The growth in wind and solar installations in China could mean it hits 2030 targets five years early. CC-licensed photo by Land Rover Our PlanetLand Rover Our Planet on Flickr.

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

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

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

Bankrate posts AI-generated article, deletes it when we point out it’s full of errors • Futurism

Jon Christian:

»

With no fanfare, last week Bankrate quietly started posting new AI-generated articles once again — which it described in a disclaimer as “maintained by an in-house natural language generation platform using industry-standard databases” — suggesting that CNET could soon restart the program as well.

The new articles’ topics are mundane and clearly designed to capture readers searching Google for information, with titles like “Documents needed for mortgage preapproval” and “Best places to live in Colorado in 2023.”

With so many eyes on the company’s use of AI, you would expect that these first few new AI articles — at the very least — would be thoroughly scrutinized internally before publication. Instead, a basic examination reveals that the company’s AI is still making rudimentary mistakes, and that its human staff, nevermind the executives pushing the use of AI, are still not catching them before they end up in front of unsuspecting readers.

For example, consider that article about the best places to live in Colorado. It’s extremely easy to fact-check the AI’s claims, because the piece prominently features a link to a “methodology” page — evidently intended to bolster the site’s position in search engine results by signaling to entities like Google’s web crawler that its information is accurate — that documents precisely where the site is supposedly sourcing the data in its “Best places to live” articles.

Comparing the AI’s claims to that publicly-available data, here are some of the mistakes it made:

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The list is then much too long to include here, and it’s pretty basic stuff that you’d expect a human – or a machine – to spot.
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Apple’s Vision (Pro) of growth • Canalys

Jason Low and Nicole Peng:

»

Canalys forecasts that the Vision Pro and the related device lineup will reach a 20 million user base by the fifth year after the product launch in 2024.

…Despite the differentiated positioning, it is ultimately an XR [augmented/virtual reality] headset, which still comes with the same drawbacks and challenges that all the other vendors, such as Meta, HTC, Microsoft and Pico, have faced. Such compromises include:

• Friction to use brought on by the trouble of putting on a headset, on top of fit and comfort issues
• Social isolation as it is mainly a personal experience
• Social stigma of wearing an XR headset when people are around
• A lack of sticky, killer use cases that can drive mass adoption
• Not highly accessible to the masses due to high price points.

Even so, Canalys believes Apple will surpass all other players in the XR field. Canalys forecasts that the Vision Pro and the related device lineup will reach a 20 million user base by the fifth year after the product launch in 2024. With the Vision Pro, Apple will once again show that a late market entry is no barrier to success, and Apple will own yet another new category.

By focusing on making the goggles a better MacBook, rather than trying to invent a new universe, Apple has shown that it understands the wants and needs of its next generation of customers. For comparison, 20 million users by the end of year five represents 15% of the MacBook installed base (Canalys estimates a MacBook installed base of 127 million at the end of 2022), and just 2% of the iPhone’s installed base.

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20 million? At a few thousand per, that’s going to make the revenue from AirPods seem like small bananas.
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Apple Vision Pro: a watershed moment for personal computing • MacStories

Federico Viticci:

»

I then watched a montage of clips recorded with Apple Immersive Video, which consists of 180-degree footage recorded in 8K. The best way I can describe these is that they were like a video version of the panoramas I mentioned above. Imagine a panoramic video that expands in front and around you, with fantastic display quality and spatial audio. The videos were so large and expansive, I felt like I was “in” them at several times, or at least very close to the action.

One moment I was flying over the ocean, the next I was watching a group of scientific researchers (I think?) in a jungle care for a rhino. As one of the women in the group started scratching the rhino’s nose, I could hear the sound of the rhino’s thick skin in my left ear since my head was turned in the opposite direction. Later in the video, another baby rhino came closer to me, and I instinctively went “aww” and reached out with my hand because I wanted to scratch its nose this time. The montage ended with a very intense, front-facing shot of a woman standing on a tightrope between mountains looking straight into my “eyes”. In that moment I looked down, afraid of the void, then back up again at her gaze, and the video cut to black.

Based on the two different video clips I saw, I have no doubt about the potential for entertainment and educational content on the Vision Pro.

…Lastly, I believe the Vision Pro’s immersive capabilities have a real shot at rejuvenating the market of mindfulness and meditation apps. In a 1-minute experience I had during my Vision Pro demo, I tested a version of Apple’s Mindfulness app for visionOS. As soon as I opened it, a sphere made of colored, translucent leaves appeared in front of me. As the sphere started pulsating and a guided voice told me to focus on my breath, the leaves started spreading around until the whole room grew dark and I was completely surrounded by colors.

I have to be honest: it felt nice. For just a few seconds, it was just me, soothing music, and a relaxing 3D visualization that gently engulfed me until I returned to the real world, ready to continue working my way through the demo.

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OK, this is from a couple of weeks ago when the demos were new, but this seemed worth noting. Do click through to see how the tightrope sequence was captured. It’s breathtaking.
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Ad-fraud claims could force Google to pay billions. But don’t hold your breath • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

»

A Google spokesperson pointed to a blog post addressing the allegations [about video ads not being shown to humans]. In short, Google said the report “used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies and made extremely inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network.”

Google said advertisers can choose whether or not the ads will appear exclusively on YouTube, or whether they can also run on the GVP network. The company said it uses third-party organizations to verify publishers follow Google’s standards. “In addition to the high bar we set on YouTube, we have strict policies that all third-party publishers, including Google Video Partners, must follow,” Google’s blog post said. “To give you a sense of how serious we are about this, in 2022 we stopped serving ads on more than 143,000 sites for violating our policies.”

Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, stands by the conclusions in the report. “Google’s rebuttal sidesteps most of the core issues we found,” Franaszek said.

For example, Google’s blog post argues that 90% of the ads it shows are “viewable,” meaning users see them, and advertisers don’t have to pay for ads that aren’t viewable. However, that’s an issue that isn’t even mentioned in the report, and it says nothing about ads playing in the outstream or with the sound off.

Google’s claim that the publishers it partners with are vetted and made to abide by strict policy guidelines stands in stark contrast to the report’s conclusions. To name just a few examples, the research documented ads running on Russian disinformation sites, as well as Android apps that are delisted or not allowed in Google’s own app store. Adalytics found Google serving ads with publishers based in countries that are sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, such as Iran. In other words, advertisers may be inadvertently funding entities sanctioned by the Government. The fact that Google had to pull ads from 143,000 sites for policy violations, by its own admission, is a sign that Google’s system isn’t catching problems before they happen.

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There’s plenty more: it looks even worse than the Facebook video mis-measurement stuff.
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February 2018: ‘NatWest closed my account with no explanation’ • The Guardian

Rupert Jones, in February 2018:

»

In March 2015, Money reported how economics professor Iraj Hashi had had his NatWest current account, savings accounts and credit card shut down with no explanation. The only reason he could think of was that he was born in Iran.

Last April the Guardian related how a UK law firm was handling more than 60 complaints by Iranian nationals who had had their UK accounts closed. Meanwhile the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer last year reported on the case of Mohammad Rahman, who had his bank accounts frozen and then closed by Barclays.

You can perhaps see a theme here: many of those affected are of Asian or African origin. So what’s going on? Welcome to the secretive world of bank “de-risking”.

In 2016, City regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) revealed that in recent years it had become aware that banks were withdrawing banking facilities from customers – or failing to offer them in the first place – in greater numbers than before. It said there was a perception that this was driven by banks’ concerns about the money laundering and terrorist financing risks posed by certain types of customer.

A 2016 report commissioned by the FCA revealed that, between them, two large (unnamed) UK banks were closing about 1,000 personal and 600 business/corporate accounts per month for “risk appetite-type reasons”.

It also revealed that the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) was dealing with 20 to 30 complaints a week about bank account closures. However, when Money spoke to the FOS this week, it estimated that the figure was now nearer 80-90 a week.

It follows that because countries deemed risky in terms of money laundering and financing terrorism tend to be Asian and African, people from these areas may be particularly vulnerable.

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This is current again because Nigel Farage (afraid so) is complaining that his bank has closed his account. As (former Culture minister) Ed Vaizey pointed out, this is because he’s a Politically Exposed Person, which means banks get itchy about transactions. Perhaps he received some crypto, which is ringing all sorts of alarm bells at present. Even Vaizey, who’s about as upstanding as they come, has been affected.
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China on course to hit wind and solar power target five years ahead of time • The Guardian

Amy Hawkins and Rachel Cheung:

»

China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time, according to the report by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based NGO that tracks operating utility-scale wind and solar farms as well as future projects in the country.

It says that as of the first quarter of the year, China’s utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined. The installations are concentrated in the country’s north and north-west provinces, such as Shanxi, Xinjiang and Hebei.

In addition, the group identified solar farms under construction that could add another 379GW in prospective capacity, triple that of the US and nearly double that of Europe.

China has also made huge strides in wind capacity: its combined onshore and offshore capacity now surpasses 310GW, double its 2017 level and roughly equivalent to the next top seven countries combined. With new projects in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu and along coastal areas, China is on course to add another 371GW before 2025, increasing the global wind fleet by nearly half.

…China’s green energy drive is part of its effort to meet dual carbon goals set out in 2020. As the world’s second largest economy, it is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and accounts for half of the world’s coal consumption. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, pledged in 2020 to achieve peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

«

Meanwhile the UK hasn’t authorised a single onshore wind farm for years.
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Google to block access to Canadian news for anyone living in Canada • The Star

Raisa Patel:

»

Google has followed fellow tech giant Meta in announcing it will block Canadian news content from its search engine in Canada after days of negotiations with the Liberal government hit an impasse over its recently passed online news bill.

“We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our products,” a blog post from Kent Walker, the company’s president of global affairs, read Thursday.

“We have now informed the government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.”

The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online news content. The Liberals say the law is meant to end tech titans’ dominance of the digital advertising market, stating that in 2020, both platforms took in more than 80% of Canadian online advertising revenues as the country’s journalism industry faced hundreds of closures. Under the new framework, platforms would face financial penalties for failing to comply with the legislation.

A number of news publishers (including Torstar, which publishes the Toronto Star) have lobbied Ottawa in favour of the legislation, and already have deals in place with both companies for the sharing and repurposing of their content.

…On Tuesday, NordStar Capital — which owns the Toronto Star and Metroland Media — and Postmedia — which owns the National Post and daily newspapers across the country — shared news of a potential merger between the two companies. Two weeks earlier, CTV’s parent company announced it was slashing 1,300 positions and closing or selling nine radio stations.

It is believed that Google and Meta’s combined responses could result in millions of dollars in lost revenue for Canadian news publishers, possibly resulting in the shuttering of some smaller and independent outlets.

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Comes into effect at the end of the year. News orgs backing these laws are turkeys voting for Christmas. As Benedict Evans says, just be honest and levy a tax on the digital giants.
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Apple joins opposition to encrypted message app scanning • BBC

Chris Vallance:

»

Apple has criticised powers in the Online Safety Bill that could be used to force encrypted messaging tools like iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal to scan messages for child abuse material.

Its intervention comes as 80 organisations and tech experts have written to Technology Minister Chloe Smith urging a rethink on the powers.

Apple told the BBC the bill should be amended to protect encryption.

The government says companies must prevent child abuse on their platforms.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) stops anyone but the sender and recipient reading the message. Police, the government and some high-profile child protection charities maintain the tech – used in apps such as WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage – prevents law enforcement and the firms themselves from identifying the sharing of child sexual abuse material.

But in a statement Apple said: “End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk.

“Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all.”

But the government told the BBC that “companies should only implement end-to-end encryption if they can simultaneously prevent abhorrent child sexual abuse on their platforms.”

«

Essentially, the government there demanding that tech companies take on the status and powers of gods, which is quite the ask. The real demand is to remove encryption from messaging. That toothpaste just isn’t going back in the tube.
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Twitter’s new chief eases into the hot seat • NY Times

Ryan Mac, Tiffany Hsu and Benjamin Mullin:

»

Ms. Yaccarino, 60, has spoken with some of Twitter’s advertisers about unsavory content on the site, four people with knowledge of the conversations said. But she has not engaged in public hobnobbing and hands-on negotiating with advertisers to increase Twitter’s revenue.

That’s because a contractual agreement with NBCUniversal prevented Ms. Yaccarino — at least initially — from working on advertising deals that would conflict with the interests of her former employer, three people familiar with the arrangement said.
It is all part of an adjustment as Ms. Yaccarino settles into her new role and reports to a new boss. After working for traditional media organizations in New York for decades, she is now helping to lead a San Francisco-based social media company that has undergone rapid changes under Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter last year.

Restricted from hammering out advertising deals, Ms. Yaccarino has instead repaired at least one relationship, between Twitter and Google; talked with regulators; and focused on employee morale. She has held happy hours and tried rallying workers with mission statements and more internal communication.

“Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication,” she wrote this month in her first companywide email, which The New York Times obtained. “We’re on the precipice of making history.”

…Ms. Yaccarino has made progress in some areas, including helping to mend Twitter’s relationship with Google. That relationship frayed under Mr. Musk when Twitter partly stopped paying Google for cloud computing services. Twitter owed Google more than $42m in unpaid invoices and was trying to stop its use of Google’s products by the end of June, according to an internal memo obtained by The Times.

Ms. Yaccarino spoke this month to Thomas Kurian, the head of Google Cloud, to resolve the issue and ordered the bill paid, a person familiar with the conversation said.

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Not sure about being on the precipice of world history. Precipices usually have abrupt downward drops.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Privatised utility Thames Water is circling the drain as its debt piles up. CC-licensed photo by Liz Henry on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Aren’t they?. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI-generated books of nonsense are all over Amazon’s bestseller lists • Vice

Jules Roscoe:

»

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list was filled with dozens of AI-generated books of nonsense on Monday and Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Amazon appeared to have taken action against the books, but the episode shows that people are spamming AI-generated nonsense to the platform and are finding a way to monetize it.

“The AI bots have broken Amazon,” wrote Caitlyn Lynch, an indie author, in a tweet on Monday. “Take a look at the Best Sellers in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart. I can see 19 actual legit books. The rest are AI nonsense clearly there to click farm.” Motherboard viewed dozens of clearly AI-generated books Tuesday afternoon; by Wednesday, the vast majority of them had fallen off of the bestseller list but were still available to buy on the platform.

Select titles include: When the three attacks, Apricot bar code architecture, The journey to becoming enlightened is arduous, Department of Vinh Du Stands in Front of His Parents’ Tombstone, The God Tu mutters, Ma La Er snorted scornfully, Jessica’s Attention, etc.

Lynch included a screenshot of one book that, as of Wednesday morning, is in 90th place in the Top 100 Bestseller list for the Teen Contemporary Romance category. The book is called wait you love me and its cover is a black-and-white photo of a seagull with a neon yellow bar stretching across it containing the title text. The book has two one-star reviews, both of which call it a “fake AI book.”

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No sign of this in the UK Kindle store, but that may be because Amazon has taken action. Indicative of the problem that AI content generation leads to though: if you let anyone put content in your store, and people have tools that can generate endless content, you have a problem. Contrast this with the next book-related problem..
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How Goodreads reviews can tank a book before it’s published • The New York Times

Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris:

»

Cecilia Rabess figured her debut novel, “Everything’s Fine,” would spark criticism: the story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views.

But she didn’t expect a backlash to strike six months before the book was published.

In January, after a Goodreads user who had received an advanced copy posted a plot summary that went viral on Twitter, the review site was flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews, with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise.

“It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on Goodreads, but these are broader campaigns of harassment,” Rabess said. “People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well.”
In an era when reaching readers online has become a near-existential problem for publishers, Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building an audience. As a cross between a social media platform and a review site like Yelp, the site has been a boon for publishers hoping to generate excitement for books.

But the same features that get users talking about books and authors can also backfire. Reviews can be weaponized, in some cases derailing a book’s publication long before its release.

“It can be incredibly hurtful, and it’s frustrating that people are allowed to review books this way if they haven’t read them,” said Roxane Gay, an author and editor who also posts reviews on Goodreads.

«

Goodreads said it “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” Yeah, sure. Simple solution: reviews posted before publication are deleted and the reviewer blocked, unless they’ve got special dispensation. We’re 25 years into online reviews and they haven’t worked this out? (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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AI may someday work medical miracles. For now, it helps do paperwork • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

»

Dr. Michelle Thompson, a family physician in Hermitage, Pennsylvania., who specializes in lifestyle and integrative care, said the software had freed up nearly two hours in her day. Now, she has time to do a yoga class, or to linger over a sit-down family dinner.

Another benefit has been to improve the experience of the patient visit, Dr. Thompson said. There is no longer typing, note-taking or other distractions. She simply asks patients for permission to record their conversation on her phone.

“AI has allowed me, as a physician, to be 100% present for my patients,” she said.

The AI tool, Dr. Thompson added, has also helped patients become more engaged in their own care. Immediately after a visit, the patient receives a summary, accessible through the University of Pittsburgh medical system’s online portal.

The software translates any medical terminology into plain English at about a fourth-grade reading level. It also provides a recording of the visit with “medical moments” color-coded for medications, procedures and diagnoses. The patient can click on a colored tag and listen to a portion of the conversation.

Studies show that patients forget up to 80% of what physicians and nurses say during visits. The recorded and AI-generated summary of the visit, Dr. Thompson said, is a resource her patients can return to for reminders to take medications, exercise or schedule follow-up visits.

After the appointment, physicians receive a clinical note summary to review. There are links back to the transcript of the doctor-patient conversation, so the AI’s work can be checked and verified. “That has really helped me build trust in the AI,” Dr. Thompson said.

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How easy is it to fool AI detection tools? • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson and Tiffany Hsu:

»

The pope did not wear Balenciaga. And filmmakers did not fake the moon landing. In recent months, however, startlingly lifelike images of these scenes created by artificial intelligence have spread virally online, threatening society’s ability to separate fact from fiction.

To sort through the confusion, a fast-burgeoning crop of companies now offer services to detect what is real and what isn’t.

Their tools analyze content using sophisticated algorithms, picking up on subtle signals to distinguish the images made with computers from the ones produced by human photographers and artists. But some tech leaders and misinformation experts have expressed concern that advances in AI will always stay a step ahead of the tools.

To assess the effectiveness of current AI detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short.

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The arms race – the illustrations getting better, the AI detectors too – is probably going to be won by the generators, not the detectors. They have the headstart.
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Elon Musk’s biographer: I saw him fly into ‘demon mode’ • Business Insider

Grace Kay:

»

[Walter] Isaacson plans to release his biography on Musk in September. He has written biographies on several innovators, including Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. He said many brilliant and successful people, including Musk and Steve Jobs, had a “dark streak.”

Isaacson said they were not saddled with as much empathy and, as a result, were more able to focus on accomplishing a larger mission.

In Musk’s case, the biographer said the billionaire had a “maniacal sense of urgency” that could frighten some of his workers. He said the CEO’s demeanor would change when people didn’t match his sense of urgency.

“He’d go dark and I’d know that he was just going to rip that person apart,” Isaacson said, adding that it was a common occurrence when the billionaire first took over Twitter and gutted over half of the social-media site’s staff.

The biographer, who observed Musk’s day-to-day life for about two years, said the moments of rage were “uncomfortable” for him to watch.

“He is just brutal,” Isaacson said. “The thing that I noticed is that once he finishes doing it — and it was never physical and it was almost done in a flat monotone — but he would just really attack people and then a few days later, if they absorbed the lesson, he’d forget about it. It would be as if he went from becoming Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and then didn’t even think that much or remember that much of how tough he had been on people.”

Musk’s criticism seemed effective about 80% of the time and was “problematic” 20% of the time, which he said could even make people “afraid to give him bad news,” Isaacson said. He said that at times he’d later find out that the man Musk had chewed out had made a mistake because of personal issues, like losing a child two weeks prior.

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Sounds, in its way, a lot like Steve Jobs: if people didn’t see what he saw as urgent, then they’d find out pretty soon. It’s unsurprising that someone successful would do this. But you also see it from people who are unsuccessful. In the latter case, we just call them jerks.
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How a shady Chinese firm’s encryption chips got inside the US Navy, NATO, and NASA • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

In July of 2021, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security added the Hangzhou, China-based encryption chip manufacturer Hualan Microelectronics, also known as Sage Microelectronics, to its so-called “Entity List,” a vaguely named trade restrictions list that highlights companies “acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States.” Specifically, the bureau noted that Hualan had been added to the list for “acquiring and … attempting to acquire US-origin items in support of military modernization for [China’s] People’s Liberation Army.”

Yet nearly two years later, Hualan—and in particular its subsidiary known as Initio, a company originally headquartered in Taiwan that it acquired in 2016—still supplies encryption microcontroller chips to Western manufacturers of encrypted hard drives, including several that list as customers on their websites Western governments’ aerospace, military, and intelligence agencies: NASA, NATO, and the US and UK militaries. Federal procurement records show that US government agencies from the Federal Aviation Administration to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the US Navy have bought encrypted hard drives that use the chips, too.

The disconnect between the Commerce Department’s warnings and Western government customers means that chips sold by Hualan’s subsidiary have ended up deep inside sensitive Western information networks, perhaps due to the ambiguity of their Initio branding and its Taiwanese origin prior to 2016. The chip vendor’s Chinese ownership has raised fears among security researchers and China-focused national security analysts that they could have a hidden backdoor that would allow China’s government to stealthily decrypt Western agencies’ secrets. And while no such backdoor has been found, security researchers warn that if one did exist, it would be virtually impossible to detect.

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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UK government looks at nationalising Thames Water as crisis deepens • Financial Times

Gill Plimmer, Jim Pickard and Michael O’Dwyer:

»

Ministers have discussed a temporary nationalisation of Thames Water as investors and the government braced for the potential collapse of the debt-laden utility.

Wednesday’s contingency planning came a day after the abrupt exit of Thames Water chief executive Sarah Bentley, who was battling to turn round a company with a legacy of under-investment and £14bn of debt just as UK interest rates hit their highest level since 2008.

Shareholders 12 months ago promised to invest £500m in the company — the first equity injection since privatisation — and pledged a further £1bn subject to conditions. But the £500m was only paid this March and the additional £1bn has never been paid.

Cathryn Ross, co-interim chief executive, earlier this month said the company had made a “very large loss and that is not ideal in terms of raising capital”.

“We may need to go back to them [our shareholders] for more equity,” said Ross, a former chief executive at regulator Ofwat, in previously unreported comments.

…More than half the group’s debt is linked to inflation, which the company has justified by noting that customer bills are also linked to it. However, the debt is linked to the RPI [retail prices index] measure, which is at a historically wide premium to CPI [consumer prices index] inflation, which is used in pricing bills.

…After being sold with almost no debt at privatisation three decades ago, UK water companies have taken on borrowings of £60.6bn, diverting income from customer bills to pay interest payments.

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That debt premium, usually around 1%, is now over 4%. Water companies are very indebted, and very screwed. Renationalisation beckons.
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National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers • The Washington Post

Paul Farhi:

»

Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem.

On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers.

The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department.

The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine’s editorial operations.

Departing staffers said Wednesday the magazine has curtailed photo contracts that enabled photographers to spend months in the field producing the publication’s iconic images.

In a further cost-cutting move, copies of the famous bright-yellow-bordered print publication will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year, the company said in an internal announcement last month.

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Not really National, not very Geographical. Truly a last gasp for a storied title. Perhaps ChatGPT can help write?
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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0 • Nature

Mariana Lenharo:

»

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

“It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

Consciousness is everything that a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says.

Despite a vast effort, researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.”

…The goal was to set up a series of ‘adversarial’ experiments to test various hypotheses of consciousness by getting rival researchers to collaborate on the studies’ design. “If their predictions didn’t come true, this would be a serious challenge for their theories,” Chalmers says.

The findings from one of the experiments — which involved several researchers, including Koch and Chalmers — were revealed on Friday at the ASSC meeting. It tested two of the leading hypotheses: integrated information theory (IIT) and global network workspace theory (GNWT). IIT proposes that consciousness is a ‘structure’ in the brain formed by a specific type of neuronal connectivity that is active for as long as a certain experience, such as looking at an image, is occurring. This structure is thought to be found in the posterior cortex, at the back of the brain. GNWT, by contrast, suggests that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission, according to the theory, happens at the beginning and end of an experience and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: thanks to Artiste212 for pointing out that whales and dolphins, which are intelligent and which I don’t eat, are mammals, not fish. The search goes on for an intelligent fish, I guess.

The sport of pickleball is rising fast in the US, and so are injuries related to it – mainly of the wrist. CC-licensed photo by Seattle Parks and Recreation on Flickr.

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

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

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

Magic mushrooms, LSD, ketamine: the drugs that power Silicon Valley • WSJ

Kirsten Grind and Katherine Bindley:

»

Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics.

Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, leaving boards and business leaders to wrestle with their responsibilities for a workforce that frequently uses. At the vanguard are tech executives and employees who see psychedelics and similar substances, among them psilocybin, ketamine and LSD, as gateways to business breakthroughs.

“There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now,” said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is “the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on,” said Goldfield.

Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.

The account of Musk’s drug use comes from people who witnessed him use ketamine and others with direct knowledge of his use. Details about Brin’s drug use and the Founders Fund parties come from people familiar with them.

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Fairly sure they left one drug out, but anyway: I remember about 30 years ago all the talk was of “smart drugs” that would, well, you understand. Seems like that hasn’t happened. Instead it’s quite different things that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1960s.
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Google violated its standards in ad deals, research finds • WSJ

Patience Haggin:

»

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business.

Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren’t skipped.

Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations.

Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal.

In a statement, Google said the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe.” The company said it has strict policies for the program that serves video ads on third-party sites.

“As part of our brand safety efforts, we regularly remove ads from partner sites that violate our policies and we’ll take any appropriate actions once the full report is shared with us,” the company said.

…Among the major brands whose Google video-ad placements weren’t in line with the promised standards were Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Samsung, Sephora, Macy’s, Disney+ and The Wall Street Journal, according to Adalytics. It also affected ads for government agencies, including Medicare, the U.S. Army, the Social Security Administration, and the New York City municipal government.

“CMS is concerned with reports of invalid ad placements by YouTube,” said a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

YouTube accounts for 8.3% of U.S. digital-video ad spending, according to research company Insider Intelligence. Marketers feel obligated to advertise on YouTube because of its size, several ad buyers said.

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Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and agency:

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A US judge has fined two lawyers and a law firm $5,000 (£3,935) after fake citations generated by ChatGPT were submitted in a court filing.

A district judge in Manhattan ordered Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay the fine after fictitious legal research was used in an aviation injury claim.

Schwartz had admitted that ChatGPT, a chatbot that churns out plausible text responses to human prompts, invented six cases he referred to in a legal brief in a case against the Colombian airline Avianca.

The judge P Kevin Castel said in a written opinion there was nothing “inherently improper” about using artificial intelligence for assisting in legal work, but lawyers had to ensure their filings were accurate.

“Technological advances are commonplace and there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”

The judge said the lawyers and their firm “abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted nonexistent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”

Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said.

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Google killed its augmented-reality Iris smart glasses • Business Insider

Hugh Langley:

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Google killed off a project to build a pair of augmented-reality glasses it had been working on for several years.

The glasses, known internally by the codename Iris, were shelved earlier this year following layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s chief of augmented and virtual reality, according to three people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

The Verge first reported on the existence of Project Iris in January 2022, describing the device as resembling a pair of ski goggles. However, Google employees said the “ski goggles” were actually the foundations of a separate AR project that’s since been announced as a partner product with Samsung, while Iris was a series of devices more closely resembling eyeglasses.

Google planned to build and launch Iris as its own product, and it shored up talent through acquisitions. In 2020, the company announced it had purchased North, a Canadian startup that made AR glasses. An early version of Iris closely resembled North’s first device, the Focals, while a later version that Google publicly demoed had translation features.

Since shelving the Iris glasses, Google has focused on creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets. It’s building an Android XR platform for Samsung’s headset and has been working on a “micro XR” platform for glasses, a person familiar with the plan said.

Employees working on the “micro XR” software are using a prototyping platform known internally as Betty. One employee described Google’s new ambition as being the “Android for AR,” focusing on software rather than hardware.

Insiders say Google leaders kept changing the strategy for the Iris glasses when they were in development, which led to the team continually pivoting, frustrating many employees.

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Google Glass and now this. Google really is struggling to come up with hits in the hardware space.
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Pickleball injuries are skyrocketing across the country • Axios

Nathan Bomey:

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Pickleball injuries are creating $250m to $500m in medical costs annually, UBS analyst Andrew Mok estimated after assessing data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association and studies about the sport.

The pickleball-induced sprains, strains and fractures to wrists and legs are contributing to the spike in treatments that sent shares of health insurers plunging earlier this month.

80% of the costs are for outpatient treatment, while Medicare is picking up 85% of the tab, with more than 8 in 10 Pickleball patients over 60 years old, the UBS analyst estimates.

Roughly 22.3 million people are expected to play pickleball this year, up from 8.9 million in 2022 and 3.5 million in 2019, according to UBS.

«

If you haven’t seen it, pickleball is like beach tennis, played with a hard hollow aerated ball and solid bats, and scored like badminton on a court of similar size (but much lower net). Tolerable if you’ve got nothing better to do.
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Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” • Data Colada

Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons:

»

This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.

In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020). In the fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS). Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.

…Two summers ago, we published a post (Colada 98: .htm) about a study reported within a famous article on dishonesty (.htm). That study was a field experiment conducted at an auto insurance company (The Hartford). It was supervised by Dan Ariely, and it contains data that were fabricated. We don’t know for sure who fabricated those data, but we know for sure that none of Ariely’s co-authors – Shu, Gino, Mazar, or Bazerman – did it [1]. The paper has since been retracted (.htm).

That auto insurance field experiment was Study 3 in the paper.

It turns out that Study 1’s data were also tampered with…but by a different person.

That’s right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.

…A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.

Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like “First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc.” CalcChain is short for ‘calculation chain’.

…CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with!

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Years ago, this sort of detective work wouldn’t have been possible. Now: it’s available to anyone determined enough and who knows what they’re looking for.
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Apple finally breaks Android’s grip on Southeast Asia • Rest of World

Joan Aurelia Rumengan:

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Yuni Pulungan, a 28-year-old project manager at a nonprofit in Jakarta, always thought of iPhones as luxury devices — too expensive to ever consider seriously. But when the Android phone she had used since 2019 ran out of storage and the camera started to degrade, she began to mull switching to a higher-quality phone, one she’d be able to enjoy and use for years to come.

In April, after nearly a year of meticulous research and teetering back and forth, Pulungan finally cracked and bought an iPhone 13. She hasn’t looked back. “The phone is durable and the camera doesn’t shake when recording videos,” she told Rest of World. “The audio is also good.” The sting of the high cost — $798, more than double the average monthly salary in urban Indonesia — was made much less painful with a cashback deal from the e-commerce site she bought it from.

Pulungan is not alone in her appreciation for the iPhone. According to research agency Counterpoint, Apple’s iPhone shipments to Southeast Asia increased by 18% in the first three months of 2023 compared to the same period last year. In Indonesia and Vietnam especially, iPhone demand was strong, even as smartphones reached saturation point elsewhere across Southeast Asia.

…Le Xuan Chiew, Singapore-based analyst at technology research firm Canalys, told Rest of World the region’s youthful population is also helping Apple in the region.

“The middle class, which Apple traditionally targets, are grown-up consumers. Now [Apple] targets more Gen Z, more young people. In terms of target group, channel, there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Chiew.

«

Interesting how once you have a saturated market, you create the opportunity for people to shift towards its premium end if you can keep the brand value and quality up.
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Canada’s Online News Act targets Facebook and Google • The New York Times

Mike Ives:

»

The Canadian Parliament has passed a law that will require technology companies to pay domestic news outlets for linking to their articles, prompting the owner of Facebook and Instagram to say that it would pull news articles from both platforms in the country.

The law, passed on Thursday, is the latest salvo in a push by governments around the world to force big companies like Google and Facebook to pay for news that they share on their platforms — a campaign that the companies have resisted at virtually every turn.

With some caveats, the new Canadian law would force search engines and social media companies to engage in a bargaining process — and binding arbitration, if necessary — for licensing news content for their use.

The law, the Online News Act, was modeled after a similar one that passed in Australia two years ago. It was designed to “enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contribute to its sustainability,” according to an official summary. Exactly when the law would take effect was not immediately clear as of Friday morning.

…Mr. Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, suggested that he was not open to striking a compromise with tech companies over the Online News Act.

“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way,” he told reporters. “It’s not going to work.”

Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in regulations that govern the internet and e-commerce, has said the efforts could backfire. “It will disproportionately hurt smaller and independent media outlets and leave the field to poorer quality sources,” Professor Geist said. “Worst of all: It was totally predictable and avoidable.”

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The act doesn’t actually specify any per-link payments; that has to be worked out by a form of arbitration. I’d love to know what the amount is.
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RIP to my Pixel Fold, dead after four days • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.

The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100% brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen. The entire left half of the foldable display stopped responding to touch, too, and an hour later, a white gradient started growing upward across the display.

Samsung, BOE, and pretty much every other company making foldable screens build these flexible OLEDs the same way. The OLED panel is covered in an “ultra thin glass” that’s thin and flexible enough to survive the folding process, though it’s not very durable. Because the glass can’t stand up to the slightest bit of damage, the whole display is covered in a protective plastic layer. This essentially kills the firm, slippery glass surface we’re all used to, but the interior glass layer provides some much-needed structure to what would otherwise be very squishy plastic.

This plastic layer is critical to the OLED’s survival, but it doesn’t stretch to the edges. Every company that builds these screens leaves a margin around the perimeter of the display where there is no plastic layer, just a raw, exposed OLED panel peeking out into the world. We would normally expect a foldable to break along the crease, where the screen sees the most stress. But mine died due to this exposed OLED gap.

The tiniest bit of something got in there, and when I closed the display, the pressure of the other display side was enough to puncture the OLED panel.

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As I said yesterday, foldables leave me cold. But they can leave their owners out of pocket. (OK, if that happened to someone in the normal course of events during the first year of ownership, it would get replaced for free. But it’s still an inconvenience that would also put you on edge for the future.)
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The Snowden files: where are they and where should they end up? • Electrospaces

»

In order to protect the Snowden files, only brand new laptops with no connection to the internet are used to search, sort and read them. It’s not clear whether the files themselves are also stored on these laptop computers, or only on removable storage devices, like a thumb drive or an SD card.

According to Barton Gellman’s book Dark Mirror, the files he received from Snowden were stored on brand new laptops which had their USB ports sealed, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware removed and the batteries disconnected. The data on these laptops were encrypted, with the keys stored on memory cards which were also encrypted and were never in the same room except when in use. The laptops were stored in a big and heavy safe bolted to the floor of a windowless room with a high-security lock and a video camera in the hall outside. The Snowden archive was thus protected by four different credentials: door key, safe combination, digital key card, and passphrases. These credentials were divided among the reporting team members and no one but Gellman had all of them.*

In a 2013 Brazilian television report, Glenn Greenwald was seen using some thumb drives and a standard SD card while working with the Snowden documents.

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Sounds like the files are now more securely held than when they were originally collected. It’s pretty hard to say if they retain any value now, more than a decade after the first exposure. Snowden seems to think what remains is just bureaucratic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Octopus can’t be bred in farm conditions – but a Canary Islands location wants to try. Why farm yet another animal? CC-licensed photo by damn_unique 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.

AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Earlier this year, I was researching AI agents — systems that use language models like ChatGPT that connect with web services and act on behalf of the user, ordering groceries or booking flights. In one of the many viral Twitter threads extolling the potential of this tech, the author imagines a scenario in which a waterproof shoe company wants to commission some market research and turns to AutoGPT (a system built on top of OpenAI’s language models) to generate a report on potential competitors. The resulting write-up is basic and predictable. (You can read it here.) It lists five companies, including Columbia, Salomon, and Merrell, along with bullet points that supposedly outline the pros and cons of their products. “Columbia is a well-known and reputable brand for outdoor gear and footwear,” we’re told. “Their waterproof shoes come in various styles” and “their prices are competitive in the market.” You might look at this and think it’s so trite as to be basically useless (and you’d be right), but the information is also subtly wrong.

To check the contents of the report, I ran it by someone I thought would be a reliable source on the topic: a moderator for the r/hiking subreddit named Chris. Chris told me that the report was essentially filler. “There are a bunch of words, but no real value in what’s written,” he said. It doesn’t mention important factors like the difference between men’s and women’s shoes or the types of fabric used. It gets facts wrong and ranks brands with a bigger web presence as more worthy. Overall, says Chris, there’s just no expertise in the information — only guesswork. “If I were asked this same question I would give a completely different answer,” he said. “Taking advice from AI will most likely result in hurt feet on the trail.”

This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard — impossible, even — to fully map the damage. And yes, people are plentiful sources of misinformation, too, but if AI systems also choke out the platforms where human expertise currently thrives, then there will be less opportunity to remedy our collective errors.

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Newsguard points out in a new report that there are about 25 new AI-generated content farms begin generated every week; one of them produced 1,200 articles a day. And it’s either unreliable or useless. Increasingly, any sort of search leads to an ocean of junk.
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Experimental drug could offer more weight loss than any drug now on the market, study finds • NBC News

Berkeley Lovelace Jr:

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An experimental drug from Eli Lilly has the potential to provide greater weight loss benefits than any drug currently on the market.

The experimental drug, retatrutide, helped people lose, on average, about 24% of their body weight, the equivalent of about 58 pounds, in a mid-stage clinical trial, the company said Monday from the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in San Diego. The findings were simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

If the results are confirmed in a larger, phase 3 clinical trial — which is expected to run until late 2025 — retatrutide could leapfrog another Lilly weight loss drug, tirzepatide, which experts estimated earlier this year could become the best-selling drug of all time. Tirzepatide is currently approved for Type 2 diabetes under the name Mounjaro; FDA approval of the drug for weight loss is expected this year or early next year.

The new findings, according to Dr. Shauna Levy, a specialist in obesity medicine and the medical director of the Tulane Bariatric Center in New Orleans, are “mind-blowing.”

Levy, who was not involved with the research, said the drug seems to be delivering results that are approaching the effectiveness of bariatric surgery. “It’s certainly knocking on the door or getting close,” she said.

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The reason why we’ve suddenly got weight loss drugs coming out of our ..ears is the development of GLP-1 agonists, which dates back to 2005. This has been a long time coming.
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Google Pixel Fold review: closing the gap • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

To Google’s credit, the Pixel Fold is a much more approachable device than the [Samsung] Z Fold 4. Rather than overwhelm you with possibilities, the Pixel places guardrails around what you can and can’t do, like limiting multitasking on the inner screen to two apps. It’s a friendlier device to someone who’s fresh to foldables. But I have a hard time believing that anyone seriously considering the Pixel Fold (or any phone nearing $2,000) is afraid of a little complexity.

There are a couple of practical concerns that came up in my testing, too. Battery life was hit-and-miss, and the phone seems to drain more on standby than it should. I also have some concerns about long-term durability — first-generation Google hardware and all.

Still, I don’t want to dismiss what Google has achieved in the Pixel Fold. It’s a phone and a small tablet all in one device, and it’s a gadget I think most anybody could pick up and feel comfortable with right away. Walking to a coffee shop, unfolding the phone, and playing a game on the big screen, then folding it back up again for the walk home is just straight-up delightful. The form factor is lovely and familiar, and it allows you to do some of the things you’d normally have to put down your phone and pick up your laptop for. But it’s also fair to ask for more from this device, especially at $1,800, because right now, it doesn’t quite deliver.

«

Sure, you could go to the cafe and unfold your phone. Or you could buy a phone, and also get an iPad mini ($499), which would fit in many pockets or handbags, or any small cheap Android tablet, and go to the cafe, and have lots of money left over. Foldables leave me cold; the last real innovation in phone form factors was Samsung pushing screen sizes past 6in.
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Victims speak out over ‘tsunami’ of fraud on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp • The Guardian

Jess Clark and Zoe Wood:

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The social media giant Meta is facing growing pressure from MPs, consumer groups and the UK banking sector over its failure to prevent a “tsunami” of fraud on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Britons are losing “life-changing” sums every day.

It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta’s platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm’s failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023.

With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch.

One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram.

Among the most upsetting experiences shared were those of victims of the WhatsApp “Hi Mum” impersonation scam, where fraudsters impersonate family members to get them to send large sums of money.

Valerie, 73, one of the many victims, handed over £2,000 to someone pretending to be her son, a small business owner who had borrowed money in the past. Ill with long Covid, she said she would “never get over” the humiliation of being caught out this way.

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The URL of the embedded link there, from Lloyds Banking Group, tells its own story: two-thirds of all (UK) online shopping scams now start on Facebook or Instagram. Though Twitter is certainly also now host to a ton of scammy-looking drop shipping ads from Alibaba companies of uncertain reputation, including products that are illegal to own in the UK.
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Advertisers should beware being too creative with AI • Financial Times

John Gapper:

»

beware of the AI hangover. The last technology revolution in ads that promised magical efficiency and exact consumer targeting was automated ad buying across the web. In practice, the ad tech industry, dominated by companies such as Google, has been a distinctly mixed blessing.

About a quarter of the $88bn spent on automated ad buying by US advertisers is wasted, their trade group complained this week, with the average spot running on 44,000 websites, some of them dodgy. “We went down the niche audience road with programmatic advertising a decade ago and we got seduced by technology,” observed Peter Mears, who heads Havas’s media agencies.

Generative AI undoubtedly has uses on the creative side of advertising. One is that it can help smaller businesses to level up against the big marketing spenders at Mars, Diageo and the like. The creative brains at the agencies occupying the prime hospitality spots in Cannes this week tend to be expensive to hire: they have to pay for all those parties somehow.

I came across a couple of examples, one at SiriusXM, the US radio broadcaster. It plans to use AI to produce ads for smaller companies, offering them choices of AI-generated pitches, and then getting their pick read by an AI voice, rather than by expensive “voice talent”. The result is unlikely to be as persuasive as a human production but it will be cheaper and faster.

Similarly, the marketing group McCann Worldgroup used AI to make 42,000 individual signs and menus for 8,400 owners of Mexican hot dog and hamburger stands who are customers of its client Bimbo, the bakery group. While having an AI-designed fast food display cannot put you on a par with McDonald’s or KFC, it all helps.

…I wonder if it’s worth it. Nvidia’s chips may be capable of processing billions of individual ads, but there are not that many reasons to buy ice cream or ketchup. In fact, we mostly eat them for the same reason as everyone else, which is how advertising has always worked. It may sound exciting to fragment ads, but is it sensible?

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Is the UK finally getting over the great Brexit schism? • Financial Times

Luke Tryl runs the More In Common polling thinktank:

»

Nearly four years on from Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” campaign — and seven years after the referendum — our latest research finds those divides, which seemed a lasting schism, are softening. Not only has EU membership tumbled down the list of important issues from first to 11th (and almost never comes up unprompted in our focus groups), but the number who say Brexit is an important part of their identity has fallen from 50% to 39%. Political allegiance has become once again a more important marker.

And that Brexit depolarisation has not been symmetrical. After the 2019 election, Leavers and Remainers were equally likely to say their Brexit vote was important to their identity. But now, the number of Leavers saying it is important has fallen by 19 points, while among Remain voters it has fallen by just four points. So what persists about Brexit identity is largely being driven by Remainers.

Why is this? An obvious reason is that we did ultimately leave the EU; defending the status quo arouses less passion than a campaign. But our research suggests a more important driver of that asymmetry — the perception that Brexit has, so far, been a failure.

Nearly two-thirds of voters in our research, including almost half of Leave voters, say that Brexit has been unsuccessful. Were a new referendum to be held today, Britons would vote to rejoin by a margin of 58:42 — with one in seven Leavers switching their vote.

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As Tryl also notes, politicians have noticed this. But the Tories are completely hamstrung by having backed Brexit, and being in thrall to the right wing of their party.
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World’s first octopus farm proposals alarm scientists • BBC News

Claire Marshall:

»

A plan to build the world’s first octopus farm has raised deep concerns among scientists over the welfare of the famously intelligent creatures.

The farm in Spain’s Canary Islands would raise about a million octopuses annually for food, according to confidential documents seen by the BBC.

They have never been intensively farmed and some scientists call the proposed icy water slaughtering method “cruel.” The Spanish multinational behind the plans denies the octopuses will suffer.

The confidential planning proposal documents from the company, Nueva Pescanova, were given to the BBC by the campaign organisation Eurogroup for Animals. Nueva Pescanova sent the proposal to the Canary Islands’ General Directorate of Fishing, which has not responded to a BBC request for comment.

Octopuses caught in the wild using pots, lines and traps are eaten all over the world, including in the Mediterranean and in Asia and Latin America.

The race to discover the secret to breeding them in captivity has been going on for decades. It’s difficult as the larvae only eat live food and need a carefully controlled environment, but Nueva Pescanova announced in 2019 that it had made a scientific breakthrough.

The prospect of intensively farming octopus has already led to opposition: Lawmakers in the US state of Washington have proposed banning the practice before it even starts.

«

I eat meat, but that’s from animals that we’ve farmed. I eat fish, but not intelligent fish (ie whales or dolphins). I don’t think we should start farming a clearly intelligent animal, just as we wouldn’t start farming chimpanzees for food.
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Publishers Clearing House settles ‘dark patterns’ suit for $18.5m • The New York Times

J. Edward Moreno:

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Publishers Clearing House, the direct marketing company that uses sweepstakes to sell magazine subscriptions, agreed on Monday to pay $18.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which accused the company of using what’s known as dark patterns to trick customers into paying for products or giving up their data.

The company coerced customers through false suggestions that making a purchase was the only way to enter its popular sweepstakes or that doing so would increase their chances of winning, the complaint says. The company is also accused of charging customers hidden fees during purchases, sending deceptive marketing emails and misleading customers about how their data was being used.

Many of the customers who fell victim to these tactics are older and have lower incomes, according to the suit, which was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. On top of paying $18.5m, which the FTC said it would use to refund customers, the company agreed to adjust its interface to prevent more confusion.

«

Nasty. It’s not a new tactic, but the difference is that the internet makes it much easier to reach more people and scam them. Meanwhile the FTC last week filed a similar lawsuit against Amazon over the signup process for Amazon Prime. Order popcorn.
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NASA analog astronauts ‘depart’ for year inside mock Mars base • collectSPACE

»

The next time that Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu will see blue sky, a year will have gone by on Earth.

Not that the four “analog astronauts” are leaving the planet, but for the next 12 months they will live inside a mock Mars base located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they will be remotely observed and studied by scientists. As the first of three planned Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, crews, Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will help inform the space agency how to better design and plan for future human missions on the real Martian surface.

Mission 1 gets underway tonight (June 25) as the four volunteers enter the 1,700-square-foot (158-square-meter) habitat, known as “Mars Dune Alpha,” at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT). They will not leave the 3D-printed structure — other than to conduct the occasional Mars-walk within an adjoining 1,200-square-foot (111-square-meter), enclosed Mars “sandbox” — until Sunday, July 7, 2024.

“To me, this is really exciting because one of the things that’s different than some of our previous analogs at NASA is people will be in isolation as a crew for 378 days,” Suzanne Bell, lead for NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, said in an interview with collectSPACE. “We also do analogs in something called HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, and our missions there have been 45 days. And then we collect data at other analogs, too, with varying lengths, but this will be three, over one yearlong missions, which is a really great extended isolation.”

«

Is it really isolation, though, when you know that everything’s just in reach if you really shout loudly enough? Where you aren’t at risk of dust storms that cut you off from contact for days or months at a time. Or suddenly losing all your water supply. (Or are the experiment controllers going to play some games?)

Anyway, after Mr Deep Sea, we have a new isolation experiment to keep track of.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New research suggests that curly hair keeps your head cooler than other styles. CC-licensed photo by Ralf Steinberger 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. Yes, hello to you, too. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Draft EU plans to allow spying on journalists are dangerous, warn critics • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

»

Draft legislation published by EU leaders that would allow national security agencies to spy on journalists has been condemned by media and civic society groups as dangerous and described by a leading MEP as “incomprehensible”.

On Wednesday, the European Council – which represents the governments of EU member states – published a draft of the European Media Freedom Act that would allow spyware to be placed on journalists’ phones if a national government thought it necessary.

Unusually, the council did not take the step of holding an in-person meeting of ministers responsible for media before the draft was published.

The Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld, who has overseen the European parliament’s investigation into the use of Pegasus spyware on journalists and public figures, said the claim that permission to spy on the press was needed in the interests of national security was “a lie”.

“I think what the council is doing is unacceptable. It’s also incomprehensible. Well, it’s incomprehensible if they are serious about democracy,” said In ‘t Veld.

The first draft of the act – originally tabled by the European Commission to strengthen protections for the independence of journalism in countries where it is under threat such as Poland and Hungary – had included strong safeguards against the use of spyware.

The draft must be agreed by the European parliament before it becomes law.

«

You can read the proposed legislation: search on “spyware” and it says it’s not to be used.. except on a case-by-case basis where it’s justified on national security. No chance at all that would ever be abused, no sirree.
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Curly hair keeps the head coolest • Smithsonian Magazine

Victoria Sayo Turner:

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Scientists have long wondered why humans’ scalps are covered in hair even though we are far less hairy elsewhere. A new study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests these strands coming out of our heads may have evolved to stop our ancestors’ large brains from overheating, with curly hair cooling more.

Shielding the head from heat could have been crucial for early hominid ancestors living in Africa under the equatorial sun. “The brain is a large and very heat-sensitive organ that also generates a lot of heat,“ says Tina Lasisi to National Geographic’s Tom Metcalfe. “So we figured, evolutionarily, this could be important—especially in a period of time when we see the brain size of our species growing.”

To better understand how hair affected the temperature of the head, Lasisi and her colleagues placed three different wigs or no wig on a research manikin, called a “thermal manikin.” The manikin was heated to a body temperature of 95ºF, according to National Geographic, and placed under hot lights in a climate-controlled wind tunnel. The scientists measured the temperature on the manikin’s head when covered with no wig and human hair wigs that had straight strands, loose curls or tight coils—which were similar in thickness and color.

Under a simulated sun beaming down at 86ºF, the starkest difference in heat was between no hair and hair. The manikin head always became hotter, but adding the straight-haired wig cut that heat gain by more than half compared to a bare head. The moderately-curled wig made the scalp area less hot than the straight-haired wig, and the tightly-coiled wig led to the coolest head.

…Another experiment aimed to simulate sweat on the head by wetting the manikins. In this case, bald heads cooled the most through evaporation of water. But cooling with sweat might not be that helpful overall. Having hair lowered the amount of sweat required to balance the sun’s heat, according to New Scientist.

«

Possibly the curls trap cooler air; though nobody’s quite sure. But it would make sense. The next question would be why our hair lost its frizz when we left Africa.
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Joseph Dituri: Florida scientist ‘Dr Deep Sea’ resurfaces after breaking record for living underwater • CNN

Ashley R. Williams, writing on June 11, following a story first noted here back in March:

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An associate university professor in Florida has completed his research mission and set a new world record in the process: living 100 days beneath the ocean’s surface.

On Friday morning, Dr. Joseph Dituri felt the sun’s rays for the first time since retreating to a subaquatic compound 22 feet below the waters of Key Largo, Florida, on March 1.

Dituri, 55, a biomedical engineer who teaches at the University of South Florida and calls himself “Dr. Deep Sea,” spent just over three months at the bottom of the Emerald Lagoon in Jules’ Undersea Lodge, the only underwater hotel in the United States, according to the hotel’s website.

The research project, Project Neptune 100, was organized by the Key Largo-based Marine Resources Development Foundation and focused on ocean conservation research and studying how compression affects the human body, according to Dituri’s website.

The US Navy veteran said he’s already noticed one impact: The water pressure seems to have shrunken his stature by half an inch. Dituri stood at 6 feet 1 inch tall before starting his mission, the University of South Florida stated in a news release.

The scientist began the project with a hypothesis that increased pressure could help humans live longer and prevent aging-related diseases, the news release said. Dituri said he hopes his underwater research will benefit the treatment of a variety of illnesses, including traumatic brain injuries, according to the release.

Dituri also used the project as an educational experience for youth.

«

So that was June 11, while we were all away. You can only imagine how Dituri felt, having achieved his largely unremarked underwater record, at the events of the Titan submersible last week, which have definitely been an educational experience for a lot of youth, who will be freaked out at the idea of going Deep Diving.
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Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

»

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.

The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.

The current AI boom — the convincingly human-sounding chatbots, the artwork that can be generated from simple prompts, and the multibillion-dollar valuations of the companies behind these technologies — began with an unprecedented feat of tedious and repetitive labor.

«

It’s always the same story. As this piece points out, the same was true for image recognition systems: enormous amounts of low-paid work to create a colossal amount of residual value.
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Spain will generate over 50% of power from renewables in 2023 • PV-Tech

Simon Yuen:

»

Spain will generate more than half of its power from renewable sources this year, according to Rystad Energy.

In a recent study, Rystad Energy said Spain is on track to become the first of the top five European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and the UK, by power demand to generate more than half of its power from renewable sources.

The cumulative installed capacity of solar PV is expected to reach 27.4GW in 2023, jumping from 20.5GW in 2022. Therefore, the installed capacity of solar and wind in Spain will be 58GW this year, increasing by 8.2GW year-on-year.

PV Tech reported that the EU will add 69GW renewables capacity in 2023 recently. Figures from the EU showed that Spain installed around 5.9GW of renewable capacity last year, bringing the total to 67.9GW in 2022. Of the renewable capacity installed that year, 4.5GW was solar, increasing from 3.6GW in 2021.

…However, Spain’s growth in renewable power generation may be disrupted by France’s demand for energy. According to Rystad Energy, France struggles with low nuclear power generation this year, forcing it to turn to Spain for power imports. Currently, average power prices in France are 34% higher than those in Spain due to the Iberian country’s renewable energy transition.

«

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Netflix subscriptions jump as US password-sharing crackdown begins • WSJ

Isabella Simonetti:

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Netflix’s long-awaited crackdown on password-sharing in the US delivered a windfall of new subscribers in its earliest days, according to new data, a sign that the move is bearing fruit despite being unpopular with many users.

According to streaming analytics company Antenna, the streaming giant amassed more new subscriptions in the US between May 25 and 28, shortly after Netflix notified users of the limits, than in any other four-day period since Antenna began compiling such data in 2019.

The change, which is upending years-long password-sharing arrangements between families and friends, is critical to Netflix’s growth: The streaming giant and its rivals are struggling to bring in new subscribers, particularly in the US market, where consumers can choose from a range of services that are easy to turn on and off.

Netflix has said more than 100 million people around the world watch its content using borrowed passwords.

The password-sharing crackdown, which started going into effect in the US and more than 100 countries and territories on May 23, forced users who share an account outside the same home to pay an additional $7.99 a month to watch. It also limited the number of extra members customers could add to their account, depending on the tier of service they pay for.

«

More empirical evidence that in fact, people will pay for a service if you oblige them to. Obviously some people won’t. But at the margin, there are people who want to watch Netflix content and will pay. This picks that low-hanging fruit.

The next question is how – next year? – Netflix is going to keep growing once it has got everyone paying. It’s already got an ad-supported version. What else is there but to raise prices?
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AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are on the rise • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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Thousands of AI-generated child-sex images have been found on forums across the dark web, a layer of the internet visible only with special browsers, with some participants sharing detailed guides for how other paedophiles can make their own creations.

“Children’s images, including the content of known victims, are being repurposed for this really evil output,” said Rebecca Portnoff, the director of data science at Thorn, a nonprofit child-safety group that has seen month-over-month growth of the images’ prevalence since last fall.

“Victim identification is already a needle-in-a-haystack problem, where law enforcement is trying to find a child in harm’s way,” she said. “The ease of using these tools is a significant shift, as well as the realism. It just makes everything more of a challenge.”

The flood of images could confound the central tracking system built to block such material from the web because it is designed only to catch known images of abuse, not detect newly generated ones. It also threatens to overwhelm law enforcement officials who work to identify victimized children and will be forced to spend time determining whether the images are real or fake.

The images have also ignited debate on whether they even violate federal child-protection laws because they often depict children who don’t exist. Justice Department officials who combat child exploitation say such images still are illegal even if the child shown is AI-generated, but they could cite no case in which someone had been charged for creating one.

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Pretty sure they’d be illegal in the UK. The real problem is that as image generation apps go open source and local, there’s nothing to stop the creation of this stuff. And if they share the prompts, not the image, is that legal?
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Camera review site DPReview finds a buyer, avoids shutdown by Amazon • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.

But then, something odd happened: the site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was “nothing to share,” which wasn’t much to go on but also didn’t make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.

On June 20, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its “current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]” were acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of June 20.

«

A rare piece of good news in the whole “wiping content off the internet” sagas.
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Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? • Café Lob-On

“Bloonface” says there’s been a big exodus from Mastodon:

»

As it exists at the moment, Mastodon functions essentially as Twitter did in about 2008. In some ways, that’s nice. The userbase is calmer, the Discourse™ does not get spun up as easily.

But the thing is, functionality-wise, Twitter in 2008 existed in 2008. We are now in 2023, where someone can use the Twitter of 2023. From a functionality standpoint, Twitter in 2023 is quite good, with some of the alternative Twitter-style frontends (e.g. Misskey and Calckey) being at about parity.
So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation. This brings me to the first thing that might piss off a lot of Mastodon users:

Decentralisation is not a selling point for 99% of people

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:
• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

«

People are allegedly on BlueSky. I’ve tried it, and it’s OK, but it still isn’t Twitter. Unfortunately.

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Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto • MIT Technology Review

Adam Popescu:

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This is a pivotal moment for Africa’s oldest protected park. After four years of disease outbreaks, pandemic lockdowns, and bloodshed, Virunga [National Park in eastern Congo] badly needs money, and the region badly needs opportunities. The Congolese government provides around just 1% of the park’s operating budget, leaving it to largely fend for itself. That’s why Virunga is betting big on cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, though, isn’t usually associated with conservation or community development. It’s often known for the opposite. But here it’s part of a larger plan to turn Virunga’s coveted natural resources—from land to hydropower—into benefits for both the park and locals. While operations like this mine may be unconventional, they’re profitable and they’re green.

Proceeds from the sale of Bitcoin are already helping to pay for park salaries, as well as its infrastructure projects like roads and water pumping stations. Elsewhere, power from other park hydro plants supports modest business development.

This is how you build a sustainable economy tied to park resources, de Merode says, even though the mine itself is something of a happy accident.

“We built the power plant and figured we’d build the network gradually,” he explains. “Then we had to shut down tourism in 2018 because of kidnappings [by rebels]. Then in 2019, we had to shut down tourism because of Ebola. And 2020—the rest is history with covid. For four years, all of our tourism revenue—it used to be 40% of park revenue—it collapsed.”

«

Possibly the only bitcoin mine that really is 100% powered by green energy. Internet connectivity is a challenge, though. Also the armed militia.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Analysts on Wall Street earnings calls have a new favourite phrase which is both bizarre and humdrum. CC-licensed photo by Dave Dugdale 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.

Operational note: The Overspill is going to be on a break for two weeks. Next edition on Monday 26th.

There’s another post at the Social Warming Substack going live at about 0845 BST: it’s about India.

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t you mouse over me, buddy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ron DeSantis ad uses AI-generated photos of Trump, Fauci • AP Fact Check

Bill McCarthy:

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A new Ron DeSantis campaign video attacking Donald Trump purports to show three photos of the former president embracing Anthony Fauci, a key member of the US coronavirus task force, with kisses on the cheek. But the images have the markings of fakes created using artificial intelligence technology, three experts in media forensics told AFP.

“Donald Trump became a household name by FIRING countless people *on television*,” the DeSantis rapid response team wrote in a June 5, 2023 tweet sharing the video. “But when it came to Fauci…”

The 44-second spot contrasts footage of Trump telling contestants “You’re fired” during his time as a reality TV show host with clips of him explaining why he would not give the boot to Fauci, who headed the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was the face of America’s coronavirus response.

…”It was sneaky to intermix what appears to be authentic photos with fake photos, but these three images are almost certainly AI generated,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and expert in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis.
Farid and two other media forensics experts polled by AFP agreed the images have irregular characteristics typical of those produced by AI.

“These images contain many signs indicating that they were AI-generated,” said Matthew Stamm, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University, who specializes in detecting falsified images and videos. “For example, if you look closely at Donald Trump’s hair in the top-left, bottom-middle, and bottom-right images, you can see that it contains inconsistent textures and is significantly blurrier than other nearby content such as his ears or other regions of his face.”

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And so it begins: AI fakery becomes part of the US political landscape. The campaigning proper has barely begun, and we’re going to have audio deepfakes to come too; the Trump campaign used a deepfake of Trump’s voice to mock DeSantis’s Twitter campaign launch.
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From “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy tests to the depression-prone: we found 650,000 ways advertisers label you • The Markup

Jon Keegan:

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What words would you use to describe yourself? You might say you’re a dog owner, a parent, that you like Taylor Swift, or that you’re into knitting. If you feel like sharing, you might say you have a sunny personality or that you follow a certain religion. 

If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital ad industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. The trove of data indicates that advertisers could also target people based on sensitive information like being “heavy purchasers” of pregnancy test kits, having an interest in brain tumors, being prone to depression, visiting places of worship, or feeling “easily deflated” or that they “get a raw deal out of life.”

Many of the Xandr ad categories are more prosaic, classifying people as “Affluent Millennials,” for example, or as “Dunkin Donuts Visitors.” Industry critics have raised questions about the accuracy of this type of targeting. And the practice of slicing and dicing audiences for advertisers is an old one. 

But the exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies. 

Because the segments also include the names of the companies involved in creating them, they also shed light on how disparate pools of personal data—collected by tracking people’s online activity and real-world movements—are combined into bespoke, branded groups of potential ad viewers that can be marketed to publishers and advertisers.

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They have a search system where you can see how people get segmented. It’s really remarkable how incredibly narrow the brackets can be.
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Apple Vision Pro hands-on: way ahead of Meta in critical ways • UploadVR

Ian Hamilton has tried all the VR headsets:

»

Vision Pro outclassed Meta Quest Pro and every other headset I’ve ever tried to a degree that is utterly show-stopping. I could see the weight of the headset still being a bit straining, and Apple wouldn’t talk about the field of view, but it felt at least competitive if not wider than existing headsets. Overall, Vision Pro provided easily the best headset demo I’ve ever tried, by a wide margin.

My first moment with Vision Pro seeing the physical room viewed through the headset’s display in passthrough, I looked down at my own hands and it felt as if I was looking at them directly. This was a powerful moment, more powerful than any previous “first” I’d experienced in VR. I feel the need to reiterate. I was looking at my own hands reconstructed by a headset’s sensors and it felt as if I was looking at them directly.

For the last decade, VR developers struggled with a number of tough design questions. Should they only show tracked controller models? Should they attach cartoonish hands? What about connecting those hands to arms? Sure, those are all interesting design questions, but those should be secondary implementations to a person simply looking down and feeling like their hands are their own. Vision Pro did this right out of the gate for the first time in VR hardware. It worked so well that I question how transparent optics, like those in use by HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap 2, will ever hope to match Apple’s version of passthrough augmented reality in an opaque headset.

Passthrough was by no means perfect – I could still see a kind of jittery visual artifact with fast head or hand movements. Also, in some of Apple’s software, I could see a thin outline around my fingertips. But these are incredibly minor critiques relative to the idea that this was night-and-day better than every other passthrough experience I’ve ever seen. From now on, every time I look through Quest Pro passthrough, I’ll be frustrated that I’m not using Vision Pro.

Is the difference between the $1000 Quest Pro and $3500 Vision Pro worth it? I’ll frame my answer to this question this way – can you afford to pay $2500 extra for a better sense of sight?

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Apple’s Vision Pro isn’t the future • WIRED

Kate Knibbs is “a senior writer at WIRED, covering culture”:

»

I’m not a gambler, but I’d bet everything that Apple’s Vision Pro will flop.

…This is not a “revolutionary” gadget, no matter how confident Tim Cook looks when he says it is. It’s a rare misfire, and a sign that Apple is losing its ability to turn tech-geek novelties into normie must-haves. It doesn’t augur the future so much as suggest that Cupertino doesn’t have a clear view forward. 

“Every successful Apple product of the past two decades has disappeared into our lives in some way—the iPhone into our pockets, the iPad into our purses, the Apple Watch living on our wrists, and the AirPods resting in our ears,” my colleague Lauren Goode wrote this week, after demoing the device at WWDC. “But the Vision Pro is also unlike almost every other modern Apple product in one crucial way: It doesn’t disappear.” Instead, Goode wrote, the device settles onto your face, hides your eyes, “sensory organs that are a crucial part of the lived human experience.” The same was true of all virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses, she conceded, but the Vision Pro marked the first time an Apple product had made such an intrusion into people’s lives.  

Reading Lauren’s review converted me into a full-fledged Vision Pro doomer. It drives home the reality that an Apple headset, no matter how nifty its specs, is still a big honking gizmo plonked between its wearer and the rest of the world, inherently a barrier more than a conduit. 

«

Well, it’s a point of view. Of course the difficulty is in proving “flop”. Take the iPhone 5C and the Apple Watch: both were declared flops within about six months of going on sale. For the iPhone 5C, that was almost certainly true (Chinese buyers preferred the metal 5S), but the Watch is going well. So when do you know it’s a flop? Who decides? Let’s come back in two years.
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Vision Pro’s big reveal • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

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Vision Pro’s value seems to lie largely in the realm of metaphor. There’s that brilliant little reality dial—the “digital crown”—that allows you to fade in and out of the world, an analog rendering of the way our consciousness now wavers between presence and absence, here and not-here. And there’s the projection of your eyes onto the outer surface of the lens, so those around you can judge your degree of social and emotional availability at any given moment. Your eyes disappear, Apple explains, as you become more “immersed,” as you retreat from your physical surroundings into the screen’s captivating images. See you later. Your fingers keep moving, though, worrying their virtual worry beads, the body reduced to interface. In its metaphors, Vision Pro reveals us for what we have become: avatars in the uncanny valley.

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“Virtual worry beads”. What a phrase. Carr, of course, always has an orthogonal take on tech, which is what makes him worth reading.

One point, though: nobody outside of Apple has seen what the “virtual eyes” projected on the goggles look like in real life. (Yes yes adverts sure.) All the demos have been to a single person, who wears the headset. Minor point, but might affect the spookiness in a shared space.
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Smoke forecast • FireSmoke.ca

This interactive map shows where the smoke – particularly the most dangerous small particles, known as PM 2.5 – is expected to move over the next few days. There’s no lower limit for PM 2.5 but levels above 10 are seen as particularly risky for any extended period. Some of the US eastern seaboard, and its cities, are forecast to see levels of 60 or more.
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Wall Street has a new favourite phrase and it’s utterly nauseating • Financial Times

Louis Ashworth:

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A spectre is haunting earnings calls — the spectre of double-clicking.

If you haven’t encountered this phrase previously, you might — naive, tiny baby that you are — think it’s just about interfacing with software.

And, of course, a search for “double click” on analytics platform AlphaSense also throws up a few tech demonstrations (though not very many, based on Alphaville’s half-arsed QA process).

But the truth is far more sinister.

On cloud verticalisation: “Satya, in your prepared remarks, you spoke about an increase in verticalisation of Azure. Can we double-click on that a bit more?” Gregg Moskowitz, Mizuho, on the Microsoft April 2023 call

On the exceptional growth in Europe: “[C]urious to hear or maybe if you can double-click on what’s driving the exceptional growth here in Europe.” Samik Chatterjee, of JPMorgan, on the Apple April 2023 call.

On new customers: “Just double-click on what customers are coming to Salesforce and engaging with you around some of the new things that we’ll hear about it sounds like in June.” Brent Bracelin, of Piper Sandler, on the Salesforce May 2023 call.

«

Heaven only knows what started this. It’s absolutely 😱😱 and is starting to challenge “Great quarter, guys” for the most-used cliché in earnings calls. You might be grateful that the article is behind the paywall. Meanwhile, the suggestions for “Further reading” at the end of the article are:

»

— How I lost my 25-year battle against corporate claptrap (FT)
— How to Clean Up Vomit: 12 Steps (WikiHow)

«

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Scientists claim over 99% identification of ChatGPT • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

“Right now, there are some pretty glaring problems with AI writing,” said Heather Desaire, first author of a paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, and a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas, in a statement. “One of the biggest problems is that it assembles text from many sources and there isn’t any kind of accuracy check – it’s kind of like the game Two Truths and a Lie.”

Desaire and her colleagues compiled datasets to train and test an algorithm to classify papers written by scientists and by ChatGPT. They selected 64 “perspectives” articles – a specific style of article published in science journals – representing a diverse range of topics from biology to physics, and prompted ChatGPT to generate paragraphs describing the same research to create 128 fake articles. A total of 1,276 paragraphs were produced by AI and used to train the classifier.

Next, the team compiled two more datasets, each containing 30 real perspectives articles and 60 ChatGPT-written papers, totaling 1,210 paragraphs to test the algorithm.

Initial experiments reported the classifier was able to discern between real science writing from humans and AI-generated papers 100% of the time. Accuracy at the individual paragraph level, however, dropped slightly – to 92%, it’s claimed. 

They believe their classifier is effective, because it homes in on a range of stylistic differences between human and AI writing. Scientists are more likely to have a richer vocabulary and write longer paragraphs containing more diverse words than machines. They also use punctuation like question marks, brackets, semicolons more frequently than ChatGPT, except for speech marks used for quotations. 

ChatGPT is also less precise, and doesn’t provide specific information about figures or other scientist names compared to humans. Real science papers also use more equivocal language – like “however”, “but”, “although” as well as “this” and “because”.

«

Good points about the punctuation and vocabulary. Perhaps they’ve discovered the formula!
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Adobe will cover any legal bills around generative AI copyright issues • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Adobe Firefly, the software giant’s AI-powered image generation and expansion tool, is being rolled out to businesses today. At its flagship Adobe Summit event, the company is unveiling an expansion of Firefly for enterprise users that will include “full indemnification for the content created through these features,” says Claude Alexandre, VP of digital media at Adobe. (The publicly available beta of Firefly has already been used to create AI-generated riffs on classic album covers and works of art.)

Anything created using Firefly’s text-to-image generation tool will be fully indemnified by the company “as a proof point that we stand behind the commercial safety and readiness of these features,” Alexandre says.

That’s important because of the challenges around the legal status of generative AI tools and their outputs. The standards around generative AI and copyright have not yet been settled legally, which is causing companies to hold off using generative AI in their business operations. This decision, Alexandre hopes, provides clarity.

The Firefly model is trained on stock images for which Adobe already holds the rights, as well as on openly licensed content (for example, Creative Commons images) and public-domain content. “Adobe has actually offered indemnification for quite some time against the use of its own products, and in particular for stock [images],” Alexandre says, noting that this is an extension of the practice.

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Note the catch though: “The offer will be available only to enterprise customers”. Presumably, customers who are still paying their subscription at the time the litigation arrives, and while it’s in progress. So the subscription becomes a form of insurance too.
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Wind and solar overtake fossil generation in the EU • Ember

»

New data from energy think tank Ember shows that wind and solar produced more EU electricity than fossil fuels in May, for the first full month on record. Almost a third of the EU’s electricity in May was generated from wind and solar (31%, 59 TWh), while fossil fuels generated a record low of 27% (53 TWh).

“Europe’s electricity transition has hit hyperdrive,” said Ember’s Europe lead Sarah Brown. “Clean power keeps smashing record after record.”

The new milestone was driven by solar growth, strong wind performance and low electricity demand. Solar generated a record 14% of EU electricity in May, hitting an all-time high of 27 TWh, which exceeds the monthly solar records set in July last year. For the first time, EU solar generation overtook coal generation, with coal generating just 10% of EU electricity in May.

Wind power grew year-on-year to generate 17% of EU electricity in May (32 TWh). However, this was lower than the record set in January this year when wind produced 23% (54 TWh) of EU electricity. 

The strong performance of wind and solar meant that EU coal generation fell to an all-time monthly low in May, with just 10% (20 TWh) of EU electricity coming from the most polluting source. The record-low coal generation in May was just below the previous record set during the pandemic lockdowns, when coal power generated slightly above 10% of EU electricity in April 2020.

«

“Low electricity demand” is a strange one, which isn’t explained. Why, given everything, is electricity demand lower? Could microgeneration from solar panels be having some broader impact, since it reduces direct demand for power?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We don’t do business with ants, even though they can do a lot we might find useful. Would super-AIs treat us like ants too? CC-licensed photo by Nicolas Rénac 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. Us, colonial? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Instagram connects vast paedophile network • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt:

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Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles…

…The promotion of underage-sex content violates rules established by Meta as well as federal law.

In response to questions from the Journal, Meta acknowledged problems within its enforcement operations and said it has set up an internal task force to address the issues raised.

«

This is terrible. And it’s worse than the 2019 discovery that paedophiles were using YouTube comments on videos of children to create ad-hoc networks. There, at least, YouTube wasn’t promoting the comments. (The link should be free to read.)
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TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away • Vulture

Josef Adalian and Lane Brown:

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Across the town [ie Hollywood], there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework.

The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labour unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetises its biggest hits: it doesn’t.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.

“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”

«

An absorbing read which also makes one think that streaming, whether music or video (and perhaps also spoken, ie podcasts?), is only good for the consumer and the provider, but not the content creator. That, though, carries the seeds of its own destruction.
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The platforms give up on 2020 [US election] lies • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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One function [Elon] Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions. Across a variety of dimensions, Musk has moved fast and loudest — and when others have followed, the response has been barely a whimper.

Mass layoffs, stricter job performance requirements, a war on remote work, paid verification for social accounts — all of these served as a kind of aphrodisiac for other Silicon Valley CEOs, who proceeded to implement their own, slightly softer versions of Musk’s cultural reset.

Most recently, Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

Last month, for example, Musk told an interviewer that users who made false claims about the 2020 election being stolen “would be corrected.” But there was no accompanying effort to make that happen. And so, that same week, the top 10 posts promoting a rigged election narrative racked up a collective 43,000 retweets, the Associated Press reported.

As Musk was surely not aware, his predecessors had sought to unwind the company’s enforcement of 2020 election lies. In January 2022, CNN reported to general surprise that Twitter had abandoned its old policy in March 2021. Enforcement measures were intended to operate only until the next president was inaugurated, a spokeswoman said at the time, and no longer.

In any case, Twitter’s peers took notice of its reversal and chose to follow suit. In February, Meta restored Donald Trump’s accounts, and upon reinstating him said it would no longer prevent users from lying about the 2020 election. And on Friday, YouTube announced that it wouldn’t, either.

«

Twitter used to be a great leader in setting these standards. No longer. And as Newton points out, that means defection becomes much easier for all the other platforms. None of which is encouraging, as another American election looms.
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India pauses plans to add new coal plants for five years, bets on renewables, batteries • AP News

Sibi Arasu:

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The Indian government will not consider any proposals for new coal plants for the next five years and focus on growing its renewables sector, according to an updated national electricity plan released Wednesday evening.

The temporary pause in the growth of the dirty fuel was hailed by energy experts as a positive step for a country that is currently reliant on coal for around 75% of its electricity.

Updated every five years, the plan serves as a guideline for India’s priorities in its electricity sector.

India is the world’s third highest emitter and most populous country. It plans to reach net zero emissions by 2070, which would mean significantly slashing coal use and ramping up renewable energy.

In a draft of the plan released in September, the Central Electricity Authority, which is in charge of planning for India’s electricity needs, projected that nearly 8,000 megawatts of new coal capacity was required by 2027. But Wednesday’s strategy proposes the build out of more than 8,600 megawatts of battery energy storage systems instead.

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Great to see India taking this crucial step. You don’t solve climate change by adding to it (NB Rowan Atkinson).
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First impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS • Daring Fireball

John Gruber is impressed with his impressions:

»

The worlds, as it were, of MacOS and iOS (or Windows, or Android, or whatever) are defined and limited by the displays on which they run. If MacOS is a place I go mentally when working, that place is manifested physically by the Mac’s display. It’s like the playing field, or the court, in sports — it has very clear, hard and fast, rectangular bounds. It is of fixed size and shape, and everything I do in that world takes place in the confines of those display boundaries.

VisionOS is very much going to be a conceptual place like that for work. But there is no display. There are no boundaries. The intellectual “place” where the apps of VisionOS are presented is the real-world place in which you use the device, or the expansive virtual environment you choose. The room in which you’re sitting is the canvas. The whole room. The display on a Mac or iOS device is to me like a portal, a rectangular window into a well-defined virtual world. With VisionOS the virtual world is the actual world around you.

…This is not confusing or complex, but it feels profound. Last night I chatted with a friend who, I found out only then, has been using Vision Pro for months inside Apple. While talking about this “your real world room is your canvas for arranging your application windows” aspect of the experience, he said that he spent weeks feeling a bit constrained, keeping his open VisionOS windows all in front of him as though on a virtual display, before a colleague opened his mind to spreading out and making applications windows much larger and arranging them in a wider carousel not merely in front of him but around him. The constraints of even the largest physical display simply do not exist with VisionOS.

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Someone pointed out to me on Twitter that a Vision Pro might be like a laptop that would let you have multiple huge screens yet would fit in a kitchen drawer at the end of the work day. If Apple can solve the (keyboard) input problem, this could be remarkable.
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We don’t trade with ants • world spirit sock puppet

Katja Grace:

»

When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens:

“Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us”

“We don’t trade with ants”

I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation.

When a person says “we don’t trade with ants”, I think the implicit explanation is that humans are so big, powerful and smart compared to ants that we don’t need to trade with them because they have nothing of value and if they did we could just take it; anything they can do we can do better, and we can just walk all over them. Why negotiate when you can steal?

I think this is broadly wrong, and that it is also an interesting case of the classic cognitive error of imagining that trade is about swapping fixed-value objects, rather than creating new value from a confluence of one’s needs and the other’s affordances. It’s only in the imaginary zero-sum world that you can generally replace trade with stealing the other party’s stuff, if the other party is weak enough.

Ants, with their skills, could do a lot that we would plausibly find worth paying for.

«

The implication, of course, being that we humans would be the ants compared to the superintelligences. Grace makes some good points about what ants can do (and so cheaply!) which leads one to puzzle about why, dammit, we don’t trade with ants.
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Global smartphone production drops to a ten-year quarterly low at 250m units • Trendforce

»

The ongoing global economic downturn continues to impact consumer confidence in the market. TrendForce reports that the global production volume of smartphones in 1Q23 was only 250m units—marking a 19.5% YoY decrease. This represents not only the greatest annual decrease but also a historic low in quarterly production since 2014.

Samsung observed a slight surge in Q1 production thanks to the launch of its Galaxy S23 series, reaching 61.5m units—a 5.5% QoQ rise. However, TrendForce predicts a nearly 10% drop in Q2 production due to weakening demand for new models. Apple faced a substantial 27.5% QoQ drop in smartphone production in Q1, delivering a total of 53.3m units. The new iPhone 14 series accounted for approximately 78% of this figure, an improvement from the same period last year. Nonetheless, as the company navigates the transition period between model launches, a projected decrease of 20% is expected in Q2.

«

That’s a colossal drop; it’s as bad as the PC market is seeing, and I think there’s a suspicion that this is more than cyclical; that people are just not seeing any reason to buy a new smartphone at all. Foldables haven’t moved the dial in the slightest; they’re a margin of error.

But maybe if Apple were to offer cameras on its phones that could record in 3D, for viewing later on a headset… others might take that idea up too.
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Apple software chief Craig Federighi on iOS 17’s new privacy features • Fast Company

Michael Grothaus:

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What does concern [Apple software VP Craig] Federighi from a privacy and security standpoint, however, is the human element. Specifically, he worries about a rise in the use of deepfakes, AI-generated audio and video that can make it look like anyone is saying or doing anything. As AI tools become more accessible in the years ahead, deepfakes could increasingly be used in so-called social engineering attacks, in which the attacker persuades a victim to hand over valuable data by tricking them into thinking they are communicating with someone they’re not.

“When someone can imitate the voice of your loved one,” he says, spotting social engineering attacks will only become more difficult. If “someone asks you, ‘Oh, can you just give me the password to this and that? I got locked out,’ ” and it literally sounds like your spouse, that, I think, is going to be a real threat.” Apple is already thinking through how to defend users from such trickery. “We want to do everything we can to make sure that we’re flagging [deepfake threats] in the future: Do we think we have a connection to the device of the person you think you’re talking to? These kinds of things. But it is going to be an interesting time,” he says, and everyone will need to “keep their wits about them.”

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There’s plenty more in what is a very interesting interview; Federighi is by far the most expansive of the Apple VPs on parade these days.
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Apple avoids “AI” hype at WWDC keynote by baking ML into products • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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Amid impressive new products like the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and the Apple Vision Pro revealed at Monday’s WWDC 2023 keynote event, Apple presenters never once mentioned the term “AI,” a notable omission given that its competitors like Microsoft and Google have been heavily focusing on generative AI at the moment. Still, AI was a part of Apple’s presentation, just by other names.

While “AI” is a very ambiguous term these days, surrounded by both astounding advancements and extreme hype, Apple chose to avoid that association and instead focused on terms like “machine learning” and “ML.” For example, during the iOS 17 demo, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi talked about improvements to autocorrect and dictation:

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Autocorrect is powered by on-device machine learning, and over the years, we’ve continued to advance these models. The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever. And with the power of Apple Silicon, iPhone can run this model every time you tap a key.

«

Notably, Apple mentioned the AI term “transformer” in an Apple keynote. The company specifically talked about a “transformer language model,” which means its AI model uses the transformer architecture that has been powering many recent generative AI innovations, such as the DALL-E image generator and the ChatGPT chatbot.

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As Edwards effectively points out, not saying “AI” wasn’t an omission; the presenters didn’t somehow forget to include it. They purposely avoided saying it because they’re trying very hard not to get lumped in with the other companies.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if you could get an iPhone alarm that could be shared with your family? An app developer has a lot of novel ideas like that. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Quine 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. Unalarming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Sorry, Rowan Atkinson, electric cars are here to stay — and improve • The Washington Post

Michael Coren:

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EVs [electric vehicles] still pollute. As [comedian but also car enthusiast Rowan] Atkinson writes, manufacturing EVs can generate more emissions than making conventional ones — nearly 70% more, according to Volvo statistics he cites.

There’s some truth to that, largely because of the energy it takes to make a battery. Building a Nissan Leaf generates the equivalent of about 65 grams of CO2 per kilometer (averaged over the vehicle lifetime) compared to 46 for the average European vehicle, according to an examination of the scientific literature by CarbonBrief, a climate science website.

But that number is ultimately misleading. First, manufacturing emissions are predicted to fall as battery manufacturing improves and the industry decarbonizes. Second, it doesn’t matter much in the final accounting.

The vast majority of a car’s emissions come from the fuel the vehicle consumes over its lifetime, not the materials that go into them. When overall emissions are calculated over 150,000 to 200,000 miles, it turns out those from manufacturing are “a really, really small number,” says Jason Quinn, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University who conducts life cycle analyses.

A more honest accounting, by CarbonBrief, shows that driving a Nissan Leaf EV in 2019 generated at least three times fewer lifetime emissions per kilometer compared to an average conventional car.
In the United States, it’s already less polluting — and cheaper — to recharge rather than refill, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The same is the case in most places around the world.

Every year, this argument gets stronger. The United States is now targeting a carbon-free grid by 2035. “EVs are just going to get better because the grid is getting cleaner,” says Quinn.

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I didn’t link to the original Atkinson article (in which he noted he has an electronic engineering degree – yeah, well, join the crowd, matey) because it seemed so in need of rebuttal: the idea that it’s better to keep burning fossil fuels is ridiculous on its face. And so, here we have it.
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This guy on Twitter keeps inventing horrible tech features that no one wants • Digg

Darcy Jimenez:

»

Imagine if your DoorDash deliverer could request a few of your fries via the app, or the person you were texting could see your thumb-shaped face in real-time as you typed. If you’ve seen these features doing the rounds on Twitter lately, you might have been fooled into thinking some of them were a reality.

Luckily, these unhinged ideas are all a product of Soren Iverson’s imagination. The product designer, who works at Cash App, has gone viral for his mockups of often nightmarish (and occasionally genius) “improvements” to the apps we use every day.

Iverson told Digg that he started off making “satirical UI” and exploring how AI could be used in “unexpected ways” — then, his shared iPhone alarm idea went viral in January of this year.

“From there I’ve just been making an idea a day, and having fun with it,” he said.

«

When I saw the headline, I thought they meant Elon Musk, but Iverson’s ideas are actually weirdly funny and just on the edge of workable (almost always tilting over into the wrong side). The “shared iPhone alarm” (“iOS alarms, but everyone has to wake up”), though, would be absolutely brilliant for a family: school days when you all need to get up, or head off on holiday, or whenever you need to do something in concert. Or when you’re with a team in a location and need coordination.
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Rep. Jim Jordan, GOP allies amplify scrutiny of top disinfo researchers • The Washington Post

Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn:

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Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his allies in Congress are demanding documents from and meetings with leading academics who study disinformation, increasing pressure on a group they accuse of colluding with government officials to suppress conservative speech.

Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events.
Last week, Jordan threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests.

The university turned over its scholars’ communications with government officials and big social media platforms but is holding back records of some disinformation complaints. Stanford told The Washington Post that it omitted internal records, some filed by students. The university is negotiating for limited interviews.

The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians.

Jordan has argued that content removals urged by some in the government have suppressed legitimate theories on vaccine risks and the Covid-19 origins as well as news stories wrongly suspected of being part of foreign disinformation campaigns.

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This is the downside of the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives: they go on their weird vendettas.
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iOS 17 preview • Apple

»

iOS 17 brings new features to enhance the things you do every day.

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Unlike the headset, these (for the most part little) tweaks are actually going to be used by hundreds of millions. Some of them actually look useful too. Seems you can install the Developer Betas without having a developer account for the first time.
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Stefanie Sun deepfake music covers arise from AI voice cloning • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Singaporean Mandopop diva Stefanie Sun is one of the most beloved singers in China. Over the past two decades, she has sold millions of albums and attracted a loyal fan base across the country. But the 44-year-old star has not released a new album since 2017, so fans decided to take on the task themselves.

Zheng, a Xiamen-based coder and dedicated fan, fed more than a 100 of Sun’s original songs into a deepfake voice generator called So-Vits-SVC, training the program to perform any song in Sun’s distinctive, lilting voice.

“I wanted to listen to her sing other songs,” Zheng, who preferred to be identified only by his last name for fear of legal consequences, told Rest of World. He used the model to generate a wide range of deepfake Sun covers — from the folk classic “Five Hundred Miles” to the pop hit “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. “It’s very similar. [Artificial intelligence] performs more consistently than Sun herself,” said Zheng.

The surge of open-source AI programs such as So-Vits-SVC — shared online by Chinese programmers on platforms such as GitHub — has allowed internet users to train and build their own deepfake models that mimic celebrity voices. From Singapore to Spain, people have used these Chinese-made AI programs to resurrect dead artists, parodize politicians, and bulk-produce songs in the voices of Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump.

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This is the future, here right now. I wonder if some unknown artists will start feeding their own content into these systems in order to build up a catalog they can monetise. No copyright issues then.
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Apple Vision • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has tried it:

»

The larger Vision Pro opportunity is to move in on the iPad and to become the ultimate consumption device.

The keynote highlighted the movie watching experience of the Vision Pro, and it is excellent and immersive. Of course it isn’t, in the end, that much different than having an excellent TV in a dark room.

What was much more compelling were a series of immersive video experiences that Apple did not show in the keynote. The most striking to me were, unsurprisingly, sports. There was one clip of an NBA basketball game that was incredibly realistic: the game clip was shot from the baseline, and as someone who has had the good fortune to sit courtside, it felt exactly the same, and, it must be said, much more immersive than similar experiences on the Quest.

It turns out that one reason for the immersion is that Apple actually created its own cameras to capture the game using its new Apple Immersive Video Format. The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.

What is fascinating is that such a season pass should, in my estimation, look very different from a traditional TV broadcast, what with its multiple camera angles, announcers, scoreboard slug, etc. I wouldn’t want any of that: if I want to see the score, I can simply look up at the scoreboard as if I’m in the stadium; the sounds are provided by the crowd and PA announcer. To put it another way, the Apple Immersive Video Format, to a far greater extent than I thought possible, truly makes you feel like you are in a different place.

«

I wonder if the 3D cameras are going to be sold separately at some stage, because having to wear a camera is substandard, both as an experience and a solution. It would definitely seed sales of the headset.

Thompson’s post is free to read – it’s worth taking the time.
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Hands on with Apple’s Vision Pro: bringing the metaverse to life • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

Moving from app to app using the device could hardly be more intuitive thanks to eye- and hand-tracking. Click a button with your right hand, and an iPhone-like home screen appears. Glance at a photo or icon, then pinch your fingers to “double-click”. You can scroll through photos with a swiping gesture, or zoom in as if a giant smartphone were projected in front of your face.

The device can easily move between virtual reality, in which the wearer is fully immersed in a digital world, and “augmented reality,” which overlays images upon the real surroundings. An Apple Watch-like dial allows you to manually fade between these two modes or, in some settings, the effect is automatic: if a person stands beside you, just look at them and their image will slowly appear and become clearer with time.

Among the features Apple could not show in its presentation were the 3D photos and videos that the headset could capture. In my private demo, I could sit around a fire with friends or have a seat at the table as children blew out birthday candles in uncanny depth.

Gene Munster, portfolio manager at Deepwater Asset Management, said this part of the demo blew him away. “3D memories are going to change how we remember things,” he said. “I’m not going to want to take a birthday party video again, unless it’s like that.”

«

You say: but it costs $3,500, who can afford to have one of those and children? Related: the analysis company Trendforce reckons Apple will sell 200,000 in the first year despite “concerns around price and battery life”.

I’ll tell you who’ll record those videos of (kids’ and others’) birthday parties: paid flunkeys of the very rich. Think “Succession”, which surely would have used this as a throwaway in some episode had the Vision Pro been available.
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FTX’s big AI bet could help bail out customers • Semafor

Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti:

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FTX’s bankers are quietly shopping what might be the most valuable asset inside the collapsed crypto exchange: a stake in Anthropic, a startup that has ridden the AI craze and is now worth billions of dollars.

Perella Weinberg, the boutique bank sorting out the mess left behind when FTX went bankrupt in November, has been teasing the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of shares in Anthropic to potential investors, people familiar with the matter said. The privately-held company, which created the Claude chatbot that is taking on ChatGPT, has gone from virtually unknown to one of the hottest companies in the AI boom in a matter of months.

FTX appeared to own $500m worth of Anthropic stock when it went bankrupt, though it’s unclear how former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrived at that valuation. The stake is now expected to fetch nine figures, money that would go to former customers.

Bankers are discussing whether to sell the entire stake now or hold some back, on the theory that AI valuations will keep rising. (Bankman-Fried is no longer an investor in Semafor).

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On the gambling premise alone, you’d be crazy to sell it all at once; sell half now, half later if it appreciates in value.
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Linda Yaccarino replaces Elon Musk as Twitter boss • BBC News

Annabelle Liang:

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Linda Yaccarino, the new boss of troubled social media firm Twitter, has started the role earlier than expected.

Ms Yaccarino, 60, was previously head of advertising at NBCUniversal. She joined days after Twitter lost its second head of trust and safety.

Elon Musk had announced on 12 May that his successor would join in six weeks but her start date appears to have been brought forward.

Twitter also announced it had recruited Joe Benarroch from NBCUniversal. Mr Benarroch was senior vice president of communications, advertising and partnerships at the media giant. He also worked for a number of years at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. At Twitter he will focus on business operations.

Mr Musk has said he plans to remain involved with the firm. The billionaire owner of Twitter said last year he would resign as chief executive once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job”.
It followed a Twitter poll when Mr Musk asked people to vote on whether he should resign – 57.5% voted yes.

Ms Yaccarino welcomed her former NBCUniversal co-worker Mr Benarroch to Twitter, which is known for its logo of a bird. She tweeted: “Welcome to the flock @benarroch_joe! From one bird to the next.”

He said: “I am looking forward to bringing my experience to Twitter, and to working with the entire team to build Twitter 2.0 together.”

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And so ends the short period when the Twitter CEO was actually an involved, active user of Twitter, which had never happened before. (Even with Jack Dorsey.) Tagging in Benarroch to keep Musk away from day-to-day operations is smart.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, the FTC has fined Amazon’s Ring because in the past, employees could watch customer videos without authorisation. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. No pictures please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon’s Ring to pay millions to settle FTC privacy lawsuit • Business Insider

Jordan Hart:

»

Amazon-owned smart doorbell company Ring agreed to settle a lawsuit filed against the company by the Federal Trade Commission regarding privacy and data security concerns.

Ring will pay $5.8m to the FTC and implement a new system for data security as part of the settlement, according to court documents filed Wednesday. The surveillance company — which was acquired by Amazon in 2018 in a $1bn deal — is used by millions as a form of security, but the FTC alleged Ring employees had unrestricted access to footage on customers’ home security systems.

“Ring promptly addressed these issues on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry,” a Ring spokesperson told Insider. “While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and deny violating the law, this settlement resolves this matter so we can focus on innovating on behalf of our customers.”

In one instance, a Ring employee viewed thousands of recordings from at least 81 female Ring camera users between June and August 2017, CNN reported.

“Only after the supervisor noticed that the male employee was only viewing videos of ‘pretty girls’ did the supervisor escalate the report of misconduct,” the FTC alleged in its complaint, obtained by CNN. “Only at that point did Ring review a portion of the employee’s activity and, ultimately, terminate his employment.”

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This happened last week, and I linked to the related Alexa settlement, but the details in this are, as above, terrible. There was no proper control over who could see which videos. Skim through the details of the FTC complaint and shudder. But it’s also absolutely the case that every tech company that makes hardware or software has a God Mode at some point, and the question is when it deletes it – if ever.
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Apple reveals Vision Pro AR headset at its worldwide developers conference • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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Apple has lifted the lid on the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley and revealed the Vision Pro, a $3,499 VR headset.

“With Vision Pro, you’re no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas,” the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. “Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to Spatial Computing.”

The headset allows users to interact with “apps and experiences”, the Apple vice-president of human interface, Alan Dye, said, in an augmented reality (AR) version of their own surroundings or in a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) space. “Apple Vision Pro relies solely on your eyes, hands and voice,” Dye said. “You browse the system simply by looking. App icons come to life when you look at them; simply tap your fingers together to select, and gently flick to scroll.”

A feature called “EyeSight” will show users’ eyes on the front screen when they are in an AR mode, simulating a transparent screen and letting them more naturally interact with those around them, but will show a blurred version of a VR experience to indicate to others when they are not present in the room.

“Because you can see the world clearly when wearing Vision Pro, you remain present in your space,” Apple said. “You can review your to-do list and notes, review your next trip in Safari, and play music while you type. It works seamlessly with familiar Bluetooth accessories, and you can even bring your Mac wirelessly into Apple Vision Pro just by looking at it.”

As well as applications built from the ground up for the device, Vision Pro will also run apps built for iOS, appearing as a floating screen in front of the user. The company is pitching the device as a powerful but compact replacement or augmentation for a user’s existing devices.

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Lots of people seem to think this will somehow take over from TV. Not a chance, unless you’re living alone in a cupboard. I still don’t see the attraction.
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ChatGPT is spawning religious chatbots in India • Rest of World

Nadia Nooreyezdan:

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In January 2023, when ChatGPT was setting new growth records, Bengaluru-based software engineer Sukuru Sai Vineet launched GitaGPT. The chatbot, powered by GPT-3 technology, provides answers based on the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture. GitaGPT mimics the Hindu god Krishna’s tone — the search box reads, “What troubles you, my child?”

In the Bhagavad Gita, according to Vineet, Krishna plays a therapist of sorts for the character Arjuna. A religious AI bot works in a similar manner, Vineet told Rest of World, “except you’re not actually talking to Krishna. You’re talking to a bot that’s pretending to be him.”

At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. Rest of World found that some of the answers generated by the Gita bots lack filters for casteism, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for instance, say it is acceptable to kill another if it is one’s dharma or duty.

…And, as with all AI, these chatbots already display certain political biases.

Rest of World found that three of the Gita chatbots held strong opinions on India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party has close links to right-wing, Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. While the chatbots praised Modi, they criticized his political opponent, Rahul Gandhi. Anant Sharma’s GitaGPT declared Gandhi “not competent enough to lead the country,” while Vikas Sahu’s Little Krishna chatbot said he “could use some more practice in his political strategies.”

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Maybe we’re going to get AI-mediated social warming. Not encouraging.
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SEC says Binance misused customer funds, ran illegal crypto exchange in US • WSJ

Dave Michaels, Caitlin Ostroff and Patricia Kowsmann:

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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday sued Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, alleging the overseas company operated an illegal trading platform in the US and misused customers’ funds.

The SEC lawsuit also named Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and controlling shareholder, as a defendant. The SEC said that Binance and Zhao misused customers’ funds and diverted them to a trading entity that Zhao controlled. That trading firm, Sigma Chain, engaged in manipulative trading that made Binance’s volume appear larger than it actually was, the SEC said.

Binance also concealed that it commingled billions of dollars in customer assets and sent them to a third-party, Merit Peak, which was owned by Zhao, the SEC alleged. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the SEC was examining the relationship between Binance.US—the US arm created in 2019—and Sigma Chain and Merit Peak.

“This will be a landmark case,” said Kurt Gottschall, a partner at Haynes and Boone LLP and former head of the SEC’s Denver office. “The SEC appears to be very concerned about the commingling of customer funds.”

«

This feels like wrapping up the loose ends. Related: a long Fortune article (subscription, or broken Javascript) about the crypto winter, which says inter alia:

»

Fundraising for crypto VC has fallen off a cliff in 2023, according to PitchBook data provided to Fortune. Though the data is only through mid-May, it’s not off to a good start: Crypto firms globally have raised just $500m—98% less than in all of 2022—over eight funds—90% fewer.

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Still $500m too much if you ask me, but as they say, it’s a start.
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Japan’s hot-spring resorts are blocking geothermal energy plants • The Economist

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With over 100 active volcanoes, Japan is estimated to have a potential geothermal resource of 23 gigawatts, equivalent to the output of 23 nuclear reactors. But the Nakao [2 megawatt geothermal power] plant is a rarity—Japan has hardly developed its geothermal reserves. Geothermal energy accounts for just 0.3% of its electricity supply. Japan holds the third-largest geothermal potential in the world, after America and Indonesia, but ranks tenth in terms of geothermal power generation. For a country heavily dependent on imported energy and struggling to honour its commitment to decarbonise its economy by 2050, this represents a huge missed opportunity.

Japan’s sprawling onsen (hot spring) industry is the main obstacle to geothermal development. Though many geologists reckon there is little chance of geothermal plants negatively affecting bathing pools (which are generally filled by much shallower aquifers than the geothermal reservoirs energy companies look for), the onsen industry is unconvinced. “The government relies on hot springs for its tourism—what are they going to do if the hot springs disappear because they keep building geothermal power plants?” asks Sato Yoshiyasu of the Japan Onsen Association, a big industry group. Japan’s 3,000 hot-spring resorts routinely withhold the consent necessary for development to proceed. And the fact that they are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and attract around 130m visitors a year, has largely deterred the government from pushing back.

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Japan imports 94% of its energy. Nimbyism really isn’t limited by geography, is it.
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Eight reasons why the Post Office compensation scheme is a scandal • Tax Policy Associates Ltd

Dan Neidle:

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Between 2000 and 2017, the Post Office falsely accused thousands of postmasters of theft. Some went to prison. Many had their assets seized and their reputations shredded. Marriages and livelihoods were destroyed, and at least 61 have now died, never receiving an apology or recompense. These prosecutions were on the basis of financial discrepancies reported by a computer accounting system called Horizon. The Post Office knew from the start that there were serious problems with the Horizon system, but covered it up, and proceeded with aggressive prosecutions based on unreliable data. It’s beyond shocking, and there should be criminal prosecutions of those responsible.

The Post Office then spent years fighting compensation claims in the courts, using every trick in the book to draw things out as long as possible – even a completely meritless application for a judge to recuse himself on the basis he was biased, which the Court of Appeal described as “without substance”, “fatally flawed” and “absurd”.

Now, finally – ten years after the Post Office almost certainly knew that it had wronged these people, it is paying compensation – but in a way that guarantees the wronged postmasters receive derisory sums. This article focuses on the “historical shortfall scheme” (HSS), which compensates postmasters who were not actually convicted of theft, but who were accused of theft, lost their jobs, threatened with prosecution, and forced to repay cash “shortfalls” which in fact were entirely fictitious. There are about 2,500 HSS claims. The average settlement payment so far is only £32,000.

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The fact that no minister has taken the Post Office and shaken it by the scruff of the neck, and that the people who were in charge of the false accusations have been allowed to get paid and even given honours, shows modern Britain at its absolute worst.
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Twitter’s US ad sales plunge 59% as woes continue • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu:

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Twitter’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88m, down 59% from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its US weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30%, the document said.

That performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees.

Twitter’s ad sales staff is concerned that advertisers may be spooked by a rise in hate speech and pornography on the social network, as well as more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products, the people said. The company has forecast that its US ad revenue this month will be down at least 56% each week compared with a year ago, according to one internal document.

These issues will soon be inherited by Linda Yaccarino, the NBCUniversal executive whom Mr. Musk named Twitter’s chief executive last month. She [was] expected to start the job on Monday, four people familiar with the situation said.

…Twitter feels increasingly “unpredictable and chaotic,” said Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, an association for premium publishers. “Advertisers want to run in an environment where they are comfortable and can send a signal about their brand,” he added.

Some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers — including Apple, Amazon and Disney — have been spending less on the platform than last year, three former and current Twitter employees said. Large specialized “banner” ads on Twitter’s trends page, which can cost $500,000 for 24 hours and are almost always bought by large brands to promote events, shows or movies, are often going unfilled, they said.

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As the article points out, the quality of advertisers is plummeting too. And on Monday the person in charge of North American government relations resigned. Pretty soon there’ll be nobody left at all.
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Compensation for atmospheric appropriation • A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries

Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel:

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Wealthy, industrialised nations of the global North, such as the United States and Germany, are responsible for 90% of excessive levels of carbon dioxide emissions, and could be liable to pay a total of $170 trillion in compensation or reparations to ensure climate change targets are met by 2050.

These funds amount to an annual transfer of nearly $6 trillion or about 7% of annual global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which should be distributed to low-emitting countries, such as India and Nigeria, as compensation for decarbonising their economies far more rapidly than would otherwise be required.

In our new open-access study, published in Nature Sustainability, we analyse 168 countries and quantify historical responsibility for climate breakdown (or lack thereof), based on excess CO₂ emissions beyond equality-based fair shares of global carbon budgets.

We propose an evidence-based compensation mechanism that takes into account historical responsibility for both causing and averting climate breakdown in an ambitious scenario where all countries decarbonise from current levels to ‘net zero’ by 2050, which keeps global heating below 1.5°C.

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This won’t happen, of course, but it is educative to see (using the interactive charts) that China actually won’t ever hit the sort of emissions level that would require it to contribute to the theoretical reparations, and that the US is a far worse offender.
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Big Tech can’t escape the ad business • The Atlantic

James Ball:

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Targeting isn’t about making the user’s ad experience better; it’s about showing the highest-value advertisements to the users who match the advertiser’s criteria. In effect, this means that when you visit a site, it looks for the identifying information it has about you, and determines which detail has the highest value.

For example, a site might identify that you’re browsing from the U.S., that you’re currently logged in to your Facebook account, and that you’re a regular reader of a premium newspaper that we’ll call The Economics Times Journal. That last bit of identifying information is worth much more than the other two: On average, readers of this publication have significantly higher salaries than the U.S. population at large.

This means that you might get an ad for a more premium product, even on a garbage clickbait site, than someone who reached it with just the first two tags attached to them. But this presents a problem for the publication itself: Its homepage now becomes the most expensive place on the internet for advertisers to reach its own readers. Why pay to advertise there if you can reach users more cheaply when they browse elsewhere?

The result of this system is a conflict of interest between the Big Tech companies that run the ad networks and their clients, fueled by relentless tracking of users across the internet, with perhaps dozens of different trackers on any site that seeks to make money from advertising.

So-called artificial-intelligence search, powered by large language models such as GPT-4, will likely make that conflict even more intense, as Bing and Google allow AI assistants to present information from across the web on their own sites, giving users even less reason to click through to publishers.

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Publishers seem likely to get badly squeezed by this tendency, especially as GPT-alikes suck up information.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The departures from the executive ranks at Twitter are continuing, with two key people leaving at the end of last week. CC-licensed photo by CeltikipoohCeltikipooh 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 coming last Friday at the Social Warming Substack. Go have a read! Free signup.

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.

The AI founder taking credit for Stable Diffusion’s success seems to have a history of exaggeration • Forbes

Kenrick Cai and Iain Martin:

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AI researchers with whom [Stability AI CEO and founder Emad] Mostaque worked told Forbes he claimed credit he did not earn or deserve. And when pressed, Stability spokesperson Motez Bishara admitted to Forbes that Stability had no special deal with Amazon.

Mostaque’s other mischaracterizations to investors include multiple fundraising decks seen by Forbes that presented the OECD, WHO and World Bank as Stability’s partners at the time — which all three organizations deny. Bishara said the company could not comment on the presentations “without knowing the exact version,” but that they were accompanied by additional data and documentation.

Inside the company, wages and payroll taxes have been repeatedly delayed or unpaid, according to eight former employees, and last year the UK tax agency threatened to seize company assets. (“There were several issues that were expeditiously resolved,” Bishara said.)

…In responding to a detailed list of questions, Mostaque shared a statement saying that Stability had not historically prioritized the “systems and processes” underpinning the fast-growing startup. “We recognize our flaws, and we are working to improve and resolve these issues in an effective and compassionate manner,” he wrote.

AI experts and prospective investors have been privately expressing doubts about some of Mostaque’s claims for months now. Despite Silicon Valley’s sudden, insatiable appetite for AI startups, a number of venture capitalists told Forbes that the Stability founder has been struggling to raise hundreds of millions more in cash at a roughly $4bn valuation. Mostaque publicly claimed last October that annualized revenue had surpassed $10m, but insiders say sales have not improved (Bishara said the October number was “a fair assessment of anticipated revenues at the time,” and declined to comment on current revenue). “So many things don’t add up,” said one VC who rejected Mostaque’s funding overtures.

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I’m wary of quoting the article in full because of British libel law, but it’s really not complimentary to Mostaque. Though one claim – that his wife, who’s head of PR, took thousands of pounds from the company – is completely explicable as repayment of a loan made previously to the company. You can see that when some VC money comes in, you might want to collect on the money put in months or years ago. Loans by directors to and from their companies are completely routine in startups.
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Air Force official’s story of killer AI was a hypothetical • Business Insider

Charles Davis and Paul Squire:

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An Air Force colonel who oversees AI testing used what he now says is a hypothetical to describe a military AI going rogue and killing its human operator in a simulation in a presentation at a professional conference.

But after reports of the talk emerged Thursday, the colonel said that he misspoke and that the “simulation” he described was a “thought experiment” that never happened.

Speaking at a conference last week in London, Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, head of the US Air Force’s AI Test and Operations, warned that AI-enabled technology can behave in unpredictable and dangerous ways, according to a summary posted by the Royal Aeronautical Society, which hosted the summit.

As an example, he described a simulation where an AI-enabled drone would be programmed to identify an enemy’s surface-to-air missiles (SAM). A human was then supposed to sign off on any strikes.

The problem, according to Hamilton, is that the AI would do its own thing — blow up stuff — rather than listen to its operator.

“The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat,” Hamilton said at the May 24 event, “at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

But in an update from the Royal Aeronautical Society on Friday, Hamilton admitted he “misspoke” during his presentation. Hamilton said the story of a rogue AI was a “thought experiment” that came from outside the military, and not based on any actual testing.

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I read the blogpost, like all the other people who reported on this, and at no point did it suggest that this was a simulation in his mind. But it did echo some of the examples recorded in “The surprising creativity of digital evolution: a collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities“, a PDF full of weird stories. (I referenced it in Social Warming. It’s a fascinating read.)

Of course the hype around this story echoed the concerns about AI – extinction! – that have been going round. So no surprise that nobody called Hamilton.
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AI entertainment made to order: you think you want that? • At the Mountains of Sadness

Mike Drucker is a screenwriter:

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On its face, entertainment made to order sounds nice, like finding porn of your favorite proper noun. In theory, it means that everything you watch will be specifically created for you and will cater to your tastes. You won’t have to scroll through a streaming service, quit the app, and then scroll another streaming service. You could say, “A romantic comedy starring Arianna Grande and Greta Garbo” and a machine would spit it out for you. And it’ll be perfect.

A couple things though.

First – and most obvious – none of us know what the fuck we want. I don’t mean that in some vast “We, the gatekeepers know what you want more than you do” way. I mean it in the literal sense of none of us know what the fuck we actually want from moment to moment. We aren’t scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because there’s nothing that appeals to us. We’re scrolling endlessly through streaming apps because we aren’t sure what we want to watch at that specific moment. There’s thousands of things that appeal to us we just skim right by.

You do it on Spotify all the time when a playlist you made for yourself hits a song you absolutely do not want to hear.

Like, I’m a fan of Law & Order, but I don’t want to watch it all the time. Sometimes I’ll skip right past it. No Law & Order for me! No thank you! I’m all set on what happens in a version of the Manhattan legal system featuring courtrooms with natural sunlight. Except, sometimes I think I want to watch Law & Order. And I really do and love it! Other times I don’t. And then I turn it off. And then I look for something else, even though my brain was certain I wanted Law & Order. 

Rather, it’s what we didn’t think we’d like that surprises us. Shows we think, “What the hell” and then end up loving. Documentaries that look boring as dog shit turn into thrilling mysteries. You finally got around to watching that movie everyone won’t shut up about with that actor you hate and – guess what? – you actually loved it. You didn’t know you would. But you did. 

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It’s an excellent point. My expectation is that the AI systems will just churn out unlimited stuff and it’ll just be semi-random what you pick; serendipity might be the next phase of the internet.
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The world’s peak population may be smaller than expected • The Economist

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few have noticed a wealth of new data that suggest that Africa’s birth rate is falling far more quickly than expected. Though plenty of growth is still baked in, this could have a huge impact on Africa’s total population by 2100. It could also provide a big boost to the continent’s economic development. “We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa,” says Jose Rimon II of Johns Hopkins University. “Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did.”

The UN’s population projections are widely seen as the most authoritative. Its latest report, published last year, contained considerably lower estimates for sub-Saharan Africa than those of a decade ago. For Nigeria, which has Africa’s biggest population numbering about 213m people, the UN has reduced its forecast for 2060 by more than 100m people (down to around 429m). By 2100 it expects the country to have about 550m people, more than 350m fewer than it reckoned a decade ago.

Yet even the UN’s latest projections may not be keeping pace with the rapid decline in fertility rates (the average number of children that women are expected to have) that some striking recent studies show. Most remarkable is Nigeria, where a UN-backed survey in 2021 found the fertility rate had fallen to 4.6 from 5.8 just five years earlier. This figure seems to be broadly confirmed by another survey, this time backed by USAID, America’s aid agency, which found a fertility rate of 4.8 in 2021, down from 6.1 in 2010. “Something is happening,” muses Argentina Matavel of the UN Population Fund.

If these findings are correct they would suggest that birth rates are falling at a similar pace to those in some parts of Asia, when that region saw its own population growth rates slow sharply in a process often known as a demographic transition.

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It’s not just a fiscal fiasco: greying economies also innovate less • The Economist

»

it is on productivity that demographic decline may have the most troubling effect. Younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas. Older people have more “crystallised intelligence”—a stock of knowledge about how things work built up over time. There are no precise cut-offs, but most studies suggest that fluid intelligence tends to peak in early adulthood and to begin to decline in people’s 30s. Both types of intelligence are useful: companies, industries and economies need both youngsters able to respond to new challenges and seasoned veterans with a detailed understanding of their trade. But the two are not of equivalent value when it comes to innovation.

In research published in 2021, Mary Kaltenberg and Adam Jaffe, both economists, and Margie Lachman, a psychologist, used a database of 3m patents filed over more than 40 years to explore the relationship between innovation and age. Depending on the scientific discipline, the authors note that patenting rates peak in a researcher’s late 30s and early 40s. The rates of patenting then decline only gradually through their 40s and 50s.

But for disruptive innovations, which fundamentally change a scientific field, the picture is very different. The researchers used a measure of disruptiveness based on the number of citations of a given invention in future patents. If a particular patent is cited by subsequent inventors, but that patent’s technological predecessors are not, it is categorised as a disruptive rather than an incremental innovation. For instance, the work of Kary Mullis, a Nobel-prize-winning biochemist, on polymerase chain reactions underpins much modern genetic and medical testing. After Mullis published his work, citations of prior technologies in the same field nosedived. Mr Jaffe, Ms Kaltenberg and Ms Lachman find that patents filed by the very youngest inventors are much more likely to be completely novel, discipline-changing innovations, and that as inventors age the patents they file become increasingly incremental.

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I think these articles were written by Mike Bird, but The Economist doesn’t do bylines, so it’s just surmise based on his tweets.
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The big question of how small chips can get • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw and Anna Gross:

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chipmakers now face a daunting challenge. Moore’s prediction has fallen behind schedule and the cadence is now closer to three years. The latest 3-nanometre chips being mass produced for this year’s iPhones will be followed by what some see as an even bigger leap forward to 2nm by 2025. “But once you get to 1.5nm, maybe 1nm, Moore’s Law is 100% dead,” says Ben Bajarin, a technology analyst at Silicon Valley-based Creative Strategies. “There’s just no way.”

Chip engineers have defied forecasts of an end to Moore’s Law for years. But the number of transistors that can be packed on to a silicon die is starting to run into the fundamental limits of physics. Some fear manufacturing defects are rising as a result; development costs already have. “The economics of the law are gone,” says Bajarin.

That has sent chip designers into a scramble over the past few years for alternative ways to sustain advances in processing power, ranging from new design techniques and materials to using the very AI enabled by the latest chips to help design new ones.

…one consequence of chip innovation being more narrowly focused is that any breakthroughs tend to be more zealously guarded and less transferable to the wider market.

“Through the 1990s and early 2000s, cost per transistor and the ability to build more complex chips was roughly free to the entire industry,” says [leader of the US National Network for Critical Technology Assessment, Hassan] Khan. “[Now] computation is less of a general purpose technology . . . If I’m optimising chips for AI, that might make GPT more efficient or powerful but it may not spill over into the rest of the economy.”

Another key delta of innovation is in chip “packaging”. Instead of printing every component on to the same piece of silicon, to create what’s known as a “system on a chip”, semiconductor companies are now talking up the potential for “chiplets” that allow smaller “building blocks” to be mixed and matched, opening up new flexibility in design and component sourcing.

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Could Ozempic also be an anti-addiction drug? • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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As semaglutide [aka Ozempic] has skyrocketed in popularity, patients have been sharing curious effects that go beyond just appetite suppression. They have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin. Not everyone on the drug experiences these positive effects, to be clear, but enough that addiction researchers are paying attention. And the spate of anecdotes might really be onto something. For years now, scientists have been testing whether drugs similar to semaglutide can curb the use of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids in lab animals—to promising results.

Semaglutide and its chemical relatives seem to work, at least in animals, against an unusually broad array of addictive drugs, says Christian Hendershot, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. Treatments available today tend to be specific: methadone for opioids, bupropion for smoking. But semaglutide could one day be more widely useful, as this class of drug may alter the brain’s fundamental reward circuitry. The science is still far from settled, though researchers are keen to find out more. At UNC, in fact, Hendershot is now running clinical trials to see whether semaglutide can help people quit drinking alcohol and smoking. This drug that so powerfully suppresses the desire to eat could end up suppressing the desire for a whole lot more.

The history of semaglutide is one of welcome surprises. Originally developed for diabetes, semaglutide prompts the pancreas to release insulin by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide 1. First-generation GLP-1 analogs—exenatide and liraglutide—have been on the market to treat diabetes for more than a decade. And almost immediately, doctors noticed that patients on these drugs also lost weight, an unintended but usually not unwelcome side effect.

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That’s going to be an interesting side effect, if confirmed and controllable. Weight loss and addiction reduction? “Wonder drug” gets overused, but this is pretty dramatic.
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Why trends have lost all meaning • Fast Company

Matt Klein:

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Trends once meant meaningful social change: an emerging and defining collective thought, behavior, value, or attitude. A shift in society. But today, “mermaidcore” is being named a top trend for this summer.

Trends lost their meaning.

When brands joined the conversations on social media en masse, it set off a chain reaction that would ultimately lead us to devalue the rigorous practice of trend forecasting and the original definition of a “trend.”

As soon as brands created their own accounts the thought became: “If we participate in these discussions, we win culture . . . and then sales.”

It’s unclear if this notion has even been effectively measured or supported, but it often remains the collective hypothesis.

As a result, brands started obsessing over the “trending” story of the day, hashtag, meme of the moment, or core aesthetic. Watching everyone engage in public conversations across social media, many brands believe emulating our “friends” would unlock cultural resonance.

In the process of chasing cool, brands have lost the purpose of analyzing culture. Most of the signals considered “trends” today are really nothing more than frivolous entertainment.

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I always thought that trends were meant to indicate deep cultural changes that brands and companies would want to engage with. Such as “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night“.
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Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality to leave • Reuters

Tiyashi Datta and Sheila Dang:

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Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, has decided to leave the company, according to a source familiar with the matter on Friday, the second safety leader to depart in a matter of days.

The latest departure adds to a growing challenge for new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, even before she steps into the role.

On Thursday, Ella Irwin told Reuters that she resigned from her role as vice president of product for trust and safety at the social media company, where she oversaw content moderation efforts and often responded to users with questions about suspended accounts.

Brown worked on efforts to prevent ads from appearing next to unsuitable content.

Platformer and the Wall Street Journal earlier reported Brown’s departure.

Since Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, who were wary about the placement of their ads after the company laid off thousands of employees.

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The departure of Irwin seems to have been over a film that Musk wanted shown titled “What is a woman?” What’s strange is that Irwin chose to resign over that, rather than all the other things Musk had done. Also, I haven’t heard of any hirings at Twitter; only departures.
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The Google Pixel Watch is randomly popping open for some • Android Police

Rajesh Pandey:

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Over on Reddit, reports from Pixel Watch owners about its backplate suddenly falling out have been popping up for at least the last few months. The issue does not seem widespread, but it is also not small enough to be ignored. In most cases, users report their Pixel Watch back came off while removing the wearable from the charging puck. This indicates an issue with the adhesive that holds the back and the watch together.

Contacting Google support has worked for most users, as the company sent a replacement unit to most. However, in some cases, owners had to escalate the issue as support asked for $300 to file a warranty claim or denied a replacement.

This is not the first instance of Google’s devices facing random hardware or build quality issues. There have been complaints from Pixel 7 users about its rear camera glass spontaneously shattering without any apparent reason. With the 2021 Pixel 6 series, there were complaints about its screen randomly cracking.

Google has not yet acknowledged the problem. But with such reports appearing frequently, it’s clear that there’s an issue with the adhesive that glues the smartwatch’s back to the chassis.

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“Not widespread, but not small enough to be ignored” puts it well. The Pixel Watch will have sold in really quite small volumes, so these reports definitely suggest a design problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified