Mosquitoes are attracted to a specific chemical that humans exude – but different people give off more, making them tasty targets for the bloodsuckers. CC-licensed photo by John Tann 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.

Holiday! I’m having one, because the world has used up its available supply of news in the past couple of weeks, and needs replenishing. So The Overspill will be on a break for three weeks: back on Monday 14 November.

There’s another post coming at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. Bite me. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Battle with bots prompts mass purge of Amazon, Apple employee accounts on LinkedIn • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several dozen large organizations, and last week he noticed that two of them had far fewer people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours previously.

Pinho’s screenshot below shows the daily count of employees as displayed on Amazon’s LinkedIn homepage. Pinho said his scraper shows that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33% drop.

…In late September 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned about the proliferation of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world’s largest corporations. A follow-up story on Oct. 5 showed how the phony profile problem has affected virtually all executive roles at corporations, and how these fake profiles are creating an identity crisis for the businesses networking site and the companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees.

A day after that second story ran, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a recruiter who noticed the number of LinkedIn profiles that claimed virtually any role in network security had dropped seven% overnight. LinkedIn declined to comment about that earlier account purge, saying only that, “We’re constantly working at taking down fake accounts.”

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When you think about it, of course this was going to be LinkedIn’s moderation problem. It just happens out of the light, because who realises what’s going on at LinkedIn?
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Copilot: the next stage in the AI copyright wars? • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

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Copilot is an AI tool that writes code based on prompts. The program has been trained on the corpus of code submitted to the open source software repository Github, and it uses OpenAI’s Codex.

Almost from the start, Copilot has proven to be controversial, some people complained that this was a violation of open source principles (and potentially infringing copyright), yet it appears to be widely used by some developers. According to Github the tool has been used by 1.2 million users in a period of 12 months.

…While it may be difficult to find infringement in [Copilot] outputs, the question of inputs is really where things are starting to heat up. The most interesting legal debate is happening with the data used to train machine learning models. This has been a large part of the ongoing debate with art models (discussed here), but the first shot in the future of litigation may very well involve Copilot.

Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick has been getting a lot of attention when he announced that he was starting an investigation into Copilot with the intention of eventually starting a class-action lawsuit against Github and their parent company Microsoft.

…There is also a very strong ethical element to the complaint. Open source software communities are there to share code, but Copilot takes that code and closes it in a walled garden that contributes nothing to the community.

This is probably the biggest potential challenge to AI that we have witnessed yet, and its reach cannot be underestimated. I have been getting a few questions about this: is Butterick right?

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Could be an important case, but with US copyright laws tending to be looser than British ones it feels like this is unlikely to go against Microsoft. The UK already allows data mining for training ML, and so does the EU.
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Some people really are mosquito magnets, and they’re stuck that way • Scientific American

Daniel Leonard:

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In a new paper published on October 18 in the journal Cell, researchers suggest that certain body odours are the deciding factor. Every person has a unique scent profile made up of different chemical compounds, and the researchers found that mosquitoes were most drawn to people whose skin produces high levels of carboxylic acids. Additionally, the researchers found that peoples’ attractiveness to mosquitoes remained steady over time, regardless of changes in diet or grooming habits.

“The question of why some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others—that’s the question that everybody asks you,” says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist and mosquito expert at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rockefeller University. “My mother, my sister, people in the street, my colleagues—everybody wants to know.” That public interest is what drove Vosshall and her colleagues to design this study, she says.

…Vosshall and her colleagues gathered 64 participants and had them wear nylon stockings on their arms. After six hours, the nylons were imbued with each person’s unique smell. “Those nylons would not have a smell to me or, I think, to anyone really,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a senior scientist at the biotech company Kingdom Supercultures and lead author of this new study, which she conducted while at Rockefeller. Still, the stockings were certainly odorous enough to entice mosquitoes.

The researchers cut the nylons into pieces and placed two (from different participants) into a closed container housing female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Did they migrate to subject number one’s sample en masse or prefer the scent of subject number two’s? Or were both equally appealing? The researchers continued these head-to-head battles over several months, Vosshall says, collecting new samples from the participants as needed. When the tournament was over, the team had clear proof that some people were more attractive than others.

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I’ve lived in multiple tropical countries, and it was always our belief that mosquitoes preferred particular people’s scent. Anyhow, as I’m going to be holidaying somewhere with mosquitoes, this is only mildly encouraging news.
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Adobe plays catch-up with Project Blink, an AI-powered video editor • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Wednesday, Adobe announced Project Blink, an AI-powered web app that can recognize objects, people, sounds, and words spoken in videos to help edit them faster. It uses text editing to make the process of editing a video similar to using a word processor, Adobe claims.

Adobe debuted Project Blink during a “sneaks” session at its Adobe MAX conference, according to CNET. The firm also released a demonstration video that depicts editing video by editing a text transcription of words spoken during the video. “Just upload your video, and our AI engine will figure out what happened,” it says.

Adobe claims that Project Blink can search a video for specific people, objects, or feelings—or locate sections where people are laughing or singing. Additionally, Adobe says you’ll be able to delete silent sections or remove filler words like “ums” in text, with changes automatically reflected in the video.

Some of Project Blink’s editing capabilities strongly resemble existing AI-powered video editors such as Runway, which we reported on last month, and Descript, which can edit videos based on written transcripts similar to a word processing document. It’s been a busy year for deep learning AI applications, including text-to-image and text-to-video products that have turned assumptions about creative content generation on their head. All that AI activity has prompted some to wonder how Adobe would respond, and now we’re seeing some reaction from the creative app giant.

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Microsoft and Adobe. Everyone’s doing it.
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These mini wind generators with no spinning blades can power homes and buildings • Singularity Hub

Vanessa Bates Ramirez:

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In 2021, wind turbines generated more than 9% of US utility-scale electricity. The majority of the turbines making up that figure are the horizontal-axis variety (a rotor mounted at the top of a pole, blades twirling windmill-style). But wind energy isn’t limited to this classic design. There are also small vertical-axis turbines; large offshore vertical-axis turbines; and now, rooftop wind generators that aren’t really turbines and don’t have an axis at all, at least not in the traditional sense.

The generators are called Aeromines. Made by Aeromine Technologies, they harness wind and convert it to energy differently than conventional turbines. The latter use wind to turn blades attached to a rotor, and the spinning rotor powers a generator. Aeromines don’t have rotors or blades; instead, they have two airfoils or “wings” shaped like spoilers, angled towards each other on either side of a pole.

The generators sit on the edge of a building’s roof, taking advantage of the aerodynamic effect created by the wall below. As wind hits the airfoils, it creates a low pressure zone that sucks air through perforations and turns a propeller at the bottom of the unit. The spinning propeller is connected to a generator, which can be hooked up to a battery or connect directly to the building to provide electricity.

…The average US household uses about 9,000 kWh of electricity each year, which requires a 6.6 kW array of solar panels (about 21 standard panels). That means one Aeromine could meet the needs of an energy-conserving home, and two would be more than enough for an energy-gobbling home.

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This link suggests that Aeromines generate 50% more energy per dollar spent than solar panels, which sounds promising. But a cursory glance suggests they need a flat roof, which not that many domestic houses in the UK (not many domestic houses generally?) have.
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Three fundamental problems still plaguing Meta’s Enterprise XR ambitions • Creative Strategies

Oliver Blanchard:

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The first point of friction in Meta’s enterprise metaverse play is the cost of entry of its hardware: Even under the best economic tailwinds, adding $1,500 per head to budget allocations that already include phones, tablets and PCs would be hard to justify, especially when the reason behind the extra spending is an XR headset whose purpose and value for the average employee remain difficult to quantify. Granted, $1,500 per unit isn’t a lot of cash for large orgs so long as the value is there, and we have seen the math work well in niche use cases. But if Meta and Microsoft are setting their sights on mass adoption and scale, either the ROI of that investment will have to be made clear and indisputable, or the pricing will have to come down. Way down.

The second point of friction is the form factor of the hardware itself. As impressive as the Quest 2 Pro’s specs and capabilities are, it still looks and feels more like a deconstructed fighter jet helmet than a pair of AR glasses: Bulbous, wide, on the wrong side of light and comfortable, and not particularly portable. The question almost asks itself: Does anyone really want to wear a cumbersome XR headset at work all day? Probably not, at least not unless you absolutely have to.

…The third point of friction is Meta’s unfortunate dehumanization of collaboration in the metaverse. As cute as it may initially seem to transform coworkers into Wii-themed digital avatars (with or without digital legs) I worry that replacing human faces with digital ones will have a negative emotional and psychological impact on remote workers over time, and we would do well not to overlook or underestimate this potential problem in the making.

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Hard to disagree with, though as he says price isn’t much of a barrier. Companies were happy to lay out thousands of dollars for the first PCs because they saw they might be transformative. Though there’s a fair bit of persuasion to be done here on that.
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MubertAI/Mubert-Text-to-Music: a simple notebook demonstrating prompt-based music generation via Mubert API • Github

Ilya Belikov:

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We’re glad to present you our new Text-to-Music demo interface. Now as a Google Colab, and soon we’ll add this feature as a simple form on our website. This has already gone viral, so the community has questions about how everything works

People ask how generative this music really is. Each time you send a request, our API generates a unique combination of sounds. The probability of repetition is extremely small. Music is not taken from the database of finished tracks, it is created at the time of the request.

How are sounds selected for generation? The input prompt and Mubert API tags are both encoded to latent space vectors of a transformer neural network. Then the closest tags vector is selected for each prompt and corresponding tags are sent to our API for music generation.

All sounds (separate loops for bass, leads etc.) are created by musicians and sound designers, they are not synthesized by any neural network. Our paradigm is “from creators to creators”. We are musicians ourselves and it is important for us that musicians stay in the equation.

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View it on YouTube. It’s quite weird (the prompt “Vladimir Lenin smoking weed with Bob Marley” produces a reggae tune with strange overtones).

Anyhow, another AI-generated content source.
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Damaged cable leaves Shetland cut off from mainland • BBC News

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Communications to Shetland have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged.

Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut. The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents.

Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island.

The Scottish government’s resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added. She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: “There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been.”

MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored.

…The cable that was damaged between Faroe and Shetland last week will be repaired on Saturday, according to Faroese Telecom’s head of infrastructure Páll Vesturbú. He said: “The damage is affecting most of telecom services to Shetland. There are some services still working but we will try to establish more services during the day if that’s possible.

“We expect it will be fishing vessels that damaged the cable but it is very rare that we have two problems at the same time.” MP Alistair Carmichael added that the damage had caused “catastrophic impact”.

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Fishing vessels, one hopes. Or possibly.. Russian submarines?
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Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings NFT ‘experience’ sounds like a nightmare • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

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On Thursday, Warner Bros. announced the impending arrival of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Version) Web3 Movie Experience,” a cumbersomely named rerelease of Peter Jackson’s 2001 film that will live on Eluvio’s branded Content Blockchain. In a press release about their partnership, Eluvio CEO Michelle Munson sang Warner Bros.’ praises for its commitment to NFT projects and said that their partnership is poised to help bring films-as-NFTs to an even bigger audience of consumers.

“Fans of The Lord of the Rings can now acquire, participate, and trade in an epic living media experience that will undoubtedly surprise and delight them,” said Munson. “It’s truly designed for a mass consumer audience, not just Web3 enthusiasts, which is why it should, and does, feel so remarkable and engaging.”

You can already buy and permanently own physical copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and all of Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings films in 4K. But the studio’s banking on a handful of NFT-related features being enough to convince people to buy either the “Mystery” or “Epic” editions of the movie as their first step toward becoming embedded in WB’s Movieverse.

…it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. will really be able to sell people on what sounds very much like a gussied-up, browser-based DVD selection menu masquerading as a collectible item.

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Reasonable points, though I feel that it shouldn’t be impossible to find a person – analyst, cynic, whatever – who would make the point about the uselessness of the “Web3 Movie Experience”.
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Year of the Four Emperors • Wikipedia

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The Year of the Four Emperors, AD 69, was the first civil war of the Roman Empire, during which four emperors ruled in succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.[1] It is considered an important interval, marking the transition from the Julio-Claudians, the first imperial dynasty, to the Flavian dynasty. The period witnessed several rebellions and claimants, with shifting allegiances and widespread turmoil in Rome and the provinces.

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Hmm, can’t think what it was that prompted Overspill reader G to point us to this one. The UK is so far only on its third prime minister (and, OK, second monarch, but cool your jets), though of course the 12 months began in the summer, so plenty of time yet for prime minister No.4 to make an entrance some time in 2023.
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How a secret rent algorithm pushes rents higher • ProPublica

Heather Vogel, Haru Coryne and Ryan Little:

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On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.

“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage’s software in a testimonial video on the company’s website.

The nation’s largest property management firm, Greystar, found that even in one downturn, its buildings using YieldStar “outperformed their markets by 4.8%,” a significant premium above competitors, RealPage said in materials on its website. Greystar uses RealPage’s software to price tens of thousands of apartments.

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Depressing, honestly. Rent income is effectively unearned, yet this is about squeezing money from people doing actual work.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An academic has calculated that sticking with Daylight Savings Time would save people serious money on energy bills. So why don’t we do it? (Picture by Diffusion Bee on the prompt: “clocks going back for daylight savings time”.)

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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not involved in stand-up rows. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning – and raising questions about an innate grammar • The Conversation

Morten Christiansen (prof of psychology, Cornell U) and Pablo Contreras Kallens (PhD student in psych, Cornell U):

»

many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.

GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.

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If Chomsky lives to see his fondest theory overturned, then it will be a moment to savour, given how fabulously wrong he has been about so many things outside his specialist field.
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Quantifying Britain’s moron risk premium • Financial Times

Louis Ashworth:

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Britain has finally got its longed-for exceptionalism in recent weeks, experiencing a yadda yadda yadda (you know the story).

Not a whole lot of value has emerged from the past month’s omnishambles, but one valuable development is the coining of “moron risk premium” — in short, the extra money the UK is paying to borrow because its leaders are a few sandwiches short of a tea party.

TS Lombard’s inimitable Dario Perkins appears to have coined the term, which is now pretty widespread.

Section I: The signs you might have MRP
If you’re just getting to grips with MRP, here’s what we’re talking about. The yield on 30-year gilts has shot up far more quickly than other countries’ equivalent bonds since Liz Truss and the wild bunch took power in early September:

In case you’re worried this focuses unfairly on the time since the author joined Alphaville Truss entered Number 10 (on September 5), here’s a year-to-date view:

As that graph shows more clearly, the UK has a potential partner in Italy, whose own MRP peaked in mid-June as former prime minister Mario Draghi’s leadership fell into crisis.

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A funny-yet-serious piece, as the entire edifice of the government falls to pieces around Truss’s ears. (Free to read.)
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Save energy by not turning clocks back in October, says expert • The Guardian

Rachel Hall:

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Households could save more than £400 a year on energy bills if clocks are not put back at the end of October, according to an expert, who said it would help people with the cost of living crisis and reduce pressure on the National Grid this winter.

Evening energy demand peaks between 5pm and 7pm during winter, when the sun has already set after daylight savings time (DST). If clocks didn’t go back, it would remain light for at least part of this time, reducing carbon emissions and energy demand.

Prof Aoife Foley, a clean energy expert at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “By simply forgoing the winter DST in October, we save energy because it is brighter in the evening during winter, so we reduce commercial and residential electrical demand as people leave work earlier, and go home earlier, meaning less lighting and heating is needed.”

This would help the government tackle the “energy war” in Europe resulting from the Ukraine invasion, she said. “Dependent on weather conditions this winter it is very likely we may need to start rationing energy very seriously to avoid bigger energy issues in December and January when gas reserves start to run low,” she said.

Foley’s calculations suggest that households could save £1.20 a day and more than £400 a year on electricity bills if clocks are not put back at the end of October, although exact amounts depend on tariffs.

There has long been debate over whether to scrap DST, which was introduced in 1916 to reduce energy demand during the war by prolonging evening daylight in summer. It still benefits some farmers, but is less popular among people who would prefer more light later in the day in winter, and is thought to cause sleep disturbance.

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Well I’m going to implement this in my house, and damn the rest of you.
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Ask an AI art generator for any image. The results are amazing—and terrifying • WSJ

Joanna Stern looks at AI art generators, and it’s much as you’d expect, but this is interesting:

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What about the bias? 

My first query for “a technology columnist writing a column” in Dall-E 2 returned four images of white men. Another I conducted of “a man commuting to work” returned four images of white men. In DreamStudio a prompt for a basketball player on the moon returned an image of a Black man.

The source material for training the AI is found across the internet. “We are aware that the data is heavily biased toward western culture and white male culture,” said Jean Oh, an associate research professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “These models can amplify these biases, generating more stereotypical images.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company continues to do research on mitigating bias and improve results. It recently modified Dall-E to diversify its results when a query doesn’t include race or gender—I did see a few examples of this. Both OpenAI and Stability AI suggest you can add specific prompts to increase the diversity of image results.

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Something we’ll need to keep tabs on.
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75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12 • 1000 Hours Outside

Ginny Yurich:

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Every year at the start of the summer vacation I see all sorts of posts about the 18 summers we get with our kids. The intention of these posts is exactly the same as mine. They are a reminder that we need to fight to slow down and to simplify. We need to pray for perspective on the days that drag on. We need to put down the screens and connect. 

While our intentions may be the same I fully disagree with the number. Maybe those who write articles about the 18 summers with our kids still have only little ones at home. Maybe they have forgotten the summers when they turned 15 and then 16 and were able to drive and have jobs. There is a significant developmental shift that happens during childhood around age 12 (occasionally earlier) and with that often comes a change in family dynamics. Summers begin to have a different look and then eventually parents and siblings become more of a background object, a less integral piece of the puzzle. In fact, 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12.

Don’t get me wrong. Growing up is a good thing, something to be celebrated. Ultimately we want our kids to take on the challenges of the real world and they begin to do this in stages. Drivers training. First jobs. Dating. What all of this means is that  it’s highly unlikely that any of us will get 18 endless summers with our kids. Maybe we will get 13 or 14 if we are fortunate. Our time truly is limited.

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It’s quite a sobering thought. OK, the first three years are totally exhausting, which means the next two are mostly spent recovering from them (unless another child happens along, in which case rinse, repeat). But the years after 12 are very high quality, in general. So it’s not all bad.
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Mango Markets exploiter comes clean, claims all actions were legal • The Block

Osato Avan-Nomayo:

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Avraham Eisenberg, the man behind the $114m exploit on Mango Markets, has confirmed that he orchestrated the attack on the DeFi platform in a statement issued today.

“I was involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy last week,” Eisenberg confirmed, adding, “I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are.” Eisenberg declined to comment on the size of his team when asked by The Block.

This legal trading strategy required $10m on Eisenberg’s part to drain $114m from Mango Markets. The “trade” worked by manipulating the price oracle to inflate the mango token price three-fold from $0.30 to $0.91. This boosted the value of Eisenberg’s collateral, allowing him and his team to borrow more funds from the protocol.

Eisenberg’s name was linked to the attack barely a day later. Independent reporter Chris Burnet published an article providing some evidence connecting Eisenberg to the attack. The evidence included leaked screenshots of Discord chats describing the planned attack as well as suspicious on-chain activities following the incident. This is not the first time Eisenberg has been linked to a DeFi exploit. Earlier this year he was accused of defrauding FortressDAO investors to the tune of $14m. 

With regards to FortressDAO, Eisenberg said, “In February, Fortress DAO voted for a full redemption of the Treasury and I helped implement that. By the end of March, this redemption was complete and any fort token holders were able to exit for a proportional share of the Treasury.”

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Eisenberg’s form of words – “legal open market actions” – is the same as the defence lawyer for a hacker facing a charge saying “but, your honour, my client simply asked the computer for access, and the computer granted it. That cannot be illegal, because it was allowed.” I’m pretty sure I heard that exact argument, literally in Southwark Crown Court in the 1990s.

And that is the problem for Mango. Their screwy protocol, their problem, Eisenberg’s advantage. Oh, and the hacker got off, via a jury decision.
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Broadband customers face up to 14% hike in bills, warns Which? • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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Broadband bills could surge by as much as £113 [£9.40 per month] next year if a number of the UK’s biggest telecoms firms push ahead with inflation-busting price increases next spring, says consumer watchdog Which?

Many of the country’s main internet providers – including the largest player BT, along with TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet and Vodafone – use a mechanism to increase the cost of bills annually by the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer prices index (CPI) in January, plus 3.9%.

The Bank of England forecasts inflation at just below 10% for January, meaning millions of broadband customers will face a 14% mid-contract increase in their bills.

Which?’s latest broadband survey found that a typical BT customer is facing the largest potential increase of £113 compared with what they were paying in January this year.

Customers of Plusnet, also owned by BT, will face the smallest hike of £87.15 [£7.25 per month] among the five telecoms companies that use the mechanism surveyed by Which?

Given the telecoms companies pushed through inflation-busting rises of around 10% in April, next spring their customers will have seen their bills increase by between £120 and £156 in just two years.

“It is unacceptable that many broadband customers are facing price hikes during an unrelenting cost of living crisis,” said Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at Which? “Customers should be allowed to leave their contract without penalty if prices are hiked mid-contract, regardless of whether or not these increases can be said to be ‘transparent’.”

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It’s also wild that broadband companies, which truly aren’t reliant on workers toiling in the data factories to turn out stuff (sure, they have workers who want pay rises, but they aren’t their total opex) should raise prices like this. My advice: call them and say you’re looking to change. Weirdly, they’ll want to keep you and when they look down the back of the sofa, they’ll find a special, cheaper offer.
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Global smartphone market fell 9% as consumers trim spending • Canalys

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In Q3 2022, the global smartphone market recorded its third consecutive decline this year, dropping 9% year-on-year, marking the worst Q3 since 2014. The gloomy economic outlook has led consumers to delay purchasing electronic hardware and prioritize other essential spending. This will likely continue to dampen the smartphone market for the next six to nine months.

Samsung retained its leading position with a 22% market share driven by heavy promotions to reduce channel inventory. Apple was the only vendor in the top five to record positive growth, improving its market position further with an 18% share during the market downturn thanks to relatively resilient demand for iPhones. Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo continued to take a cautious approach to overseas expansion given domestic market uncertainty, retaining 14%, 10% and 9% global market shares, respectively. 

«

By Canalys’s numbers, in the past 15 quarters (since Q1 2019) the smartphone market has only had growth above 5% twice – both in the first half of 2021.

The precise size of the market isn’t important any more, but has become an interesting proxy for worldwide consumer sentiment about discretionary big-ticket (comparatively) purchases – whether bought on monthly repayments or by a single payment.

This data suggests that economically, things haven’t been too good for quite a while, and now are getting worse.
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Experts grade Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube on readiness to handle midterm election misinformation • The Conversation

Anjana Susarla:

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The 2016 US election was a wake-up call about the dangers of political misinformation on social media. With two more election cycles rife with misinformation under their belts, social media companies have experience identifying and countering misinformation. However, the nature of the threat misinformation poses to society continues to shift in form and targets. The big lie about the 2020 presidential election has become a major theme, and immigrant communities are increasingly in the crosshairs of disinformation campaigns – deliberate efforts to spread misinformation.

Social media companies have announced plans to deal with misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections, but the companies vary in their approaches and effectiveness. We asked experts on social media to grade how ready Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are to handle the task.

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The experts consulted are Dam Hee Kim, assistant professor of Communication at the University of Arizona; Anjana Susarla, professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University; and Scott Shackelford, professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University.

So consider: they looked at Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. How would you grade each, on an A (great) to F (appalling) scale? Now see how the experts think they do. Bear in mind this is only really for US elections; for other countries, things tend to be worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s competition authority has told Facebook that it can’t buy Giphy, a repository of GIFs. Sayonara to the format? CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine 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. Not run by a mole. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The hunt for Wikipedia’s disinformation moles • WIRED

Masha Borak:

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Governments have good reasons to influence Wikipedia: 1.8 billion unique devices are used to visit Wikimedia Foundation sites each month, and its pages are regularly among the top results for Google searches. Rising distrust in institutions and mainstream media have made sources of reliable information all the more coveted.

“Because of its transparency and auditability, Wikipedia became one of the few places where you can actually build a sense of trust in information,” says Mathieu O’Neil, an associate professor of communication at the University of Canberra in Australia who studies Wikipedia. “Governments and states that want to promote a particularly strategic perspective have every reason to try and be there and kind of try and influence it.”

Proving government intervention, however, has proved difficult, even as some cases have raised suspicion. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation banned an “unrecognized group” of seven Wikipedia users from mainland China and revoked administrator access and other privileges for 12 other users over doxing and threats to Hong Kong editors. Speculation of “pro-China infiltration,” however, was never proven.

[Research director at CASM, part of think tank Demos, Carl] Miller can’t say if coordinated disinformation campaigns already happen on Wikipedia nor whether such attempts would be successful in avoiding the platform’s intricate disinformation rules. But, he says, new tools might shed more light on it: “We’ve never tried to analyze Wikipedia data in that way before.”

The research tracked 86 editors who are already banned from Wikipedia. The editors tried to sway narratives on the English-language Wikipedia page for the Russo-Ukrainian war towards pro-Kremlin views, through subtle changes like casting doubt on the objectivity of pro-Western accounts, changing historical context, and adding links from Russian state-owned news and websites.

“Wikipedia has quite a lot of defenses that it’s built up to stop vandals just randomly adding bad information onto the site,” says Miller. “But when you look at the way that states can attack Wikipedia, the kind of threat looks completely different. It would be much like these editors.”

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Apple TV Remote now has a USB-C port • MacRumors

Sami Fathi:

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Apple today announced an updated Apple TV and, along with it, a new Siri remote that has a USB-C port for charging rather than Lightning.

In the press release announcing the new TV, Apple said the new Siri remote now features USB-C in the same design introduced in April 2021.

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The Siri Remote has the same beloved design and functionality as the previous generation and adopts USB-C for charging. It is included with the new Apple TV 4K, or can be purchased separately for $59 (US) starting today, and is compatible with all generations of Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.

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Why link to this? Because it’s a subtle sign that a future – perhaps even the next? – iPhone will have USB-C too. As all the accessories move to USB-C (only the keyboards, mice and AirPods are now Lightning) it signals that the iPhone will too. But it will probably be the last to go. And even so the legacy of Lightning connectors will live on for a decade.
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The hottest app right now? One where teens have to say nice things about each other • WSJ

Ann-Marie Alcántara:

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TBH was hot. Five years ago, the app, which prompted teens to compliment one another, topped Apple’s App Store charts and quickly amassed millions of users in the coveted high-school demographic. Facebook snapped it up less than three months after launch—and soon shut it down.

Now one of TBH’s co-creators is back with Gas, a nearly identical iPhone app. Gas asks teens multiple-choice questions about people in their school, letting them choose yearbook-style superlatives such as “the most beautiful person you have ever met” or the classmate who is “never afraid of getting in trouble.” 

As of Friday, Gas was the most popular free iPhone app and the No. 1 social-networking download in the App Store, despite being limited to a handful of states.

Like TBH, the questions Gas asks are positive, urging teens to compliment each other—that is, to gas each other up. Those selected in the polls receive “flames,” notifications that they were chosen. The voting is anonymous by default—people only find out the gender and grade of those who voted for them. But users of the free app can make in-app purchases to find out their admirers’ names, or to keep their own names hidden in poll results.

Users have downloaded Gas more than 500,000 times since its launch in late August, according to Data.AI. 

“To us, being at No. 1 is a vote of confidence that we’re doing something right for teens,” says Nikita Bier, co-creator of TBH and president of Find Your Crush LLC, which developed Gas.

…The rapid popularity has come with some bumps. Some people are sharing what appear to be Snapchat screenshots, alleging that Gas collects excessive data that could be used for sex trafficking.

Mr. Bier says Gas uses location data to help people pick their school. The location data isn’t associated with user accounts or stored on the app’s servers, he adds. Gas has also developed a system to remove users who may be lying—for instance, if a user has no contacts at the school they claim to attend.

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Every single possible vein of social networking is being mined – or if you prefer, is having a needle stuck into it to see whether there’s still blood running.
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Kakao outage in South Korea prompts security, monopoly concerns • The Washington Post

Bryan Pietsch:

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In South Korea, Kakao is ubiquitous. Nearly everyone, from schoolchildren to the elderly, uses the Korean tech company’s apps for messaging, taxis, navigation and payments. It’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Uber, Google Maps and Venmo wrapped into one.

So when a fire broke out this weekend at the building where the company’s servers are run, disabling its apps, people joked that the country would shut down.

But the outage forced a serious reckoning over security and monopoly concerns in Korea, where a handful of giant conglomerates hold dominance over the country’s economy. (Hyundai, known for its cars in the United States, operates apartment complexes and department stores here; Samsung, the technology giant, also sells insurance and owns a high-end clothing company.)

Kakao said in a presentation to investors in August that its customer base had grown to 53.3 million active users, with 47.5 million of those in South Korea — striking dominance in a country of more than 51 million. Many stores accept Kakao Pay, most of the taxis across the Seoul metropolitan area run on Kakao T, the company’s ride-hailing app, and friends, companies and even the government use Kakao Talk to exchange messages.

…On Monday, as Kakao was still getting some of its services back online, President Yoon Suk-yeol said his administration would investigate whether Kakao had a monopoly on the market. If that were the case, with Kakao becoming “nationwide infrastructure,” Yoon said, “then the state must take necessary measures for the good of the people.”

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Monopolies of an Everything App are bad? That’s interesting.
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Meta gets final order to sell Giphy from UK antitrust watchdog • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

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Bye-bye: Meta has again been ordered by the U.K.’s competition watchdog to sell animated GIF platform Giphy. And this time it’s final.

The decision follows a ‘stay of execution’ for Meta this summer, after the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal sent the case back to the antitrust regulator to be reassessed following a procedural finding that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had not provided full, unredacted disclosure to Meta representatives of documents related to its decision.

But the tribunal upheld the CMA’s decision on five of the six challenged grounds — saying it had “no hesitation” in concluding that the regulator’s finding that the merger substantially reduced dynamic competition was lawful. So this news should shock precisely no one.

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I’m shocked, shocked. Well, possibly not. The CMA seems to think Meta is big enough. Everyone is amazed that the CMA should do this over GIFs – GIFs!! – but if you think it’s too big, it’s too big. Also, on the topic of GIFs..
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The GIF is on its deathbed • The Atlantic

Kaitlyn Tiffany:

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About 40% of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs—a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big.

This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms. Fiddling with them was worthwhile, because GIFs were very important. You had to have them! They were the visual style that the audience craved. Not only did I make dozens a day for the website I worked for, but I often made extras for co-workers who requested them for their personal use. (I was eager to please!)

…As the GIF’s star rose, GIF-searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage, making it even easier to find a GIF to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words.

And that was the turning point. These search features surfaced the same GIFs over and over, and the popular reaction GIFs got worn into the ground. They started to look dated, corny, and cheap. “GIFs Are for Boomers Now, Sorry,” Vice’s Amelia Tait argued in January. As older adults became familiar with GIFs through the new, accessible libraries attached to essentially every app, GIFs became “embarrassing.” (Tait specifically cites the GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio raising a toast in 2013’s The Great Gatsby, and I agree—it is viscerally humiliating to be reminded of that movie.) The future is dark for GIFs, Tait suggested: “Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge?”

…Tumblr is now a rarity for displaying GIFs at all. Most popular sites—including Twitter and Imgur—convert GIF uploads and serve the animations as MP4 videos. As Kohler explained to me, video compression has improved so much over the years that many video files are much smaller than GIF image files. He pulled a GIF from a movie and a graphic-art GIF to show me the difference. The GIF from the movie was nearly 4.5 megabytes, and the MP4 translation of it was about 20 times smaller, at less than 0.23 megabytes. “MP4 is the right choice for this kind of image,” he said. “Much smaller, very similar visual effect.”

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Very interesting how formats all trend towards whatever takes least space. MP3s v AIFF, MP4s v GIF.
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Land below 1.0 meters of water • Climate Central

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An interactive map showing areas threatened by sea level rise and coastal flooding. Combining the most advanced global model of coastal elevations with the latest projections for future flood levels.

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Climate Central is “an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives. We are a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

“Climate Central uses science, big data, and technology to generate thousands of local storylines and compelling visuals that make climate change personal and show what can be done about it. We address climate science, sea level rise, extreme weather, energy, and related topics. We collaborate widely with TV meteorologists, journalists, and other respected voices to reach audiences across diverse geographies and beliefs.”

There’s lots more to explore than just land that may be below a metre of water in a few decades. A remarkably deep site.
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EVs exploding in Florida after water damage • Technocracy News

Thomas Catenacci:

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A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

“It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely,” he continued in a follow-up tweet. “Thanks to [North Collier Fire Rescue] for their hard work.”

Patronis published a video of firefighters in Naples, Florida, battling a fire started from a Tesla EV’s battery. A bystander is overheard in the video saying that the crew had used hundreds of gallons of water attempting to put the fire out.

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Not sure water is the best plan there. Firefighters need to learn a little more about EVs.
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DuckDuckGo’s new browser for Mac protects your data on YouTube • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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DuckDuckGo launched a web browser for macOS in beta on Tuesday, offering privacy-minded web surfers a new way to browse. The browser uses a variety of techniques to protect your information from snooping websites and even includes some innovative tools, including Duck Player, which is supposed to let you watch YouTube with fewer ads and less data collection. You can download DuckDuckGo for Mac here.

If you’re like most people on earth, you’re cruising around the web using Google Chrome, which sends so much data back to company servers that some privacy advocates call the browser spyware. There are a number of more private options, including FireFox, Brave, and even Apple’s Safari. DuckDuckGo already has a browser for mobile devices, but this marks the company’s first foray into desktop browsing.

As far as features go, the more private YouTube player might be the star of the show. Duck Player harnesses Google own tools for embedding video on another page using the strictest privacy settings available. According to DuckDuckGo, that means you’ll be better protected from tracking, and the ads you see won’t be personalized. In fact, the company says it prevented most ads from playing altogether during their tests, a perk YouTube otherwise makes users pay for. It’s hard to imagine Google will let a fewer-ads version of YouTube slide for ever, but you can enjoy it while it lasts. You’ll also be able to watch your videos in a cleaner, distraction-free interface.

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Fewer ads on YouTube would be nice. It’s infested with them. Though I suspect this is just going to be a money pit for DDG, because it won’t be a huge hit, yet will require updating: it’s not a Chromium fork, and it’s all done by the DDG team.
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What is a Semaform, anyway? And why should you care? • Semafor

Gina Chua is executive editor at Semafor, the new news organisation set up by ex-Buzzfeed, ex-NYT folk, and now trying to justify its existence :

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We’re redesigning the atomic unit of written news, the article.

We’re breaking articles into:
• The News
• The Reporter’s View (or analysis)
• Room For Disagreement (or counterargument)
• The View From (or different perspectives on the topic)
• Notable (or some of the best other writing on the subject)

Let’s dive in.

The news article is a venerable format, designed for more than a century of print newspapers, but its age is showing. Too much news — even some of the best journalism that’s practiced today — so tightly intertwines facts and analysis that readers have trouble telling the two apart. Articles don’t always honestly offer opposing viewpoints. And they’re usually told from a single perspective. All that makes it hard for time-strapped readers to trust — or even understand — the big picture.

So we rebuilt the story form into what we’re calling a Semaform. This format separates the undisputed facts from the reporter’s analysis of those facts, provides different and more global perspectives, and shares strong journalism on the subject from other outlets.

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The survival of the news article format is because it’s an effective method of communicating information. I worked at The Independent when it experimented with really different writing formats for news stories. It didn’t work. Semafor isn’t ripping anything up. This is just well-written standard news stories.
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The Wire intends to review its reporting on Meta • The Wire

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Starting from October 6, 2022, The Wire published four reports on Meta, plus a statement on October 17. Our first report disclosed the fact that Meta’s controversial XCheck programme was operating in India and that BJP leaders were among those given this status – usually understood as safeguarding their posts from takedown complaints. The document we received also indicated that the role extended to taking down others’ posts as well – a claim Meta denied. In the second story, we published an email from a senior Meta official, Andy Stone, expressing anger at the leak of the document.

The publication of each report prompted appreciation as well as criticism. Meta said the documents reproduced by The Wire were fabricated but there were also questions from other quarters about the authenticity of the documents on which our reports were based.

The Wire received the information and other materials from our sources, at least one of whom had earlier supplied material that we have been using for a separate and ongoing investigation. We sought to check the integrity and authenticity of the new source material as best we could, and then proceeded to draft each report, being careful to strike a balance between showing our readers what this material contained but not enough to reveal the sources’ identities. (The Wire’s whistleblower policy is available to read here.)

In the light of doubts and concerns from experts about some of this material, and about the verification processes we used – including messages to us by two experts denying making assessments of that process directly and indirectly attributed to them in our third story – we are undertaking an internal review of the materials at our disposal.

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There was a lot of speculation that this story was wrong because The Wire (an Indian publication) was hoaxed by someone external, but the denials from experts that they verified material makes it look like the hoaxer is closer to home.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The British government will collect energy use data from smart meters – and link it to your name and address as part of its fuel subsidy scheme. Are you concerned? CC-licensed photo by Ambernectar 13 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. Artificially intelligent. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, raises $101m • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, today announced that it raised $101m in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1bn post-money, according to a Bloomberg source, and comes as the demand for AI-powered content generation accelerates.

London- and San Francisco-based Stability AI is the brainchild of CEO Emad Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a Master’s in mathematics and computer science, he served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. Mostque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI in 2020, motivated both by a personal fascination with AI and what he characterized as a lack of “organization” within the open source AI community.

“Nobody has any voting rights except our employees — no billionaires, big funds, governments or anyone else with control of the company or the communities we support. We’re completely independent,” Mostaque told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “We plan to use our compute to accelerate open source, foundational AI.”

Stability AI has a cluster of more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train AI systems including Stable Diffusion. It’s quite costly to maintain — Business Insider reports that Stability AI’s operations and cloud expenditures exceeded $50m. But Mostaque has repeatedly asserted that the company’s R&D will enable it to train models more efficiently going forward.

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This whole field has suddenly accelerated dramatically, which feels weird given that we have been hearing about Moore’s Law hitting a wall. GPUs though seem to have plenty of headroom, and they scale well, so it starts to feel like the sky’s the limit.
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Use of electricity meter and gas meter personal data collected through the Energy Price Guarantee scheme: privacy notice • GOV.UK

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We will collect and process the following personal data, related to each electricity and gas meter in Great Britain:

• Meter Point Administration Number (MPAN) – electricity meter number
• Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN)
• postcode
• electricity consumption
• data about each meter (for example profile class, energisation status)
• data about how the meter point is billed (for example billing cycle, payment type)
• energy tariff data
• personal data including; name, date of birth, address, communication data, email address
•

We are processing the data to:

• enable BEIS to monitor the progress and operational delivery of the Energy Price Guarantee scheme (EPG) (this includes monitoring the reach of the scheme across regions and vulnerable groups)
• conduct financial checks on EPG payments including for assurance and the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences including fraud
• allow BEIS to evaluate the scheme to understand its impact and to inform future government policy.

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This page was updated on the 1st of October, but it’s only just been noticed. That your personal data will be connected to the smart meter and collected by the government is the biggest invasion of privacy I think I’ve ever seen by a British government – not even the Covid app required this.

At the end of June there were 29.5m smart meters in use in homes and small businesses, or just over half of all the meters installed. I’d predict uptake will stall unless really good reasons for this intrusion can be given.
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Intel is planning thousands of job cuts in face of PC slump • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman and Debby Wu:

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The layoffs will be announced as early as this month, with the company planning to make the move around the same time as its third-quarter earnings report on Oct. 27, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The chipmaker had 113,700 employees as of July.

Some divisions, including Intel’s sales and marketing group, could see cuts affecting about 20% of staff, according to the people.

Intel is facing a steep decline in demand for PC processors, its main business, and has struggled to win back market share lost to rivals like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. In July, the company warned that 2022 sales would be about $11bn lower than it previously expected. Analysts are predicting a third-quarter revenue drop of roughly 15%. And Intel’s once-enviable margins have shriveled: They’re about 15 percentage points narrower than historical numbers of around 60%.

…Intel’s last big wave of layoffs occurred in 2016, when it trimmed about 12,000 jobs, or 11% of its total. The company has made smaller cuts since then and shuttered several divisions, including its cellular modem and drone units. Like many companies in the technology industry, Intel also froze hiring earlier this year, when market conditions soured and fears of a recession grew.

The latest cutbacks are likely meant to reduce Intel’s fixed costs, possibly by about 10% to 15%, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said in a research note. He estimates that those costs range from at least $25bn to $30bn.

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Intel’s problem isn’t just the PC slump, though. It’s that it’s spending too much and yet moving too slowly. TSMC can fabricate better than it can; Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook are designing their own chips for their own uses. The CPU market is beginning to look like the low-end commodity market, and nothing good happens there.
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Football is sexy and VAR is coitus interruptus; can we just get back to banging please? • Football365

John Nicholson:

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Sunday revealed just how deeply embedded the VAR system is in the Premier League: No VAR, no football. [Soccer, for US readers.]

At Elland Road, a game could not go ahead without the all-seeing eye when the Leeds v Arsenal game was suspended due to an electrical fault causing VAR [Video Assistant Referee, which is used to adjudicate contested decisions on goals or offside] to fail and the officials being not able to communicate with each other via ear-pieces.

Football was played without VAR for 150 years; it was played for almost all that time with officials communicating by the simple means of talking or shouting at each other. That VAR has so occupied football’s real estate at this level that games literally cannot go on without it, shows just how complete its takeover of the game is.

It is tempting to think they were scared to show that football can be played perfectly well without VAR and show that it has made football worse, that it has neutered and blunted every player and fan’s reaction to every goal. That it is thoroughly inconsistent and leaves many of us bewildered and confused.

VAR is often called ‘technology’ but it’s not really technology. It’s not some nuanced algorithm crunched by a big giant brain of a computer in a bunker under a volcano inhabited by men in white coats. It’s a bloke looking at a telly. Calling it technology is to aggrandise the process in order to make it seem more sophisticated and thus important. That conned some into believing infallible robots would be in charge, not the pesky fallible humans. But no, it’s just a bloke and a telly.

The vast majority of fans do not want VAR but it is now a legal obligation to play games with it. So we fans don’t matter. Oh no. We saw that at Elland Road as they held up the game for 40 minutes until they’d fixed VAR without any thought for the Arsenal fans who had to get back to London on a Sunday evening, without thought for the home fans too.

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VAR does feel like technology imposed on the game, rather than one that helps the game – as much as anything because it’s so slow. In tennis, it’s almost instant, and ditto in squash. Nobody really likes VAR, though: there’s just growing resentment when it is brought in.
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Remove objects from video: Inpaint content-aware fill • RunwayML

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Remove Objects From Video: The Magic Tool that lets you remove any object from any video with just a few simple brush strokes.

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I’ve linked to Runway before, but this demonstration is quite scarily good. You can imagine that Stalin would have loved it.
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This Danish political party is led by an AI • Motherboard

Chloe Xiang:

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The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and policies derived from AI, is eyeing a seat in parliament as it hopes to run in the country’s November general election.

The party was founded in May by the artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and tech organization MindFuture Foundation. The Synthetic Party’s public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is meant to represent the values of the 20% of Danes who do not vote in the election. Leader Lars won’t be on the ballot anywhere, but the human members of The Synthetic Party are committed to carrying out their AI-derived platform.

“We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat. So it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realise, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so,” Asker Staunæs, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at MindFuture, told Motherboard.

Leader Lars is an AI chatbot that people can speak with on Discord. You can address Leader Lars by beginning your sentences with an “!”. The AI understands English but writes back to you in Danish.

“As people from Denmark, and also, people around the globe are interacting with the AI, they submit new perspectives and new textual information, where we collect in a dataset that will go into the fine-tuning. So that way, you are partly developing the AI every time you interact with it.” Staunæs said.

Some of the policies that The Synthetic Party is proposing include establishing a universal basic income of 100,000 Danish kroner per month, which is equivalent to $13,700, and is over double the Danish average salary. Another proposed policy change is to create a jointly-owned internet and IT sector in the government that is on par with other public institutions.

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I suppose that an AI wouldn’t be able to feel mortified when its policies had to be reversed because the (algorithm-driven, often) markets didn’t like them. Surely this will be or was a Black Mirror plot? Though I feel that phrase gets used a lot. Talking of feeling mortified…

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The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation • The Atlantic

Tom McTague:

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Britain has been broke before. It was in this position after the war when it needed US assistance, and then again in the late 1970s when it was bailed out by the IMF. It was battered by the markets in 1992 when John Major’s economic strategy collapsed.

What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy. Truss’s problems are so acute that Tory MPs are discussing removing her as a serious option, perhaps their only one. If Truss is removed any time soon, hers would be the shortest premiership in British history, beating George Canning’s 119-day tenure in 1827. And he died in office.

Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.

An old friend who died recently once told me a story about economic decline that stuck with me. He had traveled the world as a journalist for Reuters and said Argentina was the best place he’d ever lived. But that was before its collapse into chaos, populism, and crisis in the late 1990s. I last saw him in 2019; he was living in Brussels then, but told me that he worried some similar decline was happening in Britain.

Back then, I dismissed his fears. I’d lived through the turmoil of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis and Brexit. I’d seen Scotland coming close to seceding from the country, David Cameron’s austerity leading to calamity, Boris Johnson’s turbulent administration, and Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour to electoral oblivion. But through it all, Britain had plodded along, not exactly prospering as it once had but inching forward nonetheless. Its institutions did their job, the constitution held up, people’s lives went on much as they always had.

And then Liz Truss came along… Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.

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“The hell with it”—Elon Musk to keep funding Ukrainian Starlink service • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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In a tweet early Saturday afternoon, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that satellite-based ISP Starlink will continue providing Internet service to Ukrainian forces battling the Russian invasion, as well as the country’s government. “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free,” Musk tweeted.

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Oh well, that was easily solved. It seems Musk donated around 20,000 handset units, and that another 8,000 have been requested, and that use over the rest of this year would cost “more than $120m” and “close to $400m for the next 12 months”.

Assume 20,000 handsets (ie 8,000 were broken), that’s $20,000 per handset per year, or $1,666 per month. Not cheap, but for essential military equipment, probably not the most expensive. SpaceX, which runs Starlink, says that the most expensive units cost $4,500 per month to run. (Again, this is all about what you think is an actual “cost”: probably no, not the data, but probably yes keeping the satellites in position.)
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Kanye West is buying ‘free speech platform’ Parler • The Verge

Jon Porter and James Vincent:

»

Kanye West, the musician now legally known as Ye, is buying Parler, a social media platform that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. The acquisition was announced by Parler in a press release, which said that it has entered into an agreement in principle with Ye that’s expected to close later this year.

“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said Ye in a press statement.

Parlement Technologies, Parler’s parent company, said the acquisition would help create “an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.” In a message sent this morning to the “Parler Family,” [included in the full story], Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said, “The current Parler staff you’ve come to know —many of whom you’ve interacted with— will still be working on the app, and the platform will continue to utilize Dynascale’s cloud services.”

In a press statement, Farmer said the deal would “change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech.” Notably, Farmer is the husband of conservative influencer and commentator for right-wing outlets Candace Owens, who has visibly become close to Ye recently, with TMZ reporting the two are “in constant talks” and saying his friends believe she’s influencing him.

«

Well, it’ll certainly change Farmer’s bank balance, which is likely feeling the pain of funding Parler. However as quite a few have pointed out, Parler ranks far behind the other right-wing talk sites such as Gab. Ye is getting the short end of a bad deal.
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Elon Musk’s business ties deserve more scrutiny • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

»

Musk, like most global manufacturing executives these days, has extensive business dealings with China. And while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it means Musk has to watch what he says regarding the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not just in his personal capacity as a business executive but potentially in his institutional role as well. And he’s not alone; Apple TV+, for example, has a rule that none of its content can portray China negatively.

That’s an unfortunate but straightforward consequence of Apple TV+ being so small compared to Apple’s core business of making and selling smartphones: they compromise the content business for the sake of the manufacturing business. The good news for the world is that Apple TV+ is a very small share of western cultural output. They’re doing well with niche content (I love “For All Mankind”), and they won an Oscar for “Coda.” But it’s a small service in the scheme of things.

The problem for the world is that Twitter would be the Apple TV+ of Elon Musk’s enterprises, much smaller and less important than Tesla, so its interests will always be sacrificed to advance Tesla’s interests. And Tesla, like Apple’s hardware business, is deeply enmeshed in China. But Twitter is much more important to global politics and culture than Apple TV+. That’s the whole reason the Musk/Twitter saga has been such a subject of fascination. Twitter is one of a handful of other influential media properties — The New York Times, the three cable networks, AM talk radio stations — that exert a cultural and political influence that far exceeds their modest financial footprints. Apple executives are much less polarizing and controversial than Musk. But pretty much everyone on both the left and right knows they’re a bit squirrelly about China for business reasons. And if they bought the New York Times, that would have dire implications for the integrity of their China coverage.

Musk is mercurial and I won’t pretend to be able to predict what he will do. But I think his business relationships with China and tendency to take pro-PRC positions in his public statements raise some disturbing questions about the future of Twitter that deserve much more scrutiny relative to the concern that he won’t be strict enough in policing hate speech.

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Higher heating bills poised to hit US households this winter • WSJ

Ryan Dezember:

»

Americans should expect bigger home-heating bills compared with last winter, thanks to higher prices for natural gas, heating oil, propane and electricity as well as slightly colder weather, the US Energy Information Administration said in its seasonal outlook.

Government energy specialists predict that it will cost $931 to warm the typical home that is heated with natural gas between this month and March. That is up 28% from a year earlier in nominal terms. If it gets colder than federal weather forecasters expect, heating bills could be 51% more than last year for homes with gas-fuelled furnaces and boilers, which is nearly half of US households. A 19% year-over-year jump is anticipated if it is a warm winter.

The base case for those who burn heating oil—mainly in the Northeast, where low imports and closed refineries have reduced supply—is for 27% greater expense. Those with propane, popular in rural areas, and electric heat are expected to pay 5% and 10% more, respectively, if temperature forecasts hold.

“Winter energy expenditures for most households are likely to be higher than last winter,” said Joseph DeCarolis, EIA administrator. “Much higher if the weather is very cold.”

A really chilly winter could throw energy markets back into overdrive and turn up the pressure on central bankers, who are fighting what has been the highest inflation in four decades with the steepest interest-rate increases since the early 1980s.

«

But of course Americans don’t get any help with their bills. The only thing that can save the economy is.. global warming?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A DeepMind system has invented – or discovered? – an entirely new, and faster, way to multiply certain matrices. That could help GPU algorithms in future.

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.

On Friday, there’ll be another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. No motion capture, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

America curbs Chinese access to advanced computing • The Economist

»

Visions of a technologically ascendent China keep American strategists up at night. They see the contours of a surveillance state implementing the will of President Xi Jinping by algorithmic edict at home and projecting computing power abroad. To erase those contours for good, on October 7th President Joe Biden’s administration announced the most sweeping set of export controls in decades. The new rules cut off people and firms in China from many advanced technologies of American origin, and from products made using these. The list includes chips used for artificial intelligence (ai), software to design advanced chips and the machine tools to manufacture them. Selling such things to China is now barred without explicit permission from America’s government. Rulebreakers risk being cut off from American tech themselves.

The share prices of affected Chinese firms have sunk. China’s biggest producer of memory chips, the state-owned ymtc, has 60 days to allow American officials to inspect its operations for compliance. American companies that sell advanced semiconductor technology to China have also been hit, even as they reel from a deep cyclical slump in demand for their wares. This week it emerged that Intel, America’s chipmaking champion with Chinese sales of $21bn last year, is about to axe thousands of jobs.

«

Another piece (because this has huge ramifications) from the Center For Strategic and International Studies:

»

The most important chokepoints in the context of this discussion are AI chip designs, electronic design automation software, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and equipment components. The Biden administration’s latest actions simultaneously exploit US dominance across all four of these chokepoints. In doing so, these actions demonstrate an unprecedented degree of US government intervention to not only preserve chokepoint control but also begin a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry—strangling with an intent to kill.

«

And there’s a Twitter thread (on a single page) on the effects this is having in China, which kicks off with this:

»

To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship. Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight.

One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump.

«

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DeepMind AI finds new way to multiply numbers and speed up computers • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

the mathematician Volker Strassen proved in 1969 that multiplying a matrix of two rows of two numbers with another of the same size doesn’t necessarily involve eight multiplications and that, with a clever trick, it can be reduced to seven. This approach, called the Strassen algorithm, requires some extra addition, but this is acceptable because additions in a computer take far less time than multiplications.

The algorithm has stood as the most efficient approach on most matrix sizes for more than 50 years, although some slight improvements that aren’t easily adapted to computer code have been found. But DeepMind’s AI has now discovered a faster technique that works perfectly on current hardware. The company’s new AI, AlphaTensor, started with no knowledge of any solutions and was presented with the problem of creating a working algorithm that completed the task with the minimum number of steps.

It found an algorithm for multiplying two matrices of four rows of four numbers using just 47 multiplications, which outperforms Strassen’s 49 multiplications. It also developed improved techniques for multiplying matrices of other sizes, 70 in total.

AlphaTensor discovered thousands of functional algorithms for each size of matrix, including 14,000 for 4×4 matrices alone. But only a small minority were better than the state of the art. The research builds on AlphaZero, DeepMind’s game-playing model, and has been two years in the making.

Hussein Fawzi at DeepMind says the results are mathematically sound, but are far from intuitive for humans. “We don’t really know why the system came up with this, essentially,” he says. “Why is it the best way of multiplying matrices? It’s unclear.”

«

The Strassen algorithm is a bit mindbending in its own right, since it requires creating new matrices, so seems like it’s entailing much more work. But more intriguing is that the humans don’t quite know why this works; it needs to be reverse engineered to understand.
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A six-year cult has the Tories in its grip. Only defeat can free them • The Sunday Times

Matthew Syed:

»

In the autumn of 1954 a young and rather daring psychologist called Leon Festinger infiltrated a UFO cult in Minnesota. The cult insiders believed that they would be picked up in a spaceship at midnight on December 21 and transported to a new planetary utopia on the edge of the galaxy. They had sold their possessions and told the local newspaper what was about to unfold.

Festinger was not interested in the prophecy per se. Many such groups have risen up from time to time in different parts of America. Rather, he was fascinated in what would happen after the prophecy failed. Would the cult members admit their folly? Would they go back to their lives? Would they become reacquainted with reality?

In fact the 35-year-old Festinger, who had spent his career examining dogmatic thinking in all its forms, had a different expectation. He thought their convictions would become even more entrenched. It would be too psychologically threatening to admit they were wrong, too mortifying to confront the stares of those who had warned them. Sure enough, as the clock ticked past midnight, the cult members rapidly found an alternative explanation. The planetary timetable had shifted: the spaceship would now come two years later. Within a week they were back out on a recruitment drive.

I mention this research because it offers the only lens through which to make sense of what has unfolded over the past six years of British politics.

«

Very astute. Let’s see how The Markets like the appointment of Jeremy Hunt – someone very much not in the cult (voted to Remain, backed Rishi Sunak, doesn’t agree with supply-side economics) – this morning.
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Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab • CNN Politics

Alex Marquardt:

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Since they first started arriving in Ukraine last spring, the Starlink satellite internet terminals made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been a vital source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay connected even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia.

So far roughly 20,000 Starlink satellite units have been donated to Ukraine, with Musk tweeting on Friday the “operation has cost SpaceX $80m and will exceed $100m by the end of the year.”

But those charitable contributions could be coming to an end, as SpaceX has warned the Pentagon that it may stop funding the service in Ukraine unless the US military kicks in tens of millions of dollars per month.

Documents obtained by CNN show that last month Musk’s SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120m for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400m for the next 12 months.

“We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales wrote to the Pentagon in the September letter.

Among the SpaceX documents sent to the Pentagon and seen by CNN is a previously unreported direct request made to Musk in July by the Ukrainian military’s commanding general, General Valerii Zaluzhniy, for almost 8,000 more Starlink terminals.

In a separate cover letter to the Pentagon, an outside consultant working for SpaceX wrote, “SpaceX faces terribly difficult decisions here. I do not think they have the financial ability to provide any additional terminals or service as requested by General Zaluzhniy.”

«

First: if only SpaceX knew someone of immense wealth – perhaps worth billions personally – to whom it could turn for funding. (Though the world’s richest man seems to think Ukraine should just roll over.)

Second: how is this costing SpaceX any money? It puts up the satellites: that’s a capital cost, but one it has to bear to run its business. It has to keep the satellites in position: that’s an operating cost, but one it has to bear to run its business. It has ground stations: that’s an operating cost, etc etc. The bandwidth, though, is essentially free. It only “costs” in that use of bandwidth may be exclusionary to paying users. Though there probably aren’t that many in Ukraine.
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The Kettle Companion

»

The Kettle Companion is an assisted living product, that helps those who live apart to stay connected, by illuminating when a loved one activates their kettle at home.

This is signaled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. Additionally, if there is a change in pattern of use, for instance, an elderly parent has not had their habitual morning cup of tea by the usual time, the paired Kettle Companion will illuminate red. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance, prompting them to check on their loved one. 

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Very neat little idea. Nothing about price, but you’d hope it would be.. tolerable?
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Company documents show Meta’s flagship metaverse falling short • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez and Meghan Bobrowsky:

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While Mr. Zuckerberg has said the transition to a more immersive online experience will take years, the company’s flagship metaverse offering for consumers, Horizon Worlds, is falling short of internal performance expectations.

Meta initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds by the end of this year, but in recent weeks revised that figure to 280,000. The current tally is less than 200,000, the documents show.

Most visitors to Horizon generally don’t return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring, according to the documents, which include internal memos from employees.

By comparison, Meta’s social-media products, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, together attract more than 3.5 billion average monthly users—a figure equivalent to almost half the world’s population. Horizon is currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, S.D.

Horizon is designed to be a sprawling collection of interactive virtual spaces, or worlds, in which users appearing as avatars can shop, party and work. Yet there are rarely any girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party, and in Murder Village there is often no one to kill. Even the company’s showcase worlds, such as Questy’s, a virtual arcade featured in a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, are mostly barren of users.

According to internal statistics, only 9% of worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people. Most are never visited at all.

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I’m trying to think of ways by which this could really, really turn round for Meta, but honestly can’t. It requires a huge shift in how people work akin to the smartphone, but VR is far, far away from that. We could have holographic TV first.
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Meta’s virtual reality legs video was a lie: it used motion capture • Kotaku

Luke Plunkett:

»

While the updates bringing full-body avatars aren’t expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?

Anyone who has ever been around—*checks the culture*—any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help.

As UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”

Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to photo tricks shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company trying to sell us something that isn’t out yet.

But there’s something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a Kinect demo—a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009—has ended up with its own dumb feet-related moment.

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Deep sigh.
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Lipstick on a pig • Pixel Envy

Nick Heer:

»

This is clearly an area Zuckerberg is passionate about to a truly painful degree. So far, though, the best use case — the best use case — for even the more credulous believers is meetings. I cannot imagine buying dedicated expensive hardware for meetings, but I am probably not in the right market; two-and-a-half years into working from home and I still have not bought a ring light. Regardless, that sounds pretty dull. Are businesses champing at the bit to have staff sit in a virtual board room instead of just on a call? Is this solving a meaningful problem for them?

Zuckerberg preemptively responded to criticisms like these by reminding everyone that this category is just getting started. But that is a bit of misdirection. Oculus, the virtual reality hardware company Meta bought, was founded in 2012; Meta bought it in 2014. On a technical level, Meta can point to plenty of improvements. But it is much more difficult for anyone to point to clarifications in the concept and purpose of virtual reality. Again, I would be an idiot to argue there are none at all, but this week’s keynote would have been a great time for Meta to illustrate something new and enrich the story. So far, it does not have legs.

«

VR has been around for ages: I first tried it out in the early 1990s, on games, though it was also being tried for some less trivial applications. The fact that it keeps not getting traction suggests to me that it’s like 3D TV or films: a technological breakthrough that completely fails to enthral users.
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Alaska snow crab season cancelled as officials investigate disappearance of an estimated 1 billion crabs • CBS News

Jonathan Vigliotti:

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In a major blow to America’s seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem.

An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population.

“Did they run up north to get that colder water?” asked Gabriel Prout, whose Kodiak Island fishing business relies heavily on the snow crab population. “Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?” 

Ben Daly, a researcher with ADF&G, is investigating where the crabs have gone. He monitors the health of the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.

“Disease is one possibility,” Daly told CBS News.

He also points to climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska is the fastest warming state in the country, and is losing billions of tons of ice each year — critical for crabs that need cold water to survive. 

“Environmental conditions are changing rapidly,” Daly said. “We’ve seen warm conditions in the Bering Sea the last couple of years, and we’re seeing a response in a cold adapted species, so it’s pretty obvious this is connected. It is a canary in a coal mine for other species that need cold water.”

«

For much, much more, read this thread. (Unfortunately I couldn’t find a single-page version of it.) TL;DR it’s both climate change (warmer seas) and commercial trawling.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

With AI illustrators all the rage, Microsoft is now offering one that could integrate with Office. Is Clippy back.. as an AI? (Picture by Stable Diffusion: “a paperclip interrupting a presentation”.)

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. Sub-hypermobile. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

How a ghostwriter makes $200,000 a year writing tweets for top Silicon Valley investors • Business Insider

Mattathias Schwartz spoke to said ghostwriter:

»

As a ghostwriter, I never log in to a client’s Twitter account. I just write things and they send them out into the world. We use a software tool where I draft tweets, the client sees them, and the client can then choose to send them if and when they want. We often use Trello. I’ll push it into Trello, and their executive assistant will post it.

There isn’t usually much of a filter between what I write and what gets tweeted. Twitter is so fast. You’re either on the zeitgeist or you’re not. Most people will post close to 100% of what I write. If it turns out to be a banger, that’s great. If it’s not a banger, it gets deleted.

I pride myself on not sticking my foot in my mouth. Nothing has turned into a gaffe. There is a set of topics that no matter what you say about them, it leads to people being angry in your replies. And VCs will often choose to engage in those third-rail topics. For example, how many hours should you work? That’s a classic. If a VC feels they’re not getting enough attention, they can just tweet, “You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful.” Everyone will come out to tell you that you’re canceled. It taps into money, privilege, class, ability to sacrifice. People have a lot of emotions about those subjects.

So taking risks can lead to greater attentional rewards, but the precise level of risk I’ll take depends on the client. Some clients don’t care. They’re shock jocks. They’ll tweet anything. Others are more careful. It’s a question of what brand they’re trying to build.

Most VCs who are playing the content game employ a bunch of writers. I know people who make almost seven figures doing this. I’m not there yet. But I definitely make more at this than I do at my day job. I’ve raised tens of millions of dollars for the company I founded, but I’m not allowed to cash out any of my equity. The average founder of a Series C company makes something like $120,000 a year. And you’re expected to cover your travel costs out of pocket. So that work doesn’t actually pay the bills. I can’t afford to stop ghostwriting, because the city where I live is too expensive.

«

And why does [person] find a market for this? Because SV VCs make their relationships on Twitter now, not in the bars or bistros or barbeques of Sand Hill Road. (OK, there aren’t any there.) It sounds like a lot of money, but that’s from having between 25 and 50 clients. Shifting patterns of work create more abstracted ways to connect. (How soon before an AI is doing this?)
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AI-generated imagery is the new clip art as Microsoft adds DALL-E to its Office suite • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Microsoft is adding AI-generated art to its suite of Office software with a new app named Microsoft Designer.

The app functions the same way as AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, letting users type prompts to “instantly generate a variety of designs with minimal effort.” Microsoft says Designer can be used to create everything from greeting cards and social media posts to illustrations for PowerPoint presentations and logos for businesses.

Essentially, AI-generated imagery looks set to become the new clip art.

The app isn’t ready for a full launch though, and Microsoft is only offering a limited web preview. “We’re inviting people to try it out, give us feedback, and help us make it great,” writes Microsoft vice president Liat Ben-Zur in a blog post. Once it’s ready, Designer will be available as both a free standalone app and a more feature-filled version that will be available to paying Microsoft 365 subscribers.

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Super bonus point to Nigel Moss on Twitter, who simply said: “Clipp-E”?
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How AI could be used to make life and death decisions • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

»

A coffin-size pod with Star Trek stylings, the Sarco is the culmination of Philip Nitschke’s 25-year campaign to “demedicalize death” through technology. Sealed inside the machine, a person who has chosen to die must answer three questions: who are you? Where are you? And do you know what will happen when you press that button? 

Here’s what will happen: The Sarco will fill with nitrogen gas. Its occupant will pass out in less than a minute and die by asphyxiation in around five. 

A recording of that short, final interview will then be handed over to the Swiss authorities. Nitschke has not approached the Swiss government for approval, but Switzerland is one of a handful of countries that have legalized assisted suicide. It is permitted as long as people who wish to die perform the final act themselves. 

Nitschke wants to make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible, giving people who have chosen to kill themselves autonomy, and thus dignity, in their final moments. “You really don’t need a doctor to die,” he says. 

Because the Sarco uses nitrogen, a widely available gas, rather than the barbiturates that are typically used in euthanasia clinics, it does not require a physician to administer an injection or sign off on lethal drugs. 

At least that’s the idea. Nitschke has not yet been able to sidestep the medical establishment fully. Switzerland requires that candidates for euthanasia demonstrate mental capacity, Nitschke says, which is typically assessed by a psychiatrist. “There’s still a belief that if a person is asking to die, they’ve got some sort of undiagnosed mental illness,” he says. “That it’s not rational for a person to seek death.”

He believes he has a solution, however. Exit International is working on an algorithm that Nitschke hopes will allow people to perform a kind of psychiatric self-assessment on a computer. In theory, if a person passed this online test, the program would provide a four-digit code to activate the Sarco. “That’s the goal,” says Nitschke. “Having said all that, the project is proving very difficult.” 

«

You may be able to see that having an algorithm decide whether you’re mentally competent is proving a bit of a stumbling block. Also, this pod idea doesn’t really work for people who don’t have the use of their limbs, which in wasting diseases is often linked with a wish for assisted death. Or maybe you’d have to speak the code, and then it would work? All very sketchy, really, compared to the certainty one feels about having humans involved. This pod thing is too reminiscent of Futurama’s suicide booths.

Plus, nominative determinism prize for having someone surnamed Heaven writing on this topic.
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Netflix to charge $6.99 a month for ad-supported plan starting Nov. 3 • CNBC

Alex Sherman:

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Netflix will charge $6.99 per month for its new advertising-supported tier, which the company will roll out in the U.S. on Nov. 3.

Netflix’s “Basic with ads” tier will include an average of four to five minutes of commercials each hour and won’t give users the ability to download movies and TV series. A limited number of TV series and movies will initially be unavailable due to licensing restrictions.

Ads will be 15 or 30 seconds in length and will play before and during Netflix’s content. Companies will have the ability to prevent ads from appearing on content they deem unsavoury or unsuitable. To help advertisers understand its reach, ratings company Nielsen will use its standard digital audience measurement, Digital Ad Ratings, in the US beginning in 2023.

…Netflix priced the service so that any customer who switches to the ad-supported service from the ad-free basic plan will have a “neutral to positive” effect on the company’s revenue, according to Peters.

That suggests Netflix will get at least $3 a month per user in advertising revenue.

“We want to offer consumers choice and figure out what the best offering is for them,” Peters said during the conference call.

Video resolution for Netflix’s advertising tier will be 720p rather than 1080p, the quality of Netflix’s standard plan that costs $15.49 per month. The company’s basic plan without advertising is $9.99 per month and also has 720p resolution.

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Four minutes per hour will seem like nothing to American audiences. US broadcast channels average 12 to 17 (!) minutes per hour. Even in the UK, ad breaks can total up to 8 minutes per hour on “terrestrial” channels.
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Economists must get more in touch with peoples’ feelings • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

»

I once gently teased the happiness research community by suggesting we wouldn’t learn much about how to reform a nation’s economic institutions by asking citizens, “Overall, how rich do you think you are these days, on a scale of 0-10?” The question seems silly and a reminder of how little we really know about wellbeing.

Well, the joke is on me. Perhaps that is precisely the question we should be asking. A recent study by Federica Liberini, Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto and Michela Redoano looked at the impact of how people feel about their finances. Liberini and her colleagues looked at a question from a long-running academic survey, Understanding Society: “How well would you say you yourself are managing financially these days?”. Answers varied from 1 (living comfortably) to 5 (finding it very difficult).

The researchers found that people who said they were living comfortably were more likely to support the Remain campaign in the UK. Those who found their finances very difficult tended to sympathise with Vote Leave. Indeed, write the researchers, “UK citizens’ feelings about their incomes were a substantially better predictor of pro-Brexit views than their actual incomes.”

Then there is inequality. Objectively speaking, it is far from clear that income inequality is rising. In the UK, income inequality rose to high levels during the 1980s and has broadly stayed there ever since. Globally, there is no obvious cause for alarm either. Incomes have risen much faster in China and India — two large, poor countries — than in the US or Europe, putting downward pressure on income inequality.

But people’s feelings? They tell a different story. Jon Clifton, the head of Gallup, which has been tracking wellbeing around the world for many years, notes a polarisation in people’s life-evaluations. Compared with 15 years ago (before the financial crisis, smartphones and Covid-19) twice as many people now say they have the best possible life they could imagine (10 out of 10); however, four times as many people now say they are living the worst life they can conceive (0 out of 10). About 7.5% of people are now in psychological heaven, and about the same proportion are in psychological hell.

«

The Brexit data is a new one on me. But the story of society being pulled apart sounds very familiar.
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Where is all the book data? • Public Books

Ruby Ray Daily:

»

BookScan’s influence in the publishing world is clear and far-reaching. To an editor, BookScan numbers offer two crucial data points: (1) the sales history of the potential author, if it exists, and (2) the sales history of comparable, or “comp,” titles. These data points, if deemed unfavorable, can mean a book is dead in the water.

Take it from freelance editor Christina Boys, whom I spoke with over email, and who worked for 20 years as an editor at two of the Big Five publishing houses (Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group). Boys told me that BookScan data is “very important” for deciding whether to acquire or pass on a book; BookScan is also used to determine the size of an advance, to dictate the scale of a marketing campaign or book tour, and to help sell subsidiary rights like translation rights or book club rights. “A poor sales history on BookScan often results in an immediate pass,” Boys said.

Clayton Childress, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, came to similar conclusions in his 2012 study of BookScan data, in which he interviewed and observed more than 40 acquisition editors from across the country. Bad book sales numbers can haunt an author “like a bad credit score,” Childress reported, and they can “caus[e] others to be hesitant to do business with them because of past failures.”

According to editors like Boys, the sway of book sales figures has siphoned much of the creativity and originality out of contemporary book publishing. “There’s less opportunity to acquire or promote a book based on things like gut instinct, quality of the writing, uniqueness of an idea, or literary or societal merit,” Boys claimed. “While passion—arguing that a book should be published—still matters, using that as a justification when it’s contrary to BookScan data has become increasingly challenging.”

…Trubek says that BookScan data encourages publishers to keep recycling the same kinds of books that sold well in the past. “I didn’t want to be a publisher who was working that way,” she elaborated.

«

But you can see the publishers’ point. It’s just like the music business: what you want is surefire hits. From a new act. Failing that, surefire hits from an old act.
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Eero ends its $30 a year Eero Secure subscription plan • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

Earlier this month, Eero announced it would be transitioning its paid subscription plans to one flat rate of $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Formerly called Eero Secure Plus, Eero Plus is now the only option for users of the mesh Wi-Fi system if they want to access features like parental controls, ad blocking, or any network usage information.

Today, subscribers to the now-defunct cheaper plan, Eero Secure, started to receive notifications that their plan was ending and would be transferred to the new — more expensive — Eero Plus plan starting on November 15th.

A subscription is not required to use Eero devices, but without one, you can’t set parental controls or see how devices behave on your network, including how much data is being used. These are services that most router manufacturers offer for free. For example, Google Nest Wifi offers parental controls and network activity information for free on its mesh network system.

«

Parental controls are one thing (though you can probably set those on the devices themselves?) but do many people spend any time looking at “how devices behave” on their network, or monitor their data usage? Some crazy plans might limit data, but surely not many – and people on plans like that would be unlikely to be experienced enough to deal with this. (Plus, now they might as well spend the extra money on an unlimited data plan.)

Peculiar move, though. It’s not as if that functionality actually costs Amazon anything at all to implement. It’s inherent in any router: it’s an essential, configurable part of the webserver it’ll have running to show an interface with the user. Money for nothing, really.
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The amazing power of “machine eyes” • Ground Truths

Eric Topol:

»

Today’s report on AI of retinal vessel images to help predict the risk of heart attack and stroke, from over 65,000 UK Biobank participants, reinforces a growing body of evidence that deep neural networks can be trained to “interpret” medical images far beyond what was anticipated. Add that finding to last week’s multinational study of deep learning of retinal photos to detect Alzheimer’s disease with good accuracy. In this post I am going to briefly review what has already been gleaned from 2 classic medical images—the retina and the electrocardiogram (ECG)—as representative for the exciting capability of machine vision to “see” well beyond human limits. Obviously, machines aren’t really seeing or interpreting and don’t have eyes in the human sense, but they sure can be trained from hundreds of thousand (or millions) of images to come up with outputs that are extraordinary. I hope when you’ve read this you’ll agree this is a particularly striking advance, which has not yet been actualized in medical practice, but has enormous potential.

First, a review on deep learning from the retina. We should have known a few years back that something was rich (dare I say eye-opening) about the retina that humans, including retinal experts, couldn’t see. While there are far simpler ways to determine gender, it’s a 50-50 toss up for ophthalmologists, which means there are no visible cues to human eyes. But now two models have shown 97% accuracy of gender determination from neural network training. That was just the beginning.

«

I’ll be extremely picky and say that the Nature abstract doesn’t make clear whether it’s gender or sex that the retinal systems identify (and 97% offers a lot of edges anyway). But what the systems can detect is amazing; even if they’re wrong, it’s worth checking.
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💊 Mango Markets exploited for $100m • Web3 Pills

Alex Valaitis writes a daily newsletter on the goings-on, which tend to be – oh, you guessed:

»

Yesterday alone, saw four DeFi hacks accounting for $115m! The vast majority of funds stolen came from a single exploit on a protocol called Mango Markets.

For those that are unfamiliar, Mango is one of the leading decentralized exchanges on the Solana network. In fact, the hack of Mango accounted for close to 10% of the entire DeFi TVL on Solana. 🤯

Once the Mango team realized what was happening, they froze the entire platform to prevent further damage, but at that point it was already too late.

…In many ways, the drama only began with the exploit. In the aftermath, there has already been a wild sequence of events. Most notably, the attackers went into the governance forum for Mango and made a proposal to return a portion of the funds in return for a bounty and the DAO committing to not pursue criminal investigations.

What is most absurd about this entire proposal, was that most of the ‘Yes’ votes in favor of it, were actually placed by the attackers themselves with funds from the exploit!

On the one hand, this situation has become almost comical and feels like an entertaining scene out of a movie. On the other hand, it shows just how immature the Web3 industry still is. Mango Markets was a “top” DeFi protocol built on the 6th largest blockchain by market cap, Solana.

The fact that they were able to suffer this large of an attack reflects poorly on the entire DeFi space. How can participants have confidence when a massive DeFi attack seems to happen every week?

Not to mention, there are a lot of important questions being asked in regards to who was behind this. It’s an open secret in crypto, that some nefarious developers and/or auditors, intentionally leave behind exploitable code. Some have been speculating whether or not this was an inside job of some sort.

While I think it’s dangerous to speculate to that degree right now, it is worth pointing out that this exact vulnerability was laid out in the Mango Markets Discord back in March.

«

Valaitis then points to someone describing, yup, exactly how the vulnerability could work. It is hilarious that the hacker(s) could, by virtue of the hack they’d carried out, give themselves the authority to pay a bounty and block any further action. Brilliant twist.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When it started in 1972, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was futuristic. Now it’s decaying. CC-licensed photo by 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. Tendentious. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

In the ultimate Amazon smart home, each device collects your data • Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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You may not realize all the ways Amazon is watching you. No other Big Tech company reaches deeper into domestic life. Two-thirds of Americans who shop on Amazon own at least one of its smart gadgets, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Amazon now makes (or has acquired) more than two dozen types of domestic devices and services, from the garage to the bathroom.

All devices generate data. But from years of reviewing technology, I’ve learned Amazon collects more data than almost any other company. Amazon says all that personal information helps power an “ambient intelligence” to make your home smart. It’s the Jetsons dream.

But it’s also a surveillance nightmare. Many of Amazon’s products contribute to its detailed profile of you, helping it know you better than you know yourself.

Amazon says it doesn’t “sell” our data, but there aren’t many U.S. laws to restrict how it uses the information. Data that seems useless today could look different tomorrow after it gets reanalyzed, stolen or handed to a government. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

We each have to decide how much of our lives we’re comfortable with one company tracking. Scroll below to see what Amazon’s products and services could reveal about you.

«

Includes “toilet with Alexa integration” which “allows you to create personalized settings for your toilet, including a preferred temperature and ambiance. You can even flush it with your voice.”

The list is colossal, though I suspect just knowing your Amazon account purchases would go a long way to knowing plenty about you. Personally, I don’t have any Amazon hardware at all, though a Ring doorbell – or similar video system – always seems tempting. Or you can just have a large dog, which will also provide exercise. Beat that, Ring.
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February 2022: Facebook accused of blacklisting OnlyFans’ rivals • BBC News

Noel Titheradge:

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Facebook has been accused of colluding with OnlyFans to blacklist rival adult websites in a lawsuit filed in the US.

This week, BBC News revealed that OnlyFans was being sued over claims it directed a social media company to disable accounts of adult entertainers by placing their content on a terrorism database.

Facebook has now been named as the company alleged to have conspired with OnlyFans in a class action filing. Its parent company, Meta, says the claims are “without merit”.

UK website OnlyFans – best known for hosting pornography – has grown hugely in recent years. It lets users share video clips and photos with subscribers in return for a monthly fee.

Performers often use social media accounts to promote and link to adult websites showing their explicit content.
On Tuesday, BBC News revealed that rival adult website FanCentro is suing OnlyFans in the US.

The legal action claims that social media content of adult performers promoting rival websites to OnlyFans was placed on a database of extremist material shared between tech companies that is run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).

«

I’m linking to this February story because on Wednesday evening (UK time), an update to this story broke on Twitter quoting US court documents naming two Meta executives, one of whom is well-known in the UK. But being legally wary, I’m not going to link to them, because they’re (pretty dramatic) allegations, and not proven. Let’s see if the BBC follows up.
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Greenland ice sheet may be more vulnerable to climate change, study finds • Glasgow Times

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The study found rising air temperatures amplify the effects of melting caused by ocean warming, leading to greater ice loss from the world’s second largest ice sheet.

Experts liken the effect to how ice cubes melt more quickly if they are in a drink that is being stirred – the combination of warmer liquid and movement accelerates the melting process.

Previous studies have shown that rising air and ocean temperatures both cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt, however the new study, by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh and California San Diego, reveals how one intensifies the effects of the other.

Dr Donald Slater, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who led the study, said: “The effect we investigated is a bit like ice cubes melting in a drink – ice cubes will obviously melt faster in a warm drink than in a cold drink, hence the edges of the Greenland ice sheet melt faster if the ocean is warmer.

“But ice cubes in a drink will also melt faster if you stir the drink, and rising air temperatures in Greenland effectively result in a stirring of the ocean close to the ice sheet, causing faster melting of the ice sheet by the ocean.

A glacier undergoing submarine melting in south-west Greenland (Donald Slater/PA)
“This unfortunately adds to the overwhelming body of evidence showing the sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to climate change, hence the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

«

Urgh.
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Pixel Watch review: beautiful, fast, and way too expensive • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Let’s talk about the elephant-sized price tag in the room. The Pixel Watch starts at $350, and that’s without cellular. The LTE version is $400. The Apple Watch SE—a product that’s much better, faster, and more mature than the Pixel Watch—is $100 less, starting at $250. Google is asking an absolutely outrageous price for what is a barely there, first-generation beta test of a smartwatch ecosystem. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is currently on a penny-pinching mission at the company, but this pricing will kill this product. Everything related to the Pixel Watch needs to be about 30% less expensive to even approach being competitive.

Despite having sky-high prices, the specs of the Pixel Watch are not great. The SoC is made by Samsung, the company that is freeing Wear OS from the neglect of Qualcomm, but Google isn’t using Samsung’s latest wearable SoC. Google opted for the Exynos 9110, a 10 nm, dual Cortex A53 chip that is four years old. Samsung’s latest chip, the Exynos W920 in the Galaxy Watch 5, is a huge improvement; it’s a 5nm, dual Cortex A55 chip with a way faster GPU. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 costs $280—that’s $70 less for better hardware. It’s not clear how Google decided this price is appropriate.

…As for battery life, the Pixel Watch is definitely a “charge every day” sort of device. In the first two days, I burned the battery down in 12 hours, but for what I would call “light” usage—no music streaming, cellular, workouts, or GPS, just 24/7 heart rate monitoring, dealing with notifications, and with the always-on display enabled—I’m getting about 24 hours of battery life. You’ll always need to charge the watch at least once a day—and probably more if you’re doing anything serious.

«

Always-on displays murder the battery. Reviews of this really are not favourable: too little, too late seems to be the verdict.
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Proximity to fracking sites associated with heightened risk of childhood leukaemia • YaleNews

»

Pennsylvania children living near unconventional oil and gas (UOG) developments at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between the ages of 2 and 7 than those who did not live near this oil and gas activity, after accounting for other factors that could influence cancer risk, a novel study from the Yale School of Public Health finds.

The registry-based study, published Aug. 17 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, included nearly 2,500 Pennsylvania children, 405 of whom were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, the most common type of cancer in children.

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, also referred to as ALL, is a type that arises from mutations to lymphoid immune cells. Although long-term survival rates are high, children who survive this disease may be at higher risk of other health problems, developmental challenges, and psychological issues. Unconventional oil and gas development (UOG), more commonly referred to as fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing), is a method for extracting gas and oil from shale rock. The process involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals into bedrock at high pressure, which allows gas and oil to flow into a well and then be collected for market.

For communities living nearby, UOG development can pose a number of potential threats. Chemical threats include, for example, air pollution from vehicle emissions and well and road construction, and water pollution from hydraulic fracturing or spills of wastewater. Hundreds of chemicals have been reportedly used in UOG injection water or detected in wastewater, some of which are known or suspected to be carcinogenic. The paucity of data on the association between UOG and childhood cancer outcomes has fuelled public concerns about possible cancer clusters in heavily drilled regions and calls for more research and government action.

«

Not sure that growth in childhood leukaemia is what Liz Truss’s government is actually after.
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podcast.ai

»

Welcome to podcast.ai, a podcast that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Every week, we explore a new topic in depth, and listeners can suggest topics or even guests and hosts for future episodes. Whether you’re a machine learning enthusiast, just want to hear your favorite topics covered in a new way or even just want to listen to voices from the past brought back to life, this is the podcast for you.

«

Everyone (else) is getting excited about this machine-generated podcast of Joe Rogan talking to Steve Jobs, though I have to say – not having listened to Rogan’s show – that it sounds dull as ditchwater. Jobs’s voice is just right, but I lost interest in what the machine didn’t have to say quite quickly. I’d love to know what proportion of listeners made it through the whole 19m15s. Only the robots?
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TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging • BBC News

Hannah Gelbart, Mamdouh Akbiek and Ziad Al-Qattan:

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Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.

Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value.
The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that.

TikTok said it would take prompt action against “exploitative begging”. The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount.

Earlier this year, TikTok users saw their feeds fill with livestreams of families in Syrian camps, drawing support from some viewers and concerns about scams from others.

In the camps in north-west Syria, the BBC found that the trend was being facilitated by so-called “TikTok middlemen”, who provided families with the phones and equipment to go live.

The middlemen said they worked with agencies affiliated to TikTok in China and the Middle East, who gave the families access to TikTok accounts. These agencies are part of TikTok’s global strategy to recruit livestreamers and encourage users to spend more time on the app.

Since the TikTok algorithm suggests content based on the geographic origin of a user’s phone number, the middlemen said they prefer to use British SIM cards. They say people from the UK are the most generous gifters.

«

BBC tested this by sending $106 from an account: the Syrians’ account received $33. TikTok (and middlemen) had taken the other 69% by value. When they took the cash out, another fee, leaving them just $19. At this point, arguments for cryptocurrency begin to make sense.
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How clever mechanics use Windows 98 and eBay to keep the 50-year-old Bay Area Rapid Transit going • Mercury News

Eliyahu Kamisher:

»

When San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) first carried passengers, the country was sending astronauts to the moon. The Apollo-era trains were symbols of a generation barreling toward a space-age future complete with carpeted floors and a seat promised to every passenger.

That was 1972, when BART was state of the art. But half a century later, as the agency celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, many of those same silver-and-blue trains are still chugging through the Bay Area. And keeping them running — even in the country’s technology capital — requires a special breed of ingenuity.

BART mechanics rely on Frankensteined laptops operating with Windows 98, train yard scraps and vintage microchips to keep Bay Area commuters on the rails. “We have literally started with a picture and scoured different manufacturers and eBay looking for an oddball part,” said John Allen, a mechanic who specializes in breathing new life into broken down BART trains. When Car 372 caught fire in Orinda in 2013, his team created an entirely new system and built their own tools to replace the floor. “Sometimes we don’t even know what the name of the part is.”

To understand why BART upkeep is so complicated, take a look back to the founders. They shunned heavy steel trains and old-school signaling technology and instead hired an aerospace company to build a train fleet that would serve as a new model for public transit. The result? All-electric trains with sleek aluminum bodies and wide windows, underpinned by nearly autonomous operations. The price tag for BART’s original 450 cars: $160m.

…Today, the transit system is an outlier, with everything from wheels to windows crying out for custom-built attention. “The biggest stumbling block is coming up with parts that they don’t make anymore,” said Mark Wing, a mechanic who oversees maintenance on the entire train, spanning electrical propulsion equipment to busted seats.

Which parts are not made any more? “Pretty much everything,” he said.

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Isn’t it infrastructure week yet?
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Netflix to reveal for first time how many people watch its shows in the UK • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

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Netflix will finally reveal exactly how many people watch its programmes in the UK, giving an insight to the true cultural power of the streaming service and its impact on British viewing habits.

Until now it has been possible to know that 13 million people tuned in for the finale of the BBC’s Line of Duty or that 31 million viewers watched England in the Euro 2020 final – but Netflix has closely guarded the numbers of people who stream its hit shows such as Squid Game or Heartstopper.

In a change of direction, the streaming service agreed to sign up as a full member of the British ratings agency, Barb, meaning it will publish independently audited viewing figures that can be compared with traditional channels.

As a result, when the fifth series of The Crown is released next month, it will finally be possible to see whether the cultural coverage around Netflix’s royal show actually attracts more eyeballs than a less-hyped programme on a traditional television channel.

Preliminary figures from September showed how Netflix is already used by two-thirds of the British television viewing public in a given month. Netflix currently accounts for 8% of all television viewing in the UK, making the company larger than Channel 4, Channel 5, and Sky – but still far behind the BBC and ITV.

The decision to go public with viewing data for individual programmes suggests Netflix is confident that it will be seen in a good light.

«

No doubt just waiting long enough to be sure it’ll actually show up. And it does become something to promote over other streaming services, who are also vying for your monthly stipend, and at risk of cancellation at any moment. “Join millions of people who are watching The Crown tonight”, for example.
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Lufthansa flip-flops: AirTags now allowed on flights • AppleInsider

Mike Wuerthele:

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After being incredibly clear on social media that AirTags weren’t allowed on Lufthansa flights, the airline has caved and is now allowing them.

After a chaotic weekend for Lufthansa where its social media presence made it clear that Apple’s AirTags weren’t welcome in checked baggage, the airline seems to have reconsidered. In a tweet, the airline made it clear that the trackers are now allowed.

It’s unclear why Lufthansa said that the Luftfahrtbundesamt shares its risk assessment of AirTags. The airline was explicit over the weekend that they considered the devices unsafe for flight, despite international airline regulations being clear about the matter.

AppleInsider contacted six Lufthansa flight employees in the US who are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company while preparing this story. Three thought that the ban was still in place, two didn’t know about the ban, and one didn’t know what an AirTag was, or how it worked. So, it’s not clear if the new guidance — or any information at all — has been promulgated completely.

«

Over the weekend, Lufthansa (alone) had tweeted about not allowing AirTags in baggage, leading to this NY Times story. But it seems like everyone was very confused. Let’s settle down and decide: chicken or beef?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In India, spam from businesses has begun to make WhatsApp unbearable for some users. (Image: Diffusion Bee interpreting “spam meat in paradise”.)

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. Incapacitorated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

WhatsApp is now a spammers’ paradise in India • Rest Of World

Nilesh Christopher:

»

Meta’s WhatsApp is wildly popular in India, with around 550 million users in the country. Over the past year, the company has aggressively expanded its WhatsApp Business services in the country, allowing brands to reach out to customers, offer support, receive payments, and even verify documents. Direct access to customers over WhatsApp is an exciting proposition for Indian businesses since a reported 80% of messages sent on the app are seen within five minutes, making the platform an incredibly more efficient outreach channel than email or SMS.

The unchecked rise of spam has, however, meant that the messaging platform that was once seen as a private and intimate space to communicate with friends and family now feels like a busy main street crowded with hawkers, at least 10 regular users of the app told Rest of World. “It’s honestly such a frustrating experience now that WhatsApp has its business section. It feels like harassment tbh,” Rao wrote to Rest of World. “WhatsApp doesn’t really feel very personal anymore. I wish there was a legal way to fight this.”

“Every fucking thing Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO] touches is forever ruined,” wrote Deepak Mehta, who works in tech, shared his irritation on Twitter. “WhatsApp used to be so good. Now every 2nd message is from a random corporate account I never gave permission to spam my inbox. Fuck you, you slithering lizard.”

WhatsApp did not respond to specific questions on the rise of spam. “As we continue to connect people with the businesses they value most on WhatsApp, it’s important that messages sent through our service are helpful and expected,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in an email statement to Rest of World. “We offer features and tools to give people control over their conversations and take action when businesses send messages they don’t want to receive.

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Thankful that nothing like this is happening (yet?) in the UK. Presumably if WhatsApp was a lot more popular in the US, this would be completely standard.
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The bizarre duality of Meta’s new Quest Pro VR headset • Wired

Lauren Goode:

»

The Meta Quest Pro apps shown off during press demos last week were a mixed bag. The color pass-through imagery—the information about the real world being taken in by the cameras mounted on the outside of the device—sometimes appeared aberrated at the edges. Using Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s app for conducting business in VR, felt awkward. (Some of Meta’s own employees are reportedly skeptical of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s broad vision for the metaverse, and are using Meta’s Horizon software less than expected.) Zuckerberg, in his keynote today, tried to position the metaverse as people-centered, rather than app-centric, because of the potential for social interactions. But social experiences rely on broader adoption of these virtual worlds. 

The new Meta Quest Pro also costs $1,499, which might come as the biggest surprise. This is not a headset that’s accessible to most consumers, nor is VR in general far along enough to compel them to spend that much on a headset. The Meta Quest Pro is Meta’s attempt to prove that it can build this next generation of virtual reality computers, that real-time social interactions are possible in VR.

The result is a paradoxical computing platform, one that is technologically advanced and has the ability to catapult users into the virtual reality future, but still may not be the device to make VR totally mainstream. It is both a virtual reality and “mixed reality” headset. It’s a great escape from reality, but a good reminder that physical presence is better. Its apps are fun, but sometimes glitchy. The headset, which looks like a pair of high-end ski goggles, is comfortable at first; it also leaves a deep impression on your forehead after extended use.

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Meta figured out legs for its Horizon avatars • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Legs are “probably the most requested feature on our roadmap,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company’s Connect event while showing off the new avatars, which look significantly better than the avatars available now. (Imagine the improved avatar Zuckerberg showed after his current-gen avatar got memed on but in motion.) “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”

According to Zuckerberg, the company started off with avatars that don’t feature an entire body because it has been challenging for a VR headset to accurately estimate where things like your elbow or legs actually are. If the system had them show up inaccurately in VR, that would break the immersion.

For arms, Meta has gotten better at figuring out what those body parts are doing as tracking and predictive technologies have improved. Legs can be tricky because of occlusion, Zuckerberg said. If your legs are under a desk, for example, it’s hard for a standalone VR headset to figure out what they might be doing because the desk is blocking the view of the on-headset cameras. Instead, to be able to represent legs, Meta has built an AI model to predict the position of your whole body.

Avatar legs will be coming first to Meta’s Horizon social VR platform, though it’s unclear exactly when. They’ll be coming to “more and more experiences over time as we improve our technology stack,” Zuckerberg said. During the Connect event, they seemed to move quite naturally, though because it was a prerecorded video, we’re not sure yet how they’ll look in practice.

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In some ways, having the legs will be even more distracting and weird. At least being Weebles meant that it showed this was for office work.
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Article/Text Generator • GPT-3 AI Powered

»

Have GPT-3 generate an article or other content (including marketing pieces!), uniquely for you!

Need help with your next blog post? Want to generate a unique article for your website?
Need a unique article for your marketing campaign? This tool is for you!

For quality results, please try to be as specific as possible with your prompt.

«

The page is littered with AdWords ads, which implies that the creator expects it to get a fair amount of passing traffic. (Try giving it the prompt “a collection of links and extracts from web pages interspersed with commentary”. I don’t feel threatened. Yet.)
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Facebook winds down its newsletter service • The New York Times

Katie Robertson:

»

Facebook is shuttering its Bulletin subscription service, ending its attempt to compete with Substack and other newsletter services.

Facebook, which is now part of the parent company Meta, has contacted writers within the program to tell them that the Bulletin platform will be wound down early next year.

“Bulletin has allowed us to learn about the relationship between creators and their audiences and how to better support them in building their community on Facebook,” the company confirmed in a statement on Tuesday. “While this off-platform product itself is ending, we remain committed to supporting these and other creators’ success and growth on our platform.”

The program began in June last year, aiming to attract independent writers when more were looking to leave publications and have a direct relationship with their readers and take home all of their own revenue. It was looking to mimic the success that Substack, another newsletter platform, had with enticing writers to build their own newsletter brands.

A note at the time from executives said Bulletin would support writers with a suite of publishing and subscription tools, as well as services like legal resources and design.

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Included Malcolm Gladwell whose newsletter was (as Ryan Broderick pointed out) apparently less popular than skateboarding dogs etc that forms the most popular content on Facebook (“now part of parent Meta”, yeah sure). Benedict Evans comments that we really don’t know how big a business newsletters really are. I’d say they’re definitely a zero-billion dollar industry.
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Lesser-known Apple Watch workouts • Basic Apple Guy

The anonymous guy:

»

I have been wearing my Apple Watch for years to track my steps and workouts. As a result, I have logged millions of steps and hundreds of cycling & strength training exercises to date. And for those types of activities, the Apple Watch shines. It has dozens of workout options ranging from outdoor runs and traditional strength training to archery, fitness gaming, and tai chi.

But what was missing were workouts that captured the true milieu of what happens during a life, tasks that we humbly perform each day that don’t get the credit for helping us close our rings that they deserve.

The project started in early August and became a running collection of posts titled “Lesser known Apple Watch Workouts.” This post is a collection of the first (but not the last) series of lesser-known Apple Watch workouts. Enjoy.

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I particularly like Cable Management:

»

Part core, part endurance, part upper body, part lower body. Is there anything a round of cable management doesn’t strengthen? And not only does it test the body, but it also tests the mind. After all, you’re putting yourself and your body into places and positions nobody should ever be in. It’s basically the land equivalent of cave diving.

«

Very, very true.
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Damien Hirst burns his own art after selling NFTs • BBC News

Steven McIntosh:

»

Damien Hirst has begun burning hundreds of his own artworks after selling a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The artist told buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection to choose either the physical artwork or the NFT representing it. Those who chose the NFTs were told their corresponding physical piece would be destroyed.

Asked how he felt to be burning the works, Hirst said: “It feels good, better than I expected.” The artist was dressed in silver metallic boiler-suit trousers and matching fire safety gloves as he collected each piece and burned it in a contained fire box. It has been estimated the works being burned are collectively worth almost £10m.

Hirst launched his first NFT collection last year, called The Currency, which was made up of 10,000 NFTs, corresponding to 10,000 original pieces of art. Collectors who bought one had to choose between keeping the NFT or swapping it for the physical artwork. London’s Newport Street Gallery said 5,149 buyers opted for the original artworks while 4,851 chose the NFTs.

Artworks for the non-exchanged NFTs would be destroyed, buyers were informed, with Hirst telling his Instagram followers earlier this week that he would burn the first 1,000 artworks on Tuesday. The NFTs, which depicted colourful spots, reportedly sold for $2,000 (£1,800) each.

Livestreaming the event, the Turner Prize winner and assistants used tongs to deposit individual pieces stacked in piles into fireplaces in the gallery as onlookers watched.

«

As Matt Levine put it in his newsletter: you could pay £2,000 to have a Damien Hirst work, or pay £2,000 to not have a Damien Hirst work, or you could not pay £2,000 to not have a Damien Hirst work. (Also, the Damien Hirst works are now more valuable by virtue of being rarer.)
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People still seem to think their cars are fully self-driving • The Register

Richard Currie:

»

the US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) study of 600 motorists who regularly engage systems like GM’s Super Cruise, Nissan’s ProPILOT Assist, and Autopilot (200 of each) found that “they were more likely to perform non-driving-related activities like eating or texting while using their partial automation systems than while driving unassisted.”

Just over half of Super Cruise users, 42% of Tesla owners, and 12% of ProPILOT Assist drivers “said that they were comfortable treating their vehicles as fully self-driving.”

Despite the Autopilot branding, Tesla covers its behind by insisting the system should only be used by attentive drivers with hands on the wheel. It has a lockout feature that disables Autopilot if the user is deemed not to be paying attention, and Super Cruise does the same. Alarmingly, 40% of those using these drive assist systems admitted they had been kicked out for good.

“The big-picture message here is that the early adopters of these systems still have a poor understanding of the technology’s limits,” said IIHS president David Harkey. “But we also see clear differences among the three owner populations. It’s possible that system design and marketing are adding to these misconceptions.”

The IIHS said Super Cruise ads focus on hands-free capabilities while Autopilot “implies Tesla’s system is more capable than it really is.” This correlates with the lower number of users relying on ProPILOT Assist, the name of which makes it clearer to the driver that it is only an aid.

Gender may have also influenced the results. “The majority of Super Cruise and Autopilot owners were male, while both sexes were more or less equally represented among ProPILOT owners,” said the IIHS. “Most Super Cruise owners were over 50, Autopilot owners tended to be younger (a quarter of them were under 35), and ProPILOT Assist owners were more evenly distributed across the age range.”

«

Soooo… the problem is male drivers, basically?
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Why Europe’s defense industry can’t keep up • POLITICO

Ilya Gridneff:

»

Simply put, there just aren’t enough bullets, weapons and hi-tech systems in Europe to match the EU’s demands and looming dangers ahead. And the demand is high — since the war broke out in February, EU countries have pledged to spend more than €230bn to modernize their arsenals. 

The reason for the sudden influx of cash is not just Russia’s revanchism. There is also a push from many powerful European countries to ensure the Continent does not have to rely on the US military — or the powerhouse US defense industry — to defend its own borders. The recent Russian mobilization, nuclear threats and suspected gas pipeline sabotage have only heightened the local nature of these threats.

“We hear from US colleagues, actually advice,” said Jiří Šedivý, head of the European Defense Agency (EDA), an EU agency that is trying to help countries team up on defense purposes. “‘Invest in your own strategic enablers, because there might come a time, and it could be pretty soon, when actually, we, the US, might be engaged fully elsewhere in Asia-Pacific and we will be simply unable to support you.’”

In response, European defense firms are trying to play catch up, intensifying production and their own capabilities. But many European contracts have still been going abroad to places like the U.S. and even South Korea.

“As a company, we are investing hundreds of millions now in making sure that we can meet the demand,” said Micael Johansson, CEO of the Swedish defense firm Saab, whose shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, called NLAWs, have been critical for Ukraine.

But Europe’s security challenge presents a typical EU problem: success hinges on aligning the self-interests of 27 member states. Failure to do so, some argue, will only allow conflicts to fester.

«

OK, but Russia really can’t keep up. Though the broader point is that the European arms industry is used to manufacturing during peacetime (uh, no surprise) and has been caught on the hop by people actually firing thousands of rounds per day.
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The EU wants to put companies on the hook for harmful AI • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

»

The new liability bill would give people and companies the right to sue for damages after being harmed by an AI system. The goal is to hold developers, producers, and users of the technologies accountable, and require them to explain how their AI systems were built and trained. Tech companies that fail to follow the rules risk EU-wide class actions.

For example, job seekers who can prove that an AI system for screening résumés discriminated against them can ask a court to force the AI company to grant them access to information about the system so they can identify those responsible and find out what went wrong. Armed with this information, they can sue. 

The proposal still needs to snake its way through the EU’s legislative process, which will take a couple of years at least. It will be amended by members of the European Parliament and EU governments and will likely face intense lobbying from tech companies, which claim that such rules could have a “chilling” effect on innovation. 

In particular, the bill could have an adverse impact on software development, says Mathilde Adjutor, Europe’s policy manager for the tech lobbying group CCIA, which represents companies including Google, Amazon, and Uber.  

Under the new rules, “developers not only risk becoming liable for software bugs, but also for software’s potential impact on the mental health of users,” she says. 

Imogen Parker, associate director of policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an AI research institute, says the bill will shift power away from companies and back toward consumers—a correction she sees as particularly important given AI’s potential to discriminate. And the bill will ensure that when an AI system does cause harm, there’s a common way to seek compensation across the EU, says Thomas Boué, head of European policy for tech lobby BSA, whose members include Microsoft and IBM. 

«

Interesting, but plenty of room for a slip between cup and lip.
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Analysis: UK’s gas imports would be 13% lower if it had not ‘cut the green crap’ • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

The UK’s gas imports would be 13% lower if successive Conservative-led governments had not “cut the green crap” over the past decade, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

The findings come as the government’s North Sea Transition Authority announces a new licensing round for North Sea oil and gas, with the stated aim of increasing UK energy security. The analysis also follows news that the UK is at risk of blackouts if imports of gas and electricity are restricted.

Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that UK gas imports would have been cut by 65 terawatt hours (TWh) if government support for energy efficiency and renewables had continued, instead of being rolled back after then-prime minister David Cameron told ministers in 2013 to “cut the green crap”.

This saving would have been nearly twice as large as the 34TWh imported from Russia last year. It would have been sufficient to cut the UK’s net gas imports by 13% overall, significantly boosting energy security. The saving would have avoided buying 65TWh of gas at a cost of around £5bn.

Most of the savings would have been from additional onshore wind and solar capacity, which would have cut UK gas demand for electricity by 20%.

«

So many bad decisions in the past about energy. Didn’t build nuclear power stations. Didn’t insulate homes. Didn’t build onshore wind. Just amazing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting messaging apps to interoperate seems like a crazy demand. Yet Brazil’s banks managed it with Pix – and that exchanges real money. CC-licensed photo by Open Rights GroupOpen Rights Group 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.

On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Is it time to retire futurism? • TechTalks

Rich Heimann:

»

Charles Perrault perfectly captures the emphasis futurists place on movement and speed. Perrault is one of the leaders of the so-called AI Speedometer for the AI Index project. While the AI Speedometer cannot explain what AI is or how to solve it, it tries to convince you that the rate of progress within artificial intelligence is significant enough to result in bigger achievements. However, the value of measuring speed when you don’t know the destination or how to get there is never worth the time and effort spent calculating it.

Before speed can be essential, friends of artificial intelligence need to agree on where they are, where they are going, and how good a given solution is for the disputed problem of intelligence. After all, knowing the speed of something is useless if you don’t know where you are, where you are going, the distance to travel, and the time that one must reach a destination—going fast or faster means next to nothing if you don’t know where to go, or how or when to arrive. When distance and time are known and fixed, but speed varies due to research hurdles, speed alone will not be enough to accomplish a goal no matter how fast one goes. Like futurism, the AI Speedometer is, in effect, saying, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!”

Instructional frivolity aside, scientific knowledge doesn’t require a speedometer. Thomas Kuhn perfectly describes how scientific knowledge is developed, dispelling the progress myth. Scientific knowledge is not based on movement, speed, action, accumulation, or spawned on a specific day. Scientific discovery does not happen in straight lines or on paved roads. It only sometimes moves forward, and it is futile to identify the exact date when a paradigm shift occurs.

We don’t track progress toward solving the Riemann hypothesis or P=NP in computing because progress is zero until a breakthrough is achieved. Futurism distorts our senses by distorting our perception of time and progress.

«

Definitely: progress is extremely non-linear. Let’s hope there is a sudden breakthrough just around the corner. In what, who knows.
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Ministers hope to ban solar projects from most English farms • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

»

Ministers are planning to ban solar farms from most of England’s farmland, the Guardian can reveal.

The new environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, is understood to oppose solar panels being placed on agricultural land, arguing that it impedes his programme of growth and boosting food production.

To this end, say government sources, he has asked his officials to redefine “best and most versatile” land (BMV), which is earmarked for farming, to include the middling-to-low category 3b. Land is graded from 1 to 5, and currently BMV includes grades 1 to 3a. Planning guidance says that development on BMV land should be avoided, although planning authorities may take other considerations into account.

Currently, most solar farms are built on and planned for 3b land, so this move would scupper most new developments of the renewable energy source.

Extending BMV to grade 3b would ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land. Much of grade 4 and 5 land is in upland areas that are unsuitable for solar developments.

During her speech at the Conservative party conference last week, the prime minister, Liz Truss, reeled off a list of “enemies”, including green campaigners, who make up what she characterised as the “anti-growth coalition”. However, green campaigners say blocking the building of renewables would make her government part of such a group.

«

Bit inconvenient if Truss herself turns out to be part of the anti-growth coalition, but this is consistent with her previous actions: in 2014, exactly eight years ago, she stripped farmers of subsidies for solar farms saying they were a “blight” pushing food production overseas.
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Brazil’s Pix is a great example for future messaging apps interoperability • Notes by Rodrigo

Rodrigo Ghedin:

»

Pix began to be developed by the Brazil Central Bank in 2014 with an open model for dialogue, consisting of a discussion forum, working groups and even an open source repository on Github.

• In less than two years, almost 130 million (>50%) people and just over 11m companies have made at least one transaction with Pix
• This audience has created more than 500m “Pix keys” — shortcuts to facilitate Pix transfers. A Pix key can be a phone number, an email, a national ID (and its equivalent for companies), or a random number
• Close to BRL 1 trillion (~$200bn) was moved in 2.2bn transactions — the majority, 68%, between individuals (P2P).

It is true that Brazilian banks, despite all the power they have, shrink next to the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, such as Meta, Apple, and Google. Even so, they are really powerful and yet were all in. For all these reasons, Pix can be a reference to another conundrum that we face on a daily basis: the multiplicity of messaging applications.

In the first half of this year, the European Union advanced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a new law created to curb the unbridled power of American big tech and restore competition in the sectors in which these companies operate.

Among other requirements, the DMA demands for interoperability between messaging apps made by big companies. iMessage will have to talk to WhatsApp, and both will have to talk to… whatever Google’s messaging app is at the moment.

It seems as unlikely as it was in Brazil until 2020 to transfer a few bucks, free of charge and instantaneously, between rival banks accounts on a Sunday night. Difficult? Certainly, but not impossible.

…For messaging, we need a “common language” that understands the basic functionality of this kind of app, such as exchanging messages, creating groups, and making calls. The rest — stickers, reactions, mini-apps, etc. — is up to each application. These would be the differentiators.

«

Reflect on it: banking involves money, so it has to be encrypted and safe. Messaging doesn’t even involve money. It can be done, really.
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Binance blockchain hit by $570m hack • The New York Times

Ephrat Livni:

»

Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed on Friday that $570m had been stolen in a hack of a blockchain it runs that serves as a bridge for asset transfers between networks. The attack on the Binance Smart Chain network highlighted weaknesses in decentralized finance, or DeFi, where transactions are controlled by code.

“Software code is never bug free,” Binance’s chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, said in an interview with CNBC. He emphasized that no users had lost money in the hack but said that so-called cross-chain bridges were particularly vulnerable to hacks and the industry needed to get better at learning from them.

“We have seen a series of attacks on targeting vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridges,” Binance Smart Chain wrote in a blog post apologizing to users. “We will openly share the details of the postmortem and all lessons on how to implement more advanced security measures to shore-up these vulnerabilities.”

In August, the blockchain research company Chainalysis estimated that $2bn worth of cryptocurrency had been stolen in 13 cross-chain bridge attacks, mostly in 2022. In March, an attack drained $600m from a bridge behind the crypto-powered video game Axie Infinity. In February, $325m was stolen from the Wormhole network.

These exploits show that a reliance on code for control of DeFi platforms leaves these systems exposed, and that in emergency situations, decentralization can be an obstacle to quickly resolving issues.

«

Does the day have a Y in it? Then there’s an attack against a blockchain system being plotted, planned or executed. Also, if users lost no money, who did?
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Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta today announced it’s increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. Amid a slew of product updates for advertisers, including a music catalog for advertisers and a new ad format for Facebook Reels, the company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds.

Meanwhile, though Instagram Reels began rolling out 30-second ads globally last year, followed by Reels ads on Facebook earlier in 2022, the new format now being tested will involve shorter ads on Facebook Reels, specifically.

Called “post-loop” ads, these 4- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads will play after a Reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the Reel will then resume and loop again. Like TikTok, many Reels are designed to be watched more than once — but stuffing an ad at the end could see users instead choosing to scroll to a new video instead of watching the same one again. This is a risky move, as people will also likely consider this a poor user experience.

Meta also said it will test “image carousel” ads in Facebook Reels starting today. These are horizontally scrollable ads that can include anywhere from two to 10 image ads and are shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content.

«

Sounds awful. The good thing about Instagram’s adverts has always been that they’re well-targeted, but as there are more and more of them it’s inevitable that the quality gets worse and worse.
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Why short-sightedness is on the rise • BBC Future

Jessica Mudditt:

»

While a family history of myopia raises the risk of a child developing it, a purely genetic case of myopia is rare, says Neema Ghorbani-Mojarrad, a lecturer at the University of Bradford in the UK and a registered optometrist.

Instead, lifestyle factors are thought to be more significant, in particular, a lack of time outdoors, and focusing on close objects for an extended period through an activity like reading. These factors help explain why one otherwise thoroughly positive trend in children’s lives has unintentionally worsened the spread of myopia: education.

Of course, education in itself – in the sense of discovering the world, and empowering oneself through knowledge and skills – does not cause poor eye health. In fact, education is associated with many positive, measureable health effects. But the way children obtain an education in the modern world, with the emphasis on long hours spent in classrooms, appears to be consistently hurting their eye health.

“Education has been shown to cause short-sightedness,” says Ghorbani-Mojarrad, referring to education as measured by school years. “We don’t know what it is about education – we suspect it is reading and spending more time indoors. Every year of education completed increases the expected amount of short-sightedness.”

Ghorbani-Mojarrad and his colleagues studied the effect of education, as measured by school years, on myopia, by investigating the impact of the UK’s raising of the school leaving age from 15 to 16, in the 1970s. “There’s literally a bump in the chart for the extra year of school. Now that the leaving age is 18 in the UK, I wonder whether we will find the same thing again,” he says.

To understand this surprising link, it helps to parse how myopia develops in the first place. Most newborn babies begin life long-sighted. Within the first year of life, the eyes naturally develop and the long-sightedness reduces to the point of their vision becoming almost perfect. However, in some cases the eyes do not stop growing and short-sightedness develops. The eyeball is too elongated to be able to make out objects at a distance without the help of a corrective measure such as glasses.

“Everyone has a finite amount of retina, and if the eye continues to grow, it’s like trying to scrape the same amount of butter on a larger piece of bread,” says Ghorbani-Mojarrad. “The retina becomes really thin and is more prone to tearing.”

It appears that being indoors may worsen this problem, perhaps because of the way indoor lighting differs from natural light.

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Massive downturn in PC demand as worldwide shipments fall 18% in Q3 2022 • Canalys

»

“Alarmingly, vendors, channel partners and other industry players began indicating in Q3 that commercial procurement, which had remained strong in the face of worsening economic conditions, had come under threat as IT budgets were being reprioritized or slashed,” said senior analyst Ishan Dutt. “Businesses are exhibiting greater caution by extending device refresh cycles as they weather the current uncertainty. A positive signal for the PC market had been the relatively robust employment and hiring numbers in major markets. However, indications that this could reverse will further diminish commercial demand as the need for new PCs drops off. Business investment also faces constraints as the cost of borrowing is set to continue rising with interest rate hikes planned throughout the next few quarters. Despite the current adverse environment, the importance of PCs to support new workstyles and digital transformation goals remains high. Older devices in the installed base will need to be replaced and the market is expected to see recovery by the second half of 2023.”  

Lenovo maintained pole position in the global PC market but suffered a 16% year-on-year drop to 16.9m units. For the second quarter in a row, HP underwent the largest decline out of the top five vendors as it posted 12.7m units, a 28% year-on-year fall. Both Lenovo and HP shipped their lowest totals since the onset of the pandemic in Q1 2020. Third-placed Dell also posted a significant decline of 21% in shipments, posting just under 12m units. Apple enjoyed a better quarter than its competitors as it fulfilled orders from Q2 delayed due to supply disruptions in China and launched new M2 Macbooks. It sealed fourth place with 8.0 million units, a modest year-on-year increase of 2%. Asus rounded out the top five with 5.5m units, an annual decrease of 8%.

«

Basically takes the market as a whole back to pre-Covid levels, but with headwinds ahead. Apple was the only one to grow in a market that shrank dramatically: its market share hit (a record?) 9.3%.
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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA): searching for supply-side effects • Economic Studies at Brookings University

William Gale and Claire Haldeman analysed the effects of Trump’s 2017 tax-cut to see if its supply-side moves increased government revenue or GDP in the following two years:

»

The revenue effects of TCJA should not be controversial, but leading advocates of the bill made what are essentially ludicrous claims in this regard. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claimed TCJA would “not only pay for itself but in fact create additional revenue for the government.” Former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said he was “totally convinced [it was] a revenue neutral bill.”

In fact, the TCJA reduced revenues significantly, a conclusion reached by every credible analysis of the fiscal effects of the Act; see results from Page et al. (2017), Penn-Wharton Budget Model (2017), Tax Foundation (2017), Zandi (2017), Barro and Furman (2018), International Monetary Fund (2018), and Mertens (2018). The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (2017) estimated that TCJA would lose almost $1.5 trillion in revenue between 2018 and 2027 ($1.1 trillion on a dynamic basis), including $416bn in 2018 and 2019. The Congressional Budget Office obtained similar numbers.

In 2018 and 2019, total federal revenue was $545bn or 7.4% lower than projected before TCJA (CBO 2020a). Relative to pre-TCJA projections, income tax revenue declined 6.9%, and corporate tax revenue declined by more than 37%. These declines are not the product of overly optimistic prior projections. If they were, payroll tax revenues, which were unaffected by TCJA, would have declined relative to pre-TCJA projections. But predicted and observed payroll tax revenue track very closely in 2018 and 2019. In contrast, Holtz-Eakin (2020) reflects that the decline of almost a third in corporate income tax receipts from FY 2015 to FY 2019 “was to be expected” given the tax cut.

III. Economic Growth A. GDP
The facts are straightforward. GDP grew at the same rate in the first two years after the tax cut as it had in the last two years before the legislation, but it grew faster (at 2.4% per year) than had been predicted under pre-TCJA baselines (1.7%). The interpretation of these facts is difficult for several reasons. First, the predicted impact of TCJA on GDP was fairly small—CBO (2018a) estimated the Act would raise GDP by 0.3% in 2018 and 0.6% in 2019 and reports several other groups’ estimates that are similar in magnitude—which makes detecting the impact more difficult.

Second, much of the short-term projected growth derived from increases in consumer spending but consumption growth actually declined in 2018 and 2019 relative to 2016 and 2017 (Figure 2).

«

Perhaps someone could print this out and sneak it into Kwasi Karteng’s in-tray.
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‘The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash’—or just on a roller coaster • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

On a sunny September Sunday, Sara White and her family headed to Kings Island amusement park outside Cincinnati. 

The 39-year-old dentist zipped her two-day-old iPhone 14 Pro securely in her fanny [For British readers: bum – Ed.] pack, buckled into the Mystic Timbers roller coaster and enjoyed getting hoisted 109 feet in the air and whipped around at over 50 mph.

Afterward, she looked down at her phone. The lock screen was lined with missed calls and voice mails from an emergency dispatcher asking if she was OK.

During the ride, Apple’s new car-crash detection triggered and automatically dialled 911. The call to the Warren County Communications Center featured an automated voice message from Ms. White’s iPhone: “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash and is not responding to their phone.”

The message is repeated seven times during the call. As the phone made the call and played the automated message, it also picked up background audio from the scene—in this case cheers, music and other amusement-park sounds.

According to the 911 report, a team was sent to the ride but didn’t locate an emergency. When Ms. White realized what happened—ironically, when in line for the bumper cars—she called back the number to tell them she was OK. 

On one hand, it’s funny—especially when you consider that I flew to Michigan, hired a demolition-derby driver and totaled some cars so I could test the feature with the new iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Series 8, Ultra and SE. You know what would have been a lot easier? Driving to Six Flags in New Jersey!

On the other hand? There is nothing funny about busy emergency-services workers—and in some cases friends and family—accidentally being alerted to a tragedy that never happened.

«

The roller coasters seem to trigger this not during the wild up and down, but the stop at the end, which can be abrupt. Apple says it will keep working on the algorithms that detect this. People who have had the phone make calls for them seem reassured: it proves it works. Even a motorcyclist whose phone was knocked off the handlebars, and which then called and messaged all and sundry about the calamity, felt happy about it.

(You can turn Crash Detection off in Settings. Maybe next time you’re on a roller coaster…)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

All the money Jeff Bezos spent on taking William Shatner to space didn’t pay off: Cpt Kirk felt “grief” and “sadness” at the vista. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

William Shatner: my trip to space filled me with sadness • Variety

William Shatner went up with Jeff Bezos:

»

As we ascended, I was at once aware of pressure. Gravitational forces pulling at me. The g’s. There was an instrument that told us how many g’s we were experiencing. At two g’s, I tried to raise my arm, and could barely do so. At three g’s, I felt my face being pushed down into my seat. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I thought. Will I pass out? Will my face melt into a pile of mush? How many g’s can my ninety-year-old body handle?

And then, suddenly, relief. No g’s. Zero. Weightlessness. We were floating.

We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.

I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

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Space tourism gets its first one-star Yelp review.
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Meta’s VR platform Horizon is too buggy and employees aren’t using it enough, says exec • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

In one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”

Horizon Worlds lets people build and interact in virtual worlds as legless avatars, sort of like Roblox meets Minecraft. It’s a key initiative following CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranding of Facebook to Meta; the company is spending billions per year to build his vision of the metaverse. The multiplayer platform was released on Meta’s Quest headset in December of last year. It hit 300,000 users earlier this year and is supposed to be coming to mobile and desktop via a web version sometime soon, though Vishal’s memos imply a web launch could be pushed back.

“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” Shah wrote in a memo last month. “But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”

…A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

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Sounds bad. But: now read on.
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24 hours in the metaverse version of Facebook was surprisingly fun • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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[The product manual] also said children under the age of 13 shouldn’t use the headset, while those over 13 shouldn’t use it for “prolonged periods,” because it could interfere with “visual development” and hand-eye coordination.

Wearing the headset, I thought I looked like a failed version of the future, but my 5-year-old was captivated. She begged to try my goggles. Eventually, I relented and let her play Bogo, a game in which she cared for a cute baby alien. After a few minutes, I tried to remove the headset, but she liked it so much that she ran away from me — and straight into a wall. (She was fine.)
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Despite Meta’s warnings, every time I went into the metaverse, I inevitably ran into children. During one of my first visits to the Plaza, on a Monday afternoon in July, a guy in a gray blazer named Dustin excitedly told me that he had joined Horizon the day before and had spent eight straight hours there. He invited me to play a zombie-shooting game in a shopping mall. When tiny versions of the blocky, green zombies appeared, I exclaimed, “They’re little kids!”

“So am I,” he said, before adding, “Well, not that little.”

Dustin told me that he was 11, squarely in the camp of people whose brains were more threatened by the device than by the undead. As other journalists have discovered, there are tons of young people running around Horizon. On the upside for Meta, this means the company finally has a product that appeals to the generation that has largely rejected Instagram and Facebook. Though Horizon is an 18-and-over app, community guides told me that they kicked out only users younger than 13, and only if users explicitly revealed their age.

My headset notified me that its battery was low, and so I bade Dustin and the other players farewell. “Why don’t you plug and play?” one asked. I cringed at hearing a cutesy expression for a behavior that struck me as unhealthy. I resolved never to plug in my headset while it was attached to my head.

“Too ‘Matrix’ for me,” I joked, and then wondered if the young Dustin would understand the reference to a 1999 science-fiction movie about pale humans encased in goo and plugged into a simulated reality machine.

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Hill recounts multiple excursions into the Metaverse. The presence of children is surprising, but they’re probably the ones who are going to find out what’s good and bad about it.
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UK looks to cap renewable electricity generator revenues • Financial Times

Nathalie Thomas and Jim Pickard:

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Companies generating power from wind and solar fear the plans, similar to proposals already announced by the European Union, will effectively amount to a windfall tax on renewable energy.

The businesses involved in renewable power generation that could be affected include EDF Energy, RWE, ScottishPower and SSE. The government had been hoping to persuade electricity generators to agree voluntarily to 15-year fixed-price contracts well below current wholesale rates for their output.

But talks with the companies have collapsed and government legislation, which could be unveiled as early as next week, will be used to underpin a revenue cap on the generators, said people familiar with the plans. With UK households contending with soaring energy bills, the government indicated to generators at a private meeting last week that it would pursue a cap, said people briefed on the discussions.

People briefed on last week’s meeting said prices of about £50 to £60 per megawatt hour were mentioned as a starting point for the cap, well below current prices of about £490/MWh, although no final decisions have been taken.

…A “high percentage” or all of the revenues above the cap set by the government would be paid to the Treasury, added one of these people. The EU has announced a similar cap as part of plans to raise €140bn in windfall taxes.

Electricity generators fear the UK government’s plans will be more damaging to the sector than a 25% windfall tax imposed on oil and gas companies in May by the then chancellor Rishi Sunak.

His 25% “energy profits levy” was accompanied by a new investment allowance that energy companies can use to offset their tax bills if they press ahead with projects to boost UK production of fossil fuels.

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Makes total sense, to be honest, but you can see that the renewables companies won’t like it.
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‘It’s a scam’: Even after $100bn, self-driving cars are going nowhere • Bloomberg via Autoblog

Max Chafkin:

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“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175bn. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30bn, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3bn. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”

Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for more than a decade, the field’s biggest star. Now he’s running a startup that’s developing autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it’s more like zero.”

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Elon Musk insisted in 2015 that it would soon be a solved problem. Guess that’s another thing he was wrong about.
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Deaf or blind: Beethoven, Handel • The Sociological Eye

Randall Collins:

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Beethoven started going deaf in his late 20s.  Already famous by age 25 for his piano sonatas, at 31 he was traumatized by losing his hearing. But he kept on composing: the Moonlight Sonata during the onset of deafness; the dramatic Waldstein Sonata at 32; piano sonatas kept on coming until he was 50. In his deaf period came the revolutionary sounds of his 3rd through 8th symphonies, piano and violin concertos (age 32-40). After 44 he became less productive, with intermittent flashes (Missa Solemnis, Diabelli variations, 9th symphony) composed at 47-53, dying at 56. His last string quartets were composed entirely in his head, left unperformed in his lifetime.

Handel went blind in one eye at age 66; laboriously finished the oratorio he was working on; went completely blind at 68. He never produced another significant work. But he kept on playing organ concertos, “performing from memory, or extemporizing while the players waited for their cue” almost to the day he died, aged 74.

Johann Sebastian Bach fell ill in his 64th year; next year his vision was nearly gone; he died at 65 “after two unsuccessful operations for a cataract.”  At 62 he was still producing great works; at 64 he finished assembling the pieces of his B Minor Mass (recycling his older works being his modus operandi). At death he left unfinished his monument of musical puzzles, The Art of the Fugue, on which he had been working since 55.

Can we conclude, it is more important for a composer to see than hear?

…My point is not the pathos of difficult lives, nor the triumph of overcoming it. Deaf or blind creators in different fields provide a natural experiment, evidence for what kind of the skill — including social skill– is the specific ingredient of creativity in music, and what are specific to other fields.

Music without texts (folk music and the like) is hand-to-ear coordination. With instrument ensembles, it becomes also hand-to-eye coordination.

Playing an instrument is a bodily skill; the whole body may go into the rhythm; the movements of fingers on strings and keys; of arms scraping bows over strings or beating drums; of fingers on stops and valves coordinated with lips and mouth and lungs that is the playing of wind instruments. Opera singers are trained players of their own body cavities and the tensing and relaxing of muscles. All this while keeping an eye on the score, or at least having memorized it. Complex music– AKA classical music — is the coordination of instruments and players: a social skill, a social invention. The symphony orchestra was no less an organizational innovation than a factory of workers operating machinery.

Participants in these humans-with-instruments combinations – composers, players – practice hand-to-eye-to-ear coordination. When composers are deaf, they can continue to coordinate hand-to-eye and thus generate the social follow-through that is music creation. When composers go blind, they mostly stop composing.

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K-Pop apps create the illusion of private messaging with celebrities • Nielsen Norman Group

Lillian Yang:

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South Korean pop music, known as K-Pop, is one of the most popular music genres in the world. With catchy pop hits and intricate choreography, K-Pop groups such as BTS and Black Pink have attracted deeply dedicated fans from around the world.

Individual K-Pop group members are referred to as “idols.” Idols are known for their carefully developed public personalities, which are often strictly controlled by their music labels, because fans’ emotional attachments to individual idols are extremely profitable. Within the past few years, the industry has pioneered a new way to monetize fans’ emotional needs by creating dedicated mobile apps, such as Bubble and Universe, that simulate private messaging between idols and fans.

…Fans feel as though they are receiving a private message, written just for them, from their favorite idol. However, in reality, idols do not reply individually to each fan message. The goal is to make fans feel as if they have direct access to their favorite idols and thus strengthen their emotional attachment to these stars and increase profits.

The first instance of simulated private messaging appeared in the Bubble app, owned by the K-Pop label SM Entertainment. To chat with each idol, fans need to purchase a monthly subscription plan on the application’s STORE page — a blunt commoditization of idols’ time and attention.

After users pay to chat with a specific idol, a new private chat room is created and the fans start receiving the idol’s messages. Some artists text several times a day, while others just once a month. Idols typically send updates about what they are currently doing or thinking — for example, what they ate for lunch, selfies of their day-to-day life, and song recommendations. This content may seem mundane, but it helps fans feel as if they know the idol personally. Moreover, each idol seems to have a unique texting style — for example, some send longer text messages and others heavily use emojis. This consistency in the idol’s “personality” helps to persuade fans that it’s truly that person behind the screen.

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An insight into a very weird world, where they’re happy to get a message, disappointed if it breaks the illusion somehow (by being out of context), yet quickly forget it and carry on.

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Virginians can pay new fee by the mile to boost gas tax • The Washington Post

Ian Duncan:

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More than 7,000 Virginians have signed up to pay a fee for each mile they drive under a program launched this summer, putting the state at the forefront of a nationwide effort using new technology to prop up gas taxes that pay for roads.

The Virginia program, known as Mileage Choice, is aimed at drivers of electric vehicles and fuel-efficient cars who pay less in gas taxes while using the same roads as other drivers. Since 2020, Virginia has levied a fixed fee on those kinds of vehicles based on the difference between what they would have paid in gas taxes if driving an average number of miles.

In July, the state launched an alternative program to let drivers pay the fee at a per-mile rate — a cost savings for those who drive less than the average amount, which officials peg at 11,600 miles annually. For drivers of battery-powered cars, that fee works out to a penny per mile.

With the Biden administration aiming for half of new vehicle sales to be electric by the end of the decade, the federal government and states across the country are exploring such fees, seeing them as a way to ensure drivers continue to pay for the roads they use. The push is coming years after state and federal officials began to notice that increased fuel efficiency was denting transportation budgets funded by gas taxes.

Oregon and Utah have the nation’s longest-running per-mile programs, while other states have run pilots.

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Not yet introduced in the UK, but as EVs become more common, it will surely be necessary – fuel duty tax generates a lot of money for the Treasury.
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United Airlines is aiming to have electric planes flying by 2030 • CNBC

Ian Thomas:

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United has pushed heavily into a variety of lower-emission forms of aviation, not only announcing plans to buy electric air taxis and vertical aircraft, as well as hydrogen-electric engines but also investing in the companies behind the burgeoning technologies.

“We cannot continue doing and operating our business the way we do; it is imperative that we change it, and the way we’re going to change it is through investing in technology,” Mike Leskinen, United Airlines Ventures president, said in an interview as part of CNBC’s ESG Impact virtual conference on Thursday.

“Existing technology is going to either cause us to fly less, which is an unacceptable alternative, or continue with a carbon footprint, which we believe is equally unacceptable,” Leskinen said.

Heart Aerospace, which recently redesigned what will be its first electric aircraft which is now called the ES-30, plans to have the planes enter service in 2028, said Anders Forslund, the company’s CEO and founder.

The 30-passenger planes will be driven by electric motors with battery-derived energy, allowing the planes to have a fully electric range of 200 kilometers (124 miles). The planes will also include a reserve-hybrid engine powered by sustainable aviation fuel, allowing it to have an extended range of up to 400 kilometers with a full flight.

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A whole 124 miles, you say? For 30 passengers? If only there were some sort of road-based transport with similar – or better – ranges capable of taking as many – or more – passengers. Perhaps it would be something on which the wheels go round and round.
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Scientists discover they can pull water molecules apart using graphene electrodes • Phys.org

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Writing in Nature Communications, a team led by Dr. Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo based at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) [at the University of Manchester, England] used graphene as an electrode to measure both the electrical force applied on water molecules and the rate at which these break in response to such force. The researchers found that water breaks exponentially faster in response to stronger electrical forces.

The researchers believe that this fundamental understanding of interfacial water could be used to design better catalysts to generate hydrogen fuel from water. This is an important part of the U.K.’s strategy towards achieving a net zero economy. Dr. Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo said, “We hope that the insights from this work will be of use to various communities, including physics, catalysis, and interfacial science and that it can help design better catalysts for green hydrogen production.”

A water molecule consists of a proton and a hydroxide ion. Dissociating it involves pulling these two constituent ions apart with an electrical force. In principle, the stronger one pulls the water molecule apart, the faster it should break. This important point has not been demonstrated quantitatively in experiments.

Electrical forces are well known to break water molecules, but stronger forces do not always lead to faster water dissociation, which has puzzled scientists for a long time. A key difference with graphene electrodes is that these are permeable only to protons. The researchers found that this allows separating the resulting proton from the hydroxide ion across graphene, which is a one-atom-thick barrier that prevents their recombination.

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Seems encouraging? Graphene has long been one of those wonder materials that we just need to be able to make in large enough amounts for something amazing to happen.
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Why the US might not use a nuke, even if Russia does • Slate

Fred Kaplan:

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The wargame’s scenario: Russia invades one of the Baltic countries; NATO fights back effectively; Russia fires a low-yield nuclear weapon at the NATO troops or at a base in Germany where drones, combat planes, and smart bombs are deployed. The question: What do US decision makers do now? (I describe this game, in greater detail, in my 2020 book, The Bomb.)

At first, the generals in the room discussed how many nuclear weapons the US should fire back, and at what targets. But then Colin Kahl, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, raised his hand. You’re missing the big picture, he told the generals. Once Russia drops a nuclear bomb, we face a “world-defining moment”—an opportunity to rally the entire world against Russia, to isolate and weaken Moscow politically, economically, and militarily. However, if we fire back with nukes of our own, we would forfeit that leverage and, besides, normalize the use of nuclear weapons. So, Kahl suggested, we should continue and step up the conventional war, which we’re winning.

A few hours of discussion ensued about Kahl’s political calculus, the conventional strength of NATO, the uncertainty of where to fire a nuclear weapon anyway, and the additional uncertainty of whether a nuclear response would end the war any sooner or more successfully. A consensus emerged: The U.S. should respond just with stepped-up conventional military operations.

One month later, the NSC’s Principals Committee—the group of cabinet secretaries and military chiefs headed by National Security Adviser Susan Rice—played the same game. At one point, an official from the Treasury Dept. raised the same point that Kahl had at the Deputies’ Meeting, but he was shouted down, mainly by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who insisted that it was crucial to meet a nuclear attack with a nuclear response; the allies expect us to do this; if we didn’t, that would be disastrous for NATO, the end of all our alliances, the end of America’s credibility worldwide.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and the Secretary of Energy agreed with Carter. Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state, who was sitting in for a traveling John Kerry, was undecided, saying he saw the logic on both sides.

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Ironic but certainly true: if Russia fires a low-yield nuclear bomb, that means you are, or were, winning. (Things may have taken a bit of a reset at that point.) Which means your conventional approach is right. Now you just need to make Russia the utter paraiah. That’s the tricky bit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified