If you live in France, make sure to declare your pool (which attracts extra tax). AI plus satellite photos will spot it. CC-licensed photo by Alex Ford 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. Seasonal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton:

»

In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers, who generate the vast majority of the company’s revenues. But the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5bn in revenue this year — about half of Twitter’s 2021 revenue — and is already a profitable company.

Some executives thought Twitter could easily begin capturing a share of that money since the service is already the primary marketing channel for most OnlyFans creators. And so resources were pushed to a new project called ACM: Adult Content Monetization.

Before the final go-ahead to launch, though, Twitter convened 84 employees to form what it called a “Red Team.” The goal was “to pressure-test the decision to allow adult creators to monetise on the platform, by specifically focusing on what it would look like for Twitter to do this safely and responsibly,” according to documents obtained by The Verge and interviews with current and former Twitter employees.

What the Red Team discovered derailed the project: Twitter could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not — and still is not — effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform.

“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” the Red Team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found.

«

Elon Musk’s legal team will be scrambling to get this into their latest missive complaining about the timing and content of their trial to avoid paying $44bn. To users of Twitter, this will sound very unsurprising: sure, it’s run really badly. But objectively, it’s appalling. That’s what matters.
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French tax officials use AI to spot 20,000 undeclared pools • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

»

French tax authorities using AI software have found thousands of undeclared private swimming pools, landing the owners with bills totalling about €10m.

The system, developed by Google and Capgemini, can identify pools on aerial images and cross-checks them with land registry databases. Launched as an experiment a year ago in nine French departments, it has uncovered 20,356 pools, the tax office said on Monday, and will be extended across the country.

Modifications to property, including adding swimming pools, must be declared to the tax office within 90 days of completion. As property taxes are based on the rental value of the property, improvements mean an increase in taxes. A typical pool of 30 sq metres would be taxed at about an extra €200 a year.

The tax office – or le fisc, as it is known – says it is now looking at using the system to spot undeclared annexes, extensions and verandas including permanent pergolas.

“We are particularly targeting house extensions like verandas, but we have to be sure that the software can find buildings with a large footprint and not the dog kennel or the children’s playhouse,” Antoine Magnant, the deputy director general of public finances, told Le Parisien newspaper.

However, the tax authorities’ technical team say they are not yet able to establish whether a rectangular shape on an aerial image is an extension or a tent, terrace or even tarpaulin placed on the ground.

In April it was claimed that the Google-Capgemini software had a 30% margin of error. Not only was it mistaking solar panels for swimming pools, but it was failing to pick up taxable extensions hidden under trees or in the shadows of a property. Tests are being carried out to perfect the technology.

«

Expected next year: movable grass cover for pools; people who will make your pool non-rectangular; dark tiles for the bottom of the pool so it doesn’t show up as light blue.
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Stable Diffusion is a really big deal • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

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If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be.

Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the public by Stability.ai six days ago, on August 22nd.

It’s similar to models like Open AI’s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing. You can try it out online at beta.dreamstudio.ai (currently for free). Type in a text prompt and the model will generate an image. You can download and run the model on your own computer (if you have a powerful enough graphics card).

You can use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes, under the terms of the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license—which lists some usage restrictions that include avoiding using it to break applicable laws, generate false information, discriminate against individuals or provide medical advice.

…I’m finding the ethics of all of this extremely difficult.

Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. The Stable Diffusion v1 Model Card has the full details, but the short version is that it uses LAION-5B (5.85 billion image-text pairs) and its laion-aesthetics v2 5+ subset (which I think is ~600M pairs filtered for aesthetics). These images were scraped from the web.

I’m not qualified to speak to the legality of this. I’m personally more concerned with the morality.

The final model is I believe around 4.2GB of data—a binary blob of floating point numbers. The fact that it can compress such an enormous quantity of visual information into such a small space is itself a fascinating detail. As such, each image in the training set contributes only a tiny amount of information—a few tweaks to some numeric weights spread across the entire network.

But… the people who created these images did not give their consent.

«

This is going to be the ticklish question. Will future content say “no AI was used in the creation of this image/video”?
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Cloudflare pressured to drop Kiwi Farms after latest doxing effort • Daily Dot

Claire Goforth:

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Users of Kiwi Farms are currently terrorizing Twitch streamer and transgender rights activist Clara Sorrenti. Sorrenti, who goes by Keffals online, recently fled her home after being “swatted.” A person impersonating Sorrenti reportedly sent local lawmakers a mass shooting threat, leading police to arrest Sorrenti. She was released without charges.

Then she was reportedly doxed again by Kiwi Farms users who analyzed the bedsheets at her hotel to determine her location.

The content on Kiwi Farms is notoriously transphobic. In March, one of the site’s users took aim at Sorrenti based on the belief that she played a role in getting another Twitch streamer booted from that platform for transphobia. The comment thread they started now spans more than 1,200 pages and thousands of comments

Now Sorrenti is in hiding. She’s also campaigning to convince Cloudflare to stop hosting Kiwi Farms, which has become a haven for far-right doxing and trolling efforts. The push is gaining steam online.

Kiwi Farms has played a central role in some of the internet’s worst moments. The Christchurch mass shooting videos were hosted there. When a police officer emailed the site’s founder for information about the shooter, he reportedly responded by posting the email without redacting the officer’s address.

Antifa obsessive Andy Ngo has also joined in the fray, defending the site and claiming it merely posts about leftist extremists.

Ngo, who’s been repeatedly accused of coordinating with far-right extremists, responded to Sorrenti’s efforts by misleading about Kiwi Farms. “The internet forum site features threads of photos and information about Antifa militants & other far-left extremists,” Ngo tweeted.

Sorrenti replied that Kiwi Farms’ users are also currently attempting to dox the police chief of London, Ontario, where she lives.

«

Analysing the bedsheets. Another person was located because they mentioned their snow boots had fallen apart. If it weren’t so hate-driven, it would be admirable. But anything Ngo backs is, you can be sure, in the wrong. Deplatforming takes away the platform – nothing more, but certainly nothing less.
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Snap plans to lay off 20% of employees • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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Snap is planning to lay off approximately 20% of its more than 6,400 employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs, which Snap has been planning for the past several weeks, will begin on Wednesday and hit some departments harder than others, the people said. For example, the team working on ways for developers to build mini apps and games inside Snapchat will be severely impacted. Zenly, the social mapping app Snap bought in 2017 and has since run separately, will also see deep cuts.

Another team that will see layoffs is Snap’s hardware division, which is responsible for its AR Spectacles glasses and the Pixy camera drone that was recently canceled after being on sale for just a few months. The company’s ad sales organization is also being restructured.

Russ Caditz-Peck, a Snap spokesperson, declined to comment.

Though the scale of the layoffs is significant, it shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise: Snap’s stock price has lost nearly 80% of its value since the beginning of this year, and the company said in May that it would slow hiring and look for ways to cut costs. It then delivered dismal earnings for the second quarter and said it wouldn’t forecast results for the third quarter.

Like its other tech peers, Snap hired aggressively during the pandemic. It entered March of 2020 with roughly 3,427 full-time employees and ended last quarter with 6,446, a 38% increase from the same time last year. And in May of 2021, the company made its largest acquisition ever by buying WaveOptics, the supplier of the AR displays used in its latest Spectacles, for more than $500m.

«

Think I can see where they may have gone wrong.
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‘Insane’ prices will make people abandon gas, says Wintershall Dea CEO • Reuters via Yahoo Finance

Nora Buli:

»

Wholesale gas prices have scaled “insane” levels that will ultimately hurt demand, although the lack of Russian gas means Europe’s supply will be tight for several years, the chief executive of German oil firm Wintershall Dea said on Tuesday.

The benchmark European gas contract has risen by more than 300% in a year and on Friday touched a record high of 343.08 euros per megawatt hour (MWh).

On Tuesday it fell to 259 euros/MWh, as Europe almost reached its target of filling gas stores to 80% as a security policy ahead of the peak demand winter months, but prices remain well above normal levels.

“The prices we are having currently are insane. That is nothing even a gas producer is looking for because in the end, we are going to massively destroy demand for our product,” Mario Mehren told reporters on the sidelines of an energy conference.

“Whoever has a chance to walk away from gas is walking away from gas and we don’t know if they’re coming back.”

High prices have already cut fertiliser production in Europe and many other big users of gas are seeking ways to reduce consumption.

Mehren said the best way to stabilise prices was to show there is sufficient supply not just this winter, but also for the next winters.

«

Continues to be astonishing that the most effective climate warrior the planet has ever seen is someone who rules a country with colossal fossil fuel reserves. However, I don’t think there’s much chance of Vladimir Putin winning the Nobel Peace Price.
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Lord of the pings: how I turned off my phone notifications, and got my life back • The Guardian

Georgina Lawton:

»

The reasons for turning off your notifications are numerous: better focus and concentration, being more present, better sleep, feeling in control of your life. When people who are still at the mercy of pings, rings and push notifications ask me how it all works, I paraphrase my ex: “You just check your phone as and when you need to.” My friends look horrified. But in this era of constantly breaking news, keeping them on seems like self-flagellation. Allowing yourself to become panicked by yet another depressing political update as it unfolds, or the news that your ex has had a baby, is like having an extra voice in your ear saying: “You’re worthless, no one loves you – and you’re doomed!” I actually like to schedule in some time for self-loathing around 7pm on Sunday instead of having it forced upon me ad hoc by my phone, thanks very much.

If you’re too scared to switch everything off from your phone’s main settings, you can try apps that limit time on certain apps, or just switch off notifications individually and ease yourself in gently. It can happen in stages. First you can try your big social media ones: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Chances are you won’t actually miss the empty feeling that comes from browsing the lives of others and hearing awful news 24/7.

Then if you’re feeling braver, go for your email notifications. Friends who work as business managers, editors and lawyers tell me that there’s no way they could do that for fear of missing out on an important message and jeopardising their whole career. “I could be deemed negligent and get sacked,” the lawyer said, before admitting that his work phone never goes off and that he has notifications on both his personal and work phones. But are we ever paid enough to be on call 24/7? (Actually, the lawyer probably is). Surely, setting aside a slot in your day to respond to work messages is more time-efficient than frantically picking up your phone every time it goes off and distracting yourself from other urgent tasks?

«

Fabulous headline. An Apple Watch is a pricey way of doing much the same thing: you can pick and choose which notifications you get. Or just turn on Do Not Disturb.
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SmartDry’s useful laundry sensor to be cloud-bricked next month • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

SmartDry was a smart home product that did something useful: tell you when your clothes in your dryer were actually dry.

A small pack mounted inside nearly any dryer drum could prevent clothes from shrinking, save you energy costs (at least $60 per year, the marketing claimed), and even warn you about clogged vents causing high heat—or, much worse, gas buildup. A second-generation version could even turn off your gas dryer automatically. Reviewers greatly preferred it to their own dryers’ unpredictable dryness sensors.

The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home’s Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life’s servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, “cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported.”

In other words, SmartDry will become a tiny brick inside your dryer unless you’re willing to procure a little ESP32 development board, load some code onto it, plug it in near your dryer, and set up your own alerts in your Home Assistant server. If you had a first-generation SmartDry, this would actually be a slight improvement, as those devices used Espressif ESP32 chips with a forever vulnerability.

«

Depends a bit on your tumble dryer – Overspill Central’s has its own sensor (and captures the water!), but there are lots of ageing tumble dryers in the US, where this might be useful. Well, not any more.
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How time became the scarcest commodity in UK energy • Financial Times

Helen Thomas:

»

a social tariff that cuts say 30% from bills, would tackle usage. But [the Resolution Foundation’s] idea of targeting households where no one earns over £40,000 hits a database problem, essentially requiring HMRC’s systems to connect with other bits of government. That’s not impossible but it requires time: broadly, we should have started months ago.

The same is true elsewhere. In fairness, the energy department is trying to fast-track elements of complex, long-term market reform, such as unlinking domestic power prices and gas prices.

The government reportedly wants to shift generating companies on old-style renewables obligation contracts, which in effect pay wholesale gas prices for renewable power, on to cheaper 15-year fixed price deals. These contracts account for about 18GW of wind power alone, or a quarter of UK generating capacity. “If you have a block of cheap low carbon power, you could sell that directly at a cheap fixed rate to vulnerable consumers,” said Adam Bell, a policy adviser at consultancy Stonehaven and former government energy strategist.

This year could and should have been spent improving the UK’s paltry home insulation rate from 200,000 a year back towards the 2m the market routinely managed before 2013. That was an obvious, no-regret choice six months ago. Instead, the government is currently relying on common sense and hardship to get people to reduce gas usage by 8% simply by adjusting their boiler settings to run more efficiently.

The scale of the problem means there are no great options for protecting households, especially because the support needed is essentially open-ended. The risks are a bigger, broader, more expensive scheme than really necessary, or an inadequate stop-gap that leaves many out in the cold. Either way, we are also trying to buy back time that has been squandered.

«

There have been so many ways to catch up, but an utterly useless government failed to do so again and again. Now everyone, including the government (but ultimately the taxpayer) pays the price.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a simple way to tell if a picture of an Apple product is an official one, but you may not have noticed it before. CC-licensed photo by ajay_sureshajay_suresh 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. Are you OOO if you WFH? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Greenland ice sheet melt set to trigger nearly a foot in sea level rise – The Washington Post

Chris Mooney:

»

Human-driven climate change has set in motion massive ice losses in Greenland that couldn’t be halted even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, according to a new study published Monday.

The findings in Nature Climate Change project that it is now inevitable that 3.3% of the Greenland ice sheet will melt — equal to 110 trillion tons of ice, the researchers said. That will trigger nearly a foot [30cm] of global sea-level rise.

The predictions are more dire than other forecasts, though they use different assumptions. While the study did not specify a time frame for the melting and sea-level rise, the authors suggested much of it can play out between now and the year 2100.

“The point is, we need to plan for that ice as if it weren’t on the ice sheet in the near future, within a century or so,” William Colgan, a study co-author who studies the ice sheet from its surface with his colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said in a video interview.

“Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast,” Colgan said.

One reason that new research appears worse than other findings may just be that it is simpler. It tries to calculate how much ice Greenland must lose as it recalibrates to a warmer climate. In contrast, sophisticated computer simulations of how the ice sheet will behave under future scenarios for global emissions have produced less alarming predictions.

A one-foot rise in global sea levels would have severe consequences. If the sea level along the US coasts rose by an average of 10 to 12 inches by 2050, a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found, the most destructive floods would take place five times as often, and moderate floods would become 10 times as frequent.

«

And yet the likely next British Prime Minister isn’t that keen on green energy and thinks we should do more fracking. Sometimes you wonder where they get their information.
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The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of Scarcity) • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

»

What does once-in-a-millennium flooding in Pakistan have to do with you, the rich Westerner? Am I asking you to shed a tear for some poor drowned kids? You should. But mine isn’t (just) a moral point. Flooding in Pakistan has everything to do with you, because you might not know it, but many of your clothes and textiles are made there.

Just like those jeans I was perusing at Weekday, Pakistan’s a major, major global textile exporter. Why is that? Because it has fields upon fields of cotton, and cheap labour to boot. It’s a perfect recipe for becoming a global center for everything from cotton to “cashmere,” aka…Kashmir.

But now things are changing. This once-in-a-millennium flood — this monster monsoon — is likely to hit every year, maybe every two or three, if the country’s lucky, because of levels of global warming so rapid they’re shattering every worst forecast. And as it does, guess what? All those cotton fields and textile mills and cheap labour — they’re in serious trouble. The extreme weather will cause crop failures, whether it’s the unsurvivable heat or the flooding, the cheap labour will have to migrate, and the mills will have to shutter, at least many of them.

And the price of all that stuff that you didn’t even know was made in Pakistan — because, well, who really looks at a label? It’s going to skyrocket. That effect of course is already what’s behind much of the global inflationary wave rocking the world.

«

Haque is never what you’d call a ray of sunshine, but the question one should always ask is: what if he’s right? About everything?
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Why are all Apple products photographed at 9:41 a.m.? An Apple insider reveals the answer • Inc.com

Minda Zetlin:

»

I hadn’t noticed it myself. Maybe you hadn’t either. But every single Apple product in every promotional photo is set to 9:41 a.m. MacBook, iPad, iPhone, it really doesn’t matter. With one big exception (which we’ll get to), for every Apple product in the world, it was exactly 9:41 a.m. at the time of its photo shoot.

Random coincidence? Obviously not. But why 9:41? Turns out it was a carefully made choice. Also, it wasn’t the original choice. Earlier on, Apple products were apparently photographed with a time of 9:42 a.m.

What is this craziness? Australian iOS developer Jon Manning wanted to know too. And he happened to be at the first iPad launch, where he saw Scott Forstall, then senior vice president of iOS software at Apple and leader of the original iPhone and iPad software development team. Manning had noticed that early products had been set to 9:42 in their photos, but that changed to 9:41. Brimming with curiosity, he asked Forstall what was going on.

The answer had to do with Steve Jobs and his very carefully crafted product launch presentations, Forstall explained. “We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation,” he said. “When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly.”

Preferring to be early rather than late, the team literally gave themselves an extra couple of minutes and set the devices to 9:42 a.m. in product photos. But as Jobs practiced his presentation, it seemed he would unveil the first iPhone at 9:41 a.m. and so the image of the phone was set for 9:41. And it worked like a charm. When Jobs introduced the original iPhone at MacWorld 2007, the first image of the phone with its screen turned on appeared on the giant screen behind him with the time set to 9:41 a.m. at 9:41 a.m.

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Sure you can figure out what the exception is, but: what time do you think that is set to?
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Apple AR glasses: a next big thing candidate • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée:

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At least two cameras are needed, one to capture the outside world, and another to track your eye movements so the AR engine knows how to render the image that it lays on top of reality. Add to that the cycles needed to deal with messages and other communication traffic, and one thing is sure: Apple’s AR Glasses will require substantial computing power. And all of this power must be packed into a small form factor that includes a battery that won’t be too heavy — or too hot — to wear for hours at a time.

As a point of reference, an iPhone 13 weighs between 5 and 6.1 ounces (141 to 174 grams) and does substantially less than a pair of Apple Glasses would need to do. The bottom line, as I perceive it, is that Apple Glasses would require a substantial jump in the economy of hardware complexity, computing power, and battery consumption. Johny Srouji’s team, to whom we owe Apple Silicon breakthroughs, is familiar with the struggle to produce more computing power with fewer watts, but Glasses takes the battle to a new level.

Then there are the software obstacles. A veteran engineer reminds me of the latency challenge. Movies feel natural because they provide fresh images every 40 milliseconds (24 images/second). The AR engine would need to update your “screen” every 40 milliseconds so that when you turn your head, the scene doesn’t fracture. And it needs to juggle more tasks than our phones or desktops, all in apparent real time, no pauses, no “beachball”.

…The first iPhone, shipped late June 2007, didn’t offer cut and paste, nor did it have an SDK (Software Development Kit), with Steve Jobs blithely promoting Web apps, fully knowing the missing SDK was a few months away. And let’s not forget the $499 price, high for the time, and 2G cellular connectivity Verizon and others were happy to lambaste.

Fifteen years later, Apple is an immensely more powerful company…but AR Glasses are orders of magnitude more complicated than the 2007 Jesus Phone. I’ll be really interested in seeing what Apple finally™ introduces and the story company execs tell about their infant Apple Glasses.

Back to our premise: Are Apple Glasses the much-fantasied about Next Big Thing, the new Apple Mother Lode?

I have my doubts.

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Looking more and more like these will be niche (though perhaps a wished-for niche, because of price). Will they be announced on September 7, though?
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WhatsApp’s JioMart shopping integration is the latest in its super app rollout plan • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

WhatsApp users in India can now do their grocery shopping without ever leaving their messaging app. Meta announced a new integration with JioMart today, through which users can text “Hi” to a certain number and be taken to an in-app shopping experience. The shopping experience looks fairly familiar, akin to what Instacart and other delivery services have been designing for years. But here, there’s no other app. And for WhatsApp, that’s a big deal.

Meta is convinced that business messaging is a big part of how WhatsApp will make money going forward. (Well, that and ads, but the ads thing is causing WhatsApp some trouble.) “Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post announcing the partnership. The JioMart integration is part back-and-forth chat, part in-app browser, but contains everything from selection to payment to delivery within WhatsApp.

Ultimately, Meta wants WhatsApp to be a WeChat-style super app, the one app users need to run their whole lives. WeChat users can pay their rent in the app, buy concert tickets in the app, pay for food in the app, and much more. Any platform that can consume that much of people’s lives is basically guaranteed to make a fortune in the process, through payment processing fees, premium features, and — you guessed it — ads.

No other platform has come anywhere close to achieving WeChat’s level of dominance, but with more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp has a better chance than most. India is its most popular market, too, with roughly 400 million users in the country. WhatsApp is free, it doesn’t take much data, and it runs on phones at practically all prices.

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First India, then Brazil? Then Europe?
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Will this be the first country bankrupted by crypto? • Rolling Stone

Daniel Alvarenga:

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To date, [El Salvador president Nayib] Bukele claims to have purchased 2,400 bitcoin tokens at more than $100m. Due to market fluctuations, the government’s bitcoin holdings have lost 60% of their value. The issuance of the bitcoin-backed volcano bonds are intended to save the country from defaulting but have reportedly been delayed likely due to a lack of investors. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s national debt is $23bn, $800m of which needs to start being paid to the IMF by 2023.

There are also environmental factors to consider in the construction of Bitcoin City. Bukele has been touting the use of geothermal energy from the country’s volcanoes to harness clean energy for bitcoin mining. However, geothermal energy only supplies about 27% of El Salvador’s energy, and the country still has to import 25% of its electricity to meet demand. It’s still a really expensive source of energy, says Cuéllar: “It requires a lot of capital investment to build out that infrastructure. And so the cheap resource is still fossil fuels.”

Building another geothermal plant could strain the country’s resources because it requires a lot of groundwater in a country that is already experiencing water shortages. “Salvadorans need water because it’s running dangerously low in a country where in a generation or two, most water will be imported,” Cuéllar says. More than 600,000 Salvadorans lack access to clean water, and it’s predicted that El Salvador could run out of water within 80 years. Addressing the population’s dire need for water has taken a back seat to promoting cryptocurrency in the country.

Bitcoin is still an impractical solution for the average person in El Salvador, where using bitcoin is akin to gambling with your next meal. In order to invest in bitcoin, “one must have income above what is necessary to survive, which is not what occurs in the majority of the Salvadoran population,” explains economist Carmen Tatiana Marroquín. Folks with little disposable income cannot afford to lose any of it if the price if bitcoin dips, like when it did by 50% in January, and then 19% again in May.

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A quite amazing set of misaligned incentives. The national debt/loan repayment problem is the most obvious problem that bitcoin absolutely doesn’t solve.
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How a retired MI6 boss, his Brexiteer friends and a celebrity Marxist became targets in Russia’s war on Ukraine • POLITICO

Emilio Casalicchio:

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In the disinformation drive around the war in Ukraine, even eccentric academics lunching with their grandsons can become collateral damage.

At first glance, Gwythian Prins, a professor at the London School of Economics, seems an unlikely target for Russian hackers seeking to discredit the British government. Yet the faceless hackers who broke into and published Prins’ personal emails revealed not only harmless discussions of his day-to-day life — including family lunches in rural England — but also extraordinary claims about an establishment plot to control the British government.

The hackers’ real target, it seems, was Prins’ retired friend and supposed co-conspirator, Richard Dearlove, with whom he frequently exchanged encrypted emails. Dearlove, an ardent Brexiteer, is a former boss of MI6, the top British spy agency made famous by the James Bond movie franchise.

Further attacks on prominent British political figures have followed. Suspected Russian hackers also targeted the Marxist activist Paul Mason, a former economics journalist on British TV news, and now a well-known political commentator who has urged fellow left-wingers to back British efforts to face down Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Both hacks are now subject to intensive investigations by the British security services, POLITICO can reveal.

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Email hacking! We’re six years on from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and the Democratic committee getting hacked by Russians, but this most insecure of messaging systems is still the target of continual attacks.

Just take it to WhatsApp or Signal, people. More secure in so many ways.
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Why YouTube decided to make its own video chip • Protocol

Max Cherney:

»

Google’s self-designed YouTube chips [for video transcoding] are part of a growing trend among the tech giants. Amazon has built its Graviton server processors, Microsoft is working on Arm-based server processors, Facebook has a chip design unit — the list goes on.

A common assumption is that big tech companies are getting into chipmaking because it’s an obvious way to save money. Most chip companies operate with a gross margin north of 50%, so by moving the chip design process in-house, tech companies can theoretically save an enormous amount of money.

But that’s not the case, according to Jay Goldberg, principal at D2D Advisory. For one thing, the economics don’t make sense — it’s not worth the massive effort to hire and nurture chip designers to save a few dollars on the margin front. A new advanced chip can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to simply build a prototype, which can then cost tens of millions of dollars to perfect.

“Our focus is not really on saving money,” Silver said. “We like saving money, but what we really want to do is deliver an as-good — if not a better — quality experience for viewers.”

The motive is actually pretty simple: The big tech companies are designing their own chips to create a strategic advantage.

“Typically what that means is you have some software that you want to tie to the chip, and you get a big performance gain,” Goldberg said. One of the earliest and best-known examples is Google’s TPU, which it developed to tackle AI tasks in its data centers.

For certain workloads, “the TPU reduces the number of data centers they have to build by 50%,” Goldberg said. “At $1 billion a pop, that’s a lot of savings.” While saving money on data center construction, it also gave Google Cloud something it could offer that Microsoft Azure and AWS didn’t have at the time.

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The article calls them “self-built” custom chips, but of course they’re self-designed; someone else actually makes them.
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Walmart lists a 30TB portable SSD for $39. It is, naturally, a scam • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

It feels like high-capacity SSDs are getting cheaper all the time, but in the words of a security researcher known as Ray Redacted on Twitter, there are still some deals that are too good to be true. In the spirit of discovery, he bought a “30TB” external SSD from AliExpress for $31.40, which also happens to be listed on Walmart’s website for $39 (I am linking it for educational and entertainment value, please do not buy it).

On the inside, this “SSD” looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board’s firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as “15.0TB” to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower. This is another giveaway; Windows reports drive capacities in gibibytes (1,024 mebibytes) or tebibytes (1,024 gibibytes), while drive manufacturers use gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) and terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). This is why a 1TB drive normally only has a reported capacity of 930-ish GB, rather than a nice round number.

The drive is even more clever when it comes to tricking people into thinking it’s working. It preserves the directory structure of whatever you’re copying, but when it’s “copying” your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards. Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn’t there.

Replies to Ray Redacted’s thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure.

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There’s a non-trivial amount of electronic and software effort in making these; plus the process of producing them, presumably in some spare factory line time. (Which is maybe more available given lockdowns and so on.) The guide price for a terabyte of external SSD: around $/£100.
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Blood abnormalities found in people with Long Covid • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

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An ambitious study of people with Long Covid, the mysterious, disabling symptoms that can trail a SARS-CoV-2 infection, has turned up a host of abnormalities in their blood. The clues add to a body of evidence hinting at drivers of the condition and potential treatments worth testing. They also suggest that, as many scientists and patients have suspected, Long Covid shares certain features with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), another condition thought to follow an infection.

The new study, posted as a preprint last week, was modest in size, examining just 99 people with Long Covid. “But it went very deep, it went into granular aspects of the T cells, the antibody response,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who was not involved in the work. “This is exploratory, but it’s the foundation for much bigger studies.”

The Long Covid patients, most of them struggling with intense fatigue, brain fog, and other symptoms, had low levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that helps the body control inflammation, glucose, sleep cycles, and more. Features of their T cells indicated their immune system was battling unidentified invaders, perhaps a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 or a reactivated pathogen such as Epstein-Barr virus.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Consider carefully – would it be legal to refuse to hire someone based on their star sign? CC-licensed photo by Numerology Sign on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Even on your holidays. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Listening to European electricity traders is very, very scary • Bloomberg via The Washington Post

Javier Blas:

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Every week, the people who trade electricity in the UK get to quiz the managers of the National Grid for an hour. The conference call, which anyone can monitor, offers an insight into what the men and women on the front line of the power market are worried about. Listening to them is getting scarier by the week — and suggests keeping the lights on this winter will be a lot more challenging than European governments are admitting.

Prices are worrying enough. British households were told on Friday that their power and gas bills will increase from Oct. 1 by 80%. The so-called energy price cap was set at £3,549 ($4,189) per year, up from £1,971 over the past six months and £1,277 during last winter.

But the industry’s teleconference suggests the problem is broader than just rising costs. Increasingly, the words “emergency” and “shortages” are being used, with participants focusing on when, rather than if, a crisis will hit. Imagine being able to overhear conversations between Wall Street executives and the Federal Reserve as the global financial crisis unfolded in 2008.

Here’s a question from last week’s session: “Are you war-gaming possible options for if/when cross-border trading collapses under security of supply pressures this winter?” And another: “Can we have a session where we talk through the emergency arrangements?” Another participant said that the forecast for demand-and-supply electricity balance showed “how bad the winter could be for anyone who can do the maths.” The same caller was blunt about the grid’s own predictions: “I don’t think you believe what you’ve written, and nobody else does.”

One intervention was particularly revealing. “Based on where winter ‘22 products are trading, where does this position yourself with respect to securing power over the winter?” asked one participant. The background? In the forward market, UK power for December 2022 is fast approaching £1,000 per megawatt hour, up 50% from current prices. The implication? Power shortages.

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Going back to the 1970s, in an unfortunate hurry.
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Closure of coal power station set to be delayed to prevent UK blackouts • The Guardian

Alex Lawson:

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[German owner] Uniper had been due to decommission one of its 500-megawatt units at the Nottinghamshire plant at the end of September, two years before closing the remaining three units at the site.

Under the deal [first sought in May], the National Grid is expected to pay the company a fee to delay the decommissioning so all three units can be called on if needed. Uniper will also be compensated for costs incurred, including coal purchases, with any additional charges eventually being fed through to consumers’ energy bills.

The UK government has committed to ending the use of coal power in Great Britain by October 2024, a year earlier than originally planned. But that target is now at risk as ministers and power operators race to ensure security of supply.

Deals with Drax and EDF to extend the life of two units each from October to the end of March have already been agreed.

Drax, which operates a power plant in Yorkshire, said it had agreed to source up to 400,000 tonnes of additional coal, which with current stocks is enough to produce 1 terawatt of electricity. The plant will only operate when instructed to do so by National Grid.

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Upfront cost of the deals: £220m-£420m, depending how much coal (whose price has predictably soared) is needed. It’s a contingency, but a reminder once more of the penalty we pay for inaction in the past. Knock the coal-fired stations down, cover the space with solar panels (or leave them up and ditto). After all, they’re already in the right place for a grid connection.
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More than half of all bitcoin trades are fake • Forbes

Javier Paz:

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As part of Forbes research into the crypto ecosystem using 2021 data, we ranked the 60 best exchanges in March. More recently we conducted a deeper-dive into the bitcoin trading markets to answer a few pressing questions:

Where is bitcoin traded? How much bitcoin gets traded every day? How is bitcoin traded? Our study evaluated 157 crypto exchanges across the world. Here are our main findings:

• More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128bn on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262bn one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.
• Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, continues to be a dominant player in the crypto trading economy, especially when it comes to trades against bitcoin. Its current market capitalization is $68bn, despite questions about its reserves.
•
In terms of how much bitcoin activity takes place at these firms, 21 crypto exchanges generate $1bn or more in daily trading activity, while the next 33 exchanges had volume between $200m and $999m across all contract types, spot, futures and perpetuals.…
• The biggest problem areas regarding fake volume are firms that tout big volume but operate with little or no regulatory oversight that would make their figures more credible, notably Binance, MEXC Global and Bybit. Altogether, the lesser regulated exchanges in our study account for approximately $89bn of the true volume (they claim $217bn).
• The creation of new trading assets and products such as stablecoins and perpetual futures adds complications for national authorities seeking to regulate crypto markets. Major US exchanges hardly utilize these instruments or contracts in any of their trading. However, offshore exchanges make significant use of them as ways to synthetically create US dollar liquidity on their platforms (they cannot get US bank accounts).
• In the Western world and particularly in the US, it is tempting to think of bitcoin only trading against either the US dollar or the euro and British pound. But some of the largest trading pair activity occurs against fiat currencies like the Japanese yen and Korean won and against major stablecoins like Binance US dollar and the USD coin.
• 573 million people visit crypto exchange websites on a monthly basis.

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So the fake trading is probably “wash trading” – basically passing the asset from one hand to the other and back again. Surprising if it’s only half fake, to be honest.
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Megan Coyne, the voice of New Jersey, is headed to the White House • New Jersey Globe

David Wildstein, at the beginning of August:

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Just five years after interning on Phil Murphy’s 2017 gubernatorial campaign, Livingston native Megan Coyne is on her way to the White House.

Coyne, one of the architects of New Jersey’s hugely successful Twitter account with an attitude departed last week as Murphy’s social media director to join the Biden administration.

“It’s an absolute dream come true to be joining the Office of Digital Strategy as Deputy Director of Platforms,” Coyne said on Twitter on Monday.  “So excited for the journey ahead.”

Coyne and her boss at the time, Pearl Gabel, brought life and a quintessential New Jersey manner to a once dull state-run Twitter account that began to take off in 2019. “Who lets New Jersey have a Twitter?” tweeted someone with 88 followers. The reply – “Your mom” – had nearly a half-million likes and 85,000 retweets.

More than 439,000 followers watch the wit and sarcasm of New Jersey’s official Twitter account every day, which has garnered national attention.

“Megan Coyne has been an incredibly valuable member of our team, and her humour and wit will be greatly missed in our office,” said Murphy.  “Her passion for our state—and fierce defense of Central Jersey—is unparalleled and as the person behind @NJGov, Megan’s voice has become synonymous with New Jersey.  I wish her the best at the White House.”

As New Jersey’s social media tone setter, Coyne has played nearly every conceivable New Jersey card: the Sopranos, Springsteen and Bon Jovi.  She has picked fights with other states, especially in defense of New Jersey’s pizza industry, and has treated the Taylor Ham vs. Pork Roll war fairly, even though she knows the real name is Taylor Ham.

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That was the beginning of August. Coyne graduated (with a BA in political science) in 2019, so is in her mid-20s. She seems to have been the brains behind the excoriating tweet thread from the White House last week which picked out Republicans complaining about student loan forgiveness and citing PPP loans *they* had taken that had been forgiven. One to watch, especially as the November midterm elections approach.
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SwitchBot Lock review: a smart lock with seven ways to unlock your door • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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heThe $99 SwitchBot Lock is the first smart door lock I’ve tested that doesn’t replace any part of your existing lock. Instead, it attaches to the back of your door over the top of the thumb turn. This removes a major pain point of smart locks: an involved installation. But the SwitchBot Lock is really odd looking — my husband literally stopped in his tracks and said, “What is that thing?” I had a similar reaction when I first saw it and was wholly unconvinced this large piece of black plastic would have the power to unlock my deadbolt.

I was surprised to discover that the SwitchBot Lock moves that thumb turn just as well as I can, and it stayed firmly put during my two weeks of testing, despite being attached solely by double-sided sticky tape. (No word yet on long-term durability, but it looks promising so far).

The downsides are that it’s not very smart and it’s missing a few key features (haha). You also need around $70 worth of accessories to add smart home control and a keypad. This puts it closer in price to more elegant-looking solutions, such as the $230 August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, which needs a bit more work to install but doesn’t leave you with a honking great piece of plastic on your door.

The SwitchBot Lock is a retrofit Bluetooth-powered smart door lock that can lock and unlock your door using the SwitchBot app on a smartphone or Apple Watch. (It’s not Home Key compatible). It attaches to your door using 3M VHB tape and uses a small plastic grabber to hold on to and turn the lock’s thumb turn.

That grabber can turn anything. Videos in Amazon reviews show it even turning a key, making this an excellent solution for people with nontraditional door locks and multipoint locks who can’t get any other smart lock to work (see a list here). It’s cleverly engineered with shifting base plates that prevent the lock from twisting itself off while turning the lock.

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Nice idea for retrofitting (though wouldn’t it need screwing in for really tricky locks?). Doesn’t seem to have reached the UK yet, though Switchbot does have lots of things for remotely opening and closing curtains.
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Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social website is facing financial challenges as its traffic remains puny and the company that is scheduled to acquire it expresses fear that his legal troubles could lead to a decline in his popularity.

Six months after its high-profile launch, the site — a clone of Twitter, which banned Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 — still has no guaranteed source of revenue and a questionable path to growth, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Digital World Acquisition, the company planning to take Trump’s start-up, the Trump Media & Technology Group, public.

The company warned this week that its business could be damaged if Trump “becomes less popular or there are further controversies that damage his credibility.” The company has seen its stock price plunge nearly 75% since its March peak and reported in a filing last week that it had lost $6.5m in the first half of the year.

…There are signs that the company’s financial base has begun to erode. The Trump company stopped paying RightForge, a conservative web-hosting service, in March and now owes it more than $1m, according to Fox Business, which first reported the dispute.

The company also has struggled with some basics of corporate operation. The US Patent and Trademark Office this month denied its application to trademark “Truth Social,” citing the “likelihood of confusion” to other similarly named companies, including an app, “VERO — True Social,” first released in 2015.

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The alternative web headline for this story is “Trump’s Truth Social isn’t paying its bills”. Next: remarkable news about the toilet habits of bears.
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San Francisco police and car thefts: what they can and can’t do to help you • San Francisco Chronicle

Megan Cassidy had her car stolen while observing a court case in San Francisco:

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In recent months, I’ve spoken to many theft victims who were able to pinpoint the location of their luggage, bicycles and other stolen goods.

While this technology has been around for years, police say its spread — particularly Apple’s introduction of the AirTag last year to compete with products like the Tile tracker and the Galaxy SmartTag — has prompted a boom in calls for help like mine.

As the Washington Post’s Heather Kelly wrote in an article in October, after tracking down her stolen Honda Civic in San Francisco, Apple’s marketing for the AirTag focuses on misplaced items and makes “no mention of crime, theft or stealing in any of the ads, webpages or support documents. But in reality, the company has built a network that is ideal for that exact use case.”

Recent stories have documented similar recoveries in Memphis, Atlanta and Seaford Rise, a suburb of Adelaide in Australia.

In San Francisco, a city rife with gadget-lovers and plagued by high property crime, the technology would seem to be a game changer. But in reality, situations like my stolen Subaru can often be mired in unforeseen complications.

The response by police has at times been thwarted by legal constraints — for example, an officer generally can’t enter a home just because the Find My iPhone app says your cellphone is inside — and at other times by what victims say feels like apathy.

Police officials say the reality is that a stolen phone, bike or even car is not as high a priority as a violent crime, so cops don’t always have time to get involved and stay involved.

The result can be maddening for victims armed with case-cracking evidence. And while police say they always advise these victims against following their valuables into potentially dangerous situations, many people told me they felt they had no choice but to go cowboy.

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Seems like frustration with the police over property crimes is a common thread between the west coast of the US and all across the UK. Too few police, and an abundance of caution in the US where everyone might be armed and/or violent.
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Rocket ships and tractors • Benedict Evans

Evans, on how revenue isn’t necessarily a necessity early on:

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If you are acquiring tens or hundreds of millions of users with a new kind of service, and they are attributing value and attention to you, and the users, attention and value have network effects and hence probably winner-takes-all effects, and if they come with little or no marginal cost, then the revenue can and probably should come later. It is probably more important to focus on building the value than making money from the value – revenue is a feature, and you should build it later. Indeed, one of the ways NewsCorp killed MySpace was by trying to make money too early. Such companies spend much more time looking at MAU/DAU [monthly, daily average users] than OFCF [operating free cash flow].

In other words, if you’re on a rocket ship, and it’s going up very fast, don’t argue about the thrust-to-weight ratio. The thrust-to-weight ratio is ‘lots’. Your aim is to keep it pointed roughly upwards and make sure you don’t blow up – you can worry about the revenue model once you get into orbit.

However, there are other companies that are not rocket ships, but instead look more like tractors towing a heavy set of equipment across a muddy field. For these companies, Mr Micawber is much more relevant than Eric Schmidt. For a tractor, success comes down to the gearing ratios – you have 10 or 20 or 30 operating metrics, all interlocking, and their end result is the difference between £19.99 and happiness and £20.01 and misery. If Facebook or Snap were rocket ships, Uber or Instacart are tractors – it’s all about the ratios. For these kinds of companies, you need to have a pretty good idea of the unit economics before you start. 

…People really did think that Facebook would never make money, and they also looked at Wework and thought that arbitraging long-term rents against short-term rents could have high margins. WeWork could, theoretically, be a sustainable business, but it was never a rocket ship. And to stretch the analogy, if you put hydrogen peroxide into a tractor’s fuel tank, the results will be entertaining, but only from a safe distance.

This is also another way to look at the recurring question ‘is that a tech company?’, which can also mean ‘is that a software company?’ or, really, ‘does that have the scope for a 50x return?’ Software companies tend to be high gross margin companies – in the 1980s they sold you a couple of pieces of plastic in a cardboard box for $500, which is one reason Bill Gates became the richest man in the world. Pure software companies can have very high leverage on success.

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Capricorns need not apply: is it legal to pick a roommate by astrological sign? • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

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Is choosing a roommate based on their astrological sign simply a preference, or illegal discrimination? It may depend on where you live.

This week, a post sharing the response to a housing inquiry went viral when the applicant was turned down for their zodiac sign of Capricorn.

“Our main goal is to keep things egalitarian, without anyone being ‘in charge’ or domming the household,” the original poster said. Capricorns are known for being “know-it-alls”, “unforgiving” and condescending as well as good managers, disciplined and self-controlled, according to online astrology resources. “I love capricorns, but I don’t think I could live with one,” the post said.

People often share preferences for certain astrological signs, swearing to never date another Gemini (as pop star Lizzo did on her most recent album). As interest in astrology grows and apps to look up the signs of potential co-workers, partners and housemates become more mainstream, some have speculated that rejecting someone based on their star sign is a form of discrimination.

This argument is legally tenuous at the federal level, said David Levine, a professor who teaches civil procedure law at the University of California Hastings College of Law.

“In order for this to be legally considered discrimination, you have to fall within a protected category,” he said. “Otherwise, you can choose to create a housing contract for any reason you want.”

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There’s a rumour that I can’t track down that a famous female singing star recently refused to hire various backing dancers on the basis of their star sign. If it’s not a protected characteristic, though, I guess we could start seeing this in job interviews as a way to winnow applications?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google’s estimates for the climate impact of flights it finds for you have been cut substantially, a code change shows. CC-licensed photo by Bill Abbott 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. Piecemeal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google ‘airbrushes’ out emissions from flying, BBC reveals • BBC News

Justin Rowlatt:

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The way Google calculates the climate impact of your flights has changed, the BBC has discovered, meaning flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before.

That’s because the world’s biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator.

With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people’s travel decisions. “Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry’s climate impacts from its pages” says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace.

The company said it made the change following consultations with its “industry partners”. It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company’s “Google Flights” search tool.

Google says this feature is designed “to help you make more sustainable travel choices”. Yet in July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2.

Some experts say Google’s calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights. “It now significantly understates the global impact of aviation on the climate”, says Professor David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University, the author of the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the contribution of air travel to global warming.

Flying affects the climate in lots of ways in addition to the CO2 produced by burning aviation fuel. These include the creation of long thin clouds high up in the atmosphere – known as contrails – which trap heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a net warming effect on our planet.

These additional warming impacts mean that although aviation is only responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, the sector is actually responsible for around 3.5% of the warming caused by human activity. And it is a sector that is only going to get bigger. Since 2000 emissions have risen by 50%, and the industry is expected to grow by more than 4% every year for the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

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Spotted, no kidding, by a change on Github, where the code for the calculation is housed.

Question for Google: why not be aggressive in its estimates for the impact?
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Twitter whistleblowing report actually seems to confirm Twitter’s legal argument, while pretending to support Musk’s • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

The first and most important thing to remember is that, even as Musk insists otherwise, the Twitter lawsuit is not about spam. It just is not. I’m not going to repeat everything in that earlier story explaining why not, so if you haven’t read that yet, please do. But the core of it is that Musk needed an escape hatch from the deal he didn’t want to consummate and the best his lawyers could come up with was to claim that Twitter was being misleading in its SEC reporting regarding spam. (As an aside, there is very strong evidence that Musk didn’t care at all about the SEC filings until he suddenly needed an escape hatch, and certainly didn’t rely on them).

But — and this is kind of important — many of Musk’s claims were based on either misunderstanding or deliberately misreading Twitter’s SEC filings. As I’ve explained multiple times now, what Twitter reports to the SEC is how much spam is likely included in their “monetizable daily average user” (mDAU) accounting. This is not, and has never been, about “how much spam is on the platform.” The company came up with this other metric — mDAU — that is a segment of the total Twitter population. As Mudge’s report notes, an mDAU is defined as a “valid user account that might click through ads and actually buy a product.”

That’s not every account. There are accounts that are inactive. There are accounts that are automated (but useful — such as those tweeting out the weather or earthquakes or whatnot). There are lots of accounts that may exist on the platform, but may not be counted in mDAU. And that includes some spam/bot accounts. That has always been clear for anyone who reads the details.

Next, Twitter’s filings with the SEC are only about how much spam is in their mDAU number. This takes place after Twitter has made use of other processes to try to eliminate spam accounts from the mDAU, and then they do a daily spot check of 100 accounts. That creates a sample size of 9000 over the course of a quarter (the time period between Twitter reports), and is statistically significant for declaring that less than 5% of the mDAU is spam.

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But of course Musk’s lawyers brought it up in legal pleadings on Wednesday: “The way Mr. Zatko [the whistleblower] put it, management had no appetite to properly measure bot accounts,” said Musk’s lawyers.
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Twitter is becoming a podcast app • The Verge

Ariel Shapiro:

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Twitter is officially getting into podcasts. The app will launch a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests.

The redesigned Spaces tab opens with Stations, topic-based playlists combining podcast episodes pulled from RSS with Twitter’s social audio events and recordings. It functions like a Pandora station but for spoken word and is pretty different from the a la carte listening podcast consumers are used to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Live and upcoming spaces are still in the tab, further down the page. The test will roll out to a random group of users across the world, initially only in English.

The more users listen, the more tailored the audio Stations will become. But Twitter isn’t starting from square one — the company is relying on what it already knows about its users’ interests to curate the playlists. It’ll draw from the interests of people they follow, as well. “What we’re really trying to capture here is as if it’s like another user recommending you something,” Twitter senior product manager Evan Jones, who focuses on audio, told Hot Pod.

Podcast discovery is notoriously difficult, limited either to top 100 charts, hand-picked selections on apps, or — more often than not — word of mouth. No platform has managed to crack it, yet.

It’s easy to imagine the promotional possibilities around being able to share and listen to podcasts in the same app, but it’s not quite there yet. The test does not yet have a clipping capability, and listening can only happen in the Spaces tab, not on the timeline. That being said, Spaces has a clipping feature that could be applied to podcasts at some point.

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Neatly taking it full circle: Twitter was originally Odeo, a podcast company, and pivoted to a messaging project in July 2006. So, 16 years to go sort of full circle.
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Criminals posting counterfeit Microsoft products to get access to victims’ computers • Sky News

Alexander Martin:

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Microsoft has confirmed to Sky News that criminals are posting counterfeit packages designed to appear like Office products in order to defraud people.

One such package seen by Sky News is manufactured to a convincing standard and contains an engraved USB drive, alongside a product key.

But the USB does not install Microsoft Office when plugged in to a computer. Instead, it contains malicious software which encourages the victim to call a fake support line and hand over access to their PC to a remote attacker.

Microsoft launched an internal investigation into the suspect package after being contacted by Sky News.

The company spokesperson confirmed that the USB and the packaging were counterfeit and that they had seen a pattern of such products being used to scam victims before.

They added that while Microsoft had seen this type of fraud, it is very infrequent. More often when fraudulent products are sold they tend to be product keys sent to customers via email, with a link to a site for downloading the malicious software.

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Apparently originally sent to a retired man’s home. Seems like the “Microsoft virus” scammers, who have been at this for at least 15 years, have moved on to a new method of targeting people.
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Big budget blockbusters arrive amid fears of ‘peak TV’ • Financial Times

Alex Barker and Christopher Grimes:

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this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced.

On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season — almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over.

HBO Max’s House of the Dragon — the prequel to Game of Thrones — is reported to have cost $200mn for the season’s 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise.

…there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services.

“Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things,” said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese’s Netflix film The Irishman. “But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, ‘Something’s got to go — I’ve got $140 worth of subscriptions here!’”

Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. “People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: ‘what’s next?’ From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it’s clearly unsustainable.”

This year’s wave of new programming is due in part to the bottleneck of Covid-delayed productions finally easing up. Yet it is unlikely that it will result in the kind of breakneck subscriber gains that streamers experienced during the pandemic — at least not in North America or the UK. The two leading streamers, Netflix and Disney, have had little growth in those markets this year.

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I’d also observe: retreads. Not a single one of those is an original idea. Is that just how it goes?
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She-Hulk’s review bombing proves IMDB’s biggest ratings problem • ScreenRant

De’Vion Hinton:

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In the wake of its premiere, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has become the latest in a growing list of movies and television series that have fallen victim to review-bombing on the website IMDb. The Internet Movie Database, popularly known as IMDb, has become a go-to resource for casting news, release dates, and audience reviews of films and shows. However, as exposed by the review bombs of She-Hulk and other recent projects, IMDb’s intent to offer a credible index of genuine audience reviews has been massively undermined by one of its own rules and by the site’s rise in popularity. The rise in bad-faith IMDb reviews, particularly for projects led by women and/or BIPOC, threatens to render the site’s scores meaningless if the problem is not addressed.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is an MCU comedy series starring Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters, cousin of Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk. The show is looking to break new ground for the MCU in terms of style and form. Its first episode has drawn comparisons between the characters She-Hulk and Deadpool, with the series looking to deliver a similar sort of self-aware, fourth-wall-breaking humor combined with sitcom tropes and superhero action. As a result, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has received acclaim to the tune of an 82% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet even before any episodes became available to the public, many IMDb users sought to undermine the series by leaving as many one-star reviews as possible, striving to create a negative narrative around the latest Marvel release.

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Internet rule 1: if you have an open ratings system, it will get abused.
Internet rule 2: if it involves something that white teenagers can get offended about, it will get seriously abused.
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What the Colorado river water shortage means for the U.S. • ProPublica

Abrahm Lustgarten interviews Jay Famiglietti, executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan :

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Q: Let’s start with the Colorado River because it’s in the news. The federal government has put some extraordinary numbers out there, suggesting water users [should] cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water usage starting this year — roughly 40% of the entire river’s recent flow. How could that possibly happen?

Jay Famiglietti: It’s going to be really hard. We’re looking at drastically reduced food production and the migration of agriculture to other parts of the country and real limits on growth, especially in desert cities like Phoenix. My fear is that groundwater will, as usual, be left out of the discussion — groundwater is mostly unprotected, and it’s going to be a real shit show.

Q: Remind us how that happens. States and farmers cut back on the Colorado River, and California and Arizona just start pumping all the water out of their aquifers?

JF: Yeah. This started with the drought contingency plan [the 2018 legal agreement among the states on the Colorado River]. Arizona had to cut nearly 20% of its Colorado River water. To placate the farmers, the deal was that they would have free access to the groundwater. In fact, something like $20 million was allocated to help them dig more wells. So, it was just a direct transfer from surface water to groundwater. Right away, you could see that the groundwater depletion was accelerating. With this latest round, I’m afraid we’re just going to see more of that.

Q: Some of that groundwater actually gets used to grow feed for cattle in the Middle East or China, right? There’s Saudi-owned agriculture firms planting alfalfa, which uses more water than just about anything, and it’s not for American food supply. Do I have that right?

JF: There’s been other buyers from other countries coming in, buying up that land, land grabbing and grabbing the water rights. That’s happening in Arizona.

Q: What about in California? Groundwater depletion has caused the earth to sink in on itself. Parts of the Central Valley are 28 feet lower today than they were a century ago.

JF: California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014, which mandated an extraordinarily long time horizon: two years to form the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and then five years for each GSA to come up with its sustainability plan. So that’s now: 2022. And then 20 years to come into sustainability. My fear is that the slow implementation will allow for too much groundwater depletion to happen. It’s sort of the same old, same old.

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Amazing little glimpse of capitalism: other countries come in and buy up bits of the US to put water-intensive crops in for their animals.
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China’s Chongqing extends factory power cuts indefinitely • The Register

Laura Dobberstein:

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Officials from the manufacturing hub of Chongqing notified factories on Wednesday that mandated power cuts in the municipality were extended until further notice, affecting both PC and Apple suppliers.

The power cuts were originally ordered from August 15 to August 20 in 19 Chonging and Sichuan area cities, as a measure to prioritize electrical grid resources for residents while China experienced an unprecedented heatwave. The power rationing was eventually extended to Thursday August 24, before Chongqing’s mandate was made indefinite and neighboring Sichuan reportedly extended to Saturday.

The heatwave has been joined by sweeping wildfires, leaving residents relying on candlelight to see and blocks of ice to keep cool. In that environment, manufacturing lines just have to take a backseat.

Sichuan-based General Interface Solutions said in a regulatory filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Monday that it was complying with government requests, and had adopted off-site backup to compensate for adjusted production and operations. The company provides touchscreens and other components for mobile phones, wearable devices, tablets and notebooks, and has been listed as an Apple supplier in the past.

Fellow Apple supplier Foxconn is reportedly operating at “low levels.” Foxconn told The Register the impact is currently “not significant.”

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Second-order effects.
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NFTs worth $100m stolen in past year, Elliptic says • Reuters

Elizabeth Howcroft:

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Scams remain rife in the NFT market even as it declines, with July seeing the highest number of NFTs reported stolen on record, London-based Elliptic said in a report.

Security compromises via social media have surged, accounting for 23% of NFT thefts in 2022, it said.

Thieves received on averaged $300,000 per scam, Elliptic said. The true scale of NFT thefts is likely to be even higher, given that not all crimes are publicly reported, it added.

Hacks and scams have long plagued the crypto industry, while regulators around the world are increasingly concerned about the use of crypto assets in cyber crime.

Elliptic put the amount of money-laundering in NFT-based platforms at just $8 million. But almost $329 million worth of funds in the NFT market came from services such as so-called cryptocurrency mixers, which are designed to hide the funds’ origin, Elliptic said.

One such mixer, Tornado Cash, was used for laundering just over half of the proceeds of NFT scams, Elliptic said, before it was sanctioned by the United States this month.

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North Korea must be astonished at how easy all this is – both the stealing and the cashing out. By contrast, my bank rang me the other day to say it couldn’t accept a payment sent to me by the news organisation Al-Jazeera for a TV appearance because the originating country, Qatar, doesn’t conform to the required anti-money laundering procedures. Maybe I should get them to pay me in.. no, actually no.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A French photographer whose multi-year program finds döppelgangers thinks his double is.. Rowan Atkinson. Seriously. CC-licensed photo by GJ Kooijman 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. We have followup! (See end.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Japan signals return to nuclear power to stabilise energy supply • Reuters

Mayu Sakoda and Yoshifumi Takemoto:

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Japan will restart more idled nuclear plants and look at developing next-generation reactors, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday, setting the stage for a major policy shift on nuclear energy a decade after the Fukushima disaster.

The comments from Kishida – who also said the government would look at extending the lifespan of existing reactors – highlight how the Ukraine crisis and soaring energy costs have forced both a change in public opinion and a policy rethink toward nuclear power.

Japan has kept most of its nuclear plants idled in the decade since a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Quake-prone Japan also said it would build no new reactors, so a change in that policy would be a stark turnaround.

Kishida told reporters he had instructed officials to come up with concrete measures by the year end, including on “gaining the understanding of the public” on sustainable energy and nuclear power.

Government officials met on Wednesday to hammer out a plan for so-called “green transformation” aimed at retooling the world’s third-largest economy to meet environmental goals. Nuclear energy, which was deeply opposed by the public after the Fukushima crisis, is now seen by some in government as a component for such green transformation.

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Six months into its three-day “special military operation” to acquire Ukraine, Russia has succeeded in making pretty much every country turn towards a less fossil fuel-dependent energy mix, and make serious plans to increase their renewables and nuclear production. The reversals by Japan (and to a lesser extent Germany) are amazing.
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Twitter executives push back against whistle-blower complaint • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Kate Conger:

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Executives at Twitter pushed back on Wednesday against what they said was a “false” narrative being created around a former executive’s allegations about the company’s security practices.

At its weekly companywide meeting, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, addressed a whistle-blower complaint made by Peiter Zatko, the former head of security, who was fired in January. Mr. Zatko’s complaint, in which he accused Twitter of lying about its security practices and violating a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, was made public on Tuesday.

“This complaint that was filed yesterday is foundationally, technically and historically inaccurate,” Mr. Agrawal told employees at the meeting, which The New York Times listened to. “There are accusations in there without any evidence and many points made without important context.”

Other executives — including Sean Edgett, the general counsel, and the privacy and security executives Damien Kieren and Lea Kissner — echoed Mr. Agrawal.

“We have never made a material misrepresentation to a regulator, to our board, to all of you,” Mr. Edgett said. “We are in full compliance with our F.T.C. consent decree.”

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Uh-huh sure. Meanwhile here’s a thread by Zach Edwards, a private and data supply chain researcher, about how Chinese sources buying Twitter ads could be using them to unmask and identify Chinese Twitter users. Not good.
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California to ban the sale of new gasoline cars • The New York Times

Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman:

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California is expected to put into effect on Thursday its sweeping plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, a groundbreaking move that could have major effects on the effort to fight climate change and accelerate a global transition toward electric vehicles.

“This is huge,” said Margo Oge, an electric vehicles expert who headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s transportation emissions program under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “California will now be the only government in the world that mandates zero-emission vehicles. It is unique.”

The rule, issued by the California Air Resources Board, will require that 100% of all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of the fossil fuel emissions chiefly responsible for warming the planet, up from 12% today. It sets interim targets requiring that 35% of new passenger vehicles sold in the state by 2026 produce zero emissions. That would climb to 68% by 2030.

The restrictions are important because not only is California the largest auto market in the United States, but more than a dozen other states typically follow California’s lead when setting their own auto emissions standards.

…At least 12 other states could potentially adopt the new California zero-emissions vehicle mandate relatively soon; another five states, which follow California’s broader vehicle pollution reduction program, are expected to adopt the rule in a year or so. If those states follow through, the restrictions on gasoline-vehicle sales would apply to about one-third of the United States’ auto market.

…The governments of Canada, Britain and at least nine other European countries — including France, Spain and Denmark — have set goals of phasing out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles between 2030 and 2040. But none have concrete mandates or regulations like the California rule.

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Pretty sure the UK has committed, actually. Wonder if there will suddenly be a lot of “trucks” sold in California running on fossil fuels.
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We must fundamentally rethink “net-zero” climate plans. Here are six ways • MIT Technology Review

James Temple:

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the very nature of net-zero plans drives companies toward solutions that look quantifiable on paper. By embracing cheap offsets and other dubious tools, they can tally up a somewhat credible-seeming ton-for-ton decarbonization plan.

It’s time to stop that. (Even HBO’s John Oliver has taken to ridiculing offsets on his show.) Going forward, the purchase of such credits should at best be thought of as an act of climate philanthropy, but not as a realistic method for scratching off tons of emissions from corporate carbon ledgers.

Actually cutting operational emissions will mean investing heavily in research and development; supporting, testing, and scaling emerging solutions; and pushing for aggressive policies that will pressure suppliers and other business partners to strive for similar changes. 

These things may not earn credit within the confines of a net-zero plan anytime soon. But corporations need to achieve their long-term targets without questionable carbon accounting schemes.

The good news is that more and more companies and standards bodies are coming to recognize many of the flaws in current corporate climate plans and altering their practices or guidelines.

Here are six ways that companies can take real steps to tackle their pollution and help get industries on track to make much faster progress in the coming years.

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The six ways being: slash actual emissions (duh), avoid offsets (unreliable, prone to scams), invest in actual carbon removal (trees!), fund R+D, stop relying on carbon “credits”. All good, though few companies would score 6/6.
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Your doppelgänger is out there and you probably share DNA with them • The New York Times

Kate Golembiewski:

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The picture series “I’m not a look-alike!” was inspired by Mr. Brunelle’s discovery of his own look-alike, the English actor Rowan Atkinson.

The project has been a hit on social media and other parts of the internet, but it’s also drawn the attention of scientists who study genetic relationships. Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, had previously studied the physical differences between identical twins, and he wanted to examine the reverse: people who look alike but aren’t related. “What’s the explanation for these people?” he wondered.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, Dr. Esteller and his team recruited 32 pairs of look-alikes from Mr. Brunelle’s photographs to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lifestyles. The researchers used facial recognition software to quantify the similarities between the participants’ faces. Sixteen of those 32 pairs achieved similar overall scores to identical twins analyzed by the same software. The researchers then compared the DNA of these 16 pairs of doppelgängers to see if their DNA was as similar as their faces.

Dr. Esteller found that the 16 pairs who were “true” look-alikes shared significantly more of their genes than the other 16 pairs that the software deemed less similar. “These people really look alike because they share important parts of the genome, or the DNA sequence,” he said. That people who look more alike have more genes in common “would seem like common sense, but never had been shown,” he added.

However, DNA alone doesn’t tell the whole story of our makeup. Our lived experiences, and those of our ancestors, influence which of our genes are switched on or off — what scientists call our epigenomes. And our microbiome, our microscopic co-pilot made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses, is further influenced by our environment. Dr. Esteller found that while the doppelgängers’ genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. “Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart,” he said.

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Still reeling at the idea that someone’s lookalike is Rowan Atkinson. Though judge for yourself. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How a major change to ethereum could change cryptocurrency forever • The Guardian

Alex Hern on how the (expected) change in early September for Ethereum to proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (he compares it to lottery tickets v premium bonds) is likely to pan out:

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After years at the centre of ethereum infrastructure, the miners face their industry being simply switched off overnight, and many of them aren’t happy with that proposal. They have real, physical assets invested in the continuation of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, from expensive graphics cards to electrical hookups, and it’s not easy to repurpose it for something else.

Due to the open-source nature of cryptocurrencies, it’s easy enough for the miners to simply pick up where they left off, and carry on running Nu-thereum, or whatever it gets called, on 16 September as though the merge had never happened. The question is, what happens next?

Everyone who has a balance of ETH will suddenly find that they have two balances, one on each blockchain. And everyone who has a smart contract running on ETH will suddenly find they have two of them, as well: there will be the proof-of-work version of the Bored Ape NFTs, and the proof-of-stake version, and so on.

Some of those duplicates may happily coexist. Others might try to talk down the forked version, but never quite kill it – how much would someone who wants to own a killer NFT pay for an “unofficial” version on the forked chain? If it’s not zero, then the trade could continue for some time, even if the developers of the Apes disown the forks.

But for other projects, there can only be one. Each USDC token is backed by $1 of hard assets held by Circle, the company that develops the stablecoin. If there are suddenly twice as many USDCs because of the fork, Circle doesn’t have twice as much cash, and it will have to choose one network to support and the other to reject.

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And it’s likely they’ll reject the proof-of-work version. We will see!
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Capitol drops AI rapper FN Meka following backlash • The New York Times

Joe Coscarelli:

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Capitol Music Group, the company that houses major record labels including Capitol and Blue Note, said on Tuesday that it was severing ties with its latest controversial artist: FN Meka, a virtual “robot rapper” powered partly by artificial intelligence, who boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok.

The company had previously teased the project — the first augmented reality artist to sign to a major label, it said — as “just a preview of what’s to come.” Yet after growing backlash to what skeptical observers said amounted to digital blackface — including content that seemed to trivialize incarceration and police brutality — Capitol said it had “severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately.”

The company added in a statement: “We offer our deepest apologies to the Black community for our insensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it. We thank those who have reached out to us with constructive feedback in the past couple of days — your input was invaluable as we came to the decision to end our association with the project.”

…FN Meka was backed by the company Factory New, which described itself as a “first of its kind, next-generation music company, specializing in virtual beings.” (Also on the roster: the crypto-rapper Lil Bitcoin.) Though voiced by a human, FN Meka and his music — “lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds” — was derived in part from artificial intelligence, the industry publication Music Business Worldwide reported last year.

“Not to get all philosophical, but what is an ‘artist’ today?” Anthony Martini, a Factory New founder, told the publication at the time. “Think about the biggest stars in the world. How many of them are just vessels for commercial endeavours?”

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Really, it’s Gorillaz written by an algorithm, except they chose the wrong training schema.
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Liz Truss is easy to mock, but she could do more damage than Boris Johnson ever did • The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff:

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Liz Truss loves maths. She loves it so much that she used to fire mental arithmetic questions at civil servants during meetings, and once told an audience of female high-flyers that her best advice for their ambitious daughters was to study the subject. She loves maths so much, indeed, that she approaches political decisions like an equation to be solved. The maths professor’s daughter works methodically through every possible option, including some that others would consider beyond the pale; she likes to test every argument, sometimes to exhausting lengths. (As one of her aides used to joke: what’s the difference between a rottweiler and Liz Truss? A rottweiler eventually lets go.) Her logical, dispassionate mathematician’s approach makes her a formidable negotiator and an unsentimental strategist, swift to abandon positions that no longer serve her.

Yet those who know her best say that with it comes a curious emotional detachment, or inability to factor into her calculations how things feel to other people, which is only now being exposed. She can be good company in private, funny and lively. But when colleagues mention her “faintly awkward” manner, or even call her “as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in parliament” (Dominic Cummings, no stranger himself to being called something similar), this particular disconnectedness is often what they mean. It’s shaped the campaign of the woman still most likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, barring a political earthquake, and may soon shape this country’s future.

…She lacks Johnson’s taste for high living – any emerging scandals won’t involve gold wallpaper – or his need to be loved; she has taught herself not to care what people in politics think of her. But where Johnson never seemed to know what to do with his enormous majority, Truss is a workaholic policy geek whose government would be driven by her manic energy. In the worst-case scenario, she could do more damage than he ever did.

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Very useful primer about who we seem, barring bizarre screwups by all the polling organisations, to be in for. Rory Stewart, who was an environment minister under her, tells of bringing her a 25-year environment plan (???), being told it wasn’t good enough in a meeting, and asking: “What don’t you like about it?” To which she replied “Everyone around this table knows what I don’t like about it,” to murmurs of assent from the civil servants. When she had left, he asked some of those remaining what, in fact was wrong with it. “Sorry, Rory, don’t know, just didn’t want to go against her,” came the reply.

She’s also a complete political chameleon, having once told Stewart (who finds her maths obsession weird) that she couldn’t see the point in his interest in foreign affairs. Then she ends up as Foreign Secretary.
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Underground (1958) • British Television Drama

Oliver Wake:

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When people talk about live television drama, and in particular the disasters that can befall live productions, actors forgetting their lines and technical faults loom large. Sometimes mention will be made of the incident in which a leading actor died during a performance. It sounds like it could be a dark joke or an industry myth, but it’s true. It’s a morbid story but a fascinating one.

The production in question was Underground, transmitted on Sunday 30 November 1958 as part of ITV company ABC’s popular Armchair Theatre drama anthology. It was directed by William (known as Ted) Kotcheff, one of ABC’s regular directors, then aged only 27, and produced by Sydney Newman, the company’s drama supervisor. The play was a television dramatisation by James Forsyth of Harold Rein’s 1955 novel Few Were Left.

No recording of the play exists, so this account is based on various interviews and media reports about the play. There are several accounts of what happened which, though largely consistent on the main events, differ notably on the smaller details. In this essay I’ll try to separate the reality from the myth and distortion as far as is possible at this remove from the event itself.

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Back in the days when it seemed like a good idea to do live plays as TV drama, not realising the drama might turn into a crisis. Fantastic research for a curio of TV history.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Two queries from yesterday.
First: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation as a method of disturbing hard drives? Seth F pointed out that it had much of the flavour of an urban legend, with “a friend’s experience” and studied vagueness about the PC OEM and hard drive maker in question. One for the “unproven” files.

Second: the IKEA effect, where you value things you’ve assembled more than you do things of the same quality made by others? It’s a real thing – there’s research to sort of confirm it. (Might depend on interpretation.)

The pitch-shifted sound of a black hole in the Perseus cluster truly is the spookiest thing you’ll hear this week. CC-licensed photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope 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. Inflationary. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko raises concerns over security threats at platform • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan, Clare Duffy and Brian Fung:

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Twitter has major security problems that pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy, according to an explosive whistleblower disclosure obtained exclusively by CNN and The Washington Post.

The disclosure, sent last month to Congress and federal agencies, paints a picture of a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform’s central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight. It also alleges that some of the company’s senior-most executives have been trying to cover up Twitter’s serious vulnerabilities, and that one or more current employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service.

The whistleblower, who has agreed to be publicly identified, is Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who was previously the company’s head of security, reporting directly to the CEO. Zatko further alleges that Twitter’s leadership has misled its own board and government regulators about its security vulnerabilities, including some that could allegedly open the door to foreign spying or manipulation, hacking and disinformation campaigns.

The whistleblower also alleges Twitter does not reliably delete users’ data after they cancel their accounts, in some cases because the company has lost track of the information, and that it has misled regulators about whether it deletes the data as it is required to do. The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don’t have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to.

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Bet there were a few champagne bottles popping in Elon Musk’s office at this news. Though it doesn’t materially fit into their dispute – about how many bots there are on Twitter – it’s obvious that any halfway competent lawyer will be able to wrangle Zatko’s complaint into a narrative about a badly run company. Which isn’t hard, because Twitter famously is a badly run company.
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Google search is quietly damaging democracy • WIRED

Francesca Tripodi:

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If one were to look up “Washington Times Antifa Evidence,” the top return (as of the time of this writing) is the original article with the headline “Facial Recognition Identifies Extremists Storming the Capitol.” Underneath, Google summarizes an inaccurate argument, highlighting that the ones identified as the extremists were antifa. Perpetuating these falsehoods has long-lasting effects, especially since those in my study described Google as a neutral purveyor of news and information. According to an April 2021 poll, more than 20% of Republican voters still blame antifa for the violence that transpired that day.

The trouble is, many users still rely on Google to fact-check information, and doing so might strengthen their belief in false claims. This is not only because Google sometimes delivers misleading or incorrect information, but also because people I spoke with for my research believed that Google’s top search returns were “more important,” “more relevant,” and “more accurate,” and they trusted Google more than the news—they considered it to be a more objective source. Many said the Knowledge Graph might be the only source they consult, but few realized how much Google has changed—that it is not the search engine it once was. In an effort to “do their own research,” people tend to search for something they saw on Facebook or other social media platforms, but because of the way content has been tagged and categorized, they are actually falling into an information trap .

This leads to what I refer to in my book, The Propagandists’ Playbook, as the “IKEA effect of misinformation.” Business scholars have found that when consumers build their own merchandise, they value the product more than an already assembled item of similar quality—they feel more competent and therefore happier with their purchase. Conspiracy theorists and propagandists are drawing on the same strategy, providing a tangible, do-it-yourself quality to the information they provide.

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Explains why “do your own research” is so dangerous.
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The spookiest sound in astronomy • The Atlantic

Marina Koren:

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Ah, the sounds of late summer. Pass a pool, and hear the happy yelps of kids splashing around. Sit outside at night, and bask in the soothing buzz of cicadas hidden in the trees. Open the internet, and hear the terrifying howling of outer space.

Thank NASA for that last one. The space agency recently shared a clip online of sound coming from a cluster of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth. NASA, always eager to show off its capacity to produce cosmic wonder, presented the audio enthusiastically, as if to say, Wow, check out this cool thing! And although the transformation of space phenomena into something detectable by our human ears certainly seems like an exciting exercise, the reality is—well, have a listen.

The noise sounds like a ghostly wail, or the horror-movie music just before a jump scare, or, as several people have pointed out, the cries of countless souls trapped in eternal darkness. Just nothing good; less awe-ful, and more awful. Does space really sound this scary?

The answer is, sort of. And there is a perfectly horror-free explanation for it. Some parts of space are full of hot gas, including the medium between the distant, sparkly galaxies huddled together. In 2002, when a NASA space telescope named Chandra studied the Perseus cluster, it detected wavelike movements in the gas, propagating outward like ripples in water. The ripples, scientists determined, were produced by the supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy. When the black hole sucks in cosmic material, it burps some out—explosive behavior that pushes around the gas nearby. The resulting waves, astronomers concluded, were sound waves, with a frequency much too deep for any of us to hear.

It wasn’t until recently that Kimberly Arcand, Chandra’s visualization scientist, decided to shift those impossibly low cosmic notes into the audible range. She wanted the public, and particularly those who are blind or have reduced vision, to be able to experience the wonder of the Perseus cluster with senses besides sight. Arcand told me she was inspired by Wanda Díaz-Merced, a blind astrophysicist who developed a program to convert sunlight into sound so that she could hear a solar eclipse sweeping across the United States in 2017. Arcand extracted the sound data from Chandra’s observations and then, with some mathematical work and sound editing, brought them into the range of human hearing, a couple hundred quadrillion times higher than the original frequency. The result: a spooky, cosmic wail.

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It truly is like she says – souls trapped in a weird hellhole.
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Right-wing groups are exploiting OSINT to spread propaganda in India • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher:

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A scan of @thehawkeyex’s viral tweets includes several unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories. For instance, @thehawkeyex has claimed that the music-streaming app Spotify is a leftist propaganda platform in India, based on the cherry-picked interpretation of podcast titles. The account also shared conspiratorial threads citing a belief that the Ford Foundation is a plant by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operating and funding anti-India organizations. In some threads, @thehawkeyex cites documents, pamphlets, speeches, or tweets, presenting them as indisputable evidence of a grand conspiracy to destabilize the country. They have targeted Alt News, a prominent Indian fact-checking organization, and claimed to trace the organization’s public corporate filings, lobbing an allegation that its founders were involved in tax evasion. The account alleged that Pieter Friedrich, an activist and author critical of Hindu nationalism, was “running a non-stop unrest [campaign] in India.” Friedrich was reached for comment but did not respond.

Joyojeet Pal, a professor at the University of Michigan, and Aditya Kadam, a research intern, ran a forensic analysis of the reach and engagement of @thehawkeyex and found that all the quoted mentions of the tweets from the handle are from pro-BJP sources that appear to be making an effort to sway public opinion.

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Not clear whether this is paid for in some way by the BJP. Probably not; with just under 100k followers, this account probably isn’t making much difference in the real world. And yet, it can feel like it’s making a difference online.
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Snap scraps development on flying selfie Pixy drone • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky:

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Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel recently told staff during a regular question-and-answer session of the decision around the Pixy drone. The effort to halt further development of the project is part of broader reprioritization of company resources, Mr. Spiegel told staff, the people said.

Pixy is a small drone that takes off and lands in the user’s hand. It was introduced at the end of April during Snap’s annual partner summit with a $230 starting price. When it launched, Mr. Spiegel said it planned to sell a limited quantity of them.

Snap will continue to sell the current iteration of Pixy, according to a person familiar with the matter. As of [last] Thursday morning, it was available for online purchase.

The company behind the social-media platform Snapchat has been particularly hard hit in recent months from disruptions in the digital advertising market, posting its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth in July. Shares tumbled almost 40% on those results.

The company also still is grappling with changes Apple Inc. introduced to its privacy policy, denting Snap’s ad business and that of other social-media companies. Snap shares have slumped more than 80% over the past year.

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Just collecting some missed links, for completeness: Snap keeps trying hardware (glasses, drone) and then keeps giving up. Is the idea that it’ll achieve liftoff at some point? Perhaps if it focussed on something that’s a rising and popular space, in the way that Apple did with the iPod in 2001 (music = popular, MP3 players = emerging space)? Drones only seem to be good for war. A lot of money has been lost trying to get consumers interested in them.
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Spyware scandals are ripping through Europe • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

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Over the past 13 months, it has been revealed that spyware had targeted opposition leaders, journalists, lawyers and activists in France, Spain, Hungary, Poland and even staff within the European Commission, the EU’s cabinet-style government, between 2019 and 2021. The bloc has already set up an inquiry into its own use of spyware, but even as the 38-person committee works toward producing a report for early 2023, the number of new scandals is quickly mounting up.

What sets the scandal in Greece apart is the company behind the spyware that was used. Until then the surveillance software in every EU scandal could be traced back to one company, the notorious NSO Group. Yet the spyware stalking Koukakis’ phone was made by Cytrox, a company founded in the small European nation of North Macedonia and acquired in 2017 by Tal Dilian—an entrepreneur who achieved notoriety for driving a high-tech surveillance van around the island of Cyprus and showing a Forbes journalist how it could hack into passing people’s phones. In that interview, Dilian said he had acquired Cytrox and absorbed the company into his intelligence company Intellexa, which is now thought to now be based in Greece. The arrival of Cytrox into Europe’s ongoing scandal shows the problem is bigger than just the NSO Group. The bloc has a thriving spyware industry of its own.

As the NSO Group struggles with intense scrutiny and being blacklisted by the US, its less well-known European rivals are jostling to take its clients, researchers say. Over the past two months, Cytrox is not the only local company to generate headlines for hacking devices within the bloc. 

In June, Google discovered the Italian spyware vendor RCS Lab was targeting smartphones in Italy and Kazakhstan. Alberto Nobili, RCS’ managing director, told WIRED that the company condemns the misuse of its products but declined to comment on whether the cases cited by Google were examples of misuse. “RCS personnel are not exposed, nor participate in any activities conducted by the relevant customers,” he says.

More recently, in July, spyware made by Austria’s DSIRF was detected by Microsoft hacking into law firms, banks, and consultancies in Austria, the UK, and Panama. DSIRF did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers • The Old New Thing

Raymond Chen:

»

A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.

One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

What’s going on?

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. (Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)

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As he says, it’s a Tacoma Narrows thing.
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Court documents confirm Xbox One sold less than half as many as PS4 • GameLuster

Bobby Kent:

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A high-profile case is ongoing in Brazil, as Microsoft attempts to defend its Activision Blizzard acquisition from CADE, the Brazilian competition authority. Official court documents have revealed a lot of juicy details so far. The latest court papers from Microsoft have confirmed that the Xbox One sold less than half of Sony’s PlayStation 4 throughout its lifetime.

Microsoft has been refusing to release console sales information since 2015, claiming it isn’t the “key metric of success” they like to focus on. Microsoft prefers to focus on engagement, a key factor for the creation of the Xbox Game Pass. The hesitation to release sales figures never stopped business analysts from coming up with some accurate estimations of sales. Ampere Analysis data predicted 51m sales of the Xbox One line of consoles in 2020, and it appears they were right.

The information can be found on page 18 of the Microsoft court papers dated Aug. 9, 2022. The translated line reads “Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and install base, having sold more than twice as many [than] Xbox in the last generation”, from a rough Google translation. A member of GameLuster staff who can read Spanish was able to partially read the Portuguese, and concurs with this translation.

Sony recently released their final PS4 sales figures, confirming 117.2m sales of the console line, making it the second biggest home console of all time. This means the Xbox One consoles must have sold less than approximately 58.5m units, which is in line with former industry analysts predictions. This places the Xbox One right below the NES, and just above the SNES.

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We always focus on consoles and the games that appear on them, but phone gaming is easily an order of magnitude bigger in sheer numbers. Then again, Microsoft’s argument that it’s not about sheer numbers but about engagement (and selling those Xbox Passes) is reasonable.
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Does the whole world hate Liz Truss? • POLITICO

Cristina Gallardo and Leonie Kijewski:

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Around the world, governments are slowly waking up to a new reality: Liz Truss is about to become U.K. prime minister.

London-based diplomats are scrambling to report back to their capitals with intelligence on the Conservative leadership front-runner, as every new poll offers further evidence that — barring some last-minute disaster — Truss is headed to 10 Downing Street.

In truth, few foreign powers much like what they’ve seen.

More than a dozen conversations with senior diplomats and insiders from power centers around the world suggest Truss is not exactly a popular choice on the global stage. She will be met with deep skepticism across much of western Europe, and within the Biden White House. There are questions about relations with the new Australian government. She is despised in Moscow and Beijing.

On the other hand, Truss is quite popular in eastern European states, and parts of the Indo-Pacific. So it’s not all bad.

Supporters say Truss’ expected emergence on the world stage is just poorly-timed, with potential conservative allies in the US, Germany and Australia all ousted in national elections over the past two years.

But her relations with EU countries are undoubtedly clouded by the bitter row over how to trade across the Irish Sea after Brexit while keeping both the Northern Irish unionists and republicans happy.

Hopes in Brussels and other EU capitals that the new UK foreign secretary would prove an amicable interlocutor evaporated last spring when she unveiled controversial legislation to allow U.K. ministers to switch off parts of the Northern Ireland protocol, a key element of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, leading to accusations that Britain is preparing to breach international law.

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Truss is walking into a situation that would challenge the most competent PM who had a highly skilled team of ministers backing them up: rampant inflation, energy shortages, strikes on railways and docks and in courts, an NHS in utter crisis. She might work harder than Johnson (wouldn’t be hard), but she lacks his charm. It’s hard to see how the next two years won’t be utterly calamitous.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Suddenly, solar panel payback times are plummeting – but supply chains can’t keep up with the new excess demand. CC-licensed photo by Ken Bosma 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. Autopresent and autocorrect? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A dad took photos of his naked toddler for the doctor. Google flagged him as a criminal • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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Mark noticed something amiss with his toddler. His son’s penis looked swollen and was hurting him. Mark, a stay-at-home dad in San Francisco, grabbed his Android smartphone and took photos to document the problem so he could track its progression.

It was a Friday night in February 2021. His wife called an advice nurse at their health care provider to schedule an emergency consultation for the next morning, by video because it was a Saturday and there was a pandemic going on. The nurse said to send photos so the doctor could review them in advance.

Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider’s messaging system. In one, Mark’s hand was visible, helping to better display the swelling. Mark and his wife gave no thought to the tech giants that made this quick capture and exchange of digital data possible, or what those giants might think of the images.

With help from the photos, the doctor diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics, which quickly cleared it up. But the episode left Mark with a much larger problem, one that would cost him more than a decade of contacts, emails and photos, and make him the target of a police investigation. Mark, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of potential reputational harm, had been caught in an algorithmic net designed to snare people exchanging child sexual abuse material.

Because technology companies routinely capture so much data, they have been pressured to act as sentinels, examining what passes through their servers to detect and prevent criminal behavior. Child advocates say the companies’ cooperation is essential to combat the rampant online spread of sexual abuse imagery. But it can entail peering into private archives, such as digital photo albums — an intrusion users may not expect — that has cast innocent behaviour in a sinister light in at least two cases The Times has unearthed.

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As Hill reports, this led to Mark – and in a separate case, another person who did similar – getting their accounts banned and being reported to the police. That’s the downside of false positives, and they’re very substantial. And very likely to stymie Apple’s plans for on-device scanning permanently, suggests G, who provided the link. (Ta.) It also reveals a sort of mission creep: Google is guessing at what is abuse content, and not being careful enough in its review.
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Phoenix – Alpha Zulu (Official Video) • YouTube

Funky tune. But, more than that, the (very enjoyable) video is generated by AI. See? The content tsunami is coming our way. Now all you need is a GAN that produces different versions and pushes them at people in an A/B test and refines it more and more. AI can produce the music too. (Thanks Victor Z for the link.)
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AI power consumption is exploding • Semi Engineering

Brian Bailey:

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Why is energy consumption going up so fast? “The compute demand of neural networks is insatiable,” says Ian Bratt, fellow and senior director of technology at Arm. “The larger the network, the better the results, and the more problems you can solve. Energy usage is proportional to the size of the network. Therefore, energy efficient inference is absolutely essential to enable the adoption of more and more sophisticated neural networks and enhanced use-cases, such as real-time voice and vision applications.”

Unfortunately, not everyone cares about efficiency. “When you look at what the hyperscaler companies are trying to do, they’re trying to get better and more accurate voice recognition, speech recognition, recommendation engines,” says Tim Vehling, senior vice president for product and business development at Mythic. “It’s a monetary thing. The higher accuracy they can get, the more clients they can service, and they can generate more profitability. You look at data center training and inference of these very large NLP models, that is where a lot of power is consumed. And I don’t know if there’s any real motivation to optimize power in those applications.”

But some people do care. “There is some commercial pressure to reduce the carbon impact of these companies, not direct monetary, but more that the consumer will only accept a carbon-neutral solution,” says Alexander Wakefield, scientist at Synopsys. “This is the pressure from the green energy side, and if one of these vendors were to say they are carbon neutral, more people will be likely to use them.”

But not all energy is being consumed in the cloud. There are a growing number of smart edge devices that are contributing to the problem, as well.

«

This is based on a single slide from a talk by AMD’s chief technology officer talking about ML systems’ power consumption compared to world energy production. It seems a bit overdone, to be honest.
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Faltering French connection leaves UK fearing winter blackouts • POLITICO

Graham Lanktree:

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The UK government has already drawn up a “reasonable worst-case scenario,” for organized blackouts in the months ahead, Bloomberg reported recently. Over four days in January, the scenario envisages the UK’s capacity to supply energy could slump to just a sixth of peak demand, as cold weather combines with gas shortages to make organized blackouts a necessity.

Yet even this doomsday Whitehall planning downplays the increasing risk of uncontrolled blackouts if energy imports are cut off, a figure from one major, energy-intensive British manufacturing industry warned. “We do think that there’s a much higher risk than the government perhaps is recognising in public,” the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Uncontrolled blackouts would be far more damaging to heavy industry than the organized shutdowns envisaged in the government’s worst-case scenario planning, due to “the risk to life and assets and damage,” the person added, if industrial equipment is shut off unexpectedly. Even a slightly increased risk of this happening is “intolerable,” they said.

The industrialist warned that the UK’s National Grid power network assumes in its winter outlook that “even on the coldest day, or the day with the highest demand,” Britain can always rely on “an influx of electricity via interconnectors on the continent.”

Yet these interconnectors link the UK to France — which, like much of Europe, is currently suffering its own large-scale energy crisis — along with the Netherlands and Belgium.

“We think that is a very brave assumption to make at the moment,” the person said, citing the disastrous outages in France’s nuclear fleet and the “potential risks that Russia could significantly reduce gas supply over the winter period to mainland Europe.”

A spokesperson for the National Grid defended its forecast as an “early view” to “help the industry prepare for this winter.”

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What everyone is quietly hoping for now is a warm winter.
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Chipmakers caught in crossfire of rising US-China geopolitical tensions • Financial Times

Christian Davies and Song Jung-a:

»

Samsung and SK Hynix have boosted investments in US production facilities even as they remain heavily exposed to the Chinese market. South Korea exported $50bn of chips to China last year, up 26% from 2020 and accounting for nearly 40% of the country’s total chip exports, according to the Korea International Trade Association.

But they share a near-total dependence on a small number of US, Japanese and European chip designers and equipment makers for the technology required to produce advanced chips, giving Washington leverage over what [author of “Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology” Chris] Miller described as the “main choke points in the semiconductor production process”.

Those companies include US chip design software providers Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics, now Siemens EDA, American equipment makers Applied Materials and Lam Research and ASML in the Netherlands, which makes the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) tools needed to produce cutting-edge Dram memory chips.

“China has the market, but the US has the technology,” said Yeo Han-koo, who served as South Korea’s trade minister until May. “Without technology, you have no product. Without a market, at least you can find a way to diversify and identify alternatives.”

Neither Samsung nor SK Hynix, which both specialise in Dram and Nand memory chip production, manufacture their most advanced semiconductors in China.

China’s largest chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp announced last month that it had started shipping advanced 7-nanometre semiconductors. However, analysts said that without access to the world’s most sophisticated equipment, SMIC would struggle to close the gap with Samsung and TSMC, which are major global suppliers of 5nm and 4nm chips.

A person close to TSMC, which dominates the global market for foundry chips, said the US bill was unlikely to have a dramatic effect as the Taiwanese government already had restrictions on producing advanced chips in mainland China.

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As the author of Digital Wars and Cyber Wars, I feel like I missed a trick in letting Miller grab that title.
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Learn all about any London postcode’s affluence, crime, demographics and more • CrystalRoof

Victoria Varzinova and Vlad Suharukov:

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In 2016, Victoria and Vlad made the huge decision to relocate to London.

As you know, London is a pretty big place and finding the right spot proved challenging…

They went on their search with an open mind, but like most of us, they didn’t know much about how the real estate industry worked and how it was so focused on Landlords and Investors.

They were new to the city and didn’t have any special local knowledge about the many residential areas of Greater London. They did not understand the different properties and the many potential ‘warning signs’ you need to be aware of when viewing!

Despite their open minds and willingness to find a place to call home, they ended up being unhappy and unsuccessful in their search. They had to move on four separate occasions until they eventually found somewhere right for them.

Every time they thought they found the right property for them, an issue made the residence unlivable.

Whether it was: poor insulation in an old Victorian property, inconsiderate neighbours, noise pollution from aircraft despite the property being far from Heathrow airport… something wasn’t right.

If they’d had access to the information they needed, they would have been able to save nearly 30 hours of wasted time viewing unsuitable properties.

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So they’ve set up a company that lets you stick in a postcode and it’ll tell you all the relevant information. Not quite down to individual properties, but impressive in its use of open data.
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Solar panels: how to fix your energy bills while the sun shines • The Guardian

Patrick Collinson:

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British households are racing to install roof-top solar electricity panels amid huge energy price rises, with installers saying demand has “exploded”.

Simon Dudson, the chief executive of the Little Green Energy Company, which serves London and south-east England, says: “It’s absolutely crazy times. It’s unprecedented. We have had a 400-500% increase in business.”

The soaring price of electricity means a domestic solar panel system can now pay for itself in as little as seven years, and the way things are going, that could go down to five years. About a year ago, installers were saying the “payback” period was 15 years or more. Then there are the environmental benefits of solar panels.

But don’t expect to have a system installed by your first-choice company this side of winter. The increase in demand, plus supply problems – about 90% of panels are made in China – mean some installers are warning customers of delays stretching out 10 months or more.

Sussex Solar, like many installers across the UK, this week had a blunt message on its website. “We are very sorry but due to an unprecedented level of interest in solar panels and heat pumps, we are unable to accept any new inquiries for the time being. We will reopen our contact page towards the end of August …”

Sussex Solar’s director, Amanda Baxter, adds: “It’s absolutely mad at the moment.”

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Not just demand; the supply chain is all over the place. Used to be labour. The penny has dropped for a huge number of people, all at the same time.
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Twitter is becoming a lost city • Buttondown

Annaleee Newitz:

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there are a few growing communities on Twitter, like the Zack Snyder fans who lobbied for the “Snyder cut” of the Justice League movie and descended in howling troll maelstroms on anyone who dared question them. Unfortunately, a WarnerMedia investigation has just revealed that Snyder paid at least two consulting firms to create a bot army of shitposters for him. So I would take any report on the growth of certain segments on Twitter with a major grain of salt. At this point, the platform seems as if it’s optimized for paid trolls and automated “movements.”

And it’s not as if there is some new, different community arriving to pick up the pieces. I know because I’ve witnessed that happen, too. I was once, long ago, very into Orkut. It was a pre-Facebook social network created by product manager Orkut Büyükkökten at Google, with all the typical first-gen social media shit: you got a cute little personal page, where you posted pics, updates, quotes, links to your friends and websites. At first, its users were mostly English-speaking. But then more and more Portuguese-language memes flooded in. Every tenth new friend request came from someone in São Paulo. It was not the same Orkut, but the social network was bigger than ever, and arguably more fun. It just wasn’t a useful social platform for people who didn’t live in Brazil or read Portuguese.

This is not what’s happening on Twitter. I’m not seeing a flood of new people arriving, spouting memes I don’t understand. I’m just seeing less of everything. The point is, Twitter isn’t becoming a vibrant but different social space that belongs to a new group of people; it’s being abandoned. 

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That Twitter isn’t attracting new users is a truism. But it also seems to have reached a steady state: not shrinking either. It’s still the place where people put news to get it noticed. Abandonment is a difficult thing to perceive, even more difficult to prove.
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Sony’s racing car AI just destroyed its human competitors—by being nice (and fast) • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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Sony soon learned that speed alone wasn’t enough to make [its AI racing program] GT Sophy a winner. The program outpaced all human drivers on an empty track, setting superhuman lap times on three different virtual courses. Yet when Sony tested GT Sophy in a race against multiple human drivers, where intelligence as well as speed is needed, GT Sophy lost. The program was at times too aggressive, racking up penalties for reckless driving, and at other times too timid, giving way when it didn’t need to.

Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It’s true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls “etiquette”: the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand.

This is also what makes GT Sophy relevant beyond Gran Turismo. Etiquette between drivers on a track is a specific example of the kind of dynamic, context-aware behavior that robots will be expected to have when they interact with people, says Wurman.

An awareness of when to take risks and when to play it safe would be useful for AI that is better at interacting with people, whether it be on the manufacturing floor, in home robots, or in driverless cars. 

“I don’t think we’ve learned general principles yet about how to deal with human norms that you have to respect,” says Wurman. “But it’s a start and hopefully gives us some insight into this problem in general.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Touchscreens in cars are less easy to use than physical buttons. That’s what you thought. Now data agrees. CC-licensed photo by Michael Sheehan 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. Present and putatively correct. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us • Social Warming Substack

By me, ruminating on how many machine learning systems there are churning out content already:

»

One of the lessons I absorbed from a few decades of technology journalism is that conceiving what will happen when things scale up is really, really difficult. We can see a lone tree and grasp it; but imagining how a forest of them will change the ecosystem is incredibly hard. The iPhone and Android made it easy to get email out of the office! But they also prompted an explosion of apps. Which created a new economy of people making apps. Which encouraged apps that weren’t restricted just to doing things on the phone, but were useful in the physical world, such as Uber. Meanwhile, the connectedness meant that photos and videos could be uploaded and even streamed—for good, for bad.

The point being that all the disparate bits above might look like, well, disparate parts, but they’re available now (and that’s without mentioning deepfakes). The trees are here, and the forest might be starting to take shape. Here’s an example: a 40-page comic book about monsters, free for download (PDF), by Steve Coulson, in which all the images are drawn by [AI illustrator] MidJourney. It’s very, very impressive.

I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.

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But there’s more. MUCH more.
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How the Find My app became an accidental friendship fixture • The New York Times

Kalley Huang:

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Location sharing isn’t new. In 2011, Apple released Find My Friends. In 2013, 7% of U.S. adults said they checked into locations on social media or shared their locations with friends, according to the Pew Research Center. This year, 69% of Gen Z and 77% of millennials said they activated location-sharing features at least sometimes, compared with 62% of US adults in general, according to the Harris Poll.

But what can be startling — and harder to quantify — is how widely younger people share their location information. Some say that they track a dozen or more friends on the app, and that those friends track them back.

These features are not limited to just Find My. Dating, food delivery and ride-hailing apps often ask for access to location data. Facebook’s Messenger, Snapchat’s Snap Maps and third-party apps like the family-oriented Life360 — all available on iPhones and Android phones — offer real-time location-sharing features.

And location sharing is built into some smartphones. Starting in 2015, Find My Friends came automatically installed in iPhones. In 2019, it and Apple’s device-locating apps Find My iPhone and Find My Mac were rolled into the stand-alone Find My. Google Maps, which comes preinstalled in Android phones, has a similar location-sharing feature.

As with a check-in on Facebook or location tagging on Instagram and Twitter, users opt into location sharing on Find My. But unlike those features, Find My shares real-time location after users opt in, with the options to share for one hour, until the end of the day or indefinitely.

With Find My, “you aren’t actively choosing to do something as you reach a certain location because you’re constantly sharing your location,” said Michael Saker, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London. As a result, “there’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” he added. “There’s a verification of being friends.”

But sharing locations can come with privacy concerns, especially if users are not aware of or do not consent to whom they share their location with, and for how long, said Eva Galperin, cybersecurity director at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Even if users consent at first, expectations among friends can make it more difficult to opt out, she said.

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In The Overspill’s family, the app is known as “Stalk My Family” (from the days when it was Find My Friends). As this shows, it’s used a lot more widely now, but with the same general intent.
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China hit by drought, floods, as Yangtze River runs dry • The Washington Post

Karina Tsui and Ian Livingston:

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China is suffering its worst drought on record as soaring temperatures dry up key parts of the Yangtze River, damaging crops and limiting drinking-water supplies in some central and southern communities.

At the same time, other parts of the country are suffering under an opposite extreme. In the western province of Qinghai, heavy rain has driven floods and landslides, leaving at least 16 people dead and 18 missing, state media reported.

Some rivers were running so high that they changed course, contributing to floods affecting more than 6,200 people, Reuters reported.

In the drought-hit regions, a prolonged heat wave has exacerbated conditions, authorities said.

Chinese officials this week announced what they said were several new measures to help alleviate the impact, including financial aid, cloud seeding and shutdowns of some energy-intensive industries.

In Hubei, in central China, authorities said 4.2 million people were found to have been affected by the drought. The southwestern province of Sichuan, which relies heavily on hydropower, also ordered factories in 19 cities and prefectures to halt operations until Saturday to preserve electricity for the public.

The temperature in the neighboring district of Chongqing hit a record 113º Fahrenheit (45ºC), China’s National Meteorological Center said Thursday — the highest temperature recorded in the country outside of Xinjiang, a desert region in the northwest. The county of Xinwen recorded 110ºF (43ºC), which set a provincial record for Sichuan.

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China knows that global heating is a huge problem, and this is it hitting home. (Also: worst drought *on record* for China is quite a record, which must go back a very long way.)
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Major rivers across Europe are drying up at the worst possible moment • Bloomberg Green

William Wilkes:

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The Rhine — a pillar of the German, Dutch and Swiss economies for centuries — is set to become virtually impassable at a key waypoint later this week, stymieing vast flows of diesel and coal. The Danube, which snakes its way 1,800 miles through central Europe to the Black Sea, is gummed up too, hampering grain and other trade.

Across Europe, transport is just one of the elements of river-based commerce that’s been upended by climate change. France’s power crisis has worsened because the Rhone and Garonne are too warm to effectively cool nuclear reactors, and Italy’s Po is too low to water rice fields and sustain clams for “pasta alle vongole.”

While disruptions to waterways would be a challenge at the best of times, the region is already on the brink of recession as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fuels inflation by squeezing food and energy supplies. The situation — just four years after a historic halt to Rhine shipping — adds urgency to European Union efforts to make inland shipping more resilient.

The continent’s rivers and canals convey more than 1 ton of freight annually for each EU resident and contribute around $80bn to the region’s economy just as a mode of transport, according to calculations based on Eurostat figures. But the fallout from dried-up waterways goes deeper.

“It’s not just about commercial navigation. It’s about freshening up when it’s hot, it’s about irrigating and so many other things,” said Cecile Azevard, director at French water operator VNF. “Rivers are part of our heritage.”

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You have to read a long way down the story before it starts mentioning that this is a climate change/global heating effect: droughts are also hitting the UK, South Africa, China and Brazil.
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Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds • Vi Bilägare

Fredrik Diits Vikström:

»

The screens in modern cars keep getting bigger. Design teams at most car manufacturers love to ditch physical buttons and switches, although they are far superior safety-wise.

That is the conclusion when Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare performed a thurough test of the HMI system (Human-Machine Interface) in a total of twelve cars this summer.

Inspiration for the screen-heavy interiors in modern cars comes from smartphones and tablets. Designers want a ”clean” interior with minimal switchgear, and the financial department wants to lower the cost. Instead of developing, manufacturing and keeping physical buttons in stock for years to come, car manufacturers are keen on integrating more functions into a digital screen which can be updated over time.

So in what way have these screens affected safety? Vi Bilägare gathered eleven modern cars from different manufacturers at an airfield och measured the time needed for a driver to perform different simple tasks, such as changing the radio station or adjusting the climate control. At the same time, the car was driven at 110 km/h (68 mph). We also invited an ”old-school” car without a touchscreen, a 17-year-old Volvo V70, for comparison.

One important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started.

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This is so blindingly obvious, but it’s nice to have data to prove it.
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Apple already sold everyone an iPhone. Now what? • The Economist

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As it dreams up more gadgets to sell to more people, however, Apple is employing another strategy in parallel. The company has so far put 1.8bn devices in the pockets and on the desks of some of the world’s most affluent consumers. Now it is selling access to those customers to other companies, and persuading those who own its devices to sign up to its own subscription services. As Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, said on a recent earnings call, the Apple devices in circulation represent “a big engine for our services business”.

The strategy is picking up speed. Last year services brought in $68bn in revenue, or 19% of Apple’s total. That is double the share in 2015. In the latest quarter services’ share was even higher, at 24%. Apple doesn’t break down where the money comes from, but the biggest chunk is reckoned to be fees from its app store, which amounted to perhaps $25bn last year, according to Sensor Tower, a data provider. The next-biggest part is probably the payment from Google for the right to be Apple devices’ default search engine. This was $10bn in 2020; analysts believe the going rate now is nearer $20bn. Apple’s fast-growing advertising business—mainly selling search ads in its app store—will bring in nearly $7bn this year, reckons eMarketer, another research firm.

Most of the rest comes from a range of subscription services: iCloud storage, Apple Music and Apple Care insurance are probably the biggest, estimates Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. More recent ventures like Apple tv+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade and Apple Pay make up the rest.

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I often wonder what would happen if Google said one day that it wasn’t going to pony up the $20bn, and was reducing it to, say, $5bn, or less. When that happened with Firefox, Yahoo stepped in – and the money was essentially wasted. Would Microsoft pile in to give Bing a shopfront?
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How a stretch of US-19 in Florida became the deadliest road for pedestrians • Vox

Marin Cogan:

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ecauseBecause life in the United States is so structured around cars — so many of us depend on them, due to sprawl and lack of good public transit, and because infrastructure in this country is built with drivers in mind — it can be easy to miss the broader crisis unfolding on our streets. Most of us, when we drive, tend to think about our experiences as specific; our roads might have horrible traffic, or our community’s drivers might be particularly reckless. But the evidence mounting over the past few years indicates that something much larger is going on: America is experiencing a pedestrian fatality crisis.

It’s not just Florida. In 2020, more than 6,700 pedestrians were killed while walking and using wheelchairs, despite a dramatic decrease in the number of cars on the road and the number of miles traveled. Data from the Governors Highway Safety Association that year projected that the pedestrian fatality rate soared 21 percent, amounting to “the largest ever annual increase in the rate at which drivers struck and killed people on foot.” That same year, nearly 39,000 people were killed in car crashes, the largest number of deaths since 2007. When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its preliminary findings, the NHTSA’s deputy administrator told Reuters: “We’ve never seen trends like this, and we feel an urgency … to take action and turn this around as quickly as possible.”

In 2021, the problem managed to get even worse. Preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association found that 7,485 pedestrians were killed by drivers, an 11.5% increase over the year before, and the most pedestrian deaths recorded in nearly 40 years. In response to the rising death toll among pedestrians and drivers, the US Department of Transportation announced more than $5 billion in funding for local efforts to make roads safer. “We face a national crisis of fatalities and serious injuries on our roadways,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in making the announcement this May.

We are so inured to the dangers of driving — and the death toll it regularly incurs — that many people don’t recognize that the United States is an outlier among comparable countries: People are more than twice as likely to die in an automobile crash here as in Canada or parts of Europe.

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Small business owners worry whether they will make it through the winter • Financial Times

Oliver Barnes:

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In normal times, [business energy broker Ali] Carnegie wrangles with gas and electricity providers over single-digit percentage increases in the bills of the more than 250 small to medium-sized enterprises he has on his books. But now he has to recommend contracts that may tip some of his clients’ businesses over the edge as energy bills have started to rise sharply, driven primarily by Russia’s squeeze on gas supplies to Europe.

Last month, a hospitality business he works with was offered a new electricity contract priced at £605,000 a year, a seven-fold increase on its previous one. The owners are now working out whether their business can survive the rise.

Spiralling energy costs are just one of a number of pressures weighing on the UK’s 5.5mn small businesses. “This winter would be very grim if energy prices alone were going up,” said Carnegie, who runs Cornwall-based consultancy Total Energy Solutions.

Increasing wage bills, higher raw material costs, the supply chain crunch and the fallout from Brexit only add to the pressures. The upshot is that many SMEs, which together employ about three-fifths of the UK workforce, will probably collapse without government intervention.

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the UK lost nearly 390,000 small businesses, more than one-twentieth of the total. Tina McKenzie, policy chair at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), predicted that this winter “could easily be just as devastating . . . if not worse”.

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Without drastic action, this is going to be catastrophic. Plus think of the council swimming pools, libraries, schools, etc etc who are going to face colossal rises. The deficits are going to be enormous.
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Electric vehicles are way, way more energy-efficient than internal combustion vehicles • Motor Trend

Justin Westbrook:

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Out of the 8.9 million barrels of gasoline consumed daily in the US on average, only 1.8 million gallons, or approximately 20%, actually propel an internal combustion vehicle forward. The other 80% is wasted on heat and parasitic auxiliary components that draw away energy. As the world begins its shift to EV proliferation, the good news is electric vehicles are far more energy efficient on the road.

A new set of graphics from Yale Climate Connections makes visualizing the efficiency gains of an EV over an ICE vehicle straightforward. Using data from fueleconomy.gov and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these graphics break down the energy waste in your typical gas-powered car.

The vast majority of energy wasted in an ICE vehicle is through the heat the engine produces, which you can literally feel radiating from under the hood. About 5% is lost through parasitic engine components including the cooling system, which draws on the engine’s own energy to help cool it down, about 4% is lost through the mechanical friction of the drivetrain and transmission components, and another 2% could be lost to auxiliary electrics like heated and powered seats, lights, and infotainment systems. In total, approximately 75% to 84% of the original gasoline’s energy is lost.

Compare that to only 31-35% energy loss in the average electric vehicle (average EV battery size is about 63 kWh), before factoring in potential recuperation from energy regeneration. Its losses can be broken down into approximately 10% of the source energy from the grid lost in the charging process, 18% lost to the drivetrain motor components, up to 4% lost to auxiliary components, and another 3% lost solely from powertrain cooling and other vehicle systems.

Comparing the two, “the rough math pencils out to the energy equivalent of around 2 million barrels of gasoline per day, which is a substantial savings over the 8.9 million barrels currently used,” according to Yale Climate Connections.

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Even if the power stations that generate the energy were all running on fossil fuels (and they aren’t) it would still save energy. The shift to EVs needs to happen faster, but every little piece of data can be persuasive. (Via John Naughton.)
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Generate look-a-like photos to protect your identity • Generated Photos

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Frequently asked questions

Can I use the Anonymizer for free?: Yes! You have permission to use the Anonymizer for free for personal usage. You do not have permission to create a stockpile of images or to use your generated image for commercial purposes. For commercial usage, purchasable licenses are available. For commercial usage, please contact us.

Do you store my picture?: No, we do not save your personal data and photos. This project is meant as a useful way to showcase the utility of synthetic media. The photos are processed in the RAM and stored on your computer. We don’t collect or store it for future analysis and re-learning like many AI tools do. More in our privacy policy.

What type of image should I use?: In order for the Anonymizer to work correctly you should upload a clear photo of your face looking straight forward. Cropping out the background is not needed. Avoid using images where multiple faces are visible.

Where can I use my anonymous image?: Anywhere online! Do not use your image to impersonate another person or to conduct illegal activity.

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Uses a generative adversarial network to create photos that are like you but aren’t you for online is a weird way of thinking, though makes sense of sorts.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The sealed battery in many modern consumer products such as Apple Airpods makes them more attractive to use – but limits their lifespan. And how long is that? CC-licensed photo by Maurizio Pesce 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. Recharging. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Operational notes:
1: The Overspill is going on a two-week break. Back on Monday August 22.
2: The Social Warming Substack will (probably) continue publishing on the Fridays in between. Including today, if it gets finished.

Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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Here’s a dirty little secret of the tech industry: “Almost every device these days has a battery that’s going to wear out, and it’s a built-in death clock,” says Kyle Wiens, the CEO of repair community iFixit. Today, there are batteries in everything from your toothbrush to your vacuum cleaner. They are consumable products, like printer ink or tires.

But buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises.
Gadgets don’t consume as much energy as planes and cars, but the damage they cause comes from manufacturing and disposing them. Making new devices requires mining raw materials such as cobalt, often at great human cost. Disposing old gadgets is costly and is fuelling a rash of dangerous battery fires in trucks and recycling centres.

And according to Apple, of all the carbon emissions its products add to the earth over their life span, 70% comes just from manufacturing. That means every time you buy a new gadget like a laptop, you’re adding hundreds of more pounds of carbon into the sky before you even switch it on.

But even if you wanted buy long-lasting devices, it’s often impossible to tell when any product’s battery might die. Of course, devices fail for many reasons, but dead batteries are the death clock that’s built in.
That’s why I spent six weeks pushing some of the world’s largest corporations to find these basic facts about some of our favourite gadgets:
• First, how many recharges — or, “cycles” — can the product’s battery take until its capacity drops to 80%? “After that, they are defined as dead,” because capacity starts to drop precipitously, explains Bas Flipsen, a lecturer in industrial design engineering at the Delft University of Technology.
• Second, when that inevitable day comes, what — if anything — can a consumer do to replace their battery?

Only three companies — Nintendo, e-bike maker VanMoof and Apple (in part) — disclosed these battery details on their websites. Nearly half of the companies I contacted, including Sony, Dyson, Logitech, Google-owned Fitbit, Amazon, Therabody and Samsung-owned JBL refused to answer or just ignored my specific questions.

None of this should be a secret.

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It’s a reasonable point. And at least he isn’t insisting that there shouldn’t be sealed batteries. That ship long ago sailed: people have shown their preference very clearly.
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Can bacteria eat plastic? Hunt is on for mutants to devour waste on an industrial scale • The Times

Tom Whipple:

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No one will ever know quite how it happened, or exactly when. But here is one plausible explanation for how bacteria in a Japanese recycling plant started eating plastic. Each day, plastic bottles piled up in the plant in Osaka, ready to be filtered, separated, recycled and reused. A few bacteria lived among this casually tossed detritus, surviving mainly on the sugary remnants of fizzy drinks left sloshing around in the bottles. It was an energy-poor environment — but the strange thing is, there was energy all around waiting to be unlocked.

It had taken energy to make those plastic bottles and this remained within their chemical bonds. Nature, though, had no way of unlocking it. How could it? In the span of evolutionary time, plastic has only just been invented.

The great tragedy of plastic is that this wonder material is destined to go brittle, fragment, degrade and become useless, but never decompose.

Except, on one ordinary day, in this one ordinary place in Japan, one piece of plastic did decompose. A bacterium had reproduced with a slight mutation, meaning the chemical tools its offspring used to eat things behaved slightly differently.

…PET, of which most plastic bottles are made, has a particular kind of bond between its monomers that can be cut using a specialised enzyme. There are other plastics, though — 80% of them, in fact — that have other, tougher, bonds that remain impervious, which need their own enzymes.

Even if we find the tyrannosaurus rex of PET, we need more plastic predators. Scientists are increasingly confident, however, that they are out there. To find a plastic-chomping bacterium once could be sheer luck. To find one twice? That’s different.

Other enzymes — better enzymes still — must be out there, and across the world, people are looking. They are burying plastics in soil, swabbing in the springs of Yellowstone, sieving the detritus of recycling plants, searching through the genomes of known species.

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Death from above, printed at home: Ukrainians deploy DIY weapons against Russian troops • Yahoo News

Michael Weiss and James Rushton:

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The three Russian soldiers, filmed from a weaponized Ukrainian drone from above, scramble into what looked like a worn-down sedan somewhere near the city of Kharkiv. Their position had already been struck earlier by another drone and they were trying to evacuate an injured comrade. Just then, a small metal projectile about the size of a soda can descends on them. It has been outfitted with an incongruous white fin. It sails through the air, slipping right through the aperture in the car’s roof, detonating on impact. One soldier is still able-bodied enough to sprint away, although the same can’t be said for his co-passengers. As smoke billows from the top, the vehicle careers out of control, grinding to a stop.

The drone’s camera footage shows a Russian soldier through the sunroof. Another is crawling on the ground. Though the concussive force of the blast didn’t kill these men instantly, the numerous lacerations caused by the mortar’s shrapnel may yet prove deadly.

The video ends.

“We have thousands of volunteers in Ukraine hoping to say ‘hi’ to Russian occupiers in this way,” Yuri Vlasyuk said admiringly of his own team’s work. The soft-spoken 46-year-old explained to Yahoo News at a cafe in Kyiv that the white fin on the bomb, which gave it enough aerodynamic stability to perfectly meet its target, was 3D-printed by a Ukrainian civilian at home. Although it was dropped by an operator of Ukraine’s 92 Mechanized Brigade, the manufacturer received his own digital trophy.

“The volunteers that print these for the drones get a video showing them being put to good use,” Vlasyuk said with a grin. He then pulled up other videos posted to Facebook and Twitter showing grenades and mortars with 3D-printed fins hitting columns of unsuspecting Russian troops, as well as ones displaying Ukrainian hands packing their metal tubes with nails.

Vlasyuk self-effacingly described himself as a “just a guy who knows some cool people.” In reality, his cohort is an organic network of tinkerers — engineers, electricians, programmers and 3D printers — who’ve been helping their military wage a grassroots campaign against Russian invaders.

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This is a different war from any previous in so many ways. 3D printing. Video. Citizen participation (though Iraq had that, we just didn’t see it that way). And for so many watching on social media, real death.
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The sublime Danielle Steel: for the love of supermarket schlock • LA Review of Books

Dan Sinykin:

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Something unsettling has happened to Steel. For the first couple decades, she published one or two novels most years. From 1997 through 2014, she plateaued at a steady three. In 2015, she ticked up to four. Then, in 2016, an alarming six. She’s done six or seven annually since. That’s a novel every 50 days or so for a woman now 74 years old.

“I’ve reacted with amazement, shock, and outrage when people have asked me in my fan mail, who writes my books,” Steel wrote in a blog post in 2012, when she was working at a much more reasonable pace. “WHO writes my BOOKS??? Are you kidding? Who do you think writes my books, as I hover over my typewriter for weeks at a time, working on a first draft, with unbrushed hair, in an ancient nightgown, with every inch of my body aching after typing 20 or 22 hours a day […]” She enumerates the bodily horrors of such a regimen: bleeding fingers, popped veins in her hands, and, of course, an aching back. Nevertheless, she “would never just hand off an outline for someone else to write.”

More than an insane sleep schedule makes her productivity possible. As of 2012, she employed three assistants — Heather, Allee, and Alex — who protected her from paparazzi, fielded her phone calls, and talked with “lawyers, bankers, plumbers,” handling all her business. They fed her, too, given that she doesn’t want “to stop and eat anything complicated” when she’s writing. (“I have terrible eating habits, and in my early days for some reason lived on a writing diet of liverwurst and Oreo Cookies, which became the subject of many jokes.”) I presume this setup persists. She has a researcher on retainer, Nancy Eisenbarth, who supplies specificity, past and present: “I drive her insane, calling her at 3 am, or sending her emails, needing to know what floor something is on, how many people died in a famous fire, what is the decor of a certain restaurant, or a detail about a unit of the French Resistance in WW2.” One of their most ambitious endeavors resulted in the 500-page historical romance set during the Russian Revolution, Zoya.

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You didn’t care about pulpish fiction writer Danielle Steel? But now you are. Or should be.
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Diving into digital ephemera: identifying defunct URLs in the web archives • The Signal

Olivia Meehan worked on the web archiving team at the US Library of Congress, and decided to see how well online archives of the papal transition (no, not that sort) in 2005 had survived:

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Based on the results I have so far and conversations I’ve had with other web archivists, the lifecycle of websites is unpredictable to the extent that accurately tracking the status of a site inherently requires nuance, time, and attention – which is difficult to maintain at scale. This data is valuable, however, and is worth pursuing when possible . Using a sample selection of URLs from larger collections could make this more manageable than comprehensive reviews.

Of the content originally captured in the Papal Transition 2005 Collection, 41% is now offline. Without the archived pages, the information, perspectives, and experiences expressed on those websites would potentially be lost forever. They include blogs, personal websites, individually-maintained web portals, and annotated bibliographies. They frequently represent small voices and unique perspectives that may be overlooked or under-represented by large online publications with the resources to maintain legacy pages and articles.

The internet is impermanent in a way that is difficult to quantify. The constant creation of new information obscures what is routinely deleted, overwritten, and lost. While the scope of this project is small within the context of the wider internet, and even within the context of the Library’s Web Archive collections as a whole, I hope that it effectively demonstrates the value of web archives in preserving snapshots of the online world as it moves and changes at a record pace.

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Good argument for throwing a few spare bucks over to the Internet Archive (and hoping that it won’t prolong its quixotic battle about lending ebooks from the pandemic).
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This is the future climate hawks want to see • BusinessGreen Blog Post

James Murray:

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No country is even close to getting every part of the net zero transition right yet, no matter how often the UK government insists it is world leading. But there is a fascinating thought experiment to be had imagining what an economy would look like right now if it took the best part of different countries’ net zero strategies.

An economy that boasted the UK’s offshore wind industry and planned zero carbon industrial hubs, France’s nuclear plants, Denmark’s heat pumps, Norway’s EV adoption rates, China’s clean tech manufacturing and epic renewables projects, India’s solar boom, Germany’s passivhaus buildings, the Netherland’s cycling networks, South Africa’s Just Transition Partnership, Japan’s levels of energy efficiency, Costa Rica’s forest protection, the EU’s carbon market, Australia’s rooftop solar industry, Iceland’s direct air capture plant, and Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem, would be well on its way to net zero already.

Such an economy would be more productive, more competitive, and less exposed to volatile fossil fuel prices than its peers. It would play a leading role in the 21st century, shape the future of human civilisation, and push back against the march of petrostate authoritarians. It would be happier and healthier too. Done right, the public support would be overwhelming.

This is the future climate hawks want to see. It is mad they have to fight for it.

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(“Climate hawks” being those who aggressively want action on the climate crisis, as opposed to climate doves who vaguely hope things will come together.)

Related: James O’Malley on how we shouldn’t expect the energy crisis to finish any time soon. Remember how people thought, in March 2020, that the pandemic would be done by September 2020? Like that.
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Hidden Menace: massive methane leaks speed up climate change • AP News

Michael Biesecker and Helen Wieffering:

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To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered throughout the oil-rich Permian Basin.

What’s not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, primarily methane, billowing from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky.

The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas Inc., was observed releasing an estimated 870 kilograms of methane – an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere each hour. That’s the equivalent impact on the climate of burning seven tanker trucks full of gasoline every day.

But Mako’s outsized emissions aren’t illegal, or even regulated. And it was only one of 533 methane “super emitters” detected during a 2021 aerial survey of the Permian conducted by Carbon Mapper, a partnership of university researchers and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The group documented massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the bottom of a shallow sea. Hundreds of those sites were seen spewing the gas over and over again. Ongoing leaks, gushers, going unfixed.

…Carbon Mapper identified the spewing sites only by their GPS coordinates. The Associated Press took the coordinates of the 533 “super-emitting” sites and cross-referenced them with state drilling permits, air quality permits, pipeline maps, land records and other public documents to piece together the corporations most likely responsible.

Just 10 companies owned at least 164 of those sites, according to an AP analysis of Carbon Mapper’s data. West Texas Gas owned 11.

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And this is only for the US. It could be a fantastic resource if it were extended worldwide (Carbon Mapper is going to start using satellites to provide more rapid data) so we could identify hotspots. It can be a tossup whether to burn the methane: traps 80x more heat than CO2 over 20 years, 25x over 100 years. So how long do you think we have? (It seems worthwhile burning the methane.)
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The women calling out Apple’s handling of misconduct claims • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Patrick McGee:

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In 2018, CEO Tim Cook spoke of the company’s commitment to “helping more women assume leadership roles across the tech sector and beyond”, launching an initiative to train and mentor female entrepreneurs building apps. In the company’s internal 31-page onboarding document called “Apple Start”, the iPhone maker holds itself to a high standard, telling new employees about the “Apple difference”, how it fosters teamwork and innovation, and “does things differently”.

Yet the stories shared by women at Apple indicate the world’s largest company is falling short in building the culture it aspires to. The accounts collected by the FT paint a portrait of a People [Human Resources, aka HR] team that acts less like a safe place for employees to go with complaints and more like a risk mitigation unit that protects bad managers. In six cases, women said speaking up had cast them as bad team members and resulted in their departure. In three instances, Apple offered multiple months of salary in exchange for not disparaging the company or being held liable.

In response to the FT’s findings, Apple said in a statement it works hard to thoroughly investigate all misconduct allegations, and that it strives to create “an environment where employees feel comfortable reporting any issues”. 

The company acknowledged it had not always met those ambitions. “There are some accounts raised that do not reflect our intentions or our policies and we should have handled them differently, including certain exchanges reported in this story,” Apple said. “As a result, we will make changes to our training and processes.” It declined to comment on specific cases “out of respect for the privacy of individuals involved”.

Insiders say it’s a matter of priorities. Apple “is so singularly obsessed about making the best products, that there are blinders to everything else”, says Chris Deaver, an HR business partner at Apple from 2015 to 2019. “This is an engineering-led organisation. It can be a bit logos-heavy. A bit detached from emotions.”

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Is it internal Apple culture, or is it just male culture? One can’t deny the stories, and even if they’re only isolated incidents, it’s still a problem for those women. And HR departments are the same the world over: they’re not there to change the corporate culture, they’re there to protect it.
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Damien Hirst confesses he’s been ‘all over the fucking shop’ about NFTs as he plans to burn 4,851 physical works • The Art Newspaper

Anny Shaw:

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If, like us, you find NFTs baffling, fear not. They also have Damien Hirst’s head in a spin.

One year ago, the artist launched a project in which the buyers of 10,000 NFTs were forced to choose between keeping the digital token (priced at $2,000 each) or swapping it for a corresponding work on paper. Now the jury is in: 5,149 people have traded their NFT for an enamel dot painting, meaning 4,851 NFTs remain in existence. The physical works that were not claimed will now be burned by the artist.

Revealing that he kept 1,000 NFTs for himself, Hirst has confessed on Twitter that he has “been all over the f****** shop with my decision making, trying to work out what I should do”.

In the beginning, Hirst says he was adamant that he would “chose all physical”, or “most physical”. Then he flip-flopped to thinking he would go half and half. “Then I felt I had to keep all my 1,000 as NFTs and… then all paper again and round and round I’ve gone, head in a spin.”

Despite the onset of “crypto winter”, but perhaps unsurprisingly given that The Currency project is backed by the technology company Heni, Hirst ultimately stuck to NFTs. He says: “I decided I need to show my 100% support and confidence in the NFT world (even though it means I will have to destroy the corresponding 1,000 physical artworks). Eeeeeek! I still don’t know what I’m doing.”

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So if I read this correctly, there were 11,000 physical works (the 10,000 plus the 1,000 Hirst kept), but now there will only be 6,149 of them. I’d say that means the physical work has at least doubled in value, while the NFTs, which are attached to nothing that can be valued, haven’t. (If the figure is originally 10,000 and now just 5,149, the value has surely doubled.) That suggests the physical purchasers are the smart ones. Here’s the original story in March 2021, which makes less than zero sense. (Thanks Alan for the link.)
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Earth sets new record for shortest day • Time And Date

Graham Jones and Konstantin Bikos:

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The narrow, jagged spikes in the chart are a result of the Moon’s monthly orbit around Earth. The longer, smoother waves—with the shortest days coming in or around July each year—are related to movements in Earth’s atmosphere.

What is causing the current downward trend in the length of the shortest day? It could be related to processes in Earth’s inner or outer layers, oceans, tides, or even climate. Scientists are not sure, and struggle to make predictions about the length of day more than a year ahead. But there are tentative ideas.

At next week’s annual meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (presentation SE05_A009), Leonid Zotov—together with his colleagues Christian Bizouard and Nikolay Sidorenkov—will suggest the current decrease in the length of day could have some relation to the ‘Chandler wobble’.

Chandler wobble is the name given to a small, irregular movement of Earth’s geographical poles across the surface of the globe.

“The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about three to four meters at Earth’s surface,” Dr Zotov told timeanddate, “but from 2017 to 2020 it disappeared.”

If Earth’s fast rotation continues, it could lead to the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second.

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[Chandler from Friends voice:] Could the Earth be any more puzzling?

Also: “Chandler wobble”?

via GIPHY

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Textbooks are expensive, but also resaleable. Now Pearson thinks NFTs can somehow solve the problem. Do you? CC-licensed photo by Patrick 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. Hypertextual. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Nuclear power plants could stay open, says Germany • WSJ

Bojan Pancevski and Georgi Kantchev:

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said for the first time that his government could postpone the planned closure of its remaining nuclear reactors, as he criticized a decision by Russia to constrain gas flows to Germany—a move that could deal a severe blow to Europe’s largest economy.

Last month, Russia shut down for maintenance its giant Nord Stream pipeline, which connects Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea and is operated by Russian state-owned energy producer Gazprom PJSC.

After the maintenance ended, Gazprom restored the flow, but only to 40% of the pipeline’s capacity. It has since cut that to 20%, saying it couldn’t maintain normal flow without a turbine that had been undergoing maintenance in Canada. On Wednesday, Mr. Scholz rejected that explanation, saying Russia refused to take delivery of the turbine.

The looming gas shortage has forced the government to trigger emergency measures, raising the specter of gas rationing over the winter that could force factories to shut down and push Europe’s powerhouse economy into a recession.

On Tuesday, the chancellor broke with a longstanding policy and said for the first time that it “could make sense” to keep Germany’s last three nuclear reactors online. They are due to be shut down in December as part of the country’s transition to renewable energy.

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A “transition to renewable energy” that involves opening new coal-fired power stations. It’s ridiculous, and the Greens who 20 years ago pushed to close them should hang their heads in shame.

Alternate headline: Germany re-engages with reality.
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‘Our fields shouldn’t be full of solar panels’: Truss vows to crackdown on renewables development • BusinessGreen News

Cecilia Keating:

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Conservative leadership candidate Liz Truss has fuelled concerns the UK’s onshore renewables sector could face further barriers to development in the coming weeks, after the frontrunner to become the next Prime Minister promised to “change the rules” to ensure farming is prioritised over new solar projects.

Speaking at Conservative leadership husting held [on Monday] in Exeter, the Truss also outlined her support for domestic fossil fuel extraction, promising to “exploit all the gas in the North Sea”, and reiterated her pledge to suspend ‘green levies’ on energy bills, arguing the proposed reforms would bolster domestic energy supplies and ease the cost-of-living crisis for households.

In her address to attendees at the event, the Foreign Secretary said she would allow fracking in locations “where communities supported it” and back the maximum extraction of the UK’s offshore fossil gas resources.

“I will also make sure we exploit all of the gas in the North Sea and make sure we use that to bolster our domestic energy supply,” she said. “I’ll move forward faster with nuclear, including major nuclear stations but also small modular reactors which are produced in Derby and a major a major opportunity for our country as well.”

Commercial small modular reactors do not currently exist, although the government is providing significant financial support for the nascent sector in the hope that it could play a role in the transition to a net zero emission energy system.

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These people are idiots. They think there will be magical technological solutions (as they thought would happen for Northern Ireland’s trade barrier with the UK/Europe; didn’t happen). And they value a field more highly than future generations.
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California’s megadrought is worse than you think • E&E News

Anne C. Mulkern:

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Nearly three-quarters of California is in either extreme or exceptional drought, considered worse than severe, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. It’s so bad that scientists say the ongoing drought in the western United States marks the region’s driest 22-year stretch in more than 1,200 years.

The conditions have affected a broad swath of regions and industries. California wells are going dry. Farmers are either paying a premium for water or letting their fields sit empty. And there is growing concern that water exports from the Colorado River could come to a halt.

“We are dealing with a changed climate in California that demands we reimagine not just how we use water, but how we capture, store and distribute it throughout the state,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week as he addressed local water leaders.

Scientists pin a large share of the blame for the megadrought on climate change. UCLA climate scientist Park Williams, whose recent work flagged the ongoing Western drought as a historical anomaly, said about 40% of its severity is due to climate change. The study looked at California, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and southwest Montana.

“The turn-of-the-twenty-first-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory in terms of severity or duration without” human-caused climate change, the study said.

But others are saying elected officials such as Newsom aren’t doing enough to respond to the historic conditions. Some argue the state needs to impose mandatory cutbacks, limits on commercial water use and more storage options.

Andrew Fahlund, senior program officer at the Water Foundation, a California nonprofit, said it would have been helpful to take steps to conserve water “earlier in the drought cycle.” But “it is a little too late to do that this time around,” he said.

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Equifax sent lenders inaccurate credit scores on millions of consumers • WSJ

Andrew Ackerman and AnnaMaria Andriotis:

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Equifax provided inaccurate credit scores on millions of U.S. consumers seeking loans during a three-week period earlier this year, according to bank executives and others familiar with the errors.

Equifax sent the erroneous scores on people applying for auto loans, mortgages and credit cards to banks and nonbank lenders big and small—including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Ally Financial Inc., the people said. The scores were sometimes off by 20 points or more in either direction, the people said, enough to alter the interest rates consumers were offered or to result in their applications being rejected altogether.

The inaccurate scores were sent from mid March through early April, the people said. The company began disclosing the errors to lenders in May, they said.

Equifax said it has since fixed the error, which the company described as a “technology coding issue.” The glitch didn’t alter the information in consumers’ credit reports, the company said.

…The percentage of incorrect scores provided to lenders varied, the people said. At one big bank, for example, 18% of applicants during the three-week period had incorrect scores, with an average swing of 8 points, one of the people said.

Equifax told one large auto lender that about 10% of applicants during the three-week period had inaccurate scores, according to a person familiar with the matter. Of those, several thousand saw a change of 25 points or more on their credit score, the person said. In a small number of cases, applicants went from having no credit score at all to a score in the 700s—or vice versa, the person said.

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One thing Equifax is noticeably not doing in this story: offering to make good where it screwed up. Equifax, you might recall, is the company that was hacked on a colossal scale back in 2017 because it had failed to make a crucial security patch. The hackers were inside for 76 days. Lawsuits are ongoing.

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Pearson says NFT textbooks will let it profit off secondhand sales • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Textbook publisher Pearson suggests blockchain tech could let it take a cut of secondary textbook sales, capturing a section of the book market that’s so far escaped it. As quoted by Bloomberg, Pearson CEO Andy Bird believes non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, could help publishers make money off textbook resales, although he stopped short of describing concrete plans.

“In the analog world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale,” said Bird after the company announced its latest quarterly earnings this week. “The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life.” Bloomberg suggests this would mean letting buyers resell ebooks, something that’s so far been a rarity in the publishing world.

It’s not clear how, when, or if NFTs might show up in Pearson’s catalog. But they could mark a new stage in a long-standing publishing war. Thanks to legal concepts like the first-sale doctrine, physical book buyers typically own the media they’ve purchased outright, and they’re allowed to sell it without the original publishers making money. But ebooks have complicated that calculus. Any digital transfer creates a new “copy” of the work, and third-party secondhand ebook sales (along with other secondhand digital media sales) have faced serious legal challenges as a result.

That’s historically given physical books a built-in advantage for students, who can buy or sell them secondhand to defray their often extraordinary upfront costs — without the publishers taking any of that money. Allowing ebook resales could make that advantage less dramatic.

As with many mainstream crypto applications, NFTs don’t bring an obvious technical innovation to this question.

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Not surprised that there weren’t concrete plans. I bet a lot of people would be delighted if Pearson tried to attach NFTs to its textbooks, since it’s hard to see that being any obstacle to copying, or resale of a physical object.
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Inside a mechanical watch • Bartosz Ciechanowski

Bartosz Ciechanowski:

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What you see here is known as the movement – the inner part of a mechanical watch that’s usually enclosed in a metal case. In this article I’m focusing on a watch movement itself, since beautiful watch cases merely hide the intricate mechanisms which are the real stars of the show.

The entire watch movement has a lot of parts, and in this blog post I’ll explain the purpose of each one. The world of watchmaking is jargon-heavy, so many of the components may have unfamiliar names, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to remember them – the names and parts will be color-coded for easy reference.

In a functioning watch many parts are in constant motion. By default all animations in this article are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or if you want to save power, you can globally pause all the following demonstrations.

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I’ve heard this article referred to a couple of times, but hadn’t actually clicked through to it before. But since we’ve been pondering the attraction of mechanical watches, this seems apposite. (Thanks Giuseppe for the link.)

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I was on TikTok for 30 days: it is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy • UX Collective

Luiza Jarovsky:

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Videos must be short, fast, quickly awe-inspiring and preferably using soundtracks, filters, effects, descriptions, tags and content that are currently trending in the app. To thrive on TikTok, you must be fixated on it. You must use it frequently to know what is trending on the app, otherwise you will lose the timing — and timing is everything. There is a popular dance everybody else is doing? Stop what you are doing, get dressed, get your phone in the vertical position and start recording now. The path to TikTok success is joining micro-trends and mimicking successful videos highlighting your personal touch, in a bandwagon-compulsion style. If you are a teenager and you missed a trend, you lost a valuable opportunity of online popularity and social validation among your peers.

On this topic, teenagers have stated that their social lives currently revolve around TikTok: new trends, dances, viral videos, emerging stars, who is popular over there and who is not, what is cool and what is not. The power of TikTok’s algorithm over today’s youth is inconceivable. Getting together is an opportunity to attempt a TikTok viral, so get your phones ready.

Regarding the content available on TikTok: it is known that creators have 3 seconds to enchant the viewer, otherwise their video will be thrown into TikTok’s forgetfulness blackhole. In order to captivate in 3 seconds, the content must essentially be outstanding: either shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary, performing admirable abilities, showing exposed bodies and so on. There is no room for ordinariness.

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Back in the days when writing stuff down at length was a significant challenge, people composed and memorised very long oral poems – Homer did well on this front. Now we can capture video at any time, we need to capture attention within three heartbeats. An observation, in passing.
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Michael Saylor steps down as MicroStrategy CEO, company takes $917m charge on bitcoin • Yahoo Finance

David Hollerith:

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MicroStrategy announced on Tuesday its founder and CEO Michael Saylor will step down from the top job and take a new post as executive chairman, focused on the company’s bitcoin strategy.

Phong Le, the company’s president, will take over in the CEO role.

MicroStrategy reported quarterly results that were light of Wall Street estimates on Tuesday, with revenue coming at $122.1m against expectations for $126m. Losses in the quarter totaled $918.1m, with $917.8m attributable to the company’s bitcoin holdings.

In a statement, MicroStrategy said Saylor will focus primarily on, “innovation and long-term corporate strategy, while continuing to provide oversight of the Company’s bitcoin acquisition strategy.”

“As Executive Chairman I will be able to focus more on our bitcoin acquisition strategy and related bitcoin advocacy initiatives, while Phong will be empowered as CEO to manage overall corporate operations,” Saylor said in a statement.

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OK, but what are Microstrategy’s corporate operations? What does it do? I’ve never seen an explanation, including in this story. The FT calls it a “habitually unprofitable software shop”: apparently it sells enterprise business intelligence application software. Employees seem to like it. It was founded in 1989.

Somehow it acquired a huge cash pile, Saylor (who owns 70% of the shares – don’t think he’s going away) decided bitcoin was a one-way bet, and, well, here we are.
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The changing face of compute • Digits to Dollars

Jay Greenberg:

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Once upon a time chip companies all specialized on designing one type of chip: Intel made CPUs; Qualcomm made modems; Nvidia made GPUs; Broadcom (pre-Avago) made networking chips. That age is all over. The future of semis will be designing ever more specific chips for ever more specific uses. This change will take many years to play out, but the transition has already begun. This is going to upend the semis industry to the same degree that consolidation over the past 20 years has.

There are many causes of this. This simplest is to just say Moore’s Law is slowing, so everyone needs to find a new business model. But that really does not explain much, so let’s unpack it.

…Once upon a time, data centers were essentially warehouses full of CPUs. Now they have to house GPUs, AI accelerators, funky networking loads and a bunch of FPGAs too. This is often called heterogenous compute, and it the opposite of that past CPU uniformity.

Nor are these changes only happening in data centers. The whole notion of “Edge Compute” looks increasingly to be an exercise in custom and semi-custom silicon popping up in all kinds of places – cars, factories and smart cities – to name just a few.

Ultimately, the major chip companies are going to have to decide how to address these changes. Building custom chips is not a great business, but designing semi-custom chips is full of risks not least picking the right designs, supporting them and hoping they land on target. Established companies are already starting to position themselves for this, and for the first time in a decade the door for start-ups is starting to open a crack.

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Which suggests problems for Intel. Which brings us to…
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Intel? They are who we thought they were • Share Donors

Doug (mule):

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Now they [Intel] expect PCs to be down 10% in volume, which is more in-line with market forecasts, compared to the clearly above market forecast last quarter. The part I don’t buy is that Q4 will magically start to improve inventory. I acknowledge the seasonal impacts, but we aren’t even firmly in a recession. Continuing to push out hopes that things turn around very specifically in Q4 feels contrived to me, especially when the second half of the year’s macro results could be much worse than right now. Intel moved down numbers, but this is not a kitchen sink. That’s the worrying part. Oh, speaking of which, how the hell did they not preannounce this?

They didn’t answer that question (weird), and then they also talked about other execution issues that they have been facing, namely Sapphire Rapids [a new CPU] volume delay. Pat [Gelsinger, the new Intel CEO] mentioned execution issues multiple times, and the proof is in the pudding; they are not executing well.

The infamously broken culture continues to hurt, and Pat saying that employees are engaged via surveys is not exactly assuaging my fears. In fact, given their GAAP net loss (maybe one of the few in the company’s history), the variable bonuses that engineers are receiving are one the lowest, if not the lowest, payouts in the company’s storied history. How will you turn around a culture when you keep losing and everyone’s making less money? Talk about negative momentum.

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I hadn’t noticed, but Intel had an absolutely terrible quarter, with revenues and profits down, and longtime rival AMD passing it in market cap. Given that AMD doesn’t actually make chips, just designs them, that means that all of Intel’s multi-billion-dollar foundries are being written off as worthless by the market.

This is a very big shift. Intel has permanently lost a top-end customer (Apple) that bought about 5-10% of premium processors. The PC market is shrinking. Its rival is pulling ahead. Intel’s in a dive, and Gelsinger has a hell of a job to pull it out.
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Apple plans to delay launch of iPadOS 16 update by about a month • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. expects to delay its next major iPad software update by about a month, taking the unusual step of not releasing it at the same time as the new iPhone software, according to people with knowledge of the matter. 

For the last several years, the tech giant has released major iPad and iPhone software updates, known as iPadOS and iOS, at the same time in September. This time around, Apple plans to put out iOS 16 during the usual period but not launch iPadOS 16 until October, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. 

The delay of the software is due, at least in part, to an ambitious effort to overhaul the iPad’s multitasking capabilities. The update includes a feature called Stage Manager that lets users operate several tasks at the same time, resize windows and bounce between different clusters of apps.

During beta testing, the system has drawn criticism from some developers and users for its bugs, a confusing interface and lack of compatibility with most iPads.

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I’ve been trying iPad OS 16 on an older (2018?) iPad Pro, and it seems fine to me, but I’m not trying Stage Manager. (Doesn’t run on that model.) But a delay does mean that Apple is actually giving it the attention and focus it deserves as a separate platform.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified