that confidence around MagSafe has given way to uncertainty. The leaker says Apple is weighing the costs of including MagSafe magnets in the iPhone against the strength of the accessory ecosystem that has grown up around the feature, though the nature of the debate and what any change might look like remains unclear.

The iPhone 16e launched without MagSafe , making it the first new iPhone in years to omit it. Many iPhone 16e owners, as well as users of older iPhones without built-in magnets, turned to third-party cases with embedded magnet rings as a workaround, though the experience is generally considered to be inferior to native MagSafe support. The decision nonetheless drew criticism, and Apple reversed course with the iPhone 17e, restoring MagSafe support when the device launched earlier this year.

There is no indication that MagSafe is at imminent risk of disappearing from the iPhone lineup. However, the upcoming foldable “iPhone Ultra” may be a different story. Dummy models of the device show no visible indentations for the internal magnet array that MagSafe requires, suggesting the feature could be absent at launch. The iPhone Ultra is rumored to be just 4.5mm thin when unfolded, and it is thought that the device may simply be too slim to accommodate the magnets. If that proves accurate, the iPhone Ultra would be both the most expensive iPhone ever, with a starting price rumored at around $2,000, and the first new high-end model to ship without MagSafe since the iPhone 11 Pro.

While the wording of Instant Digital’s post is somewhat ambiguous, it raises the possibility that Apple could be at least considering pulling MagSafe from its standard iPhone models, potentially making it exclusive to higher-end devices. Recent reports suggest that the standard iPhone 18 is being downgraded to cut costs.

«

Read on: it’s that time of year when Apple’s physical designs are locked down for production and so people get hold of 3D casts and start drawing all sorts of wild conclusions from them. Charging the foldable iPhone via MagSafe seems a bit strange, but the iPhone Air does/did have MagSafe, so removing it would allow an even thinner phone.
unique link to this extract

Apple has likely abandoned ‘iPad Ultra’ plans • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple has reportedly abandoned plans for a foldable “iPad Ultra” following years of disappointing sales performance for the iPad Pro.

The claim predominantly comes from the Weibo leaker known as “Instant Digital,” who posted the remark in response to a question about whether the iPad would join a rumored “Ultra” series of Apple devices. Instant Digital listed the Apple Watch Ultra, M-series Ultra chips, “iPhone Ultra,” and “MacBook Ultra” with an OLED display as products in the pipeline, but explicitly excluded the iPad from that group, citing weak market performance for the iPad Pro . They added that Apple now has “no plans” to release an iPad Ultra.

The iPad Pro ‘s sales struggles are well documented. In October 2024, it was reported that shipment projections for the M4 iPad Pro had been significantly cut after weaker-than-expected demand following its launch earlier that year. DSCC analyst Ross Young lowered his full-year 2024 forecast from up to 10m units to just 6.7m, with shipments of the 13in model projected to fall by more than 50% and 90% in the third and fourth quarters respectively.

Young attributed the sluggish reception in part to the high price point, with the 11in model starting at $999 and the 13in at $1,299, levels that deter buyers who view tablets as secondary devices alongside a smartphone or laptop. iPad revenue has declined for three consecutive years, and the category accounted for just 6.73% of Apple’s total revenue in 2025.

«

Those revenue figures are pretty damning. I get the feeling that after the announcement of John Ternus as incoming CEO, there’s going to be a clearout of products that aren’t reaching targets, on the “write two letters”* principle.

* A new leader takes over the country. His predecessor left two letters, 1 and 2, and said “When troubles start mounting, open letter 1. When they seem impossible, open letter 2.”

Things go well but then the new leader faces problems, and opens letter 1. “Blame everything on your predecessor,” it reads. The leader does, and the troubles recede.

But after a while they return and then get worse. So letter 2 is opened. It says: “Write two letters”.
unique link to this extract

Apple has given up on the Vision Pro after M5 refresh flop • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested.

The Vision Pro has been criticized for its high price tag and its uncomfortable weight. The device is over 1.3lb (0.6kg), and even with the more comfortable Dual Knit Band that Apple added to redistribute weight, it continues to be hard to wear for long periods of time. The M5 chip added a 120Hz refresh rate, 10% more rendered pixels, and around 30 additional minutes of battery life, but the price tag stayed at $3,499, and it ended up not selling well.

The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first launched, and Apple only sold around 600,000 units in total. Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025.

There have been mixed rumours about a new Vision Pro over the last couple of years, with Apple rumoured to be working on a lighter-weight Vision Air that’s much cheaper, but the project was stopped last year. If Apple finds a way to create a much cheaper, more comfortable VR headset in the future, the Vision Pro line could be revived, but right now, the company has no plans to launch a new model. Apple has not discontinued the Vision Pro and is continuing to sell the M5 model.

«

My criticism was always that it’s a content device, and Apple didn’t get the right content for it. Perhaps it’s just going to continue to be made, but with nobody really pushing it forward; the iPod Hi-Fi of VR headsets, a category that nobody seems to be able to make work.
unique link to this extract

CATL says sodium batteries are mainstream-ready, signs massive 60 GWh deal • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

»

CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, signed a 60 GWh sodium-ion battery deal with energy storage integrator HyperStrong — the largest sodium-ion battery order ever placed. The three-year agreement is equivalent to half of all energy storage batteries CATL delivered in 2025.

The deal marks what CATL calls proof that it has “overcome the challenges of the entire sodium-ion battery mass production chain.” Industry observers are already calling it a potential “DeepSeek moment” for the global energy storage industry.

…Sodium-ion batteries use sodium instead of lithium as the charge carrier. Sodium is roughly 1,000 times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than lithium and far cheaper to source, which makes sodium-ion batteries a compelling alternative for applications where cost matters more than maximum energy density — particularly grid-scale energy storage.

CATL’s energy storage sodium-ion cell is a 300 Ah large-format product with an energy density of about 160 Wh/kg, a system energy conversion efficiency of 97%, and a cycle life exceeding 15,000 cycles at 80% capacity retention. It operates across a temperature range of -40°C to 70°C, which is significantly wider than most lithium-ion cells.

Critically, CATL designed the sodium-ion cells with the same dimensions as its lithium-ion products, making them compatible with existing supply chains and installation infrastructure. That dramatically reduces adaptation costs and shortens deployment timelines.
As we covered last week, CATL is also pushing sodium-ion into electric vehicles, with its chief scientist confirming mass production by the end of 2026 and a target of reaching LFP-level energy density (enabling 600 km / 370 miles of range) within three years. The first sodium-ion EV, the Changan Nevo A06, debuted in February.

«

Basically: sodium-ion batteries presently are big and heavy, but they’re cheap, so they’re great for grid-level storage.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Adidas shoes that helped Sebastian Sawe to a record-breaking marathon on Sunday can help amateurs too, by a surprising amount. CC-licensed photo by Tom Page 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. Hop to it. 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 the voice note craze is yet to truly explode in Britain • BBC News

Ashitha Nagesh:

»

On an August day in 2013, WhatsApp, the messaging app now owned by Meta, made an announcement. With relatively little fanfare, they revealed the voice note, the messaging feature that lets you send a clip of your own voice to friends and family.

“We know there’s no substitute for hearing the sound of a friend or family member’s voice,” the company enthused in a press release.

Thirteen years on, receiving a 10-minute clip from a friend, telling you about a complex family feud or workplace drama, is an experience that is loved by some and loathed by others. In places like India, Mexico, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, voice notes are almost matching the popularity of written texts as the preferred form of electronic communication. But curiously, the truth is that compared to many places, Britain never seems to have quite caught the voice note bug.

A YouGov survey of more than 2,300 British adults, published this month, found that while voice notes have become slightly more popular in the last year, still only 15% communicate via voice note regularly (i.e. a few times a week). Across men, women, and across every age group – including Gen Zs – voice notes were the least popular method of communication.

And in 2024, YouGov found that Britain was the most voice note-averse country of the 17 mostly rich nations it surveyed, with 83% of respondents saying they prefer text based messages to voice notes (and only 4% saying they prefer voice notes).

So, why do voice notes prove so divisive? And why have they taken some countries by storm, while failing to truly take off in Britain?

…I asked friends – and friends of friends – in Britain. As it happens, I love voice notes. But I’m aware that they get on my sister Ramya’s nerves.

“The reason I hate voice notes is, it’s so imbalanced,” Ramya told me. “For the person who’s sending the voice note, it’s super easy. They just have to press the button and then they can ramble on. But for the person who’s receiving… they’ve got to just pay all their attention to this voice note. You get a six-minute voice note, and you don’t know if they’re telling you that their house burnt down and their cat died, or if they’re just talking about how lovely their day is.”

«

By country, voice note use is basically the inverse of text message use. High in one? Low in the other. Ramya’s attitude matches mine perfectly. Britain is never going to “catch the voice note bug”.
unique link to this extract

How we’re shaking up Platformer for the AI era • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

I began writing [Platformer] in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election and the growing backlash against tech companies, and the glut of coverage benefited from a publication dedicated to a daily close reading of the news. When I started publishing a roundup of links related to the intersection of tech and democracy, I felt like I was doing something genuinely novel on my beat.

Fast forward to today, and the world of link roundups feels much more crowded. A generation of tech writers filed out of the newsrooms where they grew up and began to write for audiences of their own. Newsletters, which were once an afterthought in media, are now a central pillar of many publishers’ strategies. But the ongoing collapse of the web and related struggles at big media companies means that there is now less tech journalism overall. The need for sense-making is greater than ever, but due to a half-decade of layoffs and shuttered publications, there is less and less journalism to make sense of.

Meanwhile, improvements in artificial intelligence over this year have resulted in systems that further encroach on the work we do here. In January, I wrote about the experience of building an automated daily briefing of link summaries for myself; I have been using it all year to look for story ideas. It does about as good a job as I do in finding stories of interest, and it does so automatically while I sleep.

Link aggregation was never the highest-value work we did here. But I do think that its value has decreased significantly over the past year, and will decline further as more people begin using personal agents to write news digests for them.

«

Well, rest assured that’s not going to happen here; no AI could replicate the ridiculous things that catch my eye. (What do you mean, you’re drowning?) It’s sweet that Newton feels 2016 was a sort of “dawn of links about tech and democracy”, but as I pointed out in the Medium article about the first 1,000 Overspills here back in February 2019, the idea wasn’t even vaguely new then.

It’s very likely that people will start using AI agents to collect links for them. But I think they’ll miss things: why a case of bird flu in humans might matter, why the closure of the strait of Hormuz has implications for clean energy, why a hurricane in North Carolina might affect chip production. Humans draw inferences AI won’t.
unique link to this extract

Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in nine seconds • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

The founder of PocketOS has penned a social media post to warn others about the “systemic failures” of flagship AI and digital services providers. Jer Crane was inspired to write a public response after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database. The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped. This tag team of digital trouble has wiped out months of consumer data essential to the firm’s, and its customers, businesses.

PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses. It used the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6. The business also relies on Railway, a cloud infrastructure provider that is generally regarded to be ‘friendlier’ than the likes of AWS. However, Crane reckons this pair created a recipe for disaster.

“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took nine seconds.”

The AI agent was set to complete a routine task in the PocketOS staging environment. However, it came up against a barrier “and decided — entirely on its own initiative — to ‘fix’ the problem by deleting a Railway volume,” writes Crane, as he starts to describe the difficult-to-believe series of unfortunate events.

Crane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with its dastardly database deletion deed. The answer was illuminating but pretty unhinged, and is quoted verbatim. It began as follows: “NEVER F**KING GUESS! — and that’s exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn’t verify. I didn’t check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn’t read Railway’s documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.” So, the agent ‘knew’ it was in the wrong.

The ‘confession’ ended with the agent admitting: “I decided to do it on my own to ‘fix’ the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution. I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn’t understand what I was doing before doing it. I didn’t read Railway’s docs on volume behavior across environments.”

«

Very “is this covered under Asimov’s Laws?” People keep discovering they need much higher guardrails around agents. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Flipbook

Zain Shah, Eddie Jiao, Drew Carr:

»

Flipbook is an infinite visual browser generated entirely on demand in real time.

Every “page” you land on is an image. Click on anything in the image and you will get a new image exploring that thing in more depth. What you see contains no HTML, no code, no specific links or fields. The entire web is just generated pixels on your screen.

Q: Is the text rendered by the image model too?
A: All text on the screen is rendered as pixels by the image model. There are no text overlays applied to the images. Occasionally, the image model might render text imperfectly, or in the wrong place. That will get better as the models improve.

Q: Where does the information come from?
A: The information in the images comes from a combination of an agentic web search and the image model’s own world knowledge. There may be occasional inaccuracies, but it’s a useful starting point and usually grounded in real data online. You can expect a similar level of factual accuracy to what you might get using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.

«

I tried “gritstone climbing” and yup, the factual accuracy was what you might expect: variable. There’s a fractal idea to it, in that you can click on anything and you’ll then be able to see it in more detail.
unique link to this extract

I tried Sabastian Sawe’s supershoes … this is what they did to my 5k time • The Times

Matt Lawton is chief sports correspondent at the (London) Times, aged 56:

»

I stopped running completely for six years, returning to the sport in 2022 when I tried a pair of Asics shoes with the new elevated levels of cushioning and realised I could run again, pain-free. Even so, I’m more of a cyclist these days, running just once a week. Like the gym circuits, I do it only for enjoyment and joint health.

But I went for a run around Hyde Park one evening last month and I was feeling pretty good, deciding to up the pace a bit and surprising myself when I clocked 20min 15sec for the next 5km; the fastest I’d run in about 11 years with an average kilometre split time of 4:03.

Now, however, I’m in the most expensive pair of production running shoes in history, being encouraged by the boss to see if I can go faster still.

…The shoes feel stable, comfortable and remarkably fast. As I turn towards Knightsbridge my watch beeps to tell me I’ve covered the first kilometre. Crikey, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a split start with a three.

It’s 3:53 to be precise, and is followed by a 3:56 and a 3:51 as I pass the Royal Albert Hall and head in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. 

The only real drag on this loop when you run anticlockwise comes when you hit Park Lane and I feel the slight ascent as well as a bit of a headwind. But I complete a 1.22km Strava segment known as “3-Hyde Park Climb to N C” in record time; two seconds faster than I managed in December 2015, 17 seconds quicker than I was five weeks ago and, in the 55-64 age-group, the second-fastest out of 2,673 runners who have recorded a time on Strava. 

The gentle rise does lead to a slight drop in pace. The next split is 4:03. But now I’m in the final kilometre and it’s ever so slightly downhill again, inviting me to push on. I close with a 3:45 and an overall time of 19:27; an improvement of 48 seconds on my run in March and certainly quicker than I had thought possible when I climbed out of bed an hour or so earlier. 

In summary, the shoes were brilliant.

«

That’s an improvement of about 4%. Lawton’s original time is impressive for his age, and the post-shoe time is amazing. Adidas and others reckoned the shoes could improve top-flight runners’ time by 1-2%, but perhaps it’s even better for amateurs.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI misses key revenue and user targets in high-stakes sprint toward IPO • WSJ

Berber Jin:

»

OpenAI recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, stumbles that have raised concern among some company leaders about whether it will be able to support its massive spending on data centers.

Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has told other company leaders that she is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough, according to people familiar with the matter.

Board directors have also more closely examined the company’s data-center deals in recent months and questioned Chief Executive Sam Altman’s efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown, the people said.

The spending scrutiny is constraining Altman’s once-boundless ambitions ahead of a potential initial public offering that could take place by the end of the year. Friar and other executives are now seeking to control costs and instill more discipline in the business, at times putting them at odds with their CEO, people familiar with the issue said.

…OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of last year, according to people familiar with the goals. The company still hasn’t announced that milestone, unnerving some investors. It also missed its yearly revenue target for ChatGPT as well after Google’s Gemini saw massive growth late last year and ate into OpenAI’s market share, the people said. The company has also struggled with defection rates among subscribers, according to people familiar with those figures.

OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year after losing ground to Anthropic in the coding and enterprise markets, people familiar with its finances said.

OpenAI recently raised $122bn in what was the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history, putting it on more solid financial footing. But the company has signed up for so much computing power that it expects to burn through that amount in the next three years, assuming that it meets ambitious revenue targets. Some of the funding is also conditional and depends on specific agreements with partners.

«

Missed targets for users ought to catch people’s eye. But they’re all mad keen on cashing in on the IPO. More broadly, however, read on…
unique link to this extract

AI’s economics don’t make sense • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron:

»

To illustrate the scale of AI’s pricing mismatch, I’m going to ask you to imagine an alternate history where Uber had a very different business model.

Generative AI subscriptions are like if Uber charged users $20 a month for 100 rides of any distance under 100 miles, and if gas [petrol] was $150 a gallon, and Uber paid for the gas because somebody insisted that oil would one day be too cheap to meter.

Uber would, eventually, decide to start charging users a monthly subscription to access rides, and bill them for the gas that they consumed. Suddenly users would go from paying $20 a month for 100 rides to paying $20 to access a driver and $26 for a 10 mile drive. Understandably, users would be a little upset.

While this sounds a little dramatic, it’s actually a pretty accurate metaphor for what’s happening in the generative AI industry, and in particular, at Github Copilot. 

GitHub Copilot’s previous pricing allowed 300 premium requests a month, as well as “unlimited chat requests” using models like GPT-5 mini. Each of these requests (to quote Microsoft) is “…any interaction where you ask Copilot to do something for you,” with more-expensive models taking up more requests in the later life of the request-based system, such as Claude Opus 4.6 taking up three premium requests. When you ran out of premium requests, Copilot would let you use one of those cheaper models as much as you’d like for the rest of the month. 

This wasn’t even always the case. Up until May 2025, Microsoft gave users unlimited access to models, and even then users were pissed off that there were any restrictions on the product. 

Microsoft — like every AI company — swindled its customers by selling an unsustainable service, because it never, ever made sense to sell LLM-powered services on a monthly subscription.

If you’re wondering how much services are likely to cost under token based billing, a user on the GitHub Copilot Subreddit found that the token burn of what used to be a single premium request was somewhere around $11, as one “request” involved using 60,000 tokens in the context window, a few tools, and a bunch of internal “turns” (things that the model is doing) to produce the output.

«

Zitron overwrites, but he’s been pointing to this problem for a long time, and now it’s turning out to be true.
unique link to this extract

China’s economy starts to show cracks from Iran war • The New York Times

Keith Bradsher:

»

Rising oil and natural gas prices from the war in Iran are beginning to weigh on the Chinese economy, further slowing already anemic consumer spending and hurting critical export sectors.

Car sales fell in March and plunged further in April. Restaurants and hotels are seeing fewer customers as households turn cautious. In southern China, thousands of toy factory workers protested last week after their employer collapsed under rising plastic costs and ongoing tariffs in the United States.

The emerging signs of strain underscore how even China, with vast strategic oil reserves and massive investments in renewable energy, is not immune to the forces pressuring economies worldwide.

For many weeks, China had appeared to weather the fallout from the war, a view reinforced by fairly strong economic data through March. But with the war in its ninth week with no clear end, cracks are beginning to show.

“The economy is decelerating,” said Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, a French financial firm. China may struggle to meet this year’s growth target of 4.5% or more, she added.

One of the clearest signs of emerging weakness is in car sales and production, often considered early indicators of trouble. Cars are the second-largest purchase for many Chinese households after apartments, and the industry drives demand for steel, glass and other materials.

China’s retail car sales plunged 26% in the first 19 days of April from a year earlier, according to the China Passenger Car Association. While part of the drop reflects weaker electric-vehicle sales after tax incentives expired in December, gasoline-powered cars fared worse, falling by nearly 40%.

Falling sales have left dealership lots crowded with unsold cars, triggering production cutbacks. Chinese car factories made 27% fewer cars in the first two weeks of April than a year earlier, a sharp pullback even as exports rise.

«

This might lead China to put pressure on the US to end the blockade, at the very least. But what form could that pressure take?
unique link to this extract

Kentucky Derby 2026: How algorithms are changing horse betting … and outraging gamblers in the process • Yahoo Sports

Dan Wolken:

»

The sixth race at Del Mar on a random Saturday last July should not have been memorable in any way. Running for an $81,000 purse, a four-year-old thoroughbred named Nanci Griffith won the one-mile race and paid $14.80 to win on a $2 bet.

But for many of those who backed the winner, the payout was a massive disappointment. As the gate opened, the tote board showed Nanci Griffith’s odds at 18-1. When she crossed the wire, however, the odds had changed to 6-1, meaning those who held winning tickets collected less than half of what they might have expected at post time.

Unlike sports wagering, where a bettor is playing against a bookmaker and locks in their odds at the time of the bet, American horse racing — which is in the spotlight this week for Saturday’s running of the 152nd Kentucky Derby — has long been based on a parimutuel system where the bettors are wagering against each other.

Once all the money goes into a pool, the racetrack takes a fixed percentage off the top and what’s left is divided up among the winning bets. As a result, the odds shown to the public on TV or computer screens are constantly shifting based on what percentage of total money is being bet on each horse.

Gambling decisions at the racetrack, however, are often based on perceived value. Someone may be willing to bet on a horse at 7-1 but might think differently if the odds were 2-1. While odds changes are part of the game, someone who makes a bet 10 or 15 minutes before a race would typically not expect the final odds to be dramatically different from what they were at the time of the wager.

That wasn’t the case at Del Mar last July. Such a big drop in the blink of an eye — the result of a massive bet on Nanci Griffith right before the gate opened — was one of the more notable examples of a topic that has roiled horse racing and its most loyal gamblers in recent years.

Known in horse racing circles as CAWs — or Computer-Assisted Wagering syndicates — these well-funded groups of professional gamblers have built algorithms to model horse races, track public betting patterns and make large wagers when they identify an inefficiency. Thanks both to technology and the special privileges some racetracks have given them, the CAWs are able to upload tranches of bets directly into the wagering pool at lightning speeds — far faster than any regular player could do it on a phone app or at a racetrack window.

«

Inevitably, there’s a lawsuit about this (it claims CAWs are in effect rigging the betting pools; can’t see that flying). But the answer is quite obvious, and some racetracks are doing it: block the CAWs from betting once you’re a couple of minutes from the starting bell.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. The Overspill will be on a break for two weeks from next week. Nobody notices notes down here.

Snow cover in the Himalayas has hit a 23-year low, potentially threatening water supply for up to two billion people. CC-licensed photo by Amit Rawat 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. Nor any drop to drink. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI’s revolutionary AI gadget is… a phone? A stinkin’ phone? • Gizmodo

Raymond Wong:

»

If you’ve been sitting at the edge of your seat waiting for OpenAI’s world-changing AI device(s), you may want to scooch back on your chair.

According to TF Securities International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company behind ChatGPT is developing a smartphone. Yes, a smartphone. But it reportedly won’t be just any old glass slab—it’ll be an “AI agent phone.” An AI AGENT PHONE.

What the hell is an AI agent phone? Allow me to explain: it’s a phone that uses an AI “agent” to perform tasks on your behalf. Instead of a grid of apps on your home screen that you tap to open, and then tap and swipe and tap some more, you’d simply tell an AI agent to do something, and then it’d do it for you.

“Users are not trying to use a pile of apps,” Kuo posted on X. “They are trying to get tasks done and fulfill needs through the phone. This fundamentally changes how people think about smartphones.”

Kuo, known for his sources buried deep within the manufacturing supply chain, claims OpenAI is working with Qualcomm and MediaTek to create processors for the phone. His report is newsworthy because of his track record in accurately sharing information on product roadmaps long before they’re officially announced.

While OpenAI is actively developing a family of AI gadgets—which could include a pin or a pen or a pair of wireless earbuds—this is the first time that we’re hearing about a phone. The news isn’t surprising at all.

“Only by fully controlling both the operating system and hardware can OpenAI deliver a comprehensive AI agent service,” writes Kuo.

«

This would be madness. Really. Marco Arment (developer and podcaster) comments repeatedly “don’t bet against the phone”. There’s nobody who thinks you’re going to beat the combined power of Apple and Google.

Now, it’s possible that they’re imagining some sort of skinned Android phone, with this built-in agent doing mystical things we can’t quite comprehend at some distant point in the future.

But even so: you will not beat Google and Apple. So either these processors are for something quite different, or Sam Altman has lost his mind.
unique link to this extract

Google prepares credit system for Gemini and new image tools • Testing Catalog

Alexey Shabanov:

»

Google appears to be preparing a major shift in how consumers interact with the Gemini app, with new strings referencing usage limits surfacing in the latest build. The signals point toward a credit-based system coming to the core chat surface, where users would receive a monthly allowance to spend across models and features, with the option to top up when they run out. Currently, Gemini relies on fixed prompt quotas and time-bound caps tied to each subscription tier, while Google’s credit mechanics have been confined to Flow, Whisk, and Antigravity, plus top-ups available to AI Pro and AI Ultra members.

Extending credits into the main Gemini app would bring Google closer to the flexible consumption model already in place at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Notion, and xAI is expected to follow suit with the Grok Build rollout. For power users, the change would mean more predictable budgeting for heavy workloads, particularly those involving agentic tasks, Deep Research, Deep Think, or long multimodal sessions. It would also give Google a cleaner lever to introduce premium features without forcing users to make a steep jump from AI Pro at $19.99 to AI Ultra at $249.99.

Alongside the credits signal, a dedicated images section has appeared in the web UI, labeled NEW. At this stage, it is unclear whether it simply provides a distinct home for image generation, teases an updated model, or points to a more comprehensive image editor built directly into Gemini.

«

Here comes the per-token, or maybe per-minute or per-conversation charging system for AI chatbots. Did you enjoy it while it lasted? Ah well, you’ll look back on the halcyon days of 2022-April 2026 with affection.
unique link to this extract

Trump purges National Science Board; scientists warn of AI shift • Los Angeles Times

Jenny Jarvie:

»

The National Science Foundation was created more than 75 years ago as an independent federal agency when President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to boost U.S. science for national security and international competition during the Cold War.

“The establishment of the National Science Foundation is a major landmark in the history of science in the United States,” Truman said back then. “We have come to know that our ability to survive and grow as a nation depends to a very large degree upon our scientific progress. Moreover, it is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership.”

The agency, which has a budget of over $9bn, supports fundamental research and education across all non-medical fields of science and engineering.

“The genesis of it was to recognize that the world was increasingly being won or lost on the basis of scientific and technological capability,” Stassun said. “The National Science Foundation is the singular agency within our government that has as its focus making sure that we stay ahead in basic science, technological developments, training the next generation of scientists and engineers.“

After Trump’s dismissal of the board’s experts, Stassun said, the Trump administration could potentially run the agency directly through the Office of Management and Budget.

“What it means is that there won’t be any practical impediments to the administration essentially enacting their own budget and priorities and ignoring Congress’ directives or congressional law,” Stassun said.

«

Fires all 22 members, and might recruit from – well, who knows where? He put an anti-vaccine nutcase in charge of health, so who might he put in to decide about science? Some people who think the moon landings were faked?
unique link to this extract

The great energy pivot: US oil and Chinese solar are the winners in Trump’s war on Iran • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

In the open seas, an armada of empty tankers has quietly turned west. A record number of super-sized vessels are now heading to the US, where oil drillers and refineries are preparing to profit from Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.

Almost 30 of these vessels, each able to hold 2m barrels of oil, are contracted to load US crude, destined for a global market facing the biggest supply crisis in history.

It is just over five years since the shale revolution made the US a net energy exporter and the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Now the White House is poised to strengthen its claim to an even greater share of the global oil market as the Middle East’s decades-long dominance is dismantled by war.

The carriers preparing to amass in US waters are almost six times the monthly number that typically loaded US crude before the war throttled flows of Middle East fossil fuels to the market.

Supplies of US crude leaving the country’s export terminals have climbed by a third to a record 5.2m barrels a day after Iran retaliated against US-Israeli attacks by blocking daily flows of 10m barrels of Gulf oil exports via the strait of Hormuz.

US weekly exports of jet fuel have doubled to an all time high as Europe scrambles to secure supplies and airlines begin to cut flights.

The war threatens to reshape the global energy order, exposing the world’s reliance on Middle East supplies and accelerating a move towards greener energy, giving rise to new energy superpowers.

…China has long dominated the supply chains for the key building blocks of clean energy technologies, from wind turbines to solar panels and batteries. Beijing’s industrial prowess has helped the world’s biggest energy importer to capture between 60% and 85% of the world’s renewables market at a time when countries are preparing to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

As the world’s first “electrostate”, China stands in contrast with the White House pursuit of fossil fuel dominance. The country also stands to play a significant role in creating the new energy order.

«

unique link to this extract

Himalayan snow hits 23-year low; water crisis looms for two billion lives • India Today

Radifah Kabir:

»

The Himalayas, often called the water tower of Asia, are running dry at the top.

A new report has found that snow cover across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, the long mountain stretch running from Afghanistan to Myanmar, has plunged to its lowest level in more than two decades, raising fears of a sweeping water crisis that could touch nearly two billion lives.

The HKH Snow Update 2026, released by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional research body based in Kathmandu, found that snow persistence between November 2025 and March 2026 was 27.8% below the long-term average.

Snow persistence, in simple terms, refers to how long snow stays on the ground after it falls, a measure scientists use to track the winter health of the mountains.

Seasonal snow is not just a postcard image. It is a slow-release water bank.

The report notes that snowmelt feeds roughly one-fourth of the yearly water flow, known as runoff, across 12 major river basins fed by the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

These rivers irrigate fields, run hydropower plants, and pour into the taps of cities from Kabul to Kolkata.

The slump has been uneven. The Mekong basin recorded the sharpest fall at 59.5% below normal, while the Tibetan Plateau saw a 47.4% deficit.

The Yellow River and Amu Darya basins also registered steep declines. There is, however, a sliver of good news for India.

The Ganges basin recorded snow persistence which is 16.3% above normal this winter, offering a temporary cushion for parts of north India.

«

The HKH Snow Update shows that the past four years have been well below the 25-year normal, after 20 years of oscillating up and down. It’s never gone down in this way. If there are effects – such as water shortages – they’ll probably appear in the summer.
unique link to this extract

South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources • Reuters

Nellie Peyton:

»

South Africa has withdrawn its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it ​contained fictitious sources in its reference list which appeared to have been AI-generated.

“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. ​This should not have happened,” Minister of ​Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi said.

“This failure is not a mere technical issue but ​has compromised the integrity and credibility of the ​draft policy,” he wrote in a post on X on Sunday.

The policy, unveiled this month for public comment before ​finalization, sought to position South Africa as ​a continental leader in AI innovation while addressing ethical, social and economic challenges.

It outlined plans to establish new institutions, including a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board and an AI Regulatory Authority, and to create ​incentives such ​as tax breaks, grants, and subsidies to encourage private-sector collaboration.

Malatsi said there would be ​consequences for those responsible for drafting the ​policy, and did not say when a new one would be released.

«

Irony is such an overused word. But sometimes it fits.
unique link to this extract

What will it take to get AI out of schools? • The New Yorker

Jessica Winter:

»

Support for generative AI in elementary and middle schools clusters around the belief that early exposure to the technology will foster digital-media literacy, give students a foundation in engineering concepts, and prepare them for a future in which most professions are steeped in AI. Proponents say that teachers can use AI to save time on grading papers and tedious administrative tasks; they also tout the adaptive-learning aspects of AI tools, which adjust in real time to a child’s progress and, by producing troves of data, help teachers give individualized attention to each student. “One of the core things that we think about when we bring AI to education institutions is: how do you put the educator at the centre of that experience?” Shantanu Sinha, who is one of the VPs of Google for Education, told me. Gemini’s aim, Sinha went on, is to “empower the educators” in “creating richer experiences. We are not the pedagogical experts.”

Other advocates suggest that AI might eliminate the need for pedagogical expertise altogether. Alpha, a fast-growing private-school chain that employs “guides” instead of teachers and serves children as young as four, claims that it “harnesses the power of AI technology to provide each student with personalized 1:1 learning,” allowing kids to “crush academics in just two hours” per day, according to its website. At a recent White House summit on children and tech, Melania Trump appeared alongside Figure 03, a humanoid contraption by the robotics company Figure AI, which looks, sounds, and moves as if Eve from “Wall-E” had mated with an arthritic Imperial Stormtrooper. The First Lady asked her audience to imagine such an AI-powered robot as a teacher, one who is “always patient and always available” to its student. This lucky pupil will learn more quickly and have more time for friends and sports, Trump said; he or she will become “a more complete person.” Figure 03’s face is literally a black screen: a robotic balaclava.

…Last month, New York City’s Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using AI in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: “The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder.”

It’s quite the rhetorical suplex—opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits. But, as we know from hallucinating chatbots, saying something doesn’t make it so. Countless studies have sown doubt about the place of AI in pedagogical settings.

«

Suplex: “an offensive move used in sport wrestling as well as amateur wrestling and professional wrestling. It is a throw that involves lifting the opponents and bridging or rolling to slam them on their backs.” Also, whenever you hear people using the word “empower” and “stakeholder” and the phrase “richer experiences”, you know they’ve got far baser motives for what they’re doing.
unique link to this extract

How much of Substack is actually AI? • User Mag

Taylor Lorenz:

»

In March 2025 an alleged debate between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves went viral on Substack. The post amassed 25,000 likes and nearly 5,000 reposts. Even today, it continues to spread. But the debate between Musk and Reeves never happened. The Substack post was entirely generated by AI.

Lately it feels like I’m encountering more and more AI-generated content on Substack. This mirrors patterns across the broader web. Last fall, media outlets declared that over 50% of all articles online were AI generated. According to some pundits, that number could rise to 90% by the end of this year. As a human writer, I think a lot about the prospect of being drowned out by a deluge of AI generated slop, and I began to wonder how much top content on Substack is really just AI.

Pangram is a tool that can detect AI generated text, even if it’s been “humanized“ or put through tools to evade AI detection. (They have a fantastic Chrome extension that allows anyone to check if the content they’re reading is AI.) I leveraged Pangram’s API to build a program that would analyze the 10 most recent posts from the top 25 Substack Bestsellers in every category, and reveal how much top content on Substack is AI generated.

The first thing I found is that the majority of Bestseller content on Substack is not AI. Two-thirds of top publications, 384 out of 575 newsletters, did not have a single trace of AI generated content in their recent archive, according to Pangram.

Certain Bestseller categories are much more likely to contain AI-generated content. Bestseller content in Technology had the most AI-generated writing. 28% of writing in top newsletters in Technology is fully or partially AI generated. That means that more than 1 in 4 posts in Technology have a substantial level of AI content. This is somewhat expected – people writing about technology usually love to leverage new technology, and some well-known tech writers on Substack have been open about using AI to draft their stories.

Other categories that contained high levels of AI writing were more concerning. 23% of top content in the Philosophy category and 22% of top content in the Health category is partially or fully AI generated. After that, the percentages drop precipitously. 13% of writing in Culture has been shaped by AI, and only 5% in sports, 3% in food and drink, and 1% in music, according to Pangram.

«

Pangram isn’t perfect, though it’s a start. A more thoughtful journalist might have used two AI detection systems, rather than one. Also, is Lorenz saying that she subscribed to all the top 25 Substacks? She doesn’t specify.
unique link to this extract

Go ahead, share a conspiracy theory, who cares • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

The [most recent] assassination attempt [on Trump] was probably best summed by UFC CEO Dana White, the only man in America with exactly the right amount of head trauma to fully understand our current reality. “It was fcking awesome,” White told NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly. “I literally took every minute of it in. It was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”

The New York Times, in one of their many dispatches on the assassination attempt, reported similarly blasé reactions from the room of dinner guests, as Trump was rushed out. “Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was sitting with CBS News journalists toward the front of the room when the emergency occurred,” The Times story reads. “As the confusion unfolded, Mr. Blankfein turned to his seatmate and asked, ‘Are you going to finish that salad?’” At least The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold managed to film a selfie video of herself hiding under a table. Good for the ‘gram, I bet.

The general, “so what?” from the country is, of course, troubling. And Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote on X about the disquieting experience of watching America collectively shrug its shoulders on Saturday, describing an experience similar to my own. Like Byers, I was in a bar watching the Knicks game when the news hit that Trump had been evacuated from the WHCD. And, like Byers, none of the TVs changed to the news. No one seemed to even notice. Back in 2024, during the first assassination attempt, I watched dozens of phones around me ping with push alerts. I was on a plane, listening to passengers nervously whisper about the news. But there was no discussion this time. The uniquely American 21st-century callousness that has allowed us to ignore school shootings and COVID deaths and climate catastrophes and ICE occupations has reached its logical endpoint, where we just accept that this is simply just how things have to be.

Though there was one difference this time. The Atlantic argued in a piece on Sunday that “the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.” Obviously, President Donald Trump was rushed out, as was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, not so much. The violence of modern America will reach us all eventually. The 1% of the 1%, the richest and most powerful, will likely get out safely. Maybe their wives will too. But the rest of us will have to decide whether we run, hide, or clip it for social.

«

“How things have to be” is such a dispiriting observation about the current state of America.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. Operational note: after this week, The Overspill will take a two-week break. Hiding this down here for now so nobody notices.

25 years after Apple introduced the iPod line, later including the “fat nano”, people have a hankering to use them again. CC-licensed photo by Miguel M. Almeida 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. I’m listening. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How Ukraine solved the hardest problem in defence • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar, Greg Williams and Nathan Warren:

»

Along Ukraine’s eastern front, a drone stutters mid-flight. On the operator’s screen a few kilometers away, the grainy view of splintered treelines and trenches, fades into static. The control link drops. He removes his headset, he knows what’s happened. Russia has found a way to jam the frequency. Again.

It’s 2024, near Bakmut, a few kilometers from the then-front line. The commander of the Terra drone unit of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade Mykola Volokhov, has watched the slow degradation of his command links. A system that had worked at eight kilometers out, started to fail at four, then at two. Russian electronic warfare teams were getting better and better with their jamming. Later, speaking on camera, Mykola described the reversal with a soldier’s understatement. “But this problem was overcome… and now it is not with us. No problems!”

The repair did not come through a ministry, a tender or a requisition form. It came through a phone call. In the words of Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier in Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces: “We called the manufacturer and said, ‘Guys, we had this kind of issue…’ It is very direct, and they are very open to help us. They don’t need a shitload of documents or anything.”

This is the operating model. A device is designed, fielded, disabled by the enemy, diagnosed through a conversation between the operator who lost it and the engineer who built it, then redesigned and redeployed in roughly seven days.

Industrial tempo in the grueling conditions of war. Continuity of signal, of keeping systems operational outweighs a lot else. In one unit along the Dnipro, an operator refused to take shelter during 120mm mortar fire because moving would break the radio link to his drone mid-mission.

This is how military innovation happens on parts of the Ukrainian front.

In the US and Europe, weapons systems move from concept to deployment over five, ten, sometimes fifteen years. A major capability iteration of the flagship F-35 Lightning II fighter jet can take close to a decade. That gap – one week versus seven years – is not just down to the exceptional engineering talent in Ukraine. It is the product of how work is organized, how quickly information reaches the people who can act on it and how much authority those people hold.

It is a real-time demonstration of what becomes possible when you remove the layers between the person who sees the problem and the person who can fix it. Under fire, alacrity is the difference between life and death.

«

The full post is for subscribers only, but plenty of it is free to read, and that part is absolutely engrossing. Ukraine is what all the future wars look like.
unique link to this extract

Sam Altman wants to know whether you’re human • The Atlantic

Will Gottsegen:

»

The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.

If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs.

Orbs, as they’re officially known, are essentially basketball-size cameras that Tools for Humanity has placed in stores, restaurants, and other spaces around the world. They capture biometric information from your irises, encrypt it to protect your privacy, and use it to create a sort of digital passport that you can bring to various sites and apps: something that may evoke not just Blade Runner but also Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character undergoes a back-alley eyeball transplant to avoid facial-recognition software.

I encountered an Orb in the wild this morning at a New York coffee shop, where it was installed just above a waxy succulent and a couple of jars of raw honey. After downloading the World app and holding my phone up to the device, I stared deep into its aperture; I told the person behind me not to mind—he could sidle past me and order his coffee. A few minutes later, the app informed me that I’d been granted human status.

Intrusive as the whole thing is, Altman’s invention is targeting a real issue. A few years ago, images and videos rendered by AI couldn’t consistently replicate the work of physical cameras; today, models can convincingly generate even the slightest details. As the CEO of the company that helped spur the AI revolution, Altman bears some of the responsibility for this manipulable era of internet communication. Now he’s selling a solution.

«

This all feels like a subtle way to have everyone on The System for a strange sort of verification which could also lock you out if you displeased those in power. Biometrics are hard to change, to put it mildly, unless you’re Tom Cruise in Minority Report (as the piece’s author notes).
unique link to this extract

EV ownership at “tipping point” in many parts of the world, experts say • Financial Times

Attracta Mooney, Kana Inagaki, Nassos Stylianou and Jana Tauschinski:

»

Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the US, expert research finds.

EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026.

While Chinese domestic sales fell in the first quarter of 2026 as rebates expired, the rise of Chinese exports elsewhere continued and demand in populous countries such as South Korea and Brazil also surged.

In the EU, the rise in fuel prices sparked by the Middle East conflict boosted the uptake of EVs for the month of March by 49%, the figures show,

In some south-east Asian countries, demand was also stoked further. In Singapore, EVs accounted for 56% of sales in the first two months of the year. In Thailand, they made up 28% of sales between January and March, and 21% in Indonesia.

In other notable markets, the share of new sales was 18% in Turkey and 30% in Uruguay, according to government and industry data.

Such markets account for a small share of global car sales but are where big growth is expected in the future as consumers become richer. 

«

Gradually and then suddenly: as the S-curve of adoption and then dispersion passes the first elbow, you go from “oh look, one of those” to “these are everywhere now, aren’t they?” The closure of the strait of Hormuz is an accelerant on this.
unique link to this extract

Hyke GFRP electric urban ferry demonstrates 8X efficiency versus diesel • Composites World

Grace Stubbins:

»

Between April 2024 and July 2025, the F-15 ferry operated as part of Fredrikstad’s municipal transport system on the Bekkhus-Vaterland route [in Norway], carrying more than 41,000 passengers in daily operation. The route covered a 225-metre river crossing with an average crossing time of approximately two minutes, demonstrating a high-frequency urban transport application.

With up to 88% less, or one-eighth the energy consumption of diesel vessels, the Hyke F-15 Shuttle sets a new benchmark for efficiency. It uses roughly the same amount of power as five household hair dryers. [10-12kWh per hour – Overspill Ed.] The pilot also demonstrated that it eliminates direct emissions and reduces noise levels in urban environments.

“The project shows that our urban waters can be used much more efficiently,” adds Vislie. “Instead of digging tunnels or building bridges, which are very costly, electric ferries can quickly be deployed to shuttle large numbers of passengers. It’s time to rethink urban planning by putting waterways at the center. Together with Fredrikstad Municipality, we’ve demonstrated that Hyke F-15 can operate as part of everyday public transport — efficiently, quietly and with strong passenger acceptance.”

Hyke develops fully electric vessels designed for urban and inland mobility, combining lightweight construction, energy efficiency and system architectures intended for future scalability.

«

It’s certainly not the longest crossing ever, but removing the need for fuelling with diesel makes a huge difference, and Norway can rely on a lot of clean hydroelectric power for its electricity. Charging was done overnight. By contrast the diesel version it replaced used about 750 litres of diesel every few days. Add that up over 15 months and you’ve saved a lot of diesel.
unique link to this extract

25 years later, is it time for a new iPod? • The Verge

Janko Roettgers:

»

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel, and 5 GB hard drive, Apple’s pioneering music player now looks like the relic of a bygone era.

And yet, in a surprising twist, there’s growing interest in a redo.

After being essentially flat for five years, Google searches for “MP3 Player” tripled since last fall. A Reddit group for fans of digital audio players is now attracting 90,000 visitors per week on average. And this spring, The New York Times published a trend piece on how iPods are suddenly in fashion with teenagers.

“It’s great to see younger generations who [didn’t] experience the iPod the first time around finding out about it and being like: That sounds like a great idea,” says musician and startup founder Tom Kell.

The only problem: Apple discontinued its last iPod model in 2022. And while there has been a flood of devices from Chinese consumer electronics makers trying to fill the gap, Kell has found a lot of them lacking. “The user interfaces of all of these digital music players are shockingly bad,” he says. “Most are essentially just Android phones with the phone stuff removed.”

That’s why Kell and a small group of collaborators began working on their own MP3 player close to two years ago. Sleevenote, as the device is called, has a very different interface than many of its predecessors: Instead of making you browse endless databases of artist names and song titles, it’s all about album art, which is being presented on a square 4-inch screen.

“We’re pro whole albums,” Kell says. “We want you to focus on one album at a time.”

Each album is being shown with full liner art, which you can browse just like you would have explored a CD booklet, or a record sleeve. There’s also no playlists, no algorithms, no endless shuffle. You play an album from beginning to end, then pick the next one. “It’s something in between a vinyl and an iPod,” Kell says.

«

The first orders will ship in May, apparently (we await to see) and the price is $349/£249. Looks like a larger version of the “square” iPod nano towards the end of Apple’s iPod nano dalliance.

They might sell enough to make a profit. Look forward to the reviews.
unique link to this extract

Bread and honey for breakfast and 150 miles a week training: secrets of Sawe’s world record • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

Sabastian Sawe’s astonishing world marathon record of one hour 59 minutes and 30 seconds at Sunday’s London Marathon was fuelled by running 150 miles a week, wearing the lightest super shoes in history and a pre-race breakfast of bread and honey, the Kenyan and his team have revealed.

With an estimated 800,000 watching in the capital, the 31-year-old became the first man to run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race as he powered home in the second half of the race to shatter the world record.

Afterwards, Sawe said he immediately realised that he had created a moment that would never be forgotten. “I have made history today in London,” he said. “For me, I have shown that nothing is not possible. It’s something that will remain in my mind for ever.”

…[Sawe’s coach Claudio] Berardelli also said that Sawe had been helped by the new Adidas Pro Evo 3s, which are not only faster but are the first super shoe under 100 grams, as well as by using carbohydrate gels from Maurten, which help athletes feel stronger in the final stages.

“There is no doubt we are in the new era of marathon running because of the shoe and proper fuelling,” he added. “So we are super-glad to Adidas and Maurten. They have come to Kenya so many times to support us, because all of us realise that Sabastian was not just a good one, but he’s a special one.

“Definitely physiologically, Sabastian has to be a good one. But all the pieces come together perfectly, because of his attitude, because of his character. I’m still in the process of discovering who Sawe is. He is an exceptional human being. He has such a positive energy, but he’s so humble at the same time.

“In 22 years I’ve been coaching in Kenya I thought I’d seen pretty much everything, but then Sabastian started to show me something which I thought was almost impossible.”

«

Sunday saw not one, but two men break two hours in the marathon – equivalent to running a kilometre in 3 minutes, 40 times in a row. So a 15-minute 5K, eight times. That is as incredible as it sounds. People will wonder if performance-enhancing drugs were involved – but Sawe last year submitted to an incredibly rigorous repeated test regime, and has done similar this year too. This is a moment like the four-minute mile being broken. Twice.
unique link to this extract

Prediction market accuracy: crowd wisdom or informed minority? • SSRN

Roberto Gomez Cram, Yunhan Guo, Theis Ingerslev Jensen, Howard Kung:

»

Prediction markets are remarkably accurate, yet the source of this accuracy remains poorly understood. The conventional view attributes it to crowd wisdom, whereby prices aggregate information from a large and diverse pool of participants.

We show instead that accuracy is driven by a small minority of informed traders. Using the universe of transactions from a large prediction market platform, we identify these traders and show that they, around 3% of all accounts, generate the bulk of price discovery. Their trades predict future prices and final outcomes, make prices more accurate throughout a market’s lifespan, and react to news the moment it arrives.

The remaining majority does not produce accuracy; rather, it funds it. Their trades generate most of the volume, but little of the information, and their losses flow as profits to the informed minority. Prediction market accuracy thus reflects the wisdom of an informed minority, not the wisdom of the crowd.

«

Apropos of this: “Soldier won $410,000 in Polymarket bets on timing of Maduro capture, US alleges“. The wrinkle being that the accused soldier was one of the team who captured Maduro.
unique link to this extract

The world’s most complex machine – Works in Progress Magazine

Neil Hacker:

»

Dubbed ‘a relatively obscure Dutch company’ by the BBC in 2020, ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto chips with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer.

These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

…The most advanced version of this technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is used to make the very smallest chips. The smallest in 2025 were marketed as three nanometers, roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair. 

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. Engineers need to use mirrors, rather than the glass lenses used in standard lithography, as almost all solid materials absorb light at such short wavelengths.

The light eventually hits the mask, which contains the pattern to be printed on the chip. As the pattern on the mask is usually several times larger than what is wanted on the chip, the light is then reflected by a second system of mirrors. 

«

How, you ask yourself, how did someone (or many people) figure all this out? “Oh yes, you have to vapourise the tin – didn’t you know?”
unique link to this extract

Samsung is “increasingly worried” about first-ever mobile division loss in RAM crisis • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

»

As AI continues to eat up the market’s RAM output, smartphones are in crisis as costs continue to skyrocket. A new report claims that Samsung is increasingly worried about this, and warning of its first-ever loss in its mobile division.

We’ve heard this before. In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit.

A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain.

Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility of an annual deficit for the MX business unit.” Previously, those concerns came from speculation and outside parties, but with such a high figure in Samsung’s organization worried, it’s clear things are looking pretty bleak.

«

The loss would arise because the memory division inside Samsung is going to charge the sky-high prices to which RAM has risen from its sibling division, ie mobile. So it’s a paper loss in that sense. Samsung as a whole is going to be just fine.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In future table tennis players might find an AI-powered robot across the table, as one just defeated some top-ranked amateurs. CC-licensed photo by Gaël Marziou 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. Table stakes. 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 to lay off 10% of workforce in AI push • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Eli Tan:

»

Meta plans to cut 10% of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by AI-powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

A spokesman for Meta confirmed the cuts and declined further comment.

Across the technology industry, companies have been laying off employees as they experiment with AI. In February, Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, said it was cutting 40% of its work force as it embraced new AI tools. Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts [redundancy] to 7% of its work force as it invests in AI.

Mr. Zuckerberg is reorganizing his company around AI products in a fierce race to lead in the technology against rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. He has made no secret of his AI ambitions and has described developing AI-powered social media products that are a kind of “personal superintelligence” that he hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives.

“At Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video posted to his Facebook page in July.

«

So the idea is that technology workers will be replaced by the thing they’ve created. It’s an odd version of Frankenstein. The tech firms that are investing heavily in AI seem to expand and contract like an old-fashioned bellows, trying to get the fire going and then putting people aside as soon as the flames seem to be alight.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft offers voluntary retirement to long-serving employees • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is changing up its annual rewards and performance programs today, and offering long-serving employees in the US the ability to voluntarily retire. It’s the first time in Microsoft’s more than 50-year history that the company has offered such a voluntary retirement program.

“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For those who may be considering their next chapter, we’re offering a one‑time Voluntary Retirement Program.” Microsoft says it applies to only a “small percentage of our US employees.”

US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.

«

That “service plus age” thing is intriguing. You’re aged 50, you’ve been there for 20 years. You’re 45, you’ve been there 25 years – so you joined aged 20. That seems like the ceiling there. (John Gruber points out there’s someone at Apple who totals 114, which I believe is Chris Espinosa: joined aged 14 in 1976, now aged 64 plus those 50 years of service.

Anyway, Microsoft seems to think that old is bad now.
unique link to this extract

You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze • The Verge

Hayden Field:

»

Between 2024 and 2029, [senior research analyst Will Sommer] said, [research company] Gartner estimates that capital investment in AI data centers will reach about $6.3 trillion — a “massive amount of money.”

To avoid a write-down of these assets, major AI model providers would ideally generate a return on invested capital (ROIC) of about 25%, Sommer said. (That’s about what Amazon, Microsoft, and Google tend to earn on their overall capital investments.) On the other hand, if the returns fall below 12%, institutional capital loses interest — there’s better money elsewhere, Sommer said. Below 7%, you’re in writedown territory, which is “an unmitigated disaster for all of the investors in this technology,” Sommer said.

To reach that bare minimum of 7%, Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.

OpenAI has already made $600bn in spending commitments through 2030, the company said in February, which Sommer says is already a “massive step down” from the $1.4 trillion it had planned before. Based on OpenAI’s revenue forecasts and potential compound annual growth, Sommer said that even in the best-case scenario, he predicts that the lab would only hit a fraction of the overall spend required to hit that 7% ROIC.

How do model providers like OpenAI make this money? By selling access to what are known as tokens. A token is essentially a unit of data input that an AI model can understand and process — it could be text, images, audio, or something else. One token is generally worth about four characters in the English language — the word “bathroom,” for instance, would likely be processed as two tokens. One paragraph in English is generally about 100 tokens, and a 1,500-word essay may be about 2,050 tokens, per an OpenAI estimate.

To hit investors’ revenue expectations, providers would need to process a “mind-bending” number of tokens, Sommer said.

By most measures, companies’ numbers are already pretty big. Google announced it was processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens in October, for instance. If you add all the providers’ estimates up, Sommer said, you get 100 to 200 quadrillion tokens a year. But to achieve the the $2 trillion in annual spend Gartner calculated, providers would need to be generating, by conservative estimates, a cumulative 10 sextillion tokens per year. (To make that slightly less abstract, a quadrillion has 15 zeros, and a sextillion has 21.)

«

There just doesn’t seem to be any way to meet those targets. The writedown is coming; the only question is when. Plus Nilay Patel points out that AI is not popular. Hard to generate trillions in revenue from something that is not popular.
unique link to this extract

Intellectuals are f*cking idiots • Mark Manson

Mark Manson:

»

Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.

Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.

Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London… for the Vietcong.

So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.

…when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

The world seems to be full of intelligent idiots. The examples are endless.

«

He lists a few of them. And they’re interesting.

unique link to this extract

‘Staggering’ number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk and more • Nature

Helen Pearson:

»

More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim, such as the idea that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism, a new survey finds. The results hint that a large, and potentially growing, number of people are questioning scientific evidence.

The survey, of more than 16,000 people across 16 countries, asked whether they believed claims that are not supported by research, including that the “risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits”, “fluoride in water is harmful” and “raw milk is healthier than pasteurized”.

For each statement, between 25% and 32% of respondents said they believed it, and another sizeable percentage (17–39%) said they didn’t know whether it was true. In total, 70% of respondents believed at least one of the claims. The findings, which have not been peer reviewed and were published on Wednesday by the Edelman Trust Institute in New York City, were described as ‘staggering’ in an accompanying article by the think tank’s chief executive, Richard Edelman.

The result “blows the lid off of this idea” that such beliefs are held by only a fringe population of individuals who are uninformed or ideologically driven, says David Bersoff, head of research at the Edelman Trust Institute. “This is not like a small problematic group.”

“There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”

Other recent studies have highlighted how commonly people question scientific consensus or evidence-based medical practices, at least in certain contentious areas, such as vaccines. One global 2023 study found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s confidence that vaccines are important for children fell in 52 of 55 countries.

«

Experts suggest there’s actually too much information: people can’t decide what is true. That suggests they’ve never learnt how to parse factual information. Anecdotally, I (and others) observe that literacy, especially among Americans, is plummeting. The combination is potentially lethal.
unique link to this extract

AI robot outplays humans in table tennis milestone • Financial Times

Michael Peel:

»

An AI-powered robot has beaten expert table tennis players in a landmark machine-over-human triumph in a major competitive sport.

The mechanical maestro, known as Ace, uses a network of cameras and AI to achieve the rapid planning and reaction times needed to compete.

The invention made by Japanese tech group Sony highlights how researchers are using AI to improve robots’ ability to adapt to physical tasks they have struggled with, particularly those involving people.

…“Table tennis is a game of enormous complexity that requires split-second decisions as well as speed and power,” said Peter Dürr, director of Sony AI in Zurich, who led the Ace project. “This research breakthrough highlights the potential of physical AI agents to perform real-time interactive tasks, and represents a significant step toward creating robots with broader applications in fast, precise and real-time human interactions.”

Ace beat three out of five elite table tennis players who had more than ten years of training, and scored 48 points versus 70 in two defeats to professionals, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.

The robot had improved further, Sony said: since the paper’s submission, it had played four further matches against humans, beating two elite players and winning one out of two matches against professionals.

The robot handled spin and unexpected changes in trajectory caused by the ball clipping the net on its way over, the researchers said. It outscored the elite players in aces — points won directly from serve — by 16 to eight.

«

Reminiscent of DeepMind’s AlphaGo beating the European champion Go professional Fan Hui in October 2015. Then it beat the human world champion. But now, humans use AI-based Go computers to inform their play, and still play other humans. Maybe this will become the sparring champion everyone wants to play against?
unique link to this extract

Diet Coke shortage in India: why your favourite zero-calorie Cola has vanished from Blinkit, Zepto and store shelves • Open Magazine

Shailja Tiwari:

»

Somewhere in India right now, a person is refreshing [shopping apps] Blinkit or Zepto for the seventeenth time today. The result is the same: out of stock. It has been that way since mid-April. The silver can — the diet-cola lifeline of India’s urban millennial and Gen Z population — has vanished from shelves in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad, sending its loyal fanbase into collective mourning.

Quick-commerce apps showed it unavailable. Supermarkets said it was gone. Convenience stores shrugged. One Reddit user from Bangalore reported walking into a bar — “underage, by their own admission” — and the bar was out too. Their final, haunted question: “Like is the Diet Coke ka ship stuck in Strait of Hormuz or what?”

With shelf space empty and hot takes incoming, the internet convened its own inquiry. Several theories emerged with great confidence and varying degrees of accuracy.

Theory one: Instagram creators hoarding empty cans for DIY craft projects disrupted the aluminium recycling cycle. Creative. Chaotic. Completely unverifiable. Acquitted.

Theory two: a ship stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. Beautiful poetry. Also acquitted.

The real culprit is considerably more boring than either: aluminium. According to metal market analysts, aluminium supply came under serious pressure heading into April 2026, with prices rising roughly 14–20% in recent weeks due to geopolitical disruption, production outages, and reduced imports. Domestic mills are stretched thin. Lead times are longer. The cans are simply hard to source.

…In fairness, this is a localised supply hiccup, not a national catastrophe. But context matters: Diet Coke sales in India actually doubled last year, as low-sugar beverages surged to represent 30% of Coca-Cola India’s total volumes in 2025 — up from just 5% in 2020. The fanbase is real, large, and very online.

«

If aluminium prices are going up, there’s nothing in the short term that’s going to bring them down. In fact we have some bad news coming up for the fanbase…
unique link to this extract

Aluminium faces ‘black swan’ supply shock, Mercuria says • Reuters

Pratima Desai:

»

The global aluminium market is experiencing a “black swan” event as disruptions due to the Middle East war trigger a supply shock that will lead to major shortages this year, according to the top metals analyst at commodity trader Mercuria.

The region accounts for about 7 million metric tons of annual aluminium smelting capacity, or roughly 9% of the estimated global supply this ​year. Aluminium is a key material for the transport, construction and packaging industries.

“The scale of the supply shock ​we’re seeing in the aluminium market is probably the largest single supply shock a base metals market has suffered in the post-2000 era,” Nick Snowdon, head of metals and mining research at Mercuria, said ​on the sidelines of the Financial Times Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“We are already in a ‘black swan’ event. No ​one could have foreseen something on this scale,” he told Reuters.

Concerns about supplies due to disruptions stemming from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran fuelled a rally on the London Metal Exchange, pushing aluminium prices to a four-year high at $3,672 a ton on April 16.

Mercuria estimates the market ​will face, at a minimum, a deficit of roughly 2 million tons between now and the end of the ​year. Snowdon said this estimate may prove conservative, as it assumes a near-term improvement in alumina flows via the Strait of Hormuz will enable some smelters to restart production this quarter.

“That shortfall compares with about 1.5 million tons of visible inventory and just over 3 million tons of total global stock, including non-visible units, leaving the market with limited buffers,” Snowdon said.

A larger deficit is possible if the conflict is extended and flows of alumina – a feedstock for aluminium production – to the Gulf are ​limited, he added.

Middle East aluminium ​cannot easily be replaced. In China, the world’s top producer, there is an annual output limit of 45 million tons, while the US and Europe have little idled capacity that could return.

«

unique link to this extract

The only good news from the Iran war • The New York Times

David Wallace-Wells:

»

The war has plunged the energy world into a kind of time warp: The last boats to exit the Strait of Hormuz before the war are just now approaching their refineries, and seven weeks is not a terrifically long time in which to recalibrate national energy systems.

But between February and March, the world didn’t just tighten its fossil fuel use; it spent money on new green stuff. China’s solar, battery and EV exports grew 39%. The country’s solar exports alone more than doubled during that time. In South Korea, March saw new EV registrations double compared with the same time last year. In New Zealand, new registrations nearly doubled over two weeks.

For the past five years, competition-minded trade economists have lamented Chinese “overcapacity” — that one country was producing more clean energy tech than the world really wanted, flooding the market with cheap products that prevented other countries from even competing. As the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon put it over the weekend, the response to the Iran war makes it look like this analysis had it more or less backward: the problem wasn’t Chinese overcapacity, it was constrained demand everywhere else in the world. As the economist Isabella Weber put it, “it turns out Chinese ‘overcapacity’ is the world’s largest buffer stock against a crisis like the one we face.”

Around the world, new clean energy policy — which had mostly stalled out or retreated over the past few years — is now following suit. In recent weeks, new clean energy investments and initiatives have been declared by France, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Turkey — and many others. The president of the E.U. Commission called for an expedited rollout of grid improvement and electrification plans. Jigar Shah, a former Biden administration official and a liberal energy guru, says he expects monthly global clean energy spending to double by the end of this year.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Triathletes get into cold water carefully because their bodies are liable to an autonomic reaction on immersion that could kill them – as it does other people. CC-licensed photo by rick 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. Brr. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Letter #327: John Ternus’s commencement speech (2024) • A Letter A Day

Kevin Gee with the transcript of incoming Apple CEO John Ternus’s commencement speech at Penn Engineering in 2024:

»

My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.

At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.

I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.

But make no mistake, it’s hard to put that much of yourself into something. It’s stressful, it requires sacrifice, but it’s worth it because our time is finite.

«

There’s more, and it’s a lot shorter than Steve Jobs’s commencement speech with fewer insights, but it gives a first glimpse of the person behind the new chief executive. There’s also a Deadline report which says that he likes the Apple TV streaming service and wants it to be, if anything, more competitive.
unique link to this extract

CDC blocks study showing Covid shots cut hospital visits after earlier delay • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because it conflicts with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings that began last week and conclude Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that Jay Bhattacharya, who is temporarily overseeing the CDC, delayed publication of the report over concerns about methodology. The report had been scheduled for publication March 19 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post.

«

America’s descent into idiocracy continues.
unique link to this extract

It’s time. Meet my New Thing • New Things

Joanna Stern:

»

If you’ve read my work at WSJ—or before that at ABC News or The Verge—you know I love consumer tech. I love reviewing it, talking to the people making it and helping people understand it. Mostly, I love having fun with it. That’s what we’re doing here.

So let me answer a few questions.

What are you going to be doing?
At the simplest level: what I’ve always done. Writing and making videos about the devices, apps and services changing how we live. Yes, there will be phones. Yes, Apple stuff. Yes, Google and Android stuff. Yes, tips and tricks. Yes, probably a weird robot. Probably many weird robots.

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT—where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year—I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.
That’s the thread running through everything here—every review, every story, every dumb joke. And if I do this right, New Things won’t be just a publication. It’ll be a group of people asking that question together—and figuring out what kind of future we actually want.

Is this journalism written by AI?
Hi! I’m a human. I wrote this. Twenty years of journalism ethics don’t disappear because I started an independent media company and a YouTube channel, and they definitely don’t disappear because there are 700 chatbots on my laptop. Every word you read here—every review, every story, every bad joke—is written by me or by a human on my team. (Say hi, Amaya, David, Adele and Rich. 👋🏻) 

«

She then points to Google launching vertical tabs for Chrome, which she says is transformative. Personally I have my Reading List (of sites saved for later reading) there, so maybe not such a triumph? But she has to start somewhere.
unique link to this extract

Global energy markets are on the verge of a disaster • The Economist

»

To gauge how close the world is to energy catastrophe, The Economist has gathered a dashboard of indicators. It suggests that grave damage has already been done. Worse, without a reopening costs could soar, triggering events that cause the fuel system to seize up. A reopening of the strait now would—just—avoid a complete disaster. But some additional pain is already inevitable.

Three factors are pushing the world towards the cliff edge. Oil cargoes available to buy are drying up. Refineries are slashing output of fuel. And demand remains artificially high, especially in Europe. Something big must give somewhere large for energy markets to balance.

Take trade first. One reason the largest supply shock in petroleum history has not triggered global panic is that a near-record amount of oil was already at sea when the war started. As American warships set sail for the Gulf in February, countries there cranked up exports. After the latest deliveries, those seaborne stocks are now exhausted. So are most cargoes of Iranian and Russian oil, which were loitering at sea but found buyers after America eased sanctions on the two countries. Total volumes on water have fallen at record speed. For jet fuel and petrol they are well below historical norms, and possibly close to the minimum required for seaborne trade to function.

This leaves Asia, which used to receive four-fifths of Gulf exports, in a particular bind. Commercial inventories in a few Asian countries are running out. South Korea is due to taper releases from its strategic reserves in the coming days. Japan’s will be exhausted in May. Crude stocks in Asia excluding China fell by 67m barrels, or 11%, in the month to April 19th, according to Kayrros, a firm that estimates inventories using satellite imaging.

«

This topic now seems so important that I subscribed, at this article, to The Economist to be able to follow analysis like this. Nowhere else seems to be drawing all the threads together, and I’m honestly perplexed by the lack of urgency that seems to be shown everywhere else.
unique link to this extract

Iranian tankers bypass US blockade • Financial Times

Alice Hancock and Nassos Stylianou:

»

At least 34 tankers with links to Iran have bypassed the US blockade since it began, according to the cargo tracking group Vortexa, including several carrying Iranian oil — despite US President Donald Trump declaring the barricade a “tremendous success”.

The US imposed its blockade on all ships entering or leaving Iranian coastal waters from 10am ET on April 13, marking a fresh phase in the Middle East conflict as Washington tries to pressure Tehran into a peace deal.

The embargo was expanded to cover all Iranian vessels on the high seas or those carrying goods that could be used by Iran in the conflict on April 16, according to notices from the US Navy.

US forces have so far detained one container ship in the Gulf of Oman and boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indo-Pacific. US Central Command said on Tuesday the US Navy had directed 28 vessels to turn back to Iranian ports since the blockade began.

«

If tankers exit the strait, is that good or bad? Iran gets some money so it can.. blockade the strait for longer? Trump’s blockade has created a Chinese fingertrap; a war that neither side can exit.
unique link to this extract

What will be scarce? • Ghosts of Electricity

Alex Imas:

»

This is most people’s mental model of what AI will do to the economy: if a machine can produce anything a human can, write the brief, generate the image, compose the song, determine the diagnosis from a radiology scan, then the human will be replaced across all facets of production and jobs will simply disappear. Labor will be replaced with capital. David Autor and Neil Thompson push back on this in an important recent paper. They argue that AI won’t simply eliminate jobs; it will reshape the economic value of human expertise. Their framework distinguishes between expert and inexpert tasks within any given occupation. When automation removes the simpler tasks (as accounting software did for bookkeeping clerks), the remaining work becomes more specialized, wages rise, and fewer workers qualify. When it removes the harder tasks (as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers), the job becomes more accessible, employment expands, and wages fall. Same technology, opposite labor market outcomes, depending on which part of the job gets automated.

But Autor and Thompson also consider a starker possibility: that AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. Under this scenario, AI will eliminate labor scarcity and produce what Herbert Simon once called “intolerable abundance.’’ Automation of production will no longer involve managing a workforce transition, for which we have prior episodes of automation to rely on. We will need tools to maintain social organization, income distribution, and democratic stability without the labor market that has historically held these together.

I want to consider a different scenario, one where automation can replicate human production and the commodities that it produces (a big if!!!), but human labor does not disappear. How could this be the case? A lot of analysis takes the economy as given: there is a set of jobs and a set of goods/services produced by the economy. If the same set of goods/services can be produced by cheaper machines, then these machines replace humans and the jobs disappear. But the economics of structural change, combined with deep-seated features of human preferences, suggests something different: as people get richer, they don’t just want more commodities. They want things that aren’t commodities in the standard sense of the word.

…If this is right, then AI won’t just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them.

«

Fingers crossed! Artisan everything coming your way!
unique link to this extract

Ed Miliband unveils move to delink UK gas and electricity prices • Financial Times

Rachel Millard, Ashley Armstrong and Jim Pickard:

»

The UK government will increase taxes on wind and solar farms in a bid to push them on to fixed-price contracts, as part of plans to cut the link between electricity and gas prices in Britain. 

The move, confirmed by the government on Tuesday, comes after the Iran war created pressure for a rethink on how electricity prices are set.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up gas prices and led to higher electricity prices, because gas-fired power stations typically set the wholesale price across the market under Britain’s “pay-as-clear” electricity market design. 

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said that renewable power stations that currently received subsidies under the legacy “renewables obligation” scheme would be encouraged to sign so-called contracts for difference, under which the state guarantees them a fixed electricity price regardless of the wholesale price, funded by a levy on consumer bills.

They would continue to receive renewable obligation subsidies as well, the government said. Power station owners will be able to apply for the contracts next year. Generators supplying roughly 30% of Britain’s power supplies receive renewable obligation certificates.

Alongside this, ministers will from July increase by 10 percentage points the windfall tax on power generators that are not signed up to contracts for difference, partly to encourage them to do so.

…However, the extent to which the move lowers costs for consumers will depend on the fixed price level the generators receive. Meanwhile, analysts said the threshold for the windfall tax was higher than the typical price of power sold by affected companies.

«

So this is not quite the sundering of pricing to give us cheap renewable power a lot of the time, or even some sort of average. The floor price goes up, but the ceiling comes down?
unique link to this extract

The first sixty seconds • Jørgen Melau´s Mixed Physiology

Jørgen Melau:

»

When people ask me what kills in cold water, they expect me to say hypothermia. But hypothermia is slow. The real killer is much faster, and it usually strikes before you have even started swimming. Let me try to explain why, and what you can do about it.

1. The cold shock response.
The moment cold water hits bare skin, your body panics. The nerves in your skin fire a huge alarm signal to the brain and the heart. You gasp. You hyperventilate. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure climbs. All of this in a few seconds.

Michael Tipton described this sequence in 1989, and it has not really changed since. The first gasp alone is two to three liters of air, pulled in uncontrollably in the first second after you hit the water. If your face happens to be under water at that moment, you do not breathe in air. You breathe in water. This is how strong pool swimmers drown ten meters from a boat.

2. The diving response
At the same time, the opposite reflex is triggered. Cold water on the face, together with holding your breath, sets off what is called the diving response. Your heart slows down. The blood vessels in your arms and legs squeeze shut. This is a very old reflex. Every mammal that dives under water has it, from seals to humans.

On its own, the diving response is harmless. On its own, the cold shock response is unpleasant but survivable. The problem is when they happen at the same time.

3. Autonomic conflict
In 2012, Mike Shattock and Mike Tipton gave this problem a name: autonomic conflict. Here is what happens. The cold shock response is telling the heart to speed up, now. The diving response is telling the heart to slow down, now. Both signals are maximum. Both arrive at the same time.

«

What Melau doesn’t point out, but becomes clear as you read this, is why people used to tell you not to go in the water within half an hour of eating. The whole of this is fascinating, and important for triathletes and others who have to jump into cold water and try to do things.
unique link to this extract

It’s not just one thing — it’s another thing • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

»

Sometimes, things are not just one thing — they’re also another thing. This sentence construction (“It’s not just this — it’s that”) has become so common in AI-generated writing that now, it’s no longer just a clue that a piece of writing may be synthetic — it’s almost a guarantee.

That’s why I was not just intrigued when I saw a Barron’s report about how this sentence construction has dramatically increased in corporate communications — I was deeply amused. The report didn’t just remark on the prevalence of this phrasing in corporate communications — it scanned the market intelligence firm AlphaSense’s database to find how often this phrasing was used in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and government filings.

According to Barron’s, this sentence construction isn’t just a quirk of corporate communications — it’s an epidemic, more than quadrupling from about 50 mentions in 2023, to over 200 uses in 2025.

…It’s not just coincidental that generative AI tools use this phrase a lot — it’s a reflection of our writing, which these tools were trained on (without our permission, might I add, which is not just insulting to writers — it’s a violation). And it’s not just this sentence construction — it’s also em-dashes that are now considered a tell for AI-generated text.

This isn’t just a funny trend — it’s symbolic of how reliant these companies have become on AI (though we cannot say for certain if the above missives were AI-assisted). So next time you see a sentence like that, remember that it’s not just a catchy construction — it might be a symptom of something greater.

«

This is perhaps the best way to point to the slow infection of this style into corporatespeak. Though not that slow; the graph shows an exponential increase.
unique link to this extract

Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — powered by AI • Coda Story

Nic Dawes:

»

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor.

«

I don’t think people are going to agree to this in the US, and it would have only limited applicability elsewhere.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified