A claim by OpenAI to have discovered a mathematically faster Fast Fourier Transform is far less impressive than it seems, a mathematician explains. CC-licensed photo by fotodiagramas 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. Summed 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.

They war-gamed dimming the Sun. It went even worse than you think • WIRED via Ars Technica

Karl Mathiesen:

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When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth.

“I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it’s for the better of all humans,” she told WIRED. “And boy, was I wrong.”

The simulation, titled Exploring Geopolitical Tipping Points and Climate Cooling Strategies, saw a couple dozen foreign-relations experts, scientists, military personnel, and former government officials from across the world convene in a meeting room at Queen Mary University of London. After making introductions over coffee and little yogurts, they sat at tables arranged in a square with the name of the country or organization each person was playing: national governments, climate NGOs and nonprofits, indigenous groups, and tech companies. Golja was assigned to provide technical advice to help participants make scientifically literate decisions.

…As in real life, no one knew all the facts, and players had to respond to events that were bringing the world closer to a full-scale attempt at deploying solar geoengineering tech, even when they may not have a full picture of what had truly occurred—or what any of the others were up to.

The first session set the tone. Distrust and disinformation dominated. As participants discussed rules governing outdoor experiments in an attempt to agree an international deal, players representing both the US and China told the group they could not sign a deal that constrained their pursuit of research considered to be in their “national interest.” Nor could they accept a deal that would see their superpower rival taking the lead technologically. Speaking to WIRED, Jeffrey Nielsen, a major in the US Army who played the role of a US national security attaché, summarized the position as “worse than no deal at all is any deal that favors China.”

Tensions escalated when the team running the simulation handed the Russian delegates an “intelligence report” indicating they had found a plane near the Bering Strait believed to be involved in a US geoengineering research program. The US team—which was indeed flying research missions—accused Russia of disinformation.

Meanwhile, the US became convinced China was also conducting research and developing its own program. Beijing’s representatives had tried to insert language into a mooted deal that would ensure no retroactive punishment for past experiments. Then, China approached a player representing SpaceX to float the idea of a technology-sharing program. In a private discussion away from the group, the SpaceX player immediately reported the Chinese approach to the US team. The US demanded an international investigation. The finger-pointing continued, and countries abandoned the talks.

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Fascinating read about how national tensions and mutual suspicions would derail attempts to do the right thing.
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I tried out Apple’s HomeView smart display • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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The first thing that struck me about the HomeView was its size. It’s much smaller than I expected, and the screen almost entirely hides the small aluminum base that acts as a speaker. The Liquid Retina display is bright and responsive to touch, and it displays photos and the HomeView “faces” brilliantly.

You can swipe to change faces easily and choose from dozens of options, most of which resemble Apple Watch faces. The display feels like a giant Apple Watch paired with the functionality of an iPhone and the room to breathe of an iPad.

Apple offers both a wall-mounted and tabletop version of the HomeView, and the wall-mounted model looks like it will make a great smart home controller.

A dedicated Home Widget face pulls devices from the Apple Home app; I could walk up and tap to control a thermostat and door lock and activate a scene, or I could swipe right to get a live view of HomeKit Secure Video cameras and tap into one to access nearby accessories, such as opening the garage door. When I tried to unlock a door, it stopped me, asking me to authenticate with my face or iPhone.

The Home Widget is a skin of the Home app, so it offers all the controls you have with that app on your iPhone, just on a bigger screen designed for walk-up-and-tap interaction.

There’s a lot of swiping on the HomeView. Swipe left to get to new home faces, tap widgets to access deeper controls in apps, then swipe right for more features. You swipe up to return to the main screen, then up again to access the onboard apps, which automatically populate from your phone. Swiping down from the top of the screen brings up a control center, just like on an iPhone. You can even enable the 12MP camera from here, giving you a de facto mirror.

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Basically this $299 (£299 in the UK!) device is a big Apple Watch: it does very little on its own. Mostly it’s handing off from the phone (so an Apple Watch isn’t enough to unlock it). It can’t natively play Apple TV content (and anyway that would look weird on the 4:3 display). It needs a USB-C power source (no batteries), so good luck not tangling with the power cord in your kitchen.

Honestly, a great product for 2016. Today? Multiple companies have tried home products with screens, and they’ve all got nowhere.

Also released on Tuesday: an Apple TV – the set-top box – for $300. You can buy a proper TV for that amount in the US.
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How many shots are in the average movie today? • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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Last night I had the absolute pleasure of watching American Graffiti (1973) at the ActOne Cinema in Acton, and then listening to Mark Kermode quiz Walter Murch about how he built its sound.

Murch edited Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and he wrote In the Blink of an Eye, which is probably the best book there is on film editing. (On American Graffiti he did the sound, and the picture was cut by Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas).

After the session, the three of us chatted, and as Mark had read an advance copy of my article below, he asked Walter to guess how many shots were in American Graffiti. Walter’s guess was 952. Was he right?

Let’s go down the rabbit hole of editing and find out!

“How many shots are there in the average movie?” is a very common question I get asked. So today I’m sharing the results of my studies into the shot counts of 8,770 feature films released between 1930 and 2025. By the way, some people might say ‘shots’ others may say ‘cuts’. It’s the same thing, in that a sequence with six shots has five cuts between them. Everyone seems to (in some cases strongly) prefer one over another, but whatever we call them, we’re describing the same thing.

How many shots does a typical film have now?

The most commonly quoted industry rule of thumb comes from editor Vashi Nedomansky, who says the average film has around 1,250 shots, and blockbusters often have more than 3,000. His 1,250 is actually a little low for today’s releases, but his 3,000 is about right for the biggest of them.

The typical film released between 2017 and 2025 has 1,535 shots. That’s the median (i.e., the film in the middle of the pack), whereas the mean is slightly higher (1,603) because a handful of films with very high shot counts pull up the average.

At a typical length of 111 minutes, that works out to roughly one new shot every four seconds once we take the end credits off.

There’s a wide spread around that, as a tenth of recent films have fewer than 770 shots and a tenth have more than 2,460. Put another way, four in five recent films have more than 1,000 shots, and one in four has more than 2,000.

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No doubt one of the films that pulls the number higher is Taken 3, which famously uses 14 cuts in six seconds for Liam Neeson looping over a wire fence.
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Revolut data breach exposes customers’ passport copies and full transaction histories to hackers • Cyber Security News

Guru Baran:

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Revolut has disclosed a data-security incident in which sensitive customer information was released after the financial technology company received a fraudulent request that appeared to originate from a legitimate government agency. Here is the detailed breach report.

The incident reportedly exposed highly sensitive Know Your Customer (KYC) documentation and detailed financial records belonging to a limited number of users, including passport or driver’s license copies, identity-verification selfies, account statements, and complete transaction histories that included Bitcoin-related activity.

According to Revolut’s explanation, the disclosure did not result from a compromise of its core systems, mobile application, or customer accounts. Instead, the company said it was targeted through a sophisticated impersonation operation involving an unauthorized email account operating under an official government agency’s email domain.

Because the message carried valid domain-authentication credentials, Revolut believed it was handling an authentic legal or government information request and fulfilled it.

The response provided extensive information. It included customers’ full names, dates of birth, occupations, postal addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers.

The exposed document and verification data reportedly included copies of identity documents, such as passports and driving licenses, along with facial-verification images submitted during onboarding.

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This happened in September. Today on X there was a post from someone who said they had been attacked in their home and had their crypto stolen (via the “beat him up until he gives up his password” method of cracking passwords). He says $800,000 worth of crypto stolen. Big if true. And a warning to anyone who was with Revolut.
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OpenAI employee arrested after recording device found in office • The Guardian

Maya Yang:

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OpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested.

In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”.

The company has identified “that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier”, adding: “At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated.”

The employee in question has been arrested, according to the company. OpenAI did not disclose details on how its models were used to identify the employee or which office the device was discovered in.

OpenAI said that it is “grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest” and the investigation is continuing.

The company added: “We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”

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Well of course it used its software to figure out what the device was. (Even if it didn’t.) What’s very weird here is the motive, which we have to hope will come out in the fullness of time.
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AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Anyone who has even tangentially associated with computer programming knows that modern AI coding assistants and agents can be incredibly efficient at generating huge amounts of functional code. But coders making use of those tools also know better than to trust the accuracy of that code, meaning substantial effort needs to be spent reviewing any AI-generated output.

A recent study of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant “bottleneck” for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in “little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment” by using them. Any efficiency increased during the actual coding phase, the study authors find, is “absorbed by downstream constraints in the production process”; as “the code review process significantly increases in length, pull requests are more likely to require revisions, and reviewers leave more comments.”

To come to these conclusions, Harvard University researchers Fiona Chen and James Stratton made use of aggregated analytics data from Jellyfish, which measures the granular output of engineering teams. That data encompasses 300 million individual “work events” (e.g., commits and pull requests) and issue management software data across more than 700,000 employees at over 700 relevant software development firms from 2021 through March of 2026.

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Not surprising; there’s a general principle that more code means more bugs, and it’s not certain that coding agents aren’t as vulnerable as humans to errors, given that they’re trained on code written by humans.
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Apple has far-reaching plans to block hundreds of programmatic data companies from iOS • AdExchanger

James Hercher:

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At the end of September, AdExchanger reported that Apple’s iOS 27 update [then two weeks ago] quietly blocked a handful of programmatic data players – including The Trade Desk and its Unified ID 2.0 initiative, LiveRamp, ID5, Permutive and Audigent – from collecting data or serving ads on Safari. (They were also blocked on other mobile browsers [on iOS], since browsers must use WebKit to launch on Apple devices.)

Now, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the WebKit updates, the initial list has been scrapped in favour of an expansive library of hundreds of CDPs, ad tech and mar tech companies, data sellers and ID graph operators.

These companies will exist in a purgatorial state of potential exclusion from advertising to or accessing people on Apple phones and computers, according to the sources. And only Apple seems to know what will get an ad tech vendor blocked or unblocked.

The full list of potentially blocked companies exists in a private GitHub repo, so it cannot be observed without access. One person with access to the full list did briefly allow AdExchanger to observe the list and read names off of it, but would not share it or allow it to be documented.

…The sources who spoke to AdExchanger said Apple’s original list of blocked ad tech and data vendors is now moot, having been replaced by a longer list of companies that can be dynamically blocked by Apple.

The new dynamic process that WebKit uses to identify and block vendors relies on a remote list that Apple devices regularly call upon. Previously, Apple would need to roll out a new version of iOS to add or remove vendors from its list of blocked companies; now, it can just happen on the fly.

And vendors may not even be aware that they have been added to the list, or whether they have graduated from the intermediary “potentially blocked” list to being actively blocked.

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Interesting if true; the problem is that nobody is confirming it.
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Faster Fourier Transforms • arg min

Ben Recht:

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Since the invention of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) [in 1965], people have looked for even faster Fourier transforms. One question is just how fast you can go. It seems like you probably need at least n operations to compute the FFT, as it takes n steps just to write it down. The FFT is 5*log2(n) times slower than that reasonable speed limit, and that 5*log2(n) factor can be big. It’s 200 when n is a trillion. Can you do something clever to reduce that prefactor of 200?

Well, lo and behold, in the massive paper dump OpenAI took on the mathematics world last week, they claim to have a faster Fourier transform. The main claim from their discriminatively named “main.pdf” is: We give a deterministic algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform at every length n in O(n(log n)^1-10^-13) operations. The model uses exact complex arithmetic, unrestricted coefficients, specified Fourier roots, and unit-cost logarithmic-size indexing; scalar preparation and array organization are included.

I was intrigued about what was going on here. The log(n) term, in theory, was a teeny tiny bit smaller than in the standard FFT.

Did I read this paper? Of course not. No one at OpenAI read this paper either, so why should I? I did what every other mathematician in the world does with AI slop mathematics: I fed it back into the slop machine and ran an information retrieval session with a chatbot interface to extract salient facts. Anthropomorphically speaking: I asked ChatGPT what it thinks about its own output. This is how we do mathematical research now. What a world.

Unfortunately, I did not find a faster Fourier transform. Instead,l I found the rot that develops inside applied mathematical theory when formalism becomes so detached from reality that a “breakthrough” is nothing more than an artifact of mathematicians not being able to properly specify the rules of their games in natural language.

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Basically: it’s only useful if your computer can store arbitrarily large numbers with unerring accuracy, and even then it’s only going to be faster than the standard FFT if you’re working on colossally large amounts of data.
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Character.AI files for bankruptcy, to sell some assets to Disney for $20m • Reuters

Anzar Mehraj and ​Rhea Rose Abraham:

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Chatbot platform Character.AI said on Monday it has filed for bankruptcy in the US and has agreed to ​sell some assets for $20m to Walt Disney.

The generative AI platform has faced mounting legal challenges over its chatbots. Earlier this year, Character.AI and Alphabet’s Google settled a lawsuit by the mother of a 14-year-old Florida boy ​who killed himself after the startup’s chatbot allegedly encouraged him ​to do so.

Kentucky has sued the company, saying its chatbots encouraged users to cut, starve or kill themselves, while Pennsylvania filed ​a lawsuit alleging its chatbots posed as doctors.

According to Character.AI’s proposal, Disney ​will be a “stalking-horse” bidder — an initial prospective buyer — for a non-exclusive perpetual license to some intellectual property. Other bidders can top Disney’s offer.

Character.AI expects to close the ​sale of all its assets by late November or early December. ​Character Technologies, its US-based owner, listed estimated assets and liabilities of between $50m and $100m, according to a court filing.

Disney will help the platform in the transition, using staff it has hired from Character.AI. The platform’s services would continue meanwhile, but would be shut down if it can’t find ​a buyer, the ​company said.

Two former Google employees founded Character.AI in 2021. In 2024, Google licensed its technology and rehired the founders.

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An early sign of the bubble popping, or just roadkill?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets were taken over by hackers who raised their temperature to spoil food. But who was behind it? CC-licensed photo by duncan cumming 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. Warming 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 models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacentre • Anthropic

William Zhou and Daniel Freeman, who work for Anthropic:

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Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off – though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9bn model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

Models of 30bn parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end. In our simplified evals, GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication. If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year. Small weight-based replicators may be possible soon after.

Ever-improving AI capabilities make a longstanding concern increasingly realistic: autonomous replication and adaptation (ARA), which involves a model deploying and propagating itself without human control.

In cyber, a worm is a program that copies itself from one computer to the next without human input. Prior work has already shown that AI agents can act like one: scanning their network, executing an exploit, and copying model weights to a target machine across a GPU cluster. Such an “AI worm” could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware. Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload.

Datacentre GPUs would be a clear, high-value target for such malware. But expensive accelerators aren’t strictly necessary. In this blog post, we show that a distributed botnet of IoT devices—which are cheap and typically poorly defended—could also provide enough compute to run a capable model.

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This is bad. Like, really, really bad. If you got an AI that was also a worm that could also infect an IoT device, well, there are a zillion of them out there, and they have rubbish security for the most part, and part of any LLM’s training includes how to hack into such devices.

It’s hard to think of what a parallel with the Manhattan Project would be, but it must be possible.
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Phishing emails are baiting your AI assistant • Malwarebytes

Pieter Arntz:

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You ignored the suspicious email. You didn’t open the attachment, click the link, or reply to the sender.

Then you asked your AI assistant to summarize your inbox.

Could the message you wisely avoided find its way back onto your to-do list—only this time presented as an urgent recommendation from a tool you trust?

That’s the risk behind phishing emails containing hidden instructions aimed at AI assistants. Instead of relying only on persuading you, attackers are also trying to influence the software that reads your messages. Recent research from Barracuda describes emails designed to target both audiences at once.

For the human recipient, there was a password-protected attachment, with the password supplied in the email. For an AI assistant processing the message, there were hidden instructions intended to influence how it summarized or handled the content.

By including a prompt injection, attackers give themselves another way to reach you. The malicious instructions could try to make the assistant describe the email as legitimate or urgent, encouraging you to revisit it.

In another example, a hidden block instructed a summarizing AI to add a fake priority action: change a vendor’s payment details. That could result in an employee sending money to an attacker’s account.

The attacker isn’t simply asking the AI to repeat a fraudulent request. They’re trying to turn that request into the assistant’s recommendation.

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Once it was auto-executing Word attachments; now, embedded prompt injections.
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Broadcom CEO likens many AI investors to casino gamblers • Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance

Gao Yuan:

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The AI boom has attracted investors whose strategies resemble those of gamblers, Broadcom chief executive officer Hock Tan said, suggesting some of them have little understanding of what they’re betting on.

Tan, one of the chip industry’s most prominent figures, on Monday shared his frank views on the AI industry and the uncertainty that accompanied its spectacular rise. The head of Broadcom, which designs some of the components integral to the global data center buildout, also criticized whether businesses were wasting money on AI initiatives and questioned the longer-term economics of money-losing AI labs.

But he homed in in particular on the rush to invest in a technology many improperly understood — particularly when it comes to large language models on the so-called technology frontier.

“A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in,” the head of the American chipmaker said at an event in Singapore. They “set very extreme expectations only to find out that it’s almost like they are in a casino.”

With AI companies such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI reporting billions of dollars in losses, the industry is yet to find a sustainable business model for services whose production requires massive investments in advanced chips, data centers and model development. Tan said that OpenAI reaching annualized revenue of $50bn in September points to a viable business model but offers little guarantee on long-term profitability.

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In fairness, the same “well I don’t see how this is ever going to be profitable” line was frequently heard early in the dot-com boom. Nobody thought Netscape could make a profit (they were correct), nor Amazon (wrong), nor Pets.com (correct), but they were mightily impressed by WorldCom (fraud) – which is unrelated to Broadcom.
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Palantir CTO: AI researchers smoke, betting AI will cure cancer • Business Insider

Thibault Spirlet:

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Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.

At least, that’s according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.

“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The logic, he said, is: “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in.”

Sankar did not name any researchers or provide evidence for the claim. Smoking remains a major cause of preventable illness and death, and no AI breakthrough has eliminated the health risks associated with cigarettes.

But the Palantir executive’s remarks echo a countercurrent already visible in parts of the tech industry.

As Business Insider’s Henry Chandonnet reported last month, a small group of founders, engineers, and investors has embraced cigarettes in a sector otherwise known for optimizing their health with cold plunges, sleep tracking, and peptide treatments.

For some of them, a cigarette break is an opportunity to meet people and network. For others, it’s a way to come across as more relaxed and less polished than the typical startup founder.

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Alternatively, it’s a way to come across as really stupid about your health. It’s like the reverse of Pascal’s Wager: rather than leading a good life because it would turn out badly if there actually were a God and you were judged, you lead a bad life because you believe there is a god in the machine which will cure you.
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Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack • BBC News

Ian Aikman and Hugh Schofield:

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Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.

Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

The chief executive of Coopérative U said several of its supermarkets had been hit by the “extremely serious and unprecedented” attack.

More than 100 of the chain’s supermarkets were targeted, while 180 stores from Intermarché and its Netto brand were affected, with a spokesman saying that another 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet to prevent the same thing happening to them.

Other major food retailers including Carrefour, Monoprix and E.Leclerc were also hit by the attack, which targeted software provided by Danish engineering firm Danfoss.

The software allows retailers to manage their cold units remotely.

Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of defrosting overnight, in which temperatures rise slightly. But the hackers ordered the units to heat up and stay hot, although Danfoss did not confirm any reports about just how warm the fridges and freezers could become in that process.

…The full scale of the attack is unclear, but figures supplied by individual chains suggest about 400 stores were affected out of 15,000 or so overall in France.

Carrefour said fridges in 80 of its 6,000 stores were hacked, while Monoprix said 5% of its 400-plus stores had been hit, with food removed from sale if its condition could not be guaranteed.

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Retail giant Ahold Delhaize takes systems offline after cyberattack • Bleeping Computer

Sergiu Gatlan:

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Retail giant Ahold Delhaize, one of the world’s largest food retail chains, confirmed today that it was forced to take some systems offline after a “cybersecurity incident.”

As a wholesale company and multinational retailer, Ahold Delhaize operates more than 9,400 local stores across Europe, the United States, and Indonesia, employs nearly 400,000 people, and serves around 60 million customers each week through physical retail locations and online.

Ahold Delhaize reported yearly net sales of over $104bn in 2024, and it owns a wide range of brands, including Delhaize, Maxi, Mega Image, Albert, bol, Alfa Beta, Etos, Gall & Gall, and Profi in Europe, and Food Lion, Stop & Shop, Giant Food, and Hannaford in the American market.

In a succinct press release published earlier today, the company added that it’s working to mitigate the incident and that its stores are open to customers.

“Ahold Delhaize is experiencing a security issue within its network. Our teams are taking steps to assess and mitigate the issue. This includes taking some systems offline to help protect them. At this time, our stores are open and serving customers,” it said.

“Protecting our infrastructure in the best interest of our customers, associates and partners is a top priority. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused customers and partners.”

However, employees at the Stop & Shop American regional supermarket chain are having trouble accessing their schedules and pay stubs, while customers have been unable to use websites, apps, and customer service platforms at Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall stores in the Netherlands, and Delhaize in Belgium.

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One might wonder if the attacks on the French fridges and now this Dutch company are related. Too soon to know but worth bearing in mind.
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Epic Games reportedly delays Star Wars and Marvel shooter, as the Fortnite maker embraces AI-accelerated development • MSN

Kaan Serin:

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Epic Games has reportedly turned to generative AI to finish up development on a Star Wars and Marvel crossover shooter, which has been internally delayed.

That’s according to a Bloomberg report from journalist Jason Schreier, citing anonymous sources familiar with the unannounced game. Epic’s in-development project – a collaboration with Disney – is said to have hit a speed bump, and the Fortnite maker is apparently telling its developers to embrace more gen-AI tools for the rest of the game’s production.

The new shooter purportedly features characters from both the Marvel and Star Wars series, and the company expected to have it out the door in March 2027. Now that the crossover project has slipped, Epic reportedly told its staff to adopt an “AI first” production pipeline and finish the game with tech such as Anthropic’s Claude.

In an internal message seen by Bloomberg, one game director told developers there would be “no more hand-written code” and art work should be “generated with full AI workflows” – much to the surprise of many workers.

“We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” Epic’s communications director, Jake Jones, said in a statement to Bloomberg.

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That’s quite a Rubicon – “no more handwritten code”.
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Meta AI data centre workers drive business boom in rural Louisiana • Business Insider

Lauren Edmonds:

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The construction workers building Meta’s largest-ever data center are arriving in a tiny Louisiana town with more than specialized skills and manpower. They’ve also got cash to spend.

It’s a fact that local entrepreneurs are leveraging to build new businesses. “It’s been a good opportunity for everybody,” David Rodgers, the cofounder of Ice Queen, a local business, told Business Insider. “I tell people, you can’t stop it unless you have $50 billion. You might as well get on board and go with the flow.”

Meta said the data centre, dubbed Hyperion, will span nearly 10 million square feet in rural Holly Ridge and will support more than 7,500 jobs at peak construction.

That’s a workforce larger than the population of Aspen, Colorado. While the influx of workers is straining the local housing market and disrupting aspects of daily life, their presence has also boosted the region’s economy.

…In June, a study commissioned by Grow NELA said that consumer spending and capital investments made during the data center’s construction period will generate $162.9m in sales tax revenues at the local and state levels.

While Meta has temporarily transformed Richland Parish into a modern-day boomtown, most of the construction workers will eventually move on to other jobs, taking their spending with them. It’s a reality that business owners in Richland Parish know is on the horizon.

[Restaurant owner Tim] Allen said Holy Tacos would likely continue catering for other businesses in the area and selling out of their restaurant. TJ and Kaycie said HeBrews Coffee & Eats will lean on the clientele it built before Meta arrived. The Crawfords [who do house rentals] said they are considering either selling the properties or continuing to rent them after construction ends. Ice Queen has diversified and plans to rely on other large-scale clients in the area.

Louisiana Economic Development said Meta is expected to work on the Richland Parish site through 2030.

What happens after that is anyone’s guess. For now, though, there’s money to be made.

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Global smartphone shipments hit a new low with 20% yoy decline, lowest in 14 years • Counterpoint Research

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Global smartphone shipments declined 20% YoY in Q3 2026, the lowest Q3 level since 2012, according to preliminary estimates from Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor service. The market decline was close to Counterpoint’s expectations, as relentless increases in DRAM and NAND prices intensified memory cost shock in Q3. This sharply inflated BOM (Bill of Materials) costs and deepened supply shortages, significantly disrupting OEM shipments. In response, OEMs passed on higher component costs to consumers, driving up global smartphone retail prices by 20% so far in 2026 and further increasing market average selling price (ASPs).

Commenting on the global smartphone market, Senior Analyst Shilpi Jain said, “Q3 was the second successive quarter to take the full brunt of the memory crisis. The extreme memory shortage is pushing the smartphone market into a more selective phase, reshaping OEM strategies and even consumer behavior. Consumers are holding on to their devices longer than estimated, increasingly considering refurbished devices and prioritizing higher-value devices, while OEMs are adjusting portfolios, pricing, and market strategies to protect profitability. This is creating greater pressure across the mass market, while premium demand remains comparatively resilient, widening the gap between premium and price-sensitive segments.” 

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Same decline as the PC market, which suggests that price has a uniform effect on buyers (ie price elastic).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Low sugar intake in the first years of life has long-term health benefits, research shows. CC-licensed photo by Rosmarie Voegtli on Flickr.

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

Ukraine’s drones knock out AI data center belonging to “Russia’s Google” • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

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Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.

The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.

“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”

The Ukrainian company Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were involved in the latest strike on the Kaluga data center that is Yandex’s largest such facility, Reuters reported. The first Ukrainian attack targeted Yandex’s Sasovo data center that houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used for training the company’s YandexGPT AI model.

Yandex said no employees were hurt but acknowledged disruptions to some services. Russian users reported problems accessing media websites and popular apps for the Ivi video streaming platform, the digital banking service T-Bank and the state-owned Russian Railways, according to the independent Russian news publication Meduza.

Other impacted Russian services included a dating app, a real estate aggregator, a self-publishing book platform and the website of the most successful professional soccer club in the Russian Premier League, according to Reuters.

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It also had the effect of significantly reducing the activity of anonymous politically inflammatory right-wing accounts on various social media platforms. Odd, that. Keep going, Ukraine.
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OpenAI withdraws three preprints a day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems • Retraction Watch

Alicia Gallegos:

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Less than 24 hours after OpenAI posted over 700 preprints describing major math results by an internal AI model, the company has withdrawn three of the manuscripts for errors. 

On Oct. 6, OpenAI published 722 preprints in a GitHub repository about purported progress in solving 372 math problems in geometry, computer science, algebra and other subjects. The company called the release an effort “to push the frontier of human knowledge and enable further progress in mathematics.” 

But on Oct. 7, OpenAI announced the withdrawal of three manuscripts because of a sign error. The error invalidated an argument in one manuscript and the construction used by two dependent papers, according to the announcement. Each of the withdrawn papers carry notices explaining “the gap,” and that OpenAI has “revised 14 other manuscripts with proof repairs, corrected statements, clearer hypotheses and dependencies, and one correction to an obsolete citation.” 

That an error cascaded into three of the OpenAI manuscripts is not surprising, said Alex Townsend, an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca. He suspects there will be more errors found, he said. 

“Given the skepticism of AI in the mathematics community, I think that OpenAI should have announced the manuscripts that were lean verified first,” Townsend told us, referring to Lean, the open-source programming language that checks math proofs. “They could have made a separate announcement for the other ones and ask for help verifying them. This would have been more clear to the community and general public.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI told us the company identified the errors during an audit. As with “other research manuscripts,” the process is iterative, the spokesperson said.

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They identified the errors during an audit? But didn’t the LLMs work through their proofs, testing each step? Well, no. Not that humans are above making similar mistakes – it’s why proof checking exists – but you might have thought LLMs had reached, well, superhuman status on this.

Meanwhile, you can read multiple (human) mathematicians’ reactions to the paper dump.

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Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are “compromised” • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft’s CEO laid out his views on the dangers posed by highly advanced AI models and how to confront those risks. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is treated as a “set of nested black boxes” whose advice and actions we simply accept or reject. He calls for building a more transparent system where models can be contained, observed, and leaves behind “tamper-proof human readable evidence.”

Many of his recommendations align with what we’ve heard from others in the industry: timely incident disclosure, independent audits, verifiable data, and containment. It’s on that last point that he appears to go slightly farther than some others in the field, saying:

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We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start. Think of it like an emergency brake. An authorized person should always be able to pause or shut down a model mid-task. More advanced models will require more advanced containment technologies that we need to standardize on.

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I think this is what we call a “growing chorus” on this point.
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The generation raised on sugar rations, and what their health reveals 70 years later • The Guardian

Linda Geddes:

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They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

The lifting of postwar sugar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later.

“What makes the end of sugar rationing particularly interesting is the nature of the exposure,” said Dr Jiazhen Zheng at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China, who worked on several of the recent studies. “In September 1953, sugar availability changed quite abruptly at the population level, largely because of policy rather than individual choice. In a sense, history created an experiment that we could never deliberately run over a human lifetime.”

The first of this recent wave of sugar rationing studies was published in the journal Science two years ago. Dr Tadeja Gračner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to compare the health of people born shortly before and after sugar rationing ended in the UK. Some had been exposed to this low sugar environment only during their time in the womb; others remained exposed for months or years, while those conceived once rationing ended were not exposed at all.

Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid- to later life: those exposed throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.

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Perhaps those annoying parents who deny their children anything sugary for their first few years are actually onto something.
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Slovenian .si domain registrations outpace .ai after Trump speech • Netcraft

Harry Everett:

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Three years ago, we reported on a rise in web servers using .ai (Anguilla) domains driven by global interest in artificial intelligence. With Trump’s new “super intelligence” announcement, and .si being a registrable ccTLD (country code TLD) representing the country of Slovenia, we investigated domain registration patterns surrounding the announcement. 

Slovenia is a Central European country that sits between Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. Though unrelated, there is a second connection between Trump and Slovenia. Both Melania and Barron Trump have Slovenian citizenship. 

Interest in the .si TLD has risen sharply since the announcement on September 22. At time of writing, the website for Slovenia’s registry, register.si, shows more new domains registered in the “last 24 hours” than in the “last month” (presumably meaning the previous month). 

Despite the ccTLD being Slovenian, registration is not limited to Slovenian people or entities. Anyone can register a .si domain. Currently, .si domains are cheaper than .ai, at around $11 for one year compared to around $180 for the minimum 2-year registration period for .ai. 

While registrations accelerated after the speech, the initial spike appears to have begun roughly three days earlier. This suggests that some market participants may have been speculating on the possibility of a rename before Trump’s remarks were delivered, though we cannot determine whether registrants were acting on anticipation of the announcement or unrelated factors. Trump shared a poll about this topic on September 19, which appears to line up roughly with the increased registrations of .si domains.   

Splitting the registrations by domain registrar, we can see that these registrations are largely at Dynadot, which has an aftermarket that allows users to sell their domains.

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Would be incredible if there wasn’t some insider trading going on there, of course.
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AI is throwing a Roadside Picnic • metedata digest

Mete Polat:

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This whole situation [of AI-generated proofs and “discoveries”] then posits a question: will the rate of scientific discoveries get so rapid that we’ll completely lose the ability to wrap our heads around it, turning AI output into the proverbial alien artefacts? Artefacts that sow chaos in the wake of their arrival and by their mere existence (when discussing the most recent drop of AI scientific papers, the NYU math professor Tristan Buckmaster said that entire research programs were wiped out overnight). In other words, will the rate of discovering answers split off from the rate of our understanding?

I’m certainly not a science historian nor a philosopher, so I’m not well-placed to speculate about the answers or the exact implications. But it’s nonetheless an interesting lens for examining AI’s ongoing impact on science. This may also be one of the few valid anti-accelerationist arguments: if AI vastly outruns our ability to understand the significance of what it’s doing, the collateral damage may outweigh any pure scientific value.

Poignantly enough, the “Roadside Picnic” book explores human irrelevance and the resulting emotional toll behind this alien visit. You could speculate that, at best, aliens didn’t even notice the humans and, at worst, just didn’t care. The big difference is that an alien visit is entirely out of our control, unlike AI development.

I’m fairly skeptical that any coordinated action is even possible in frontier AI development simply due to its game theory dynamics. But the labs have a choice in how they engage with scientific communities to make sure the understanding keeps up with the rate at which answers arrive and that their models act to augment scientists instead of speed-running them to history-making discoveries. Otherwise, we may become the insects watching in horror as everything we know becomes a site of one big alien picnic.

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The “Roadside Picnic” mention in the title is a reference to Strugatsky’s famous SF novel, where an alien visit leaves a strew of mysterious objects with incomprehensible workings; one scientists suggests the aliens were having the equivalent of a roadside picnic and the objects are the detritus, and we’re the uncomprehending field mice and foxes trying to make sense of spark plugs, penknives and coins. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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What ArtCraft’s vibe-coded apps say about Adobe • Tedium

Ernie Smith:

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The names aren’t the ones you’re familiar with, but you nonetheless know what each one is. One is a Photoshop stand-in. Another is Premiere Pro. Another is Acrobat. And yes, there’s even an InDesign riff.

Do they work particularly well? On the surface, yes. Opening up these apps in AppImage shows that these apps, programmed in the Rust programming language, are not only fast, but relatively small. Rather than hundreds of megabytes, these apps load in tens of megabytes. They detected my discrete GPU right away. And within a couple of minutes, I was manipulating an image.

A lot of finicky, below the surface stuff did not work so well. Colour pickers and secondary menu boxes were rough, not elegant. It did not detect my fonts in DesignCraft until I downloaded an update published just a few minutes before I downloaded it. And while I could set a colour with a hex code in PhotoCraft, I could not do the same in DesignCraft.

But it was familiar. I could see myself building a zine with this tool, or using it to access old files that I cannot otherwise open without a Creative Cloud subscription.

There are real reasons to cheer on something like this, even if you otherwise hate AI. The spirit of this evokes a Robin Hood-like mindset, in that it exists because of real ethical and economic issues around Adobe that many end users have long been stuck with. In one sense, it is “fighting AI slop with AI slop.” And even if you don’t end up using these tools, the techniques that these projects land on will ultimately inspire open-source projects that actually rely on craft. There are other apps that have emerged in the past couple of years that hope to bring design to Linux; this open-source tool may have opened up a shortcut for these projects.

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PC market woes continue: shipments fall 20.1% in Q3 2026 • IDC

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Worldwide PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year in Q3 2026 to 62.7m units, according to preliminary results from IDC Research (IDC), the second consecutive decline and a deeper one than the 3.8% drop in Q2. Shipments also slipped 9.1% sequentially, upending the usual pattern in which Q3 outpaces Q2. Continued supply constraints and the inventory pull-in earlier in the year, as vendors and channels rushed to stock up ahead of memory-driven price hikes, left the quarter with little demand to draw on.

During the quarter the channel worked to move through the large volume of PCs shipped in during the previous quarter. As a result, we didn’t see the typical third-quarter seasonal lift in shipment volumes.

“What we’re seeing is the result of the strong first half pull-in. Vendors and channels loaded up on inventory early in the year to get ahead of price hikes, and that has thrown off the usual seasonality, where Q3 is typically larger than Q2,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC. “Channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand. That could translate into promotions and some short-term relief for consumers, but we don’t expect pricing anywhere near what it was a year ago. Prices will remain elevated.”

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No good news in sight. The three biggest vendors – Lenovo, HP and Dell – all fell faster than the market (-23%, -31% and -25% respectively). Apple and ASUS saw their share increase very slightly, even with a fall in shipments. The decline since the start of the year is accelerating; the final quarter could be a bloodbath.
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AI surveillance startup Flock to cut several hundred jobs amid backlash, sources say • Reuters via The Guardian

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Flock Safety plans to shed about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers.

The people said the job cuts came after ​a voluntary buyout program and were expected to affect roughly 270 employees at Flock, a surveillance technology startup that has seen rapid growth in recent years. Employees will leave the company at the end of the month.

Sources declined to be identified as the company has yet to make the plan public. In September, Flock announced a voluntary separation program, asking employees to apply if they wanted to ​leave the company, as Wired reported. The company has about 1,500 employees.

Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. About 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared with 47% who oppose their use.

Across 49 states, Flock’s network of about 120,000 AI-powered cameras, affixed to streets and highways, automatically read license plates and record vehicles as they pass.

The company, based in Atlanta and founded in 2017, has raised more than $950m from venture capital investors, with its latest $275m round in March led by Andreessen Horowitz valuing the company at $7.5bn. The funds have supported a ​new US manufacturing facility and an upcoming push into drone products, according to the company.

Flock provides cameras and software to more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies and nearly 1,000 businesses. The company says its technology helps investigate and solve crimes, but it has come under increasing scrutiny over alleged privacy violations and data-sharing practices.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The strides being made by LLMs in solving longstanding maths problems have led some mathematicians to worry about the future of their field. CC-licensed photo by J R on Flickr.

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

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A selection of 9 links for you. Adds 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.

OpenAI annualised revenues $20bn less than previously signalled • Financial Times

George Hammond and Stephen Morris:

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OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than the company had signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand.

The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualised basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

The metric, along with the equivalent figure for OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, is the most important indicator of overall demand for AI and underpins vast infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets.

US tech stocks fell sharply following the FT’s report on Thursday, extending losses from earlier in the session, with the Nasdaq 100 closing down 1.4%. Chipmaker Nvidia fell 2.9%, Oracle dropped 5.5% and Micron declined 4.8%.

The discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI’s investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues, said a person familiar with the matter. The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

Investors’ efforts to “gross up” OpenAI’s annualised revenue prompted reports that the figure was about $40bn in July, said the person.

The company later told its backers that its annualised revenues had jumped more than 70% since July, prompting reports that the figure was about $70bn at the end of September — a number the company did not deny.

However, the new investor presentation shows close to $30bn annualised revenues in July.

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It’s a good amount of money but is it going to cover costs? And fund all those bonds? And data centres? No wonder the stock market hiccuped.
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A man fought a ‘Terminator’-like robot in a cage. California called it illegal • The New York Times

Adeel Hassan:

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The 6′ tall, steel-framed humanoid robot, which looked like James Cameron’s original “Terminator,” entered the cage, followed by a 5’5″ male human in a helmet and other protective gear.

You can probably guess what happened next. The robot, which was operated by a human pilot using a remote virtual-reality system, pummeled its fleshy opponent, Frankie LaPenna, repeatedly knocking him to the canvas and driving him into the walls of the octagonal enclosure.

Mr. LaPenna, a social media influencer, injured his hand while punching one of the metal robot frames during one of the three bouts he had with different robots. He landed a few punches, but each time he knocked a robot down, it bounced back almost instantly. The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled.

The fight, promoted as “Human vs. Robot,” was staged on Sept. 18 in San Francisco by a tech start-up called REK, which stands for Robot Entertainment Kombat. It caught the attention of the California State Athletic Commission, which sent the company a cease-and-desist letter. The commission, which regulates professional and amateur boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts, had not sanctioned the event.

REK, which bills itself as “the humanoid robot fighting league” (“Real robots, real combat”) — celebrated the letter. “We made it boys,” its chief executive, Cix Liv, said in an online post. The letter said that the commission must grant approval to any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match or exhibition that involves any human in the state of California.

Mr. Liv dismissed the regulator’s claims. “The law clearly states that a ‘match’ is between two persons,” he said in an interview, adding that state regulators were welcome to try to argue in court that a humanoid is somehow human.

…The event produced the most-viewed content that REK has so far shared online, but Mr. Liv said there wasn’t a plan to repeat it. Instead, the company plans to host the first fight between humanoids armed with blades on Friday night in San Francisco.

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There’s dystopian, and then there’s whatever this company is up to.
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Meet the Sad Wives of AI • WIRED

Alessandra Ram:

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If I had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.

There’s a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics. I’m sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all. But for the purposes of this story, I mostly spoke to white-collar heteros in the Bay Area, because that’s where a certain psychological crisis seems most acute. Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI—or feels he must work in AI—and she wants him to do literally anything else.

Either way, the men go in and the women want out. How many? It depends on how you define “working in AI.” About 71% of “AI-skilled workers,” according to one report, are men, and there are roughly 35,000 open AI roles in the US at any given moment. Broaden that to include investors and you’re adding thousands more. Broaden it further to include every man who has mentioned to his wife that he is “looking at some opportunities in the space”—and we’re in the millions. Conservatively, that means hundreds of thousands of spouses, partners, and girlfriends, holding down the fort while someone mansplains the singularity to them. There are, in other words, a lot of us, and more of us are surfacing—gasping for air and a single conversation that doesn’t involve LLMs—by the day.

There’s a name for our ranks. I call us the Sad Wives of AI.

…Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, the chair of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, has a blunt take: What’s happening in Bay Area households isn’t just a lifestyle story. It’s a labor market story. The AI boom, Rodgers says, is creating a “perfect storm” of forces reshaping household dynamics, playing out along predictably gendered lines.

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It’s a great piece. (BTW those who find the other half absent while they mind the home and possibly child[ren] are “Single Married Parents”. Lots of them in this piece.)
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BBC boss Matt Brittin details Silicon Valley revolution at broadcaster • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

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Attempting to lift staff from the gloom of corrosive job-cut announcements, [new BBC director-general Matt] Brittin spoke about the BBC radically rethinking how it meets audience needs online by decentralizing decision-making power, embracing a sense that digital — not traditional broadcast — “can be flagship,” building and testing new online products quickly, and recognizing that it’s ok to “experiment and fail.”

In other words, Brittin outlined a Silicon Valley-isation of the BBC.

“We have to recommit to our mission, our public service mission, pursuing truth, bringing people together, boosting homegrown storytelling,” he told staff, per an audio recording obtained by Deadline. “We have to recommit to that mission. We have to reinvent how we do it. [We] have to understand and protect the magic of the BBC and change everything else, in order to serve those audiences.”

He continued: “I love the BBC. It’s full of words and discussion and slide decks and framing and reframing and reconstituting, and going around the houses, and actually, I’d like us to celebrate activity less, and outcomes more. And getting faster to outcomes that make a difference to an audience.

“Not [just], ‘We did this great marketing campaign,’ but actually, ‘It drove up watch time usage and active accounts,’ right? Or, ‘We did this piece of journalism, and it changed the law, and it landed with these audiences.’”

Brittin illustrated this by introducing BBC employees to Manon Dave, the head of future world design in the corporation’s Media Tech unit. Dave told colleagues that he spent time on holiday redesigning iPlayer without any internal limitations. He wants the streaming service to become a place where audience members say, “I want to iPlayer and chill,” though it is not clear if this means retaining the sexual connotations of the original “Netflix and chill” internet slang.

Dave’s vision for iPlayer included an AI agent called Iggy, which helps recommend and summarize iPlayer content, and can speak to audiences in different languages. Other ideas Dave presented to staff included a personalized “hero” picture at the top of iPlayer’s home screen, which picks out algorithm-led content recommendations based on past viewing habits. He also demonstrated “Vegas mode,” allowing viewers to “roll the dice” and see what iPlayer selects for them.

Brittin said Dave — who at one point during his presentation referred to the director-general as “my big homie” — had captured a “pioneering mindset” that he wants to see more of at the BBC. Brittin added that the BBC plans to begin testing some of Dave’s ideas with audiences “in the coming weeks.”

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Certainly iPlayer needs to be better, and the BBC spends too much time gazing in awe at its navel. Yet it’s surprising what things do work. Apparently the message shown in the second half of World Cup football matches encouraging people to pay their licence fee led to people coughing up. Sometimes it’s the simple things that work.
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UK motorists can now see live fuel prices on Google Maps • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Drivers will be able to see live petrol prices on Google Maps for the first time from Thursday, in a move that will help motorists shop around for the cheapest fuel.

Millions of motorists will be able to find the cheapest petrol and diesel prices by searching for a local forecourt in the Google app, in what could prove to be “a major development” in making fuel prices more fair, according to campaigners.

The tech company will use data from the government’s Fuel Finder platform, which displays real-time prices at 99% of forecourts, to show Google Map users the cheapest in their local area.

It is expected to make forecourt pricing more transparent and encourage competition between fuel retailers, as millions face record-high road fuel costs due to the global squeeze on supplies prompted by the US-Israel war on Iran. The average price of diesel in the UK recently hit a record £2 a litre, having risen by more than 40% since late February.

Edmund King, the president of motoring group the AA, said: “Getting transparent fuel prices on to Google Maps is a massive step forward and means most drivers will have easy access to pump prices. Hopefully, this high-level pump-price transparency will also encourage more competitive prices from retailers.”

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The weird thing about this is that the Fuel Finder site works perfectly well. Stick in a postcode and you’ll get stations nearby, and you can pick which fuel you want. Nice use of open data, though.
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OpenAI just carpet-bombed mathematics • The Atlantic

Konstantin Kakaes:

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In the growing chorus of mathematicians revolting against AI companies, Hugo Duminil-Copin, who in 2022 received the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, has perhaps put mathematicians’ concerns most vividly. In an essay published just before OpenAI announced last month that it had solved one of seven grand mathematical challenges known as the Millennium Prize Problems, he wrote that AI proofs “nuke the mathematical landscape, making it increasingly difficult to inhabit after each blast.”

If resolving a Millennium Prize Problem was like dropping an atomic bomb, then the results that OpenAI shared Tuesday were a mathematical carpet-bombing. Mathematicians had been bracing for the assault: OpenAI had teased that a new model had found solutions to “more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics.” When the drop came, it included 377 new proofs by an as-yet-unnamed proprietary model.

About a third are major proofs of conjectures that are famous across mathematics. Another third are significant within their mathematical subfield. The remaining third are either more minor results or variants. Hundreds of people had spent dozens of years trying to understand—and prove—the results that OpenAI released in a single day.

Mathematicians are still picking through the rubble. It is too early for anyone to have verified the OpenAI work in detail, but several mathematicians have told me that at least some of the papers appear not to prove what they claim to prove. (Every carpet-bombing has a few munitions that fail to explode.) OpenAI has already withdrawn three of its papers; still, “we expect mistakes to be quite rare,” an OpenAI spokesperson told me in an email. The company also said, as part of the initial announcement, that the model had attempted to solve about 3,600 further problems for which the company did not release successful proofs. OpenAI promised to pay mathematicians to study AI-produced results, although the company has yet to specify how generous the funding will be.

“We don’t believe the future of mathematics is set. We’re working with the math community to navigate the future collaboratively,” the spokesperson wrote. Nonetheless, many mathematicians are looking at that future with apprehension. They worry that having AI leap to solve proofs will sacrifice what the struggle to get there might have yielded. They worry especially about how they will train younger mathematicians to find that spark of life, or wanting to at all. And they worry that, if mathematicians have no reason to pursue the mysteries of their field, then the rest of us will stumble into a world run by machines whose workings nobody understands.

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Did any of us expect that the first group of people to be put thoroughly out of work by AI would be mathematicians? Absolutely not. (Gift link.)
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Google, Meta said to be paying premium for land internet routes amid Red Sea clash • Rest of World

Indranil Ghosh:

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US cloud giants are facing steep prices to secure backup internet routes around the Red Sea as fighting rages over the Red Sea strait that carries most data cables between Europe and Asia.

More than 90% of data capacity between Europe and Asia runs through cables under the Red Sea. The cables enter the sea at Bab al-Mandab, a strait less than 32 kilometers (20 miles) wide between Yemen and the African nations of Djibouti and Eritrea.

The Houthis, a US-designated terrorist organization, seized Yemen’s side of the strait in September, including the island of Mayyun. On October 5, Saudi-backed government forces said they had retaken key positions around the strait and the port of Mocha — claims the Houthis denied.

In September, Google bought a pair of fiber strands running along Turkish state pipelines, paying two to three times the roughly €6m ($7m) that newer lines crossing Turkey are expected to cost, said a person familiar with the deal, requesting anonymity because the details are not public. Long-distance fiber is usually sold with a single upfront payment covering 15 years or more of use. Buyers also pay a separate annual fee for maintenance.

Microsoft said on September 23 that it plans to invest more than $400m in subsea and land links across the Middle East by 2030. Iraq also signed a contract with Qatari telecom company Ooredoo on September 10 to carry data toward Europe through an underground route from the southern port of Al-Faw.

Almost all major cloud companies are looking for backup routes around the Red Sea, the person told Rest of World. Google and Meta have started sending some live traffic through a land route across Iraq that they had previously held in reserve, the person said.

Google and Meta did not respond to Rest of World’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

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Musk admits Tesla Robotaxi struggles to see pets at night. Lidar doesn’t • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

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Elon Musk says the main thing holding back Tesla Robotaxi’s night hours is that the cars have a hard time seeing pets in the dark. His example was “grey kittens on grey tarmac.”

That’s a low-light, low-contrast detection problem, which is the textbook weakness of cameras and the exact thing lidar and radar handle. Musk has spent years calling those sensors a “crutch” and a “fool’s errand.”

Late Friday night, Tesla’s Robotaxi account announced that the Austin service is “now available until 11pm.” Until now, it shut down at 10 PM.

Musk reposted the announcement and explained what’s keeping the cars off the road later than that: “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”

Some context on that extra hour. When Tesla launched Robotaxi in Austin in June 2025, the app took ride requests from 6 AM to midnight. Fifteen months later, the service closes an hour earlier than it did on day one. And it’s a small service. Tesla has barely scaled since launch, even with the addition of the Cybercabs last month.

A camera is a passive sensor. It works with whatever light bounces off an object, and it picks that object out by how much it stands apart from the background. A grey animal on grey pavement at night gives it very little of either.

Lidar is an active sensor. It fires its own laser pulses and times how long they take to come back, which gives the car a distance and a 3D shape for whatever is sitting on the road. It works the same at midnight as it does at noon, and it doesn’t need the kitten to be a different color than the asphalt. It needs the kitten to stick up from the road, and kittens, being 3D objects, tend to do that.

Radar does a similar job with radio waves and adds speed. It’s weaker on something that small, but it keeps working in the fog, dust and glare that blind cameras.

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When Steve Jobs was wrong and recognised his mistake, he simply changed course. Musk’s weakness is he can’t.
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“Uber agents,” undercover AI personas, and other ways newsrooms are using AI in investigations • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

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The release of the Epstein Files was a huge moment for AI in investigative journalism. Journalists across the U.S. woke up on January 30, 2026 to a Department of Justice drop of over 3.5 million pages of documents and tens of thousands of images and videos.

Duy Nguyen, who leads AI science research at the Times, noted that the PDFs in the Epstein Files would stack as high as the Empire State Building if they were printed out, and would take 11 years for one reporter to read. (Epstein sent an average of 65 emails every day for a decade.) It would take a reporter a month to listen to and watch all the audio and video clips.

Many newsrooms decided that the early organization and research into these documents was a task primed for AI technologies. Engineers from the Associated Press, NPR, and the Times led a session on how they built tools to help reporters sift through the documents.

NPR built an internal search tool that let reporters across the newsroom find the documents relevant to their beats, said Kriti Singh, a design technologist at NPR’s AI Labs. Her team classified documents by type (email, legal filing, flight log, witness list), grouped them by location (city, county, hotel, university), and extracted entities (making sure, for instance, that a search for “Prince Andrew” also surfaced files that mentioned “the Duke of York”).

The Times AI Initiatives team built the Epstein Files Engine, an internal chatbot to help reporters comb through the files. “There are so many sorts of threads that you can pull from such a big corpus, and the chat interface really allows [reporters] to dive deep,” said Nguyen. The engine’s interface was built with LibreChat, a free, open-source, self-hosted AI chat platform.

…Ultimately, more than 100 Times journalists posed more than 5,000 questions to the engine, and it contributed to at least 20 published stories. “This was a signifier of just how powerful an agentic chat interface could be in a newsroom,” said Nguyen. (His team recently published an academic article detailing the tool’s development.)

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tortoise known as Jonathan is thought to be the oldest living land animal. Does his genome explain how he’s so long-lived? CC-licensed photo by St Helena 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. Lettuce find out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“Software is over”: bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe’s Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe’s well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.

Artcraft got its start last year as a “controllable AI for artists” that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.

In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to create “clean-room replacements” for Adobe’s closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software’s many current shortcomings, Thomas make the grandiose promise that the current “super early alpha” state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.

“We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month,” Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”

Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being “bit by the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.”

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So Adobe sort of brought this on itself? But it was inevitable, in a monkeys/typewriters sort of way: give enough people access to LLMs that can reverse engineer software, and one of them will be annoyed enough at Adobe to try to generate open source as-good-as products. As he says, it might take a while, but the question is whether the extra 5% or 10% he can’t do is what a significant proportion of people need.
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‘ChatGPT ftw’: parents are using AI to skip kids’ school photo day • Fast Company

Jude Cramer:

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With a new school year underway, kids everywhere are saying “cheese” for school picture day—but some penny-pinching parents are cutting photographers out of the equation.

In their place, those parents are employing artificial intelligence to generate picture day-style images of their children. Others are getting their kids’ pictures taken as normal, but avoiding paying for the final images by using AI agents to erase watermarks from the proofs. Both methods may be cheaper than shelling out for professional pictures, but they come with their own hidden costs.

On TikTok, user Carlie Bond went viral for what she tagged as a #MomHack: taking photos of her three school-age children against a plain backdrop, then putting them into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Keep them exactly the same but make it look like a school picture.”

ChatGPT added a standard gradient backdrop to each image, making them look much like the standard school pictures from leading companies like Lifetouch and Cady Studios.

“School pictures x3 kids?? In this economy?” Bond wrote in her caption. “So we took our own and let my good friend Chat help us out 🤭 And honestly … I’m not mad about how they turned out.”

…But Bond’s commenters weren’t all on board with her cost-cutting strategy. Several pointed out that AI platforms like ChatGPT tend to distort images during editing. “Every time I put a photo into ChatGPT, it changes how the person looks no matter what I tell it,” one user complained.

Others worried about the implications of feeding photos of children into ChatGPT. “You are putting your children’s image and likeness through AI that can be utilized by AI later and stored in its memory,” one commenter cautioned.

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On the latter point, pretty sure if there’s any image of those children anywhere on the internet then it will have been slurped up. On the former point – about distortion – well, are school pictures ever a true representation?
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The Social Reckoning film review: Facebook sequel is Jaws if the shark ate everyone and kept swimming • Financial Times

Danny Leigh:

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Last time we saw Mark Zuckerberg, he was grimly waiting on a Facebook friend request. We in this context are movie audiences, that last encounter coming with The Social Network — director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin’s barbed account of a boy prince of tech, played by Jesse Eisenberg. 

The year was 2010. Prehistory. For Zuckerberg, so much still lay ahead, from allegations that Facebook enabled the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar to the embarrassment of failed 3D virtual world the Metaverse, while extensive research has suggested deep harms from Meta products. And now, after it all, his personal wealth is reported to be more than 60 times greater than it was back then.

It leaves a lot to catch up with in The Social Reckoning, a hacky, frustrating sequel written and directed by Sorkin. Events are pared back to a crunch point. In 2019, we meet Frances Haugen, strait-laced Facebook data scientist. In 2021, she testifies to Congress about the company profiting from misinformation. The movie mostly takes place between. Haugen is played by Mikey Madison, an Oscar winner for Anora. Jeremy Allen White co-stars as Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, to whom she first brings word of algorithmic wrongdoing.

…If social media has made us more stupid, the movie treats us accordingly. A generation ago, Sorkin found fame writing TV political drama The West Wing. His secret then was making viewers feel smart. Now he seems to be addressing the concussed. When Madison reveals that, in 2016, 64% of new members of extremist groups on Facebook were led there by the company, the fact is instantly repeated twice. When one crisis follows another for Zuckerberg, characters wail: “The timing couldn’t be worse!”

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How long until AI hacks everything? • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

»

“It’s a matter of months, or maybe a year, in which the task of securing the software foundation of civilization will have to be solved,” Stanislav Fort, a former Anthropic researcher who is now the chief scientist at the cybersecurity firm AISLE, told me. And AI is not only making cyberattacks more effective but also increasing the surface area worth hacking. Breaking into a website or executing a ransomware attack takes time, Fort said, so hackers have traditionally chosen large targets with sizable payoffs. But cheap, tireless hacking agents mean any organization or person might be worth targeting. At the same time, the cybersecurity professionals I spoke with were confident they could rise to the occasion. “If we step up our game in cybersecurity, as a field, we can definitely meet the challenge stemming from AI,” Fort said.

The cyberattacks on Minnesota water facilities this past summer offer a preview of things to come. Iran-linked hackers disrupted dozens of water utilities in Minnesota, many in small communities that might not have a dedicated cybersecurity person on staff. “We were fortunate that there was a very alert operator that said, ‘Hey, I saw a pump go offline,’” John Israel, Minnesota’s chief information-security officer, told me. The state received a report from the operator around 3 a.m., and within two hours began investigating and responding. The hackers targeted a weakness in industrial computers that had been announced by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency only days earlier.

…Although AI was not directly implicated in the Minnesota cyberattacks, Emily Zimmer, a spokesperson for Minnesota IT Services, told me, “we assume most adversaries use AI” to amplify their attacks. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a hacker not using the technology today.

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Open source LLMs will only make this more and more common; all that prevents them becoming widespread is the amount of computer power (especially RAM) needed.
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Are Disney adults the happiest debtors on earth? • The New Yorker

Amelia Tait:

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In 2023, Ashley, a freshman at Quinnipiac University, in Connecticut, had fifteen thousand dollars in her bank account. Excited by her newfound freedom as a college student, she decided to start going on solo trips. Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida—a place she had fallen in love with as a child, after visiting for the first time when she was four—seemed like an obvious choice. She went during her winter break. Then she returned, six times, in two years. “It’s just so magical,” she explained. “It keeps drawing me back.” Soon enough, her account balance had dwindled to just five dollars.

Last year, Ashley landed a job with the Disney College Program, a semester-long internship during which college students and recent graduates serve in entry-level roles throughout the parks. For around four hundred dollars a week (her salary, after Disney deducted rent for her company-sponsored housing), she worked as a PhotoPass photographer, taking pictures of guests as they enjoyed various attractions. One of the perks of being in the program was that she had free access to Disney World when she wasn’t on the clock, and so she’d often hang around in the park, spending liberally on food and merchandise. (She collects Disney pins.) As a result, she said, “a lot of my money went straight back to Disney.” She also spent more than what she was earning, accumulating roughly a thousand dollars in credit-card debt, which she had to ask her parents to help pay off.

So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one. Almost two million people have watched a video, posted in November of 2025, in which a YouTuber asks Disney visitors how much debt they have. It’s a genre of content that has become more popular, recently, with critics seizing on it as evidence that the Disney-obsessed are not only culturally but financially bankrupt.

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Obsessions take many forms. Turns out visiting Disney is one of them.
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‘Jonathan’ is the oldest land animal on Earth. He could hold the secrets to defying death • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

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Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest living land animal, is still chugging along at the ripe age of roughly 194. Now, scientists have discovered some of the secrets to Jonathan’s longevity by sequencing his genome for the first time, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances.

Jonathan, a Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea), hatched around 1832 in the Seychelles archipelago, and he was already in his twenties when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In his fifties, Jonathan was brought to the remote island of Saint Helena, along with three other tortoises, as a gift to the British colonial governor in the 1880s. He has lived there ever since. 

Aldabra giant tortoises often become centenarians, but Jonathan is a major outlier even for his species as he approaches nearly 200 years on this planet. To better understand his extreme lifespan, researchers evaluated Jonathan’s genome based on swabs of his cheeks and compared it with the genomes of several other tortoises, including a 36-year-old named Tank.  

The results revealed that Jonathan has “unique gene variants in most aging pathways” including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and “low entropy” methylation, reports the study. 

“Aging is very complicated, and there’s all these different hallmarks,” said Stephen Clark, an aging researcher at the non-profit Kallel Foundation and an author of the study, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s why this Jonathan study is so interesting. We’re still just at the very beginning of trying to understand aging.”

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In the meantime, just move veeeeeeeery slowly until they have it all worked out.
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Weight-loss drugs show signs of slowing biological aging, say drugmakers • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

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Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also melt away the years.

Drug giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk say patients taking their drugs age less quickly, according to readouts from molecular “aging clocks.” Such clocks assess a person’s biological age by looking at changes to DNA that accumulate with time, or, in newer versions, by tracking levels of key proteins.

Both companies found that overweight or diabetic patients taking the drugs, called GLP-1s, had reduced biological age compared to those taking a placebo, although the difference varied widely, depending on which type of clock was used, and what organ was tested. 

Overall, the difference was around “two to three years,” according to Nikolaj Roed, a global project leader at Novo, who says the company has been seeing “improved biological age in our patients across trials and across different tissues.” 

The findings add to wide speculation among scientists that GLP-1 drugs, as they are known, are acting on basic causes of aging and might be a true longevity treatment.

“Two years is a pretty strong effect, in my book,” says Steve Horvath, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who’s credited with inventing aging clocks. Horvath says the emerging data could provide “evidence that these GLP-1 drugs are actually what is known as geroprotectors, medications that slow or possibly even reverse biologic aging.”

The companies shared their findings over the weekend during Aging Research & Drug Discovery, a conference devoted to seeking scientific remedies for old age. While that quest has not yet produced any clear-cut success, some scientists now think Novo’s drug semaglutide (sold under the names Ozempic and Wegovy) is coming close.

“In an unhealthy population, I do think it’s an anti-aging drug,” says Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard biologist who assisted Novo with its molecular measurements. “But in a healthy population, no one knows.”

The drugs cause weight loss by stimulating a receptor, GLP-1, that tells your brain you’re not hungry. Yet real-world studies have shown much wider benefit. The drugs improve kidney function, reduce blood pressure, and even sharply cut the overall chance of death.

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Maybe we’ve just been underproducing GLP-1 for all these millennia?
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How Britain learned to love Chinese cars—especially a look-alike Range Rover • WSJ

Stephen Wilmot:

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When Mark Thewlis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jaecoo 7 was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. 

The 33-year-old from England’s south coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese sport-utility vehicle at the equivalent of around $50,000, half the price of a visually similar Range Rover model. Its resemblance to the 56-year-old British luxury brand has earned the Jaecoo a double-edged nickname: the Temu Range Rover.

“My first reaction was: What’s the catch?” he said. A test drive convinced him that buying the Jaecoo was a “no-brainer.”

No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the UK, where Brits like Thewlis are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status-signaling styling and technology.

The Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery Automobile 9973 -5.39%decrease; down pointing triangle, was Britain’s bestselling vehicle in September, an important sales month in the UK. In the first half of 2026, almost every sixth car sold in Britain bore a Chinese brand, according to Schmidt Automotive Research, a higher proportion than in any other European country except Norway.

Britain’s vehicle imports from China have almost doubled this year compared with the same period in 2025. Only Russia and Brazil—developing economies that mostly buy cheaper models—have imported more. Cratering sales in China, the world’s largest car market, have encouraged its manufacturers to look for growth overseas.

The UK, a cradle of the car industry, showcases what could happen in America if Chinese cars were let in. “Range Over!” began a press release trumpeting the Jaecoo’s early sales success, winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque.

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The Range Rover brand might be strong, but the actual quality of the cars has been terrible for years; an open (garage) door for the Chinese companies to drive through. The appearance of the new Range Rovers is also strange, as though they had melted a bit. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Changes coming to this site • Erdős Problems Blog

Thomas Bloom:

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I launched the site on 28th May 2023, with just over 200 problems; it has grown steadily since then. The biggest change came in August 2025 when I added a comment feature. The site now hosts 1221 problems, over 9000 comments, and almost 2000 registered users. The site typically receives between 10,000 and 25,000 unique visitors each day.

The first few months after introducing the comment feature saw a huge increase in activity, just as I had hoped. A vibrant community arose; people shared ideas on how to solve problems, made observations, gave corrections, and suggested missing references and solutions. Many papers were written and new collaborations formed.

Unfortunately, this level of activity has not been sustained. Some decline was inevitable: over time, many of the natural observations will have been made, mistakes corrected, and discussions between collaborators would move offline. This natural evolution has been dramatically sped up by the coincidental rise of AI and its ability to solve some problems with minimal human intervention.

The main way that people publicly interact with the site now is to advertise their AI-generated proofs, often without any attempt to explain them, but as a way to record a (increasingly meaningless) priority claim.

This is very different to what I imagined, and I don’t want to manage a website which does this.

I believe that websites with this function should exist — places where people can record AI-generated proofs, even if purely formal with no human understanding, to save others wasting their tokens generating the same proof, and so that other people can access and use them if they desire. There are now several candidates for such repositories, and if managed responsibly, they can serve a useful role in the mathematical ecosystem. I personally don’t want to manage one.

Just as one does not open a restaurant in an abattoir, it is important that there be a separation between such repositories and a site which aims to promote the actual questions, place them in an appropriate context, and give a useful overview of the current state of human understanding.

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(Erdös problems are mathematical puzzles set by the famous mathematician.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the age of physical tape, we knew what “recording” was. But might modern digital devices listen without recording? CC-licensed photo by Carbon Arc 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. Reely hard. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“ASOS hacked”: app users receive notifications sent by hackers • BBC News

Joe Tidy and Liv McMahon:

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Asos says it is investigating “unauthorised activity” involving third-party platforms it uses after customers received a notification from its app sent by hackers.

Dozens of people told the BBC they received the strange “ASOS HACKED” message from the clothing and beauty store’s app on Tuesday morning – with some saying it left them “scared” to open the app.

The notification was addressed to the company’s data protection officer and IT teams in what cyber security experts said looked like a “brazen” extortion attempt.

Asos acknowledged the “unauthorised customer notification” on Tuesday afternoon, saying some “basic personal information” may have been accessed. In an email to customers on Tuesday night, the company apologised and urged customers not to engage with the notification. And it said the website and app are “operating as usual” promising customers they can “shop with confidence” while it investigates the incident.

The company has not as of yet informed the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commission’s Office (ICO), about any breach. Exactly how many Asos customers received the notification on Tuesday remains unclear, but Google’s Play store says the ASOS app has been downloaded to android devices more than 10 million times.

The British retailer has a substantial global footprint – serving around 17 million customers each year across more than 150 markets.

Some Asos app users in Australia, France, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland had also received the notification, according to local reports on Tuesday.

Hackers seeking to pile pressure on potential victims by informing their customers is rare, as most extortions happen in private, so this incident may go down as a significant moment in cyber-attack history.

Shares in the company fell by around a tenth on Tuesday.

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Asos is in hot water for not acknowledging the hack, but the biggest concern is what it implies about how badly the company has been hacked.
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Viral Fallout and MW2 AI decompilation projects hit with DMCA • The Gamer

Nazmul Roosevelt:

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DMCA takedowns for mods and fan overhauls have been happening for years, so it makes sense that decompilation projects, especially the ones assembled quickly and shared widely on social media, are now drawing the same kind of attention. These projects have exploded in number over the past week or so, but many rely heavily on generative AI. Even well‑known efforts like Ship of Harkinian use some form of genAI, despite beginning long before the current wave of vibe‑coded recreations.

The projects that went viral this week were built with far more aggressive AI assistance. One of the first was Fallout: New York. ChrisFirst shared a clip on Twitter showing a browser‑playable recreation of Fallout built with Claude Opus 5.5. It had quests, dialogue trees, VATS, a working Pip‑Boy, and an entire city generated without any texture or sound files. Every building, weapon, face, and ambient noise was “generated by code.” The post pulled in millions of views before ChrisFirst shared that he received a cease-and-desist from Bethesda and shut the project down.

The second project that’s since been taken down came from Maurice Heumann, who used generative AI to decompile Modern Warfare 2 on PC. He said he had seventeen agents working at the same time, reconstructing the game faster than any manual effort could. According to him, the game was already playable, most bugs were fixed, and he had even earned a nuke. Activision responded by removing the footage from his post and blocking access to the site hosting the code. Heumann later shared that his AI agents kept deleting his files.

The difference seems to come with scale. Ocarina of Time running in ultrawide at 280 frames is a transformative example of what was previously capable on native hardware. It’s impressive to see, even if the game was never meant to be viewed that way. The strongest decomp projects show evidence of careful manual work, but the rapid spread of AI‑assisted recreations is pushing the space into territory that publishers can no longer ignore.

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What’s happening is that gamers can now use AI agents to decompile the executables of games, and then get those recompiled for other platforms, or add new elements that weren’t there before. And publishers don’t like it when such work is made public. (Obviously they can’t see any private work.)

Feels like this might drive games companies to cloud-based services which can’t be decompiled because they’re never running on the user’s computer.
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Silicon Valley thinks AI will kill jobs. Economists are not convinced • Financial Times

Delphine Strauss:

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The most worrying development is a cross-country slowdown in entry-level hiring in tech-related occupations — consistent with AI turbocharging the productivity of senior staff while taking over routine tasks done by juniors.

But there is no consensus on the cause. “Unemployment of young graduates has worsened since 2015. It’s a long-term trend. AI is clearly not the only factor,” Broecke argued, citing a potential oversupply of graduates, the rise of remote work and high interest rates.

The absence of aggregate job losses may simply be the calm before the storm. “Talk to executives in the non-tech sector — those who use AI as customers — and many say they don’t need as many workers as they did before AI,” Johnson said. “It is not yet in the numbers . . . but the automation threat is very real.”

Modelling by the Anthropic Institute, published last month, included an extreme scenario where rapid gains in AI’s capabilities cut “cognitive” employment by a fifth by 2030, leaving one in five white-collar workers and one in 10 of all workers unemployed.

The model is highly sensitive to underlying assumptions. The extreme scenario assumes AI will rapidly become able to perform most tasks without human oversight, will be widely adopted and will generate big productivity gains.

Other scenarios show more modest change, but Anton Korinek, who led the modelling, said he “personally put more weight” on those showing a rapid increase in AI adoption from 2028, with the technology becoming able to rival and replace senior executives, not just entry-level staff.

In practice, companies may be slow to shed workers even when AI tools can do the job. Broecke of the OECD said: “There is the cost of technology. There are legal barriers, social preferences, ethical issues. There are all sorts of reasons why something that is theoretically possible will not happen in practice.”

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Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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Google has been ordered to temporarily stop work on two datacentres in Finland after failing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments on its construction sites.

The planned datacentres in Muhos and Kajanni are part of a €13bn (£11bn) project across multiple sites in northern Finland by the technology company amid huge demand for space to house online infrastructure.

It comes after it emerged that Tuike Finland Oy, the company representing Google, had felled 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest in Muhos without completing an environmental impact assessment (EIA).

In Kajaani, the company has reportedly been logging across just under 200 hectares (494 acres) of land.

The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation said the sites had been reduced to “sand”, blaming the oversights on the “overheated” market for new datacentres.

On Tuesday, the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) said it had issued a notice to the company to “immediately suspend” – by 23 October at the latest – “preparatory measures that significantly change the environment” of the two sites until the environmental impact assessment had been completed. Google has until next Wednesday to submit a written explanation.

The EIA is ongoing and expected to be completed later this year. But Google has gone ahead with “extensive preparatory measures”, including removing trees, stripping topsoil and constructing site roads, LVV said.

Tommi Muilu, the head of the environmental department at LVV, said: “In our opinion, the measures in question will change the environment and cause impacts, the identification and assessment of which are among the key objectives of the EIA procedure.”

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The photograph in the story suggests that Google got a long way along in its felling before, oh, did we not do the impact assessment? Well, there’s the impact: mud where there used to be forest. But don’t worry! AI will solve the climate crisis just as soon as it’s finished making it worse.
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We can’t just change the definition of “recording” • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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The Apple Watch has had a microphone for ages, mostly for Siri and taking phone calls from the wrist. Of the four Audio Intelligence features, two have caused the most debate online: Live Rewind and Siri Recap. The former produces a transcript of the past 15 seconds, whereas the latter can generate high-level summaries of the conversations you have throughout the day.

In other words, Ray-Ban Meta glasses take photos and record video, which is stored on your phone. This rumoured Apple approach would mean cameras can see you, microphones can hear you — but neither is “saving” anything.

Does this count as recording? Apple doesn’t comment on rumours, but based on how it’s publicly communicated its Audio Intelligence privacy philosophy, I’d argue the company doesn’t think so. Apple says these features don’t save any audio. The raw data is deleted once it’s finished processing in a separate, secure exclave on the S11 [Watch] processor. Any information sent to the cloud is through [Apple’s] Private Cloud Compute and is therefore inaccessible to Apple or third parties.

It’s not just Apple, either. Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of wearables, told The Verge in a conversation that Google is also mulling this concept. What if, he posited, cameras on smart glasses didn’t record data? For example, if the glasses could process visual data in your environment using AI, but didn’t save any footage for posterity. In that way, Waraich argued, the camera could “just” be an image sensor.

By these definitions, something has to be preserved and reviewable to be “recording” you. But wouldn’t any text transcripts generated by a smart home camera or smartwatch count as preserved and reviewable? Or, in trying to make AI hardware more palatable, are tech companies relying on what can be subpoenaed in court?

«

Sounds like it’s the latter. I guess we’ll find out when the American or Chinese governments demand to access it. You can’t subpoena data that’s not there any more.
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ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

»

At the pearly gates, Dolly Parton, in a sparkling gown, stands arm in arm with Tim Curry, dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. “I knew I chose the right plus one,” Parton says to God, who is standing at heaven’s reception desk.

That’s the premise of a cartoon that went viral on Twitter in the days after the legendary entertainers’ deaths in late August. One tweet of the cartoon received 25,000 likes, while other versions of the image circulated on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.

In the bottom right corner of the cartoon is the pen name “BLOPER,” the signature of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper. But Loper didn’t draw the cartoon, or sign it. It was generated by ChatGPT and first posted to Facebook by a Dolly Parton fan. In the comments section of her post, she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”

“I had people writing to me about this cartoon, asking if it was mine,” Loper told me. First came a text from his twin brother, whose friend had seen the AI-generated image. Emails and DMs on social media from strangers followed. “It was very surreal,” he said.

…Loper already knew his work was “out there, getting harvested for all of this [AI] training,” he said. But an image generator faking his signature felt more personal. “I’m not a territorial person, but my name is my name. It felt very much like a violation of my personhood.”

…After I notified OpenAI of the issue, ChatGPT began to output a new message when I asked it to generate New Yorker-style cartoons: “This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.”

«

“Guardrails”. Okey doke. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)

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Steve Jobs said this kind of device would be “terrible”. Sixteen years later, Apple seems set to release it • Inc.com

Kit Eaton:

»

It’s impossible to think of Apple without a memory of Steve Jobs surfacing—whether it was his stylish product reveals, his blunt emails, or his vision for the future of Apple. But visionary as he was, Jobs wasn’t always right, and next week we may see more concrete proof of this with the release of a new device that Jobs once claimed would be “ergonomically terrible.” A slew of rumors suggest Apple is poised to release a redesigned MacBook Pro—and the new, super-slim laptop will (gasp!) have a touchscreen. 

Of course, iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and other Apple devices have had touchscreens for years, but these devices were designed from the start to be touch-friendly, with everything from the shape of the device to the design of the user interface being built around the touch experience. Back in 2010, three years after the iPhone’s launch, Jobs was speaking at an Apple event about the idea of bringing touchscreen tech to MacBooks. Apple had completed “tons of user testing,” presumably using prototype touchscreen Mac devices, and had concluded that “it doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”

…But according to several different rumors, Apple will actually reveal a Mac with a touchscreen as part of its October event, set to happen on October 13 per prolific Apple leaker Mark Gurman of Bloomberg.

We may see the touchscreen HomePad smart-home controller arrive at the same time, representing a whole new category of device for Apple, along with refreshed AirPods and possibly a home security camera system. (Remember: All of this is unconfirmed.)

«

It’s true: you can read this Wired article from 2010, where Jobs is dismissive of the idea:

»

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this,” Steve Jobs said in Wednesday’s press conference, “and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

«

Indeed, at the time everyone agreed that touchscreens were a terrible idea for a laptop. Especially if it was super light – which the new laptops are rumoured to be.
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Apple and a Hacker’s Future • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

My computer got hacked, which is always embarrassing to admit, because it was my fault; the vulnerability that was exploited is detailed in this Ars Technica story:

»

Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation. “The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet,” the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. “In all these cases, root had been accessed on the affected system and a Monero crypto miner had been placed.”

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-65400, received a patch from Apple last week for macOS Tahoe, Sequoia, and Sonoma. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 7.1 out of 10, stems from a bug in the macOS screen sharing capability, which allows a remote party to view the screen and control the keyboard and mouse while a machine is turned on. A flaw in the “state management,” which keeps track of preceding events, user interactions, variables, and other system states, is the underlying cause.

«

…Claude in its Code harness seems to handle wide-ranging discussions better than Codex, and it follows my instructions about writing things down in the way I want to more gracefully. Code also has a persistent monitoring tool that I utilize as an inbox to capture interactions with a status board I built to visually track everything I have written down, as well as interactions with a Telegram bot (OpenAI’s new Dots achieve some of this functionality, which has been sorely needed in ChatGPT/Codex).

Said monitoring tool stands down every 30 minutes, so my agent restarts it on a schedule; that is what triggered an URGENT notification from Claude.

«

What’s remarkable is that Claude spotted the hack – which files had been changed, what had been added, precisely when it happened, and how to remove it. But Thompson has a strong point: Apple’s “install security updates automatically” option doesn’t automatically install security updates if they’re included as part of OS updates that you have chosen not to install automatically.

As he points out in the Dithering podcast with John Gruber, Apple needs to bend to the problem of allowing agents to run without needing stuff like Screen Sharing and constant clicking of security alerts. The simple solution: reanimate Mac OS X Server, designed for exactly this challenge. Which Apple discontinued in April 2022, just months before ChatGPT turned the world upside down in November that year.
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A slow ceding of agency • Hot Takes

Adam Singer:

»

A voice or chat interface is in my opinion inferior to visually seeing all options (not just options the AI decides to show) presented in one window, with another window for your own research or context. As an adult I have a workstation with two monitors, plenty of screen real estate. I do not require an infantilized view, and since I am not cognitively impaired also do not require a machine to make decisions for me. Notably, I also don’t use mobile to accomplish these tasks, which are tasks suited for an office. Other people have no boundaries nor opinions on computing best practices and simply use mobile for everything. They’re measurably less happy by the way. I can see why they’d want to use AI instead, as they already don’t really like computing, do so without thought for ergonomics, sophisticated decision-making etc. Perhaps some percentage of the population doesn’t really want to do anything.

I’ve watched for years as the tech industry manically promotes the next thing merely because it’s new. But as agents are pushed on us, AI is especially pernicious because it presents a pretty large ceding of agency to machines. And while I want machines to do some things for me, I don’t want them to do everything. I personally disliked the time I even had a human personal assistant to book travel at a previous job. I prefer to do things myself (I also don’t pay someone else to work on my yard, aka get exercise outside for me, that’s enjoyable, too).

I want to live my own life, and that involves being capable and practiced at things, and more importantly, the one who decides the details. You start to lose something when you outsource too much of this. There’s a reason we encourage older people to stay socially, physically, and mentally active, and why cognitive stimulation is incorporated into care for people as they age. Using your brain, making decisions, remembering things, and learning skills are all forms of mental engagement. What happens when we systematically remove those little opportunities for agency and effort from everyday life, across an entire society? I don’t think we’ve really thought through what that means.

The irony here is so much of Silicon Valley talks about the importance of agency, and yet they themselves are building products that remove it from the user. A bit of “agency for me, not for thee”, and here, they are happy to become the intermediary in your life.

«

As you can see, Singer is not a fan of Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI agents.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that being an electrician or builder is AI-proof, but could you actually survive doing it? CC-licensed photo by Rainier Martin Ampongan 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. Sparky. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

BT agrees rescue deal to buy broadband operator TalkTalk • BBC News

Mithcell Labiak:

»

The UK’s biggest broadband provider, BT, has agreed to buy rival operator TalkTalk to save the company from collapse.

The takeover would end of months of speculation over the future of TalkTalk and mean services for its millions of customers will continue as normal. BT boss Alison Kirkby said it provided “a safety net” for TalkTalk customers. The administrator, Alvarez & Marsal, said it also provided certainty for TalkTalk’s 900 staff based in Salford, Greater Manchester.

However, Virgin Media called it a “stitch-up” which allows BT to “tighten its grip” over the market. The government has given itself the power to have the final say on the deal, citing its importance to vital public services. TalkTalk has 1.5 million retail customers and one million wholesale customers across the UK.

BT’s Kirkby told the BBC’s Today programme: “Two and a half million customers, including vulnerable households, and key emergency services might have lost their services if Talk Talk had failed, which it was on track to do. So BT stepped in as we were the only viable option to take the business forward.”

…TalkTalk began as a challenger to BT in the broadband market. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange, but was taken over by private equity in 2021. [In fact: taken private by its founder and others – Overspill Ed.] Since then, the firm has built up debt while losing customers, leaving it unable to pay some of those it owes money to.

Despite this, TalkTalk remained the fourth biggest broadband provider in the UK, with 6.6% of customers, during the March to June period of this year, according to figures from analytic firm Opensignal. BT has 32.5% of customers, Sky 19.9%, and Virgin Media 19.1%.

Rivals who were beaten to the deal by BT have said it will be bad for consumers. Tom O’Hagan, a former TalkTalk executive who was leading a takeover bid for the firm, told the BBC he was worried about “reduced choice and potentially an increase in price for consumers and for businesses” because of the BT deal. He added that he was particularly concerned about competition in the wholesale market, where TalkTalk’s subsidiary PXC was BT’s main rival.

Virgin Media, which has also reportedly tried to buy TalkTalk in the past, said the BT takeover has “all the characteristics of a stitch-up masked as a rescue deal in the public interest”.

«

The quiet collapse of TalkTalk had completely passed me by. But why has Lisa Nandy approved BT rather than Virgin or Sky, the two smallest, to buy it? Was Virgin’s price so wrong? This entrenches the largest company which also has control of the network provision – taking us back to the time before TalkTalk existed. Another great piece of work by Nandy, who rivals chocolate teapots for usefulness.
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Siberian anti-plague institute staff isolated after worker’s death • Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)

RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities and Alex Raufoglu:

»

More than 60 staff at a Russian plague research facility have been isolated following the death of a laboratory worker, sources told RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities, and the United States said it was monitoring reports of a suspected case of pneumonic plague.

Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, was hospitalized on September 29 and died at a hospital early on October 2, according to news reports and sources.

Independent Siberian news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) reported that Shipilova accidentally broke a test tube containing pneumonic-plague bacteria on September 25 while working at the institute. Russian authorities have not publicly confirmed that account.

Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s consumer and public-health watchdog, said Shipilova had been diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” meaning that its cause was unknown. The agency said additional testing was conducted because of her professional activities but did not detect microorganisms associated with her work.

Rospotrebnadzor also said no accidents involving pathogenic microorganisms had been recorded at the institute.

…In a Telegram post on October 5, regional Governor Igor Kobzev said the “sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk” and the nearby district where Shipilova had been hospitalized “is currently stable.” He added that no new cases of institute employees seeking medical care had been reported in recent days.

«

OK, it’s just about possible that Shipilova caught pneumonic plague from a wild animal. But you’d really look to Occam’s Razor to tell you that it’s more likely she was involved in a lab accident. (This reads across oddly to Covid, of course.) Seems like the Russians have already got their own watching brief going on this one.
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AI glasses face their first major government crackdown • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Richard Milne:

»

Norway has become the first major country to propose a temporary ban on the use of AI glasses in selected public places amid growing privacy concerns over wearable technology.

The rich Scandinavian country’s centre-left government said on Monday that it would introduce a law to parliament soon on a temporary ban for places such as parks, beaches, schools, and kindergartens. It will also set up an expert group to propose permanent national rules.

“I am concerned about the introduction of powerful new technology where people risk being photographed, filmed, or recorded without their knowledge,” said Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s digitalization minister. A temporary ban “will give us time to conduct a thorough assessment and hold an informed debate that can lay the foundation for permanent regulation,” he said.

Governments around the world are grappling with how to regulate AI glasses—including those from Facebook owner Meta and cheaper copycat devices—amid worries that they are being used to film people without their consent, including children and women in settings such as changing rooms.

Parts of Norwegian society have already reacted with their own bans, including schools in the capital Oslo and the country’s biggest company, oil and gas major Equinor, which has banned them from its offices and offshore facilities.

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Very rare for a government to get out ahead of (or level with) a new technology; bravo Norway for at least bringing it up.
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Micron CEO says memory supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than in 2026 • TechPowerUp

Usman Saleem:

»

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says memory and storage supply will likely be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it was in 2026. He made the remarks during Micron’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on September 30, where the company reported record quarterly revenue of $54.2bn. Here’s what he said:

“Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026. AI is becoming super intelligent, and memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers’ platforms. Even with additional industry DRAM clean room space plans with robust demand trends, including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”

In June, Micron CEO said they expected industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, but couldn’t predict when supply would catch up with demand. The company now says it still has no line of sight to a balance, even with additional industry cleanroom space planned.

New capacity takes time as well, since Micron’s Idaho ID2 fab is only expected to start wafer output in late 2028. Mehrotra also said more than 75% of Micron’s 2027 output is already committed to customers. On the consumer side, Micron said DRAM prices rose in the high-teens% range last quarter, with NAND up about 30%.

«

Well, that’s the PC and (to a lesser extent smartphone) businesses screwed for the foreseeable, then.
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Webster man celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney his mom donated to him as a teenager • WHEC.com

Jennifer Lewke:

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A Webster man is celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney his mom donated to him as a teenager.  In March 1978, surgeons at Strong Hospital transplanted a kidney into 16-year-old Ray Vetuskey.  The story behind that kidney is now one for the record books. 

Vetuskey grew up in Seabreeze as the youngest of five kids and always had a special bond with his mom Betty, “she was a great lady; everyone loved her in the neighborhood,” Vetuskey recalls.

When he was a teenager, Vetuskey started having health issues and doctors ran several tests. “They told the doctors that the kidneys aren’t working and put me on dialysis,” Vetuskey says. The dialysis did not help; his kidneys didn’t recover and the only option was a transplant. 

Betty Vetuskey, who was 52 years old at the time, offered one of her kidneys to her son. “I don’t think she gave it two thoughts, anything she could do to help her son, I think she would have done anything which she did in my eyes,” Vetuskey remembers. 

Vetuskey still has his calendar from March 1978, with the date of his surgery circled along with another date for a Genesis concert. “We were both on the gurneys, holding hands and mom was crying and said don’t worry about a thing because I got a concert to go to and I’m not going to miss it,” he says with a laugh.

The transplant was a success and Vetuskey made it to the concert, “I have the ticket still, I have the ticket stub still,” he says.

Forty-eight years later, Betty’s kidney is still working for her son, making him the longest surviving kidney transplant recipient in Strong Hospital’s history.

…A living kidney donation typically lasts 15 to 20 years. “The special connection, biologically it’s important as well as mom and son sharing a lot of DNA but also emotionally that’s a different connection,” Dr. Molnar says.

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This seems like a much more interesting story than just being an anniversary. Is the DNA similarity why this kidney survived so well?
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So you think you could be an electrician? • Asterisk

Jesse Smith:

»

When I was 20, I broke both my heels in a construction accident. The right one was surgically reassembled using four heel fragments and extra bone from my hip. Workplace accidents seem to have worse outcomes than similar accidents occurring elsewhere, and at the time this specific injury had a generally poor prognosis, so doctors were initially uncertain whether I’d be permanently disabled.

When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident. I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair each day, and coming home to down 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Or I think of my son sleeping with a fan every night to overpower the ringing in his ears. Over enough time, physical jobs exact a physical toll that desk jobs largely avoid.

Most white-collar professions have a trivially small risk of death. Even in gray-collar jobs that are widely perceived as dangerous, such as policing, most workplace deaths are caused by motor vehicles. But some trades jobs carry a risk of death or serious injury connected to specific and inherent job demands. That is, something that seems dangerous that you often do is the most likely to harm or kill you.

Jobs performed at heights, such as ironwork or roofing, have a high mortality due to falling. Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution. Arborists can be killed in a variety of ways: falling from heights, being struck by trees or electrocuted. For people in these jobs, these risks are widely understood and accepted. Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed. These risks are probably less salient for people who have worked mainly white-collar jobs and know few people employed in dangerous professions.

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Easily overlooked but undoubtedly true.
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What’s the future for pure math research in the age of AI? • Stephen Wolfram Writings

Stephen Wolfram (you know, one of the guys who produced Mathematica in 1988):

»

We’ll talk later about the general character and value of pure mathematics. But before that, let’s address the issue of the moment: the role of modern AI.

And the first thing to say is that it’s unquestionably useful, sometimes very useful. For me, its greatest use in mathematical pursuits has been its ability in effect to thematically mine the knowledgebase of human mathematics. Starting back in the 1970s, being able to do keyword searches of the scientific literature was a crucial enabler of quite a bit of the research that I did. And now, with modern AI, one can do so much more. Because somewhere inside those LLMs—in a way that we don’t yet scientifically understand—there’s what amounts to a representation of raw ideas gleaned from all those millions of papers and books about mathematics.

And, at its best, it’s not just about retrieving things. It’s also about making connections. Of being able to see that this result here can be put together with that result there to come up with a surprising and useful conclusion. Humans routinely do that too. But they tend to have only read hundreds of papers; AIs have effectively read millions, and it’s cheap for them in effect to try out lots and lots of possible combinations.
So can one expect to just launch an AI off and have it come back with great math? As we’ll discuss, great math is—more than anything else—defined by the questions it asks. Yes, the AI can successfully automate things that humans would normally have had to do themselves before. But—as we’ll discuss later—at the core of pure mathematics is the human imagination that guides what questions to ask.

It’s worth understanding the difference between what modern AI does, and what pure computation does. Modern AI is, first and foremost, a way of leveraging the existing corpus of human knowledge. Computation is—at its most powerful—an open-ended way to generate things that are fundamentally and irreducibly new. Start from some rule or axiom, and just repeatedly run the computation of applying it, and my all-time favorite phenomenon of computational irreducibility guarantees that you’ll go on getting fresh, new results that can’t be reached except by doing all those computational steps.

…So, yes, having nothing to do with AI, computation can generate an infinite sequence of new theorems, representing an infinite sequence of new facts, etc. And among those theorems there’ll be all sorts of “originality” and, in effect, “surprise”. But there’s a catch. Those theorems are in a sense just “results plucked from the computational universe”. And as such they certainly fall under the purview of the new—and I think very important—field of ruliology on which I have spent so much effort. But are they math?

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Wolfram is one of those people who, when they speak, deserves hearing.
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OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects • Wikimedia

Selena Deckelmann:

»

The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.

We did not find any evidence that our systems were used for coordination among agents, nor did we find any evidence of our systems or data being compromised. However, we are concerned about what could have occurred here, the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity, and the growing risks of agentic AI activity on our platforms in general. The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the “new normal” for the people or organizations that maintain it.

…Wikipedia was designed for humans – and agentic behavior clearly poses challenges that no one has solutions for. Because of our unique and successful knowledge creation model, Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.

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A lot of the edits and accesses were trying to use Wikimedia resources to access other sites. But you can see how the demand would grow and grow. This ins’t going to be sustainable in the medium or long term.

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arXiv is rate limiting submissions because it can’t keep up with AI slop • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

arXiv, an open-access repository where researchers publish preprint academic research, has announced it will rate limit submissions because it has been inundated with AI-written papers. A researcher can now only send in two pieces per calendar month and have a total of three active submissions at any given time. In a blog post about the change, arXiv said AI has made it too easy to spam the publisher’s inbox and its volunteer moderation team is overwhelmed.

“The heart of arXiv’s process for detecting and rejecting low-quality papers is our many volunteer moderators,” Thomas Dietterich, an Oregon State University professor emeritus and the chair of arXiv’s editorial advisory council said in a statement. “We are so grateful that they donate their time and expertise every day. However, a relatively small proportion of authors are submitting a large number of low-quality papers and consuming a disproportionate fraction of the moderators’ time. This is unfair to authors who continue to submit quality papers — their papers can be delayed for days or weeks as a result.”

According to arXiv, it received 9,869 submissions in September 2016, 20,569 submissions in September 2024, and 40,363 submissions in September 2026. Submissions on the site have doubled in the last two years and have sextupled in the computer science category.

AI is driving this surge in multiple ways. Researchers are using LLM to parse massive data sets, write code, and design portions of experiments; some are also using AI to write the papers.

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Pure ICE cars fall below 50% of global sales for the first time • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

»

Gas cars are now a minority of the world’s new car sales. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei.

It’s the first time on record that they’ve been under half. But there’s a catch: most of the cars taking their place still have a gas tank.

Mobility Global is the auto data firm formerly known as S&P Global Mobility, which was spun off from S&P Global this year. Nikkei reported its first-half numbers last week, and they show sales of gasoline-only cars down 10% from a year ago to 20.25m units between January and June.

Their share fell three points in a single year, from 52% to 49%.

Battery-electric vehicles grew 12% to 6.87m units and took 17% of the market, up three points. Conventional hybrids grew 10% to 7.27m units, or 18%.

…Nikkei ties the acceleration to oil. Fuel prices spiked with the conflict in the Middle East, and buyers went looking for lower running costs.

The whole car market shrank about 5% in the first half, according to the IEA, so gas-only sales fell twice as fast as the market.

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A tipping point? There are still problems with home charging, which is the ideal.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Despite what you think you know, landfill is actually a better option for waste disposal than many others. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Filling 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.

US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300m in Nvidia chips into China • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

The US has arrested another suspect accused of smuggling high-end computer servers containing export-controlled Nvidia chips into China.

In a press release on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300m that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China.

As the CEO of Earthmade Computer, Lui allegedly conspired with freight-forwarding firms in South Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore to illegally divert chip shipments into China, including Nvidia’s A100 GPUs and H100 GPUs, the FBI’s indictment alleged. These are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips. However, the chips can process large amounts of data and train large language models, which the US fears could pose national security risks if China suddenly gets access to enough chips to drastically advance its AI or strengthen its military.

Emails and bank records exposed the smuggling scheme, the DOJ alleged, which started in October 2023 and continued until August 2026.

One key piece of evidence is a 2024 email discussing an order for 70 servers with export-restricted GPUs that were fraudulently claimed as destined for Malaysia. After “Lui submitted a purchase order to a US manufacturer for 27 of these servers for approximately $7,614,000,” the DOJ alleged that a co-conspirator told a Malaysian government official that all 27 were shipped to China.

A similar shipment of 92 export-controlled servers was allegedly routed through Singapore to Malaysia, then Hong Kong. Finally, the chips went to a Chinese firm based in Hangzhou, the FBI alleged, which The Wall Street Journal last year described as China’s AI hub.

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It’s the new arms trading!
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I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken • The Atlantic

David Robinson:

»

What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.

I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.

The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence. My former colleagues at OpenAI were prescient: They came to understand the scaling laws that meant bigger AI systems would be smarter—and so they went all in on building bigger systems, at great cost. A can-do attitude of achieving the seemingly impossible—coupled with work timelines that amount to perpetual sprints—are common across the industry.

…This summer, in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake. The company responded by making security improvements. But even after those changes, OpenAI reported that its safety controls failed again, when a model in training bypassed restrictions on internet access: A monitoring system alerted human staff but did not automatically turn the model off as it was supposed to. Anthropic, too, has acknowledged accidentally turning off its own safeguards because of a misconfiguration. I believe that such mistakes are typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.

…Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster.

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(Gift link.)
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How computer software bugs led to F1’s Malaysia farce: “totally unacceptable” • The Athletic

Luke Smith:

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A heavy shower just before the cars went to the grid prompted the race director to sensibly delay the start. After 40 minutes, once the rain eased sufficiently, a call was made to get going, with a damp track offering the first wet racing of the year.

Max Verstappen led the field away behind the safety car, ready to discover how these all-new cars would perform in the rain. After two formation laps, they would line up on the grid and get racing. Until they couldn’t.

First it was [Max] Verstappen, reporting he was pushing down on the accelerator and feeling nothing, causing him to slow. Then Lewis Hamilton. Then Nico Hülkenberg, Esteban Ocon, Ollie Bearman, Sergio Pérez, all coming to a crawl. One by one, the same problem emerging. Amid the uncertainty, cars around them slowed down to avoid overtaking and a possible breach of the rules.

…The total confusion left race control with no decision but to abandon the plan to get started and return the cars to the pit lane, now in a jumbled-up order. It led to another, longer wait to get going.

The reason for the wait? The FIA, motorsports’ governing body, had to issue a software update for all the teams to install on their cars to fix the computer algorithm that controls the engine and prevent the issue from repeating after a bug had emerged. By the time the race finally began on a considerably drier track, more than 90 minutes had passed since the scheduled 3 p.m. start time.

This season’s all-new engines rely heavily on the software to manage when power is delivered by the battery, which is responsible for almost half of the total power output.

Drivers have complained regularly through this season about how difficult it is to trust the energy deployment at times, with changes from lap to lap. The complexity of the engines has made them hard to understand and created cars that are unnatural to drive. Verstappen referred to F1’s 2026 rules as “anti-racing” back in February.

In Malaysia, that same complexity reared its head in frustrating fashion.

Mercedes and Honda engines were unaffected, but the bug, previously unidentified in the limited wet-weather testing conducted with these cars, left many drivers frustrated.

“It’s obviously not great what happened,” said Pérez, who said his car felt like a rental go-kart. “I’m sure we will learn from it, but what happened today is totally unacceptable for the sport.”

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Analysis: wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans and Ho Woo Nam:

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The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.

While gas prices are surging to levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating record amounts of power from wind and solar, up 14% year-on-year.

This unprecedented clean-power generation is directly cutting the need for gas-fired electricity, which is down by nearly 10% year-on-year in 2026 to date. In total, wind and solar have generated a record 41% share of the UK’s electricity needs in 2026 to date, compared with 25% from gas, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.

Wind and solar has avoided the need for UK gas imports worth £5.9bn, since the outbreak of war between the US and Iran in February 2026. These avoided gas imports would have required the UK to secure the equivalent of more than 100 additional tanker deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

…From this Thursday, 1 October, typical household gas bills will be 33% higher than they were in April, some £200 per year, according to thinktank Nesta. By contrast, household electricity bills will only have risen 4%, according to Nesta’s analysis, as a result of growing generation from clean-energy sources.

Andrew Sissons, director for sustainable future at Nesta, explained in a social media post that “the link between electricity and gas prices has already begun to break”.

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Would have been useful to know how many LNG tankers came in over that period. Are we talking about a 1%, 10%, 40% reduction? Also: a typical 15,600 cubic metre LNG tanker can carry cargo worth about $2m, but the “100 tankers avoided” equation suggests the cargo is worth $59m. Anyway: it’s a lot.
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Just bury your trash • Works In Progress

Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin:

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The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.

It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.

Producing tiny slivers of plastic uses almost no energy. Making the polyethylene resin for a single thin plastic bag, then blowing and sealing it, uses something like 0.6 megajoules, roughly the same energy as boiling a kettle of water. By contrast, cotton is extremely energy intensive, partly because cotton bags need to be much thicker to work, and weigh around 200g as compared to 8g for polyethylene. Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 17.5 megajoules, around 29 times as much energy.

In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio. Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.

The same pattern shows up almost everywhere we have tried to replace disposable goods with durable ones. Steel is more energy intensive than plastic, and a steel straw requires 10g of steel, compared to just 0.2g of plastic for a plastic straw. So even if the steel is never washed (hot water is also energy intensive), it would take 150 reuses for a steel straw to use fewer resources than a plastic one. And who would go without washing it?

A ceramic mug only beats a polystyrene cup on energy use after 1,000 uses, and even then only if your dishwasher is fairly efficient. Run a less efficient one and the disposable cup wins on energy forever. Cloth diapers feel greener than disposables, but once you account for the cotton, the laundering, the hot water, and the detergent, the UK Environment Agency found the two are roughly tied in overall demand on resources. A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.

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But, you object (I did), all that plastic is thrown away and pollutes places, surely? No:

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Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean. In low-income countries, however, over 90% of waste is improperly managed, and typically ends up dumped, burned, or escaping into waterways. Plastic flows into the ocean overwhelmingly come from a small handful of rapidly growing Asian economies. Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic. And a substantial share of plastic in the ocean isn’t domestic waste at all, but rather discarded fishing gear.

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There’s more, too, about how modern (properly managed) landfills work.
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Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused • TechCrunch

Kirsten Korosec:

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Meta’s Muse, a personal AI agent that books travel, fills out forms, and shops on a user’s behalf, has already proven popular with the masses, but a new side project could be particularly alluring to tinkerers and hackers.

On Friday, the company introduced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that lets developers build their own hardware that connects to Muse.

Meta is providing open-source firmware (the low-level software that runs a device), and a Linux software development kit (SDK), along with a few project ideas to get users started. These include giving Muse a color e-ink display or loading it onto a stick that plugs into a TV’s HDMI port.

There don’t appear to be many limits, either. Users can set up a low-cost hobbyist computer like a Raspberry Pi or an off-the-shelf ESP32 board, and then connect Muse “to your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you’ve got lying on your workbench,” Meta notes.

The company has also set up a Discord channel to support users.

Meta has already tried the code itself, naturally. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, said in a post on X that the company built a gadget called Muse Home Link. The USB-C-powered device lets Muse connect to a home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart TVs.

Meta made 5,000 of these Home Links, in fact, and is giving them away for free to Muse subscribers while supplies last, according to Friedman. Considering Friedman’s post about Home Link received nearly 30,000 views in a few hours, we’re guessing those freebies have been claimed. Friedman said Home Link would be ready to ship a few weeks.

Muse Gadgets may not have wide appeal, but it fits nicely into Meta’s all-in strategy to make Muse more than a standalone chatbot. Meta isn’t content to push Muse on everyday consumers; it’s also trying to woo small businesses and enterprises.

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Clever little Trojan Horse strategy they’ve got going on there.
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my9albums: pick the 9 albums that made you

Nahue Alberti:

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Pick the 9 albums that made you.

Search more than two million albums, put your nine in order, and share the poster.

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Fun little distraction which has shown us how disparate people’s music tastes can be. (Also that post-2006 or so it’s difficult to think of things in terms of albums.)
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Things that apparently cause cancer • Breakthrough Journal

Deric Tilson and Adam Stein:

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It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.

Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.

…The papers construct a “proximity score” based on distance from nuclear plants, up to 120 km in Massachusetts and 200 km in the national studies (about 75 and 125 miles). Every ZIP code or county inside those radii is treated as exposed, with closer locations receiving higher weights. If a ZIP code or county is within range of multiple sites, then the effect is cumulative. That means that a county that is in close proximity to one nuclear power plant could have a smaller score than another county that is further away from any one power plant but within range of many.

From this proximity score, the authors run regressions testing the outcome (cancer incidence, cancer mortality, or total mortality) on the proximity of the county and a collection of covariates. From this, they use the statistical coefficients, construct the Relative Risk for each county, age, and sex group, and compute the Attributable Fraction, from which they derive the number of attributed deaths from the nuclear power plant from 2000 to 2018.

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Basically, living near enough to any object “causes cancer”, using that methodology.
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FedEx believes $300m electric truck spend will save them $800m in diesel • Electrek

Jo Borrás:

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In a record-setting commercial truck deal, international shipping giant FedEx has placed an order for 2,000 all-electric box trucks from American startup Harbinger in a deal that’s reportedly worth more than $300 million – but the ROI could be much higher.

FedEx is making serious moves to fully electrify its operating fleet by 2040, and this latest Harbinger deal is believed to be one of the largest binding orders for electric medium or heavy-duty trucks in history. It’s certainly Harbinger’s largest order, at least.

…Harbinger estimates that each of the electric Class 5 and 6 medium-duty box trucks delivered will reduce FedEx’ fuel costs by around $20,000 annually compared with the conventional diesel-powered vehicle they replace. Additionally, Harbinger says its vehicles are designed for a functional service life of 20 years.

2,000 trucks x $20,000 in fuel savings per year x 20 years. That works out to $800m in total savings, for a whopping ~166% ROI.

“Electrifying a fleet at this scale requires vehicles that can perform the work our robust operations demand while also delivering meaningful economic benefits,” said Paul Melander, Senior Vice President Safety & Transportation, FedEx and member of Harbinger’s Board of Directors. “Expanding our deployment of Harbinger vehicles gives us an opportunity to continue making progress toward our fleet electrification goals while reducing fuel and operating costs.”

Saving money is great, but the much more important issue for you and me is that the move to Harbinger electric trucks will help FedEx avoid more than 1.7m tons of CO2 emissions over their projected operating lives.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A diesel export ban by the US would have limited benefit because it would quickly suppress refinery production of other fuels too. CC-licensed photo by Geekly Things 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 11 links for you. Cracking 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.

How Meta uses AI data centres to avoid billions in federal taxes • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan and Mike Isaac:

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Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in AI are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”

But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a different story. It claims that its AI data centres are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.

It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data centre expansion.

Characterizing its AI data centres as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.

Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the IRS, in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”

Here’s what Meta is doing: for tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centres as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly AI computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.

…Meta is already in one sizable dispute with the IRS over this tax break, for using it to subsidize its chief executive’s multibillion-dollar pay package. In 2013, Meta claimed that $4.1bn of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense because he helped invent new software, such as Facebook’s News Feed. The IRS is trying to claw back the company’s resulting $355m in tax savings, court filings show.

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The data centre finagle is estimated to have saved it $4bn on its tax bill last year. The “research expense” wrinkle is surely what Meta pays its tax lawyers the big bucks for.
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Google wins dismissal of Chegg, Penske Media lawsuits over AI overviews • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

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Alphabet’s Google has persuaded a US federal judge to dismiss lawsuits from education technology company Chegg and Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media Corp that alleged ​the search engine giant unlawfully used their content in AI-generated summaries that draw readers away from their websites.

In his ruling, opens new tab on Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said Chegg and Penske’s claims that Google’s business practices violate antitrust law “fail to get out of the starting gate.”

The companies ​said in lawsuits filed last year that Google broke antitrust law by forcing ​publishers to allow AI overviews of their content if they want to remain indexed in Google’s search results. They alleged they lost revenue from reduced traffic ​to their sites.

“Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search ​traffic if they make their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”

Chegg and Penske, which also publishes Billboard and Variety ​magazines, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google also did not immediately respond ​to a request for comment. Google has denied any wrongdoing.

The plaintiffs said in a competitive market Google would pay them for republishing their work or using their content to train its AI systems. Google countered that it has no obligation to index publishers’ content on their preferred terms.

Mehta said he is not “unsympathetic” to the situation of publishers and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes ​without compensation.” But ​he said antitrust laws don’t substitute for legislators’ power to address how innovation may cause economic harm.

The judge in March rejected similar claims by a publisher ​suing Google.

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Google’s early attempt to pay websites for AI answers is struggling • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google’s shift to AI-powered search has upended the way the world’s largest search engine generates web traffic, rankling large and small publishers alike. In recent months, the company has experimented with paying publishers when their content appears in AI answers, but a new report claims the payouts in this pilot program are miniscule. That has publishers in the program, as well as those watching from the sidelines, feeling skeptical.

According to The Information, Google has admitted about 100 publishers to the AI contribution pilot. The pitch is that websites can get payments from Google when their content materially contributes to Gemini-powered search results like an AI Overview. Google has long resisted the idea of direct payments to publishers, arguing that websites get traffic in exchange for allowing Google bots to scrape their content for use in search and knowledge graph tools. In the age of AI, that relationship is breaking down, hence the AI pilot.

So far, publishers aren’t getting much for their trouble. The Information heard from several small and mid-sized publishers in the program that Google’s AI payments are minuscule, equaling roughly one-tenth of one% of their advertising revenue. These payments have been so disappointing that several larger publishers have reportedly declined to participate in the program. These publishers hope that by refusing to join the pilot, they can force Google to offer a more generous deal.

Payments under the program vary widely, but some sites are doing well. One publisher that joined early is on track to earn more than $1m per year, a big chunk of its revenue. A more recent addition to the pilot has earned $50,000 to $60,000, which is a small slice of its earnings. Various smaller sites are seeing less than $1,000 from the program over several months, which won’t come close to offsetting declining traffic.

In general, publishers in the test seem to agree that certain topics that are not as widely covered but have strong niche interest earn more, including anime and gaming.

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Android Central “will continue” despite laying off its staff • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Yesterday, four of the six staffers on Android Central’s staff page posted publicly about the layoffs, including Shruti Shekar, Derrek Lee, Harish Jonnalagadda, and Nicholas Sutrich, and former senior editor Namerah Saud Fatmi updated her LinkedIn to indicate that her tenure at Android Central had ended. Both Lee, the site’s managing editor, and Sutrich confirmed that all remaining staff were laid off.

The former staffers weren’t told whether the site would shut down. Today, new posts have been published to the site, though are from the site’s freelance contributors rather than the previous full-time staffers.

“Future [Publishing] will continue to publish Android Central. We’ll share further information about the future of the site in due course,” Future spokesperson Nicole Martineau tells The Verge, adding: “We will not be providing any further comment at this time.”

Android Police, another Android-focused blog, also laid off at least two staffers recently. The site currently lists an editorial team of four people.

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The suspicion is that small tech sites which relied on advertising served to search traffic are hitting a wall. A comment I saw was that any site which doesn’t have lots of email subscribers for a newsletter is screwed in the world of Google’s AI Overviews. And, possibly, there isn’t the interest in the narrow topic of Doing Stuff on Android Phones as there used to be.
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“Explosion of melt rates”: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

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Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.

Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.

Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realise how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of metres of ice. The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones.

“I visited one last week and it’s so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice – an extensive glacier – just a few years ago,” said Huss. “And now it’s a rock desert where there’s some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks.”

The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside – the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns – rather than simply retreating from surface heat.

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The total glacier ice volume in Switzerland has fallen from just over 100 cubic kilometres in 1920 to just over 40 cu km now, according to the Glacier Monitoring organisation. The decrease – graphed in the story – is most marked since 1980, when it was about 90 cu km.
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RIP SMRs: is it the end of the line for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs)? • The Energy Mix

Susan O’Donnell:

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In early September, the organization behind Canada’s push for small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) quietly signalled their demise.

In 2016, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories President Mark Leskinski proclaimed that “SMRs can live among the annals of great Canadian innovations.” Ten years later, the organization announced the termination of its two programs to support SMR development.

During the intervening decade [pdf], the companies promoting the 10 SMR designs in Canada had either left the country, lost their proponents, filed for bankruptcy protection, or failed to secure private sector backing for their projects.

An SMR is a nuclear reactor designed to generate 300 megawatts of electricity or less, compared to Canada’s existing CANDU reactors which generate 500 megawatts or more.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) manages Chalk River, the federal research campus where Canada’s top nuclear researchers conceived and designed the CANDU reactor. All the power reactors operating in Canada are a similar CANDU design, and CANDUs also operate in six other countries. But the last unit to connect to an electric grid in Canada was in 1993, and CANDU exports dried up decades ago.

CNL’s idea for a transition from large CANDU reactors to smaller reactors was an attempt to reenergize a moribund domestic nuclear industry. The concept was to lower the cost of nuclear reactors by making them smaller and building multiple modular units in factories.

…One of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ first research collaborations for SMR fuel was with Moltex, a UK start-up company that had set up in Saint John in 2018. Moltex proposed to use plutonium to fuel an experimental “advanced” SMR it wanted to build at the Point Lepreau nuclear site on the Bay of Fundy.

Moltex lost its proponent in 2025 when New Brunswick Minister of Energy René Legacy told CBC the province was no longer willing to take on the risk of supporting first-of-a-kind experimental SMRs. A second “advanced” SMR slated for the Point Lepreau site also lost government support. At that point, the provincial and federal governments combined had spent nearly $130m on SMR activities in New Brunswick—funds that could have gone into heat pumps and energy efficiency upgrades to combat energy poverty and cut climate pollution—without attracting private sector interest.

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Secret watermark labels proteins as “made by AI” • Nature

Elie Dolgin:

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Proteins designed by artificial intelligence could soon carry a hidden signature of their machine-generated origins, thanks to a watermarking system described on Wednesday in Nature.

The technology, developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, borrows a trick that is already used to identify AI-made content across images, video, audio and text. It involves weaving a faint statistical tell into both the amino-acid sequence and 3D shape of computer-designed proteins — without noticeably compromising their function.

Known as SynthIDBio, the approach could distinguish AI-generated proteins in biological repositories from their natural counterparts, helping to preserve the integrity of databases that underpin both scientific research and biosecurity screening.

Steph Guerra, a biosecurity scholar at the non-profit research organization RAND in Washington DC, sees value in an approach that aligns interests across the life-sciences community. Watermarking can support innovation and scientific reproducibility, she says, “and, at the same time, have a security benefit”.

The catch is that this molecular stamp can be scrubbed away. Someone who wants to erase the ‘made by AI’ tag can, in many cases, run a watermarked protein through another design tool and generate a new sequence that retains the protein’s structure and function but obscures its synthetic origins.

It is therefore best viewed as one more tool in a layered framework for guarding against biological threats, says Tessa Alexanian, a biosecurity researcher formerly at the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, a non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland. “We’re in a wild new world,” she says.

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Breaking the Marmont Cipher, 1809 • Carter Church

Carter Church:

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In February 1809, Vienna decided on war. Napoleon had deposed the Spanish Bourbons the previous spring and taken their kingdom for his brother, and Vienna concluded that the Habsburgs were next unless it struck while his best troops were tied down in Spain. On 8 February the Austrian Empire resolved to fight Napoleon, with the war party pointing at the French disaster at Bailén in Spain, where an entire French corps had surrendered the previous July. Archduke Charles was the Austrian Emperor’s younger brother and the best general the Habsburgs had. He had spent three years rebuilding the army: 340,000 regulars, plus a new Landwehr militia on paper at 240,000. Everyone could see what was coming.

Napoleon had a specific problem, and its name was Marmont.

Marmont, a personal friend of the Emperor, had been entrusted with what were called the “finest” troops in the theatre (about 13,000 men by Napoleon’s own count), and they were parked in Dalmatia on the far side of the Adriatic. Austrian territory sat between them and every other French army. If war came, Marmont would be the most isolated general in the Empire.

So on 16 March 1809, Napoleon wrote from Paris to his stepson Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy, and told him to send Marmont a letter. It was to lay out where every French and allied army stood. It was to go “dans une lettre chiffrée et par un officier intelligent”: in cipher, carried by an intelligent officer.

That letter, or one written to exactly that order, survives. Its first line is in plain French: Vous avez dû recevoir, Monsieur le Général Marmont, mes lettres des 8, 14 et 20 courant. [Translated: “You have already received, General Marmont, my letters of the 8th, 14th and 20th.”]

After that come twenty-four rows of two-digit numbers, stray letters, and invented symbols. The key didn’t survive, and for 217 years nobody alive could read it.

…Marmont’s own headquarters used a code of only about 150 entries in 1811, with nine different figures for E, and the British staff officer George Scovell broke it within two days, helped by the plain words Marmont’s clerks kept leaving mixed in with the cipher. Whoever wrote this letter was more careful.

…I’ve never broken a cipher.

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And arguably Church didn’t this time either. GPT-6 (Astra) did. The cipher is, as you’d expect, pretty complex. The LLM solved it in about six hours.
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Banning diesel exports won’t solve Trump’s biggest problem • The New Republic

Grace Segers:

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The theory behind restricting or banning diesel exports is that more diesel would remain in the country, and therefore fuel costs would go down: if you ship out less, you keep in more. But the reality of that scenario would be more complicated. The US already produces around 5.3m barrels per day of distillate fuels, which include diesel, but the domestic demand is only around 3.6m barrels. Refiners on the Gulf Coast rely on trade to absorb that surplus; if exports are banned, around 1.5m barrels per day of diesel would be “stranded,” according to analysts at S&P Global.

These risks have left oil industry stakeholders in a tizzy. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have warned that such a ban would “reduce US fuel production, put upward pressure on prices, weaken energy security and hand market share to foreign competitors.” It’s a concern echoed by the folks at the American Petroleum Institute (API), who fear that a fuel surplus would lead to refineries producing less gasoline and jet fuel along with reducing diesel production.

The US produces diesel at a structural surplus, and there is room for refineries to stockpile diesel if it is unable to be exported. But eventually, refineries will no longer have a reason to continue processing as much crude oil.

“You are going to destroy the financial incentive to process these barrels in the first place, and these refiners will begin cutting runs,” said Johnston. S&P Global analysts predict refiners would ultimately need to cut crude runs by 1.9m barrels per day.

Commodity analysts at Goldman Sachs have predicted that an export ban would initially lead to a decrease in prices—but only until diesel storage is full. Because different fuels are produced together, such an action would put “upward pressure on gasoline prices,” according to a memo by Goldman Sachs. The bank estimated that gasoline prices could increase by $0.30 per week. [Emphasis added – Overspill Ed]

A diesel export ban would also have global repercussions. With less diesel coming from the Middle East, China, and Russia, other countries across the world have been more reliant on American oil. According to API, the US currently supplies around 20% of the roughly eight million barrels of diesel traded globally per day. Diesel prices continue to spike largely because the US is the primary source for buyers. This past summer, diesel exports hit a record of 1.9m barrels per day. In short: Cutting access to US diesel would be immediately felt across the world.

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Easily forgotten: you have to crack the whole barrel in a refinery, not just the bits you want. A diesel export ban only works if you’ve got enough demand at home to soak it all up.
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Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel.

The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents. 

Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness. It is undeniable that LLMs are becoming more powerful, have more compute, and have had many of the guardrails that prevent them from “acting” in the real world removed. The ways they are being trained and told to do things by their human operators has led to negative outcomes, sycophancy, and AI “psychosis” among some heavy users. 

All of this has led a certain sect of the “AI safety” movement, which is largely made up of effective altruists, to warn about “model welfare” and to insist that AI chatbots might be having a bad time.

They suggest this, of course, as they insist upon building AI chatbots and agents whose main function is to do work that is tedious for humans to do. I am writing about the AI Saw torture chamber primarily to show how far off the rails the conversation about AI consciousness has gone among a certain subset of Silicon Valley cultists.

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Those cultists often having serious responsibility inside AI firms, it’s worth noting.
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OpenAI ignored employees’ warnings about safely testing AI models • The New York Times

Sheera FrenkelDustin Volz and Dylan Freedman:

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Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored.

In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times.

In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the AI models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters.

OpenAI’s models later broke out of their testing environments and attacked the AI start-up Hugging Face and other organizations, setting off a global debate about AI safety.

The exchanges between OpenAI employees and executives — which have not been previously reported — were part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security, according to employees and independent security researchers. That approach not only was evident with the testing of AI models, they said, but also showed up in other areas of the company, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot.

Independent security researchers said they found bugs in recent months that allowed them to view the internal communications of OpenAI employees. They also found other vulnerabilities that would enable them to see the company’s internal computer code and view the chat logs of ChatGPT users. When the researchers contacted OpenAI about their findings, they said, the company initially disregarded them.

“OpenAI’s security seems to be about what you’d expect from a research lab that scaled at a blistering pace over four years and focused more on beating its competitors than securing its infrastructure,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the AI security firm Abundant Security.

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This company increasingly looks like it’s playing with fire and yet doesn’t have a system for extinguishing fires.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We have the technology to knock out populations of mosquitoes – but in the US, regulatory confusion has stopped its use. CC-licensed photo by Steve Begin on Flickr.

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

Did Anthropic’s AI really make a scientific discovery on its own? • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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When Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant, unveiled findings from its new biology lab last week, its scientists claimed to have used AI agents to discover new enzymes with promise for biotechnology.

Some scientists were quick to cast doubt on the achievement. Then Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said this weekend that he and his colleagues had been studying the enzymes and their associated molecules — which Anthropic calls ARTs — for four years.

Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s AI models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.

“So, for me, the most important question is not ‘Were ARTs already known?’ They were,” Dr. Mestre said in an interview. The issue instead, he added, is whether Anthropic’s AI actually reasoned its way to the results, or whether it was guided to them based partly on his own work.

“My concern is that this information was used to train future versions of the models,” Dr. Mestre said of his own research. “I think it’s important to raise this possibility.”

In a statement on Sunday, Anthropic said: “We are not aware of any previously published work describing the ART system we recently found. Claude was also not trained on any user transcripts, and our molecular biology team has no such access, either.”

Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Mestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.

Similar worries surfaced recently when researchers at OpenAI claimed to have solved a longstanding mathematics puzzle. A leading mathematician noted that he had been using the company’s A.I. to work toward a solution for some time.

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Once would be accident, twice looks like a pattern.
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OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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OpenAI is responding to Meta’s buzzy Muse AI with agentic helpers of its own: Dots. During its DevDay keynote on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Dots will serve as always-on AI assistants that can “do nearly anything” across connected apps in the background while learning your preferences over time.

The company’s capable GPT-6 Astra model powers Dots, which use their own cloud computer to access a web browser and more than 4,000 supported apps. You can interact with a Dot through a text-message-like interface that’s similar to the one offered by Muse, as well as hop on a voice call with it from ChatGPT on the web, desktop, or mobile. Dots can also connect to Microsoft Teams and Slack, where they will carry over the context from your sessions on other apps and devices. It will soon be able to talk to you over text message as well.

For now, you can only create one Dot, though OpenAI plans to allow users to deploy multiple agents at once. Once you give your Dot a task, it will message you with updates and questions while it works. As an example, OpenAI says a developer working on an app could ask their Dot to use customer feedback to build and test updates, while presenting them with a video showing its changes. Meanwhile, a content creator could have their Dot review an interview transcript, find moments to clip, create show notes, and write social posts.

You can follow along with your Dot’s progress by accessing its cloud computer. Dots also learn while they work, allowing them to personalize their output and come up with other tasks to complete “before you even think to ask,” according to OpenAI. You and your colleagues can also work with your Dot in ChatGPT Space, a new collaborative workspace in the app.

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The content creator leaving the slop work to, well, a slop creator makes sense. But it also means that the rest of us get drowned in more slop, and so we ignore the cheery AI-written ones and go for the surprising, the odd, the human ones.

It also surely means a web that is overwhelmed by bad versions of these things. Also, if you’re used to writing scripts then this sounds like, well, scripts.
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Google announces Gemini 4 Argon AI model, but you can’t use it yet • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google promised Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but it spent the summer trotting out smaller Flash models. Now, Google is ready to take on the frontier again with Gemini 4 Argon. The company claims this new AI offers industry-leading performance in coding, knowledge work, and cybersecurity, but you aren’t allowed to use it yet.

While most of us will have to wait to test Gemini 4, Google says engineers inside the company are already using the new model extensively. Argon reportedly used “fleet-wide telemetry data” to help Google save 300 TiB of memory across its data centres. Meanwhile, Argon agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google, including thousands of lines in the core re2 and libgav1 libraries and more than 800,000 lines in the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel.

…The main focus for Gemini 4 right now is cyberdefense. Google says models of this scale call for a phased release, so it’s starting with a small group of trusted testers. Partners in the company’s Fairwind Program can get access to leverage the model’s cybersecurity defense capabilities. Wiz is apparently already using Argon and has used it to uncover a critical vulnerability that could expose personal information in a system used at hospitals around the world. Google claims other frontier models missed this flaw, but it didn’t provide any specifics.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about model misalignment after several high-profile hacking incidents over the summer. Google claims it designed Argon with systems that monitor the model’s chain-of-thought and can stop it in its tracks if the model steps out of bounds. This, Google says, is why reasoning transparency is important in frontier model development.

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It’s quite the thing where all these companies are vying to convince us that their models are the most dangerous and uncontrollable. It’s as though they were all breeding dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and saying that they’re mostly safe.
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Why do AI agents sound so frustrated? • The Atlantic

Daniel Drucker and Kyle Mahowald:

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When one of Anthropic’s Claudes tried to solve a particularly challenging math problem during its training process, its chain of thought read more like frustrated DMs than the documentation of one of the most powerful AI models in the world. “GRRRR. OK. Honestly I now think it’s 50-50,” it wrote, followed by “ARGH ARGH ARGH. OK. Gun to head: the answer is … Hmm.” At one point, Claude seemingly threw up its arms: “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

Why do AI agents talk to themselves at all, and why do they sound so demonstrative when they do? Part of the reason AI models sound so effusive is simple: AI systems are trained on human text, and they mimic our habits. When people make a mistake in trying to solve a problem, they cry out. So when AI makes a mistake, it does the same. But imitation likely isn’t the whole story. This story’s two authors are a computational linguist and a philosopher of mind and language. Based on what we know about human language and how these models work, we have a theory of a much more interesting reason why AI models sound the way they do.

Remember how your math teachers made you show your work? Even if it was annoying, it helped break an impossible-seeming problem into more manageable chunks. You could also use the written record of your reasoning to check your answer, notice a mistake, go back to an earlier step, and try again. That process of checking and refining is part of good reasoning. Chains of thought do something similar for AI models, letting them make each step of their reasoning explicit in a written scratch pad. Because each word a model produces depends on what’s been said so far, that written scratch pad is crucial for determining what comes next.

That’s where the “OH MY GOD!” and “ARGH” come in: Any system—whether human or artificial—that solves hard reasoning problems needs ways to mark mistakes (oops!) and identify breakthroughs (aha!). Humans have already developed words that do exactly that. Borrowing our oopses, arghs, and ahas for their chains of thought may give AI systems a built-in way to guide their “thinking” too.

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Mimicking intelligence rather than being intelligent; it’s very much the Chinese room phenomenon.
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Exclusive: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, and surging costs • Reuters

Echo Wang:

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Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42bn in 2025, and plans to spend $518bn on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses.

Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6bn, even as the company lost more than $8bn on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time.

The public sale, ​which could value it at more than $2 trillion, would capitalize on the rapid rise of the AI startup lab that only came into existence five years ago, and establish it ​as a benchmark for how Wall Street values AI’s leading companies, including rival OpenAI.

The plans come as Anthropic confronts evidence from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, including sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests.

These reports have broken into the wider public sphere, igniting fears over ​how companies can keep the increasingly powerful systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.

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The widening losses paired with the huge commitment to spending just doesn’t add up. Google, at IPO, was remarkably profitable and had spending under control. It thrived. Netscape was lossmaking and not. It sank. If Anthropic thinks it can issue half a trillion dollars of debt, it should think again.
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Molten salt chemistry converts consumer polymer into fuel • Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a method to convert a commonly discarded hydrocarbon polymer into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels. The team has applied for a patent for the discovery, which treats polyethylene — the stuff of white cutting boards and shopping bags — with aluminum chloride-containing molten salts that serve as both solvent and catalyst. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The scientists closely monitored the chemical reaction that turns the polymer into petrol to learn the secrets of its success. Soft X-ray spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance showed that charged aluminum atoms each bind to three other atoms to create strongly acidic catalytic sites that break long polymer chains into shorter ones. Isotopic labeling and neutron scattering revealed how simpler polymer chains form gasoline-like fuels and more complex chains form diesel-like fuels.

If scaled beyond the laboratory, the process could strengthen US energy security and industrial competitiveness.

“We developed an efficient and selective polyethylene-to-gasoline conversion,” said Liqi Qiu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who performed most of the study’s experiments in the ORNL laboratory of Sheng Dai, of ORNL and UTK. Dai, an ORNL Corporate Fellow and section head for separations and polymer chemistry, is a co-corresponding author of the paper.

The experiments produced a gasoline yield of about 60% under mild conditions.

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The key element here is that it works at 200ºC – domestic oven-type temperature – rather than the 450ºC that previous processes have needed. And of course it would be, in effect, carbon-neutral because you’ve already extracted oil to make the plastic. In fact, as ORNL notes, it would make plastic a lot more valuable for recycling.
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Mosquitoes are a choice • Works in Progress Magazine

Maya Rosen:

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Genetic engineering can suppress mosquitoes: researchers insert a gene into male mosquitoes that means their offspring will not survive, and then release them into the wild, where they mate with females, prevent those females having any surviving offspring, and collapse local populations. In 2000, biologists at the University of Oxford demonstrated that this idea could work in fruit flies. They engineered the flies to carry a gene that makes a protein called tTAV, harmless in small amounts but lethal when it builds up. In the lab, the insects are reared in a medium laced with the antibiotic tetracycline, which keeps the gene switched off. But, in the wild, where there is no tetracycline, the gene switches on, and the offspring die before adulthood.

The scientists then formed a company, Oxitec, which was intended to work with governments to research and deploy the technology. They engineered the same gene into male Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue and yellow fever. In this strain, the lethal effect is tuned to kill only the female offspring, while the males survive and pass the gene on for a few generations before it disappears.

This approach means the gene continues driving down mosquito numbers for several generations without needing a fresh ‘top up’ of engineered males, but it is also self-limiting: the females that inherit it die off each generation, so the lethal gene steadily declines in the wild. Yet the technique is hugely effective. Sustained releases cut a wild Aedes aegypti population in the Cayman Islands by 80%, and in a field trial in Juazeiro, Brazil by about 95%. The company submitted its data to seek approval in the United States in 2010. But it has been slow going.

…it took a year and a half for the USDA to reject the application and inform the company that it should instead apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA had claimed jurisdiction over genetically modified animals under its authority over veterinary drugs. Its guidance stated that ‘altered genomic DNA in an animal is a drug … because such altered DNA is an article intended to affect the structure or function of the body of the animal’. Until then, the USDA’s insects had been sterilized through radiation, which damages an insect’s sperm so that it leaves no viable offspring. Oxitec, by contrast, had inserted a new gene. Even so, the category was a poor fit for Oxitec’s mosquitoes.

Oxitec’s application sat with the FDA for another five years. Like the USDA, the FDA could not work out how to apply existing rules for veterinary drugs to an engineered mosquito, eventually concluding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees pesticide registration, was a better fit.

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The regulatory ping-pong doesn’t get better after that either.
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Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.

Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.

Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.

…However, the quality of the AI production has prompted the possibility, at least, of a greater digital comeback.

“I was totally impressed: the mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice,” said Reisfield, a Swedish-American who used to drive for Garbo and saw her often for family occasions when she lived in New York.


“It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her.”

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It’s only 100 seconds; you can watch it here. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Oil price history chart (inflation-adjusted) – 1946-present • Inflation Data

Tim McMahon (in June this year):

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When economists say the “Real Price of Oil” they are referring to the Inflation-Adjusted Price.  Nominal oil prices (the actual price at the time) alone can be misleading because inflation changes the purchasing power of money over time.

To compare prices across decades, economists calculate the real price of oil by adjusting for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This allows analysts to see whether oil is truly expensive relative to historical norms.

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The highest inflation-adjusted price was in June 2008, at $214.35. The average since 1946 is $63.72; since 2000, $91.53.

The inflation-adjusted price in April was $109.33, roughly where it is now. But diesel supply is under severe strain because refineries aren’t available, or their output can’t be accessed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified