The boss of Peloton is cutting hundreds more jobs and warns the company has six more months before it’s in serious trouble. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster 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.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Beyond Move target. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s newest AI generator creates HD video from text prompts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Google announced the development of Imagen Video, a text-to-video AI mode capable of producing 1280×768 videos at 24 frames per second from a written prompt. Currently, it’s in a research phase, but its appearance five months after Google Imagen points to the rapid development of video synthesis models.

Only six months after the launch of OpenAI’s DALLE-2 text-to-image generator, progress in the field of AI diffusion models has been heating up rapidly. Google’s Imagen Video announcement comes less than a week after Meta unveiled its text-to-video AI tool, Make-A-Video.

According to Google’s research paper, Imagen Video includes several notable stylistic abilities, such as generating videos based on the work of famous painters (the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, for example), generating 3D rotating objects while preserving object structure, and rendering text in a variety of animation styles. Google is hopeful that general-purpose video synthesis models can “significantly decrease the difficulty of high-quality content generation.”

The key to Imagen Video’s abilities is a “cascade” of seven diffusion models that transform the initial text prompt (such as “a bear washing the dishes”) into a low-resolution video (16 frames, 24×48 pixels, at 3 fps), then upscales it into progressively higher resolutions with higher frame rates with each step. The final output video is 5.3 seconds long.

Video examples presented on the Imagen Video website range from the mundane (“Melting ice cream dripping down the cone”) to the more fantastic (“Flying through an intense battle between pirate ships on a stormy ocean.”) They contain obvious artefacts, but show more fluidity and detail than earlier text-to-image models such as CogVideo that debuted five months ago.

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The videos are remarkable; the artefacts are indeed visible, but when run small you don’t notice them particularly. This space is advancing so, so quickly.
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Know where your old stamps are? Use them soon or they won’t be valid • Royal Mail Group Ltd

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We’re adding barcodes to our regular stamps. After 31 January 2023, regular stamps without a barcode* will no longer be valid. You can either use up these stamps before this deadline or swap them for the new barcoded ones.

The stamps that are changing are the stamps (pictured below) that will be very familiar to you. They feature the profile of Her Late Majesty The Queen on a plain coloured background. The barcodes will enable exciting new services by connecting physical stamps to the digital world through the Royal Mail app which you can download.

Note: Special Stamps with pictures on and Christmas Stamps without a barcode will continue to be valid and don’t need to be swapped out.

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Interesting move which will enable “operational efficiencies” and “security features” and “innovative services”.
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Almost two-thirds of video streaming service subscribers cancelled a service in the past year • Newswire

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Video streaming service providers have been feeling the effects of “streaming fatigue,” with nearly two out of three people cancelling services because of price and nonuse.

The industry study published by Blue Label Labs surveyed 1005 people in North America between the ages of 15 and 67, revealing which services households subscribe to and what has been cancelled in the last year. It further examines the total amount each household spends on services and their sentiments as well as attitudes toward ads.

The survey conducted over the web between May 2022 and August 2022 also analyzes other dynamics between subscribers and providers.

• The most canceled streaming service reported in the last year is Amazon Prime at 9.46%, followed by Netflix at 8.55% and Disney+ at 8.33%
• Most subscribers (37.42%) report canceling because a service goes unused, and the next most popular reason to cancel (25.88%) is because a service is too expensive
• Regarding ads, 51.98% will deal with ads to enjoy a lower price point, 18.81% will pay to remove ads, and 19.40% report deleting apps with ads
• Rather than use a paid streaming service, 22.42% of respondents report spending more time with YouTube’s free version, 17.49% spend more time on Instagram, and 14.16% use TikTok more frequently.

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“Subscription fatigue” might be a better word for it. And speaking of subscriptions…
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Peloton to cut 500 more jobs in last bid for turnaround • WSJ

Sharon Terlep:

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Peloton Interactive said it plans to cut about 500 jobs, roughly 12% of its remaining workforce, in the company’s fourth round of layoffs this year as the connected fitness-equipment maker tries to reverse mounting losses.

Chief executive Barry McCarthy, who took over in February, said he is giving the unprofitable company about another six months to significantly turn itself around and, if that fails, Peloton likely isn’t viable as a standalone company. 

The job reductions, announced to staff on Thursday, will leave Peloton with roughly 3,800 employees globally, less than half the number of people the company employed at its peak last year. It also has eliminated about 600 more jobs since June than previously disclosed through retail store closings, attrition and other moves, Peloton said.

Mr. McCarthy said that the latest cuts mark Peloton’s final significant move to reduce its operating footprint and that executives would now focus on increasing revenue. He said the cuts are companywide but would be heaviest in its marketing operation, which he said is too big for a company of Peloton’s size.

“There comes a point in time when we’ve either been successful or we have not,” Mr. McCarthy said in an interview.

“If we don’t grow,” he said, before pausing. “We need to grow to get the business to a sustainable level.”

The company has reported six straight quarterly losses, culminating in a $1.2bn loss in the most recent quarter. Demand for Peloton’s bikes and treadmills has plunged and the number of people who subscribe to its fitness classes has stagnated as Americans return to pre-Covid routines and, more recently, confront decades-high inflation.

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If the best time to launch a company is during a recession (because you can only succeed in the teeth of tough economic times), perhaps the worst time to launch – or rapidly grow – a company is during the best possible economic and social conditions for its business model, because they’ll eventually end.

Next question: who’ll want to buy it? (No, Apple won’t.) Amazon? Google? Under Armour? Nike? Answers on a postcard/email/Twitter DM.
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Gas crisis set to worsen after Europe burns through winter stocks • Reuters

Essi Lehto and Kate Abnett:

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Europe may face an even more acute energy crunch next year after draining its natural gas tanks to get through the cold of this winter, the head of the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, as the EU looks for ways to ease the crisis.

European countries have filled storage tanks to around 90% of their capacity after Russia cut gas supplies in response to Western sanctions imposed over its invasion of Ukraine.

Gas prices, which surged in the months after the invasion in February, have retreated. But that could be short-lived as countries compete to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other alternatives to Russian pipeline deliveries.

To help tackle the pain, the European Union is considering a gas price cap, an issue that has divided the 27-nation bloc as some countries worry it could make securing supplies harder.

“With gas storages almost at 90%, Europe will survive the coming winter with just some bruises as long as there are no political or technical surprises,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based IEA.

The real challenges facing Europe, which had historically relied on Russia for around 40% of its natural gas, will begin in February or March when storage needs to be refilled after high winter demand has drained them to 25%-30%.

“This winter is difficult but next winter may also be very difficult,” Birol told journalists in Finland.

European governments have moved to cushion consumers from the impact of higher prices and on Wednesday, Germany said it will subsidise power bills next year by paying just under €13bn ($12.8bn) towards the usage fees charged by the four high-voltage transmission grid companies (TSOs).

The fees form part of electricity bills, accounting for around 10% of overall costs for retail customers and a third for industrial companies in sectors such as steel or chemicals.

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The workings of the electricity market are many and varied, but it feels like there are lots of people skimming people off all the way down the line.

Also: pray for mild winter, I guess.
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Heat pumps: The super-efficient appliance that could save you thousands on home energy costs • CNN

Ella Nilsen:

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When Maine Gov. Janet Mills took office, she pledged to install 100,000 heat pumps by 2025 to help wean her state off fossil fuel and meet her climate targets.

“We are definitely on track to hit that goal, or even hit it early,” Dan Burgess, the director of the Maine governor’s Energy Office, told CNN. “As the technology has gotten better, people have gotten used to having them or maybe know someone who has one. They’ve really taken off.”

Heat pumps have a leg up on traditional air conditioners and furnaces because they aren’t using energy to heat or cool air – a very inefficient process. Instead, they use energy to move heat in or out of the house.

In warm weather, heat pumps act as air conditioners by taking heat from indoors and pushing it outside. During a recent heat wave over 90ºF, the Hardys said they were cool in their home.

“I can’t tell you how comfortable we are,” Cathy said. “It’s not freezing like a window AC [that’s] harder to control the temperature. We don’t touch the thermostat.”

In cold weather, heat pumps consolidate heat from outside and push it indoors. And yes – there is still enough heat energy outside in the winter for the heat pump to warm your home, even when temperatures are very cold.

Heat pumps of the past always performed best in warm and moderate climates – ones that don’t get too cold. But the technology has advanced, making them more capable of heating homes in uber-cold temperatures.

“The American consumer’s perception is ‘heat pumps don’t work in cold climates, why would I want one?’” said Mark Kuntz, a CEO for Mitsubishi who oversees the companies US heat pump and HVAC operations. “The excitement in this is around a special type of heat pump that can produce an efficient heat – even in sub-zero temperatures.”

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According to this Statista page (and who knows what its sources are), the UK has just shy of 240,000 heat pumps – ground source and air source – operating in 2019. Not bad.
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Google is trying to become a more visual, more exploratory search engine • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Google is trying to blow up how you think about search. To say it’s pivoting to compete in a world where TikTok and Instagram are changing the way the internet works would be an overstatement… but not a big one. Google now exists on a more visual, more interactive internet, in which users want to be surprised and delighted as often as they just want an answer to their questions. In that world, what is a search engine even for? The Google you see tomorrow might not be completely different, but the change is already starting.

At its annual Search On event today, Google showed off a bunch of new ways for people to search the internet. Most of them continue the trend of Google’s last few years: trying to find more natural and more visual ways for people to input searches and get results. You can now ask Google a question by taking a picture or rambling into your phone’s microphone rather than trying to type the perfect set of keywords into the search bar. And Google is looking for more ways to present information you might care about without you even having to ask. 

It’s an interesting thought experiment, really: what would Google’s equivalent of TikTok’s For You page look like? Google’s search team doesn’t know exactly, but it’s working on it. And at least so far, it looks like the answer will start to appear on the homepage of Google’s iOS app. That’s where many of Google’s new features are getting their start and where lots of customers are already interacting with Google in new ways.

…advances in AI and computer vision are what power Google Lens and the new Multisearch feature with which you can search with a picture and then modify it with text. (Google always explains this with a dress — snap a photo of the green dress you like, type “in purple,” and you’re off to the races.) Multisearch has been available for a few months and is now rolling out globally. Google’s classic list of links is starting to change, too, to be replaced in some contexts by a mosaic of images and informational widgets. (Sometimes links are still the best answer, Google thinks, but not always. Not even usually.)

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Every couple of years Google says that search is changing completely, though the shift tends to be difficult to spot. But it’s definitely there. The question is, will it be enough to catch up with an audience increasingly using TikTok for search?
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Truss cut the most popular taxes; this wasn’t an accident, but it may be a mistake • The Conversation

Lucy Barnes is an associate professor in comparative politics at University College London (UCL), and Benjamin Lauderdale is professor of political science, UCL:

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For the purposes of our research, popular taxes are those that more of the respondents would choose to increase to raise revenues or at least wouldn’t decrease, given the choice. Unpopular taxes are those that more people would choose to cut and fewer would choose to increase.

We found that people were not keen on cuts to corporation tax, alcohol and tobacco duties, and the higher and additional rates of personal income tax.

But these were almost exactly the same as those the government chose to cut (or cancelled proposed raises for) in September’s mini-budget. The abolition of the 45p rate of income tax was the fourth most unpopular way to cut taxes out of the 23 options we presented.

Not all of the changes announced in the mini-budget were unappealing to our survey respondents, however. Reversing the changes to National Insurance and cutting the basic rate of income taxation have more support among the members of the public that we surveyed. But more of the public would prefer increases to the personal allowance and the higher rate threshold as ways to reduce the income tax burden.

The fact that the government chose otherwise is not simply a case of trying to appeal to Conservative voters either. The evidence indicates that these preferences are widely shared across the population, as well as among Conservative voters.

For example, we found that Corporation Tax is the second most popular way for generating public revenues among Conservative voters. Alcohol and tobacco duties are Conservative voters’ favourites, which aligns with the lukewarm reception for freezing them at the Conservative Party conference. Conservatives like the 45p rate of income tax less than their Labour counterparts, according to our survey, but they still see it as a reasonable way to raise the revenue.

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Truss and Kwarteng are so astonishingly tin-eared politically that this comes as no surprise. But it’s helpful to have the data on it.
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Ten ways Liz Truss’s policies diverge from the 2019 Tory election manifesto on which the Government was elected • the i

Jane Merrick:

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An extraordinary battle is raging at the top of the Conservative Party over whether Liz Truss has a mandate for her radical policy agenda.

Former Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries says the Prime Minister needs to call a General Election to secure a new mandate because she has undone many of the policies she had secured as Culture Secretary, while several ex-ministers and MPs have made clear their opposition to likely cuts to benefits and the now-shelved 45p tax rate cut.

Yet on Sunday, the Prime Minister insisted she was delivering on the pledges people had backed under Boris Johnson in 2019, telling the BBC Tory voters had “voted for a different future”.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has turned on the “45p-tax Tory rebels”, accusing them of staging a “coup” against the Prime Minister.

And on Tuesday, Ms Truss suggested her Government could start from scratch on all Government policy, telling Talk TV: “We are going to have to look at things differently as we move forward.”

Here are the 10 ways Ms Truss has diverged from the 2019 Conservative manifesto…

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Tax (though the argument’s a bit marginal), debt (definitely), public spending (clearly), benefits payments (clearly), online safety (still not proceeding), fracking (complete reversal), net zero (lip service, with new licences for oil/gas), environment (unclear), NHS funding (possibly), NHS workforce (not growing as promised).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Getting clocks on the internet to agree on what the time is has been a problem right back to the network’s origins. One man essentially solved it.

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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Bright and bushy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The thorny problem of keeping the internet’s time • The New Yorker

Nate Hopper:

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To solve the problem of time synchronization on the Arpanet, Mills built what programmers call a protocol—a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The Arpanet was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehaviour was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion.

Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable “truechimers” from misleading “falsetickers.” An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and NTP soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers. By 1988, Mills had refined NTP to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds—a fraction of a blink of an eye. “I always thought that was sort of black magic,” Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. NTP works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices.

The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via GPS to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to NTP servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run NTP. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to NTP servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

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Wonderful, in-depth reporting. By the way, if you think the current British government has a monopoly on mad ideas about the internet, don’t forget Greenwich Electronic Time, the brainchild of someone in Tony Blair’s team, back in 2000. It didn’t survive contact with the internet.
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Amazon’s Glow goes the way of the Fire Phone and dodo • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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The Glow allowed children to video chat, draw, and play games with family members remotely via the 8-inch display. It also projected onto a 19in mat that children could interact with. One obvious downside was the requirement of an Amazon Kids+ subscription for playing games and accessing other content, like books and art. The service is $5 per month. Glow came from Amazon’s Grand Challenge lab, which makes experimental products.

Some reviewers praised Glow’s innovation, but some, like PCMag, also lamented Glow’s reliance on a subscription and phone or tablet, considering the high price. And some reviewers, including CNET and The Verge, noted glitchy behavior.

Amazon workers who had been focused on Glow are being moved elsewhere within the company, Bloomberg reported.

As the publication noted, other recently reported moves by Amazon seemingly aimed at keeping costs low amid slowing retail sales include closing warehouses and, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, a hiring freeze on retail corporate jobs.

Amazon’s Glow device will meet other Amazon devices sent to product hell, including the Amazon Smart Oven convection oven/air fryer/microwave announced in 2019 and the FireOS-based Fire Phone, which Amazon killed off in 2015.

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The hardest thing to make in hardware remains a profit.
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How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? • Thinking about…

Timothy Snyder:

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The Ukrainians, let’s face it, have turned out to be stunningly good warriors.  They have carried out a series of defensive and now offensive operations that one would like to call “textbook,” but the truth is that those textbooks have not yet been written; and when they are written, the Ukrainian campaign will provide the examples.  The have done so with admirable calm and sang-froid, even as their enemy perpetrates horrible crimes and openly campaigns for their destruction as a nation.

Right now, though, we have a certain difficulty seeing how Ukraine gets to victory, even as the Ukrainians advance.  This is because many of our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation.  I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending. 

Using the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking.  Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.  Indeed, we should never lose sight of how much a Ukrainian victory will improve the world we live in.

But how do we get there?  The war could end in a number of ways.  Here I would like to suggest just one plausible scenario that could emerge in the next few weeks and months.  Of course there are others.  It is important, though, to start directing our thoughts towards some of the more probable variants.  The scenario that I will propose here is that a Russian conventional defeat in Ukraine is merging imperceptibly into a Russian power struggle, which in turn will require a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. This is, historically speaking, a very familiar chain of events.

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I’m very dubious about the possibility of a tactical nuke being used (even though writing this feels like a hostage to fortune at any time of the day), which is why this deconstructionist approach is attractive.
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Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel, last week:

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Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts [released via legal discovery in Twitter’s case against Musk in Delaware] were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

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It’s equally alarming, hilarious and depressing that these people have so much money and power, but they think they need to abase themselves to someone who they view as having more money, and hence power.
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iPhone not migrating to USB-C or getting Touch ID on power button any time soon • AppleInsider

William Gallagher:

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Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that market and financial benefits will mean Apple skips USB-C for iPhones, and will also not move Touch ID to the power button at any time in the near future.

Despite moving the iPad Pro to USB-C charging instead of Lightning, back in 2018, Apple has kept the iPhone on the older technology. Now the analyst says it appears Apple will neither adopt USB-C nor Touch ID on the iPhone.

“The market expects the iPhone to abandon Lightning in favor of USB-C and equip the power button with the Touch ID sensor,” writes Kuo in a note seen by AppleInsider. “Our latest survey indicates that there is no visibility on the current schedule for the iPhone to adopt these two new specifications.”

Kuo understands that there are technical issues around waterproofing, but says he believes there are market pressures involved. Specifically, Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) program is a profitable business that would be affected.

“We believe that USB-C is detrimental to the MFi business’s profitability, and its waterproof specification is lower than Lightning and MagSafe,” continues Kuo. “Therefore, if the iPhone abandons Lightning in the future, it may directly adopt the portless design with MagSafe support instead of using a USB-C port.”

“At present, the MagSafe ecosystem is not mature enough, so the iPhone will continue to use the Lightning port in the foreseeable future,” he says.

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“No visibility on the current schedule” is a careful choice of words. The 2023 iPhone has been designed and prototypes will be coming off early lines. But the 2024 version, which will have to comply (unless I’ve missed something) with the EU’s USB-C charger ruling, is – if these things are going on the schedule I’d expect – has only just emerged from design, and has yet to start being templated in factories. (I’d expect that to start being visible early next year, perhaps.) So this story could be completely accurate and yet completely misleading about what’s further out.
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Global electricity mid-year insights 2022 • Ember

Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka:

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• 1: Renewables met all growth in global electricity demand
Global electricity demand rose 3% in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period last year; this was in line with the historic average. Wind and solar met 77% of this demand growth, and hydro more than met the remainder. In China, the rise in wind and solar generation met 92% of its electricity demand rise; in the US it was 81%, while in India it was 23%.

2: Coal and gas generation remained almost unchanged
Because renewables growth met all the demand growth, fossil generation was almost unchanged. Coal declined by 1% and gas declined by 0.05%; these were offset by a slight rise in oil. Consequently, global CO2 power sector emissions were unchanged, despite the rise in electricity demand. Coal in the EU rose 15% only to cover a temporary shortfall in nuclear and hydro generation. Coal in India rose 10% because of a sharp rebound in electricity demand from the lows early last year when the Covid-19 pandemic struck hardest. These rises were offset against falls of 3% in China and 7% in the US.

3: Wind and solar growth delivered tangible cost and climate benefits
The growth in wind and solar in the first half of 2022 prevented a 4% increase in fossil generation. This avoided $40bn in fuel costs and 230 Mt CO2 in emissions. In China, the growth in wind and solar enabled fossil fuel power to fall 3%, rather than rise by 1%. In India, it slowed down the rise in fossil fuel power from 12% to 9%. In the US, it slowed down the rise in fossil fuel power from 7% to 1%. In the EU, it prevented a major rise in fossil fuel power – without wind and solar, fossil generation would have risen by 16% instead of 6%.

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So basically we’re treading water: renewables come onstream, energy use expands to fill the gap. Ember warns that things could get worse in the rest of the year, but adds:

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We are getting closer to a tipping point, where clean electricity – led by wind and solar – will meet all future electricity demand growth, and thus fossil fuel power generation peaks.

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Police use DNA phenotyping in unsolved sexual assault • Edmonton Police

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After a bus stopped at the shelter and picked up the people waiting, the unknown male followed the complainant as she continued to walk by. The male assaulted her, then pulled her into the field surrounding St. Basil and Spruce Avenue schools, where he violently sexually assaulted her.

After the assault, the woman reportedly regained consciousness and made her way to 103 Street and 114 Avenue, where a resident found her at approximately 5:45 a.m. and called 911.

An April 18, 2019 news release issued by the Edmonton Police Service outlined the details above and sought information about the suspect, describing him as 5’4”, with a black toque [“a small hat with a closely turned up brim” – dictionary], pants [trousers] and sweater or hoodie. He was described as having an accent. He was believed to have fled west from the scene.

Following a long investigation where no witnesses, CCTV, public tips or DNA matches were found, detectives took the step of enlisting Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia that specializes in advanced DNA analysis services. The service used in this case was DNA phenotyping, the process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence. Law enforcement agencies use the company’s Snapshot ® DNA Phenotyping Service to narrow suspect lists and generate leads in criminal investigations.

Using DNA evidence from this investigation, Parabon produced trait predictions for the associated person of interest (POI). Individual predictions were made for the subject’s ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, and face shape. By combining these attributes of appearance, a “Snapshot” composite was produced depicting what the POI may have looked like at 25 years old and with an average body-mass index (BMI) of 22. These default values were used because age and BMI cannot be determined from DNA.

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This is extremely dodgy. Parabon Nanolabs has generated what looks basically like glammed-up Identikit, which you’d hope the victim could do anyway. The company says its “snapshot” division has helped agencies in North America solve 230 violent crime cases. I’d really like to know how well those solved cases have stood up.
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How to identify that light in the sky • Nasa Astronomy Picture Of The Day

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What is that light in the sky? Perhaps one of humanity’s more common questions, an answer may result from a few quick observations. For example – is it moving or blinking? If so, and if you live near a city, the answer is typically an airplane, since planes are so numerous and so few stars and satellites are bright enough to be seen over the din of artificial city lights.

If not, and if you live far from a city, that bright light is likely a planet such as Venus or Mars – the former of which is constrained to appear near the horizon just before dawn or after dusk. Sometimes the low apparent motion of a distant airplane near the horizon makes it hard to tell from a bright planet, but even this can usually be discerned by the plane’s motion over a few minutes. Still unsure? The featured chart gives a sometimes-humorous but mostly-accurate assessment.

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Please note that in no circumstance is the answer “damn, it’s an alien spaceship”.
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The ever-expanding job of preserving the internet’s backpages • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

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Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to [the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster] Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult.

News organisations’ paywalls (such as the FT’s) are also “problematic”, Kahle says. News archiving used to be taken extremely seriously, but changes in ownership or even just a site redesign can mean disappearing content. The technology journalist Kara Swisher recently lamented that some of her early work at The Wall Street Journal has “gone poof”, after the paper declined to sell the material to her several years ago.

As we start to explore the possibilities of the metaverse, the Internet Archive’s work is only going to get even more complex. Its mission is to “provide universal access to all knowledge”, by archiving audio, video, video games, books, magazines and software. Currently, it is working to preserve the work of independent news organisations in Iran and is storing Russian TV news broadcasts. Sometimes keeping things online can be an act of justice, protest or accountability.

Yet some challenge whether the Internet Archive has the right to provide the material at all. It is currently being sued by several major book publishers over its “OpenLibrary” lending platform for ebooks, which allows users to borrow a limited number of ebooks for up to 14 days. The publishers argue it is hurting revenue.

Kahle says that’s ludicrous. He likes to describe the task of the archive as being no different from a traditional library. But while a book doesn’t disappear from a shelf if the publisher goes out of business, digital content is more vulnerable. You can’t own a Netflix show. News articles are there for only as long as publishers want them to be. Even songs we pay to download are rarely ours, they’re simply licensed.

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Now up to about 100 petabytes, costing only $25m to run annually, compared to $170m for San Francisco’s libraries (though those allow people in – the old high street shop/online shop difference). Evanescence is becoming the internet’s byword.
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Exclusive: Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child sexual abuse accounts • Reuters via Yahoo

Sheila Dang and Katie Paul:

»

Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the companies told Reuters.

DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter.

Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal and Coca-Cola Co to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.

Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.

“We’re horrified,” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. “Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”

«

I’m sure Elon will sort this all out really quickly – perhaps by getting rid of advertising.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A newly revealed investigation suggests that a rising star of the chess world used computer help in more than 100 online games. CC-licensed photo by Pasquale Paolo Cardo 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Handle with care. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU passes law to switch iPhone to USB-C by end of 2024 • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

The European Parliament on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of enforcing USB-C as a common charging port across a wide range of consumer electronic devices, including the iPhone and AirPods, by the end of 2024.

The proposal, known as a directive, forces all consumer electronics manufacturers who sell their products in Europe to ensure that a wide range of devices feature a USB-C port. This “common port” will be a world-first statute and impact Apple in particular since it widely uses the Lightning connector instead of USB-C on many of its devices. MEPs claim that the move will reduce electronic waste, address product sustainability, and make use of different devices more convenient.

The directive received 602 votes in favor, 13 votes against, and eight abstentions. A press release issued by the European Parliament on Tuesday states:

»

By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port. From spring 2026, the obligation will extend to laptops. The new law, adopted by plenary on Tuesday with 602 votes in favour, 13 against and 8 abstentions, is part of a broader EU effort to reduce e-waste and to empower consumers to make more sustainable choices.

Under the new rules, consumers will no longer need a different charger every time they purchase a new device, as they will be able to use one single charger for a whole range of small and medium-sized portable electronic devices.

Regardless of their manufacturer, all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops that are rechargeable via a wired cable, operating with a power delivery of up to 100 Watts, will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C port.

«

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Given that the 2024 iPhones will just be leaving the design boards, one has to wonder if those will have USB-C. Presumably yes, since they’ll be sold in the EU in 2025. Not sure a single charger will do the job: do you really want a 100W charger juicing your phone?
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Elon Musk to proceed with $44bn buyout of Twitter after U-turn • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Kari Paul:

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Lawyers for Musk confirmed in a court filing Tuesday that the billionaire will push ahead with the deal after performing another dramatic U-turn on his decision to walk away from the agreement.

The filing confirmed reports from Bloomberg on Tuesday that the Tesla chief executive had written to Twitter offering to close the deal at the original price of $54.20 a share, which sent shares in the social media site climbing more than 12% to $47.93 in New York before trading was halted.

Musk had been set for a courtroom showdown with Twitter on 17 October, with multiple legal commentators warning he had a slim chance of succeeding in his attempt to scrap the deal.

“We write to notify you that the Musk Parties intend to proceed to closing of the transaction contemplated by the April 25, 2022 merger agreement, on the terms and subject to the conditions set forth therein and pending receipt of the proceeds of the debt financing contemplated thereby,” reads the notice, filed by Musk’s lawyers with the Delaware Chancery court which was overseeing the trial.

Twitter agreed, writing: “The intention of the company is to close the transaction” that was agreed upon during the original deal.

The microblogging platform has been demanding that Musk, the world’s richest man, complete the deal under terms agreed in April. It is suing him in Delaware, the state where Twitter is incorporated and which has a strong legal reputation for enforcing merger agreements.

«

Scared of the court case? Seems so. But it’s hard to see how this is going to benefit anyone. Musk’s texts back and forth with various friends have emerged in legal discovery over the past week, and they make him and them sound idiotic.

Buy it and immediately hand it over? In any case, buying it for that amount costs money, and that’s not as easy to find on the street as it used to be.
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Chess investigation finds that US grandmaster ‘likely cheated’ more than 100 times • WSJ

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson:

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When world chess champion Magnus Carlsen last month suggested that American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann was a cheater, the 19-year-old Niemann launched an impassioned defense. Niemann said he had cheated, but only at two points in his life, describing them as youthful indiscretions committed when he was 12 and 16 years old. 

Now, however, an investigation into Niemann’s play—conducted by Chess.com, an online platform where many top players compete—has found the scope of his cheating to be far wider and longer-lasting than he publicly admitted. 

The report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, alleges that Niemann likely received illegal assistance in more than 100 online games, as recently as 2020. Those matches included contests in which prize money was on the line. The site uses a variety of cheating-detection tools, including analytics that compare moves to those recommended by chess engines, which are capable of beating even the greatest human players every time.  

The report states that Niemann privately confessed to the allegations, and that he was subsequently banned from the site for a period of time. 

The 72-page report also flagged what it described as irregularities in Niemann’s rise through the elite ranks of competitive, in-person chess. It highlights “many remarkable signals and unusual patterns in Hans’ path as a player.”

While it says Niemann’s improvement has been “statistically extraordinary.” Chess.com noted that it hasn’t historically been involved with cheat detection for classical over-the-board chess, and it stopped short of any conclusive statements about whether he has cheated in person. Still, it pointed to several of Niemann’s strongest events, which it believes “merit further investigation based on the data.” FIDE, chess’s world governing body, is conducting its own investigation into the Niemann-Carlsen affair.

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The proof is going to be interesting, and of course hotly disputed. Niemann seems to have improved more quickly than anyone, ever – including Bobby Fischer and Carlsen himself. Possible, but unlikely.
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The next century of computing • Bzogrammer

Charles Rosenbauer:

»

In this article, I will be giving 80 brief predictions on the future of computing and its impact on the broader world. These are largely predictions that you will not find elsewhere, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list of my ideas. However, from much of my theoretical research and various trends I’ve seen playing out, these are the places where I see things eventually deviating from common expectations.

Many of these take the form of a niche that I see existing now or in the future. How fast these predictions come true will be highly dependent on how fast people can find these niches and begin to fill them. In some ways this is a guide for people who may be interested in building a future that I hope you’ll agree with me is more interesting and inspiring than many current visions of the future.

1. Let us start by getting the obvious out of the way. Moore’s law is coming to an end. It is slowing down rather than coming to a grinding halt, but already Dennard scaling has broken down, which eliminates many of the real benefits from scaling further for chips that are not almost entirely memory.
2. The end of Moore’s Law will quickly result in much more bizarre hardware. The decades ahead of us will be a Cambrian Explosion of bizarre hardware.
3. Existing architectures will be abandoned. No more x86, ARM, or RISC-V. However, this will go far deeper than people expect. The basic concept of computing as a machine executing a stream of instructions, shuffling data back and forth between processor and memory, will eventually be abandoned in favor of more exotic models. The models we have today will be shown to be largely arbitrary, holding back potential efficiency gains and theoretical insights with models that reflect naive computational theory from the 1940s and 50s that has yet to die far more than any fundamental nature of computing.

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This goes very, very deep.
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TWO minutes of the Simpsons • gralefrit

Joel Morris is a comedy scriptwriter (did you laugh at Paddington? Probably one of his jokes):

»

There’s an old saying that analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. Nobody laughs and the frog dies.

But if that approach was applied to actual dissection, we’d still think humans were worked by little people inside, like The Numbskulls in that comic, or that Pixar film that was like The Numbskulls in that comic.

So I say, dammit. This is comedy science and we need to get some blood on our hands. We’ve waited long enough. Let’s cut up a frog and kill it. Not just kill it. Dice it. Shove it through the woodchipper. Leave its guts floating in the air as a fine, dull mist that nobody could laugh at, but which leaves a horrible taste in the mouth. Yay! Fun!

For this experiment, let’s send Igor to exhume the still warm corpse of the peak-era Simpsons episode Homer Badman. It’s a classic episode, from season six, regularly scoring high on critics’ and fans’ lists of the best Simpsons episodes of all time. The script will have been ping-ponged around one of the sharpest writing rooms in comedy history, but the lead writing credit here goes to Greg Daniels, who went on to co-create King Of The Hill, Parks and Rec and the American version of The Office. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s said that it’s his favourite ever Simpsons episode.

In Homer Badman, Simpson family patriarch Homer attends a candy industry trade fair, with the hope of stealing as many free samples as possible. On returning home, his attempts to grab a rare Gummi bear candy that the family’s childminder has sat on are mistaken for sexual harassment, and the hapless yellow dad ends up a victim of trial-by-media.

This episode features some of my personal favourite Simpsons moments (Homer throwing a shaken cola can as a grenade, a pitch-perfect throwaway Little Mermaid parody, a TV talk show hosted by a wild bear) and builds to possibly the greatest closing scene of any sitcom, where Homer proudly and tenderly tells his wife, “Marge, my love, I haven’t learned a thing.” (That’s the rules right there, not only for writing the character of Homer, but for keeping a sitcom going for thirty plus years.)

But we’re not going to get that far. Nowhere near.

«

Truly excellent. Not short, but if you thought a Simpsons episode was probably just a few jokes strung together, read this and reassess.
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How to read an AI image • Cybernetic Forest

Eryk Salvaggio:

»

Let’s start with an image that I’d like to understand. It’s from OpenAI’s DALLE2, a diffusion-based generative image model. DALLE2 creates images on demand from a prompt, offering four interpretations. Some are bland. But as Roland Barthes said, “What’s noted is notable.”

So I noted this one.

It is an AI image created of two humans kissing. It’s obviously weird. There’s the uncanny valley effect. But what else is going on? How might we “read” this image?

We see a heterosexual white couple. A reluctant male is being kissed by a woman. In this case, the man’s lips are protruding, which is rare compared to our sample. The man is also weakly represented: his eyes and ears have notable distortions.

what does it all mean? To find out, we need to start with a series of concrete questions for AI images:

1. Where did the dataset come from?

2. What is in the dataset and what isn’t?

3. How was the dataset collected?

This information, combined with more established forms of critical image analysis, can give us ways to “read” the images.

Here’s how I do it.

«

As he says, the picture reveals the dataset underneath. We’re developing all sorts of new methods to interrogate what we see and understand it in new ways; it’s a whole new form of art.
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Liz Truss quashes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ‘half-baked’ labour market reforms • Financial Times

Peter Foster, Jim Pickard and George Parker:

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As well as introducing no-fault dismissals for people earning more than £50,000 a year, [secretary of state for business Jacob] Rees-Mogg suggested scrapping corporate reporting requirements for the gender pay gap and the speed with which companies pay their suppliers, said people with knowledge of the discussions.

The business secretary has also proposed removing rights that enable agency workers to “passport” to full employment rights, along with the repeal of the working time directive.

The package would have sparked a hostile reaction from labour unions which are balloting for strike action across large parts of the UK economy, including railways, healthcare and postal services.

But Truss’s allies said Rees-Mogg’s ideas were either half-formed or unacceptable. The prime minister has said that she would not touch anybody’s holiday entitlement or make any significant changes to the working time directive.

The idea of removing employment rights from people earning more than £50,000 is still in play, but government officials said any threshold would have to be set above £100,000 if it were ever to be implemented.

Rees-Mogg’s allies believe such a move would be acceptable because many people on higher salaries had transferable skills and would be able to move to other jobs more easily.

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It’s an utter mystery why Rees-Mogg wants to move everything back to the 1970s. Didn’t expect to miss the Johnson government, but at least Rees-Mogg was sidelined there to leaving snotty notes on the desks of civil servants who were working from home. Now he’s got actual powers.
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Households face retrofitting bill as most new-build homes use gas boilers • openDemocracy

Ben Webster:

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The majority of new homes rely on carbon-intensive gas boilers after developers lobbied Conservative governments to water down proposed laws on cutting emissions from buildings, openDemocracy can reveal.

Two-thirds of new homes built in England in the year to the end of March 2022 use gas for central heating, according to data compiled by the Office for National Statistics following a request by openDemocracy.

Experts have warned households will face large bills to retrofit properties as a result of watered-down or delayed plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Last year, Boris Johnson was persuaded to delay a ban on developers connecting new homes to the gas grid. The government had considered implementing the policy, known as the ‘Future Homes Standard’, next year but it is now due to come into force in 2025. Even then, there will be loopholes that could allow developers to continue selling new homes with gas boilers until the end of 2026.

Taylor Wimpey, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders, tried to weaken the Future Homes Standard, Greenpeace’s Unearthed unit revealed last year. The company argued that the government’s proposal to cut emissions from new homes by 75-80% compared with the existing standard was “too ambitious”.

In May, Johnson’s government rejected a recommendation by the House of Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee that the policy be brought forward to 2023.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Darren Jones, the committee’s chair, warned that delaying the policy would cost households thousands of pounds – and accused developers of “passing the buck onto homeowners and tenants”.

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Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies • Journal of Communication

Eran Amsalem and Alon Zoizner are university researchers in Israel:

»

Abstract:
Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics on social media is rarely fulfilled.

The current study tests which of these conflicting theoretical claims is supported by the existing empirical literature. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies (N = 442,136) reveals no evidence of any political learning on social media in observational studies, and statistically significant but substantively small increases in knowledge in experiments.

These small-to-nonexistent knowledge gains are observed across social media platforms, types of knowledge, countries, and periods. Our findings suggest that the contribution of social media toward a more politically informed citizenry is minimal.

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I don’t have further access, but the abstract is straightforward enough. Did we really expect anything different? I don’t think it contradicts what I think about Brexit or Trump or social warming: that those emerged from reinforcement and intensification of peoples’ views, rather than some greater awareness and weighing up of the opposing views. Politics is emotion, not rationality.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A court case over Andy Warhol’s depiction of a photo of the musician Prince could become a copyright nightmare. (This isn’t it; it’s Stable Diffusion’s output for how a Warhol picture of Prince might look. Which is another copyright question altogether.)

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. No hot ashes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Nuclear fusion plant to be built at West Burton A power station • BBC News

Tony Roe and Alex Smith:

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A power station has been chosen to be the site of the UK’s, and potentially the world’s, first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor.

Fusion is a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only carried out in experiments.

The government had shortlisted five sites but has picked the West Burton A plant in Nottinghamshire.

The plant should be operational by the early 2040s, a UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) spokesman has said. The government had pledged more than £220m for the STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) programme, led by the UKAEA.

… Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg announced the government’s choice in a speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.

“Over the decades we have established ourselves as pioneers in fusion science and as a country our capabilities to surmount these obstacles is unparalleled, and I am delighted to make an announcement of a vital step in that mission,” he said. “The plant will be the first of its kind, built by 2040 and capable of putting energy on the grid, and in doing so will prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world.”

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Built by 2040? Can believe it. *Capable* of putting energy on the grid? Can believe it. (Solar arrays are capable of it, and frequently do.) Prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world? I think I’ll see an edible hat if that happens.

Hilariously, this is the same location where the local MP and a group of NIMBYs on Friday celebrated blocking a big new solar array, to be located in some nearby fields, which could have been ready in about a year. Wonder how they’ll feel about all the construction traffic that this will involve for a decade or so. Oh well, only swapping one proven fusion source for another, less proven, one.
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After Ukraine, the great clean energy acceleration • Bloomberg New Energy Futures

Michael Liebreich:

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according to Brussels-based think tank Breugel, by the middle of September European governments had committed €500bn ($480bn) to keeping the lights on. And this may be just a start: Norway’s energy major Equinor has warned that European energy market participants might need $1.5 trillion in liquidity guarantees to continue to operate. Clearly, this can only go on for so long before the bond markets exact punishment. A re-run of the European financial crisis of 2011 cannot be ruled out.

Other than spending public money, many of our leaders spent the early months of the crisis arguing for whatever energy technology they had always favored – be that renewables, heat pumps and electric vehicles, hydrogen, fracking or nuclear power. Of course, none of these can be deployed fast enough to make much of a difference over the next two critical winters.

…Germany’s Chancellor may be talking up hydrogen, but his ministries are beavering away, demolishing planning barriers to renewable energy projects and accelerating the electrification of heat and transport. No new natural gas boilers may be installed after 2024. Heat pump installations across 21 of the 27 EU member states have doubled over the last four years and are now growing by 34% per year. Plug-in vehicles account for around 20% of new car registrations in the EU, up from less than 5% three years ago. Europe is not just going cold turkey on Russian energy for a couple of years – it is looking to go clean for good.

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Encouraging, if we can actually get a hold of what we want to achieve.
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Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

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Assuming a lot of the inputs that go into training AI are lawful, then what about the outputs? Could a work that has been generated by an AI trained on existing works infringe copyright?

This is trickier to answer, and it may very well depend on what happens during and after the training, and how the outputs are generated, so we have to look in more detail under the hood at machine learning methods. A big warning first, obviously I’m no ML expert, and while I have been reading a lot of the basic literature for a few years now, my understanding is that of a hobbyist, if I misrepresent the technology it is my own fault, and will be delighted to correct any mistakes. I will of course be over-simplifying some stuff.

…style and a “look and feel” are not copyrightable. Sure, an image could be inspired by an author, and you could recognise a style, but it would be a stretch to say that it infringes copyright. One of the challenges for living authors, but also for others whose work may still be under copyright (Warhol and Basquiat come to mind), is that we don’t know if the AIs have been trained on their own artwork, or if they have been trained on the army of human imitators that are all over the web. There’s a reason why the AIs are so good at replicating Van Gogh’s style.

…I am sure that at some point an artist will try to sue one of the companies working in this area for copyright infringement. Assuming that the input phase is fine and the datasets used are legitimate, then most infringement lawsuits may end up taking place in the output phase. And it is here that I do not think that there will be substantive reproduction to warrant copyright infringement. On the contrary, the technology itself is encoded to try to avoid such a direct infringement from happening.

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I am also not a lawyer, but this seems solidly argued, and it’s what I’ve thought too. So it must be right! 😬 (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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The Andy Warhol case that could wreck American art • The Atlantic

Paul Szynol:

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[Photographer Lynn] Goldsmith’s prolific and historically significant output has deservedly been archived in various institutions. One of her images was also enshrined by Andy Warhol, who used a photograph she took of Prince as the basis for his illustrations of the musician. But at least in some legal and art circles, Goldsmith may end up being remembered not so much for her beautiful photographs, but for her legal dispute with the custodians of Andy Warhol’s art, which the Supreme Court will hear on October 12.

The dispute started when Goldsmith learned that her 1981 photograph of Prince, which she’d taken in a quick session in her New York studio, was the basis for Warhol’s illustrations of the rock star. In 2019, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Warhol’s image was protected by fair use. The appellate court reversed, principally on the grounds that Warhol’s image is not sufficiently transformative because it “retains the essential elements of its source material” and Goldsmith’s photograph “remains the recognizable foundation.” In other words, the original is too visibly baked into Warhol’s iteration.

To Goldsmith, the question is one of justice; her website describes her battle as a “crusade,” an impassioned effort to make sure that “copyright law does not become so diluted by the definition of fair use that visual artists lose the rights to their work.” If the Supreme Court agrees with her legal challenge, a doctrine that is central to our freedom of expression and cultural growth will be damaged and weakened, possibly for decades to come.

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Absorbing read about the argument over how far you can derive content. Which is of course relevant to the question of what AI illustration systems can and cannot do.
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Kim Kardashian paying $1.26m to settle SEC crypto-hype charges • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Kim Kardashian agreed to pay $1.26m to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that she touted a crypto asset security without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion, the agency said.

Under the settlement, without “admitting or denying the SEC’s findings,” Kardashian also agreed to not promote any crypto asset securities for three years, per the agency.

According to the SEC’s order, Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post linked to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens.

Kardashian, a celebrity reality-TV star and influencer, has one of the most-followed accounts on Instagram — currently with 301 million followers.

“This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors,” SEC chairperson Gary Gensler said in a statement. “Ms. Kardashian’s case also serves as a reminder to celebrities and others that the law requires them to disclose to the public when and how much they are paid to promote investing in securities.”

…Kardashian’s agreed payment of $1.26m includes approximately $260,000 in disgorgement (which represents her promotional payment plus prejudgment interest) and a $1m penalty.

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I hope this chart from Coinmarketcap gives some insight into how this all panned out. You may be able to see the point at which Kardashian’s post appeared.

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Elon Musk may have a point about bots on Twitter • RAND

Marek Posard is a military sociologist (?) and professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School:

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Twitter has a deep bench of engineers working for the company. They have access to trillions of data points on their over 300 million monthly active users. Why has a company this size struggled to clean up its platform?

Back in 2020, I led a project at RAND that developed tools to detect Russian interference in US elections on Twitter. Our team was small (fewer than 10 people). We had access to only 2.2 million tweets from 630,391 unique accounts. In a few months, our team was able to detect patterns of Russian bots and trolls on the platform that appeared to be interfering with American elections. If RAND could pull this off in a few months, why couldn’t Twitter do the same on a larger scale?

Here’s a possible hypothesis: Twitter might not want to look too closely at this problem because then they would have to remove accounts, reducing the number of reported “active users” on the platform.

More than 90% of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. And it is probably safe to assume that most of these advertisers are paying Twitter to display ads to real human beings, not bots or Russian trolls masquerading as Americans. If Twitter removed more of these inauthentic accounts, it would ding its “active user” metrics, which drive advertising revenue—the source of value for the platform.

Twitter is not the only social media with this problem. Back in 2017, Facebook claimed that ads on its platforms could reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. The problem was the US Census Bureau claimed that only 31 million Americans in this age group existed. Facebook is now facing a class-action lawsuit related to audience exaggeration.

Put simply, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are not incentivized to look too closely at the problem of bots, trolls, and inauthentic accounts. The latest whistleblower, Peiter “Mudge” Zatsko, who used to be head of security at Twitter has said as much.

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I think Twitter’s argument, repeatedly made, is that only 5-10% of those it counts as “daily active users” are bots. Not that only 10% of the whole user base is. And Russian bots trying to influence an election are much easier to spot than most. And, again, what is a bot? What’s the dividing line?
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Russians dodging mobilization behind flourishing scam market • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

»

Another interesting trend that arose from the widescale exit of Russians is a 50% rise in the demand for the so-called “gray” SIM cards, reported by Russian news outlet Kommersant.

These are SIMs that people can get without presenting an identity document or registering their real subscriber information to the telecommunication service providers. Kommersant’s source stated that these SIM cards work in the networks of MTS, MegaFon, Beeline, Tele2, and Yota, and concern “pay-as-you-use” programs.

Russians are frantically seeking these cards because the state can use regular SIMs to track young men eligible for military service and possibly stop them at the border.

All this has led to the Russian border officers now tracking people based on their IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity), a unique 15-digit identifier linked to the device’s hardware, not the SIM card.

According to the Russian internet rights organization Roskomsvoboda, there are multiple reports of people who FSB agents forced to give away their IMEI numbers while crossing the border to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Finland.

IMEI tracking works by using telecommunication antennas for approximate location triangulation, and it’s made possible thanks to the mobile operator keeping the number stored in their database. IMEI is included in every data transaction and communication request from and to the device and adjacent antennas, so it’s a persistent identifier. It’s the same system used by tracking software promising to locate your lost or stolen device, while law enforcement has also been using IMEI for many years now.

Assigned IMEIs aren’t interchangeable or editable, except for some Huawei, Xiaomi, and ZTE models that store the IMEI in a rewritable memory section in violation of the technology’s guidelines, giving users the capability to flash it with specialised tools.

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A follow-on from yesterday’s link about the “unfitness” certificates (which get a mention earlier in the story: they’re often scams, as I suspected). IMEI tracking and the very intriguing detail about *some* Chinese models with rewritable IMEIs. Why do those exist at all? Espionage?
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Does Apple’s crash detection work? We totaled some cars to find out • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Here’s how I set up the tech inside the vehicles for this not-exactly-scientific test [getting a demolition derby driver, Michael Barabe, to crash into some cars in a junkyard]:

• Derby car: Around Michael’s wrist was an Apple Watch Ultra. Strapped next to him in durable OtterBox cases: an Apple Watch-paired iPhone 14 and a Google Pixel 5. Apple’s crash feature is on by default; on the Pixel, you have to turn it on in the Personal Safety app. 

• Junkyard car: Secured to the air vents and also protected by durable cases, an iPhone 14 Pro Max and a Google Pixel 6.

About five seconds after Michael first crashed into the Ford Taurus head-on, at about 25 mph, the Apple Watch Ultra on his wrist buzzed with an alert: “It looks like you’ve been in a crash.”

Michael hit the cancel button on his wrist. Had he not done that within 10 seconds, he would have heard a loud alarm and seen a 10-second countdown. Without further action, the watch would then have called 911 and sent a message with his location to a personal emergency contact.

While the impact barely moved Michael at all, the phones went flying onto the floor of his car. That’s why Apple designed the feature to display the alert on the Watch if it is paired together with an iPhone.

Despite the Taurus’ driver-side air bag going off—and the entire front of the car being smashed in—the iPhone and the Pixel in that car didn’t detect a crash. Nor did the Pixel in Michael’s car.

We tried again. On the second crash, the Taurus’ passenger-side air bag deployed, and the bumper went flying. Again, the phones inside the Taurus didn’t display an alert. Inside Michael’s car, the Pixel detected the crash, but that time the Apple devices didn’t.

«

She tried various other combinations: results were mixed. Apple and Google both said that the systems would want more data to indicate you were driving – the sustained periods at speed. (So the lesson seems to be, don’t have a crash too close to home?)

Also: the story pictured in this tweet suggests that indeed, crash detection does work. A pity that it was needed.
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How I found a simple, no-cost solution to sleep apnea • Daily Beast

Jay Hancock:

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I woke up in a strange bedroom with 24 electrodes glued all over my body and a plastic mask attached to a hose covering my face.

The lab technician who watched me all night via video feed told me that I had “wicked sleep apnea” and that it was “central sleep apnea”—a type that originates in the brain and fails to tell the muscles to inhale.

As a journalist—and one terrified by the diagnosis—I set out to do my own research. After a few weeks of sleuthing and interviewing experts, I reached two important conclusions.

First, I had moderate apnea, if that, and it could be treated without the elaborate machines, mouthpieces, or other devices that specialists who had consulted on my care were talking about.

Second, the American health care system has joined with commercial partners to define a medical condition—in this case, sleep apnea—in a way that allows both parties to generate revenue from a multitude of pricey diagnostic studies, equipment sales, and questionable treatments. I was on a conveyor belt.

It all began with a desire for answers: I had been feeling drowsy during the day, and my wife told me I snored. Both can mean obstructive sleep apnea. With obstructive sleep apnea, the mouth and throat relax when a person is unconscious, sometimes blocking or narrowing the airway. That interrupts breathing, as well as sleep. Without treatment, the resulting disruption in oxygen flow might increase the risk of developing certain cardiovascular diseases.

So I contacted a sleep-treatment center, and doctors gave me an at-home test ($365). Two weeks later, they told me I had “high-moderate” sleep apnea and needed to acquire a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine, at a cost of about $600.

Though I had hoped to get the equipment and adjust the settings to see what worked best, my doctors said I had to come to the sleep lab for an overnight test ($1,900) to have them “titrate” the optimal CPAP air pressure.

“How do you treat central sleep apnea?” I worriedly asked the technician after that first overnight stay. She said something about an ASV (adaptive servo-ventilation) machine ($4,000). And one pricey lab sleepover wasn’t enough, she said. I needed to come back for another.

…recent European studies have shown that standards under the International Classification of Sleep Disorders would doom huge portions of the general population to a sleep apnea diagnosis—whether or not people had complaints of daytime tiredness or other sleep problems.

A study in the Swiss city of Lausanne showed that 50% of local men and 23% of the women 40 or older were positive for sleep apnea under such criteria.

Such rates of disease are “extraordinarily high,” “astronomical,” and “implausible,” Dr. Dirk Pevernagie, a scientist at Belgium’s Ghent University Hospital, wrote with colleagues two years ago in a comprehensive study in the Journal of Sleep Research.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest tweak to the Stable Diffusion AI illustrator means you can create (very) short films with it. How soon before we see much longer ones?

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 chosen by AI. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

andreasjansson/stable-diffusion-animation – Run with an API on Replicate

Andreas Jansson:

»

Animate Stable Diffusion by interpolating between two prompts. Starting with noise, we then use stable diffusion to denoise for n steps towards the mid-point between the start prompt and end prompt, where n = num_inference_steps * (1 – prompt_strength). The higher the prompt strength, the fewer steps towards the mid-point.

We then denoise from that intermediate noisy output towards num_animation_frames interpolation points between the start and end prompts. By starting with an intermediate output, the model will generate samples that are similar to each other, resulting in a smoother animation.

Finally, the generated samples are interpolated with Google’s FILM (Frame Interpolation for Large Scene Motion) for extra smoothness.

«

So you start with the prompt suggestion “tall rectangular black monolith, monkeys in the desert looking at a large tall monolith, a detailed matte painting by Wes Anderson, behance, light and space, reimagined by industrial light and magic, matte painting, criterion collection” and say that the end prompt should show “tall rectangular black monolith, a white room in the future with a bed, victorian details and a tall black monolith, a detailed matte painting by Wes Anderson, behance, light and space, reimagined by industrial light and magic, matte painting, criterion collection” and let it go. (The outcome’s on the page.)

We’re not that far from some sort of AI-created film where the multiple intermediate points are drawn by AI. Certainly a great way to speed up storyboarding for films.
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GhostlyStock

»

Freely-usable images summoned from beyond the aether. Energized by AI.

«

Sort-of stock images, generated by AI. They have a strange sort of quality about them – a feel that I think we’ll start to associate with AI-drawn images in the next few months, and which will likely last for a few years.
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Liz Truss: the normie playing the rebel • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

»

Liz Truss began her career at that plucky start-up, Shell. She moved on to Cable & Wireless, which was founded in a tempest of risk-taking and rule-breaking. In 1869. Her wild card of a chancellor never got around to being an entrepreneur or (unless we count a hedge fund boss) working for one. Truss is a scion of the public sector middle class. Kwasi Kwarteng could not have passed through a stabler set of institutions — Eton, Harvard, JPMorgan — had he interned at the Vatican.

None of the credentials of mavericks but all of the pose: whatever else is said about these two, they are of their time. A co-authored treatise, were it honest, would be called something like Move Slow and Say Things. 

When did normies start doing this? When did status and lustre come to reside in cheeking the establishment? What happened to joining it? Truss and her backers will believe that financial markets are made of “sheeple” in thrall to “group think” and “orthodoxy”. The more the bourses convulse, the surer the government will be that it is on to something. I don’t want here to go into the question of whether they are right. The point is rather their relish in dissent. Why do such conventional people so enjoy filing the minority report?

…the further a society gets from its last existential test, the more desk-bound and temperature-controlled the texture of life becomes, the more some innate human need for risk goes unmet. And so it finds alternative outlets. The boom in martial sports is one that Chuck Palahniuk saw coming in Fight Club. Another is the proliferation of a kind of sham maverick in public life.

It is reported that Truss’s supply-side reforms are known internally as Operation Rolling Thunder. Besides the question of taste — the name comes from a bombing campaign in Vietnam — who speaks like this? This is going to a Rage Against the Machine gig at 50. This is popping a collar and taking a long drag of a cigarette. It is iconoclasm as interpreted by someone who has never put anything on the line. In this, she is less bad than some of the friendly wonks and pundits (note again the low-stakes work) who will her to “smash” Britannia’s chains.

«

Ganesh sounds light, but the final paragraph shows that he’s absolutely furious at the obstacles put in his way to citizenship. Worth hunting the whole thing down.

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Tim Cook: not too long from now, you’ll wonder how you led your life without AR • MacRumors

Sami Fathi:

»

Responding to a question from a student [at an Italian university] on what future technologies excite him the most, [Tim] Cook pointed to artificial intelligence, calling it a “fundamental, horizontal technology that will touch everything in our lives,” ranging from innovations in the Apple Watch to “many other things” Apple is working on.

Cook, more importantly, stressed his excitement for augmented reality. Cook suggested that augmented reality’s impact on the world will be as profound as the internet itself, saying people will wonder how they led a life without it. As he was speaking on augmented reality, the live stream of the Q&A session abruptly cut, so Cook’s full comment on the subject is not publicly known. Here’s what there was:

»

I’m super excited about augmented reality. Because I think that we’ve had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you look back at a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet. And so I think it could be that profound, and it’s not going to be profound overnight…

«

Cook has in the past expressed his personal excitement for augmented reality and has hinted that Apple is working on AR/VR products. The company’s first AR/VR product, a high-end headset rumored to be called “Reality Pro,” is expected to be announced as soon as January.

«

In British politics this is known as “rolling the pitch” – a cricketing metaphor for getting everything ready for when you properly come out with your offering. (As a messaging technique, it’s lately fallen out of favour.)
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Apple executive Tony Blevins to quit after vulgar TikTok joke • The Times

Laurence Sleator:

»

A senior executive at Apple is to leave the company after joking about “fondling big-breasted women” for a living in a viral social media video.

Tony Blevins, Apple’s vice-president of procurement, featured in a video by Daniel Mac, a TikToker who approaches people in expensive cars and asks them: “What do you do for a living?” In the 25-second video, which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times, Mac approaches Blevins as he gets out his silver $500,000 (£450,000) Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren at a car show in California and asks the question.

Blevins, dressed in a turquoise suit, Union Jack waistcoat and bright red shoes, says: “I race cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women, but I take weekends and major holidays off.” To laughter from Mac and a female passenger alongside Blevins, he adds: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a hell of a dental plan.”

The video, published on September 5, prompted an internal investigation at Apple. A spokesman confirmed yesterday that Blevins would leave the Californian-based company.

In charge of striking deals with suppliers and partners, Blevins had been at Apple for 22 years and managed several hundred employees. He was one of about 30 people who reported directly to Tim Cook, who has been the chief executive since 2011. Blevins, thought to be Apple’s main cost-cutter, was said to go by the nickname the “Blevinator”, according to a 2020 Wall Street Journal profile.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Blevins apologised for his remarks and said they were a reference to the 1981 film Arthur in which the main character, played by Dudley Moore, says: “I race cars, play tennis and fondle women, but I have weekends off and I am my own boss.”

…The video angered some employees and came as senior bosses at Apple were focusing on improving diversity in the workplace, Bloomberg reported.

«

The original headline called it a “vulgar TikTok boast”, except clearly it wasn’t a boast, but a joke, using a cultural reference more than 40 years old. (Blevins is 54 or 55.) No wonder then it fell flat. But this is a crazy overreaction. The employees who were “angered” maybe need to get out more. Are they more valuable than him? The WSJ profile suggests he’s been responsible for huge savings in negotiations.
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Tesla shows off unfinished humanoid robot prototypes at AI Day 2022 • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The entire live robot demonstration lasted roughly seven minutes, and the firm also played a demonstration video of the walking Optimus prototype picking up a box and putting it down, slowly watering a plant, and moving metal parts in a factory-like setting—all while tethered to an overhead cable. The video also showed a 3D-rendered view of the world that represents what the Optimus robot can see.

Tesla first announced its plans to built a humanoid robot during its AI Day event in August of last year. During that earlier event, a human dressed in a spandex suit resembling a robot and did the Charleston on stage, which prompted skepticism in the press.

At the AI Event today, Musk and his team emphasized that the walking prototype was an early demo developed in roughly six months using “semi-off the shelf actuators,” and that the sleeker model much more closely resembled the “Version 1” unit they wanted to ship. He said it would probably be able to walk in a few weeks.

Goals of the Optimus project include high-volume production (possibly “millions of units sold,” said Musk), low-cost (“probably less than $20,000”), and high-reliability. Comparing the plans for Optimus to existing humanoid robots from competitors, Musk also emphasized that the Optimus robot should have the brains-on-board to work autonomously, citing Tesla’s work with its automotive Autopilot system.

Shortly afterward, Musk handed over the stage to Tesla engineers that gave overviews about developing the power systems, actuators, and joint mechanisms that would make Optimus possible, replete with fancy graphs. “We are carrying over most of our design experience from the car to the robot,” said one engineer, while another engineer said they drew much of their inspiration from human biology, especially in joint design.

«

I’m certain this will never see the light of day (or at least, appear with a price tag). He promised a Cybertruck years ago, and that’s a type of thing that the company is actually set up to make. The inclusion of this robot segment in the “AI Day” event – for the second year in a row – suggests Tesla, or Musk, is rapidly running out of “AI” things to show off.
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$620 for an HIV diagnosis: Russians buy their way out of military service on Telegram • Rest of World

Masha Borak:

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Telegram has become the chat app of choice for Russians, Malika Kamil, a community manager in a project called Guide to the Free World, told Rest of World. The project, launched at the start of the war, is dedicated to helping Russians leave the country. It runs a Telegram group with over 101,000 users. More than 21,000 people joined after Russia announced its mobilization efforts.

Guide to the Free World uses Telegram in a number of ways. The non-profit helps Russians emigrate, through a program partly funded by Telegram’s built-in donation button, and uses the platform’s bot function to keep spam and scammers from its channel. Other Telegram groups help track police delivering draft papers, and broadcast news about the rise of mobile recruitment offices at the border with Finland and Georgia.

Many other Telegram channels have seen an influx of scammers. Young men have been driven by panic and fear of border closures into buying services from Telegram, even as reports on scams have risen, said Sawa Zarecki, founder of Advengene, a company helping professionals from Russia find placements and companies find new markets abroad, to Rest of World. Some were promised transportation across the border, only to have their ride disappear after taking the money. 

Others peddle fake documents which could qualify Russian men to be declared unfit for duty or to be put under medical observation, giving them three to six months to escape the country.

“At the moment, the most effective way is to get a certificate that you have HIV or hepatitis,” one seller, who refused to share their real name, told Rest of World.

«

Paid in bitcoin, of uncertain provenance or effectiveness. Some are sure to be scams. But the fact that people might be looking for them is indicative.
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What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine? • The Atlantic

Eric Schlosser:

»

[Former US senator, former Cuba missile crisis officer Sam] Nunn describes Russia’s violations of long-standing norms as “Putin’s nuclear folly” and stresses that three fundamental things are essential for avoiding a nuclear catastrophe: rational leaders, accurate information, and no major blunders. “And all three are now in some degree of doubt,” he says.

If Russia uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, Nunn thinks that an American nuclear retaliation should be the last resort. He favors some sort of horizontal escalation instead, doing everything possible to avoid a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. For example, if Russia hits Ukraine with a nuclear cruise missile launched from a ship, Nunn would advocate immediately sinking that ship. The number of Ukrainian casualties should determine the severity of the American response—and any escalation should be conducted solely with conventional weapons. Russia’s Black Sea fleet might be sunk in retaliation, and a no-fly zone could be imposed over Ukraine, even if it meant destroying anti-aircraft units on Russian soil.

Since the beginning of the invasion, Russia’s nuclear threats have been aimed at discouraging the United States and its NATO allies from providing military supplies to Ukraine. And the threats are backed by Russia’s capabilities. Last year, during a training exercise involving about 200,000 troops, the Russian army practiced launching a nuclear assault on NATO forces in Poland. “The pressure on Russia to attack the supply lines from NATO countries to Ukraine will increase, the longer this war continues,” Nunn says. It will also increase the risk of serious blunders and mistakes. An intentional or inadvertent Russian attack on a NATO country could be the beginning of World War III.

«

The strong suggestion is that any use of nuclear weapons will be answered by conventional weapons, but on a scale that will dwarf the effects of a “tactical nuke”. The US could wipe out Russia’s troops in Ukraine by conventional means, given how well Ukraine’s less well-equipped troops are doing. And the US would publicise any movements of potential nuclear weapons by Russia long ahead of actual deployment. Not a winning move for Russia.
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Businessman who said he burned a $10m Frida Kahlo drawing is under criminal investigation • The Independent

Abe Asher:

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An art collectour and entrepreneur is under criminal investigation in Mexico after allegedly burning a Frida Kahlo drawing to draw attention to an NFT collection.

Martín Mobarak said he had burned a drawing torn from the pages of one of Kahlo’s diaries that was believed to be worth $10m in order to promote the 10,000 NFTs he created of the piece.

The Mexican authorities, however, do not seem to have appreciated the stunt.

“In Mexico, the deliberate destruction of an artistic monument constitutes a crime in terms of the federal law on archaeological, artistic and historical monuments and zones,” Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature stated in reference to the incident.

Much about the entire saga remains unclear. Mr Mobarak, who is the founder of the company Frida.NFT, placed the drawing known as Fantasmones Siniestros in a martini glass and set it on fire in a public demonstration at his mansion in Miami in July while a mariachi band played in the background.

A video of the event posted on YouTube begins with a page of text that includes a quote from Mr Mobarak in which he states that “I am proud to say this event will solve some of the world’s biggest problems in honor of Frida Kahlo.”

«

Honestly, these are just the very worst people. NFT sales are down 97% from their peak. If we all wish really hard, we might be able to get rid of the other 3%.
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Bruce Willis’ rep refutes report that he sold likeness for deepfakes • The Hollywood Reporter

Ryan Gajewski:

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Bruce Willis’ team is dismissing the notion that the star sold his digital likeness to a deepfake company.

Recent media reports, including one from The Telegraph, suggested that the actor sold his rights to Deepcake to authorize the creation of a “digital twin” of himself to appear in projects following the announcement that he has stepped away from performing. Although reports stated that this made Willis the first Hollywood personality to set up this type of deal, his team denies the existence of any such arrangement.

In a statement shared to The Hollywood Reporter, Willis’ representative said that he “has no partnership or agreement with this Deepcake company.”

A publicist for Deepcake confirms to THR that Willis’ digital-likeness rights cannot be sold, as they are his by default, and that the company’s involvement with the star was set up through his representatives at [the star’s agents] CAA. Deepcake’s spokesperson explains that their company created his digital twin for 2021 ad campaigns, and that any future use of the likeness would be up to Willis.

Deepcake’s website touts the company’s digital-twin technology as an ability for A-list actors to virtually include their likeness in marketing campaigns without the need to physically appear in front of the camera. The site prominently features quotes attributed to Willis about a 2021 commercial that aired in Russia for mobile phone carrier MegaFon.

«

The implications of the initial story, of Willis licensing his face for all sorts of uses, were pretty big. Seems that’s not happening… yet.
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Google Stadia never mattered, and it never had a chance • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

In the end, Stadia barely made a dent. Yes, it probably lit a fire under Amazon, which launched its Luna cloud gaming service about a year after Stadia, and Microsoft, which began to roll out Xbox Cloud Gaming in April 2021. But cloud gaming hasn’t turned the gaming industry upside down when it arguably had the prime opportunity to. When we were all stuck at home early in the pandemic and couldn’t find PS5s, Stadia felt like it should have been the perfect solution to let vast numbers of people easily play games right from whatever screen is in front of them.

But as my colleague Sean Hollister wrote in March 2021, cloud gaming still has too much friction. Can my internet connection run the game? Is the game I want available on the platform of my choice? Do I have to buy it separately, or is it part of a subscription? The questions go on and on, and Stadia was no exception. Contrast that with my Nintendo Switch, which lets me slot in a game cartridge and just start playing, and you can see why cloud gaming still hasn’t quite caught on. (Cloud gaming is also an option for a handful of Switch games, and it’s generally not a good one.)

It’s clear Stadia never mattered all that much to Google, either. Most big-budget video games take years to develop, but the company shuttered its own studios a little over a year after Stadia officially launched. If Google wasn’t willing to invest in its own platform, why should other developers? 

Developers that did support Stadia were as surprised as everyone else about Thursday’s news. Bungie, on its Destiny 2 forums, said that it “just learned” about the shutdown and would send information to affected Stadia players “once we have a plan of action.” Mike Rose of No More Robots tweeted his frustration at Google’s lack of communication, saying that “hours later and I still have no email from Stadia, and no clarity on what’s happening with our games, deals, anything.” Even Stadia employees apparently had little notice.

…Cloud gaming isn’t dead. Xbox’s offering is pretty good and getting better. Same with Nvidia’s GeForce Now. PlayStation shuttered PlayStation Now but folded in cloud streaming to its most expensive PlayStation Plus tier. Amazon’s Luna is expanding, too. Logitech just announced a dedicated cloud gaming handheld.

«

Meanwhile Apple toddles along with its not-cloud-based Apple Arcade offering, launched in September 2019 (the same year as Stadia). Has it set the world on fire? Probably not. Is it going to kill it tomorrow? No. Are there very different attitudes to project longevity at Apple and Google? Yes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified