In Norway, electric vehicles are selling like hot cakes – and Tesla models the most of all. CC-licensed photo by Norsk Elbilforening on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of AI’s potential harm, wants regulations • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Will Oremus:

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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman delivered a sobering account of ways artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world” during his first congressional testimony, expressing a willingness to work with nervous lawmakers to address the risks presented by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Altman advocated for a number of regulations — including a new government agency charged with creating standards for the field — to address mounting concerns that generative AI could distort reality and create unprecedented safety hazards. The CEO tallied “risky” behaviors presented by technology like ChatGPT, including spreading “one-on-one interactive disinformation” and emotional manipulation. At one point he acknowledged AI could be used to target drone strikes.

“If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” Altman said.

Yet in nearly three hours of discussion of potentially catastrophic harms, Altman affirmed that his company will continue to release the technology, despite likely dangers. He argued that rather than being reckless, OpenAI’s “iterative deployment” of AI models gives institutions time to understand potential threats — a strategic move that puts “relatively weak” and “deeply imperfect” technology in the world to understand the associated safety risks.

…Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee, said Altman’s testimony was a “far cry” from past outings by other top Silicon Valley CEOs, whom lawmakers have criticized for historically declining to endorse specific legislative proposals.

“Sam Altman is night and day compared to other CEOs,” Blumenthal, who began the hearing with an audio clip mimicking his voice that he said was generated by artificial intelligence trained on his floor speeches, told reporters. “Not just in the words and the rhetoric but in actual actions and his willingness to participate and commit to specific action.”

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Altman has done a clever PR job here, frightening the horses sufficiently that competitors will have to struggle through regulation that OpenAI can probably handle easily, because it’s ahead of them. Get the lawmakers happy with you, and you’re halfway there.
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Apple previews new accessibility features, including AI-generated voice clone • Six Colors

Shelly Brisbin:

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Apple organizes its accessibility features and settings by functional categories: Vision, Hearing, Physical and Motor. Now there’s Speech, too. New features under the Speech heading support those who are partially or fully nonverbal. Personal Voice is an intriguing feature that might seem familiar to anyone who has experienced AI-based text-to-speech that’s been trained on an actual human voice.

Those diagnosed with ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka motor neurone disease] are at great risk for losing their ability to speak, but often have advance warning. Using Personal Voice, an individual will be able to use an Apple Silicon-equipped Mac, iPhone or iPad to create a voice that resembles their own. If the ability to speak is lost, text the user generates on the device can then be converted to voice, for use in a variety of ways. It will work with augmented communication apps that are often used to make it easier for people with limited speech to be understood. And no, you can’t create a new Siri voice this way. All Personal Voice training is done on-device.

Live Speech can use an existing Siri voice to give people with speech disabilities a quick way to use voice to express common phrases or sentences. Type and save a statement, like a food order or a greeting, then tap the text to have it spoken aloud. It works inside Phone and FaceTime, or in-person, and users can save common phrases.

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Apple using AI, but in a way that isn’t saying “hey, look at our AI, which works on-device!”

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Introducing Ask Skift, the AI chatbot for your travel questions • Skift

Rafat Ali:

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Today, we are very excited to announce Ask Skift, the AI chatbot answers engine specializing in the travel industry, here to be of service on your daily work queries. 

Go ahead, ask away any question, such as “How is Airbnb planning to leverage AI?” Or “Who is the new CEO of IHG?”. Or “Who are the owners of Ace Hotel?” Or, “Write me a short essay on the state of overtourism post-covid.”

We have “trained” Ask Skift on all the sum totality of Skift archives over the last 11 years, including daily stories, research reports, all of our clients’ trends reports, our specialized products – Airline Weekly, Daily Lodging Report, and Skift Meetings – and all the U.S. public travel companies’ financial SEC annual and quarterly reports. As soon as a new story or report is published, it goes straight into Ask Skift.

And this is just the start: we will continue to train it on other specialized travel industry content and data in coming weeks in order to improve the answers and expand the universe of queries it can tackle.

For now we have built this on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 deep learning artificial intelligence algorithm (a logic-learning machine, or LLMin short). We would really like to use GPT-4, which gives exponentially better answers (we know, we have been testing internally on both versions) but for now it is cost-prohibitive. We expect prices to come down later this year and will upgrade to it.

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Ali, who started and runs Skift, is a very smart person in the media space: I believe he has the rare distinction of never having been in charge of a media site that has closed. And this – training a chatbot on the specialist content of your site – is a really clever wrinkle in the media landscape. What if you tuned a chatbot on The Guardian’s deep, deep content, or the NY Times’s, or any sufficiently longstanding media site?
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Telly, the ‘free’ smart TV with ads, has privacy policy red flags • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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We’ve pasted below the portion of Telly’s privacy policy verbatim, typos included, as it was published at the time — and have highlighted the questionable passage in bold for emphasis:

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“As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Data about children under 13 years of age; if you are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for or otherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. Use of the Services may capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but no Personal Data about the child is collected. If we learn we have collected Personal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. (I don’t know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the information or is there another way aroundthis)? If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have provided Personal Data to us, please contact us at…”

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A short time after contacting Telly for comment, the company removed the section from its privacy policy.

In an email, Telly chief strategy officer Dallas Lawrence said an old draft of the privacy policy was uploaded by mistake.

“The questions raised in the document between our developer team and our privacy legal counsel appear a bit out of context. The issue raised was a two-part technical question related to timing and whether or not it was even possible for us to be in possession of this kind of data,” Lawrence said.

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Hmm, perhaps. You’ll recall that Telly was going to have a big screen, and “inescapable” ads that would scroll (we presume) along a smaller screen below that. To which reader/commenter starbird2005 observed “I wonder why someone wouldn’t just put some black paper over the second monitor. Then the ads play but you’ll never see them. Sort of reminds me of that CueCat scanner, which turned out to be a very handy barcode scanner when you hacked it.” Paper! The best hack.
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Skylight: forecast Golden Hour and Sunset

Here’s a clever twist on a photography app, from the makers of the iOS app Halide:

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Skylight uses atmospheric information to give you a forecast for evening light.

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So if you’re trying to catch that perfect sunset for your holiday pic, this will tell you what sort of sunset you’re going to get, plus the “Golden Hour” – the period when the light is loveliest before sunset.

You’ll go and look at them after you’ve taken them, right? Print them? Frame them?
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A photographer embraces the alien logic of AI • The New Yorker

Chris Wiley spoke to the (art) photographer Charlie Engman, who started playing around with Midjourney:

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“And then, one time, I randomly did make something that I was, like, This is maybe cooler than anything I’ve ever made. How did that happen?”

The image in question was of a pair of ginger-haired boys perched on a couch with what looks like a miniature horse. One boy is affectionately nuzzling the other’s face. There is a distant resemblance to Dorothea Tanning’s surrealistic scenes of people and their animals, perhaps, but on closer inspection Engman’s images reveal layers of A.I. oddities. One boy’s legs appear to be merging into the sofa, and his hands have too many fingers (an easy A.I. tell). The lower halves of the second boy and their equine companion both seem in the process of being swallowed up, like loose change, by a black hole between the couch cushions.

Engman continued to make variations on the “couch with a horse” theme, each one stranger than the next. Like the Midjourney program itself, which responds to prompts with batches of four images at a time, Engman as an A.I. artist is dizzyingly prolific. “The amazing thing about A.I. is that I can make, like, three hundred pictures a day,” he told me, “And every single one of them can be an entirely different set of characters, and new location, and new material. I’m not constrained by physical reality at all.”

Physical reality, of course, is something that A.I. is completely unfamiliar with, a fact that Engman exploits to his benefit. “There was a while where I really loved how it iterated bodies in space,” Engman told me, “I was, like, How does it understand how people sit in chairs? How does it understand how people hug each other?” One series of images he made shows contorted, malformed human figures sitting in and often merging with various chairs, like a freaky update of a series of hilarious photographs by the artist Bruno Munari titled “Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair.” Another features groups of businesswomen amorously engaged with a motley collection of semi-humanoid inflatables. My favorite series shows groups of middle-aged suburbanites standing in parking lots kissing. Each configuration looks like a hybrid of an erotic-contact improv troupe and a swarm of feeding lampreys.

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Notable how uninterested he is in the copyright issue that has so many others freaking out. “We are all trained on, like, everything”, he says.
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In Norway, the electric vehicle future has already arrived • The New York Times

Jack Ewing:

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About 110 miles south of Oslo, along a highway lined with pine and birch trees, a shiny fueling station offers a glimpse of a future where electric vehicles rule.

Chargers far outnumber gasoline pumps at the service area operated by Circle K, a retail chain that got its start in Texas. During summer weekends, when Oslo residents flee to country cottages, the line to recharge sometimes backs up down the off-ramp.

Marit Bergsland, who works at the store, has had to learn how to help frustrated customers connect to chargers in addition to her regular duties flipping burgers and ringing up purchases of salty licorice, a popular treat. “Sometimes we have to give them a coffee to calm down,” she said.

Last year, 80% of new-car sales in Norway were electric, putting the country at the vanguard of the shift to battery-powered mobility. It has also turned Norway into an observatory for figuring out what the electric vehicle revolution might mean for the environment, workers and life in general. The country will end the sales of internal combustion engine cars in 2025.

Norway’s experience suggests that electric vehicles bring benefits without the dire consequences predicted by some critics. There are problems, of course, including unreliable chargers and long waits during periods of high demand. Auto dealers and retailers have had to adapt. The switch has reordered the auto industry, making Tesla the best-selling brand and marginalising established carmakers like Renault and Fiat.

But the air in Oslo, Norway’s capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30% since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed.

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The big losers? Car dealers. Of note from this story: Norwegian kindergarten children take their daytime nap outside, “weather permitting”. And Norway is a big fossil fuel exporter – an irony the Green Party there acknowledges.
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What would happen if the Succession fire played out in real life • Slate

Richard L. Hasen on the plotline in the latest episode of Succession, where a fire in a ballot counting station in Democratic-leaning Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is thought to tip the state Republican, thus handing (perhaps?) the election to a weird Trump-like figure:

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Wisconsin’s election statutes do not appear to speak to what would happen with the massive destruction of ballots on Election Day. Many states interpret vague election statutes to favor enfranchisement of the voter, but Wisconsin gives less protection for absentee ballots, as the key state Supreme Court justice in the 2020 case of Trump v. Biden explained. If the justices on the state Supreme Court divided along party lines, as is often (but not always) the case, thanks to the recent election of Janet Protasiewicz, the court likely would side with the left-leaning candidate and offer some kind of remedy. Doing so would prevent voter disenfranchisement. If the same scenario were to take place in a potential tipping-point state that had a more conservative-leaning state Supreme Court, such as North Carolina, however, it could go another way.

To carry on the hypothetical based on the premise of a divided state court with a pro-democracy lean, like in Wisconsin: Perhaps the state court would require a partial revote in Milwaukee, as was suggested by Shiv in the Succession episode and by Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, who consulted on the Succession episode. Woodall-Vogg explained that election officials would have records to know whose absentee ballots were destroyed in the fire.

But a revote may violate federal law, which requires that there be a uniform day on Election Day. (My former dean Erwin Chemerinsky unsuccessfully tried to get a revote in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000 after many voters were misled to vote for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore by the infamous butterfly ballot.)

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I’m glad he mentioned Bush-Gore, because that was an obvious example where vote counting was undermined and the courts were relied on to rule. America isn’t very good at this democracy game, if we’re honest about it.

(Don’t worry about this being a spoiler for the episode, because it’s much more about the interpersonal relationships.)
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Vice Media: from Murdoch money to bankruptcy in a decade • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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Joseph Teasdale, head of tech on Enders Analysis’ media team, told Press Gazette the problem was “Vice never figured out a model at all”.

“Vice had a pitch – we know how to engage young people – but they never found a way to turn that pitch into a business,” Teasdale said. “They tried digital advertising, sponsored content, creative agency work, TV production, but continually missed revenue targets and never hit sustained profitability.”

Jim Bilton, managing director at Wessenden Marketing, drew attention to the role the tech platforms had in Vice’s financial downfall. “Despite some interesting and quite clever diversifications, the core business model is ad-driven, volume-driven and ultimately dependent on the big tech platforms to deliver audiences that Vice will never own themselves – the reverse of what the smarter legacy media companies are doing,” Bilton said. “The bottom line is that the better legacy media organisations are actually much more agile, smarter and multi-dimensional than the ‘one trick pony’ Vice. Trusted brands, audience-appropriate content, quality independent journalism, tight management and common-sense should/must win in the long-term!”

Teasdale added that Vice, in common with Buzzfeed, had believed that their online content businesses would scale in a manner similar to the software and platform successes of the last decade.

“You invest up front, and if you grow users enough, your revenues will eventually vastly outstrip your costs. But journalism is a lot more of a widgets business than people thought: if you want people to keep coming to your site, you need to keep making content, and so you need to keep spending money. A news business like Buzzfeed or Vice could never enjoy the kind of margins a platform business like Facebook can.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Pinball is making a comeback in the US as an older generation shows the younger ones the joy of flippers. CC-licensed photo by el-toroel-toro on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Multiply. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

I’m an ER doctor, here’s how I’m using ChatGP to help treat patients • Fast Company

Josh Tamayo-Sarver was trying to explain his treatment protocol to a patient’s family:

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“I know that you are concerned about your mom,” I tried explaining to them. “But she cannot breathe right now because she has pulmonary oedema, which is fluid in her lungs. If I hydrate her with IV [intravenous] fluids, it will make her pulmonary oedema worse and she might die. Once we have the fluid out of her lungs and breathing better, then we can worry about her being dehydrated.”

“But whenever she is sick, she just needs an IV because of dehydration,” the patient’s son insisted, adamant. “Why don’t you just give her some IV fluid? She will be better in no time.”

I tried to rephrase my explanation in multiple different ways, but judging by their blank expressions, none were resonating. This is actually a common situation in the ER. People do not wake up planning on an emergency that brings them to me in the dead of night, and are often in a decompensated emotional state.

To make matters worse, several other patients were in more immediate need of my attention. 

Desperate for a solution, I went down the hall to my computer, and fired up ChatGPT 4. Typing in:

“Explain why you would not give IV fluids to someone with severe pulmonary edema and respiratory distress even though you might be concerned that the patient is dehydrated. Explain it in simple and compassionate terms so that a confused person who cares about their mother can understand.”

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What ChatGPT produced looks almost exactly like what he told the family previously. But it seemed to persuade them. He describes its effectiveness as “like working with an incredibly brilliant, hard-working—and occasionally hungover—intern. That’s become my mental model for considering the usefulness of ChatGPT.”
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Santa Barbara County man who deliberately crashed airplane for YouTube video admits to obstructing federal investigation • United States Department of Justice

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A YouTuber pilot has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge for obstructing a federal investigation by deliberately destroying the wreckage of an airplane that he intentionally crashed in Santa Barbara County to gain online views, the Justice Department announced today.

Trevor Daniel Jacob, 29, of Lompoc, agreed to plead guilty to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, a crime that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

A plea agreement and a one-count information charging Jacob were filed Wednesday in United States District Court in Los Angeles. He is expected to make his initial court appearance in the coming weeks.

According to his plea agreement, Jacob is an experienced pilot and skydiver who had secured a sponsorship from a company that sold various products, including a wallet. Pursuant to the sponsorship deal, Jacob agreed to promote the company’s wallet in a YouTube video that he would post.

On November 24, 2021, Jacob took off in his airplane from Lompoc City Airport on a solo flight purportedly destined for Mammoth Lakes. Jacob did not intend to reach his destination, but instead planned to eject from his aircraft during the flight and video himself parachuting to the ground and his airplane as it descended and crashed, he admitted in the plea agreement

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Sentencing to come. The things people will do for advertising. Speaking of which..
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Telly giving away 500,000 free ad-supported 55-inch 4K TVs • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Ilya Pozin made a bunch of money when Viacom bought Pluto TV, the free video-streaming company he co-founded, for $340m four years ago. Since exiting Pluto about a year after that deal closed, Pozin has been working on another startup venture — one he thinks will be a much bigger deal.

On Monday, Pozin’s brainchild, Telly, comes out of stealth after two years in development. Telly wants to ship out thousands (and eventually millions) of free 4K HDTVs, which would cost more than $1,000 at retail, according Pozin.

The 55in main screen is a regular TV panel, with three HDMI inputs and an over-the-air tuner, plus an integrated soundbar. The Telly TVs don’t actually run any streaming apps that let you access services like Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+; instead, they’re bundled with a free Chromecast with Google TV adapter.

What’s new and different: The unit has a 9in-high second screen, affixed to the bottom of the set, which is real estate Telly will use for displaying news, sports scores, weather or stocks, or even letting users play video games. And, critically, Telly’s second screen features a dedicated space on the right-hand side that will display advertising — ads you can’t skip past and ads that stay on the screen the whole time you’re watching TV… and even when you’re not.

…When you sign up through the company’s app, Telly will ask for specific demographic, TV-viewing and lifestyle info, which the company will use to target addressable ads to individual households. The TVs also have a built-in sensor that can detect the number of people who are watching at any particular time. Pozin emphasized that all of Telly’s features comply with privacy regulations.

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Here’s the puzzle. Obviously, it will insist that the second screen is online, or else the TV can be repossessed. But what form will those ads take? Video with sound is the most valuable, but you can’t have those at the same time as content with sound on the main screen. Someone watching a movie will find a parade of bright ads underneath pretty unbearable. I’d suggest. “Free hardware for ads” hardly ever works.
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Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny marketing • The Economist

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Twenty years ago, pinball seemed to be circling the drain. In the 1980s and 1990s video games stole market share from the mechanical sort, and home games-consoles stole market share from arcades. By 2000 WMS, the Chicago-based maker of the Bally and Williams brands of pinball machines, then the biggest manufacturer, closed its loss-making pinball division to focus on selling slot machines. Yet today, pinball is thriving again, both at places like Logan Arcade [in Chicago] and in people’s homes.

Sales of new machines have risen by 15-20% every year since 2008, says Zach Sharpe, of Stern Pinball, which after wms closed became the last remaining major maker. “We have not looked back,” he says. Next year the firm is moving to a new factory, twice the size of its current one, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago. Sales of used machines are more buoyant still—some favourites, such as Stern’s Game of Thrones-themed game, can fetch prices well into five figures. Josh Sharpe, Zach’s brother and president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, says that last year the ifpa approved 8,300 “official” tournaments, a four-fold increase on 2014.

What is driving the boom? Much of it is nostalgia. A generation raised on pinball in arcades in the 1980s and 1990s are now at an age where they have disposable income, and kids with whom they want to play the games they played as children. Marty Friedman, who runs an arcade in Manchester, a tourist town in southern Vermont, says that he and his wife opened their business after he realised it would allow him to indulge his hobby. “I compiled a list of the games I felt were essential to a collection you would deem museum-worthy,” he said, and went about acquiring them. But canny marketing is also drawing in fresh blood. Newer Stern machines are now connected to the internet, so players can log in and have their scores uploaded to an online profile. Both Sharpes suggest that the mechanical nature of the games appeals to people bored with purely screen-based play.

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I’ve always preferred pinball over any screen-based game, because it is about manipulating real objects, and there’s real skill involved. Good players are amazing to watch.
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Life inside the South African gangs risking everything for copper • Financial Times

Monica Mark:

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Copper was the new gold, as far as their gang was concerned, and anywhere it could be found was fair plunder. Theoretically, the sale and export of scrap copper is carefully controlled by South African officials. But the properties that make it the world’s third most-used metal also make copper a smuggler’s dream. Malleable and recyclable, it is easily melted down, after which its origin becomes virtually untraceable. It was February 2021 and prices had hit a 10-year high, reaching $9,000 a tonne on international markets. Any number of unscrupulous dealers would buy the coveted metal, then resell it in South Africa or, more likely, help smuggle it to booming markets in China and India.

That made a ragtag group of izinyoka the first link in a lucrative supply chain ultimately controlled by international syndicates. They were connected and feared enough that they’d never yet had to shoot anyone with their 9mm semi-automatic pistols. A warning volley fired into the air when they arrived on a job was enough to clear the premises. This heist was so routine that their group had deemed only three of their dozens of members were necessary.

Sausages was in charge. The portly commander had informants in every location worth robbing, and he’d already paid off the security guards. He had then summoned Mafia, whose nyaope addiction meant he took on jobs with a zeal bordering on ruthlessness. “That guy was smoking every day. That’s why, every day, he had to steal cables, to buy more,” recalled the third gang member, a skinny, softly spoken man known as TwoSix.

It was Mafia who once scaled a 27-metre-high electric pylon to cut live wires. But, in their time working together, they had all hacked down telephone poles, dug up underground cables and broken into industrial plants. Train stations were a favourite target. By the end of that year, izinyoka had ripped out more than 1,000 kilometres of overhead cable from Transnet, the state-owned freight rail operator, prompting it to contemplate switching from hybrid electric locomotives to diesel-only models that don’t require cabling.

In January, the consequences of industrial-scale theft in South Africa included: three security guards killed during heists; three hospitals scaling back operations because stolen copper plumbing hampers their ability to pipe oxygen to intensive care units; trains cancelled due to stolen signalling cable or track sleepers; parts of the city going without electricity for days after thieves toppled pylons.

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Amazing piece of reporting. Well worth it if you have the subscription, or can find non-paywalled access.
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Cat and dog torture videos litter Twitter, adding to concerns about moderation • NBC News

Ben Collins:

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Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.

Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video. “There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying. Clemens said she then went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”

Clemens said that she clicked on the suggested search term and a gruesome video of what appeared to be a kitten being killed inside of a blender appeared instantly. For users who have not manually turned off autoplay, the video will begin rolling instantly. NBC News was able to replicate the same process to surface the video on Wednesday.

Clemens said she is grateful her child asked her about the video instead of simply going on Twitter and typing in the word “cat” by himself. “I’m glad that my child has talked to me, but there must be lots of parents whose kids just look it up,” she said.

The spread of the video as well as its presence in Twitter’s suggested searches is part of a worrying trend of animal cruelty videos that have littered the social media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover, which included mass layoffs and deep cuts to the company’s content moderation and safety teams.

Last weekend, gory videos from two violent events in Texas spread on Twitter, with some users saying that the images had been pushed into the platform’s algorithmic “For You” feed.

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Which is why, among other reasons, you should never, ever, click on the “For You” tab. On the topic of moderation, meanwhile…
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Moderator Mayhem: a mobile game to see how well *you* can handle content moderation • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

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So much of the discussion lately around content moderation and trust & safety doesn’t come from a place of any kind of actual experience with moderating content and understanding the competing pressures, both internal and external, towards allowing free speech, protecting user safety, and complying with various laws and other factors.

A friend of mine in the trust & safety world once suggested that these conversations would be a lot more useful if everyone had to spend a few days moderating an actual community, and could learn how content moderation is not about “suppressing viewpoints,” but almost always about understanding really complex scenarios in which you have to make decisions in a very limited period of time, with limited information, and where there may not be any “right” answer.

Enter: Moderator Mayhem. It’s a browser-based mobile game, and you will learn that you have to make your moderation decisions by swiping left (take down) or right (keep up), and try to align content with the policies of the company (a fictional review site called TrustHive). Of course, users of your site may not like your decisions. They might appeal the decisions, and you might realize you missed some important context (or not!). Your manager might disagree with your decisions, and might not think you’re suited for the job. Your CEO might have his own views on how your moderation is going. So might the media.

And, of course, you don’t have much time to make your decisions, as the stack of flagged content you’re expected to review will keep growing and growing. Often, it would be helpful for you to investigate the more detailed context, and you can do that within the game, but it takes precious time. Sometimes you’ll learn something useful… but sometimes you won’t.

Also, there’s often no “correct” answer, so the game won’t tell you if you got something “right” or “wrong” because often there is no right or wrong. Your manager might tell you they disagree with your decision, or might not. But at the end of each session you’ll get a general update on how your manager thinks you’re doing in accurately applying company policy, and you’ll get a sense of your job security. Mess up too often and you may be looking for a new job. Apply the policy well enough, and maybe you can get promoted.

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Being promoted out of the moderation division seems like the point. “Enjoy” seems like the wrong salutation for this.
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Scoop: Forbes takeover bid gives cover for foreign funding • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Forbes agreed to sell itself in a deal that makes it look like the iconic magazine brand is staying in American hands. But two sources familiar with the deal tell Axios the takeover may actually be substantially paid for by foreign investors.

The deal structure has the effect of obfuscating how much money foreign groups may put in, which could help alleviate any regulatory concerns.

Forbes was ready to sell to the group of mostly foreign investors in March. But management feared regulatory pushback and pivoted, Axios previously reported. Forbes also faced public criticism over the involvement of Indian investment firm Sun Group, which has had ties to Russia.

Forbes on Friday quietly confirmed that Austin Russell, the 28-year-old American CEO of electric vehicle tech company Luminar Technologies, will acquire an 82% stake in the iconic media brand at an $800m valuation.

But Forbes and Russell didn’t disclose how he would finance the roughly $656m needed to foot his stake.

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“Youngest self-made billionaire” (a title previously held by Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, I think) Russell isn’t really committing a lot of his own money in this. It looks very peculiar.
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EU approves Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Alex Hern:

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The EU has approved Microsoft’s $69bn (£55bn) acquisition of the Call of Duty creator Activision Blizzard, in a move that drew immediate pushback from its UK counterpart, which has already blocked the gaming mega-deal.

The EU accepted Microsoft’s concessions on cloud gaming, the same problem that led the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block the transaction last month.

The proposed deal aims to bring together Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox console, with the video game developer whose hit titles also include World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Candy Crush Saga and Overwatch.

The approval by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, will revive Microsoft’s hopes for the deal as it prepares to appeal against the CMA’s decision. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US has also come out against the takeover and is suing to block it.

The commission’s preliminary investigation had found that the deal could harm competition in cloud gaming, which allows users to stream video games stored on remote servers on to their devices, and in the supply of rival PC operating systems. It was concerned that if gamers could stream Call of Duty only via a Windows-exclusive streaming service then they may be less likely to switch to other operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux.

However, the commission said on Monday it had accepted Microsoft’s proposed remedies. The compromise involves Microsoft offering free licences over a 10-year period allowing European consumers who purchase Activision PC and console games to stream them on other cloud gaming services.

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Nils Pratley, a Guardian finance columnist, is unimpressed by Microsoft’s posturing. The CMA’s objection feels like a reasonable one: Microsoft’s promises now might be meaningless in the context of the future shape of the market.
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The eyes have it • Event Photography London

Paul Clarke, again, with the followup he wrote in February 2020 to his previous post about Parliamentary photos when the new crop, from December 2019, arrived:

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As any photographer will know; as any creative will know – no, as any human with any empathy will know – it’s pretty horrible to see your work criticised. And I stress again that although it’s a perennial temptation to blame the person who presses the shutter for the results, with a project like this there are a lot of hands and eyes involved. The moment of capture is one thing; the design, set-up, handling of the portrait’s subject, editing and the sign-off for public release involve many more people.

And in this official portrait of the 158th Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle is wearing his office pass on a lanyard round his neck. A bright, green, stripy lanyard at that.

There are few cast-iron rules of corporate photography, but it’s nearly universally accepted that taking off ‘clutter’ is a good idea. And asking subjects to remove their security passes is just what you do. Immediately.

Perhaps he didn’t want to? Perhaps he refused point blank and threatened to make a scene. Unlikely – but even when something like this happens (and it’s happened to me) there are ways in. “Can we ensure consistency across all Members please sir?” and “It’s not generally good security practice to include pictures of passes in public photos” (though they did at least blur out the detail in the edit) are good lines to take.

Or even, “Very glad to see you keeping up standards sir by adopting full morning dress in contrast to the oh-so-cheeky ways of that scamp who preceded you, but I suspect that not in Erskine May nor in any other manual of Parliamentary procedure will you find reference to a necklace that looks to be modelled on that famous chewable sweet, the Pacer, lamented lost child of 1970s confectionery that it is. Would you mind slipping it off for ten seconds while we do the picture? Sir.”

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Once seen…
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Kuo: Apple ‘well prepared’ for headset announcement next month • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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In a brief report posted to Medium on Monday, Kuo wrote that the headset’s announcement next month “bodes well” for the supply chain share price, with the analyst touching on five of the device’s components that – apart from assembly – represent its “most expensive material costs” in his view.

Those include the 4K micro-OLED displays, dual M2-based processors, the headset casing, 12 optical cameras for tracking hand movements, and the external power supply. These components are being supplied by Sony, TSMC, Everwin Precision, Cowell, and Goretek, respectively.

Pricing on the headset is expected to begin somewhere around $3,000. Perhaps with that in mind, Apple won’t aim it at general consumers to start with, but will instead position it as a device for developers, content creators, and professionals. Apple expects to sell just one headset per day per retail store, and it has told suppliers that it expects sales of seven to 10 million units during the first year of availability.

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One headset per day per retail store? Apple has more than 500 stores worldwide. One per store per day is ~15,000 per month, or 180,000 per year. That’s a long way even from a million. So the expectation is for most people to buy it without trying it? Even at $1,500 you’d need some dramatic use cases.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How did Salvador Dali become the most faked artist? By producing too much “art”, it seems. CC-licensed photo by cea. on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. I’m melting! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google Bard hits over 180 countries and territories—none are in the EU • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

On Wednesday, Google detailed the evolution of its Bard conversational AI assistant, including PaLM 2 and expanded availability. The list of 180 supported countries and territories excludes Canada and all of the European Union’s (EU) 27 member states. As the world grapples with how to juggle the explosive growth of generative AI chatbots alongside user privacy, there’s suspicion that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is at the center of the omission.

Google’s I/O event this week included flashy announcements around AI developments and expanding Bard access with added Japanese and Korean language support. However, some people quickly noticed that EU countries and The Great White North were not part of the news. This could change, as Google’s support page says the company will “gradually expand to more countries and territories in a way that is consistent with local regulations and our AI principles.”

In the meantime, Google hasn’t explained why it’s not yet bringing Bard to the EU, Canada, or any other excluded geography. However, the EU features more stringent data protection and user privacy policies than Google’s homeland. And the EU’s AI regulatory landscape is on the brink of transformation.

…Italy has rather active privacy regulators and was one of the first countries to restrict access to an AI like [rival OpenAI’s] ChatGPT. When announcing its temporary ban in April, the Italian government said ChatGPT had to comply with measures around “transparency, the right of data subjects—including users and non-users—and the legal basis of the processing for algorithmic training relying on users’ data.”

OpenAI eventually complied with measures like sharing an online form that lets users opt out and delete data from ChatGPT’s training algorithms. OpenAI also checks Italian users’ birth dates upon signup to ensure they’re either 18 or older or have parental permission. Further, OpenAI said it would try to educate users about ChatGPT through a publicity campaign with details like how users can decline to share data.

By not releasing Bard in the EU, Google can avoid jumping through similar hoops OpenAI faced to retain availability in Italy.

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AI is speeding up astronomical discoveries • Gizmodo

Chris Impey:

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Astronomers working on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, use radio telescopes to look for signals from distant civilizations. Early on, radio astronomers scanned charts by eye to look for anomalies that couldn’t be explained. More recently, researchers harnessed 150,000 personal computers and 1.8 million citizen scientists to look for artificial radio signals. Now, researchers are using AI to sift through reams of data much more quickly and thoroughly than people can. This has allowed SETI efforts to cover more ground while also greatly reducing the number of false positive signals.

Another example is the search for exoplanets. Astronomers discovered most of the 5,300 known exoplanets by measuring a dip in the amount of light coming from a star when a planet passes in front of it. AI tools can now pick out the signs of an exoplanet with 96% accuracy.

AI has proved itself to be excellent at identifying known objects – like galaxies or exoplanets – that astronomers tell it to look for. But it is also quite powerful at finding objects or phenomena that are theorized but have not yet been discovered in the real world.

Teams have used this approach to detect new exoplanets, learn about the ancestral stars that led to the formation and growth of the Milky Way, and predict the signatures of new types of gravitational waves.

To do this, astronomers first use AI to convert theoretical models into observational signatures – including realistic levels of noise. They then use machine learning to sharpen the ability of AI to detect the predicted phenomena.

Finally, radio astronomers have also been using AI algorithms to sift through signals that don’t correspond to known phenomena. Recently a team from South Africa found a unique object that may be a remnant of the explosive merging of two supermassive black holes. If this proves to be true, the data will allow a new test of general relativity – Albert Einstein’s description of space-time.

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Why Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist in the world

Mark Dent:

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By the 1950s and 1960s, it was clear the demand for Dalí’s work exceeded the supply.

So Dalí, Gala, and others in Dalí’s inner circle devised a solution: prints. Lithographs and etchings took less time to finish than paintings and could be reproduced as limited series.

There were two categories of Dalí prints:
• Fully original: Dalí created the images himself on a printing plate and signed a limited series of prints. Originals sold for up to $3.5k
• Legitimate prints: Some limited-edition lithographs were made by licensed publishers copying a watercolor of Dalí. These were not technically original, although they were marketed as such and approved and signed by Dalí. They could sell for nearly as much as the fully original prints.

Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them. (The signature was worth ~$40 on its own.) Members of his inner circle, some of whom exploited Dalí for profit, once told the Wall Street Journal Dalí would sign blank sheets “every two seconds for an hour without stopping.”

The prints, the signatures, and the commercial contracts kept the dollars rolling in. Beyond, the magazine of the St. Regis Hotel, noted Dalí was as much “high finance” as he was “high art.”

But in the 1970s, the artist’s health declined, and he became a recluse for the next decade. Dalí stopped creating prints. He stopped signing his name. And yet, in a stroke of real-life surrealism, the world, and especially the US, was about to see more art attributed to Dalí than ever before.

At the Center Art Galleries in Honolulu, John Proctor’s job was to shadow visitors in the showroom. When they looked at Lincoln in Dalívision, he began his sales pitch, handing them a fact sheet revealing reported increases in value for Dalí’s art and setting them up with a “closer” to convince the visitors to spend as much as $11.5k for the print — enough, at the time, for a down payment on the median US home.

“It was easy to sell art to the tourists,” Proctor told The Honolulu Advertiser in 1980. “Once you tell them they’re going to make money, they get hot for the stuff.”

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Guess what happened next. The problem of provenance will never go away.
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Twitter’s encrypted DMs are deeply inferior to Signal and WhatsApp • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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the company appears to have stopped short of calling the feature “end-to-end” encrypted, the term that would mean only users on the two ends of conversations can read messages, rather than hackers, government agencies that can eavesdrop on those messages, or even Twitter itself.

“As Elon Musk said, when it comes to Direct Messages, the standard should be, if someone puts a gun to our heads, we still can’t access your messages,” the help desk page reads. “We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.”

In fact, the description of Twitter’s encrypted messaging feature that follows that initial caveat seems almost like a laundry list of the most serious flaws in every existing end-to-end encrypted messaging app, now all combined into one product—along with a few extra flaws that are all its own.

The encryption feature is opt-in, for instance, not turned on by default, a decision for which Facebook Messenger has received criticism. It explicitly doesn’t prevent “man-in-the-middle” attacks that would allow Twitter to invisibly spoof users’ identities and intercept messages, long considered the most serious flaw in Apple’s iMessage encryption. It doesn’t have the “perfect forward secrecy” feature that makes spying on users harder even after a device is temporarily compromised. It doesn’t allow for group messaging or even sending photos or videos. And perhaps most seriously, it currently restricts this subpar encrypted messaging system to only the verified users messaging each other—most of whom must pay $8 a month—vastly limiting the network that might use it.

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It’s the latter point which is so strange. Why offer encryption – something which is table stakes (or assumed) in so many other networks – but only for people who pay for it?
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Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Adopting Google’s strange new version of the web resulted in an irresistible flood of traffic for publishers at first: using AMP increased search traffic to one major national magazine’s site by 20%, according to the executive who oversaw the implementation.

But AMP came with huge tradeoffs, most notably around how all those webpages were monetized. AMP made it harder to use ad tech that didn’t come from Google, fraying the relationship between Google and the media so badly that AMP became a key component in an antitrust lawsuit filed just five years after its launch in 2020 by 17 state attorneys general, accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly on the advertising industry. The states argue that Google designed AMP in part to thwart publishers from using alternative ad tools — tools that would have generated more money for publishers and less for Google. Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”

Here in 2023, AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI services pose a much more direct threat to its search business than Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News ever did. But the media industry is still dependent on Google’s firehose of traffic, and as the company searches for its next move, the story of how it ruthlessly used AMP in an attempt to control the very structure and business of the web makes clear exactly how far it will go to preserve its business — and how powerless the web may be to stop it.

AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.

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Great piece of reporting.
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Apple M3 chip, Mac specifications and features: CPU, GPU and RAM increase details • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter:

»

Apple finally brings Final Cut Pro and Logic to the iPad. After a couple years of development, Apple is bringing two of its core pro apps to the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. The user interface of Final Cut Pro is designed to be touch-first (it works with a trackpad on a Magic Keyboard or similar device) and appears perfect for in-field edits or for high-end content creators. But, of course, it’s not going to replace the full functionality of Final Cut Pro on a Mac. In fact, it’s probably closer to iMovie back in the day, when it was actually functional. 

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Yup, fine, sure, except that you can’t round-trip on Final Cut Pro – ie you can’t upload a project from your Mac to the iPad, edit it a bit, and then transfer it back to the Mac. You can only send it from the iPad to the Mac, probably (the ATP folk speculate) due to RAM restrictions. So it’s absolutely not perfect for high-end content creators.

Moving on..

»

Now, here’s the angle that I am really interested in: how Apple may be adapting Final Cut Pro and Logic to its upcoming mixed-reality headset. I’m told that the headset will have a content-creation focus and that its user interface, which relies on hand and eye control, could be precise enough to handle apps like Final Cut. On top of that, the device is supposed to work with any iPadOS app out of the box. That makes it seem likely that the new apps will run on the headset.

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Good grief. Seriously? You think people are going to try to edit video or sound in a headset? This is like the Wall Street analyst who was convinced for years that Apple was going to produce a TV, and was eternally disappointed. More and more I hope Apple doesn’t release a headset, just to see how the amount of copium required.
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The mother of all photoshoots • Event Photography London

Paul Clarke, who back in 2019 looked at the new set of House of Commons photos of MPs and, as a professional photographer, had a few thoughts:

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Did you ever look at a black and white version of your face and think – “oh, that’s so much nicer!”? There are a few reasons why this can happen, but one of them is that black and white is a quick way to create a distance from reality. Given the, er, complex relationship most of us have with our own image, having a bit of room to see ourselves abstracted can often help us accept, or even enjoy, the result. With this portrait set, I think there’s been a deliberate choice to ‘cool down’ the images – shifting the colour palette down to the blue end of the spectrum. It’s what makes these pictures look a little ‘blue’ or ‘cold’ overall. It really helps to give them a distinctive look, but it also helps to make them just a little bit unreal – at least in tone.

They are, however, ruthlessly real in other aspects. They are, as far as I can judge, unretouched. We’re in really interesting territory here in terms of what we mean by the ‘truth’ of a portrait. Whether Cromwell actually used the words “warts and all” to his portrait artist Sir Peter Lely, is unknown. But we all recognise the sentiment. The role of the portrait painter was to convey an artistic impression – very possibly a flattering one – of the subject. But the role of the photographer? Well, within the world of PR photography, not all that different. But in the world of journalism? Very. A little adjustment of colour, brightness and contrast, maybe, but no retouching as such.

So are these photos to be seen as PR work, or journalism? In a sense they fall between the two stools. They are not a “news story” (although they did become one) nor are they an exercise in image management. The project team have come down firmly on the side of the journalists – unairbrushed reality. If the subject has a bit of a sweat on, it’s in. A pimple or a wart? Same. A few flakes of dandruff or a stray hair on their collar? You get the picture. It’s really easy to see the sort of problems a project like this might run into if it were seen to have manipulated the photos to flatter. But it shows the weight of the decisions that were involved.

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Paul pointed me to this post of his after the discussion last week about “what is a photo?” In this post he does a little “work” on the photos. His rates are very reasonable, I understand.
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BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the casualties of the traffic wars • The New Yorker

Nathan Heller reviews Traffic, the new book by Ben Smith (ex-Buzzfeed News); Heller worked at a webzine at that time, and this coda to his review sums up the problem faced by media today aptly:

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At the online magazine where I worked, the measure of success in traffic-seeking kept changing. The goal was at first to maximize the number of unique page views by publishing more material.

Then instructions came down that what mattered was not volume but authority (other reliable sites linking to us), and we were instructed to reach out to eminent bloggers to promote our wares. After some months of this, it was decided that, in fact, the most valuable measure of traffic was engagement (how long readers spent reading our articles); our brief was to do work that was longer, better, and nearer the headlines of the day. When that approach, too, generated insufficient revenue, volume was summoned as the solution once again.

The media business has since made at least one more complete turn on this traffic roundabout in the hope of stabilizing its future. (The line is usually that the last model “isn’t how the Web works.”) And the will to traffic is now everywhere: on your phone, in your ears, on your screen.

In dreamy moods, I sometimes fantasize about journalism dropping out of the game—not chasing traffic, not following this year’s wisdom, not offering audiences everything they could possibly want in hastiest form. Imagine producing as little as you could as best you could: it would be there Monday, when the week began, and there Friday, the tree standing after the storm. And imagine the audience’s pleasure at finding it, tall and expansive and waiting for a sunny day. In an age of traffic, such deliberateness could be radical. It could be, I think, the next big thing.

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Can Linda Yaccorino keep Elon Musk on a tight enough leash to succeed? • Fortune

Kylie Robison:

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Sources describe Yaccarino as a “tough,” traditional Italian, “Long Island lady” who can both inspire and terrify the people who work for her. She has an identical twin, who’s a nurse.

Her fearless attitude in the male-dominated ad business is undoubtedly one of her biggest strengths, and could be an important part of her professional relationship with Musk. She’s capable of playing the long game, said a source, describing her rise at NBC: “She came in knowing that she was going to run the whole thing, but she started with cable and she took over broadcast.” Two sources also told Fortune she’s a sharp negotiator, which will help her when it comes to crafting a smart employment contract with Musk.

“She stood up to a lot of misogyny. She stood up to a lot of men,“ the source recalled during her time working with Yaccarino. “There’s nothing demure about her.”

Her values are well documented, too. She’s a devoted Catholic and staunch Republican. When former president Donald Trump was elected to office, Yaccarino attended his inauguration, one source told Fortune. Then, in 2018, Trump appointed Yaccarino to serve a two-year term on the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness and Nutrition, alongside big names like New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and Incredible Hulk star Lou Ferrigno, Adweek reported. One source said she joined “just to get near Trump.” 

Some have speculated that Musk chose Yaccarino because their political values aligned. Yet, according to Lou Paskalis, CEO of the marketing consultancy firm AJL Advisory, and a client of Yaccarino’s for 35 years, Yaccarino always kept her political views “fairly private.” That sensibility could provide the needed counterweight to Musk’s tendencies, Paskalis reckoned: ”She’ll probably be able to temper [Musk’s] enthusiasm for extreme commentary, but introduce more balance.”

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She kept her politics “fairly private” but attended Trump’s inauguration? And what’s the relevance of her twin being a nurse? (None, it’s just a fact dump.) What’s clear is that she’s been brought in to bring back the advertisers. She won’t be a CEO. Musk will decide what the network looks like; she’ll be in charge of filling in the white spaces where the ads should be.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s more bad news for Peloton, which is recalling 2.2m of its exercise bikes in the US over a seat fault. (But not outside the US?) CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. What’s missing? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Musicians are already using AI more often than we think • Pitchfork

Marc Hogan:

»

Shawn Everett, the Grammy-winning engineer and producer behind albums by Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs, and Alvvays, compares the advent of AI in music to the advent of the electric guitar or sampling. “As far as songwriting and production goes, we’re on the cusp of a wave of something that I don’t think we’ve really seen, maybe ever,” he says.

Everett paid attention in 2020 when OpenAI put out a tool for creating songs in various artists’ styles, complete with vocals. He even experimented with that tool while working on a song by the Killers that has never been released. Everett recalls inputting a chord progression that frontman Brandon Flowers had written and instructing the AI to continue it in the style of Pink Floyd, with a certain emotional tenor, only to have the AI spit out unexpected melodies. “What was happening was so different, and was landing in locations that no human being would normally think of, but it still felt rooted in something familiar,” he says. “I thought it was such a cool song.”

What’s coming next, Everett predicts, will be AI tools that can quickly combine ideas for melody, chords, and rhythm, similar to how programs like Midjourney and Dall-E, which generate images from natural language prompts, have shaken up visual art. Within a year or two, he speculates, the thousands of plugins in digital audio workstations like Pro Tools could merge into a single plugin that seamlessly carries out the user’s verbal requests. As an engineer, he wonders if he will ask the AI to set the EQ for a particular drum style—say, Metallica’s—or if the tech will eventually be able to spit out a replicated Lars Ulrich drum performance that sounds better than any drums he (or anyone else, for that matter) could have mic’d. “Obviously that’s a horrifying scenario for a lot of people, but it’s probably gonna happen,” Everett says. 

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Musicians can be the quickest to embrace new technology, and it definitely sounds like this has tickled their fancy.
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Wind is main source of UK electricity for first time • BBC News

Esme Stallard:

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Wind turbines have generated more electricity than gas for the first time in the UK.

In the first three months of this year a third of the country’s electricity came from wind farms, research from Imperial College London has shown. National Grid has also confirmed that April saw a record period of solar energy generation.

By 2035 the UK aims for all of its electricity to have net zero emissions.

“There are still many hurdles to reaching a completely fossil fuel-free grid, but wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event,” said Iain Staffell, energy researcher at Imperial College and lead author of the report.

The majority of the UK’s wind power has come from offshore wind farms. Installing new onshore wind turbines has effectively been banned since 2015 in England.

Under current planning rules, companies can only apply to build onshore wind turbines on land specifically identified for development in the land-use plans drawn up by local councils. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed in December to relax these planning restrictions to speed up development.

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Onshore wind isn’t going to happen until we have a different administration, let’s admit.
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Peloton shares slide after it recalls two million exercise bikes • The New York Times

Lora Kelley:

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Peloton, the maker of home exercise equipment, said on Thursday that it was recalling 2.2m exercise bikes, an announcement that sent its stock lower.

The company’s shares tumbled nearly 9% by the market close and have plunged more than 20% this month.

The company had received 35 reports of seat posts breaking and detaching from the original model of its bike during use, according to a recall notice from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Peloton is voluntarily recalling Model PL-01 bikes that were sold from January 2018 to May 2023 in the United States, and is offering customers replacements for the bike’s seat posts that can be installed at home, the company said in a statement on its website Thursday morning.

“For Peloton, it was important to proactively engage the C.P.S.C. to address this issue,” the company wrote. “We worked cooperatively with them to identify today’s approved remedy.”

The decision to recall the bikes is a turnabout for Peloton, which in the past has resisted recalling its equipment.

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I was wondering: so how many bikes has Peloton sold in the US? And the answer: 2.2m. It’s recalling all of the ones sold in the US. But this, in turn, raises the question of why the ones sold outside the US, which one presumes largely have the same design and parts (especially when it comes to seat posts) aren’t being recalled too. Or is that the next step?

Either way, this could be the killer blow for a company that’s been struggling for a while.

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Twitter has a new mystery CEO • The Verge

Mitchell Clark, Emma Roth and Jay Peters:

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Elon Musk has announced plans for a new Twitter CEO but hasn’t said who it is. In a tweet on Thursday, Musk says that he has “hired a new CEO for X/Twitter” and that “she will be starting in ~6 weeks.” Musk will instead assume the role of executive chair and chief technology officer, “overseeing product, software & sysops” of Twitter.

While Musk may soon no longer be CEO, he still owns the company, which he has renamed “X.” It seems unlikely that giving someone else one specific title will make Twitter any less of a wild ride. Musk became “Chief Twit” last October, when he closed his acquisition of the company, followed by the immediate firing of large portions of its executive staff and thousands of other employees.

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Follows the poll back in December asking if he should step down, which got a huge number of people saying damn yes.

The replacement isn’t Sheryl Sandberg (of Facebook), she’s told journalists. Who would be mad enough to take a job where Musk is both your boss (as exec chair) and underling (as CTO)? The news may be out by the time you read this, but wasn’t on Thursday evening. Kara Swisher’s suggestion was Linda Yaccarino of NBC.
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Elon Musk broke Twitter’s Ratio—the yardstick off all-out ideological insult warfare • Slate

Alex Kirshner:

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It might look like a certain kind of victory for Musk that Twitter is now this way: the site is a bit more ideologically attuned to what seems to be his liking, and it’s harder to use the wisdom of the crowd, rather than of those who pay $8 a month, to puncture ridiculous talking points in a visible forum.

But this dynamic ultimately breaks bad for Musk and his buddies, too. It gets harder to warn someone’s followers about the Woke Cancel Culture Mob on the internet, and to position oneself as the last big defender of free speech standing up against the vile left, if a person needs to read through 500 replies to a terrible Ben Shapiro tweet to see someone making a confrontational point in response.

The Twitter experience also just gets a bit less fun, for everyone. Someone on the left who doesn’t pay for Twitter has less incentive to look at tweets they think are terrible, and then craft a reply they think is cutting, if they think there’s a slim chance anyone will read it. And conservatives, who seem more likely to pay for Twitter Blue, will eventually get bored. Twitter’s benefit to them is not that it’s an echo chamber where any right-wing line is met with hugs and kisses.

There are numerous conservative social media websites, and none has gotten anywhere near Twitter’s popularity. There is no Fox News of conservative social media, because much of the fun for right-wing internet users is having an allegedly woke mob to argue with. It may not have happened yet, but it will eventually get stultifying for a huge mass of Twitter Blue subscribers to gather in the replies to talk-show hosts’ tweets to agree that socialism is bad. This kind of poster needs someone to fight with, and by tilting the playing field, Musk has cut down on fighting.

That seems like a good thing for people in two groups: those who would like to spend less time getting their blood pressure up while looking at the internet, and those who would like to see Musk’s Twitter investment degraded until the point of a wipeout.

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Some people are in both groups. Just sayin’.
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Into Thin AirPods • Defector

Casey Johnston lost her AirPods. But not to worry! They were findable with the Find My… app, weren’t they? Well:

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when I did open the [Find My] app, there the AirPods were—well, there they weren’t, but also there they were—pinging from a town about 30 minutes away in decent traffic. I zoomed in on the map until it resolved into individual residences. The AirPods appeared to be posted up on a dead end street, squarely in someone’s house. Find My wouldn’t commit to an address, but by cross-referencing Google Maps and a nearby BMW dealership, I was able to triangulate a building number.

The AirPods weren’t in the wind, as lost or stolen objects had been my entire life. They were right there. They were close. They were obtainable. I’d known going into this relationship that I would lose them; until this moment, I hadn’t thought about the possibility that I’d be able to redeem myself by finding them again.

This is the part where I say I’m aware that everyone—Apple, law enforcement, any friends with good judgment within earshot—strenuously discourages ever, under any circumstances, trying to do vigilante justice with the Find My app. If you so much as mention the possibility, like four people will jump out of the woodwork with stories about someone they knew who was shot or assaulted trying to confront a thief in the act. I’d like to emphasize that I’m firmly on the side of reason, and a steadfast believer that having crime done to me is not an occasion to show off how brave I am.

But! I have watched Veronica Mars so many times. I dream idly of mysterious cases falling into my lap, and solving them through the careful piecing together of data, clues, and information, plus the judicious application of wiles and streetwise know-how. And, honestly, I did want my ridiculously expensive AirPods back.

«

Thus begins a terrific story of pursuit.
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Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common • Science

Jeffrey Brainard:

»

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues.

…Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake, so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers.

«

Those seem like rather broad brush strokes with which to paint things as fake.
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Finding geolocation leads with Bellingcat’s OpenStreetMap search tool • bellingcat

Logan Williams:

»

Sometimes, the trickiest part of geolocating a photo can be knowing where to start looking.

In previous Bellingcat investigations, starting points have involved reverse image search, searching Google Earth for soil that is the right colour, looking for minarets and even identification of plants.

Bellingcat has built a new tool for searching OpenStreetMap data to help geolocate images and identify starting points for geolocation investigations, based on objects and structures you can identify in an image. You can think of it as a dramatically simplified version of the Overpass query language tool that some open source researchers may already be familiar with using via Overpass-Turbo. 

Users can sign up for the tool and check it out here.

«

It’s really clever, using tagged items (“railway” “convenience store” “fountain”) and finding locations where those tags are in close proximity. You’d need to figure out which country your picture is in, and hope that OSM has been updated. (It often has.)
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AI has potential to be ‘destructive’ to journalism, media tycoon Barry Diller warns • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas, Anna Nicolaou and Laura Pitel:

»

US media billionaire Barry Diller warned that the use of artificial intelligence would prove “destructive” to journalism unless publishers were able to use copyright law to exert control.

Speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism in London, Diller said that freely allowing AI access to media content would prove to be a mistake, and that the notion of “fair use” — which can be used to cover copyrighted material in data sets for machine learning — needed to be redefined.

“You can’t have fair use when there is an unfair machine that knows no bounds,” said Diller, who chairs media and internet group IAC.

Media groups have grown concerned about the use of their publications as the basis for creating generative AI. News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said this year that the group was already seeking financial compensation from an AI company for use of its “proprietary” content.

Diller said on Wednesday that he would work alongside News Corp and German publishing house Axel Springer in trying to protect their journalism from the threat.

“We are leading a group that is going to say we are going to change copyright law if necessary, to work to say that you cannot take our materials or we will litigate. What you publish you have the right to control,” he said.

«

Yes, driving the price paid for journalism down to the ground is a job for Diller and Murdoch, not the damn machines.
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Google’s new Magic Editor uses AI to totally transform your photos • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Google’s latest Photos trick is a feature it’s calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. The company revealed the feature at Google I/O 2023.

Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. Watch this GIF to see it all happen:

GIF: Google

In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates “new” parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.

It’s impressive stuff — and a logical next step from photo features like Photo Unblur and Magic Eraser. It’s also not quite perfect given leftover artifacts like creases from the bag strap in the waterfall photo and a misplaced shadow under the bench in the second. But perhaps most importantly, it’s just the latest opportunity to think about what a “photo” even is anymore — a question that’s become ever more common given things like the iPhone 14 Pro’s ramped-up sharpening and Samsung’s faked Moon photos.

«

You’d hope that the photo would reflect where items were when you took them, though, wouldn’t you? That seems like a basic element. Over-sharpened? Sure but it’s the same thing. Detail that isn’t there in the original? Sure, but it’s the same thing, in the same place. To me this is just a tweak too far.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: I forgot to include a link from 2004. Thus endeth the links from the past, I guess, because otherwise we’d quickly be including links from the future, and those are much harder to find.

Digital speedometers in cars don’t update in real time – but there’s a good user interface reason for that. 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. How fast, exactly? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI is coming to Google search through Search Generative Experience • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

The future of Google Search is AI. But not in the way you think. The company synonymous with web search isn’t all in on chatbots (even though it’s building one, called Bard), and it’s not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results. 

To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. “Why is sourdough bread still so popular?” she writes and hits enter. Google’s normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase “Generative AI is experimental.” A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says “corroborates” what’s in the summary.

Google calls this the “AI snapshot.” All of it is by Google’s large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google’s designers call “the bear claw,” which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it’s key to the way Google’s AI implementation is different. “We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?”

«

Those links to those “some sources” are not going to be clicked on at all, are they. Google relies on other sources to provide the information it boils down. If nobody clicks on the links, there’s no business model for those sources, so they’ll have to rely on cheaper ways to source it.. such as AI-generated content. Which Google’s AI will index. Or else it’ll be Wikipedia.
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Will AI become the new McKinsey? • The New Yorker

Ted Chiang (the noted SF writer):

»

I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about AI as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and AI systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with 90% of the Fortune 100—and AI are also clear. Social media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as AI promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalise the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, AI has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

The question we should be asking is: as AI becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

«

Put like this, absolutely not. ChatGPT is going to be the cousin Greg of the corporate world (for those who are keeping up with Succession.)
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Wendy’s, Google train next-generation order taker: an AI chatbot • WSJ

Angus Loten:

»

Wendy’s is automating its drive-through service using an artificial-intelligence chatbot powered by natural-language software developed by Google and trained to understand the myriad ways customers order off the menu.

With the move, Wendy’s is joining an expanding group of companies that are leaning on generative AI for growth. 

The Dublin, Ohio-based fast-food chain’s chatbot will be officially rolled out in June at a company-owned restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, Wendy’s said. The goal is to streamline the ordering process and prevent long lines in the drive-through lanes from turning customers away, said Wendy’s Chief Executive Todd Penegor. 

Wendy’s didn’t disclose the cost of the initiative beyond saying the company has been working with Google in areas like data analytics, machine learning and cloud tools since 2021. 

“It will be very conversational,” Mr. Penegor said about the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbots. “You won’t know you’re talking to anybody but an employee,” he said.

To do that, Wendy’s software engineers have been working with Google to build and fine-tune a generative AI application on top of Google’s own large language model, or LLM—a vast algorithmic software tool loaded with words, phrases and popular expressions in different dialects and accents and designed to recognize and mimic the syntax and semantics of human speech.

…Wendy’s customized language model includes unique terms, phrases and acronyms customers have come to use when ordering its burgers, fries and other items—such as “JBC” for junior bacon cheeseburger, or “biggie bags” for various combinations of burgers, chicken nuggets and soft drinks. Adding to the complexity, Wendy’s milkshakes are called Frosties, though customers may not always use the branded term.

“You may think driving by and speaking into a drive-through is an easy problem for AI, but it’s actually one of the hardest,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, the company’s cloud-computing division.

«

So it is coming for the low-paid jobs first. Huh.
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Heather Armstrong, mommy blogger, dies at 47 • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

»

Heather Armstrong, a pioneering blogger who transformed women’s media and altered the public perception of motherhood, has died at the age of 47.

Armstrong, who also went by her maiden name, Heather Hamilton, died by suicide, according to her boyfriend, Pete Ashdown, who told the Associated Press that he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home. Ashdown said that Armstrong had recently relapsed into alcoholism after remaining sober for more than 18 months.

…She founded the blog Dooce in 2001. It quickly amassed a dedicated following of young mothers who found Armstrong’s candid and deeply personal posts about the realities of motherhood captivating.

“She was a transformative figure not just in the parenting and family space, but in what we now take for granted in terms of the digital ecosystem,” said Catherine Connors, the senior vice president of creator experiences at the marketing firm Raptive and a former blogger. “She was one of the first well known bloggers in any category and had an absolutely radical impact when she began writing honestly about motherhood and her mental health issues.”

Armstrong detailed her struggles with postpartum depression, her conflicted emotions about parenting, her battles with alcoholism, her marriage, and eventual divorce. She broke taboos about religion, detailing her choice to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her death was announced on her Instagram page Wednesday.

Armstrong is credited by many with upending a women’s media world that until the early 2000s largely portrayed an idealized version of motherhood, a time when home life was considered private, and issues related to family and children were deemed too personal to discuss publicly.

«

I wonder to what extent living her life online amplified or intensified her struggles. British media had women with imperfect lives turning it into well-paid fare long before Dooce. (Hello, Liz Jones, still going strong.)
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The 50 worst album covers by rock and metal bands • Louder

Simon Young:

»

Before the days of streaming, rock and metal fans would flip through the racks at their local vinyl dealers and often buy an album based on its cover art. How many musicians have enthusiastically revealed that they got into Iron Maiden primarily based on Derek Riggs’ paintings of Eddie? 

But sometimes, bands get it wrong. This examination of the worst rock and metal album covers is not a comment on the music contained within, but more of a dry heave, a wince or a toe-curling cringe at some creative misfires which were designed, printed and placed in shops before anyone stopped for a moment to realise how awful the art was. 

Brace yourselves for what could be considered a crime in the art world.

«

The amazing thing about so many of these album covers is how cheap the artwork is. A lot of it literally looks as though someone in the band drew the short straw. The Black Sabbath one is actually close to tolerable. (It’s the second on the list.) But then things really get bad. You have been warned.
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Why digital speedometers appear to update slowly • TomTom Blog

Matthew Beedham:

»

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a tweet criticizing the fact that digital speedometers don’t update faster than every half a second. In this era of high-power processors and high-refresh rate, high-resolution screens, the fact that modern car speedos take a perceptible amount of time to update is, on the surface, puzzling. It’s enough to drive some people “nuts”. Clearly, carmakers could make digital speedometers that update ultra-fast, so why don’t they?

…To put it bluntly, speedometers that update very fast, are constantly changing speed and update with a very high refresh rate are distracting and hard to use. Sure, they look cool in drag strip videos, but using them in the real world is quite different.

“I expect this has to do with reducing distraction and cognitive load in a glanceable display”, [TomTom UX designer Drew] Meehan tells me. “If you’re staring at this speed [in the BMW], it looks like it’s refreshing slowly, but in real-world driving conditions, a glance will simply catch a single number, which is easier for our eyes and brains to process.”
In a world of congestion and traffic, drivers must keep their eyes on the road as much as possible. Because they’re hard to read, fast-updating displays could become an unnecessary distraction and lure drivers into taking their eyes off the road for too long.

What’s more, a speedo that refreshes constantly, like a video game, makes it more difficult to settle on a given speed in the blink of an eye. There’s a chance your brain would see multiple numbers simultaneously rather than catching a single number.

«

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Pure Storage says no more spinning hard drives will be sold after 2028 • Blocks and Files

Chris Mellor:

»

In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines.

Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: “The ultimate trigger here is power. It’s just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity.” Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure’s DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part.

[Rosemarin says: “…if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90% while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it’s all becoming evident that hard drives go away.”

Are high electricity prices set to continue?

“I think the UK’s power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here’s the thing … when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down … I’ve been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it’ll take us several years to get there.”

“We’re already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one… we’ve already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can’t come here, we don’t have enough power for you.” 

“The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you’re a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I’m gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable.”

«

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Apple’s first app subscription is here and now we’ll be paying for our devices forever • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

For the first time, Apple is introducing a subscription model for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which will run $4.99 a month or $49 a year apiece after a one-month free trial. You can’t buy it outright even if you wanted to and it’s doubtful Apple will ever offer a “lite” version for a flat fee. As the Mandalorian would say, “This is the way.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Apple has offered a subscription to one of its products. It sells a variety of services (TV , Music, iCloud , etc.) as well as the Apple One bundles. But it has long been rumored to be exploring hardware and software subscriptions to boost recurring sales. A Final Cut Pro subscription was referenced in a trademark filing years ago, and a hardware subscription service for the iPhone and other devices has been reportedly in the works for more than a year. So this was inevitable if not obvious.

While the Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro subscriptions make perfect sense on the iPad Pro, where people are less willing to spend hundreds of dollars upfront on a single app, it’s hard not to see the move as a sign of things to come. 

For the time being, the Mac version will stay as a one-time payment. As it stands, the Mac version of Final Cut Pro is still available for $299.99 while Logic Pro costs $199.99, but those prices seem unlikely to last. The last major update to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro came in October 2021, so they’re due for updates, very possibly to version 11 later this year or early next. And I don’t think anyone would be surprised if Apple switches to a subscription model.

…Let’s face it: Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are trial balloons. If people balk at the costs, it’s a relatively low-risk endeavor, especially since users have been making do without these apps on their tablets for years. But if they subscribe in droves—and I’m pretty certain they will—it won’t be long before everything Apple sells, from the iPhone to the apps that run on it, will be a service.

«

“If you want to imagine the future, Winston, think of a standing order paying for ever and ever.”
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October 2003: End of an era for Concorde • BBC On This Day

October 2003:

»

The legendary supersonic aircraft, Concorde, has landed at the end of its last commercial passenger flight, amid emotional scenes at Heathrow airport.

The final transatlantic flight, ending 27 years of supersonic history, carried 100 celebrities from New York and touched down at 1605 BST.

As it did so, a huge cheer went up from the thousands of people gathered by the runway on a specially-built grandstand.

Two other Concorde flights had already landed a few minutes earlier, one carrying competition winners on a flight from Edinburgh, and the other completing a trip for invited guests around the Bay of Biscay.

All three aircraft taxied to the BA engineering base, the crews hanging out of the cockpit windows and waving Union Jacks to the crowds.

Actress Joan Collins, who has flown Concorde about 10 times and was on board the flight from New York, said the end of the era was “tragic”.

“The first time I ever flew Concorde was a bit of a white knuckle ride. I am more used to it now, it’s so wonderful to make the journey in three and a half hours,” she said.

«

Concorde was taken out of service because it became even less profitable following a crash in July 2000 just after takeoff when one of its fuel tanks was ruptured by debris on the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport. Strengthening the fuel tanks and guarding against the problem happening again made it (even )heavier. In retrospect, the principle of supersonic passenger jets seems even more crazy given the environmental damage we know they cause.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new Tesla scheme aims to tempt early buyers who were given free Supercharger use for life away – presumably because it’s a money drain. CC-licensed photo by Jakob Härter 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.

Wait for Friday, when there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Tucker Carlson to revive show on Twitter after Fox News dismissal • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

Tucker Carlson will be reviving his show on Twitter, after being abruptly dismissed from Fox News last month.

In a tweet captioned “We’re back,” Carlson on Tuesday shared a video discussing his next moves. The former host said he would be taking his show to Twitter, which he described as “the last remaining platform in the world” to allow free speech.

Carlson offered few details but promised a “new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years”. He did not mention when the show may air. But he did echo many of the same points he has often asserted: that the so-called mainstream media is full of propaganda and lies.

“Twitter is not a partisan site, everybody’s allowed here and we think that’s a good thing,” he said. “And yet, for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets.”

Carlson’s pivot to Twitter comes after the site has become more welcoming to mostly-conservative accounts previously banned for spreading hate speech and disinformation under Elon Musk’s new direction. The billionaire took over the site in October 2022 and promptly allowed previously banished accounts to return, including that of Donald Trump.

Carlson did not make any mention of Musk in his video. Twitter responded to a request for comment with a poop emoji.

«

Comes just as Fox News reports a $54m loss for its first quarter, mostly due to its legal settlement (nearly $800m) to Dominion for lying about the 2020 election.

The key question is: will Carlson’s audience (older, right-wing) really come to Twitter (younger, left-wing)? If it’s a revenue share for ads shown in the “show”, who gets more – Twitter, or Carlson? Can it be profitable for Carlson? Will advertisers withdraw even further in the face of this right-wing lurch? The pivot to video either kills or cures. Let’s see how this one goes.
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Almost half of YouTube viewership happens on TV screens • Insider Intelligence

Daniel Konstantinovic:

»

Nearly half (45%) of all YouTube viewership takes place on TVs, according to internal figures, up from below 30% in 2020. The fast growth has propelled YouTube from a digital-only platform often left out of the conversation of broader entertainment and TV advertising to a direct, major competitor with the world’s largest streaming services.

Time spent watching YouTube on TVs now exceeds any other individual network or streaming service, according to Nielsen data cited by The Information.

YouTube’s viewership on TV screens likely increased as a result of pandemic lockdowns, but it’s far from a fad. The company has been making moves to capture a greater share of connected TV (CTV) audiences, and even before the pandemic, viewership was on the rise.

In March 2020, YouTube viewership on TV screens was up 80% from March 2019, and ad spend was similarly rising. Since then, YouTube has launched a number of quality-of-life features to make the viewing and search experience on TV screens easy, such as allowing the YouTube mobile app to be used as a remote.

Growth isn’t just being driven by YouTube TV, the company’s pay TV offering. In fact, the majority of TV user growth is coming from YouTube’s free, standard service.

«

Quite astonishing. Not absolutely clear whether that’s viewing inside the US or around the world. Means that YouTube Premium becomes just another streaming subscription for many families. Does the same radicalisation process that happens for other YouTube viewers happen with them too?
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US says it has disabled major Russian cyberespionage operation • The Washington Post

Perry Stein:

»

Federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday that they have hacked and disabled a complex Russian cyberespionage operation that allegedly was used for about 20 years to steal sensitive government materials from the United States and its allies.

Justice Department and FBI officials described the Russian operation as one of the country’s most powerful cyberespionage tools. They said the agency has been secretly investigating the network for nearly as long it was in operation but executed a court-authorized search warrant only this week to remotely hamper the Russian malware.

Law enforcement personnel had to surreptitiously develop their own cyberinfrastructure to interact with and disrupt the malware, which the Russians were constantly updating and changing, the officials said.
The U.S. government, which coordinated its investigative activities with foreign governments, also had to time the execution of the search warrant to access the compromised computers simultaneously to keep the Russians from reacting and thwarting the operation.

The law enforcement officials said they believe their actions this week will make it difficult for Russia to continuing operating this spying network.

…FBI officials said the malware, known as “Snake,” was developed and operated by the Federal Security Service, the Russian government’s main security agency, which uses the acronym FSB.

The Russians allegedly used the malware to steal sensitive information from computer systems in at least 50 countries, including members of the NATO alliance, and to spy on journalists and other Russian “targets of interest,” the officials said.

«

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TikTok tracked users who watched gay content, prompting employee complaints • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Byron Tau:

»

For at least a year, some employees at TikTok were able to find what they described internally as a list of users who watch gay content on the popular app, a collection of information that sparked worker complaints, according to former TikTok employees.

TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.

Other topics in TikTok’s data set also included lists of users, but the former employees didn’t consider those topics to be sensitive. TikTok workers in the US, UK and Australia in 2020 and 2021 raised concerns about this practice to higher-level executives, saying they feared employees might share the data with outside parties, or that it could be used to blackmail users, according to some of the former TikTok employees.

Many social-media and ad-tech companies infer traits about their users based on online behavior. They use it to select which content or ads to serve to users.

Social-media and ad-tech industry practices, however, discourage tracking potentially sensitive traits such as sexuality, according to people who work with digital information. This data can essentially create a list of vulnerable users in parts of the world where some LGBT people face harassment and violence.

«

These stories come out, like bankruptcy, slowly and then all at once. But the behaviour is always something constant. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is company culture.
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Tesla tries to get owners to give up ‘unlimited free Supercharging for life’ • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

»

For the first few years of selling Model S and Model X, Tesla was offering free Supercharging for the vehicle’s life.

It was a really enticing offer since you could technically not have to pay to power your vehicle ever. Of course, that’s if you don’t charge at home and only use the Supercharger network, which is not ideal for most people, but it is an extremely valuable perk for some power users.

In 2018, Tesla ended the perk after claiming that it was unsustainable – though it did temporarily bring it back as a sale incentive at times.

There are still today a few hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles with unlimited free Supercharging around the world.

Earlier this year, Tesla made a first effort to try to get those vehicles off the perk by offering owners an extra $5,000 discount if they trade in a Model S and Model X with unlimited free Supercharging.

Now Tesla is doubling down on this effort by launching what it calls a new “Ownership Loyalty Benefit.”
The automaker is offering those owners six years of unlimited Supercharging when buying a new Model S or Model X by the end of the quarter.

The offer makes it clear that the goal is to remove unlimited Supercharging:

»

Current Tesla Model S or Model X owners with active unlimited free Supercharging are eligible for 6 years of unlimited Supercharging. To qualify, owners must trade in or remove unlimited Supercharging from their vehicle and take delivery of a new Model S or Model X by June 30, 2023.

«

«

Always a problem when you offer a “free for life” product early on: what if it’s too popular? It’s much like the problem that some airlines had with “free for life” flights.
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Nearly 50 news websites are ‘AI-generated’, a study says. Would I be able to tell? • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

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Breaking news from celebritiesdeaths.com: the president is dead.

At least that’s what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline “Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET”. The site explained that Joe Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep” and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: “I’m sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy on generating misleading content.”

Celebritiesdeaths.com is among 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software”. The sites publish up to hundreds of articles daily, according to the report, much of that material containing signs of AI-generated content, including “bland language and repetitive phrases”. Some of the articles contain false information and many of the sites are packed with ads, suggesting they’re intended to make money via programmatic, or algorithmically generated, advertising. The sources of the stories aren’t clear: many lack bylines or use fake profile photos. In other words, NewsGuard says, experts’ fears that entire news organizations could be generated by AI have already become reality.

It’s hard to imagine who would believe this stuff – if Biden had died, the New York Times would probably cover it – and all 49 sites contain at least one instance of AI error messaging containing phrases such as “I cannot complete this prompt” or “as an AI language model”. But, as Futurism points out, a big concern here is that false information on the sites could serve as the basis for future AI content, creating a vicious cycle of fake news.

What do these sites look like – and would AI articles always be as easy to spot as the report of Biden’s death? I spent an afternoon in the brave new world of digital nonsense to find out.

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It is quite scary how junk these sites are, and yet they’ll also benefit by siphoning off colossal amounts of advertising revenue.
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People are arguing in court that real images are deepfakes • NPR

Shannon Bond:

»

In 2016, Elon Musk went on stage at a tech conference outside Los Angeles and made a bold statement about the self-driving capability of Teslas.

“A Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now,” the CEO told the Code Conference audience during a Q&A session following his interview with tech journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Video of the session has been up on YouTube for nearly seven years. But it recently came back into the spotlight as part of a lawsuit brought by the family of a man who died when his Tesla crashed while using the self-driving feature. The family’s lawyers cited that 2016 claim, along with others Musk has made about Tesla’s self-driving software.

But the carmaker’s lawyers pushed back.

Musk, “like many public figures, is the subject of many ‘deepfake’ videos and audio recordings that purport to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did,” they wrote in a court filing, going on to describe several fake videos of the billionaire

…In Musk’s case, the judge did not buy his lawyers’ claims.

“What Tesla is contending is deeply troubling to the Court,” Judge Evette Pennypacker wrote in a ruling ordering Musk to testify under oath.

“Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deepfakes, his public statements are immune,” she wrote. “In other words, Mr. Musk, and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deepfake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do. The Court is unwilling to set such a precedent by condoning Tesla’s approach here.”.

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Totally predictable, in its way.
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Spotify ejects thousands of AI-made songs in purge of fake streams • FT via Ars Technica

Anna Nicolaou:

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Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from artificial intelligence music startup Boomy, ramping up policing of its platform amid complaints of fraud and clutter across streaming services.

In recent months the music industry has been confronting the rise of AI-generated songs and, more broadly, the growing number of tracks inundating streaming platforms daily.

Spotify, the largest audio streaming business, recently took down about 7% of the tracks that had been uploaded by Boomy, the equivalent of “tens of thousands” of songs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Recording giant Universal Music had flagged to all the main streaming platforms that it saw suspicious streaming activity on Boomy tracks, according to another person close to the situation.

The Boomy songs were removed because of suspected “artificial streaming”—online bots posing as human listeners to inflate the audience numbers for certain songs.

AI has made this type of activity easier because it allows someone to instantly generate many music tracks, which can then be uploaded online and streamed.

Boomy, which was launched two years ago, allows users to choose various styles or descriptors, such as “rap beats” or “rainy nights,” to create a machine-generated track. Users can then release the music to streaming services, where they will generate royalty payments. California-based Boomy says its users have created more than 14 million songs.

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And so the arms race enters a new stage.
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March 2002: Woman granted ‘right to die’ • BBC On This Day

March 2002:

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A woman paralysed from the neck down has won the legal right to die by having her treatment withdrawn.

The judge in the case then urged her to reconsider her decision.

The 43-year-old woman, known as Miss B after she was granted anonymity, watched via a video-link from her hospital bed as Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss delivered the landmark ruling.

Miss B, who was born in Jamaica but moved to Britain aged eight, said afterwards: “I am very pleased with the outcome.”

It means doctors at the hospital where she is being treated, which cannot be identified, will have to switch off the ventilator keeping her alive whenever she chooses.

Dame Elizabeth said the former social care professional had the “necessary mental capacity” to make the decision to reject treatment. But she added: “She is a splendid person and it is tragic that someone of her ability has been struck down so cruelly.

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This seemed to some as though the door to assisted suicide was being opened, but in fact it was just the normal adult right to refuse treatment. More than 20 years later, assisted suicide still isn’t legal in the UK, despite numerous test cases.

(If you’re wondering why I’m including stories from years past, it’s because they match the number of today’s edition! Don’t worry, ends this week. Otherwise I’d be bringing you news from the future, which would be quite a feat.
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The UK’s Online Safety Bill, explained • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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The UK government’s elevator pitch is that the bill is fundamentally an attempt to make the internet safer, particularly for children. It attempts to crack down on illegal content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and to minimize the possibility that kids might encounter harmful and age-inappropriate content, including online harassment as well as content that glorifies suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders.

But it’s difficult to TL;DR the Online Safety Bill at this point, precisely because it’s become so big and sprawling. On top of these broad strokes, the bill has a host of other rules. It requires online platforms to let people filter out objectionable content. It introduces age verification for porn sites. It criminalizes fraudulent ads. It requires sites to consistently enforce their terms of service. And if companies don’t comply, they could be fined up to £18m (around $22.5m) or 10% of global revenue, see their services blocked, and even their executives jailed.

In short, the Online Safety Bill has become a catchall for UK internet regulation, mutating every time a new prime minister or digital minister has taken up the cause.

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This is a good writeup, though there’s still disagreement about what the encryption element entails. A Tory MP (Damian Collins, who sits on the relevant committee) insisted on Tuesday that what’s required is not decryption of messages, but to reveal (if required) any metadata collected about encrypted messaging. I wouldn’t be absolutely sure that he’s right and all the companies are wrong, however.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There are signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s excitement about the metaverse is waning in favour of AI. Well, who can blame him? It’s what people want. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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. Quite the odyssey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google IO to feature AI updates, showing off PaLM 2 LLM • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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Artificial intelligence is going to be a central theme at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, as the company is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM), CNBC has learned.

According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename “Unified Language Model.” It’s also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis.

At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is “helping people reach their full potential,” including “generative experiences” to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company’s AI advancements.

The updates come as competition ramps up in the AI arm’s race, with Google and Microsoft racing to incorporate chat AI technology into their products. Microsoft is using its investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI to bolster its Bing search engine, while Google has quickly mobilized to try and incorporate its Bard technology and its own LLM across various teams.

Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses “generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts.” 

Last month, Google said its medical LLM called “Med-PaLM 2” can answer medical exam questions at an “expert doctor level” and is accurate 85% of the time.

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Remember that sorta-AI doodad which was going to phone your hairdresser and make an appointment for you? Whatever happened to that? Google has a bad habit of announcing things at I/O which don’t appear. Maybe these will be different?
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May 2001: Scientists warn of more CJD cases • BBC On This Day

May 2001:

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Leading experts on new variant CJD, the human form of BSE or “mad cow” disease, have warned the current outbreak could get much worse.

So far, 99 people have had the disease and nearly all of them have died.

New evidence gathered from experiments on mice suggests this first batch of cases could be followed in a few years’ time by a much larger “second wave”.

Professor John Collinge is one of the government’s top advisors on vCJD and director of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit in London.

He has found that a small number of the mice he observed got vCJD fairly quickly while the rest had a longer incubation period before contracting the disease.

“I don’t want to be alarmist about this,” he said “but it’s entirely possible and we have to consider that what we are looking at, at the moment is, thankfully, a very small incidence of the disease amongst a small sub-section of the population. It may be five or ten years before the rest of the population of those at risk develop the disease.”

«

The government had admitted the existence of vCJD back in 1996, but there was still uncertainty about how many people might develop the disease – an awful descent into helplessness as holes developed in the brain. I discovered a study, which wasn’t published, by the official vCJD unit, which estimated the final death toll would be in the hundreds, perhaps peaking in 2003.

The most recent figures show 178 deaths since the first ones were recorded in 1995, with none from 2017. The peak, of 28 deaths, was in 2000.
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The Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s tech obession, is officially dead. ChatGPT killed it • Business Insider

Ed Zitron:

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The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people losing their jobs.

But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.” Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers, despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be “Metaverse first.” While Zuckerberg may suggest that developing games for the Quest headsets is some sort of investment, the writing is on the wall: Meta is done with the Metaverse.

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Zitron is (when he’s not being a PR guy) a polemicist, rather than a journalist. However it’s hard to disagree: everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, nobody’s talking about the metaverse. Got to feel Apple’s going to be facing some serious headwinds if it does release a VR headset. (I’m still sceptical.)
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I know the motive behind every mass shooting • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Kimberly Harrington:

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“The shooting came barely a week after a man fatally shot five people in Cleveland, Texas, after a neighbor asked him to stop firing his weapon while a baby slept. It also follows other rampages in recent days, including the fatal shootings of six victims in a home in Oklahoma City on Monday, and gunfire that killed one and injured four in a medical facility in Atlanta on Wednesday.” — NBC News

CLEVELAND, TEXAS: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

OKLAHOMA CITY: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

ATLANTA: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

I’m not a cop, a star witness, an FBI agent, or a forensic psychologist. I’m not a clairvoyant, I’m bad at math, and I lie to my doctor about doing regular breast exams. But even I—an ordinary American citizen with soft morals and the ability to take in basic information and discern simple patterns—know what the motive was behind every mass shooting. Every single one.

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Put like this, it is pretty obvious. All the chin-scratching around whether the latest mass shooting was by someone who was an extreme right-winger or just a bit right-wing or what tends to overlook this simple, basic fact: such people exist in other countries too, including the UK. And yet: the mass shootings are a thing you only find in the US. Because…

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Florida tosses climate lifeline to swamped ‘Keybillies’ • E&E News

Daniel Cusick:

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A steady outflow of low- and middle-income residents — beginning after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and again after 2017’s Hurricane Irma — has demographically reshaped Big Pine Key. Longtime residents who work the service and labour jobs undergirding the Keys’ multibillion-dollar tourism economy are being squeezed out. New people with deeper pockets and greater mobility are moving in, often with cash in hand.

In the years after Wilma, Big Pine Key lost a fourth of its population, bottoming out at 3,777 people in 2012, according to Census Bureau data. It rebounded over the next decade — a relatively quiet period for Florida hurricanes — peaking at 5,339 in 2017. Then came Irma, the Keys’ second-strongest storm in a century. It whittled Big Pine Key’s population back down to 4,521 in three years, a 15% drop.

After each hurricane, Big Pine Key’s low-income residents had little to return to, and those who did found themselves packed into substandard houses or mobile home parks. Some sprawling trailer communities with reputations for colorful tenants and rough-and-ready living shuttered after Irma, drawing complaints of no-notice evictions and money-grubbing landlords.

What a difference five years makes. Big Pine Key is rebuilding again, and real estate values have nearly doubled since Irma, from $390,000 in 2018 to $777,000 in 2022, according to the real estate site Redfin. Cleared lots are going for six figures, and even unbuildable lots bound by state-imposed growth restrictions can fetch $80,000 or more. Those prices are putting added pressure on long-term Keys residents.

[Saima] Kawzinsky and her fiancé of 10 years currently pay $1,650 per month in rent for a 2-bedroom elevated home built by an affordable housing land trust created by a local philanthropist.

“We want to buy a house, but it’s getting harder and harder,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s either going to be me and my family living an underwater lifestyle or leaving and getting our heads just above water.”

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“Her fiancé of 10 years” is a phrase that tells its own story. Of course climate change is affecting the low-paid in America first; that’s how it’s going to go everywhere.
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TikTok spied on me. Why? • FT via Ars Technica

Cirstina Criddle:

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One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working on anything related to the company at the time.

The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, “as a courtesy,” that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I’d read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters’ data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers’ sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance’s chief executive lamented the incident as the “misconduct of a few individuals.”

When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is, and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.

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Even the FT’s security team couldn’t stop TikTok trying to invade her privacy.
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The new Microsoft Bing AI wants to be the future of everything • Fast Company

Ryan Broderick:

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The new version of Bing runs on OpenAI’s newest language model, GPT-4. It integrates it further into the Bing search engine and the Edge web browser and centralizes all of its various processes into one interface—including the ability to generate images right in the same window, using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image tool. But Bing AI doesn’t just pull all of this into one window, it offers some significant upgrades on how these services work.

The big addition to Bing is chat history. If you’ve never used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the AI creates a thread for every query you ask. If you come back to that thread, the AI just picks up where you left off. Bing now has that feature, as well, but it also allows you to name your chat threads, organize them, and export them to a PDF or Microsoft Word document.

Bing also has real-time access to Bing search results, a feature that, in its early stages, led to critics describing it as “psychotic.” The chatbot seems a lot more mild-mannered these days, and as a guard against fake results (aka hallucinations), when it returns summaries, it does so with citations pulled in from Bing search. Even more impressive, when running Bing’s AI inside the Edge browser, it can summarize long articles and will include in-page citations, allowing you to find the exact text it’s referencing.

I asked Bing for advice about where to go while I’m on a trip in Milan next week, and it spit out five decent-enough suggestions. It also allowed me to click on the links it was summarizing and then, via an AI chatbot sidebar in the Edge browser, it was able to answer specific questions about the web page I was viewing.

Sarah Mody, Microsoft’s director of global search and AI product marketing, tells Fast Company that they’re hoping to inspire “magic moments,” where the AI suddenly surprises you with what it’s capable of. For her, it was a realization that Bing AI could not only generate a recipe, but also organize the ingredients based on where they would likely be found in the supermarket (an admittedly impressive feat).

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OK, it’s impressive – for about ten seconds. But you have to go around the supermarket. Sure, vegetables will be by the entrance and drinks nearer the exit, but don’t you know, Bing, that this stuff gets shuffled around all the time?

Anyhow, the tsunami continues.
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Your Twitter feed sucks now. These free add-ons can help • WIRED

Justin Pot:

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I’m not here to judge anyone who pays for Twitter Blue. However, I’m not a fan of pay-to-win mechanics. At this point, Twitter is a game where players compete for the most attention; Twitter Blue is overpowered DLC [downloadable content]. If you buy a subscription, your tweets are shown at the top of comment threads and prioritized in other contexts, including the “For You” page. This makes Blue the social media equivalent of paying for unlimited ammo or improved body armour, regardless of who you are or whether what you have to say is worth promoting.

It also makes Twitter really annoying to use. No one wants to play with the people who are paying to win. That’s why there’s so much mockery of, and desire to avoid, Twitter Blue users.

Granted, there are plenty of reasons why longtime Twitter power users—in particular, public figures or people who historically have trouble with impersonators—might pay for Twitter Blue. No one wants to lose an audience they worked hard to build, and Twitter has the right to monetize itself however it likes. You also have the right to consume (or not consume) the social media you choose.

All the same, it can’t be denied that a lot of really annoying posts from Twitter Blue users with low follower counts show up in all kinds of contexts. If you don’t want to see those posts, I don’t blame you, and here’s how you can filter them all out.

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Basically, use a Chrome extension. Or just look at the people you’re Following. (Though I suspect that some of the people who you follow are shifted to the For You tab, meaning you miss them. Can’t prove it, though.)
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Marissa Mayer on AI, tech fears, and Yahoo regrets • Morning Brew

Patrick Kulp speaks to the ex-CEO of Yahoo, ex-veep of Google, who is now running an AI startup that wants to organise your contacts list:

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PK: If there is one thing that you could have done differently in your time at Yahoo, what would it be?

MM: My perspective on Yahoo is there are probably three things I would have done differently. One is obvious—I hired the wrong COO; I would have hired a different COO. I would have hired [current Integral Ad Science CEO] Lisa Utzschneider, who became my chief revenue officer. And that would have been great.

We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr [for $1.1bn]. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4bn and Hulu was at $1.3bn at the time. And either of those, with hindsight being 20/20, would have been a better acquisition.

And probably the biggest one—if you made me name just one—is that we should have done the tax-free Alibaba spinoff to separate the assets of the company. Because one, if we had done that, it would have saved $10bn for our shareholders or made them that money, whichever way you look at it, in taxes that were paid. And two, it would have allowed Yahoo to continue as an independent company, and it would have potentially had more success. Now it is an independent company and privately held by private equity. But I’m not sure that the foray through Verizon was as helpful to some of the technologies and what they had to offer as it could have been.

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Of course you’re wondering who the “wrong COO” was. It was Henrique de Castro, who she hired over from Google but binned after a year (to January 2014)

Wonder if Netflix would have been for sale. It would have been a brutal takeover fight, and probably would have flamed out over the huge cashflow problem: Mayer would have wanted to data it to death, but Netflix is a content company, not a data company. So, bullet dodged.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Millennium Bridge opened in London in 2000 – and almost immediately closed because pedestrians made it sway. And sway. CC-licensed photo by pablocanenpablocanen 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 was another post on Friday at the Social Warming Substack – about the challenge of moderating Twitter. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Still going. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI is tearing Wikipedia apart • Vice

Claire Woodcock:

»

It didn’t take long for researchers to figure out that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a terrible fabricator, which is what tends to doom students who rely solely on the chatbot to write their essays. Sometimes it will invent articles and their authors. Other times it will name-splice lesser known scholars with more prolific ones, but will do so with the utmost confidence. OpenAI has even said that the model “hallucinates” when it makes up facts—a term that has been criticized by some AI experts as a way for AI companies to avoid accountability for their tools spreading misinformation. 

“The risk for Wikipedia is people could be lowering the quality by throwing in stuff that they haven’t checked,” Bruckman added. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a first draft, but every point has to be verified.” 

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the website, is looking into building tools to make it easier for volunteers to identify bot-generated content. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is working to draft a policy that lays out the limits to how volunteers can use large language models to create content.

The current draft policy notes that anyone unfamiliar with the risks of large language models should avoid using them to create Wikipedia content, because it can open the Wikimedia Foundation up to libel suits and copyright violations—both of which the nonprofit gets protections from but the Wikipedia volunteers do not.

…The community is also divided on whether large language models should be allowed to train on Wikipedia content. While open access is a cornerstone of Wikipedia’s design principles, some worry the unrestricted scraping of internet data allows AI companies like OpenAI to exploit the open web to create closed commercial datasets for their models. This is especially a problem if the Wikipedia content itself is AI-generated, creating a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked.

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June 2000: Swaying Millennium Bridge closed • BBC On This Day

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Huge crowds of people have been blamed for forcing the temporary closure of London’s new bridge on the day of its opening.

The city’s first new river crossing for decades began swaying violently in the wind under the weight of hundreds of pedestrians on Saturday morning.

Police became concerned and the bridge was closed briefly while engineers made safety checks to the structure.

A limit was subsequently imposed on the number of pedestrians allowed to cross the bridge, which spans the Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Tate Modern gallery on the South Bank.

A spokesman for architects Foster and Partners who designed the bridge with engineers Ove Arup and Partners said: “Because there was such a huge number walking all at once across the bridge, which is very unusual, there was a certain amount of swaying.

“The bridge is intended to have some movement. It’s a suspension bridge – if there isn’t movement there can be a problem.”

Pedestrians had to wait for half an hour before they were able to continue crossing the bridge.

The project cost more than £18m and was designed by architect Sir Norman Foster and the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro.

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This was a fascinating story: the problem was that people walking really did cause it to sway unpleasantly. Arup were properly surprised. It required £5m worth of 91 dampers to stop the movement. I wrote about it for The Independent; it was a sort of British Tacoma Narrows, except stopping well short of the self-destruction.
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Which jobs will be most impacted by ChatGPT? • Visual Capitalist

»

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI heralded a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) by introducing ChatGPT to the world.

The AI chatbot stunned users with its human-like and thorough responses. ChatGPT could comprehend and answer a variety of different questions, make suggestions, research and write essays and briefs, and even tell jokes (amongst other tasks).

Many of these skills are used by workers in their jobs across the world, which begs the question: which jobs will be transformed, or even replaced, by generative AI in the coming future?

This infographic from Harrison Schell visualizes the March 2023 findings of OpenAI on the potential labor market impact of large language models (LLMs) and various applications of generative AI, including ChatGPT.

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“High exposure” to the change, apparently, will be jobs which fit in these categories: interpreters + translators; survey researchers; writers and authors; public relations specialists; tax preparers; mathematicians; blockchain engineers; proofreaders and copy markers; accountants and auditors.

“Low exposure”: athletes, automotive repairers, cement masons, cooks, piledriver operators, stonemasons, tire repairers and changers, dishwashers, carpenter helpers.

To which I have a few queries: “blockchain engineers”?? And what’s the difference between a “tax preparer” and an accountant/auditor? Doesn’t one subsume the other? Also, presumably crane operators are there with piledriver operators. Though “athlete” sounds more fun. (Not listed on either side: “Wikipedia contributor”.)
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Ex-Googlers blast Geoffrey Hinton’s past silence on fired AI experts • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan:

»

women who for years have been speaking out about AI’s problems—even at the expense of their jobs—say Hinton’s alarmism isn’t just opportunistic but also overshadows specific warnings about AI’s actual impacts on marginalized people.

“It’s disappointing to see this autumn-years redemption tour from someone who didn’t really show up” for other Google dissenters, says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and an AI researcher who says she was pushed out of Google in 2019 in part over her activism against the company’s contract to build machine vision technology for U.S. military drones. (Google has maintained that Whittaker chose to resign.)

“I didn’t see any solidarity or any action when there were people really trying to organize and do something about the harms that are happening now,” she says.

Another prominent ex-Googler, Margaret Mitchell, who co-led the company’s ethical AI team, criticized Hinton for not denouncing Google’s 2020 firing of her coleader Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher who had spoken up about AI’s risks for women and people of color. 

“This would’ve been a moment for Dr. Hinton to denormalize the firing of [Gebru],” Mitchell tweeted on Monday. “He did not. This is how systemic discrimination works.”

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Do colonoscopies really save lives? • The Science Writer

John Horgan:

»

NordICC, for Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer, is the first large-scale, randomized trial of colonoscopy. The study focused on 84,585 men and women 55-64 years old in Sweden, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands. The researchers randomly divided subjects into two groups: one invited to get a colonoscopy, the other not. 

NordICC measured rates of death from colon cancer and from any cause in these two groups after 10 years. Some researchers favor “all-cause” mortality, because tests and treatments for a specific cancer can result in deaths unattributed to that cancer.

Colonoscopy can cause perforation of the colon, bleeding and infection; patients may also have adverse reactions to purging of the bowels and sedation. A 2016 study of 331,880 people who underwent colonoscopies found that 1.6% had complications serious enough to require “unplanned hospital visits” within one week. 

NordICC found that the risk of death from colon cancer after 10 years was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the control group. The difference in risk of death from any cause was even smaller: 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the uninvited group. These are not statistically significant differences.

Defenders of colonoscopy seize on the fact that only 42% of the NordICC subjects invited to get a colonoscopy actually got it; this group’s mortality rate from colon cancer was 0.15, significantly less than the control rate of 0.31. The Colon Cancer Coalition says this finding confirms that “colonoscopy saves lives.” But this lower mortality rate might reflect self-selection bias, precisely what NordICC was designed to overcome.

«

Horgan also suggests following the money (which, in the US, would certainly make sense), which takes you to companies which benefit a lot from carrying out colonoscopies.
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IPCC’s conservative nature masks true scale of action needed to avert catastrophic climate change • The Conversation

Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester:

»

If we step outside the rarefied realm of IAM [climate modelling] scenarios that leading climate scientist Johan Rockström describes as “academic gymnastics that have nothing to do with reality”, it’s clear that not exceeding 1.5°C or 2°C [of excess warming] will require fundamental changes to most facets of modern life.

Starting now, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise.

Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO₂ emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

Most IAM models ignore and often even exacerbate the obscene inequality in energy use and emissions, both within nations and between individuals. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, the top 10% of emitters accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions from energy use in 2021, compared with 0.2% for the bottom 10%. More disturbingly, the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 1% are 1.5 times those of the bottom half of the world’s population.

So where does this leave us? In wealthier nations, any hope of arresting global heating at 1.5ºC or 2°C demands a technical revolution on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan. Rather than relying on technologies such as direct air capture of CO₂ to mature in the near future, countries like the UK must rapidly deploy tried-and-tested technologies.

«

I don’t like what I believe the narrator’s voice is going to say in a couple of decades’ time.
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The coronation was an act of magic for a country scared the spell might break • POLITICO

Tanya Gold on cracking form:

»

That lack of confidence in the magic spell was obvious at breakfast time. As the congregation spooled into Westminster Abbey, with actors at the front — kings tend to like actors, as they have the same job — the head of the anti-monarchist pressure group Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested near Trafalgar Square with five other republican leaders. The peaceful protest, he told me last week, was organized with the approval of the Metropolitan Police. They arrested him anyway, confiscated the placards, and blamed the string which tied the placards together for breaking the rules. (Apparently they might have used it to “lock” onto buildings.) A few hours later the king swore to serve us, which means serving our democracy. So he has already failed.

The protest went on in Trafalgar Square, but the BBC cut away as the cavalcade passed. Screens were erected in front of the protest, as if our eyes — and the king’s — were too delicate to be allowed to see it. We were told the police operation passed off without incident. The Duke of York was booed as he left Buckingham Palace, but that too was not reported on. The BBC was in the hagiography business at this coronation, and it was fervent and vapid. This is possibly tactical — they fear what an unpopular nativist government will do to their funding model — but it also indicates a nation afraid of itself. A deputy chairman of the Conservative Party suggested all republicans emigrate. They were all afraid the spell might break.

Then came the pomp: the fantastical costumes, the militarism, the uneasy horses, one of which panicked and backed into the crowd. Another marched sideways. It was lovely to look at, but it is the fumes of Empire, which of course is why the Mall was full.

«

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Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges • Nature

Katharine Sanderson:

»

More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May.

Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs

«

This is the challenge that the open access model faces. The alternative to getting lots of institutions to pay a regular subscription to get paywalled access to scientific research is: get smaller numbers of individuals (or institutions) to pay occasional large amounts to make their scientific research available for free. The former is the usual Nature/Science/etc model, the latter is “open access”. But what’s the right price for the latter?

Or does it need a third, alternative model?
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A $15.8m mistake: why San Francisco can’t pay its teachers on time • SF Chronicle

Bilal Mahmood:

»

In 2019, the [San Francisco] school district approved a $9.5m contract with the consulting company Infosys to replace the payroll system that had been used for 17 years. The new system was originally set to go live in 2021 but wasn’t rolled out until 2022, delays that raised costs by about $7m.

When the EMPowerSF system finally did go live, problems immediately emerged. Hundreds of teachers didn’t get their paychecks.

Months went by with no resolution. By the end of the summer of 2022, the district finally hired a consulting firm named Alvarez & Marsel to diagnose and audit the issue. Over the course of the year, the firm’s initial contract of $2.8m was extended so it could stabilize the problem, costing the district another $8m. In 2023, an additional $5m was spent to finally fix the problem.

What Alvarez & Marsel’s audit found was shocking: 64 software bugs had gone undetected in the EMPowerSF system for nearly a year, with 18 of the bugs affecting pay rules management, 12 bugs affecting the user interface, 7 affecting leave management, 7 affecting time management, 5 affecting benefits management and 15 bugs affecting other system protocols.

These bugs resulted in employees being paid even after they were terminated, incorrect daily rates being set for paid leave during pregnancy disability and annual salary fields for certificated bi-weekly employees being incorrectly pro-rated.

To add insult to injury, the same software underlying the EMPowerSF system had been used once before in a California school district. In 2007, Los Angeles Unified School District also launched a payroll system powered by the same software, and it also failed to pay teachers on time.

Compounding matters, the San Francisco school district lacked personnel with the technical experience to support the implementation of the new system. To successfully implement a payroll transition, you need experienced financial operators, technical administrators and, perhaps most important, software engineers to transfer hundreds of thousands of records between systems.

«

“Turnkey” systems never are. And I’ve never seen a company merger get its payroll to run smoothly. Unsurprising if a school district can’t either.
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Over half of Twitter Blue’s earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Twitter Blue’s struggles since its launch nearly six months ago are more severe than previously revealed, new data suggests.

Since Musk’s version of the subscription service launched last November, Twitter has only been able to convert around 640,000 Twitter users into paying Twitter Blue subscribers as of the end of April, as Mashable reported earlier this week.

While those numbers are lacklustre, an even more telling detail about Twitter Blue is just how many of its earliest subscribers have canceled their subscriptions.

Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.

The total early subscriber numbers are linked directly to internal leaks published by the Washington Post last year showing that a total of 150,000 users originally signed up for Twitter Blue within just a few days of its launch in November. Twitter temporarily disabled new signups for about a month shortly after those users subscribed as a result of accounts signing up for Blue with the intent to impersonate major brands on the platform.

That means around 81,843 users, or 54.5%, of Twitter users who subscribed to Twitter Blue when it first launched in November are no longer subscribed to the service. That’s an abnormally high churn rate for an online subscription service. Churn rate is the percentage of users that unsubscribe from a service.

«

Perhaps all those original ones were troll accounts that got shut down? That would be the optimistic reading. Otherwise it means that they didn’t think Twitter Blue was worth it. Say it ain’t so, Elon!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Remarkably, Apple and Google are working together to prevent AirTags being used for stalking. But what about for tracking your car? CC-licensed photo by Tatsuo Yamashita on Flickr.

There’s another post at the Social Warming Substack, due about 0845. It’s about the puzzle of correcting things on social networks.

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. Nearly around again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

EU warns Apple about limiting speeds of uncertified USB-C cables for iPhones • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

It was rumoured in February that Apple may be planning to limit charging speeds and other functionality of USB-C cables that are not certified under its “Made for iPhone” (MFi) program. Like the Lightning port on existing iPhones, a small chip inside the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models would confirm the authenticity of the USB-C cable connected.

“I believe Apple will optimize the fast charging performance of MFi-certified chargers for the iPhone 15,” Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in March.

In response to this rumour, European Commissioner Thierry Breton has sent Apple a letter warning the company that limiting the functionality of USB-C cables would not be permitted and would prevent iPhones from being sold in the EU when the law goes into effect, according to German newspaper Die Zeit. The letter was obtained by German press agency DPA, and the report says the EU also warned Apple during a meeting in mid-March.

Given that it has until the end of 2024 to adhere to the law, Apple could still move forward with including an authentication chip in the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models later this year. And with iPhone 16 models expected to launch in September 2024, even those devices would be on the market before the law goes into effect.

The report says the EU intends to publish a guide to ensure a “uniform interpretation” of the legislation by the third quarter of this year.

«

Does Apple have to “limit” the functionality of the cables? It could just put up a warning when you plug in an uncertified one, saying “this is not a certified Apple cable, speeds cannot be guaranteed” (but more briefly). Because USB-C cables really are a lottery. You might find the speeds of charging or data is variable anyway without Apple lifting a finger, or a chip.
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October 1999: Super-cyclone wreaks havoc in India • BBC On This Day

October 1999:

»

A massive cyclone has swept through the state of Orissa in eastern India, killing an unknown number of people and leaving thousands more homeless.

The extent of the damage is difficult to determine. The area is almost impossible to reach, as the cyclone has torn down bridges and made roads and railways impassable. All communications have been cut, and the rescue effort is being hampered by the continuing bad weather.

Officials in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, say nine deaths have been confirmed, but that number is expected to rise rapidly. Many towns and villages have not been able to report casualty figures or damage assessments because telephone lines have been brought down.

The winds are believed to have reached over 160 mph (250 km/h) – some of the highest ever recorded in the region.

A devastating tidal wave has also driven in across the low-lying plains along the coast, wiping out entire villages.

«

Perhaps the first of the serious, climate-change driven, extreme weather events. Though of course picking out one or the other and saying that’s the one is impossible.
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Vice Media reportedly headed for bankruptcy • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

Vice, the global news publisher and TV company that was once valued at nearly $6bn (£5bn), is reportedly close to filing for bankruptcy.

The company, whose assets include Vice News, Motherboard, Refinery29 and Vice TV, has been involved in sale talks with at least five companies in an attempt to avoid filing for bankruptcy, according to the New York Times.

Vice, which hit a valuation of $5.7bn in 2017 as media giants including Rupert Murdoch, WPP and Disney clamoured for a slice of its youth appeal, has been seeking a sale at a price tag of about $1.5bn.

Last week, the company – which has been evaluating its future since plans to float using a special purpose acquisition vehicle (Spac) collapsed two years ago – announced it was cancelling its popular Vice News Tonight as part of a restructuring that could result in more than 100 staff being made redundant.

In February, Fortress Investment Group, the company’s debt holder, extended a $30m funding line to enable Vice to pay overdue bills to vendors. The same month, Nancy Dubuc, who took over as chief executive from controversial co-founder Shane Smith in 2018, announced her surprise departure.

If a sale cannot be agreed – suitors are said to be seeking a sub-$1bn deal – a bankruptcy process would result in Vice continuing to operate normally while an auction process is run.

«

This would be a pity: the Motherboard part of Vice, which writes about the technology world, has consistently been a terrific outlet. It’s hard to think it would continue quite so brightly under a different owner.
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Google internal memo: “we have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Semi Analysis

Dylan Patel, quoting a note that apparently was posted internally by a researcher at Google:

»

the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. Just to name a few:

• LLMs on a phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec
• Scalable Personal AI: You can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening
• Responsible Release: This one isn’t “solved” so much as “obviated”. There are entire websites full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind
• Multimodality: The current multimodal ScienceQA SOTA was trained in an hour.

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13bn params that we struggle with at $10m and 540bn. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us:

We have no secret sauce. Our best hope is to learn from and collaborate with what others are doing outside Google. We should prioritize enabling 3P integrations.

People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.

Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the <20bn parameter regime.

«

Google’s moat (the business element that protects its profits) always used to be its search index and the data gathered from it. But in AI, that doesn’t count for much.
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Google shared AI knowledge with the world – until ChatGPT caught up • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: they had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world.

For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website.

But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things. The San Francisco start-up kept up with Google by reading the team’s scientific papers, Dean said at the quarterly meeting for the company’s research division. Indeed, transformers — a foundational part of the latest AI tech and the T in ChatGPT — originated in a Google study.
Things had to change. Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.

The policy change is part of a larger shift inside Google. Long considered the leader in AI, the tech giant has lurched into defensive mode — first to fend off a fleet of nimble AI competitors, and now to protect its core search business, stock price, and, potentially, its future, which executives have said is intertwined with AI.

«

Best time to build a moat: right about now.
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How eating ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) can affect your mental health • The New York Times

Sally Wadyka:

»

Recent research has demonstrated a link between highly processed foods and low mood. In one 2022 study of over 10,000 adults in the United States, the more UPFs participants ate, the more likely they were to report mild depression or feelings of anxiety. “There was a significant increase in mentally unhealthy days for those eating 60% or more of their calories from UPFs,” Dr. Hecht, the study’s author, said. “This is not proof of causation, but we can say that there seems to be an association.”

New research has also found a connection between high UPF consumption and cognitive decline. A 2022 study that followed nearly 11,000 Brazilian adults over a decade found a correlation between eating ultraprocessed foods and worse cognitive function (the ability to learn, remember, reason and solve problems). “While we have a natural decline in these abilities with age, we saw that this decline accelerated by 28% in people who consume more than 20% of their calories from UPFs,” said Natalia Gomes Goncalves, a professor at the University of São Paulo Medical School and the lead author of the study.

It’s possible that eating a healthy diet may offset the detrimental effects of eating ultraprocessed foods. The Brazilian researchers found that following a healthy eating regimen, like the MIND diet — which is rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts, berries, fish, chicken and olive oil — greatly reduced the dementia risk associated with consuming ultraprocessed foods. Those who followed the MIND diet but still ate UPFs “had no association between UPF consumption and cognitive decline,” Dr. Goncalves said, adding that researchers still don’t know what a safe quantity of UPFs is.

«

The 2022 study does adjust for poverty level – that’s the most obvious thing you’d expect to predict both consumption of UPFs and depression/anxiety. So America, and the rest of us, are eating ourselves into gloom?
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Traders grow wary of ‘unloved’ bitcoin rally • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

»

The degree to which a market can absorb large orders without major changes to the price of bitcoin has declined since the start of the year, according to data provider CCData.

In January it would have required the purchase of more than 1,400 bitcoins, roughly equivalent to $23m at the time, to move the price of the token by more than 1% of its prevailing market value, CCData said.

Towards the end of last month it would have taken only 462 bitcoins, worth about $13m, to move market prices by 1%, the lowest point of market depth for the bitcoin-tether trading pair since May 2022, when the industry plunged into crisis.

“Prices are recovering, but liquidity has yet to return. No exchange or market maker has yet to fill the space that FTX and [its sister trading arm] Alameda once encompassed,” said Michael Safai, managing partner at crypto trading firm Dexterity Capital.

Investors who have bought into bitcoin in recent months are now holding on to their investments.

Glassnode, a crypto data provider, said “there has been remarkably little expenditure” by investors who bought bitcoin when it hit a two-year low after FTX’s failure last November.

“The ‘FOMO’ that drove a lot of first time institutional and retail investors last year is obviously not happening now, despite the fact the crypto markets have rallied significantly this year,” said one crypto fund manager based in Dubai, referring to a fear of missing out.

Moreover, there have been outflows of $72mn over the last two weeks in digital asset investments, ending a six-week run of consecutive inflows, according to CoinShares.

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Wonder when we declare it all a zombie that no longer merits our attention.
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Apple and Google join forces to combat AirTag stalking • Bitdefender

Graham Cluley:

»

Apple and Google have announced that they are teaming up in order to combat the safety risks associated with AirTags and other tracking devices.

In a joint press release, the tech giants revealed that they had teamed up in an effort to thwart the growing problem of Bluetooth tracking devices being used to stalk individuals without their knowledge.

Although such gadgets were invented to help people locate their lost luggage or mislaid car keys, they have also been used to secretly track individuals’ location.

Although the phenomenon is often labelled “Airtag stalking” after the popular device Apple released in 2021, the problem of unwanted location-tracking can also be present with other gadgets, such as those from manufacturers such as Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee.

“Bluetooth trackers have created tremendous user benefits, but they also bring the potential of unwanted tracking, which requires industrywide action to solve,” said Dave Burke, who heads up Android engineering at Google.

Burke isn’t wrong. There are countless media reports of AirTags and their like being used by jealous partners and stalkers to monitor the movements of individuals without their knowledge.  It has even been alleged that one Indiana woman used an AirTag to track her boyfriend, and then – after an argument – murder him.

No major tech company wants to be associated with a technology that is making it easier to stalk people.

So it’s not a huge surprise that in a draft specification lodged with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Google and Apple describe how they aim to protect the privacy of individuals who do not want to either themselves or their belongings unwittingly tracked, by people misusing location-tracking accessories.

«

Not sure how this squares with the NYPD encouraging people to stick AirTags in their Hondas so they can track them when they’re nicked. A skim through the specification suggests that if you’re not the owner and the AirTag is “in range” (10 metres for Bluetooth LE?) then you should get an alert that it’s travelling with you.

Side note: think the last time I saw a joint Apple-Google press release was for Covid tracking.
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The Reverse-Scooby-Doo Theory of Tech Innovation • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

There’s a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:

(1) Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.

(2) The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we won’t be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.

We can think of this as a “reverse-Scooby-Doo.” It’s as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby Doo villain, but decided in this case that he’s actually the hero. (“We would’ve gotten away with it, if not for those meddling regulators!”)

…My main hope from the years of “techlash” tech coverage is that we collectively might start to take the power of these tech companies seriously and stop treating them like a bunch of scrappy inventors, toiling away at their visions of the future they might one day build. Silicon Valley in the ‘90s was not the power center that it is today. The largest, most profitable, most powerful companies in the world ought to be judged based on how they are impacting the present, not based on their pitch decks for what the future might someday look like.

What I like about the study of digital futures’ past is the sense of perspective it provides. There’s something almost endearing in the old claims that “the technological future is inevitable, so long as those meddling regulators don’t get in the way!”, applied to technologies that had so very many fundamental flaws. Those were simpler times, offering object lessons that we might learn from today.

It’s much less endearing from the present-day tech billionaire class. Balaji Srinivasan either doesn’t understand the existing limits of AI or doesn’t care about the existing limits of AI. He’s rehashing an old set of rhetorical tropes that place Silicon Valley’s inventors, engineers, and investors as the motive force of history, and regards all existing social, economic, and political institutions as interfering villains or obstacles to be overcome.

«

This is a fabulous piece, from February, but newly relevant. Srinivasan is the guy who “bet” $1m that the US would go into hyperinflation within 90 days, then said “kidding!” after 45 days. Karpf has views on that too. I’m very much enjoying his Substack.
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Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

One of the ways that [VC firm] Andreessen Horowitz marketed itself as distinct from its competitors was its founder-centric approach, which, during the go-go era of the 2010s, was in high style. It’s probably part of the reason that [co-founder Marc] Andreessen in 2015 defended [Theranos founder and subsequently convicted criminal Elizabeth] Holmes — he wanted to make it clear to founders that he was on their side no matter what. “We tend to be pro-megalomania,” Andreessen said in 2009.

More aggressive reporting on tech jeopardized the model of hyping a business and then selling after an inflated valuation. It’s no surprise, then, that Andreessen turned on the media. It probably didn’t help that The Wall Street Journal suggested in 2016 that a16z was all hat and no cattle — not really an elite firm if you looked at its returns, which had merely doubled its investment capital. The article contrasted a16z’s performance with that of Bill Gurley’s Benchmark, which “has multiplied investors’ money 11 times net of fees in its 2011 fund, according to a person familiar with its performance.”

Still, a 2014 Andreessen article about the news media is perceptive. Unlike most techies, Andreessen’s aware that the “view from nowhere” is a recent artifact, born from media consolidation. He knew how important distribution was. His list of possible business models was among those many publications experimented with. Andreessen and a16z even made a few media investments. They largely failed.

…The other vibe shift that would seriously affect a16z’s strategy, of course, was the Fed.

When a16z was founded in 2009, the Fed’s interest rate was near zero, where it mostly remained until 2022. A series of rate hikes beginning last year means that borrowing money is now more expensive than it has been at any point in the history of Andreessen Horowitz.

«

Wonderful piece, which shows that the questioning about tech has now moved on to the questioning about tech funding.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The proliferating buttons on the car dashboards of a decade or so ago went away.. and now they’re coming back. CC-licensed photo by Elizabeth 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.

When it’s Friday, there’ll be another post at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not even looking! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The glorious return of a humble car feature • Slate

David Zipper:

»

As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touch screens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel. Despite their name, touch screens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.

In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.

Meanwhile, a revolt has been brewing. A recent J.D. Power consumer survey on vehicle dependability concluded that “infotainment remains a significant issue for new vehicles.” It wasn’t hard to understand why. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece titled “Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”

«

Wonder if the NHTSA will mandate something to do with touchscreens, and how the carmakers – addicted to cheap screens – will cope with it.
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Why are TV writers so miserable? • The New Yorker

Michael Schulman:

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For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” [Laura] Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”

Aly Monroe, a 30-year-old writer who’d worked up from production assistant to story editor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” told me that she makes about $10,000 a year in residuals, “and that’s certainly not reflective of what the studio is making.” In the long breaks between seasons, she relies on her wife’s more regular income while stretching out the money from “Handmaid.” Some of her friends are getting copywriting jobs or moving back in with their parents. “Before the strike demands came out, a lot of my friends were feeling really hopeless and essentially ready to give up, because it had just been such a hard road,” she said. “And they think that what the W.G.A. is asking for makes us all feel really good and like we’re working toward something that can make it back into a livable career for all of us. That’s certainly how I feel.”

At the same time that the money has tightened, original ideas have become harder to sell. The prestige-cable days of “Mad Men” and “Nurse Jackie” became the prestige-streaming era of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things,” which has given way to the algorithm-and-I.P.-fuelled hellscape of superheroes, mergers, and HBO Max becoming plain old Max.

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They’re also extremely worried about AI being used to generate ideas or content or to “punch up” content they’ve written. And given how studios will use absolutely any excuse to screw over those who work for them, it’s a legitimate concern.
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Web3’s fake version of Web history • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential Venture Capital firms in the world. He is Web3’s single biggest investor, and its most prominent evangelist.

And he is just atrocious at explaining the history of the Web.

Dixon made his money in the internet of the ‘00s and ‘10s. He works with Marc Andreessen, the iconic “golden geek” of the ‘90s internet. The guy has been around long enough to know better. When he gets the history of the Web completely wrong, he is doing so with intent. And he has been prominently, boldly getting this wrong for YEARS. No one seems to call him on it. I don’t understand why.

(Yes I do. It’s because he’s rich and well-connected. Picking fights with him over something like “the history of the web” has little upside. It’s one of those things that only a tenured professor who isn’t looking for much research funding would bother with.)

…Broad historical narratives are a bit like statistical models — “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” Of course history is more messy and complicated than that. But if the general outline makes sense, and if it helps us make sense of the present, then the effort is justifiable.

But let me offer a corollary: “all models are wrong, but some are wronger than others.” And the problem with Dixon’s model is that it extremely, ceaselessly, aggressively wrong. It’s the type of wrong that might be useful for hawking unregistered Web3 security products (err, sorry, I mean, play-to-earn games), but is not at all useful for actually understanding the development of the internet.

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Karpf offers a neat history of the internet – and it is correct, especially about the Web2 phase.
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Report describes Apple’s “organizational dysfunction” and “lack of ambition” in AI • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

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The Information’s sources [in an article about Apple’s struggles or otherwise with AI] offer up numerous examples of senior Apple leadership putting the brakes on (or at least reining in) aggressive efforts within the company’s AI group for fear of seeing products like Siri present the same kinds of embarrassing factual errors or unhinged behavior that ChatGPT and its ilk have done. In other words, Apple isn’t keen on tolerating what many working in AI research and product development call “hallucinations.”

For example, Siri’s responses are not generative—they’re human-written and human-curated. Apple leadership has been hesitant to allow Siri developers to push the voice assistant toward detailed back-and-forth conversations like you see in the latest LLM-driven chatbots. Those are seen as more attention-grabbing than usefulness, and Apple is worried about being responsible for bad answers.

Some engineers within the company have argued that Apple should be more tolerant of bizarre edge cases and factual errors, saying that a certain scale and comfort for wonkiness is needed to truly improve them. Notably, several senior people within the company have abandoned ship for Google or startups out of frustrations with Apple’s conservative mindset.

Further, Apple has increasingly focused on running AI and machine learning features on users’ local devices—both because that enabled faster response times and because of the company’s public commitment to user privacy. For some features, that is an advantage (as Giannandrea explained to Ars Technica in 2020). But to date, LLMs typically run in the cloud, and some have questioned whether they’ll ultimately work as well on local devices.

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Counting down to LLMs on-device.. what do we think, a year?
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The long demise of the stretch limousine • The New York Times

Jesus Jiménez:

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Over a few days in early March, carmakers and limousine company operators gathered at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for an annual convention, where they went to panels and parties and admired shiny new party buses, vans and black sport utility vehicles.

But something was missing.

“There wasn’t one stretch limousine on the show floor,” said Robert Alexander, president of the National Limousine Association, a trade group. “Not one.”

Decades ago, stretch limos were a symbol of affluence, used almost exclusively by the rich and famous. Over time, they became more of a common luxury, booked for children’s birthday parties or by teenagers heading to the prom.

These days, it seems as if hardly anyone is riding in a stretch limo. While the limousine name has stuck, the limo industry has shifted to chauffeur services in almost anything but actual stretch limos, which have largely been supplanted by black S.U.V.s, buses and vans.
“The limo business isn’t your father’s limo business anymore,” Mr. Alexander said.

Today, the stretch limo represents less than 1% of services offered by limo companies, down from about 10% a decade ago, according to the association.

“The stretch limo is — what’s the expression? — gone like the dodo bird,” Mr. Alexander said. “Extinct.”

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What happened? Mostly, Uber and Lyft. The Great Recession. Also not looking like a jerk.
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Netflix Spain lost 1 million users last quarter, Kantar says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Clara Hernanz Lizarraga and Thomas Seal:

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In early February, Netflix introduced a €5.99 ($6.57) monthly fee for users in Spain who shared their log-in details with another household and technical measures to detect such sharing. The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password, according to Kantar’s research, which is based on surveys of household streaming habits.

“It’s clear this steep drop is due to the crackdown,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar’s Worldpanel Division, adding that the loss of a million users, even if most weren’t paid subscribers, would be a blow to Netflix in terms of word of mouth recommendation for its shows and service.

Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.

A similar fee was introduced in Portugal, Canada and New Zealand after a roll-out in several Latin American countries.

“We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts.

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Netflix says that Canada, where it tried this first, dipped and then came back above the previous point. Keep those fingers crossed!
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Who Can I Vote For?

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Find out about candidates in your area.

WhoCanIVoteFor is a simple tool which allows UK voters to see lists of candidates in upcoming elections using only their postcode.

All the candidate data ued in this site is collected by volunteers from council websites and other sources. If you wish to contribute, please visit Democracy Club Candidates.

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OK, so this is a little late (today is the day for local elections in many, though not all, parts of the UK) but it’s a good site to bookmark – and also available in Welsh. Hats tipped to Sym Roe, Joe Mitchell, Tim Green, Andy Lulham and David Miller, with a little help from mySociety – the latter being one of those Web2 ideas that keeps on giving.
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Amnesty International criticised for using AI-generated images • The Guardian

Luke Taylor:

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While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not.

The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media – and has since removed them.

The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021.

But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off.

The faces of the protesters and police are smoothed-off and warped, giving the image a dystopian aura.

The tricolour carried by the protester has the right colours – red, yellow and blue – but in the wrong order, and the police uniform is outdated.

…Amnesty International said it had used photographs in previous reports but chose to use the AI-generated images to protect protesters from possible state retribution.

To avoid misleading the public, the images included text stating that they were produced by AI.

“We have removed the images from social media posts, as we don’t want the criticism for the use of AI-generated images to distract from the core message in support of the victims and their calls for justice in Colombia,” Erika Guevara Rosas, director for Americas at Amnesty, said.

“But we do take the criticism seriously and want to continue the engagement to ensure we understand better the implications and our role to address the ethical dilemmas posed by the use of such technology.”

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As Ryan Broderick pointed out in his Garbage Day email/Substack, Amnesty could completely have used real photos, and just blurred the faces of the people. But they thought to themselves it would be cool and edgy to use AI.
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August 7 1998: US embassies in Africa bombed • BBC On This Day

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At least 200 people have been killed and more than 1,000 injured following explosions at United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The bombings took place within minutes of each other at around 1030 local time.

The first blast happened in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam and the second, just five minutes later, in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

The Nairobi explosion demolished a five-story office block sending it crashing onto the embassy next door.

The US Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was meeting Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at the nearby Ufundi Cooperative Bank at the time but was only slightly injured.

The blast could be heard 10 miles (16km) away and caused total chaos in the city centre.

No-one has claimed responsibility but US officials suspect the attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist.

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A cloud the size of a man’s fist on the horizon. Earlier in the year, India and then Pakistan had carried out a series of underground nuclear tests, which “provoked worldwide condemnation and fears of a nuclear conflict in one of the world’s most volatile regions.”

Which just goes to show how wrongly placed fears can be.
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Former Coinbase official Balaji Srinivasan closes out $1m bitcoin bet early • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Olga Kharif:

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Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase Global Inc., said he closed out what appeared to be a losing bet that Bitcoin would rise to $1m within 90 days.

Srinivasan said he gave $1m to two organizations, including the Bitcoin Core development team at researcher Chaincode Labs, as well as paying $500,000 to someone who goes by James Medlock on Twitter, and who won the wager.

The goal of the bet, Srinivasan reiterated in a Twitter post and a short video Tuesday, was to show that fiat currencies such as the dollar are in trouble, and that those troubles will push Bitcoin’s price up. At $28,710, Bitcoin is about 10% up from when Srinivasan accepted the bet on March 17.

The terms of the wager weren’t immediately clear. Medlock and Srinivasan didn’t return requests for comment.

“The reason that I did that is I wanted to tell you in a provable way that there’s something wrong in the economy and the state isn’t telling you about it,” Srinivasan said in the video, recounting troubles with US banks, sovereign debt and other potential issues. “That is what I am doing at my own expense, I am raising public alarm.”

Back on March 16, Medlock posted a tweet, “I’ll bet anyone $1m dollars that the US does not enter hyperinflation.”

On March 17, Srinivasan responded with, “I will take that bet.”

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Honestly, how did someone with so little comprehension of the world get so rich that he can afford to throw a million dollars away?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified