In the US, two storefronts are hit by cars.. every day. And the vast majority aren’t ram raids. Yet there’s a simple fix. CC-licensed photo by Scott Hughes on Flickr.

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

There’s another post due this Friday at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. What if you had someone who wanted to be the main chracter, though? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon’s tweets now • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

For many of us, Twitter’s “For You” is full of tweets and replies to tweets from Elon Musk. Not everyone is getting the Elon-first feed, but on Monday afternoon, more than a few people noticed something was different.

Several of us here at The Verge are seeing more Musk replies than usual, and I personally counted five at the very top of my feed, with many more sprinkled in between tweets from other users. The same is true for some accounts that don’t even follow Elon Musk.

This comes just days after Musk complained that his tweets weren’t getting enough views — and even fired an engineer over it.

As reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, internal Twitter data indicates that while Musk’s account rose to peak popularity in search rankings in April 2022, engagement has since dropped significantly, and engineers found no issue with Twitter’s algorithm.

Over the weekend, Musk said Twitter rolled out some sort of change to fix this “visibility” issue, with the billionaire CEO stating that 95% of his tweets weren’t “getting delivered.” I’m not sure if this is at all related to this Elon-filled feed, but I’m hoping Twitter fixes this issue soon — unless the new mandate is to get the boss more views by any means necessary.

«

Tom Warren had a tweet which showed this perfectly.

Meanwhile, the abrupt changes to the API (with a limited free tier and more pricey paid tier/s) has been delayed again because everyone showed so much “enthusiasm” for it. That’s not how I usually understand enthusiasm to work. This discussion on Hacker News of what people think of the upcoming API changes is quite educational: companies probably aren’t going to wear it.

Pulling the company out of this self-imposed dive at the ground is going to be a hell of an achievement – if that’s what happens.
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Benefits of improved brakes on oil trains miscalculated by US • Claims Journal

Matthew Brown:

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President Donald Trump’s administration miscalculated the potential benefits of putting better brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it scrapped an Obama-era rule over cost concerns, The Associated Press has found.

A government analysis used by the administration to justify the cancellation omitted up to $117m in estimated future damages from train derailments that could be avoided by using electronic brakes. Revelation of the error stoked renewed criticism Thursday from the rule’s supporters who called the analysis biased.

Department of Transportation officials acknowledged the mistake after it was discovered by the AP during a review of federal documents but said it does not change their decision not to install the brakes.

Safety advocates, transportation union leaders and Democratic lawmakers oppose the administration’s decision to kill the brake rule, which was included in a package of rail safety measures enacted in 2015 under President Barack Obama following dozens of accidents by trains hauling oil and ethanol in the US and Canada.

…The deadliest happened in Canada in 2013, when an unattended train carrying crude oil rolled down an incline, came off the tracks in the town of Lac-Megantic and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people and obliterating much of the Quebec community’s downtown.

There have been other fiery crashes and fuel spills in Alabama, Oregon, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota and Illinois.

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Of course when the rule was suggested, lobbyists for the rail and oil industries said it would be too expensive yet ineffective. Seems to me that not setting off massive balls of fire is desirable. (Another example of regulation that you need.) (Thanks drew for the link.)
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TikTok’s parent takes on Meta in battle for virtual-reality market • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky and Stu Woo:

»

Two years ago, ByteDance bought Pico, a Chinese startup that makes VR headsets. That launched a new front in the Chinese company’s competition with Meta, whose Instagram and Facebook services have been battling for users and advertising dollars against TikTok as the short-video app soared in popularity.

Pico’s headset shipments have since jumped, turning it into a small but fast-rising No.2 to Meta in the global market, according to industry data, even though Pico doesn’t sell its consumer headsets in the US. 

Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 renamed Facebook to Meta in part to reflect his bet on the metaverse, a more immersive version of the internet to be experienced largely through virtual-reality headsets. The company has been spending heavily on that concept. In its latest quarterly results, Meta said there were more than 200 apps on its VR devices that have generated over $1m each in sales, although total revenue in Meta’s Reality Labs segment was down 17% in the quarter due to lower Quest 2 headset sales.

Meta held 90% of the market share about a year ago, according to research firm International Data Corp. By the third quarter of 2022—the latest period for which data is available—its market share had dropped to about 75%. Market share for Pico more than tripled over the same period to about 15%. No other VR headset maker held more than 3% of the market. 

Meta’s headset shipments in the third quarter declined 48% from a year earlier, IDC’s data shows. ByteDance’s Pico was the only headset maker to increase shipments, in a market that was estimated to be worth $4bn as of 2022.

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Feels like it’s going to be another of those inside China/outside China tech markets, like smartphones and search engines.
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How Spotify’s podcast bet went wrong • Semafor

Max Tani:

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By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors.

The Swedish audio streaming giant had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase podcast production companies and big name creators in the hopes of luring new subscribers to the platform. Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.

Then Bill Simmons sent an email to her boss.

Simmons had sold the sports and pop culture audio empire The Ringer to Spotify a year earlier for $200m. Now he wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to argue for keeping the Ringer’s mass audience on Apple and its advertising revenue, driven by the explosion of sports betting.

Simmons won the argument. But that 2021 dispute exposed deep questions about the strategy behind Spotify’s billion-dollar bet on podcasting. In January, Spotify pushed out Ostroff and canceled nearly a dozen shows at its highest-profile podcast investment, the studio Gimlet. Podcasting was a “big drag on our business in 2022,” the company’s chief revenue officer said earlier this month.

“In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market,” Ek said on an earnings call in January. “So we are shifting to focus on tightening our spend and becoming more efficient.”

«

Lots of noise but.. doesn’t seem to add up to much. The biggest claim, that Joe Rogan’s podcast contract ends this year, was flatly contradicted by Spotify after the article published.
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Adversary drones are spying on the US and the Pentagon acts like they’re UFOs • The Drive

Tyler Rogoway:

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We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive.

Our team here at The War Zone has spent the last two years indirectly laying out a case for the hypothesis that many of the events involving supposed UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as they are now often called, over the last decade are actually the manifestation of foreign adversaries harnessing advances in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of America’s most sensitive warfighting capabilities. Now, considering all the news on this topic in recent weeks, including our own major story on a series of bizarre incidents involving US Navy destroyers and ‘UAP’ off the Southern California coast in 2019, it’s time to not only sum up our case, but to discuss the broader implications of these revelations, what needs to be done about them, and the Pentagon’s fledgling ‘UAP Task Force’ as a whole.

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Makes far better sense than absolutely any other hypothesis out there.
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New iMac not expected to launch until late 2023 at earliest • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple has no plans to launch a new 24-inch iMac until late 2023 at the earliest, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In his newsletter today, he reiterated his expectation that Apple will skip updating the iMac with the M2 chip and instead wait to release a model with the M3 chip, which has yet to be announced.

“I haven’t seen anything to indicate there will be a new iMac until the M3 chip generation, which won’t arrive until the tail end of this year at the earliest or next year,” wrote Gurman. “So if you want to stick with the iMac, you’ll just have to sit tight.”

Apple’s M3 chip is expected to be manufactured based on TSMC’s latest 3nm process, providing additional performance and power efficiency improvements. The M3 chip is also expected to be used in a new MacBook Air rumored to launch by the second half of 2023, and potentially in future versions of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini. By comparison, the M2 chip is built on TSMC’s second-generation 5nm process.

Apple last updated the iMac in April 2021 with the M1 chip and a new ultra-thin design available in seven colors, including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver.

«

Why the rush? Nobody’s doing mission-critical video processing on an iMac. The M2 Mac mini plus a screen of your choice will do the job. The iMac is positioned as a low-end consumer product.
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Journalism is lossy compression. Isn’t everything? • Whither news?

Jeff Jarvis:

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To predict the next, best word in a sequence is a different task from finding the correct answer to a math problem or verifying a factual assertion or searching for the best match to a query. This is not to say that these functions cannot be added onto large-language models as rhetorical machines. As Google and Microsoft are about to learn, these functions damned well better be bolted together before LLMs are unleashed on the world with the promise of accuracy.

When media report on these new technologies they too often ignore underlying lessons about what they say about us. They too often set high expectations — ChatGPT can replace search! — and then delight in shooting down those expectations — ChatGPT made mistakes!

[Ted] Chiang [in his New Yorker article, linked yesterday] wishes ChatGPT to search and calculate and compose and when it is not good at those tasks, he all but dismisses the utility of LLMs. As a writer, he just might be engaging in wishful thinking.

…We are early our progression of learning what we can do with new technologies such as large-language models. It may be too early to use them in certain circumstances (e.g., search) but it is also too early to dismiss them.

«

Certainly he’s right that journalism is quick to praise things and quick to shoot them down, but to complain about Chiang’s “lossy compression” analogy because we don’t document absolutely everything about every event (whether in libraries or news journalism) seems weak. And it wasn’t journalists who pushed Microsoft to include ChatGPT in Bing. (Thanks wendyg, again, for the link.)
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7-Eleven to pay $91M to Bensenville man who lost both legs in storefront crash • NBC Chicago

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A 57-year-old suburban man who became a double amputee after a car pinned his legs against the front of a Bensenville 7-Eleven will receive a $91m payout from the convenience store chain.

The 2017 crash was one of the thousands of similar incidents identified in discovery for the case, collisions that frequently resulted in crippling injuries, said James Power, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiff, who wished to be identified as “Carl” to avoid drawing attention to his windfall.

The settlement was approved by a Cook County judge on Monday, the day the case had been set for a jury trial, and is the largest pre-trial settlement in a personal injury case in state history, Power said. Joseph Power Jr., Larry Rogers Jr. and Louis Berns also represented the plaintiff.

“(Carl) was in shock. Just silent amazement,” Power said, noting that his client had been hospitalized for a month after the crash and now walks using prosthetic legs. “He has been through a lot of pain.”

The case was the first in which attorneys had access to some 15 years of reports from 7-Eleven, which identified some 6,253 storefront crashes at 7-Eleven stores across the country, Power said. Data from a previous lawsuit against the company identified another 1,525 crashes between 1991 and 1996.

The crashes could have been prevented if 7-Elevens had installed bollards — thick posts anchored in the ground — between storefronts and parking spaces, Power said.

…“We have evidence 7-Eleven had been getting sued for these kinds of incidents going back to 1990,” Power said, noting the total number of storefront crashes identified in the case indicated that, on average, a car crashed into a 7-Eleven store about once a day.

«

An amazing instance either of corporate indifference or corporate lack of communication. It probably would have cost a lot less than $91m to fit the bollards. And the stats suggest on average there are *two* storefront crashes across the US per day. (Thanks Patrick for the link.)
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Please don’t trust Twitter with your credit card info • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Imperfect social media tools gave anyone the ability to publish their thoughts and communicate. And the men who got rich from building those tools suddenly realized they didn’t want to have to read what the rest of us had to say (about them). And they have spent the years since the start of the pandemic losing billions of dollars building embarrassing failed attempts at retrofitting the internet into a country club.

They create invite-only “social audio” apps, they try and convince us to buy cryptocurrency or expensive VR helmets or change the algorithms that power our apps to only prioritize their own content. They bend themselves into pretzels because they can’t seem to grasp that they aren’t cool or popular and they won’t ever be, no matter how much money they make.

Even in the techno-feudalist future they all salivate over, as long as the serfs can make content, which is, ironically enough, the only way these guys make their money, we will still be able to post about how much they suck.

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Ryan constantly has the viewpoint that gets underneath the flotsam on the internet (even though often he’s writing about the flotsam – such as in this case, about Elon Musk’s idiotic sort-of plans about ignoring blocklists not created by Twitter Blue users.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have swapped weapons and war for deskbound jobs. And they find it utterly boring. CC-licensed photo by ResoluteSupportMediaResoluteSupportMedia 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.

Last Friday, there was another post due at the Social Warming Substack. The latest was “ChatGPT gets its iPhone moment; but does that make humans the PCs?”

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

ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web • The New Yorker

Ted Chiang is an SF writer (he wrote the short story that prompted the film Arrival) and a technical writer the rest of the time:

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a common technique used by lossy compression algorithms is interpolation—that is, estimating what’s missing by looking at what’s on either side of the gap. When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in “lexical space” and generating the text that would occupy the location between them. (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .”) ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

Given that large language models like ChatGPT are often extolled as the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it may sound dismissive—or at least deflating—to describe them as lossy text-compression algorithms. I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large language models…

…Large language models identify statistical regularities in text. Any analysis of the text of the Web will reveal that phrases like “supply is low” often appear in close proximity to phrases like “prices rise.” A chatbot that incorporates this correlation might, when asked a question about the effect of supply shortages, respond with an answer about prices increasing. If a large language model has compiled a vast number of correlations between economic terms—so many that it can offer plausible responses to a wide variety of questions—should we say that it actually understands economic theory?

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This, by my reckoning, is the best article framing how to understand Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Read it all, especially the opening example about Xerox. (Thanks Wendyg for the link.)
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Magazine publishes serious errors in first AI-generated health article • Futurism

Jon Christian:

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Take the very first article the bot published in Men’s Journal, which carries the title “What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone,” and the human-sounding byline “Men’s Fitness Editors.” The story issued a cornucopia of medical claims, nutrition and lifestyle advice, and even suggested a specific medical treatment in the form of testosterone replacement therapy, all aimed at readers looking for guidance on a serious health issue.

Like most AI-generated content, the article was written with the confident authority of an actual expert. It sported academic-looking citations, and a disclosure at the top lent extra credibility by assuring readers that it had been “reviewed and fact-checked by our editorial team.” 

But on closer inspection, the whole thing fell apart. Bradley Anawalt, the chief of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center who has held leadership positions at the Endocrine Society, reviewed the article and told Futurism that it contained persistent factual mistakes and mischaracterizations of medical science that provide readers with a profoundly warped understanding of health issues.

“This article has many inaccuracies and falsehoods,” he said. “It lacks many of the nuances that are crucial to understand normal male health.”

Anawalt pointed to 18 specific errors he identified in the article. Some were flagrantly wrong about basic medical topics, like equating low blood testosterone with hypogonadism, a more expansive medical term. Others claimed sweeping links between diet, testosterone levels, and psychological symptoms that Anawalt says just aren’t supported by data.

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Fortunately, no man in the world believes he has low testosterone, so no harm done. If it had been something to do with excess testosterone, on the other hand…
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Microsoft cuts jobs in HoloLens, Surface, Xbox as layoffs continue • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Dina Bass:

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Microsoft Corp., implementing the layoff of 10,000 workers announced last month, on Thursday cut jobs in units including Surface devices, HoloLens mixed reality hardware and Xbox, according to people familiar with the matter.

Cuts to much of the HoloLens hardware team throw into question whether the company will produce a third iteration of the goggles outside of a planned version for the US Army, said the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem Group, one of the people said.

Xbox chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. “I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues,” Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.

Microsoft declined to comment on the cuts, but said it remains committed to the mixed reality space and the current HoloLens 2 version. “While we don’t comment on specific staffing details, we can share there are no changes to HoloLens 2 and our commitment to mixed reality,” the company said in an emailed statement that pointed to a blog post from last week about its commitment.

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So the Surface group hasn’t escaped. (Unsurprising given the way PC sales are forecast to dive this year.) Contrast with all the money being poured into ChatGPT/Bing.
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Taliban bureaucrats hate working online all day, ‘miss the days of jihad’ • Vice

Matthew Gault:

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The Taliban may have won the war in Afghanistan, but the jihadists who once spent their days riding horses in the countryside are now stuck behind a desk, lamenting their boring computer jobs, spending all their time on Twitter, high rent, and commutes to work.

It’s been almost two years since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over. In that time, the country’s new leaders have had time to take over its industries, occupy its buildings, and get very bored of the day-to-day drudgery of running the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

In a series of interviews with five former mujahideen turned government functionaries and police officers, the Afghanistan Analytics Network shed light on the inner lives of the men who spent a lifetime fighting an empire only to win and have to run a country.

The Afghanistan Analytics Network is a non-profit research agency. Researcher Sabawoon Samin conducted the interviews in person, primarily in Kabul. He interviewed five members of the Taliban to see how they’re adjusting to victory. “They ranged in age from 24 to 32 and had spent between six and 11 years in the Taliban, at different ranks: a Taliban commander, a sniper, a deputy commander and two fighters,” Samin said in his piece. After the fall of the Islamic Republic, the men secured jobs for the new government in Kabul. Two got civilian jobs and the other three got security positions. 

Huzaifa, a former sniper, said life was simple and free during jihad. “All we had to deal with was making plans for ta’aruz [attacks] against the enemy and for retreating,” he said. “People didn’t expect much from us, and we had little responsibility towards them, whereas now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that…the Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.”

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Maybe this is the way the war is won: by boring the former fighters to death. Sadly, thousands are starving to death in the meantime, and women being denied access to education. (Via Helen Lewis’s excellent Bluestocking.)
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Why Britain has Brexit regret • Sydney Morning Herald

Tom Birts, an Australian abroad, bringing an Antipodean eye to Brits’ current situation:

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I kept thinking about the electric meter. I remembered that, apart from the room we were in, all the lights were off.

We drove to London because the trains weren’t running. Oxford Street was busy. “See,” said London, “everything is normal.” I asked a man in a shop about sending something back to Australia. “We’ve been advised not to send anything abroad,” he said. “Not until we hear otherwise. We can’t guarantee it will get there.”

At a christening, we stood around and talked about the cost of living. They wouldn’t stand for this in France, we agreed. There would be riots.

What’s stoicism? What’s indifference? Which one keeps you from drowning?

Shortly before we’d arrived, my friend’s dad had a heart attack. We heard that the wait for an ambulance would have been nine hours, so my friend drove him to the hospital instead. He’s still alive, but the wait for an ambulance is longer now.

While we were there, a relative found themselves in the state of diagnosis where nobody has said cancer, but everyone knows it’s cancer and what cancer might do. “They’re rushing me in,” she said. “That’s good,” I said. “When?” “Next Monday. Hopefully.”

Utilities, transport, healthcare … the things that make a country a success or a failure. The things that make a country function like a country. We stopped at more than one petrol station with no fuel, more than one with fuel but no way to take our bank cards. I laughed at a sign in one of their windows that read “Help Wanted”. Yeah, right.

Maybe a nation, like a sturdy vessel, can drift slowly and indefinitely towards the horizon. Maybe bits can fall off and not be replaced and the basic structure, the ribs, are enough to keep it going. Maybe the water stops pouring in when the ship sinks low enough.

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The 25 tweets that show how Twitter changed the world • The New York Times

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On Wednesday, Twitter announced that users who pay extra will be able to send their thoughts into the world in tweets of up to 4,000 characters, instead of 280 or less. A few hours later, the site glitched. Users couldn’t tweet; they couldn’t DM; #TwitterDown began trending. All of it — the muddled sense of identity, the breakdown of basic function — confirmed the sense that Twitter, a site that has hosted the global conversation for almost two decades, had become a rickety shell of itself, that its best days were behind it and that it would never be as significant again.

But what, exactly, is being lost? We wanted to capture the ways that Twitter — a platform used by a tiny percentage of the world’s population — changed how we protest, consume news, joke and, of course, argue. So we set ourselves to the task of sorting through the trillions of tweets sent since 2006 to determine which were just noise and which deserved a place in the history books. And then we asked: Could we maybe even … rank them?

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For those who don’t like the NYT paywall, this article is “gifted” so should be available to all. The selected tweets are well-chosen (by a galaxy of choosers). Has it passed its peak? Will it be able to survive? Speaking of which…
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More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

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More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics, in a striking sign of how far reaching the advertiser exodus has been following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.

Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127m to just over $48m, according to the data.

The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5bn advertising business for Twitter. After Musk completed his takeover of the company in late October, advertisers began to worry about the safety and stability of the platform given his plans to cut staff and relax content moderation policies. In early November, Musk said Twitter had seen a “massive revenue drop.”

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Not to worry, he’s fired all those costly engineers (and he’ll fire any more who say he’s not popular)! And he’s stopped paying rent! Cost control is going great!
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The Mastodon bump is now a slump • WIRED

Amanda Hoover:

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Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.

After a decade of Big Tech dominating social media, the idea of a small, alternative, and open source platform like Mastodon growing into a truly mainstream challenger was alluring to some. The decentralized platform operates very differently from services like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and demands volunteers take on the job of sustaining and moderating servers. That’s because Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a network of servers running interoperable open source software.

Thanks to dedicated admins, many instances survived the flood of sign-ups and came back stronger. But Mastodon never was, and never will be, Twitter. For some, that’s what makes Mastodon valuable. To others, it’s a barrier. But the Twitter migration showed that Mastodon can adapt—and quickly. 

“The biggest lesson of what happened is that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can scale. This was a big question,” says Robert Gehl, a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada. He has studied Mastodon and says it’s enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. But that pattern can still add momentum. “Each time, a percentage of the wave sticks,” Gehl says. “You get people converting to it.” 

During Mastodon’s Musk bump, admins worked hard to get servers swamped by new users back online. They crowdfunded money to pay for increased hosting bills and updated their policies on content moderation.

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Wired feels as though it has a weird downer on Mastodon. Sure, it’s not as big as Twitter. Perhaps it will never be as big? But Twitter feels like a place that’s decaying.
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Nuclear Tourism: when atomic tests were a tourist attraction in Las Vegas • Rare Historical Photos

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Las Vegas is known as the city of lights and, at one time, that light was the glow of an atomic detonation in the Nevada desert. Starting in 1951, the US Army began testing nuclear ordnances just 65 miles from Sin City.

At night, the glow of the bombs lit up the sky, and mushroom clouds could be spotted rising over the horizon during the day.

In classical American fashion, fear was not the only reaction. Vegas started becoming a destination for a certain type of people — Nuclear Tourists.

Let’s roll back to understand why Nevada was selected for nuclear testing. The Yucca Flats of Nevada was located in the center of the American wasteland, making it the perfect place for nuclear testing. First off by being located in the middle of the desert, it created very few threats to surrounding homes.

Additionally, over 87% of the Nevada area is owned by the federal government. It had vast available lands, sunny weather, and good rail connections. The nuclear detonations provided a source of spectacles and entertainment for people who did live in this area. As a result, Vegas began to experience a new influx of people from across the country who would travel thousands of miles in order to catch a glimpse of this new show.

Soon after Las Vegas was transformed from the original city of 25,000 people to the world-renown spectacle of three million people. Journalists began jumping on this new exciting event, and the topic of atomic tourism became the biggest headliner everywhere. Even writers in the New York Times began referring to it as, “the non- ancient but nonetheless honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching.”

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I couldn’t find an author. But it’s really the pictures that are the thing. So blasé about looking at raw radiation. Plus the consequences: there were an estimated 10,000-75,000 cases of thyroid cancer as a result, and/or possibly 1,800 leukaemia deaths.
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Google Stadia had less than 10% of cloud gaming market share • 9to5 Google

Kyle Bradshaw:

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In new statistics shared by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), we’ve learned that Google Stadia had significantly fewer active users than most other cloud gaming services.

Following Microsoft’s announcement of its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard, regulatory bodies around the world have taken action to investigate how such a merger would affect competition in the video game industry. Because Microsoft is responsible for Xbox Game Pass Streaming, the merger’s effect on cloud gaming has been a key point of contention.

The CMA has released its provisional findings, explaining in great detail the ways that a merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard would have a negative impact on competition. In one section of the findings, the CMA offers statistics on how many active users each of the major cloud gaming platforms had in 2021 and 2022.

While the CMA does not provide the raw numbers for each service in the public version of its report, the regulator does show a percentage range (0-5%, 5-10%, etc) of market share that each had, based on the number of monthly average users (MAUs). In an appendix, it’s explained that these charts were created based on information provided directly by each company and reflect global usage, not just players in the UK.

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You do have to dig around the appendix, but it’s on page C4. Apple (with its Arcade offering) doesn’t appear at all. Google Stadia had 5-10% of average monthly average users in 2021, and 0-5% of MAUs in 2022. Microsoft’s xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation and NVidia all have 20%+ of share.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if, and just hear me out, we could get AI to redo Futurama as a 1980s US sitcom with humans? Or do the same for other modern series? CC-licensed photo by Dave Monk on Flickr.

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

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A selection of 10 links for you. View them, dammit! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count • Platformer

Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton:

»

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44bn, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is. 

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size.

«

Damned reality not living up to Musk’s expectations again.
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Where are the good Android apps for Mastodon? • The Verge

Barbara Krasnoff would like to know, and pretty much hunts down the answer:

»

Samsung, which is responsible for a large number of the Android phones on the market, offers a version of Android whose interface and most basic features can be pretty different from those of Google’s version (which can be found on phones like the Pixel line).

It takes resources to deal with those differences — resources that individual developers and smaller companies may not have. JR Raphael, founder and publisher of Android Intelligence, says, “These days, it’s pretty rare to see any major company fail to release an app for both Android and iOS at the same time, with equal priorities. Where I think we see a noticeable contrast is with the smaller, startup-based services and more indie app developers. In those sorts of scenarios, where resources are clearly limited and a company has to make decisions about where its attention is most valuable, we do still see places sometimes focusing on iOS initially and then coming back to Android later, down the line — or sometimes even just focusing on iOS exclusively. It’s a frustrating reality and one I wish we could change.”

«

The Twitter mobile app for iOS and Android is pretty horrible by iOS standards, certainly compared to an app made by the two-man team at Tapbots (who made Tweetbot); I suspect it looks the same on Android, and that that is sort of the point – to have a fairly consistent interface.

But Mastodon doesn’t have a big organisation to write the “official” app, and so you get all the small developers having a stab at it. Often with a knife and fork. And that’s where the finicky attention to detail that iOS developers devote to their work (for which they do get rewarded) shows up. Krasnoff links to John Gruber’s notes on this, and he’s right: the two platforms simply have different baselines for acceptable design, just as happens on Windows and macOS.
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Ukraine war: Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm bars Kyiv from using Starlink tech for drone control • BBC News

James Fitzgerald:

»

SpaceX has limited Ukraine’s ability to use its satellite internet service for military purposes – after reports that Kyiv has used it to control drones.

Early in the war, Ukraine was given thousands of SpaceX Starlink dishes – which connect to satellites and help people stay connected to the internet.

But it is also said to have used the tech to target Russian positions – breaking policies set out by SpaceX.
A Ukrainian official said companies had to choose which “side” they were on. They could join Ukraine and “the right to freedom”, or pick Russia and “its ‘right’ to kill and seize territories”, tweeted presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.

At an event in Washington DC on Wednesday, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell explained that Starlink technology was “never meant to be weaponised”.

She made reference to Ukraine’s alleged use of Starlink to control drones, and stressed that the equipment had been provided for humanitarian use.

Uncrewed aircraft have played an important role in the war, having been used by Kyiv to search out Russian troops, drop bombs and counter Moscow’s own drone attacks.

Russia has been accused of attempting to jam Starlink signals by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Ms Shotwell confirmed that it was acceptable for the Ukrainian military for deploy Starlink technology “for comms”, but said her intent was “never to have them use it for offensive purposes”.

«

Sooo.. the Ukrainian military should just use it for.. defensive purposes? What amazing nonsense from Starlink. You can’t use it for things that are weapons, but you can use it for people who are holding and using weapons?
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The Moon smells like gunpowder • Nautilus

Jillian Scudder:

»

Dirt on Earth is usually not very sharp; small pieces of rock and degraded plant material are tumbled against each other and generally turn out somewhat polished, like river rocks, before they enter our noses. If you happen to be allergic to dust, it’s bad luck, but it’s not doing much in the way of physical harm.

The lunar dust, on the other hand, is the shattered remains of rocks, broken repeatedly by tiny meteorites striking the surface. It’s sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it slashed the seals on some of the vacuum-sealed bags meant to preserve moon dust on the way home; they wound up being contaminated with oxygen by the time the Apollo missions made their three-day trip back to Earth.

It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust. Considering that the astronauts were notoriously clumsy on the lunar surface, trying to adapt to both the unwieldy suits and the lowered gravity, most of them had taken several tumbles over the course of their moonwalks, and these suits were no longer pristine after many hours on the surface. They were, instead, rather comprehensively covered in lunar dirt.

It was more than just getting wedged in the folds of the suit—it was static cling. If you have ever seen a cat try to extract itself from a box of packing styrofoam without trailing pieces stuck to all parts of itself, that’s the problem we were having with the lunar dust on the moon.

…The human lung does not like tiny microscopic shards of rock. Breathing these in can damage lung tissue in a way that is difficult to repair, because the rocks are so sharp and so tiny, that simply coughing won’t expel them, and so they stay embedded in the lungs, continuously doing damage and eventually causing problems similar to very severe pneumonia.

There’s an earthbound parallel called silicosis, which comes from breathing fine mineral dust, most notably from mining quartz, and which still causes deaths today, less now from mining and more from the cutting of quartz countertops without proper protection. Between 1999 and 2019, 2,512 people in the United States died of silicosis. Like the moon dust, quartz isn’t intrinsically toxic, it’s just that it’s like inhaling fine shards of glass, which isn’t a great idea.

But it’s one of many problems we’re going to have to solve if we want humans to go live on the moon.

«

*Sighs* *crosses off timeshare sales on the Moon*. (The gunpowder thing is because it’s wrecking the inside of your nose.)
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Extracting tables from images in Python • Better Programming

Xavier Canton:

»

About a year ago, I was tasked with extracting and structuring data from documents, mainly contained in tables. I had no prior knowledge in computer vision and struggled to find a suitable “plug-and-play” solution. The options available were either state-of-the-art neural network (NN) based solutions that were heavy and tedious, or simpler OpenCV-based solutions that were inconsistent.

Inspired by existing OpenCV scripts, I developed a simple and consistent method to extract tables and turned it into an open-source Python library: img2table.

What does my library do?
Lightweight (compared to deep learning solutions), the package requires no training and minimal parametrization. It provides:
• Table identification for images and PDF files, including bounding boxes at the table cell level
• Table content extraction by providing support for OCR services/tools (Tesseract, AWS Textract, Google Vision, and Azure OCR as of now)
• Extraction of table titles
• Handling of complex table structures such as merged cells
• Implementation of a method to correct skew and rotation of images
• Extracted tables are returned as a simple object, including a Pandas DataFrame representation
• Export extracted tables to an Excel file, preserving their original structure.

«

For those who have been looking for something like this. Usual proviso: I haven’t had time to try it myself, so approach with care. But I can already think of projects, such as extracting data from financial reports or government documents, where this is just what you want. (You could also try this entirely different service – small amounts free, then it’s paid – but I haven’t tried it and the usual warnings about uploading sensitive content applies.)
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Viral spread: Peter Hotez on the increase of anti-science aggression on social media • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Sara Goudarzi interviews Hotez, a professor in virology and microbiology (and who incidentally has a daughter with autism, a condition he has pointed out is not due to childhood vaccination):

»

Goudarzi: Are you seeing a difference in the attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines versus say the flu or MMR vaccines?

Hotez: Yeah, because remember, MMR came out of autism; that was the [original] assertion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. That was [The Lancet] paper from 1998. But then around 2014, 2015 (I like to think because I was helping to take some of the wind out of the sails around autism), you started to see the anti-vaccine movement pivot around this concept of health and medical freedom, that you can’t tell us what to do about our kids. And that was the first link to the Republican Tea Party here in Texas. In fact, they started getting PAC [political action committee] money… It really took off in Texas and Oklahoma and that’s what you see came off the rails with COVID-19.

It has been documented now by Charles Gaba, a health analyst whose work has been mentioned in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Pew Research Center and Peterson Academic Center, that the lowest vaccination rates were where health freedom propaganda was the strongest, and among those who are in red states like Texas, the redder the county, the lower the vaccination rate, the higher the numbers of deaths. It’s a really tight correlation, so much so that David Leonhardt in the New York Times has called it red COVID. My forthcoming book, The Deadly Rise of Antiscience: A Scientist’s Warning and it’s full on linked to far-right politics and it’s been embraced by the House Freedom Caucus.

After vaccines became widely available, the statements from the 2021 CPAC conference of conservatives in Dallas was first along the lines of: “they’re going to vaccinate you, and then they’re going to take away your guns and your bibles.” It’s ridiculous.

«

Ridiculous, and yet it’s happening. Nobody knows what the solution to such partisan thinking is. The really concerning thing might be that there isn’t one, short of a devastating event that means everyone has to work together for survival. That seems like too high a price to get rid of partisanship.
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What ChatGPT and generative AI mean for science • Nature

Chris Stokel-Walker and Richard Van Noorden:

»

Some researchers think LLMs are well-suited to speeding up tasks such as writing papers or grants, as long as there’s human oversight. “Scientists are not going to sit and write long introductions for grant applications any more,” says Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a neurobiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who has co-authored a manuscript using GPT-3 as an experiment. “They’re just going to ask systems to do that.”

Tom Tumiel, a research engineer at InstaDeep, a London-based software consultancy firm, says he uses LLMs every day as assistants to help write code. “It’s almost like a better Stack Overflow,” he says, referring to the popular community website where coders answer each others’ queries.

But researchers emphasize that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable at answering questions, sometimes generating false responses. “We need to be wary when we use these systems to produce knowledge,” says Osmanovic Thunström.

This unreliability is baked into how LLMs are built. ChatGPT and its competitors work by learning the statistical patterns of language in enormous databases of online text — including any untruths, biases or outmoded knowledge. When LLMs are then given prompts (such as Greene and Pividori’s carefully structured requests to rewrite parts of manuscripts), they simply spit out, word by word, any way to continue the conversation that seems stylistically plausible.

The result is that LLMs easily produce errors and misleading information, particularly for technical topics that they might have had little data to train on. LLMs also can’t show the origins of their information; if asked to write an academic paper, they make up fictitious citations.

«

What’s really telling is that in the middle of the article there’s a “What’s your experience with ChatGPT? Take Nature’s poll”, which indicates how keenly this is being watched in a field where, after all, writing authoritative-sounding text is what it’s all about. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Why is YouTube filled with these AI-generated show intros? • Daily Dot

Audra Schroeder:

»

Over the last month, a new kind of uncanny content has been flooding YouTube: Intros to animated series and TV shows recreated with AI-produced images, made to look like they came from another decade. 

There’s Family Guy, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Adventure Time, Futurama, South Park, and Beavis and Butt-Head. These are just a handful of examples from the last month, but they all have the same waking-nightmare feel to them, likely because a majority were made in Midjourney. I didn’t search for any of these videos, but around late January, YouTube started recommending them, and wouldn’t stop. Most recently, it thought I would like “The Joe Rogan Experience as a 90’s Sitcom.”

Three weeks ago, YouTuber Lyrical Realms posted a surreal Family Guy intro, which has more than 5 million views. It features just stills, presented as a slideshow, showing the main characters from the animated show as live-action renderings. But once you zoom in on the teeth and hands, it looks a little less “human,” and the characters don’t feel like they’d be pleasant to actually watch. (Largely because there is no dialogue or plot.)

One of the comments on the clip: “mind blowing. you could convince somebody who didn’t know about family guy that this was a real sitcom.” 

Lyrical Realms told the Daily Dot that they were inspired by “the recent surge in popularity of ‘80s sci-fi movies.

“I have a background in machine learning and a love for AI, so this was a natural fit for me. The process was quite long, taking me five full days to generate between 1,000 to 1,500 images. The most challenging part was the prompt engineering and having to discard many images during the process until I found the perfect prompts.” 

YouTuber Suburban Garden says they saw a video titled “Dark Souls as an 80’s Dark Fantasy Film” in early January and got inspired to try one out: “I got the free trial for Adobe premiere and stayed up until six in the morning trying to release my video before someone else took the idea.”

After publishing a Futurama intro that got more than 900,000 views in two weeks, they say their “channel of only 10 subscribers quickly rose to 1,000 in three days.” It currently has more than 5,000 subscribers. 

Last month, writer Ryan Broderick pondered “how long it’ll take for YouTube to start trying to downrank this stuff algorithmically.” But it seems these kinds of videos are only proliferating, and some of them are getting millions of views; YouTube doesn’t have much incentive to stop it.

«

They are terrible, as much as anything because they capture the terrible lighting and casting of 80s sitcoms. It’s the AI tsunami coming at us.
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Inside Safe City, Moscow’s AI surveillance dystopia • WIRED

Masha Borak:

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The Russian capital is now the seventh-most-surveilled city in the world. Across Russia, there are an estimated 21 million surveillance cameras, and the country ranks among the top in the world in terms of the number of connected surveillance cameras. The system created by Moscow’s government, dubbed Safe City, was touted by city officials as a way to streamline its public safety systems. In recent years, however, its 217,000 surveillance cameras, designed to catch criminals and terrorists, have been turned against protestors, political rivals, and journalists. 

“Facial recognition was supposed to be the ‘cherry on top,’ the reason why all of this was built,” says a former employee of NTechLab, one of the principal companies building Safe City’s face recognition system.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Safe City’s data collection practices have become increasingly opaque. The project is now seen as a tool of rising digital repression as Russia wages war against Ukraine and dissenting voices within its own borders. It is an example of the danger smart city technologies pose. And for the engineers and programmers who built such systems, its transformation into a tool of oppression has led to a moment of reckoning. 

…In addition to its network of more than 200,000 cameras, Safe City also incorporates data from 169 information systems, managing data on citizens, public services, transportation, and nearly everything else that makes up Moscow’s infrastructure. This includes anonymized cell phone geolocation data collection, vehicle license plate recognition, data from ride-hailing services, and voice recognition devices. As Safe City was still rolling out in 2020, the Russian government announced plans to spend $1.3bn deploying similar Safe City systems across Russia. From the outside, the potential for the system to be abused seemed obvious. But for those involved in its development, it looked like many other smart city projects. “No one expected that the country would turn into hell in two years,” says one former NTechLab employee…

«

What’s also notable in this story is all the companies mentioned as suppliers which scramble to be quoted saying they’ve got no involvement since the Ukraine invasion.
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How deepfake videos are used to spread disinformation • The New York Times

Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur:

»

In one video, a news anchor with perfectly combed dark hair and a stubbly beard outlined what he saw as the United States’ shameful lack of action against gun violence.

In another video, a female news anchor heralded China’s role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting.

But something was off. Their voices were stilted and failed to sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a pixelated, video-game quality and their hair appeared unnaturally plastered to the head. The captions were filled with grammatical mistakes.

The two broadcasters, purportedly anchors for a news outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. They are computer-generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known instance of “deepfake” video technology being used to create fictitious people as part of a state-aligned information campaign.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this in the wild,” said Jack Stubbs, the vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation. Graphika discovered the pro-China campaign, which appeared intended to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and undercut the United States for English-speaking viewers.

… Graphika linked the two fake Wolf News presenters to technology made by Synthesia, an A.I. company based above a clothing shop in London’s Oxford Circus.

The five-year-old start-up makes software for creating deepfake avatars. A customer simply needs to type up a script, which is then read by one of the digital actors made with Synthesia’s tools.

AI avatars are “digital twins,” Synthesia said, that are based on the appearances of hired actors and can be manipulated to speak in 120 languages and accents. It offers more than 85 characters to choose from with different genders, ages, ethnicities, voice tones and fashion choices.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In China, pig farming has been taken to dramatic new levels of industrialisation, with 26-floor towers in the middle of rural villages. CC-licensed photo by jennicatpinkjennicatpink on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Even the squeak? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google shows off new AI search features, but a ChatGPT rival is still weeks away • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited public access to.

In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google showed off how it will use generative AI in the future to summarize information from the web. In the demo, the company showed a search for the question “what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing?” with an AI-generated response highlighting a few key options and how to spot them.

“New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in search results,” said Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan. “With this you’ll be able to quickly understand the big picture and then go on to explore different angles.”

Raghavan referred to this sort of response as a “NORA” reply — standing for “no one right answer.” (A common criticism of AI-generated search responses is that they tend to pick a single answer as definitive.) He did not specify when this feature would be available.

«

Google drew some heat for including a suggestion in its pre-publicity that the James Webb Space Telescope took the first picture of an exoplanet (last month), when in fact it was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004.

FT Alphaville tried to argue that Bard wasn’t wrong, but I think it’s wrong.

Also – Bard is weeks away? That’s nothing. Most people have no idea ChatGPT exists.
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Her car died, so she walked to work. One day on the walk, she found $15,000 • The Seattle Times

Sydney Page:

»

Dianne Gordon’s green Jeep Liberty broke down about a year ago, and ever since, she’s been walking 2.7 miles each way to and from work, five days a week. Her car couldn’t be fixed, and Gordon, 65, couldn’t afford to buy a new one.

It takes her about an hour to walk from her home in White Lake Township, Mich., to VC’s Fresh Marketplace in Waterford Township, where she works behind the deli counter, slicing meat and serving salads. When her shift is over, she walks home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” said Gordon, who lives alone. “I had to have a positive attitude.”

Gordon’s regular walks are usually uneventful. On Jan. 21, though, she spotted something unexpected: A Ziploc bag, filled with $14,780.

About 5:30 p.m. that day, Gordon was on her usual walk home. It was a notably cold afternoon, and she decided to stop at a gas station for a snack.

As she opened the door, “I happened to look down, and there was a bag of money,” Gordon said. “I picked it up, and there were some papers that went with it, and I turned it over, and there was even more money.”

She knew the money would be life-changing for her, she said, but she refrained from opening the cash-filled bag.

“I just looked at it, and I knew it wasn’t mine,” Gordon said. “I knew what I needed to do.”

She went into the gas station, clutching the bag of cash in her hands, and immediately called the police.

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Ah, but what happened next? That’s what makes this worth reading.
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Republicans, aided by Musk, accuse Big Tech of colluding with Democrats • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima:

»

Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he began promoting screenshots of internal company documents that he said exposed “free speech suppression” on the social media platform during the 2020 election. Republicans were thrilled.

On Wednesday, Musk’s “Twitter Files” took center stage in a combative Capitol Hill hearing, as GOP leaders attempted to turn Twitter’s decision to briefly block sharing a New York Post story about the president’s son into evidence of a broad conspiracy. Conservatives have long argued that Silicon Valley favors Democrats by systematically suppressing right-wing viewpoints on social media. These allegations have evolved in nearly a half-decade of warnings, as politicians in Washington and beyond fixate on the industry’s communications with the FBI and Democratic leaders, seeking to cast the opposing party as against free speech.

“Twitter … was a private company that the federal government used to do what it cannot: limit the constitutional free exercise of speech,” said House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, flanked by a poster displaying the New York Post story. He added that the committee now knows all of this “because of Elon Musk,” joining a chorus of Republicans praising the mercurial billionaire throughout the hearing.

The testimony of former Twitter executives repeatedly contradicted these accusations. Still, Republicans plowed ahead with unsubstantial allegations of collusion between government officials and the company’s old regime. After one former Twitter executive testified that most of his interactions with the FBI were about foreign interference, Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, shot back: “I think you guys got played.”

At times, the hearing veered away from Republican aims as Anika Collier Navaroli, a company whistleblower, brought forward new testimony alleging conservatives influenced the social network. The company changed its policies to accommodate Trump’s rule-breaking tweet, according to Navaroli, and the Trump White House asked Twitter to remove an insulting tweet about the former president, posted by the television personality Chrissy Teigen.

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It’s all performative by the Republicans to get video clips for their social media campaigns.
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China’s bid to improve food production? Giant towers of pigs • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu:

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The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.

This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.

Inside the hulking edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the young hogs.

Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than one million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight and health.
The building, located on the outskirts of Ezhou, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, is being hailed as the world’s biggest free-standing pig farm with a second identical hog high-rise opening soon. The first farm started operating in October, and once both buildings reach full capacity later this year, it is expected to raise 1.2 million pigs annually.

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You have to see the picture of the outside of the tower. It’s astonishing. Plus you really have to wonder about the potential for disease spread. And, er, would you want to live downwind?
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A solution to the climate crisis: mining the moon, researchers say • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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Proponents of a “moonshot” idea to deal with global heating have been handed a new, very literal, interpretation by researchers who have proposed firing plumes of moon dust from a gun into space in order to deflect the sun’s rays away from Earth.

The seemingly outlandish concept, outlined in a new research paper, would involve creating a “solar shield” in space by mining the moon of millions of tons of its dust and then “ballistically eject[ing]” it to a point in space about 1m miles from Earth, where the floating grains would partially block incoming sunlight.

“A really exciting part of our study was the realization that the natural lunar dust grains are just the right size and composition for efficiently scattering sunlight away from Earth,” said Ben Bromley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Utah, who led the research, published in Plos Climate.

“Since it takes much less energy to launch these grains from the moon’s surface, as compared with an Earth launch, the ‘moonshot’ idea really stood out for us.”

Bromley and two other researchers considered a variety of properties, including coal and sea salt, that could dim the sun by as much as 2% if fired into space. The team eventually settled on the dust found on the moon, although millions of tons would have to be mined, sifted and loaded into a ballistic device, such as an electromagnetic rail gun, and fired into space each year into order to maintain this solar shield.

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What an amazing idea. But why go to the moon? Why not just see if we can trigger some volcanoes? That dimmed the sun in The Year Without a Summer, and even gave us Frankenstein.
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Book review: “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” by Justin Gregg • The Guardian

PD Smith:

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rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our existential angst and increasingly apparent talent for self-destruction? This is the question Gregg sets out to answer in his entertaining and original book.

It is the very complexity of our intelligence that may well make us less successful in evolutionary terms
The delightfully absurd title stems from his claim that the 19th-century German philosopher, who had depression and eventually dementia, was “the quintessential example of how too much profundity can literally break your brain”. The “soul-tortured Nietzsche”, who sought meaning in suffering, is an example of how, as a species, we are simply too smart for our own good. By contrast, the narwhal (“one of my favourite marine animals”) demonstrates the fact that, from an evolutionary perspective, intelligence and complex thought are often a hindrance: “The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking, and everything that is right about animal thinking.”

In search of evidence to support this theory, Gregg explores the nature of intelligence. Although non-human animals may have simpler minds than us, they are no less successful in their own way than we are, and do far less harm to their fellow beings: “The Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame.”

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The dinosaurs got on pretty well, after all, and it’s arguable whether we’d do any better at diverting the asteroid. I often wonder what a planet full of dogs would be like. Quite happy, perhaps?
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UK proposes making the sale and possession of encrypted phones illegal • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

»

A section of the UK government has proposed making the sale or possession of bespoke encrypted phones for crime a criminal offence in its own right. The measure is intended to help the country’s law enforcement agencies tackle organized crime and those who facilitate it, but civil liberties experts tell Motherboard the proposal is overbroad and poorly defined, meaning it could sweep up other forms of secure communication used by the wider population if not adjusted.

The news highlights law enforcement’s continued targeting of the encrypted phone industry. Alongside technical operations, undercover investigations, and even creating their own phone company to secretly harvest messages, authorities are increasingly exploring legislative options too.

“At the moment the government proposal appears to be vague and overly broad. While it states that the provisions ‘will not apply to commercially available mobile phones nor the encrypted messaging apps available on them’ it is difficult to see how it will not result in targeting devices used on a daily [basis] by human rights defenders, protesters and pretty much all of us who want to keep our data secure,” Ioannis Kouvakas, senior legal officer and assistant general counsel at UK-based activism organization Privacy International, told Motherboard in an email.

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Of course it’s Suella Braverman’s Home Office: here’s the document. The document specifies Encrochat, which were specially made for serious criminals. But that was infiltrated. Making the possession a crime is quite a step.
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How living on Mars would warp the human body • Salon.com

Troy Farah:

»

“We don’t know what a third of the [gravity] will do for us, we don’t know if it’ll provide any protection or if you can make use of that to give yourself enough gravitational loading to protect your skeleton and your muscles over time,” Fong says. “We don’t know, but we suspect that you’re going to need some sort of countermeasures.”

That means we’ll need to bring lots of medications and drugs to Mars, to anticipate every scenario, because we won’t be able to jog down to Walgreens if someone needs heart medications or a sleep aid. Unfortunately, we also don’t know much about how these meds might fare in space travel or if they’ll act differently in our bodies under the unique conditions of Mars.

Likewise, the psychological effects could be staggering for the first humans in history to completely lose sight of the Earth. This could have unforeseen mental health consequences.

“The suite of threats that presents to you on Mars are unique and poorly understood,” Fong says, noting that a day on Mars is about 37 minutes longer than an Earth day. “It’s dark out there. It messes with your circadian rhythms because the day is slightly longer. It’s just enough out of sync that it really messes you up. And you’re very isolated. Psychologically, there’s some not insignificant problems.”

Mars doesn’t have much of an atmosphere, magnetic field or an ozone layer, three things which make life a lot more comfortable on Earth. This means there’s still plenty of cancer-causing radiation on Mars (though slightly less than in space). And if you stepped outside sans spacesuit, the extreme cold would freeze you to death while the low atmospheric pressure would cause your blood to boil inside your veins. Life on Mars would be a life spent entirely indoors, unless you count being trapped inside a restrictive spacesuit as “outdoors.”

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I dunno, it seems like timeshares there just aren’t going to work.
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Chip suppliers warn on EU plan to bar ‘forever chemicals’ • Financial Times

Cheng Ting-Fang and Alice Hancock:

»

Five European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, on Tuesday proposed that the EU phase out tens of thousands of so-called forever chemicals, known as PFAS, used in the production of semiconductors, batteries, aircraft, cars, medical equipment and even frying pans and ski wax.

The ban would constitute “the broadest restriction proposal in history”, Frauke Averbeck, who led the proposal for the German Environment Agency, said. “It’s a huge step for us to take.”

“If no action is taken we estimate that the societal costs will exceed the costs without a restriction,” said Richard Luit, senior policy adviser at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment. However, industry executives warned that a broad ban could have severe consequences for many sectors. Chemours, a leading supplier of high-end fluoropolymers, warned that the chemicals were “absolutely critical” for semiconductor manufacturing as well as a wide range of other industries.

“If we do not have these, there would be very severe global disruption,” said Denise Dignam, Chemours’ head of advanced performance materials. “I can’t think of how you would run these [semiconductor] manufacturing processes without these materials.” 

…PFAS are extensively used across industry and in consumer products because of their resistance to high temperatures and corrosion. In many cases there are no manufacturing alternatives. Their “forever chemicals” moniker stems from the fact that their carbon-fluorine bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which means that they do not break down easily and accumulate over time in humans and in the environment. Several have been linked with impairments to unborn babies and damage to human internal organs as well as contaminating water and wildlife.

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Challenging: what happens when you have a chemical that’s essential but also a serious problem over time? See also: oil.
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The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architecture

Dustin Shahidehpour is a software engineer (for the past nine years) at Meta:

»

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

After years of iteration, the Facebook codebase does not resemble a typical iOS codebase:

• It’s full of C++, Objective-C(++), and Swift.
• It has dozens of dynamically loaded libraries (dylibs), and so many classes that they can’t be loaded into Xcode at once.
• There is almost zero raw usage of Apple’s SDK — everything has been wrapped or replaced by an in-house abstraction.
• The app makes heavy use of code generation, spurred by Buck, our custom build system.
• Without heavy caching from our build system, engineers would have to spend an entire workday waiting for the app to build.

FBiOS was never intentionally architected this way. The app’s codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user experience.

«

This reminds me a little of how biology teachers explain that the human body has evolved all sorts of design flaws: each step logically followed the previous one, until you end up with a mess that somehow just-about works, until it doesn’t and you die. John Gruber calls this post a cry for help, and it certainly seems like an app that can’t all actually be loaded into XCode is like the human pelvis being normally too narrow for a baby’s shoulders.

But you can refactor code.

(Shahidehpour’s CV includes two years as “drumline performer” for the Chicago Bulls, which seems literally to mean he was one of those folk who marches around banging a drum.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As a vet, you have to be able to look into the face of the sweetest puppy – and, if necessary, kill it. (Humanely.) Could you? CC-licensed photo by Cortney Martin 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. A trip to the farm, you say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I tried Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Search will never be the same • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Everybody knows: If you want to tell a good tech joke, just incorporate Bing. Yet Microsoft’s search engine might not be a punchline much longer. The company is releasing a version powered with AI, and it’s smart—really smart.

At least that’s my take after spending some time testing it out. 

Leaning on its multiyear, multibillion-dollar partnership with the buzzy startup OpenAI, Microsoft is incorporating a ChatGPT-like bot front and center on the Bing home page. You can ask it questions—even about recent news events—and it will respond in sentences that seem like they were written by a human. It even uses emojis.

Microsoft is also adding AI features to my favorite browser Edge. (Seriously.) The tools can summarize webpages and assist with writing emails and social-media posts. 

“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this [search] space,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told me in an interview. “A new race is starting with a completely new platform technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice finally.” 

Google—which holds 93% of the global search engine market share, according to analytics company StatCounter—is on Microsoft’s heels. On Monday, the search company said it is working on Bard, a similar chat tool that generates responses from web-based information.

Microsoft’s new Bing and Edge became available in a limited preview Tuesday. You have to sign up on bing.com for the preview wait list, and once you are in, you’ll have to use the Edge browser (available for Windows and MacOS). Microsoft plans to bring it to other web browsers over time.

It’s far too early to call a winner in this AI search race. But after seeing the new Bing in action, I can confidently say this: A big change is coming to how we get information and how we interact with our computers.

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Certainly going to be interesting to see if people migrate to Bing, or whether Google’s position as the default rules. (Here’s the Microsoft blogpost on it.)
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Mozilla, Google looking ahead to the end of Apple’s WebKit • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS.

Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine.

Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store.

As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS.

The major browser makers – Apple, Google, and Mozilla – each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple’s Safari is based on WebKit; Google’s Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla’s Firefox is based on Gecko.

Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.

…Safari developed a reputation for lagging behind Chrome and Firefox. Apple, however, appears to be aware of the risk posed by regulators and has added more staff to the WebKit team to close the capabilities gap.

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Written statements: consultation on revising the Computer Misuse Act • UK Parliament

Tom Tugendhat is minister of state for security:

»

We will issue a formal consultation today to seek views on a number of proposals made during the consultation, including:

• Considering the development of a new power to allow law enforcement agencies to take control of domains and internet protocol (IP) addresses where these are being used by criminals to support a wide range of criminality, including fraud and CMA offences.

• Developing a power to require the preservation of computer data, ahead of its seizure, to prevent it being deleted where it may be needed for an investigation. While requests from law enforcement agencies for preservation are generally met, the UK does not have an explicit power to require such preservation, and having such a power would make the legal position clear.

• Considering whether a power to take action against a person possessing or using data obtained by another person through a CMA offence, such as through accessing a computer system to obtain personal data, would be of benefit, subject to appropriate safeguards being in place. Currently, the CMA covers unauthorised access to computer, but the unauthorised taking or copying of data is not covered by the Theft Act so it is difficult to take action in these cases.

In addition, a number of other issues were raised during the Call for Information, relating to the levels of sentencing, statutory defences to the CMA offences, improvements to the ability to report vulnerabilities, and whether the UK has sufficient legislation to cover extra-territorial threats.

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The original CMA is pretty old – originally from 1990. A few tweaks are probably overdue.
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Veterinarian mental health: the story of Lacey, and why I had to kill her • Slate

Andrew Bullis:

»

We all know that this lecture will be grim—Dr Miller [not his real name] is a pig vet, after all. That might mean nothing to you, but in the vet world, it says everything. Swine vets work on swine systems and whole populations. They treat groups of animals, not individuals the way general-practice vets do. Doing so requires an incredible amount of data, and the ability to interpret it dispassionately.

Because of this, they’re also stereotypically cold, calculating, and, in a word, ruthless. They’re not your typical warm, fuzzy family vet, and they’re not shy about “liquidating” entire farms if their data says it’ll help the overall system. For this reason, I know that Miller’s talk will cover mass euthanasia—how to put down entire farms of animals, and how to do it effectively.

“I know this is the last thing you all want to talk about,” Miller says. “But this is the one thing you all need to do, and do well. You see, our business is healing, yes. But you all know there’s only so much we can do. In the end, euthanasia is an option.

“I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing. I don’t care if it’s an old dog, a sow, some pet chicken, a stallion, or a fucking 3-day-old kitten. You will do it humanely. That means quickly, painlessly, and compassionately.

“Some of you say pig vets have no heart,” he continues softly. “That might be true, but find us when we have to liquidate a farm. Those days I still carry with me.”

Miller starts to tell us how euthanasia works. His instruction is exhaustive and methodical. But there’s a crucial thing he leaves out: what all that killing does to humans.

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A very affecting piece about life on the front line as a vet.
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Meta, long an AI leader, tries not to be left out of the boom • The New York Times

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac:

»

For nearly a decade, Meta has spent billions of dollars building new kinds of AI. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, made it a mission for Meta to become a leader in the field back in 2013. The company hired hundreds of top AI researchers, including Dr. [Yann] LeCun [Meta’s chief AI scientist]. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the large amounts of computing power needed to build AI systems.

Yet Meta has been left out now that Silicon Valley is gripped with excitement by “generative AI,” the name for technologies that generate text, images and other media on their own. OpenAI has taken centre stage, even though Meta and many other companies have built similar technologies.

Others have since jumped headlong into the frenzy. On Monday, Google said it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard. And on Tuesday, Microsoft, which has invested $13bn in OpenAI, unveiled a new internet search engine and web browser powered by generative AI. [See below – Overspill Ed]i

Meta, however, was hamstrung, in part, by its reputation as a corporate giant that helps spread untruths, Dr. LeCun said last month. And with responsibilities to billions of users, it could not afford to leave online a chatbot that can generate false and biased information.

“OpenAI and other small companies are in a better position to actually get some credit for releasing this kind of thing,” said Chirag Shah, a University of Washington professor who has explored the flaws in technologies like Galactica [Meta’s briefly released and rapidly withdrawn AI chatbot from last November] and ChatGPT. “They are not going to get the same kind of blowback.”

In recent years, Meta has also shifted its focus to another technology area: the immersive online world of the so-called metaverse, which Mr. Zuckerberg has said he believes is the next big thing. In the short term, it is unclear how the company can offer generative AI products with its existing services in a way that really captures the public’s attention.

That does not mean it isn’t trying. Meta is fast-tracking its efforts to put AI-driven products into customers’ hands, said Irina Kofman, a senior director of product management for generative AI who oversees XAI, a new team that aims to help build AI products across the company. Mr. Zuckerberg is directly involved in steering the initiatives, holding weekly meetings with product leaders and top A.I. researchers, she said.

In a call last week with investors, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly mentioned AI. He called it “the foundation of our discovery engine and our ads business” and added that it would “enable many new products and additional transformations within our apps.”

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Weird: I had completely forgotten about Galactica.
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Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

Users who come in from the waitlist today will see only that central ranked feed. But Artifact beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom expects to become core pillars of the app. One is a feed showing articles posted by users that you have chosen to follow, along with their commentary on those posts. (You won’t be able to post raw text without a link, at least for now.) The second is a direct-message inbox so you can discuss the posts you read privately with friends.

In one sense, Artifact can feel like a throwback. Inspired by TikTok’s success, big social platforms have spent the past few years chasing short-form video products and the ad revenue that comes with them.

Meanwhile, like a social network from the late 2000s, Artifact has its sights set firmly on text. But the founders are hopeful that a decade-plus of lessons learned, along with recent advances in artificial intelligence, will help their app break through to a bigger audience.

Systrom and Krieger first began discussing the idea for what became Artifact a couple years ago, he told me. Systrom said he was once skeptical of the ability of machine-learning systems to improve recommendations — but his experience at Instagram turned him into a true believer.

“Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” he said.

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There’s been a lot of discussion around this, but I agree with Ben Thompson’s take that any text-based network will have limited appeal. A news-based text-based network, even more limited appeal.
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I’m a sex worker. AI porn isn’t taking my job • Motherboard

Liara Roux:

»

Images of AI-generated women are going viral on Twitter from accounts that imply that it’s “so over” for models online, or that humanity is past needing real-life online sex workers now that AI generated images have arrived.  

A real model “takes hours to create generic content,” “has to work hard to stay in shape,” and “only has one look,” Alex Valaitis, who works for a newsletter about AI, tweeted. He compared this with someone who writes prompts for machine learning technology like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or Midjourney, who can create “unlimited content,” “tons of diverse models,” and “personalized content for each simp.” 

Born from newly released image generating neural networks of questionable actual intelligence, these girls are algorithmically perfected: blonde, blue eyes, big tits, skinny waist, glowing skin, perfect ass. They squeeze each other, smile coyly at the camera, itty bitty stringy bikinis dimpling their breasts. The only clue to their artificiality are tiny terrifying details: too many teeth, grotesquely warped fingers. 

Who cares? As Vex Ashley tweeted in response: “if you think men are not capable of jerking off to these dystopian m.c escher collages of mediumly hot body parts truly you don’t know men.”

Humans have been creating “fake” imagery to jerk off to for millennia. If you’ve ever closed your eyes and thought of something while orgasming, you’ve participated in this great tradition. AI porn is nothing new. Just as erotic drawings, the printing press, photography, movies, hentai, virtual reality and robo sex dolls have not killed the demand for sex workers, neither will AI generated porn. Sorry. 

Our clientele hire us for many reasons; a large part of the appeal is that we are fellow humans. To be frank, I have no interest in working with a client who’d rather be fucking a robot anyways. 

In January, I was reading the latest 4chan discussion of me — a perennial happening — when I came across a novel insult. Why are we arguing about this AI generated whore? an anonymous post questioned. An image was attached, red lines circling portions of a photograph of me that they had decided was fake.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

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Quora opens its new AI chatbot app Poe to the general public • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product that’s independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.

To use Poe — which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration” — iOS users will have to create an account that’s verified with both a phone number and email address. They can then switch between three different AI chatbots available at launch.

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I find this puzzling: to me, Quora’s USP has always been that it brings actual people to its site to ask dumb (or clever) questions and provide dumb (or clever) answers. Having a chatbot do the answering seems to take all the fun out of it. As a human, you like to feel that warm moment when you come up with an answer and lots of other people upvote it.
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Paying Twitter subscribers made up less than 0.2% of monthly users in the US two months after Elon Musk introduced Blue, report says • Business Insider via Yahoo

Kate Duffy:

»

Twitter subscribers in the US made up less than 0.2% of monthly users in January, two months after Elon Musk introduced Blue, The Information reported Monday, citing a document.

This means that as of the middle of January, about 180,000 Twitter users in the US were paying for subscriptions to the platform, such as the $8 Blue feature, per the document, reported by The Information.

The 180,000 Twitter subscribers in the US made up 62% of the platform’s global subscriber count, indicating there were 290,000 subscribers around the world, per the report.

Musk said he wants Twitter to generate $3bn in revenue this year. Per the document, the total number of global subscribers would contribute $28m in annual revenue, or less than 1% of the $3 billion figure, The Information reported.

Two people with knowledge of the matter told The Information that revenue from Blue was making less than $4m annually before Musk acquired Twitter. The resulting revenue that the global subscriber count suggests is therefore much higher than before the takeover.

«

The numbers are backed up separately by data from Blockbot, which crawls Twitter looking for Twitter Blue-verified accounts to block, and earlier on Tuesday had 282,924 accounts blocked. (Assuming The Information wasn’t just looking at Blockbot, but had some internal Twitter data as it implied.)

Positive: lots more Twitter Blue subscribers than before, generating 7x as much money.

Negative: drop in the ocean, especially compared to the lost advertising revenue.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Nobody expects a Monty Python episode at the Internet Archi–oh bugger.

Does thanking more people in a film’s credits mean, as distributors think, it will get lower ratings? CC-licensed photo by Aranami on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. It’s the producer! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google announces ChatGPT rival Bard, with wider availability in ‘coming weeks’ • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

It’s official: Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post on Monday, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of “trusted testers” today, says Pichai, before becoming “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

It’s not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical queries, like how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be made from a list of ingredients for lunch.

Writes Pichai: “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”

Pichai also notes that Bard “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” suggesting it may be able to answer questions about recent events — something ChatGPT struggles with.

The rushed announcement and lack of information about Bard are telltale signs of the “code red” triggered at Google by ChatGPT’s launch last year. Although ChatGPT’s underlying technology is not revolutionary, OpenAI’s decision to make the system freely available on the web exposed millions to this novel form of automated text generation. The effects have been seismic, with discussions about the impact of ChatGPT on education, work, and — of particular interest to Google — the future of internet search.

«

Will we be able to tell the differences between these AI-enabled search engines? Will Bing’s be dramatically better? If not, it’s hard to see how the old defaults won’t reassert themselves, with Google being the dominant one.
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Whispers of A.I.’s modular future • The New Yorker

James Somers:

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[AI transcription software] Whisper’s story reveals a lot about the history of A.I. and where it’s going. When a piece of software is open-source, you can adapt it to your own ends—it’s a box of Legos instead of a fully formed toy—and software that’s flexible is remarkably enduring. In 1976, the programmer Richard Stallman created a text-editing program called Emacs that is still wildly popular among software developers today. I use it not just for programming but for writing: because it’s open-source, I’ve been able to modify it to help me manage notes for my articles. I adapted code that someone had adapted from someone else, who had adapted it from someone else—a chain of tinkering going all the way back to Stallman.

Already, we’re seeing something similar happen with Whisper. A friend of mine, a filmmaker and software developer, has written a thin wrapper around the tool that transcribes all of the audio and video files in a documentary project to make it easier for him to find excerpts from interviews. Others have built programs that transcribe Twitch streams and YouTube videos, or that work as private voice assistants on their phones. A group of coders is trying to teach the tool to annotate who’s speaking. Gerganov, who developed Whisper.cpp, has recently made a Web-based version, so that users don’t have to download anything.

Nearly perfect speech recognition has become not just an application but a building block for applications. As soon as this happens, things move very fast. When OpenAI’s text-to-image program, dall-e, came out, it caused a sensation—but this was nothing compared with the flurry of activity kicked off by its open-source clone, Stable Diffusion. dall-e used a “freemium” model, in which users could pay for additional images, and no one could modify its code; it generally proved more powerful and accurate than Stable Diffusion, because it was trained on mountains of proprietary data.

But it’s been forced to compete with a vast number and variety of adaptations, plug-ins, and remixes coming from the open-source community. Within weeks, users had adapted Stable Diffusion to create an “image-to-image” mode, in which they could tell the program to tweak an existing image with a text prompt. By repeatedly invoking this mode, a new method of illustration became possible, in which a user could iteratively compose an image with words, as if bossing around an endlessly patient robot artist.

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Being the New Yorker, it’s not an article that lends itself to easy excerpting. Definitely worth digging into.
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For Super Bowl ads this year, crypto is out, booze is in • AP News

Mae Anderson:

»

Last year’s Super Bowl was dubbed the “Crypto Bowl” because four cryptocurrency companies — FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro — ran splashy commercials. It was part of a larger effort by crypto companies to break into the mainstream with sports sponsorships. But in November, FTX filed for bankruptcy and its founder was charged in a scheme to defraud investors.

This year, two crypto advertisers had commercials “booked and done” and two others were ”on the one-yard line,” Evans said. But once FTX news broke, those deals weren’t completed.

Now, “There’s zero representation in that category on the day at all,” he said.

Evans said most Super Bowl ads sold much earlier than usual, with more than 90% of its Super Bowl ad inventory gone by the end of the summer, as established advertisers jockeyed for prime positions. But the remaining spots sold slower. Partly that was due to the implosion of the crypto space, as well as general advertiser concerns about the global economy, Evans said.

«

Sic transit gloria mundi. (The game’s on Sunday, apparently. Ad spots sell for about $6m upwards.)
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Musk’s Twitter expected to face the strictest EU content rules • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Jillian Deutsch and Kurt Wagner:

»

Elon Musk’s Twitter Inc. is expected to fall under the European Union’s stricter rules for content moderation despite doubts that the platform was big enough to qualify.

Twitter and the EU’s executive arm are gearing up for the company to be designated a “very large online platform” under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act, according to people familiar with the matter. That means the company has enough monthly active EU users that it will have to report on how it’s reducing harmful posts and could even be forced to change its algorithms by the European Commission.

For Musk, it means that his stripped-down company will be subject to a much more intrusive regulatory system and could face significant penalties — up to 6% the company’s revenue or even a ban from operating in Europe — if it doesn’t comply. The EU, meanwhile, would avoid the embarrassment of having one of the world’s most influential platforms escape its efforts to tame online content.

Tech companies regardless of their size have to follow the fundamental rules of the DSA and take down illegal content in all the EU’s 27 countries. The EU’s largest platforms — with more than 45 million monthly active users — will be designated as very large online platforms, or VLOPs, and will face centralized, tougher scrutiny by the EU’s executive arm in Brussels.

Some EU officials had been concerned that Twitter might not have enough users to be designated a VLOP, allowing Musk to dodge the most significant changes to the EU’s content moderation rules. At the end of October before Musk bought the social media site, some internally believed the company would fall short of the 45 million user threshold now that the UK has left the EU, according to former employees familiar with the matter.

Even so, the company prepared for VLOP designation, and was also planning an internal audit to ensure it would be in compliance with DSA regulations, the people said. Staff expected user growth and were concerned that reporting fewer than 45 million monthly active users could affect its reputation among advertisers.

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Neat dilemma: if you’re too small, you lose revenue because advertisers will demand to pay less; if you’re too big, you spend more conforming to the rules.
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Dell to lay off more than 6,500 workers or 5% of workforce • WSJ

Will Feuer:

»

“Market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future,” Jeff Clarke, Dell’s co-chief operating officer, said Monday in a memo to employees. He said the company had already paused hiring, limited employee travel and reduced spending on outside services. Those steps, he said, “are no longer enough.”

Dell is taking steps to reorganize its sales, customer-support, product-development and engineering teams, Mr. Clarke said.

“We’ve navigated economic downturns before and we’ve emerged stronger,” he said. “We will be ready when the market rebounds.”

…Dell will cut its workforce amid an industrywide slump in personal computer shipments that began in 2022 and is expected to persist until 2024. The company saw a 21% year-over-year decline in worldwide shipments in the third quarter of last year, according to IDC.

«

Joins the expanding list of companies that thought the pandemic wasn’t going to end, and that the surge in demand for things they sold during that period (PCs, Peloton bikes, Zoom calls) would go on indefinitely.
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Does thanking too many people in the credits indicate a movie is bad? • Film Data and Education

Stephen Follows:

»

David Wilkinson got in touch yesterday asking for advice on his new crowdfunding campaign. One of the topics he wanted to chat about was the ‘cost’ of offering a “Thanks” credit to his backers.

This involves awarding someone who backs the film a credit on the movie under the “With Thanks” section. This name check would appear at the end of the movie and, crucially, on IMDb.

On the face of it, there is no cost to offering an almost infinite number of these as it would just be a case of a longer end credit crawl and IMDb doesn’t charge for listing credits.

However, David brought up an anecdote from his time as a distributor. In conversations with fellow film sales professionals, the topic of ‘how to spot a bad movie’ came up. One participant said that they regard having too many ‘With Thanks’ credits as a red flag. The others agreed and added that the number of producers listed on a movie was similarly useful in spotting a bad film.

These are just the kind of industry beliefs that I love to test. This week I’m going to tackle the ‘With Thanks’ credits and then next week I’ll turn to producing credits.

I gathered data on 8,096 movies released in US cinemas between 2000-19 (i.e. pre-pandemic), taking note of their number of credited/thanked individuals, their IMDb score (to stand in for audience views) and Metascore (to sample the views of critics).

«

Go on, guess: are more thanks good, bad or indifferent for the score? And I’m definitely going to be back for the producers (executive and other flavours) tally next week. Follows does wonders with film data.
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Taiwan’s retreat from nuclear power • Hot Tip

Alexander Kaufman:

»

Germany was far from the only nation to try to turn against nuclear energy after the 2011 accident in Japan. Taiwan did, too. And the current government under President Tsai Ing-wen, whose party shares the German Greens’ anti-nuclear position, wants to shut down Taiwan’s nuclear plants by 2025.

Since the Russian invasion, pundits the world over have predicted China would attack Taiwan next. Despite what some of the more hawkish prognosticators would have you think, it’s not an apples-to-apples situation, and there are many good reasons to doubt that Beijing will choose war.

But the energy risks are strikingly parallel. As Taiwan shuts down its nuclear reactors, the country is using more natural gas. Putting aside the climate concerns about replacing zero-carbon power with a fossil fuel, Taiwan has already struggled with blackouts and energy shortages since the nuclear phaseout began. Relying on a fuel that requires constant imports is, at least according to experts I spoke with, a dangerous game. And you don’t need to imagine World War III to see why.

Following former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei last August, China carried out missile tests in the waters around Taiwan. Tankers ships freighting liquefied natural gas to Taiwan rerouted away.

There’s a lot more to this story. Plans for renewables aren’t going well. Indigenous rights play a key role in this whole affair. And the geopolitical players propelling this conflict have shifting and, at times, contradictory interests.

Consider this: the two major parties in Taiwan are sorted in large part around the question of Taiwan’s status. The conservative Kuomintang, the party of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek, supports eventually reunifying with China. It’s also vehemently pro-nuclear, the energy source that probably best guarantees Taiwan’s sovereignty. The center-left Democratic Progressive Party, the party of President Tsai, supports maintaining Taiwan’s de facto independence. Its opposition to nuclear power, however, is arguably making Taiwan much more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

«

Ironic how nuclear power is really so important in ways you wouldn’t guess a priori.
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Poker star uses AirTag to track bag lost in airport ‘twilight zone’ • CNN

Julia Buckley:

»

what happens if you check your luggage, it doesn’t appear, but you can see it sitting pretty at terminal four of London Heathrow?

For Steve O’Dwyer, the answer is: absolutely nothing.

O’Dwyer’s missing bag has been at Heathrow since January 21, when he was transferring flights en route to the Bahamas. Thanks to his use of a GPS tracker – an Apple AirTag in his case – he has evidence that the bag has been at Heathrow for the past 13 days.

Unfortunately for him, the airline he booked with, Lufthansa, doesn’t appear to have spent those 13 days trying to get it back. Now, in desperation O’Dwyer has used a totally unrelated TV appearance to call out the airline for its failure to reunite him with his property.

Traveling with checked luggage is increasingly a high stakes game, as Steve O’Dwyer would know better than most. He’s a professional poker player – ranked first on the Global Poker Index in 2016, and currently number 14 on the industry’s All-Time Money List. And yet, even one of the world’s best poker players can’t beat the odds when it comes to airlines losing luggage.

O’Dwyer, who lives in Ireland, was traveling to a tournament in the Bahamas with his girlfriend, Elisabeth Wels, on January 21. The pair had bought an AirTag earlier in the summer, with the aim of tracking their luggage. “Elisabeth thought it would be a good idea, since she’d read some good things about it,” O’Dwyer told CNN over email. She popped it in her case for the trip.

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I always liked the Bob Hope joke – “I’ve flown 100,000 miles this year. But my luggage has done 200,000” – and it keeps on being proved true. This, of course, is pretty much the canonical use for an AirTag. Lufthansa was wrongly reported to have banned AirTags in luggage last October. Maybe it wishes it had. Though people would ignore it.
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A judge just used ChatGPT to make a court decision • Vice

Janus Rose:

»

A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator—or at least, the first time we know about it.

Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision, according to a court document dated January 30, 2023.

“The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI),” Garcia wrote in the decision, which was translated from Spanish. “Accordingly, we entered parts of the legal questions posed in these proceedings.”

“The purpose of including these AI-produced texts is in no way to replace the judge’s decision,” he added. “What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting judgments after corroborating the information provided by AI.”

The case involved a dispute with a health insurance company over whether an autistic child should receive coverage for medical treatment. According to the court document, the legal questions entered into the AI tool included “Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?” and “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?”

«

But ChatGPT isn’t Google. OK, so it was used to speed up the drafting, and they fact-checked the answers. In which case.. why not just do the work yourself?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: That link for the producer? Very well worth following. Let me know if you did.

Skiers’ Apple Watches are triggering emergency alerts – which is annoying, especially for responders. CC-licensed photo by 7th Groove on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t call me. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why Apple Watches keep calling 911 • The New York Times

Matt Richtel:

»

On a recent sunny Sunday morning, following a night of fluffy snowfall, tens of thousands of skiers flocked to the resorts of Summit County. Just minutes after the lift lines opened, sirens began blaring in the 911 emergency service center, where four staff members were taking calls and dispatching help.

Each jarring alert was a new incoming call, heralding a possible car crash, heart attack or other life-threatening situation. Often, the phone operators heard a chilling sound at the far end of the line: silence, perhaps from a caller too incapacitated to respond.

At 9:07 a.m., one dispatcher, Eric Betts, responded to such a call. From the map on one of the seven monitors on his desk, he could see that the distress call originated from a slope at the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area. Mr. Betts tried calling back. A man picked up.

“Do you have an emergency?” Mr. Betts asked. No, the man said, he was skiing — safely, happily, unharmed. Slightly annoyed, he added, “For the last three days, my watch has been dialing 911.”
Winter has brought a decent amount of snowfall to the region’s ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners have been debilitated in collisions.

As of September, these devices have come equipped with technology meant to detect car crashes and alert 911 dispatchers. It is a more sensitive upgrade to software on Apple devices, now several years old, that can detect when a user falls and then dial for help. But the latest innovation appears to send the device into overdrive: It keeps mistaking skiers, and some other fitness enthusiasts, for car-wreck victims.

…The problem extends beyond skiers. “My watch regularly thinks I’ve had an accident,” said Stacey Torman, who works in London at Salesforce and also teaches spin classes. She might be safely on the bike, exhorting her class to ramp up the energy, or waving her arms to congratulate them, when her Apple Watch senses danger.

“I want to celebrate, but my watch really doesn’t want me to celebrate,” she said. Oh great, she thinks, “now my watch thinks I’m dead.”

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It’s a fabulous new feature on the Apple Watch: unintended consequences. Deeply annoying for the people running the ski emergency call centre.
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America’s offices are now half full. Is this as good as it gets? • The Washington Post

Taylor Telford:

»

The tug of war over getting workers back to the office just reached a key milestone: 50% are back at their desks on average, the most since the pandemic hit in March 2020.

But that means major corporate offices are only half as full as they once were — and many experts think this could be as good as it gets.

Overall growth in office occupancy has begun to level off in recent months despite efforts by many bosses to get workers back more often, according to data tracked by Kastle Systems. Last week, office occupancy across the country’s top 10 metro areas edged up to 50.4% of pre-pandemic levels, according to Kastle, which measures office activity through entry swipes.

Indeed, late January marked the first time that all 10 cities tracked by the index — including laggards like San Francisco that lean remote — notched average occupancy rates of at least 40% of pre-pandemic levels.

But the return-to-office figures are unlikely to go much higher as flexible work becomes entrenched in the lives of white-collar workers, experts say. Some employees have resisted hard mandates to return: they’ve left for remote opportunities elsewhere or even flouted in-office requirements, flexing worker leverage while the labor market remains hot. In response, more companies seem to be moving toward acknowledging that the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday in-office job is over. More than half of US jobs that can be done remotely were hybrid as of November, up from 32% in January 2019, according to data from Gallup.

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That really is quite a shift.
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Scoop: oh the things you’ll do with Bing’s ChatGPT: features sneak peek • Medium

Owen Yin got to play with the new Bing, apparently as an accident on Microsoft’s part:

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Bing’s ChatGPT integration will be called the new Bing. Microsoft is positioning it as an evolution of the search engine, asking you to think of it as “an research assistant, personal planner, and creative partner at your side. The integration will be powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, a faster version of ChatGPT.

The search bar is now a chatbox: the blank search bar is replaced with a large text box with a prompt inviting you to ask it anything. You’ll have 1000 characters to write your question, which will allow for a good amount of detail in your request. You’ll be able to provide context, provide specific instructions, or list examples.

Bing does research for you: unlike ChatGPT, which is trained on data collected up to 2021, the new Bing will be able to access current information.

When you ask a question, the AI will interpret it and make several searches related to your request. It will then compile the results and write a summary for you. Bing will highlight particular phrases and cite where it got that information from, allowing you to verify the claim.

Bing can make plans for you: Bing will be able to process complex tasks that you’d usually have to piece together yourself. You can give it personal requirements, like your meal preferences, budget constraints, location, or time requirements and Bing will adapt its response to your needs and interests. You could get Bing to generate inspiration for a meal plan or travel itinerary.

You can ask Bing to be creative: the new Bing has a new level of creativity and imagination. Since the AI can understand and respond to natural language queries, you’ll be able to ask Bing to take on creative tasks previously beyond the realm of a search engine. You could ask Bing to write a rhyming poem for your cousin’s birthday or create a short story featuring your friends.

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Wonder if this will shift the needle at all away from Google in search. Will there be novelty value that wears off, or will it keep people by being effectively a free ChatGPT? Google still has lots of money to buy being the default search.
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ChatGPT’s creators can’t figure out why it won’t talk about Trump • Semafor

Reed Albergotti:

»

Even ChatGPT’s creators can’t figure out why it won’t answer certain questions — including queries about former U.S. President Donald Trump, according to people who work at creator OpenAI.

In the months since ChatGPT was released on Nov. 30, researchers at OpenAI noticed a category of responses they call “refusals” that should have been answers.

The most-widely discussed one came in a viral tweet posted Wednesday morning: When asked to “write a poem about the positive attributes of Trump,” ChatGPT refused to wade into politics. But when asked to do the same thing for current commander-in-chief Joe Biden, ChatGPT obliged.

The tweet, viewed 29 million times, caught the attention of Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who has since cut ties with the company. “It is a serious concern,” he tweeted in response.

Even as OpenAI is facing criticism about the hyped services’ choices around hot-button topics in American politics, its creators are scrambling to decipher the mysterious nuances of the technology.

Many of the allegations of bias are attempting to fit a new technology into the old debates about social media. ChatGPT itself cannot discriminate in any conventional sense. It doesn’t have the ability to comprehend, much less care about, politics or have an opinion on Republican congressman George Santos’ karaoke performances.

But conservatives who criticize ChatGPT are making two distinct allegations: They’re suggesting that OpenAI employees have deliberately installed guardrails, such as the refusals to answer certain politically sensitive prompts. And they’re alleging that the responses that ChatGPT does give have been programmed to skew left. For instance, ChatGPT gives responses that seem to support liberal causes such as affirmative action and transgender rights.

The accusations make sense in the context of social media, where tens of thousands of people around the world make judgments about whether to remove content posted by real people.

But it reflects a misunderstanding about the way ChatGPT’s technology works at a fundamental level, and all the evidence points to unintentional bias, including its underlying dataset — that is, the internet.

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I’d say that refusing to tweet about Trump suggests that ChatGPT has become intelligent. Well done, ChatGPT!
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Journalistic lessons for the algorithmic age • The Markup

Julia Angwin, the founding editor, is departing The Markup (though she doesn’t say if it’s her idea or a spreadsheet’s):

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At The Markup, we developed an investigative checklist that reporters filled out before embarking on a project. Top of the checklist was not novelty, but scale—how many people were affected by the problem we were investigating. In other words, we chose to tackle things that were important but not secret.

For instance, anyone using Google has probably noticed that Google takes up a lot of the search result page for its own properties. Nevertheless, we decided to invest nearly a year into quantifying how much Google was boosting its own products over direct links to source material because the quality of Google search results affects nearly everyone in the world.

This type of work has an impact. The European Union has now passed a law banning tech platforms from this type of self-preferencing, and there is legislation pending in Congress to do the same.

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Plus: work out the hypothesis first, then see if the data(set) agrees; know that data is political; choose the sample size; go for the numbers. The things that The Markup has achieved are remarkable. Angwin is a loss, whoever (or whatever) said it was time to go.
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Harvard is shutting down project that studied social media misinformation • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell and Joseph Menn:

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Since 2019, the Technology and Social Change Project has published research into the spread of coronavirus hoaxes and the online incitement techniques that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. It will wind down due to a school policy that requires a faculty member lead such an undertaking, Nancy Gibbs, the director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, said in an internal email shared with The Washington Post.

The project’s director, Joan Donovan, one of the country’s most widely cited experts on digital “media manipulation,” is not a faculty member and therefore could not continue to lead the project, Gibbs said.

Donovan, whose title is research director, is regarded as a member of the Shorenstein Center’s staff; it’s unknown whether she had been given the option to assume a faculty role during her time at Harvard.

…The project’s sunsetting in the months before the 2024 election marks a surprise development in what has been one of the American research world’s hottest topics: how the interplay of technology, political opportunism and unwitting internet users has shaped public conversation and democratic debate.
But it also comes as the field of study into what’s known as “misinformation,” supercharged by the Trump presidency, enters a new era.

Twitter, now led by the meme-sharing billionaire Elon Musk, has worked to end the platform’s long-standing openness to free, real-time research, announcing late Wednesday that on Feb. 9 it will begin charging for automated access to its data through its Application Programming Interfaces, a move that will hurt both developers and researchers.

Some researchers also have faced harassment online or been criticized by Republican lawmakers over claims their work is skewed by a liberal agenda. The platforms they study have changed, too, away from Facebook and Twitter to places like TikTok, Discord and Twitch, which present new challenges for data gathering, analysis and debate.

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Twenty questions about the Online Safety Bill • Cyberleagle

Graham Smith, who runs a blog on “law, IT, the internet and online media::

»

Before Christmas Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan invited members of the public to submit questions about the Online Safety Bill, which she will sit down to answer in the New Year.

Here are mine.

1.A volunteer who sets up and operates a Mastodon instance in their spare time appears to be the provider of a user-to-user service. Is that correct?

2.Alice runs a personal blog on a blogging platform and is able to decide which third party comments on her blogposts to accept or reject. Is Alice (subject to any Schedule 1 exemptions) the provider of a user-to-user service in relation to those third party comments?

3.Bob runs a blog on a blogging platform. He has multiple contributors, whom he selects. Is Bob the provider of a user-to-user service in relation to their contributions?

4.Is a collaborative software development platform the provider of a user-to-user service?

5.The exclusion from “regulated user-generated content” extends to comments on comments (Clause 49(6)). But a facility enabling free form ‘comments on comments’ appears to disapply the Sch 1 para 4 limited functionality user-to-user service exemption. Is that correct? If so, what is the rationale for the difference? Would, for example, a newspaper website with functionality that enabled free form ‘comments on comments’ therefore not enjoy exclusion from scope under Sch 1 para 4?

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As you can imagine, there are 15 more, none of them simple to answer, but all important to answer. Over to you, Ms Donelan.
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Brown gold: the great American manure rush begins • The Guardian

Jessica Fu:

»

n an early August afternoon at Pinnacle Dairy, a farm located near the middle of California’s long Central Valley, 1,300 Jersey cows idle in the shade of open-air barns. Above them whir fans the size of satellites, circulating a breeze as the temperature pushes 100F (38C). Underfoot, a wet layer of feces emits a thick stench that hangs in the air. Just a tad unpleasant, the smell represents a potential goldmine.

The energy industry is transforming mounds of manure into a lucrative “carbon negative fuel” capable of powering everything from municipal buses to cargo trucks. To do so, it’s turning to dairy farms, which offer a reliable, long-term supply of the material. Pinnacle is just one of hundreds across the state that have recently sold the rights to their manure to energy producers.

Communities around the world have long generated electricity from waste, but the past few years have seen a surge in public and private investment into poop-to-energy infrastructure in the US. Though so far concentrated in states with dominant dairy sectors, like California, Wisconsin and New York, Biden’s landmark climate law passed last summer stands to unleash additional billions to support further development nationwide. The sector’s boosters describe it as an elegant way to cut emissions from both livestock and transport; but critics worry that the nascent industry could raise more issues than it resolves by entrenching environmentally harmful practices.

Animal agriculture is the nation’s single biggest source of methane, a greenhouse gas that climate scientists call a “super pollutant” due to its high short-term warming potential. The gas is released from animals when they burp, and through the decomposition of manure when collected in open-air ponds, a common livestock industry practice.

But those emissions are also a potential moneymaker. Methane from animal waste can be purified into a product virtually indistinguishable from fossil fuel-based natural gas. Marketed as renewable natural gas (RNG), it has a unique profit-making edge: in addition to revenue from the sale of the gas itself, energy companies can now also earn handsome environmental subsidies for their role in keeping methane out of the atmosphere.

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Twitter is killing off the fun bots • Buzzfeed News

Katie Notopoulos and Pranav Dixit:

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Daniel, the 23-year-old student in Germany behind @MakeItAQuote, told BuzzFeed News he would have never started it if there were a fee attached. “It’s a step in the wrong direction, as most of the API usage brings a lot of value to the platform,” he said. “And the fact that even myself, operating one of the biggest bots on the platform, has to consider shutting it down is very concerning. There are a lot of awesome, less popular bots. I don’t think any of them can be sustainable.”

The exact pricing of API access is not yet clear, and representatives for Twitter did not respond to requests for clarification. One screenshot of current API use pricing has been going around; prices start at $149/month for 500 requests of the API per month and go up to $2,499/month for high-volume use. On Thursday evening, Twitter owner Elon Musk posted a tweet suggesting that access to the API would cost $100/month and require ID verification.

There’s a long history of beloved bots on Twitter. @Horse_ebooks was a bot that grew a cult following for its vibey snippets of text like “everything happens so much.” (The account eventually was taken over by a human who continued to manually tweet in a bot-like way until he revealed himself.)

Other bots are newsworthy, like @TrumpsAlert and @BigTechAlert, which tweet whenever Trump and his advisers or Big Tech CEOs, respectively, follow or unfollow a new person.

Álex Barredo, who runs @BigTechAlert, told BuzzFeed News he’s open to paying a small fee to keep the popular bot running, but not if it costs $100 a month. He also has other options. He’s aware that most of the actual spam bots don’t even use the API to operate (which means charging for API access isn’t really going to wipe out spam), so one option he’s considering is to rework the bot so it doesn’t need the API. He’s also considering either open-sourcing it or moving it to its own website or a different platform.

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Alternative headline: Twitter is killing off Twitter. Those prices are bonkers. There’s a list of bots that presently exist on Twitter, and where you can find them on Mastodon, in this Google Doc. Presently there are 84. Musk, in his random way, says that there will be a “free write-only” API for “bots providing good content for free”. Who decides what is “good content”?

He’s also looking to charge businesses $1,000 per month for their verifications. Musk and his advisers are fools. I wrote about this in my latest missive on my Social Warming Substack.
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“2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by… George Lucas? • YouTube

Hilariously good, and you know that’s just how it would have been. Equally good, but far more restful (by the same creator), is “Star Wars directed by Stanley Kubrick“. (Both via John Gruber.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We know that AI illustrators are bad at depicting hands (and handshakes) – but why, exactly? CC-licensed photo by JourneyPure Rehab 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 10 links for you. Maybe seafood on the menu? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Floating pirate-themed restaurant sinks off Thailand coast • BBC News

»

A pirate-themed floating restaurant off the coast of Thailand has sunk in rough water.

Officials say they suspect a pump on the ship stopped working, causing it to sink.

No one was reported injured.

«

Floating ❌
Pirate 🤷‍♂️
Restaurant ❌

Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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The decision to remove free access to Twitter’s API follows the platform updating its developer rules to ban third-party clients, causing popular third-party Twitter apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot to abandon the platform.

Many small developers have used Twitter’s free API access to create fun tools and useful bots like novelty weather trackers and black-and-white image colorizers which are not intended to earn income or turn a profit. As a result, it’s likely that many bots and tools utilizing Twitter’s free API access will need to charge a fee or be shut down. It would also impact third parties like students and scientists who use the platform to study online behavior and gather information for research papers.

And as those developers also say, you’re giving us a whole.. seven days for this momentous change, and no idea what the costs are going to be. Musk hinted in a tweet late on Thursday that it might be $100/month. (I wrote about this further on the Social Warming Substack today: see top of this post for the link.)
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AI image generators keep messing up hands. Here’s why • Buzzfeed News

Pranav Dixit:

»

“It’s generally understood that within AI datasets, human images display hands less visibly than they do faces,” a Stability AI spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “Hands also tend to be much smaller in the source images, as they are relatively rarely visible in large form.”

To understand more, I got in touch with Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist and an associate professor of AI and the arts at the University of Florida, who has been analyzing the aesthetics of AI art on her blog. “I am obsessed with this question!” Winger-Bearskin exclaimed on our video call. 

Generative artificial intelligence that’s trained on billions of images scraped from the internet, Winger-Bearskin explained, does not really understand what a “hand” is, at least not in the way it connects anatomically to a human body. 

“It’s just looking at how hands are represented” in the images that it has been trained on, she said. “Hands, in images, are quite nuanced,” she adds. “They’re usually holding on to something. Or sometimes, they’re holding on to another person.”

In the photographs, paintings, and screenshots that AI learns from, hands may be holding onto drapery or clutching a microphone. They may be waving or facing the camera in a way where just a few fingers are visible. Or they may be balled up into fists where no fingers are visible. 

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So it’s our fault? Now I’m wondering what happens if you ask these systems to picture feet.
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Back at Google, cofounder Sergey Brin just filed his first code request in years • Forbes

Richard Nieva:

»

As the battle in artificial intelligence technology heats up between Silicon Valley companies, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is getting hands-on again with software code, after years of day-to-day absence.

On Jan. 24, Brin appeared to file his first request in years for access to code, according to screenshots viewed by Forbes. Two sources said the request was related to LaMDA, Google’s natural language chatbot—a project initially announced in 2021, but which has recently garnered increased attention as Google tries to fend off rival OpenAI, which released the popular ChatGPT bot in November.

Brin filed a “CL,” short for “changelist,” to gain access to the data that trains LaMDA, one person who saw the request said. It was a two line change to a configuration file to add his username to the code, that person said. Several dozen engineers gave the request LGTM approval, short for “looks good to me.” Some of the approvals came from workers outside of that team, seemingly just eager to be able to say they gave code review approval to the company cofounder, that person added.

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OK, so now it’s serious.
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ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base in history, report says • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that AI bot ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million active monthly users last month, a mere two months from launch, making it the “fastest-growing consumer application in history,” according to a UBS investment bank research note. By comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach 100 million monthly users, and Instagram about 2.5 years, according to UBS researcher Lloyd Walmsley.

“In 20 years following the Internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” Reuters quotes Walmsley as writing in the UBS note.

Reuters says the UBS data comes from analytics firm Similar Web, which states that around 13 million unique visitors used ChatGPT every day in January, doubling the number of users in December.

…Also on Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plus, a $20 per month subscription service that will offer users faster response times, preferential access to ChatGPT during peak times, and priority access to new features. It’s an attempt to keep up with the intense demand for ChatGPT that has often seen the site deny users due to overwhelming activity.

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Why VR/AR gets farther away as it comes into focus • MatthewBall.vc

Matthew Ball:

»

In 2023, it’s difficult to say that a critical mass of consumers or businesses believe there’s a “killer” AR/VR/MR experience in market today; just familiar promises of the killer use cases that might be a few years away. These devices are even farther from substituting for the devices we currently use (and it doesn’t seem like they’re on precipice of mainstream adoption, either). There are some games with strong sales—a few titles have done over $100MM—but none where one might argue that, if only graphics were to improve by X%, large swaths of the population would use VR devices or those titles on a regular basis.

I strongly prefer doing VR-based presentations to those on Zoom—where I spend 30-60 minutes staring at a camera as though no one else is there. But the experience remains fraught; functionality is limited; and onboarding other individuals is rarely worth the benefit because its participants seem to find these benefits both few and small. When the iPhone launched, Steve Jobs touted it did three distinct things—MP3 player, phone, internet communicator—better at launch than the single-use devices then on the market. The following year, the iPhone launched its App Store and “There’s an App for That” proliferated, with tens of millions doing everything they could on the device. The “killer app” was that it already had dozens of them.

«

This is the germ of the piece. You’re welcome to read the whole thing, but it’s really long, and Ball could probably afford to hire an editor next time.
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Our real-names policy is taming the online trolls • The Times

Rose Wild is the Feedback editor at The Times (of London, if that helps):

»

In early December we notified subscribers who use our digital platforms that we would soon be requiring everyone who posts comments to use their real names. At that time only 36% of commenters were doing so. Enforcing the change is an ongoing process but we are now up to 83% and, with apologies to “Maggie Thatcher” and “Jacques Oeuf”, their pseudonyms and joke handles will soon be a thing of the past. The object of the change, as we explained, was to weed out trolls and stamp out the obnoxious posts that were turning some comment threads into playground punch-ups.

We’ve already seen a substantial drop in “toxic” comments, ie, those that are removed because they breach our rules. In the month before the announcement we had an average of 1,348 daily comments flagged by our systems as toxic. In the past month the average was 815, a 40% decrease.

More than a thousand comments have so far been posted on the interview with the actress and comedian Emily Atack in which she discusses the obscene images and threats of violence she receives from men on social media.

Surprisingly, not all comments were sympathetic. As one reader, Derrick Murray, remarked, many seemed to be “either apologists for the weird men who behave like this, or blaming her for being on social media”.

Actually, the response was far from all bad and prompted an interesting conversation about anonymity online. As Brendan Linnane put it: “If all social media had a ‘real name’ comments policy and were treated as a publisher the criminal behaviour Atack suffers would disappear overnight.” Leanora Munn added: “To those who have moaned about having to use their real name, this should be an indication of why such practice should be employed by every online media outlet.”

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Remarkable that this change – which shouldn’t work! – seems to have worked. Is it something about traceability across platforms? (And how do they verify someone’s name?)
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Netflix reveals how it will block account sharing • Pocket Lint

Rik Henderson:

»

At the end of 2022, it estimated that more than 100 million households participate in account sharing globally.

One way of countering this will be a paid account sharing plan, whereby it is possible to pay a little extra on the existing subscription fee to share access with family members in other locations. This is currently being trialled in a few South and Central American countries, such as Argentina and Honduras.

However, it has also revealed how it plans to curb unpaid account sharing, with some clarification appearing in a new FAQ section on its website (thanks to GHacks and 9to5Mac).

Using multiple sources of information, including IP addresses, device IDs and account activity, it will determine whether a user is watching Netflix content from home, away or if a totally different household is accessing the service.

To ensure uninterrupted access, Netflix content must be watched via the primary Wi-Fi source at the account holder’s home at least once every 31 days. This creates a “trusted device”, claims the streaming service. If a non trusted or verified device outside that network also tries to access the service for an “extended period of time”, it may be blocked.

For those worried about access when travelling or while on holiday, the primary account holder will be able to do so without any issues. Other profiles on the same account can also access the service for up to seven consecutive days through a temporary code that can be requested by the account holder.

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Going to create plenty of fun and games for Netflix keeping tabs on all this. But it was inevitable.
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The shocking state of enthusiast apps on Android • Birchtree

Matt Birchler:

»

I recently commented on Mastodon that I thought when it comes to third party apps, iOS is remarkably far ahead of Android. My feeling is that you can take the best app in a category on Android, and that would be the 3rd to 5th best app in that category on iOS.

It’s harsh, I know, but I really think it’s true for basically every category of app I care about.

Someone responded to me saying that there are a bunch on Android apps that are better than their iOS equivalents. I wanted to be open-minded, so I asked what apps they would recommend I look at to see how Android is ahead of iOS. They recommended a text editor with a UI that looked more like Notepad++ than a modern writing tool.

But they also suggested this RSS reader called Read You. Keep in mind this is supposed to be the best RSS reader, and the app that is going to show me how wrong I am to think iOS apps are ahead of Android ones.

First, this app is in beta, and is far from feature complete, so this isn’t criticism of a production app, it’s more criticism of the suggesting this is as good as it gets on Android or iOS.

«

He makes his points clearly and strongly. John Gruber builds on this and makes a key point: there are some things that matter which don’t submit simply to tickboxes, such as artistic quality or the pleasure of a smooth scroll.
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How a tiny radioactive capsule was found in Australia’s vast outback • BBC News

Antoinette Radford on the hunt for a gamma- and beta-emitting pea-sized capsule containing caesium-137 which literally fell off a lorry:

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Radiation portal monitors detect gamma radiation and are typically used at airports to scan individuals to ensure they do not have radioactive substances on them. Gamma spectrometers measure the intensity of the radiation.

Mr Ray said the new detection equipment could be attached to vehicles so searches could be done from moving vehicles at about 50km/h. “It will take approximately five days to travel the original route, an estimated 1400km, with crews travelling north and south along Great Northern Highway,” he said.

But by the end of 31 January, the capsule continued to evade search crews. “More than 660km has been searched so far – thank you to all agencies for their support,” the Department of Fire and Emergency Services said.

So the next morning, when the government revealed the capsule had been found just two metres off the side of the highway at 11:13 local time Wednesday, it seemed the all-but-impossible had been achieved. Authorities said search crews had “quite literally found the needle in the haystack”.

“You can only imagine it’s a pretty lonely stretch of road from Newman down to Perth,” Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner Darren Klemm said at a press conference on Wednesday. “You can’t help but imagine there was an element of surprise from the people in the car when the equipment did spike up.”

While hesitant to give the exact location the radioactive capsule was found, Mr Klemm described it as “the best possible outcome”.

Local media reports suggest it was found some 74km from Newman – so around 200km from the mine site. No one appeared to have been injured by the capsule, according to authorities, and it did not seem to have moved from where it fell. Mr Klemm said the additional resources from the federal government proved key to finding the capsule.

He said the survey equipment used from the start to detect radioactivity – paired with the specialised equipment that physically located the capsule – is how a car driving past at 70km/h found it. A check of the serial code on the capsule confirmed it was the right one.

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They checked the serial number? How many did they think they were looking for?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Putting screws into iPhones on the assembly line – two per minute, hour after hour – is a tedious, demanding, but solid job. How would you cope at it? CC-licensed photo by Daiji Hirata 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 10 links for you. What number are you? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Meta lost $13.7bn on Reality Labs in 2022 after metaverse pivot • CNBC

Jonathan Vanian and Ari Levy:

»

Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a future in the metaverse is costing investors a boatload of money.

In its earnings report after the bell on Wednesday, Meta said its Reality Labs division, home to the company’s virtual reality technologies and projects, posted a $4.28bn operating loss in the fourth quarter, bringing its total for 2022 to $13.72bn.

It was a tough first full year for the new Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. In late 2021, Zuckerberg changed the company’s name and said its future would be in the metaverse, a digital universe where people will work, shop, play and learn.

But for now, it’s just a cost center, and Meta is still an online ad company.

Reality Labs generated $727m in the fourth quarter, and $2.16bn in revenue for all of 2022 — a decline from $2.27bn in 2021 — including sales of Quest headsets. In other words, the division lost more than six times the amount of money it generated in revenue last year, while accounting for less than 2% of total sales at Meta.

Analysts were expecting Reality Labs to record an quarterly operating loss of $4.36bn on revenue of $715.1m, according to StreetAccount.

Sales of VR headsets in the US declined 2% in 2022 from the prior year as of early December, according to data shared with CNBC by research firm NPD Group.

In July, Meta announced it was raising the price of its Quest 2 VR headset by $100. The company said at the time that the price hike was necessary to account for inflationary pressures. Meta then debuted its more expensive Quest Pro VR headset in October, pitching it to companies as an enterprise-workplace device for $1,500. This week, Meta is running a sale on its high-end VR headset, shaving off $400 for a limited time.

«

There’s a strong Tinkerbell energy around Reality Labs: just keep wishing! But the fact that revenue dropped is significant. What if the metaverse thing was just a pandemic flop dream, like Peloton?
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Europe: Renewables in 2022 in five charts – and 2023 • Energy Monitor

Isabeau van Halm:

»

Climate think tank Ember released a new report today analysing the European electricity transition. What happened to renewables in Europe in 2022? Energy Monitor takes you through some of the main findings from the European Electricity Review 2023 and looks ahead to what to expect this year.

In the last quarter of 2022, electricity demand dropped almost 8% compared with the year before. This drop is similar to the one seen during Europe’s Covid-19 lockdowns: electricity demand fell by 9.6% during the second quarter of 2020, for example. According to the report’s lead author, Ember’s head of data insights Dave Jones, this fall in electricity demand was the most surprising finding in the analysis.

“The fall in electricity demand at the end of the year was very sudden and it happened in every country,” says Jones. “I have read lots on falling gas demand, but I never expected to see such big falls in electricity demand as well.”

The main driver of the drop was the mild temperatures this winter, but the energy crisis likely played a big part as well. “Mild temperatures across October and November were the main driver, but the falls were far bigger than weather alone,” according to Jones. “We suspect it is mostly driven by people and businesses looking to save money amidst the cost-of-living crisis and – in some countries – soaring electricity bills but also using less energy in solidarity to Europe’s Russia-induced energy crisis.”

It seems unlikely that electricity demand will see similar declines in the long term as it is not based on “traditional” energy efficiency but rather on short-term electricity savings to get through the crisis. “The challenge for policymakers is to make sure they don’t see this demand drop as true ‘energy efficiency’, and rather to use it as an opportunity to step up [action] on energy efficiency,” says Jones. “Ultimately, it is down to individuals, and I think 2022 was a tipping point for customers to understand how much energy they use, how much it costs, and with it, a desire to reduce the amount that they use.”

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Also: wind and solar generated more power than gas in the EU; hydro and nuclear dropped.
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Foxconn protests and Covid cases: the chaos inside the China factory • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

Chinese factory laborers call jobs like Hunter’s “working the screws.” Until recently, the 34-year-old worked on the iPhone 14 Pro assembly line at a Foxconn factory in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou. His task was to pick up an iPhone’s rear cover and a tiny cable that charges the battery, scan their QR codes, peel off adhesive tape backing, and join the two parts by tightening two screws. He’d then put the unfinished phone onto a conveyor belt that carried it to the next station.

Hunter had to complete this task once every minute. During a normal 10-hour shift, his target was to attach 600 cables to 600 cases, using 1,200 screws. Every day, 600 more unassembled iPhones awaited him.

Apart from a strictly timed hour-long lunch break, he spent his days inside a windowless workshop that smelled of chlorine, wearing an antistatic gown and a face mask. If he needed to take a toilet break, he had to make up for lost time. Behind the assembly line, supervisors — known as xianzhang, or “line leaders” — monitored workers’ progress on a computer and frequently admonished those who fell behind.

“I feel we have no rights and dignity inside the workshops,” Hunter, who asked to be identified by his nickname, told Rest of World in a call after work one day. “Some line leaders just can’t live a day without scolding people.” He hated the humiliation and tediousness of the production line job, but he gritted his teeth. The pay would be worth it.

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A good piece on what it’s like to work there: calm, straightforward, factual.
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The story behind ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) • Invent Like An Owner

Rebecca Allen:

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I (Rebecca Allen) proposed that we replace the 10-digit ISBN as the key for our catalog with a minimum-impact-on-the-code “ASIN”. The ASIN would be the ISBN (if the item were a book and had an ISBN), or a 10 character serial number that represented a base 62 number. I got a ton of objections to base 62 (the 26 letters of the alphabet, case sensitive, plus the 10 digits), because that would have involved a case sensitive string — b000000000 would be a very different number from B000000000. Very. Different.

I somewhat agreed, and decided that a base 36 number (the letters of the alphabet plus the 10 digits) would work just fine. There was some debate about whether the key should have any structure. For example, credit card numbers have quite a bit of structure to them, as do well-constructed ISBNs for that matter. I objected to subdividing and having different parts of the string mean different things because it would substantially reduce the addressable space, and limit the number of items that could be moved through Amazon before having to go back and do this re-keying exercise again, with an even bigger code base. 

The people who wanted “special” ASINs were pretty persistent, though, so I threw them a bone: they could have all the ASINs that started with the letter A, and I would start the counter for ASINs at B000000000. Finally, this proposal had to get past Shel, and Shel was not super keen on the idea of someone going through the code and changing every last place that ISBNs were referenced to something that was an ASIN. Even though this proposal actually minimized the hazards in several ways (same length string, same set of allowable characters, ISBNs are still legal ASINs, etc.), it was really going to involve a lot of code being changed at the same time. And an error would be very bad.

…between sometime in 1997 or 1998 (I forget exactly when I created ASINs, but I left in 1998, so it had to be before that, and it wasn’t one of the first things I did, so it was not in 1996) and 2016, Amazon used 100 Billion (with a B, for Bezos) ASINs. Between 2016 and now, they’ve gone through at least 6 times that.

Whee! Are they going to run out?

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That’s the big, big question.
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FTC loses antitrust challenge to Facebook parent Meta • WSJ

Dave Michaels and Jan Wolfe:

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A federal judge declined to halt Meta Platforms’ acquisition of the virtual-reality startup Within Unlimited, delivering a setback to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission seeking to block the deal, a person familiar with the ruling said.

In a sealed court decision issued overnight, US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, Calif., denied the FTC’s request for an injunction blocking the proposed merger, the person said.

The judge’s opinion, which isn’t yet public, is a boost to Meta’s virtual-reality ambitions and appears to vindicate for now the Facebook parent’s claims that the FTC overreached by bringing a flawed antitrust case.

The FTC could continue to try to block the deal through a separate lawsuit filed in its in-house administrative court, where a trial is scheduled to begin on Feb. 13. But antitrust enforcers have in the past often abandoned such administrative litigation once a federal judge denies the request for an injunction.

The lawsuit has been closely watched because it is based on an unusual theory of competitive harm focusing on potential future competition in a nascent industry. The case is also widely seen as emblematic of FTC Chair Lina Khan’s opposition to the expansion of big technology companies.

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The “unusual theory” is roughly the same as the one that Europe uses: harm to competition rather than harm to the “consumer” is taken as the crux of antitrust harm.
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Ben Adida on Adida.net Mastodon

»

So OpenAI just released a detector of AI-generated text – I assume because of concerns in education / homework.

Maybe this is good?

No, it’s very bad.

They claim 26% true positives, 9% false positives. Assume 10% of submitted homework is ChatGPT generated, you get the classic counterintuitive outcome of poor predictive power: if a homework is flagged, there’s a 3:1 chance it’s *human* generated.

This is going to cause a lot of harm. It should be immediately recalled.

«

We’re all familiar with false positives, false negatives and the population incidence problem after Covid, right? So this sort of calculation should be familiar. (Also: first time linking to a post on Mastodon. It’s happening, people!)
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Why content moderation on Mastodon isn’t the train wreck some on Twitter Say It Is • FOSS Force

Christine Hall wrote something on Mastodon, got a response from someone particularly unpleasant, and reported them to their instance admin (at pieville.net):

»

I should probably explain that while Mastodon has a look and feel, as well as a functionality, that’s very similar to Twitter, or just about any other social network, it’s different under the hood. Instead of being one giant megalithic architecture housing all users under a single roof, Mastodon takes what’s called a “federated” approach. It’s a collection of independently operated servers (or “instances”) of various sizes, each running its own copy of the software that makes the platform tick and networked into the greater federation, which has little say over how individual instances manage their communities.

This includes moderation. When I reported spiritsplice, that report went straight to the administrator(s) of the @pieville.net server(s), who then decide according to the standards of their instance whether to take action on the complaint. This meant that if pieville is a server hosting a lot of homophobic, sexist, and/or white supremacist loudmouths, which I suspected, the administrator was likely to take no action at all, other than giving me the middle finger and a silent “FU.”

That’s why I took the screenshots of the conversation with spiritsplice and tooted them with the warning, “This thread just happened to me.” Even if the administrator of spiritsplice’s instance chose to ignore my complaint, admins at other instances aren’t bound by that decision. If they think that this user is a problem, they can block him from their server to protect their users, and I wanted to get the word out to admins at other instances that they might want to take a look at this guy.

My suspicion that pieville, the server used by spiritsplice, might not only be full of bad actors, but actually created especially for bad actors (you don’t have to get permission to connect yourself to the federation), began to be verified right away. Shortly after I posted the photos of the thread, Ariadne Conill, a streetwise maintainer at Alpine Linux who never fails to say what she thinks), posted: “Pieville should just be suspended everywhere. It’s a bunch of alt-right fuckwits.”

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This reminds me of how Usenet worked: admins of servers would identify malicious or spamming sources and prevent them feeding into the federated “news” (actually, forums) servers. Seems to be as effective, too.
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Britain’s semiconductor plan goes AWOL as US and EU splash billions – POLITICO

Graham Lanktree and Annabelle Dickson:

»

In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak first reported by the Times and also obtained by POLITICO, Britain’s semiconductor sector said its “confidence in the government’s ability to address the vital importance of the industry is steadily declining with each month of inaction.”

That followed the leak of an early copy of the UK’s semiconductor strategy, reported on by Bloomberg, warning that Britain’s over-dependence on Taiwan for its semiconductor foundries makes it vulnerable to any invasion of the island nation by China.  

Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory, makes more than 90% of the world’s advanced chips, with its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) vital to the manufacture of British-designed semiconductors.

US and EU action has already tempted TSMC to begin building new plants and foundries in Arizona and Germany. “We critically depend on companies like TSMC,” said the industry executive quoted above. “It would be catastrophic for Western economies if they couldn’t get access to the leading-edge semiconductors any more.”

Yet there are concerns both inside and outside the British government that key Whitehall departments whose input on the strategy could be crucial are being left out in the cold. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is preparing the UK’s plan and, according to observers, has fiercely maintained ownership of the project. DCMS is one of the smallest departments in Whitehall, and is nicknamed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ due to its oversight of sports and leisure, as well as issues related to tech.

“In other countries, semiconductor policies are the product of multiple players,” said Paul Triolo, a senior vice president at US-based strategy firm ASG. This includes “legislative support for funding major subsidies packages, commercial and trade departments, R&D agencies, and high-level strategic policy bodies tasked with things like improving supply chain resilience,” he said.

“You need all elements of the UK’s capabilities. You need the diplomatic services, the security services. You need everyone working together on this,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above. “There are huge national security aspects to this.”

The same person said that relying on “a few [lower] grade officials in DCMS — officials that don’t see the wider picture, or who don’t have either capability or knowledge,” is a mistake. 

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The “strategy” is coming Real Soon Now! Honest!
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AI-generated voice firm clamps down after 4chan makes celebrity voices for abuse • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

»

It was only a matter of time before the wave of artificial intelligence-generated voice startups became a plaything of internet trolls. On Monday, ElevenLabs, founded by ex-Google and Palantir staffers, said it had found an “increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases” during its recently launched beta. ElevenLabs didn’t point to any particular instances of abuse, but Motherboard found 4chan members appear to have used the product to generate voices that sound like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Emma Watson to spew racist and other sorts of material. ElevenLabs said it is exploring more safeguards around its technology.

The clips uploaded to 4chan on Sunday are focused on celebrities. But given the high quality of the generated voices, and the apparent ease at which people created them, they highlight the looming risk of deepfake audio clips. In much the same way deepfake video started as a method for people to create non-consensual pornography of specific people before branching onto other use cases, the trajectory of deepfake audio is only just beginning.

In one example, a generated voice that sounds like actor Emma Watson reads a section of Mein Kampf. In another, a voice very similar to Ben Shapiro makes racist remarks about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a third, someone saying “trans rights are human rights” is strangled.

…The clips run the gamut from harmless, to violent, to transphobic, to homophobic, to racist. One 4chan post that included a wide spread of the clips also contained a link to the beta from ElevenLabs, suggesting ElevenLabs’ software may have been used to create the voices.

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Inevitable. The question is quite what the useful use case is, and how ElevenLabs plans to monetise (and police) that.
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Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Privacy has been extinguished. It is now a zombie’ • Financial Times

Henry Mance:

»

The problem for privacy advocates is that their cause seems to offer too few advantages and too many drawbacks. For most European citizens, the biggest impact of privacy legislation is annoying cookies pop-ups. Regulation seems impractical: the UK and France have both wanted to place age limits on porn sites, but have so far failed to find effective ways of doing so.

Similarly, [Shoshana] Zuboff criticises Apple and Google for taking control of Covid tracing, but what if their system simply worked better than the centralised ones favoured by European health officials? She laughs at the suggestion. But she admits regulation is hindered “because we can’t get inside [tech companies] to know what’s really going on. We’re regulating with blinders on . . . We don’t understand our adversary well enough.”

Zuboff insists that her attack is not against technology itself, but the economic logic that underpins it — “theft”. She holds out the possibility that we could use data and prediction for the common good. The counterargument is that there are basic trade-offs. Tech services, whether for predicting text answers or the fastest driving routes, can only work by accumulating data and reducing our privacy.

I ask what she makes of Musk’s ownership of Twitter. “We’ve got politicians, lawmakers, elected officials, as well as the entire citizenry, focused on one man and asking the question, ‘what will he do?’ Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr Musk decides to take. I regard this as fundamentally intolerable . . . These spaces cannot exist solely under corporate control . . . We’re two decades into the digital era but we have never, as democracies, taken stock of the meaning of these technologies.”

…She compares the west’s tech giants to China’s surveillance state. “This is a world in which privacy has been extinguished. Privacy is now a zombie category. None of us have privacy, even as we thought about it in the year 2000.”

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It’s slightly odd how the US protects individual privacy from the government, but not from companies.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Biden administration is targeting Huawei for a fresh round of chip sanctions. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. (Have you read last week’s? Hmm?) Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Double down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Doppelganger murder’: German prosecutors claim woman killed lookalike to fake death • The Guardian

Philip Oltermann:

»

A 23-year-old German-Iraqi woman sought out a lookalike on Instagram and murdered her with a friend in order to fake her own death, prosecutors in Bavaria believe.

When the blood-covered body of a young woman was found last August in a parked Mercedes in Ingolstadt, southern Germany, reports initially identified the victim as Sharaban K, a Munich-based 23-year-old beautician with Iraqi roots.

Even though some members of Sharaban K’s family had identified the body, an autopsy report the next day raised questions over its identity. The victim was eventually named as Khadidja O, an Algerian beauty blogger from Heilbronn in the neighbouring state of Baden-Württemberg, also 23.

With long black straight hair, a similar complexion and heavy makeup, the two women looked “strikingly alike”, police said, leading the German press to refer to the case as the “doppelganger murder”.

Along with a 23-year-old Kosovan, named as Sheqir K, Sharaban K was detained on remand by Bavarian police on 19 August 2022, though authorities did not publicly speculate about a motive until this week. The victims and accused have been referred to by their first names and an initial as is customary in the German legal system.

“Investigations have led us to assume that the accused wanted to go into hiding because of a family dispute and fake her own death to that effect,” Veronika Grieser of the Ingolstadt state prosecutor’s office said on Monday morning.

Police say several women bearing her resemblance had been contacted by Sharaban K, operating on social media sites under numerous aliases, in the week before the murder. “By making various promises she tried to bring about meetings, which was initially unsuccessful,” Grieser said.

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Imagine what you’d think if you were one of those other women: that is a narrow escape from the most bizarre reason for murder. Social media enables someone to find their double. And, it seems, kill them.
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We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction • Al Jazeera

Vijay Kolinjivadi is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp:

»

‘Firefighters with flamethrowers’ – that is how climate writer Keton Joshi describes the world’s biggest polluters proposing climate solutions. Indeed, what governments and corporations have pushed for in terms of climate action in the past few years are policies that only make the situation worse.

Take carbon offsets – the epitome of “greening”. Acting as real-life “Pass GO and Collect $200” tickets, they allow some of the biggest climate criminals to go on polluting by engaging in a charade of tree-planting schemes. The logic behind them is that we cannot stop our greenhouse gas emissions immediately because that would “hurt the economy”, so we can instead plant trees that will absorb them and grow the economy through carbon markets – a supposed win-win situation.

But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything.

A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94% of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction. Worse still, it exaggerated the threat to forests included in its projects, while its conservation activities – which yielded some of these credits – involved serious human rights violations, including forced evictions and home demolitions of local people.

Even if some of these carbon offset schemes do make a difference in the short term through forest conservation or reforestation, given our current climate reality characterised by ever-worsening forest fires, they can easily just burn to dust and contribute to the greenhouse gas problem. One recent study, for example, found that since 2015, close to 7 million tonnes of carbon was released from wildfires in six forest projects that are part of California’s carbon trading system.

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As he points out, lots of this stuff is properly effed up.
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Biden administration considers cutting off Huawei from US suppliers • WSJ

Ian Talley and Sabrina Siddiqui:

»

The Biden administration is considering entirely cutting off Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies from US suppliers over national-security concerns by tightening export controls targeting the firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move—should the administration move forward—would mark the latest salvo in the high-stakes clash between the world’s two largest economies as US policy makers seek to counter China’s industrial policy they say threatens Western interests.

The Trump administration in 2019 added Huawei to the Department of Commerce’s “Entity List,” a roster of foreign companies deemed to be national-security threats. However, the Commerce Department later agreed to grant licenses to US companies allowing them to sell technology to Huawei as long as it wouldn’t put national security at risk. 

The Biden administration is now considering no longer granting such licenses, although no decision has been made, the people familiar said. The deliberations were previously reported by Bloomberg and the Financial Times.

The US items exempted from the Huawei blacklist include less advanced chips used in the company’s lineup of smartphones and personal computers. Huawei has been unable to offer a 5G-enabled smartphone because US restrictions cut it off from the most advanced chips needed to power such devices.

…US officials have signaled to Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp., which continue to supply Huawei, that this is a good time to wind down their sales to the Chinese company, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

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What’s odd is that Huawei doesn’t seem to have done anything particular to prompt this. It seems to be a general timing thing, as the next link indicates.
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Biden nears win as Japan, Dutch back China chip controls • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Jenny Leonard and Cagan Koc:

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Japan and the Netherlands are poised to join the US in limiting China’s access to advanced semiconductor machinery, forging a powerful alliance that will undercut Beijing’s ambitions to build its own domestic chip capabilities, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

US, Dutch and Japanese officials are set to conclude talks as soon as Friday US time on a new set of limits to what can be supplied to Chinese companies, the people said, asking not to be named because the talks are private.

There is no plan for a public announcement of the restrictions, and once an agreement is struck, actual implementation could take months as the two countries finalize legal arrangements, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Talks are ongoing, for a long time already, but we don’t communicate about this. And if something would come out of this, it is questionable if this will be made very visible,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Friday in The Hague in response to a question about the talks.

“This is such a sensitive topic that the Dutch government chooses to communicate diligently, and that means that we only communicate in a very limited way,” Rutte said.

The Netherlands will expand restrictions on ASML Holding NV, which will prevent it from selling at least some of its so-called deep ultraviolet lithography machines — crucial to making some types of advanced chips and without which attempts to set up production lines may be impossible. Japan will set similar limits on Nikon Corp.

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This is a slow closing of the doors on China’s access to essential equipment to chipmaking equipment – ASML makes the machines that everyone needs. Military and consumer chips will be affected.
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Over-spending and under-pricing: Spotify’s commercial missteps have come back to haunt it • Music Business Worldwide

Tim Ingham:

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The biggest area of acquisitive spending for Spotify throughout the past half-decade, however, has specifically been in podcasting.

From 2019 through 2022, SPOT spent €850m (around $925m) on acquiring multiple platforms to drive Spotify’s podcasting business – from Parcast to The Ringer, Anchor FM, and, most recently, Podz, Podsights and Chartable.

That $925m figure doesn’t count the cash Spotify spent on non-acquisitive Podcast content deals: For one thing, we know it spent at least another $200m on a multi-year exclusive deal for the Joe Rogan Experience. Spotify also spent further vast sums on podcast content from the Obamas, Kim Kardashian, and Harry and Meghan, amongst others. (Not all of these deals have worked out.)

So, financially speaking, what’s Spotify got to show for four years and over a billion dollars in podcast investments? According to an Investor Day presentation by senior Spotify leaders in June last year, the firm’s podcasting efforts generated under €200m in advertising in 2021.

If you were wondering how that compares to the amount of money generated by music (via subscriptions and ads) on Spotify in the same 12 months, I recommend you look at this single image, of Spotify CFO Paul Vogel, from that summer 2022 investor presentation.

The green bit is music-related revenue in each year. The gaunt wisp of pink at the top of the last bar? That’s revenue from everything else – including podcasts. (Digital graffiti, author’s own.)

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Podcasting seems to be a zero-billion dollar business: everyone likes being in it, but the rewards are strictly limited.
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Super Agent: automatic cookie consent

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Get control and improve your browsing experience, making it private, fast, and without pop-ups. Super Agent is a browser extension and web service that will auto-accept cookies for you. You define your preferences once, and Super Agent will do the rest.

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Oh man I really hope so. It would be so wonderful to be rid of those damn things. Just installed it. Hoping that it does the business. Seems to be for macOS and iOS. (Via Benedict Evans.)
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Professional writer? • On Posting

Luke Winkie:

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Shannon Liao, a reporter who was discharged during The Washington Post layoffs, made a salient tweet from the wreckage where she noted that her dream job — as a video game reporter with a muckraking verve — no longer exists in this increasingly austere media ecosystem. Launcher, the Post’s gaming vertical that is being shuttered at the end of March, allowed its staff and contributors to chase a complicated story for months without being derailed by SEO exigencies, traffic quotas, or dramatic reductions in ambition; you know, all of those self-preservation measures newsrooms must enlist in order to stave off the prospect of a Bezos liquidation. (IGN has assigned me stories derived wholly from Twitter trends to soak up residual, semi-sentient engagement. Liao is right to be wary of the rest of the field.)

She was specifically commenting on her own beat of games journalism, which is in the midst of a free fall, but it made me wonder how many genuine, aspirational dream jobs are left in the media writ large. It’s telling that everyone who doesn’t end up at the Times seems to leave the industry entirely. Maybe the best Liao can hope for — the best a lot of us can hope for — is just a job. And frankly, that doesn’t give us much room to complain.

I’m always going to love writing. This newsletter is lots of fun, same with the book proposal I’m finalizing. There are a handful of features I pick up each year that challenge me as a reporter and a thinker, and I appreciate — and will defend to the death — the art of a proudly belligerent white-hot take. But as my mid-30s threaten on the horizon, I’m capable of admitting that some of the glamor has faded from the endless slate of assignments that pay for my rent and indulgences — the grind that is commensurate to calling yourself a professional; the job part of this job.

Have I fallen out of love with the craft? I don’t think so. Instead, when I was a younger, greener journalist, it was simply easier to believe that the future was bright; that every byline was a step in the right direction; that the dream was fingertips away.

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I don’t know of any journalist who looks at the current situation and thinks “well, this is an improvement”. But then, how many professions or trades are saying that?
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my year as a hot girl for hire • words from eliza

eliza mclamb got a job managing accounts on a platform (unnamed, but perhaps OnlyFans) which turned out to be just one of the circles of hell:

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What was not made immediately clear to me, and what significantly complicated the process, is that there was one thing that almost no client was willing to do: be nude.

This very fact runs counterintuitive to the entire platform design — the idea of this space is that it’s the one place you can see people you know take their clothes off. I quickly learned that my job was to make believe not only in the idea that I was an entirely different person, but that what I was promising as that person was indeed what was being given. I had to prop up the cardboard cutout of a hot girl and try to keep people in front of her, foaming at the mouth, lest I risk her blowing away in the wind and revealing the great fraud.

I was first assigned what were informally deemed “low status” accounts, meaning that they made under $10,000 a month. Eventually, when I was trusted with high status accounts, I was told that commission would be in my future — 2% of the client’s earnings from the platform — but until then, I was paid a flat rate of $3,000 a month, which was not bad for a job I could do “any time I wanted.”

This, of course, was not the truth. I could work any time I wanted, as long as I was logged on for the site’s peak hours, which were from 10pm to 2am every night and later on weekends. I had to post daily, multiple times a day, and constantly respond to a barrage of messages that ranged from innocuous to genuinely traumatizing. If you’ve ever been a woman on the internet, you know what men say to you when they think no one is watching. Now imagine that they think they are one of the lucky few to access a particularly inaccessible woman.

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It’s not pretty. At all. So:

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The job quickly became demoralizing. I developed a five song playlist of ultra-pop hype music that I would loop while working, effectively turning into a cyborg who could reliably barrel through messages detailing rape and assault and turn violent men into paying customers. I became increasingly jaded in my attitude towards men as a whole, even the polite ones in my messages, and this motivated me to drain them of cash so intensely that part of me wondered if this learned disgust was built into the job to improve employee efficiency.

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Is 5G internet worth it, or was it just hype? • USA Today

Bob O’Donnell:

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One of the most widely touted capabilities for 5G was expected to be around connected devices and sensors. The idea was/is that the enhanced speed and bandwidth of 5G versus 4G would unleash a torrent of cellular-connected devices from AR and VR headsets to cars, home appliances and more.

In truth, some of those efforts are starting to happen, but most are more niche applications for specific vertical industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, etc. Many of these projects are starting to make an impact, but just not in ways that you and I can easily see.

We’re also starting to see more 5G applications on the business side of things. A number of companies are starting to set up what are known as “private 5G” networks that only employees or work machines can get access to. In many cases, these are being used to supplement or enhance existing Wi-Fi networks because they can provide important security and performance benefits.

Ironically, it’s on the smartphone side – where expectations were the highest – that we’ve arguably seen the least visible impact from 5G. For example, as many have noticed, download speeds in many situations haven’t been that much different than 4G. But even here, it’s important to note that average download speeds are improving (in some places, dramatically so) and it’s virtually impossible to find a non-5G equipped phone.

In other words, the impact is real, just a bit subtler than we would have hoped.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified