From 2025, line judges will be surplus at top men’s tennis events: they’re being replaced by cameras. CC-licensed photo by Carine06 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half • BBC News

Tom Singleton:

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Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg says its new social media platform, Threads, has lost more than half its users.

The Twitter rival rocketed to more than 100 million users within five days of its launch earlier this month.

But Mr Zuckerberg has acknowledged those numbers have now tumbled. “If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.

Mr Zuckerberg – who made the comments in a call to employees, heard by the Reuters news agency – described the situation as “normal” and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.

Threads was criticised for the limited functionality it had when it launched. Meta has since added new features, such as separate “following” and “for you”‘ feeds, and increased scope to translate posts into different languages. The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.

He gave the example of “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads”. The two platforms are closely tied – in order to sign up for Threads, users must have an Instagram account.

Mr Zuckerberg also updated employees on the company’s enormous bet on a yet-to-be-created virtual reality world, called the Metaverse. He said work on the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology that would power it was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track”, adding that he didn’t anticipate it going mainstream until the next decade.

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OpenAI quietly shuts down its AI detection tool • Decrypt

Jason Nelson:

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In January, artificial intelligence powerhouse OpenAI announced a tool that could save the world—or at least preserve the sanity of professors and teachers—by detecting whether a piece of content had been created using generative AI tools like its own ChatGPT.

Half a year later, that tool is dead, killed because it couldn’t do what it was designed to do.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly unplugged its AI detection tool, AI Classifier, last week because of “its low rate of accuracy,” the firm said. The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool. The link to OpenAI’s classifier is no longer available.

“We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated,” OpenAI wrote.

New tools allowing the use of increasingly sophisticated AI come online almost daily and have created a cottage industry of AI detectors.

OpenAI announced the launch of its AI Classifier claiming it could distinguish between text written by a human and an AI. Even then, however, OpenAI called the classifier “not fully reliable,” adding that the evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts correctly identified 26% of AI-written text as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling the human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time.

OpenAI said limitations of the AI Classifier include being unreliable on text with fewer than 1,000 characters, incorrectly labelling text written by humans as written by AI, and classifiers based on neural networks performing poorly outside of their training data.

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The arms race continues. AI generators still in the lead.
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How Sweden’s biggest daily uses ChatGPT in its newsroom • UK Press Gazette

Aisha Majid:

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Sweden’s biggest daily news outlet has discovered it can use generative AI tools to boost time spent on its articles, especially with younger audiences.

Aftonbladet began experimenting with ChatGPT in its newsroom at the start of the year with the goal of creating a tool to help it test out what generative AI could do.

The result was an AI-generated article summary that readers can choose to open within news articles. The initial results, deputy editor Martin Schori told Press Gazette, have been positive.

Unexpectedly, audiences spend longer reading articles that have summaries than those without. According to Schori, the findings surprised the newsroom, which initially thought the findings were a mistake.

Instead, Schori explained that since readers get a more general understanding of an article upfront, they are more likely to go on and read the whole text.

The summaries, called ‘Snabbversions’ (or ‘quick versions’ in English), use ChatGPT owner OpenAI’s API and are integrated into Aftonbladet’s CMS.

Snabbversions, which have already been rolled out into many of Aftonbladet’s published news and sports articles, have also proven popular with the title’s younger audience. Nearly 40% of younger readers opt to read the summaries.

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In case you’re wondering, yes, they do get a human to check over the summary. And consider that this is getting ChatGPT to do a summary in Swedish – which is not its most effective language.
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Japan’s population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time • The Guardian

Gavin Blair:

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Every one of Japan’s 47 prefectures posted a population drop in 2022, while the total number of Japanese people fell by nearly 800,000. The figures released by the Japan’s internal affairs ministry mark two new unwelcome records for a nation sailing into uncharted demographic territory, but on a course many other countries are set to follow.

Japan’s prime minister has called the trend a crisis and vowed to tackle the situation. But national policies have so far failed to dent population decline, though concerted efforts by a sprinkling of small towns have had some effect.

Wednesday’s new data showed deaths hit a record high of more than 1.56 million while there were just 771,000 births in Japan in 2022, the first time the number of newborns has fallen below 800,000 since records began.

Even an all-time high increase in foreign residents of more than 10%, to 2.99 million, couldn’t halt a slide in the total population, which has declined for 14 years in a row to 122.42 million in 2022.

In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida said that addressing the birthrate was “now or never” and warned, “Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions.”

Japan’s ageing population is already affecting nearly every aspect of society. More than half of all municipalities are designated as depopulated districts, schools are closing and more than 1.2 million small businesses have owners aged about 70 with no successor.

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Read the rest of the article for some amazing detail about the yakuza (Japan’s version of the Mafia) and, er, senior porn. But overall, 14 years of decline? That’s a dystopia we don’t think about often.
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Britain is a developing country • Consumer Surplus

Sam Bowman:

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The UK is thinking like a frontier economy when it should be thinking like a developing country. We’re well off by global standards, but poor by the standards of the frontier. And how rich we get mostly won’t be determined by the Great Stagnation, but by more mundane factors like the cost of energy, the supply of housing and infrastructure, and returns on capital investment.

In a way this is optimistic: the UK has a policy problem, not a fundamental scientific one. 

But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites. Stefan Dercon, author of Gambling on Development, has a theory about what allows developing countries to experience sustained economic growth: they need their elites to come to an agreement to pursue it. The reforms needed to grow are painful and unpopular in the short-run. Regimes that do them without an “elite bargain” behind them are opening themselves up to being removed. Similarly, when one party in the UK proposes planning liberalisation, almost inevitably the others swing heavily Nimbyish.

In the UK, the preoccupations of the “elite” – by which I mean the people, left and right, in politics, government and media whose views shape those of the country – are with things like Net Zero (above all), inequality, obesity, delivering Brexit, regulating Big Tech, data ethics and privacy, cutting immigration, gender and racial pay gaps, and other priorities that are either unrelated to, or diametrically opposed to, making the country richer. If growth gets mentioned at all it is usually to support some unfunded and poorly targeted tax cut. On the flip side, every proposed tax or spending cut is assessed in terms of its distributional impact, not its effect on growth.

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There’s a lot of easily absorbed detail in this post, which at the same time sets out the problem very simply. There’s a lot of ground to make up, and we’ve essentially been going backwards for years – perhaps decades.
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Electronic Line Calling Live to be adopted across the Association of Tennis Professionals (Men’s) Tour • ATP Tour

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The ATP has announced Tour-wide adoption of Electronic Line Calling Live (ELC Live) from 2025. The advanced officiating technology covers all court lines for ‘out’ calls throughout matches, a role traditionally carried out by on-court line judges.

This significant officiating update follows several seasons during which a combination of ELC Live, ELC Review and on-court line judges has been used at ATP Tour events. The move is set to optimise accuracy and consistency across tournaments, match courts and surfaces, for players competing in both main draw and qualifying events. The decision was supported by extensive research conducted by ATP across tennis stakeholders, including fans, which identified accuracy and consistency as the most important factors in assessing different line-calling systems.

All-court ELC Live coverage will also deliver comprehensive player and ball tracking across the whole Tour, leading to an unprecedented level of data for player-performance analysis and the development of new statistics in the game in collaboration with Tennis Data Innovations (TDI), in addition to future commercialisation opportunities.

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I missed this when it was announced in April. That gives them about 18 months. One already gets “Hawkeye” replays for many big tournaments, and the US Open used ELC throughout in 2022. I’d love to see an analysis of ELC v humans (the latter being cheaper, of course, but less accurate). How soon before the umpire is a robot too, since the only job will be to call the score and, occasionally, the trainer?
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The economic cost of Houston’s heat: ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’ • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe and Amara Omeokwe:

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Houstonians pride themselves on how they tolerate heat. This summer, the heat has become intolerable. 

Businesses and residents in America’s fourth-largest city have moved much of life indoors, changing work and spending habits. Some residents say they are reminded of quarantining during the pandemic’s early days: ordering in groceries, avoiding social commitments and looking for ways to stay entertained from the couch. 

The result is a dent to the local economy that could become an annual pattern if summers stay hotter for longer. 

“This year is different, people are staying home,” said Barbara Stewart, a professor of human development and consumer sciences at the University of Houston.

At Buffalo Bayou Brewing, a taproom and restaurant in the Heights neighborhood, fewer people are coming to the restaurant during the day, said Jonathan Horowitz, chief revenue and strategy officer. Earlier this month, the restaurant purchased two new portable cooling units to put behind the rooftop deck’s bar to better keep staff cool. 

He estimates revenue during the heat wave is down roughly 10% compared with the same time in 2022. 

“It seems like the time frame of this kind of heat has expanded beyond what it used to be,” Horowitz said. “We always had 100-degree days, but when you have 100-degree days for two months straight, that’s different.”

Employees at small- and medium-size businesses in the tourism, arts and entertainment and sports and recreation industries in Texas averaged 19.6 hours on the job a week between mid-June and mid-July, a 20% decline from the average during comparable weeks from 2019 to 2022, according to an analysis from Luke Pardue, an economist at payroll platform Gusto. 

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“If” summers stay hotter for longer? What are you expecting to happen, WSJ? Climate change to suddenly go into reverse?
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U.S. heat waves prompt surge in use of natural gas, a fossil fuel • The Washington Post

Timothy Puko:

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There’s a big winner in the record heat waves baking the United States, China and other countries — fossil fuels.

The United States is setting records for natural gas consumption this week at the power plants that keep the nation’s air conditioners humming, according to estimates from S&P Global Commodity Insights. In China, power plants are burning more coal to keep up with electricity needs, helping to feed a record pace in demand this year for the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

That demand is feeding what the Paris energy watchdog calls a “vicious cycle” that further boosts world temperatures. As heat waves multiply and intensify, it creates more demand for fossil fuels, which add to the greenhouse-gas emissions that intensify extreme heat around the world.

The world’s power grids are still too reliant on gas and coal, complicating efforts by the Biden administration and other governments to phase down their use. Despite climate commitments, governments face immediate imperatives to prevent power blackouts and skyrocketing energy prices to cool buildings and protect people from life-threatening conditions.

“The projection for how much energy you need is higher and higher because the cooling needs to go up,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “There are these tragic ironies all over the climate space.”

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But Lord David Frost said we’d all “adapt” to higher temperatures! That’s not “adapting”!
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Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse • Blockworks

Andrew Bailey and Nick Almond:

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Worldcoin — a new financial system connected to sensitive biometric information, mostly harvested from poor people — sure sounds like a terrible idea.

“Terrible” doesn’t do it justice.

Worldcoin will need to assemble a vast database of iris data. But not everyone is eager to gaze into an Orb. In the bootstrapping phase, at least, you had to pay people to scan their eyes. And so Worldcoin turned to the global south — home to the cheapest eyeballs — and played a dark game of ‘what will people do for money?’

Incredibly, Worldcoin was unprepared for an obvious consequence of this rollout strategy: A black market for verified credentials. You can now seemingly buy a World ID for as little as $30. Anyone, then, with more than $30 on hand can command more than one digital identity (although Worldcoin is aware of this issue and has proposed solutions to resolve it). Connecting real people to digital identities is a thorny puzzle. 

Worldcoin does not fix this. And it’s unlikely it ever can, since nothing in the design can stop professional sybil attackers farming eyeballs on the ground level through nefarious means.

This does not inspire trust in the system or its designers. And yet trust is what they demand. Worldcoin’s promotional materials are full of promises — to delete sensitive biometric information, or keep it hidden from view, or not use it in nefarious ways. One blog post (quoted here; the original appears to have been changed since initial release) put it this way: “During our field-testing phase, we are collecting and securely storing more data than we will upon its completion… We will delete all the biometric data we have collected during field testing once our algorithms are fully-trained.”

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If the crypto websites don’t like your project, you’ve really got a problem, haven’t you. Though the question of whether Worldcoin will discover if two irises are (functionally) identical, rather as fingerprints can be, remains to be answered. Molly White (of Web3IsGoingJustGreat) has much the same view.
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Typo leaks millions of US military emails to Mali web operator • Financial Times

Jacob Judah, Chris Cook, Mehul Srivastava, Max Harlow and Felicia Schwartz:

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Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers.

Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses.

The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain.

Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages — almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”

One misdirected email included the travel itinerary of General James McConville, the US army’s chief of staff, and his delegation as they prepared for a trip to Indonesia earlier this year
Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia. When Zuurbier’s 10-year management contract expires, Malian authorities will be able to gather the misdirected emails. The Malian government did not respond to requests for comment.

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This was roughly two weeks ago, but I can’t find any update on it. Has Mali got it all? Has it given it back? On tenterhooks now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sales of foldable phones (like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold) might hit 100m annually by 2027 – if Apple joins in soon. Don’t hold your breath, though. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.

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

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

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

Big AI won’t stop election deepfakes with watermarks • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

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Last week the major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, promised the US government that they would try to mitigate the harms that could be caused by their technologies. But it’s unlikely to stem the coming tide of AI-generated content and the confusion that it could bring.

The White House says the companies’ “voluntary commitment” includes “developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system,” as part of the effort to prevent AI from being used for “fraud and deception.”

But experts who spoke to WIRED say the commitments are half measures. “There’s not going to be a really simple yes or no on whether something is AI-generated or not, even with watermarks,” says Sam Gregory, program director at the nonprofit Witness, which helps people use technology to promote human rights.

Watermarking is commonly used by picture agencies and newswires to prevent images from being used without permission—and payment.

But when it comes to the variety of content that AI can generate, and the many models that already exist, things get more complicated. As of yet, there is no standard for watermarking, meaning that each company is using a different method. Dall-E, for instance, uses a visible watermark (and a quick Google search will find you many tutorials on how to remove it), whereas other services might default to metadata, or pixel-level watermarks that are not visible to users. While some of these methods might be hard to undo, others, like visual watermarks, can sometimes become ineffective when an image is resized.

“There’s going to be ways in which you can corrupt the watermarks,” Gregory says.

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Yes, this is the obvious problem. Does no watermark mean no problem? Of course not. Answers? None so far.
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Meta’s Threads needs a policy for election disinformation, voting groups say • NPR

Dara Kerr:

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“If you have that many people, you have a great responsibility to the people that are on the platform,” said Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org. “What we’re asking for here is a real plan, knowing that we’re only a few months out from presidential primaries, and that very soon the presidential election will be on our doorstep.”

The voting rights groups say they have cause for concern. During the past few elections, disinformation involving voter registration, polling places and political candidates was rampant on social media. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how that company used Facebook to target and manipulate swing voters. And in 2020, mentions of “stolen election” and “voter fraud” skyrocketed after President Joe Biden won the presidency.

“Misinformation, like social media itself, has gotten considerably more sophisticated,” said Bond Benton, communications associate professor who studies misinformation at Montclair State University. “There are ways that you can manipulate and game the system to get misinformation seen by a lot of people very rapidly. And if you’re not investing to prevent and curtail that, it’s going to find its way through.”

Meta has election disinformation policies for Facebook and Instagram, but it hasn’t published any specifically for Threads. A company spokesman told NPR that Facebook’s rules apply to Threads. So, for example, people can’t post false claims about voter registration. He also said Meta is looking at additional ways to address misinformation in future updates to the Threads app.

The voting rights groups say Threads needs a stand-alone policy. Otherwise, it’s unclear how the rules will be implemented and enforced.

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I don’t follow how, if Meta says it will use Facebook’s rules on misinformation, that isn’t sufficient for Threads. It seems like that would cover everything – at least as far as the Facebook policy really does cover anything at all.
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‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

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The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record.

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” Guterres said. “It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”

Guterres’s comments came after scientists confirmed on Thursday that the past three weeks have been the hottest since records began and July is on track to be the hottest month ever recorded.

Global temperatures this month have shattered records, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels and spurring violent weather.

The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse.

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. “For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.

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Scary. Now we need a superconductor so that we can power CO2 extraction machines all over the place. Else we’re just heading rapidly to what William Gibson called “the Jackpot”. It’s not something you want to win.
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“Diamagnetism is the most likely explanation” • Twitter

Alex Kaplan has been gathering reactions and analysis of LK-99, the allegedly superconducting material made by a Korean team:

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CMTC [Condensed Matter Theory Center] probably takes the cake at predicting diamagnetism as the most likely explanation. Consider these videos of flux pinning (perfect diamagnetism) vs. moderate diamagnetism. Which one does LK-99 remind you of?

Other susceptibility data points also indicate diamagnetism.

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Kaplan/CMTC point out too that LK-99 has higher resistance than copper, which is not really what you want from a superconductor.

Still awaiting attempted replication, but the scrutiny so far isn’t encouraging for a dramatic scientific breakthrough. (Everything has diamagnetism.) So.. no easy solution to CO2.
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Millionaire crypto influencer found dismembered in suitcase • NY Post

Ben Cost:

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Police have launched a murder investigation after the dismembered remains of missing millionaire Fernando Pérez Algaba, 41, were discovered by a group of children in Argentina over the weekend.

The grisly case came to light after the kids found a red suitcase filled with body parts while playing by a stream in the town of Ingeniero Budge, Buenos Aires Province, on Sunday, Jam Press reported.

The children’s parents notified the Buenos Aires police, who inspected the package and reportedly found the victim’s legs and forearm inside, discovering another whole arm in the stream. On Wednesday, authorities discovered the missing head and torso, El País reported.

The body parts were cleanly amputated, suggesting the work of a professional, local media reported. Meanwhile, a subsequent autopsy revealed that the victim had been shot three times before the dismemberment.

Police identified Algaba by his fingerprints and also by distinctive tattoos on the body parts. The entrepreneur had been declared missing since last Tuesday.

The businessman had accumulated millions renting luxury vehicles and selling cryptocurrency, which he frequently advertised to his 900,000 followers on Instagram. The influencer, who lived in Barcelona, Spain, had reportedly been staying in Argentina for a week prior to his alleged murder.

Police have arrested one suspect in connection with Algaba’s death. And while the motive behind the alleged murder remains unclear, authorities suspect that the influencer was killed over his numerous debts…He had reportedly run afoul of the Barra Bravas, a violent gang heavily involved in Argentina’s soccer scene, which reportedly demanded that he pay them a $40,000 loan.

“If something happens to me, everyone is already warned,” he wrote in a message.

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The moral, sadly, isn’t too hard to infer. One can only hope that the children weren’t too badly traumatised.
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Rewarding chatbots for real-world engagement with millions of users • ArXiv

A 14-strong team from Chai Research, Seamless Capital and the University of Cambridge’s Machine Intelligence Laboratory:

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The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can struggle to retain users. This work investigates the development of social chatbots that prioritize user engagement to enhance retention, specifically examining the use of human feedback to efficiently develop highly engaging chatbots.

The proposed approach uses automatic pseudo-labels collected from user interactions to train a reward model that can be used to reject low-scoring sample responses generated by the chatbot model at inference time. Intuitive evaluation metrics, such as mean conversation length (MCL), are introduced as proxies to measure the level of engagement of deployed chatbots.

A/B testing on groups of 10,000 new daily chatbot users on the Chai Research platform shows that this approach increases the MCL by up to 70%, which translates to a more than 30% increase in user retention for a GPT-J 6B model.

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It really is the world of Her, where the protagonist suddenly discovers that “his” AI has been talking to thousands, even millions of other people all the time.
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Intel stock rallies on surprise earnings as PC, data-center sales beat – MarketWatch

Wallace Witkowski:

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Intel Corp. shares surged in the extended session Thursday after the chip maker posted a surprise profit as PC and data-center sales came in better than expected.

Intel shares surged as much as 7% after hours, following a 0.6% rise to close the regular session at $34.55.

The company reported second-quarter net income of $1.48bn, or 35 cents a share, versus a loss of $454m, or 11 cents a share, in the year-ago period.

After adjusting for restructuring charges and other items, Intel reported 13 cents a share, versus net income of 29 cents a share a year ago.

Revenue fell to $12.95bn from $15.32bn in the year-ago period, and adjusted gross margins came in at 39.8% .

Intel had forecast an adjusted second-quarter loss of 4 cents a share on revenue of about $11.5bn to $12.5bn for the current period, and adjusted gross margins of about 33.2% for the quarter.

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If you read the actual Intel press release, pretty much every number is down, apart from Foundry Services; the profit seems to have been pulled from a hat. ntel’s not out of the woods yet.
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Global foldable smartphone shipments to cross 100 million by 2027 • Counterpoint Research

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Global foldable smartphone shipments are expected to pass the 100-million mark by 2027, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Global Foldable Smartphone Tracker and Forecast, with Samsung and Apple accounting for the biggest market share.

Commenting on growth expectations, Research Director Tom Kang said, “At the moment, foldables remain niche. But it is an important segment for brands looking to maintain leadership in innovation and a premium market presence.”

Kang added, “Samsung and the Chinese OEMs have been very active, especially in their home markets, with China emerging as the biggest market globally last year. If you want to make it in foldables, you have to make it there.”

Senior analyst Jene Park said, “In the long term, we are waiting to see what Apple does. We are looking at 2025 as the possible year of iPhone’s foldable debut, which could provide another growth spurt for the segment.”

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Ah, so it’s a forecast that depends on Apple entering that market. Samsung would no doubt be delighted: another customer for its foldable screens. But if that timeline is going to happen, Apple would be designing such a phone now (there’s a two-year timeline), and one might expect to start hearing little noises about Samsung increasing its foldable screen capacity. So keep an eye on that. I’m sceptical: I think Apple has plenty on its plate with the Vision Pro next year, and its followup in 2025, and foldables remain unproven.
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Facebook’s algorithm is ‘influential’ but doesn’t necessarily change beliefs, researchers say • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel:

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The algorithms powering Facebook and Instagram, which drive what billions of people see on the social networks, have been in the cross hairs of lawmakers, activists and regulators for years. Many have called for the algorithms to be abolished to stem the spread of viral misinformation and to prevent the inflammation of political divisions.

But four new studies published on Thursday — including one that examined the data of 208 million Americans who used Facebook in the 2020 presidential election — complicate that narrative.

In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to reshare posts was removed, the researchers said.

At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study: 97% of the links to “untrustworthy” news stories on the apps during the 2020 election were read by users who identified as conservative and largely engaged with right-wing content, the research found.

The studies, which were published in the journals Science and Nature, provide a contradictory and nuanced picture of how Americans have been using — and have been affected by — two of the world’s biggest social platforms.

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No simple solution in sight. Meanwhile, let’s try Threads! Though a Wired writeup of the studies says we prefer algorithmic feeds, actually.
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Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints • Reuters

Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu:

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In March, Alexandre Ponsin set out on a family road trip from Colorado to California in his newly purchased Tesla, a used 2021 Model 3. He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.

He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convinced the car had a serious defect.

“We’re looking at the range, and you literally see the number decrease in front of your eyes,” he said of his dashboard range meter.

Ponsin contacted Tesla and booked a service appointment in California. He later received two text messages, telling him that “remote diagnostics” had determined his battery was fine, and then: “We would like to cancel your visit.”

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.

The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.

Managers told the employees that they were saving Tesla about $1,000 for every canceled appointment, the people said. Another goal was to ease the pressure on service centers, some of which had long waits for appointments.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sales of the Oculus Quest VR headset helped Meta’s Reality Labs to $276m in revenue last quarter. But not a profit. CC-licensed photo by Rémy Metalograms 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. Metachorus? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

What AI teaches us about good writing • NOEMA

Laura Hartenberger:

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Writing that consistently adheres to convention is effective because its predictability makes it easy to read. If you expect to find the main point of a paragraph in its opening, you can read faster than if you had to spend time hunting for it.

But simply abiding by the rules doesn’t make excellent writing — it makes conventional, unremarkable writing, the kind usually found in business reports, policy memos and research articles. In his review of AI-generated novel “Death of an Author,” Dwight Garner describes the prose as having “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry.” Even when a user prompts ChatGPT to include specific grammatical errors or to stray from certain norms, its writing tends to carry a certain flatness. By design, the program relapses to a rhetorical median, its deviations mechanical whereas ours are organic.

That’s not to say that convention flattens prose. In fact, convention lies at the root of much of the best writing — it’s rare to see acclaimed texts that stray dramatically from grammatical and stylistic norms.

Structural convention also underlies much of what we call good writing. Most prize-winning literature innovates within classic story arcs: Aristotle’s three-act structure (beginning, middle and end); Freytag’s five-stage structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution); or a screenwriter’s six categories of dramatic conflict (conflict with self; with others; with society; with nature; with the supernatural; and with the machine).

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

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Just see if you could ever prompt a chatbot to come up with such a perfect phrase as “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry”.
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Europe and US heatwaves near ‘impossible’ without climate change • BBC News

Georgina Rannard:

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The heatwaves battering Europe and the US in July would have been “virtually impossible” without human-induced climate change, a scientific study says.

Global warming from burning fossil fuels also made the heatwave affecting parts of China 50 times more likely.

Climate change meant the heatwave in southern Europe was 2.5C hotter, the study finds.

Almost all societies remain unprepared for deadly extreme heat, experts warn.

The study’s authors say its findings highlight the importance of the world adapting to higher temperatures because they are no longer “rare”.

“Heat is among the deadliest types of disaster,” says Julie Arrighi from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and also one of the authors.

Countries must build heat-resistant homes, create “cool centres” for people to find shelter, and find ways to cool cities including planting more trees, she says.

In July, temperature records were broken in parts of China, the southern US and Spain. Millions of people spent days under red alerts for extreme heat.

Experts say extreme heat can be a very serious threat to life, especially among the elderly. According to one study, more than 61,000 people were estimated to have died from heat-related causes during last year’s heatwaves in Europe.

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Deniers/minimalists retort that more people die from cold. To which the answer is better insulation, not stuffing the atmosphere with carbon.
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Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships? • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

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When you sign up for the Eva AI app, it prompts you to create the “perfect partner”, giving you options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” or “smart, strict, rational”. It will also ask if you want to opt in to sending explicit messages and photos.

“Creating a perfect partner that you control and meets your every need is really frightening,” said Tara Hunter, the acting CEO for Full Stop Australia, which supports victims of domestic or family violence. “Given what we know already that the drivers of gender-based violence are those ingrained cultural beliefs that men can control women, that is really problematic.”

Dr Belinda Barnet, a senior lecturer in media at Swinburne University, said the apps cater to a need, but, as with much AI, it will depend on what rules guide the system and how it is trained.

“It’s completely unknown what the effects are,” Barnet said. “With respect to relationship apps and AI, you can see that it fits a really profound social need [but] I think we need more regulation, particularly around how these systems are trained.”

Having a relationship with an AI whose functions are set at the whim of a company also has its drawbacks. Replika’s parent company Luka Inc faced a backlash from users earlier this year when the company hastily removed erotic roleplay functions, a move which many of the company’s users found akin to gutting the Rep’s personality.

Users on the subreddit compared the change to the grief felt at the death of a friend. The moderator on the subreddit noted users were feeling “anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, [and] sadness” at the news.

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Meta’s Reality Labs has lost more than $21 billion since start of 2022 • CNBC

Jonathan Vanian:

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Meta reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and said that its Reality Labs unit, which develops virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed to power the metaverse, logged a $3.7bn operating loss.

The unit recorded $276m in second-quarter sales, down from the $339m in revenue it brought during the first quarter. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were projecting Reality Labs to record $421m in sales off $3.5bn in operating losses.

Shares of Meta were up about 5% after it reported an 11% pop in revenue as advertising rebounded and the company issued an uplifting sales forecast for the third quarter. It shows that Meta is still very much an ad company with a big cost center.

Last year, Meta’s Reality Labs unit lost a total of $13.7bn while bringing in $2.16bn in revenue, which is driven in part by the company’s sales of Quest-branded VR headsets. Reality Labs lost $3.99bn during the first quarter. That puts its total losses at about $21.3bn since the beginning of last year.

Meta said in its earnings report that it expects operating losses in its Reality Labs unit “to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

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Meanwhile Apple’s going to sell its headset in limited numbers, for $3,500 each, making a profit on each one, and move towards making the Vision division (aha) profitable. Spending so far on the Vision Pro is surely into the billions down the years. But would it be close to $21bn? Facebook/Meta might want to consider how it’s spending its money.

That revenue from Quest VR headsets, though: if all the $276m revenue is from selling $300 headsets, that’s about 0.9m sold. Tolerable? But depends a lot on what “driven in part” means about revenue.
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Embattled physicist files patent for unprecedented ambient superconductor • Science

Robert Service:

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Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, has drawn headlines and controversy for his claims of concocting materials that superconduct at room temperature—despite the limitation that they would require extreme pressures to work. His latest creation would be by far his most sensational yet—although he has not sought any attention for it. In a little-noticed patent filing, Dias claims to have made a material that superconducts not only at room temperature, but also ambient pressure.

If true, the discovery would be profound, igniting a host of applications, such as transmission lines that conduct electricity without losses, hyperefficient computer chips, and cheaper levitating trains. “We cannot even imagine how impactful it would be,” says Eva Zurek, a superconductivity theorist at the University at Buffalo. Such a material would also force a major rethink of the physics at play, as current theories cannot account for superconductivity under fully ambient conditions.

But scientists who have been critical of Dias’s data and methods in his previous claims don’t believe his latest work either. “I’m highly skeptical,” says James Hamlin, a superconductivity researcher at the University of Florida, who believes any superconducting behavior reported in the patent filing could be the result of broken electrical contacts in the devices used to characterize the material.

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All superconductivity, all the time.
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The latest mega-breakthrough on room-temperature superconductors is probably nonsense

Stuart Ritchie:

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If we were to invent a superconductor that didn’t require these low temperatures and high pressures, all bets would be off: we’d have ultra-efficient power grids, saving vast amounts of energy; we’d have cheaper medical imaging; we’d have more low-friction, super-fast “maglev” trains that float above the tracks; and we might even be able to develop ultra-fast quantum computers. A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor has long been something of a Holy Grail for scientists.

But this is a scientific field that’s seen many false dawns, and has seen itself descend into serious controversy. Just yesterday, it was reported that the journal Physical Review Letters was planning to retract a paper by a physicist who’d already had a paper on room-temperature superconductors retracted from the journal Nature in 2021. In the Nature case, a crucial analysis was found to be seriously flawed; in the newer case (which wasn’t specifically focused on superconductors), it appears that some data had been falsified or fabricated.

…The i contacted several of the UK’s top superconductor physicists and asked for their opinion on the new studies [from South Korea, linked here yesterday].

Professors Susannah Speller and Chris Grovenor, of the University of Oxford’s Department of Materials, jointly told i that the reports were “interesting, but not wholly convincing”. If the material really was a room-temperature superconductor, they argued, there are features one would expect to see in the data. One thing that’s clear is that there’s a “sharp drop” in resistivity, which is consistent with superconductivity. But we should also observe the material’s magnetisation changing (for the Meissner effect-related reasons discussed above), and its specific heat capacity, too. “Neither of these features,” say professors Speller and Grovenor, “is evident in the data presented.”

“It is too early to say that we have been presented with compelling evidence for superconductivity in these samples,” they argued.

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Wait for the replication attempts. As the Korean researchers included a second paper on essentially how to make their material, it shouldn’t take long. Derek Lowe in Science, who follows the topic, reckons furnaces will have been busy already making samples of LK-99, as it’s known.
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The Westminster-Big Tech revolving door keeps spinning • POLITICO

Tom Bristow and Laurie Clarke:

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Seeking influence in the corridors of power, Big Tech firms can’t get enough of Britain’s leading politicos. From former policy advisers to ex-spin doctors and even the odd journalist, the Big Tech ranks are now dotted with Westminster insiders from across the political spectrum. POLITICO takes you through some of the leading lights.

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Surprising number of British politicians and spindoctors there who have gone to work for Big Tech. You will surely have heard of one, maybe two, but if you’ve heard of more than five (out of the 22) you’re very clued in.

And guess which company has the most of the 22: Meta, Amazon, Uber, TikTok, Palantir, OnlyFans, Google, Deliveroo or Zoom?
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Elon Musk takes @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it • Mashable

Matt Binder:

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Musk now has the @x handle. What happened? Did Musk reach out to [co-founder of event photo company Orange Photography, Gene X.] Hwang? Did Hwang cash in and get a paycheck from the company for the handle as some on social media have speculated?

No, the company just took it from him.

“[I] got an email basically saying they are taking it,” Hwang told Mashable in an email exchange.

Hwang previously told Mashable he was waiting for Twitter (or X now) to contact him so he wasn’t previously in contact with the company. He hadn’t heard from X before that. There was no back-and-forth discussion. The email came from the generic support@twitter.com email address and not from a specific employee within the company.

Musk’s company is within its right to take the username. Barring trademark issues, users don’t have rights to specific handles according to most social media companies’ terms of service. However, with reports that Twitter had been considering launching a service where users could bid on unused, rare handles, some users had thought the company would offer Hwang something.

According to Hwang, the company now formerly known as Twitter did offer “an alternative handle with the history of the @x account” so that his original account, complete with its posts and followers, could live on and continue to be used.

What short, catchy username did Musk’s company change Hwang’s handle to? @x12345678998765.

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I guess @x12345678998764 was taken. It’s remarkable if Hwang has managed to hang on to that handle for any length of time even without Musk about: hackers adore getting hold of those rare handles on any social media platform and will use all sort of measures to achieve their aim. Or you can buy the whole shebang for $44bn, of course.
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Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter cuts ad prices • WSJ

Suzanne Vranica and Patience Haggin:

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The social network formerly known as Twitter is offering new incentives on certain ad formats in the US and UK and warning brands that they will lose their verified status unless they reach certain spending thresholds, emails sent this week to advertisers and viewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company, which makes most of its money from advertising, has struggled to draw new ad commitments under Musk’s ownership in part because brands are concerned about Musk’s approach to management and content moderation. The advertising industry is also in a slump, and several media companies have begun offering brands discounts.

X this week began offering some advertisers reduced pricing on video ads that run alongside a list of trending topics in X’s “Explore” tab, according to emails viewed by the Journal. Such ads give brands 24-hour placement atop the site’s list of trending topics.

It is offering 50% off any new bookings of those ads until July 31, among other discounts. “The goal of these discounts is to help our advertisers gain reach during crucial moments on Twitter such as the Women’s World Cup,” one of the emails read.

X also warned advertisers that beginning Aug. 7, brands’ accounts will lose their verification—a gold check mark that indicates their account truly represents their brand—if they haven’t spent at least $1,000 on ads in the previous 30 days or $6,000 on ads in the previous 180 days, according to the email.

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TwitterVersion2IsGoingJustGreat.com
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group in Korea claims to have invented a room-temperature, ambient pressure superconductor. Big if true! CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito on Flickr.

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

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

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

NUJ expresses ‘grave concern’ over AI-generated story on refugees published by regional news group • The Journal (Ireland)

Diarmuid Pepper:

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The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has expressed “grave concern” over an article generated by artificial intelligence (AI) about refugees published this morning on the websites of several regional newspapers.

The article, with the headline, “OPINION: Should refugees in Ireland go home?”, was published by Iconic Media’s digital titles. Its byline – a line at the top of an article that usually gives the author’s name – said “AI Generated”.

A disclaimer at the top of the article stated: “NOTE: This article was written by ChatGPT – an artificial intelligence chatbot. It was asked: Should refugees in Ireland go home?”

Around lunchtime, the headline of the article was updated to state ”Can we trust Artificial Intelligence?”. The disclaimer was also updated to include: “Here is an example of a piece of content powered by AI. We’d be interested to hear your views.” However, the text of the article remained the same.

Seamus Dooley, the Irish secretary of the NUJ, expressed “grave concern at the use of AI-generated material in this fashion”.

The Journal has contacted Iconic Media Group for comment but has not yet received a response.

Dooley said the article disclaimer “confirms the limitations of AI in terms of providing informed research and analysis”. He criticised the article’s “classic clickbait” headline.

“Asylum seekers granted refugee status in Ireland under international law are granted a new home and the notion of asking if they should ‘go home’ seems intended to fuel a debate similar to that generated in the UK,” Dooley said.

He added: “While the article seems relatively benign, the question is loaded and is a classic trope.”

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Some really stupid decisions get made inside newspapers, but this one is astonishing. Again, it must have gone through at least three levels – someone commissions it, someone does it, someone sub-edits it (and maybe puts it on the site). And nobody said “Errrr..is this.. you know.. wise?”
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The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor • Arxiv.org

Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon from South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre and Korea University’s graduate school of converging science and technology:

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For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (Tc), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (Ic), Critical magnetic field (Hc), and the Meissner effect.

The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress. It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface.

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The authors end their paper by saying “We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.” Well, yeah, absolutely – once others replicate it. Which very much remains to be done: we’ve had so many false starts. But worth noting. Thanks Adewale Aadetugbo for the link – potentially the most important one here ever!
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The arrival of the eSIM is altering how consumers interact with operators • Opensignal

Andrey Popov:

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While eSIM adoption in the mobile market has been arriving for some time, Apple’s move to make eSIM the only option for iPhone 14 range in the U.S. is propelling the worldwide shift towards eSIM technology. Opensignal’s latest analysis reveals a significant surge in the proportion of users switching their operator among those who use an eSIM across seven examined markets – Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S.

The switch from physical to embedded SIM cards threatens to alter how consumers switch operators and encourages operators to adopt new tactics to retain and acquire users, for example operators can offer network trials from within an app that provisions an eSIM immediately. eSIM also means the risks to operators of dual SIM devices that have long been common in many international markets are arriving in operator-controlled markets too, such as the U.S. and South Korea. Even on smartphones sold by operators, eSIM support is usually present in addition to a physical SIM, making them dual-SIM devices.

Google added eSIM-support to the Pixel range in 2017, Samsung added eSIM support to 2019’s Galaxy S20 flagship. While Apple first added eSIM to their phones in 2018 with the iPhone Xs, it switched to selling exclusively eSIM models in the U.S. with the iPhone 14 range in late 2022. South Korea is also a special case – eSIM support for domestic customers only began in mid-2022, before this point it was only available to international travelers. Notably, Samsung responded by introducing eSIM to a selection of its flagship devices in the home market, which had not been previously available there.

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Highly recommend an eSIM if you’re travelling somewhere with pricey roaming. They can work out much cheaper. Just don’t activate them too soon.
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Peer raises prospect House of Lords could be replaced by bots ‘with deeper knowledge and lower running costs’ • Sky News

Faye Brown:

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The House of Lords could be replaced by bots with “higher productivity, deeper knowledge and lower running costs”, a peer warned as the debate continues over the risks of artificial intelligence (AI).

Lord Londesborough said AI will soon be advanced enough to deliver his speeches in his voice by analysing and processing the comments he has made on parliament’s live TV feed.

He asked the upper chamber if the prospect of being replaced by “peer bots” is either an “exciting” or an “alarming” one, before raising concerns about the impact AI could have on millions of workers in the UK.

The hereditary peer’s comments came during the latest debate in parliament on the development of advanced AI, associated risks and potential approaches to regulation within the UK and internationally.

Lord Londesborough, an independent crossbencher, said he was “briefly tempted to outsource my AI speech to a chatbot and to see if anybody noticed”.

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Might have a better attendance record. But how would they vote?
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As actors strike for AI protections, Netflix lists $900,000 AI job • The Intercept

Ken Klippenstein:

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As Hollywood executives insist it is “just not realistic” to pay actors — 87% of whom earn less than $26,000 — more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs.

While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies’ embrace of the technology.

In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.

…“So $900k/yr per soldier in their godless AI army, when that amount of earnings could qualify thirty-five actors and their families for SAG-AFTRA health insurance, is just ghoulish,” actor Rob Delaney, who had a lead role in the “Black Mirror” episode, told The Intercept. “Having been poor and rich in this business, I can assure you there’s enough money to go around; it’s just about priorities.”

Among the striking actors’ demands are protections against their scanned likeness being manipulated by AI without adequate compensation for the actors.

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TETRA radio code encryption has a flaw: a backdoor • WIRED

Ki Zetter:

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For more than 25 years, a technology used for critical data and voice radio communications around the world has been shrouded in secrecy to prevent anyone from closely scrutinizing its security properties for vulnerabilities. But now it’s finally getting a public airing thanks to a small group of researchers in the Netherlands who got their hands on its viscera and found serious flaws, including a deliberate backdoor.

The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.

Researchers found a second vulnerability in a different part of the same radio technology that is used in more specialized systems sold exclusively to police forces, prison personnel, military, intelligence agencies, and emergency services, such as the C2000 communication system used by Dutch police, fire brigades, ambulance services, and Ministry of Defense for mission-critical voice and data communications. The flaw would let someone decrypt encrypted voice and data communications and send fraudulent messages to spread misinformation or redirect personnel and forces during critical times.

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What. What the whatting what. An intentional backdoor known to the vendors?!
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TSMC delays Arizona factory set to build chips for iPhones and AI • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

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The world’s biggest chipmaker is pushing back the start of 4nm chip production at its new facility in Phoenix, Arizona, to 2025, blaming labour shortages. Apple has said that it intends to eventually source chips for its iPhones and MacBook models from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plant in the US, while Nvidia and AMD have also committed to using its production capacity.

The chipmaker’s first Phoenix-based fab, which began construction in 2021, was originally projected to start producing 4nm chips next year. A second fab that will produce smaller, more complex 3nm chips is scheduled to open in 2026.

During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, TSMC chairman Mark Liu said that the company was “encountering certain challenges, as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with the specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility” in the US

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About a decade ago Tim Cook gave an interview to a select group of folks at The Guardian, and one of the points he made about why Apple manufactures so much (at that time, essentially everything) in China was that compared to everywhere else, including the US, it was so much easier to find skilled workers. That hasn’t changed, it seems.
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Antarctic sea ice levels dive in ‘five-sigma event’, as experts flag worsening consequences for planet • ABC News

Alexandra Alvaro:

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This winter has confirmed what scientists had feared — the sea ice around Antarctica is in sharp decline, with experts now concerned it may not recover.

Earlier this year, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022.

Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter, when Antarctica is reliably dark and cold. But this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter, leaving scientists baffled.

Physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge has been communicating with scientists and the community about the drastic changes happening around Antarctica. He said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record.

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said. “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”

Sea ice is important for a number of reasons. First, it helps regulate Earth’s temperature through something called ice-albedo feedback, where the ice reflects the Sun’s heat back into space, helping to regulate the temperature of the planet.

“If there’s less ice, then the sunlight that hits the ocean’s surface is absorbed instead of being reflected out into space,” Dr Doddridge said.

Second, the annual cycle of freeze and melt drives global currents that transport nutrient-rich water into the rest of the ocean, feeding ecosystems.

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It would be nice to have some good climate news. There just isn’t any. And yet there are those who are utterly sure that the twin forces of capitalism and technology will, finger-snap, solve it all! Unfortunately I think of a different sort of finger snap.
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A decade ago, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Now he’s paying attention to it again • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson:

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During his tenure as executive editor at The Washington Post, Martin Baron ran into a persistent problem.

Jeff Bezos had purchased The Post for $250m in 2013, less than a year after Mr. Baron had taken over. Mr. Bezos, who arrived at media ownership after founding Amazon and remaking online shopping, wanted his top editor to transform the newspaper from a regional news organization into a truly global one.

But Mr. Bezos, whose representatives kept an eye on the budget, didn’t believe The Post needed to add many new editors to accomplish that task. Reporters were classified as “direct” employees and editors as “indirect” — and his preference was to keep the “indirect” numbers down.

So, Mr. Baron came up with a workaround, according to his coming memoir. “To avoid setting off alarms up the line, my deputies and I would strip the word ‘editor’ from proposed new positions whenever possible,” Mr. Baron writes. “‘Analyst’ or ‘strategist’ were among the limited set of workarounds.”

These days, Mr. Bezos knows more about the news business. And in recent months, he has become more involved with The Post’s operations, stepping in as staff morale cratered and the business struggled.

Mr. Bezos has said he wants The Post to be profitable, but it is unlikely to reach that target this year. The Post is on a pace to lose about $100m in 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances; two other people briefed on the situation said the company was expecting to miss its forecasts for ad revenue this year.

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Twitter’s rebrand to X is destined to fail, critics say • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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The move “makes no sense,” tweeted True Ventures partner emeritus Om Malik. “I mean, what is the name ‘Twitter’ then. And why should you ‘tweet?’” By rebranding Twitter as X, Musk breaks the connection between the name of the platform and what people do on it. It seems unlikely that people will refer to sharing Xs or re-Xing any time soon. (Contacted to comment for this story, Twitter’s press office email autoresponded to say “We’ll get back to you soon.”)

Yet Musk still seems keen on foisting X branding on everything. The grand ambition stems from his first company, payments firm X.com, which brought him his initial fortune, and lingers on via the Twitter rebrand and the launch of his new AI company xAI. Musk fans will point to the fact that the media—as evidenced by this very story—now refers to Zuckerberg’s company as Meta (rather than Facebook) as evidence that Twitter’s rebrand to X could work. However, that overlooks the fact that journalists are, by nature of their jobs, required to call companies (and people, for that matter) by their latest, official names. It also overlooks the fact that the majority of the public still calls Zuckerberg’s company Facebook. Likewise, Google’s 2015 rebranding of its parent company to Alphabet is one that both journalists and the general public have by now essentially ignored.

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I don’t think this rebrand is going to stick. Twitter isn’t gaining users; the ones it has were signed up before this. So you’re pushing against the inertia of absolutely everyone.
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Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Thursday, a Reddit user named kaefer_kriegerin posted a fake announcement on the World of Warcraft subreddit about the introduction of “Glorbo” to the game. Glorbo isn’t real, but the post successfully exposed a website that scrapes Reddit for news in an automated fashion with little human oversight.

Not long after the trick post appeared, an article about Glorbo surfaced on “The Portal,” a gaming news content mill run by Z League, a company that offers cash prizes for playing in gaming tournaments. The Z League article mindlessly regurgitates the Reddit post and adds nonsensical details. Its author, “Lucy Reed” (likely a fictitious name for a bot), authored over 80 articles that same day.

Members of the World of Warcraft subreddit recently noticed that this kind of automated content scraping of Reddit has been taking place, prompting several of them to try to game the bots and get their posts featured on sites like The Portal.

Titled “I’m so excited they finally introduced Glorbo!!!” the original Reddit trap post provides little detail about what Glorbo is meant to be, and likely for good reason…

A human reading this Reddit post would likely catch factual errors within, such as a reference to Hearthstone in 1994 (the game came out in 2014) and a nod to “major bot operated news websites.” The presence of these elements would seem to preclude a human being responsible for the Z League article on The Portal.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you could skip the airport security line by paying a little extra, would you? Millions of US travellers do. CC-licensed photo by Ted & Dani Percival 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

If other media companies thought about brand equity the way Elon Musk thinks about Twitter’s (er, X’s) • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

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In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to…the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.

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Tronc! Remember Tronc? No? Why don’t you remember Tronc? Was it, perhaps, because although the word was already an English word (“A monetary pool, in which tips are collected and later shared out between all staff, e.g. in a restaurant”), Tribune Publishing thought rebranding as just “Tronc” would, uh, do something. Gave up after two years. Bad names don’t stick. Good ones survive any attempt to rebrand them.

Benton’s faux-examples are witty, though.
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OpenAI, Google will watermark AI-generated content to hinder deepfakes, misinfo • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Seven companies—including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection—have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes.

It’s currently unclear how the watermark will work, but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it.

Deepfakes have become an emerging concern for Internet users and policymakers alike as tech companies grapple with how to deal with controversial uses of AI tools.

Earlier this year, image-generator Midjourney was used to make fake images of Donald Trump’s arrest, which subsequently went viral. While it was obvious to many that the images were fake, Midjourney still decided to take steps to ban the user who made them. Perhaps if a watermark had been available then, that user, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, never would have faced such steep consequences for what he said was not an attempt to be clever or fake others out but simply have fun with Midjourney.

There are other more serious misuses of AI tools, however, where a watermark might help save some Internet users from pain and strife. Earlier this year, it was reported that AI voice-generating software was used to scam people out of thousands of dollars, and just last month, the FBI warned of increasing use of AI-generated deepfakes in sextortion schemes.

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Looking forward to hearing more about precisely how this is going to work, and how it will defeat attempts to spot it and wipe it.
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The perfect service to make everyone at the airport hate you • The Atlantic

Amanda Mull:

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Like many things about contemporary American air travel, [the private company] Clear’s presence in airports is an indirect result of 9/11. Its predecessor, Verified Identity Pass, or VIP, was founded in the aftermath of the attacks, when the federal government was looking for companies that could expedite security procedures for people who flew a lot and were regarded as a low security risk, such as business travelers. VIP’s signature product—confusingly also called Clear—gathered about 200,000 clients before the company filed for bankruptcy, in 2009. At that point, according to a 2020 story on Clear by the journalist Dave Gershgorn, it was bought by a duo of former hedge-fund managers who envisioned a life beyond government contracting for their new service.

VIP was rebranded to Clear, and the company, which had previously issued express-pass cards to its members, pivoted to biometrics. To sign up for Clear’s marquee offering, Clear Plus, the company scans your irises and fingerprints, verifies your identity, and charges a $189-a-year fee after the initial free month for people who sign up at the airport. For that price, you get escorted to the front of the security line at the 52 North American airports where the company currently operates. If you have both Clear and TSA PreCheck, the service puts you at the front of the PreCheck line, so you can also keep your shoes on.

For anyone who doesn’t have Clear Plus, the sales pitches and line-cutting can be pretty annoying. Clear’s argument is that its services help security run more smoothly for all travelers. In an email, a company spokesperson, Annabel Walsh, described Clear as a “force multiplier” for airport efficiency: Travelers who get verified via Clear don’t need to have their IDs checked by TSA, which frees up agents to check others. Airports also permit Clear salespeople to pull double duty by answering questions for travellers, Walsh told me. This appears to have upsides for both the company and the airport: Low pay and difficult work make attracting and retaining airport staff a constant struggle, so Clear salespeople can theoretically fill in some customer-assistance gaps while also finding solid opportunities to pitch their product.

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Everything, just everything, is an opportunity for an upsell in the US. Make the airport more efficient? Don’t be ridiculous!
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Apple rules out bid for Premier League football over global rights • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Apple has reportedly been interested in obtaining the rights to broadcast the Premier League as far back as 2012. Earlier this year, Bloomberg highlighted Apple’s consideration of a bid for the rights to stream the Premier League, among other lower league matches run by the English Football League, for Apple TV+ .

Eddy Cue has now effectively ruled out Apple’s intention to make a bid on the basis that it would be unable to obtain global rights. The company sought a deal similar to its rights to broadcast Major League Soccer (MLS) worldwide for a period of ten years, an arrangement hailed as a “historic first for a major professional sports league.” Speaking to The Daily Mail, Cue explained Apple’s rationale:

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I don’t like the word exclusivity because that’s important but not as important. The global rights are important to us. We’re a global company, we have customers in every country in the world, a large number of customers, and it’s not exciting for me to have something that you can have but you can’t have.

Secondly, we’re throwing a significant amount of engineering resources into the product. We think we’re going to do some very innovative things with the product as we move forward. We’ve done some things like MLS 360 (providing live look-ins from every match), we’ve done the multi-viewing of games, which is again very difficult to do in other environments. And this is nothing.

I can’t justify throwing what I think are the best engineers in the world on a small subset product. It has to be this kind of a partnership because our level of investment is significant. This isn’t “hey, I’ve got an opening from 8pm to 10pm tonight and I’m going to put this game on.” That’s not the way we’re doing it. We’re all in on this as an investment point of view, so it doesn’t work unless it’s something significant.

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So it has to be global or nothing? I’m not surprised Apple is balking at that. Even if it secured the deal, the contract would be a target every year from rivals. Sticking small with US MLS makes much better sense.
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Daily Mail prepares for legal battle with Google over AI copyright • Daily Telegraph

James Warrington:

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The owner of the Daily Mail is gearing up for a legal battle with Google over claims the tech giant used hundreds of thousands of online news stories to train its ChatGPT rival without permission.

Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), the publishing group controlled by Lord Rothermere, is understood to have sought legal advice as it considers potential action.

DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, allegedly harvested a vast cache of around 1 million news articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites to help develop its chatbot, Bard.

It is claimed that the tech giant targeted them because both use bullet points to summarise key points before the main text of a story. Google allegedly used the articles to test Bard’s capabilities by removing words from the bullet points and asking the AI to fill in the gaps based on the rest of the story.

However, it allegedly used the articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites without either copyright holder’s knowledge or permission. Around three-quarters of the articles used in the dataset are believed to have come from the Mail, while the remainder were taken from CNN’s website.

Google, DMGT and CNN declined to comment.

Any court claim by DMGT would mark the second major commercial legal action relating to AI, amid rising concerns that the nascent technology could ride roughshod over copyright laws.

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Exotic new silicon-based speakers are coming to next-generation earbuds • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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The technology that has made this transition possible, called MEMS—short for micro-electromechanical systems—is the reason an entire 1990s RadioShack’s worth of gear can be crammed into the slim slabs of touch-sensitive glass that now fit in our pockets.

So far, in speakers, there are only a handful of products shipping that use MEMS technology. I’ve tried one product—a prototype in-ear monitor, of the sort used by audio engineers—and was impressed by its performance.

Peter Cooney, founder of SAR Insight & Consulting, which tracks the audio-technology industry, has been following the world of MEMS-based, or solid-state, speakers for a decade. And this year and the next are, he says, when they will finally arrive in the kinds of devices regular consumers might buy, such as high-end wireless earbuds.

One company building this tech, xMEMS, has made available prototypes of its speakers to dozens of companies, and over 30 of them are working on earbuds and other products based on the technology, says a company spokesman.

One recipient of prototype in-ear monitors—the kind of high-fidelity earbuds professionals use when mastering musical tracks—is Brian Lucey. A mastering engineer of nine Grammy award winners, Lucey told me that the solid-state speakers in the in-ear monitors he’s using have become indispensable.

But eventually, this tech could be everywhere—in every smartphone, and in nearly all the earbuds, smart glasses, and various other “hearables” that are on their way to market.

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Exciting. I recall when the first “flat” speakers started coming out, using NXT technology: that was back in May 1998. Now we’re moving to properly solid state speakers for earbuds? Bring it on. (And of course you’d expect Apple will be on this. It declined to comment when Mims asked it if it was using MEMS.)
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The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech • Business Insider

Adam Rogers:

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In 2016, Matt Wansley was trying to get work as a lawyer for a tech company — specifically, working on self-driving cars. He was making the rounds, interviewing at all the companies whose names you know, and eventually found himself talking to an executive at Lyft. So Wansley asked her, straight-out: How committed was Lyft, really, to autonomous driving?

“Of course we’re committed to automated driving,” the exec told him. “The numbers don’t pencil out any other way.”

Wait a minute, Wansley thought. Unless someone invents a robot that can drive as well as humans, one of America’s biggest ride-hailing companies doesn’t expect to turn a profit? Like, ever? Something was clearly very, very screwy about the business model of Big Tech.

“So what was the investment thesis behind Uber and Lyft?” says Wansley, now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. “Putting billions of dollars of capital into a money-losing business where the path to profitability wasn’t clear?”

Wansley and a Cardozo colleague, Sam Weinstein, set out to understand the money behind the madness.

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Effectively, this is about the Lina Khan response to predatory pricing funded by venture capital: use antitrust law on those undercutting rivals in order to drive them out of the market. Except the focus is the venture capitalists, who profit from the IPO that shoulders the share buyers with the forthcoming losses. Weinstein seems to be arguing that you could bring a gigantic class action suit on behalf of the IPO buyers. To which the VC and company would probably point you to the S-1 describing the myriad ways in which your money could just go down the drain. And look, so it did!
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America is becoming a nation of early birds • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe:

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Trendy new restaurants are closing their kitchens at 8 p.m. And movie theaters are swapping late-night screenings for matinees. Hybrid and remote workers itching to leave the house as soon as they close their laptops are fueling the shift.

Restaurants are now seating 10% of diners between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., up from 5% in 2019, according to Yelp. Dinner parties are starting as early as 5 p.m.

Some night owls think we’re all getting a bit dull. Others embrace the mass backward slide of our activities. Kathy Hatfield is one of the converts.

When the insurance company Hatfield works for told her she could Zoom commute forever, she knew she had to adjust her routine. Living alone in a West Bridgewater, Mass., condo, she craved face-to-face interaction by the time she got off work at 5 p.m. and started bringing her Kindle to a local restaurant for a solo dinner and glass of wine.

She expected to be the only one there. Instead, she became so close with a group of bartenders and a dozen or so other regulars they now share a group text and attend each other’s milestone events. The two spots she frequents are usually packed by 6 p.m.

“I’m at the point now where I’m looking for new places, because sometimes I just want to read and I know so many people that I just chitchat the whole time,” says Hatfield, 57. She’s also had to adjust her strategy on Saturdays. While a 5 p.m. dinner used to be a surefire way to beat the crowds and get a reservation, she now finds it easier waiting until 7 p.m. “It’s flip-flopped,” she says.

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No explanation is offered, but the comparison with 2019 points to an obvious one: post-pandemic, more people are working from home, so they don’t have any commute.
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Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI • Semafor

Ben Smith:

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Tech companies appear to hope that they can placate publishers with, perhaps, eight figures worth of payouts, as the Facebook News Initiative did when it doled out payments annually between 2019 and 2022, fees reportedly exceeding $20m for the Times, $15m for the Washington Post, and $10m for the Wall Street Journal.

Publishers believe the numbers ought to be much bigger this time around. If these breakthrough language models rely on their inputs, they argue, the share of the value they collect should be commensurate — and should run into the billions of dollars across the industry.

Levin, other publishers and their counterparts at Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants declined to quote numbers, or to discuss the coalition they’re forming.

But the publishers, led by Diller himself, are also threatening to try their luck in court, where complex questions about how copyright law applies to both the inputs to AI training and the outputs of AI models remain largely untested. Publishers are watching with particular interest to a Delaware lawsuit over an artificial intelligence company’s copying of legal texts from Westlaw.

Payments on the scale the publishers expect would mark a dramatic change for companies like Google, which have built high-margin business in large part because they — unlike media companies from Netflix to Comcast — don’t pay for content.

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No harm starting your bid high, eh?
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The Reith Lectures: Robert Oppenheimer – Science and the Common Understanding – The Sciences and Man’s Community • BBC Sounds

From December 1953:

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Robert Oppenheimer is an American theoretical physicist. Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he has been described as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project while Director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory between 1943–45. In his Reith lectures entitled ‘Science and the Common Understanding’, he examines the impact of quantum and atomic theory on society.

In his sixth and final lecture entitled ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’, Professor Oppenheimer explains how the “House of Science” helps us to understand the underlying profundities of the earth and our lives. He draws parallels between the construction of human society and the atom: each man is dependent on the next, and through the power of the collective, Man’s power grows with the shared knowledge of individuals

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This program will be available for more than a year, and should be accessible to readers outside the UK. This seems to be the only one of the lectures that the BBC has (as they say) surfaced; it would be nice if the other five popped up too.

If a Barbie lecture series appears, I’ll let you know.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The poo emoji has been retired from its job answering press enquiries at Twitter. Guess it’ll have to do something else. CC-licensed photo by A Disappearing Act 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. Oppenheimlered. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple slams UK surveillance-bill proposals • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.

The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers.

The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate.

Currently, there has to be a review, and there can also be an independent oversight process and a technology company can appeal before taking any action.

Because of the secrecy surrounding these demands, little is known about how many have been issued and whether they have been complied with.

But many messaging services currently offer end-to-end encryption – so messages can be unscrambled by only the devices sending and receiving them.

WhatsApp and Signal are among the platforms to have opposed a clause in the Online Safety Bill allowing the communications regulator to require companies to install technology to scan for child-abuse material in encrypted messaging apps and other services.

They will not comply with it, they say, with Signal threatening to “walk” from the UK. Apple has also opposed the plan.

The government has opened an eight-week consultation on the proposed amendments to the IPA., which already enables the storage of internet browsing records for 12 months and authorises the bulk collection of personal data.

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For clarity, this is not the Online Harms Bill – it’s an update of existing legislation, which could be passed more easily. Apple isn’t bluffing about this. The Tories seem wilfully blind to what they’re doing.
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Spotify’s first US price hike for Premium is coming next week • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Spotify is going to raise the price of its Premium subscription plan in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal. The price is “likely” to go up by $1, meaning it would cost $10.99 per month, and the change is “expected” to be revealed next week, the publication says. The price of Premium has remained $9.99 per month since it launched in the US 12 years ago.

While perhaps not the most welcome news, it’s not entirely a surprise. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has been signaling that prices would go up in 2023 and reiterated in April that a price hike would be happening this year. Spotify didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other music services have also increased prices to that $10.99 amount over the past several months. Apple bumped up the price of Apple Music by $1 last year, Amazon followed suit earlier this year for its Music Unlimited service, Tidal announced a price hike earlier this month, and YouTube raised the price of YouTube Music just this week.

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Just two years since the last price hike. The frogs keep boiling slowly.
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Why does Tesla want to build its own $1 billion supercomputer? • QZ

Faustine Ngila:

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Any time you’re driving a Tesla, it’s collecting data in the background. An autonomous vehicle can collect up to 19 terabytes of data per day, from an array of sensors and cameras. All that data requires increasingly powerful computers to process, secure, and store, particularly as the demand for Teslas and other autonomous EVs soars.

Essentially, this data consists of all the information fed to the car’s 12 sensors and eight external cameras mounted to provide 360-degree visibility for a range of up to 250 meters to enhance safety and convenience for everyone on board.

The data can be voluminous. Tesla’s Autopilot feature, for instance, uses camera-based driver assistance software. Released in 2017, Autopilot has been collecting data from its consenting driver-users and then using it to feed neural networks and also power the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature. That latter feature, now in beta, has collected up to 300 million miles of driving data. More than half of this data was gathered over the past quarter, according to Tesla’s latest earnings presentation.

The Dojo supercomputer, to be completed by the end of 2024, will make use of these massive amounts of video and sensor data generated by Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features. As with its vehicle hardware and software, developed internally, Tesla plans to use its extremely large real-world dataset to train Dojo’s neural networks in-house.

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For its “rapidly growing fleet of autonomous vehicles”, apparently. “Fleet” might be overstating it, a bit.
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The curse of the Long Boom • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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Here’s a goofy little thought-experiment: Imagine you are one of The Long Boom’s original co-authors (futurists Peter Leyden and Peter Schwartz). In 1997, you wrote an iconic WIRED magazine cover story, predicting that the future was going to be remarkably bright and prosperous for everyone, everywhere. You included a sidebar with ten reasons why it might not work out so well. And then basically all of those reasons (including, y’know, “Russia devolves into a kleptocracy,” and “an uncontrollable plague”) actually happened.

Would you:

(A) Make a joke of it. “Haha, sorry for the curse, everyone. My next prediction can only be spoiled by free ice cream and zero-point energy for all.”

(B) Write a critical retrospective discussing not just the spoiler sidebar, but everything else that was missing from the rose-colored-glasses scenario.

(C) Reinvent yourself as an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckling world traveller, seeking to unearth whatever Old Gods you apparently offended in 1997.

or (D) Write a follow-up essay, describe it as “The Long Boom Squared,” and including another list of 10 spoilers that might ruin the future?!?

Because folks, I have bad news to report: Peter Leyden chose option D.

This time, he’s predicting that 2025-2050 will be a period of unparalleled progress and abundance, unless we run into spoilers like “Liberal Democracies Fail,” “Quasi Civil War,” “Nuclear Bomb Explodes,” “Desperate Oil States,” and “China Hot War.”

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Uh-oh. Fortunately, this is a great essay by Karpf, so at least we’ll have that to read in the coming dystopia.
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Forget designer babies. Here’s how CRISPR is really changing lives • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

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there are now more than 50 experimental studies underway that use gene editing in human volunteers to treat everything from cancer to HIV and blood diseases, according to a tally shared with MIT Technology Review by David Liu, a gene-editing specialist at Harvard University.

Most of these studies—about 40 of them—involve CRISPR, the most versatile of the gene-editing methods, which was developed only 10 years ago.

That is where [sickle-cell sufferer Victoria] Gray comes in. She was one of the first patients treated using a CRISPR procedure, in 2019, and when she addressed the group in London, her story left the room in tears.

“I stand here before you today as proof miracles still happen,” Gray said of her battle with the disease, in which misshapen blood cells that don’t carry enough oxygen can cause severe pain and anemia.

But Gray’s case also shows the obstacles facing the first generation of CRISPR treatments, sometimes referred to as “CRISPR 1.0.” They will be hugely expensive and tricky to implement, and they could be quickly superseded by a next generation of improved editing drugs.

The company developing Gray’s treatment, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, says it’s treated more than 75 people in its studies of sickle cell, and a related disease, beta-thalassemia, and that the therapy could be approved for sale in the US within a year. It is widely expected to be the first treatment using CRISPR to go on sale.

Vertex hasn’t said what it could cost, but you can expect a price tag in the millions.

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This story is from March, but I couldn’t quickly find a followup to see how all those studies are going. The difficulty about CRISPR, medicinally, is that you have to do it individually. It’s not like you can take a pill; it requires bone marrow transplants at minimum.
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Twitter is being rebranded as X • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.

Around 12AM ET last night, he started tweeting — and did so for hours — about the Twitter rebrand to X, the one-letter name he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a tweet saying “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured at the change in between other posts and replies, tweeting things like “Deus X,” or replying to other users talking about it. At one point, he joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,” and sat silently for almost an hour before unmuting and confirming he would be changing Twitter’s logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”

Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them the company would become X, and that it was the last time he would email from a Twitter address, according a Threads post from Platformer managing editor Zoe Schiffer.

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Well, it’s not as if words around the Twitter brand – “tweet”, “retweet” and so on – aren’t embedded in the language, and there’s absolutely zero value in the “Twitter” nam–hang on, I’m getting an update in my earpiece.
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Elon Musk wants to relive his startup days. He’s repeating the same mistakes • Disconnect

Paris Marx:

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Since taking over Twitter, Musk has said a lot about his plans for the platform, even if they aren’t always very coherent. The centerpiece of his tenure so far has been the move to turn verification and blue checks into a paid service, resulting in a string of impersonations and concerns among advertisers. But there’s a bigger strategy attached to the shift to paid verification.

In a Q&A on Twitter Spaces in early November, Musk outlined a longer term plan for Twitter. He saw paid verification as a way to reduce bot and scam accounts because they would not only need to pay, but would need a unique credit card. On top of that, “creators” would be able to make money on the service — something Musk reiterated recently, though with no details — and that would be a way to begin promoting Twitter as a payments service because you could keep that money within Twitter and transfer it to others. Musk said Twitter may even offer $10 incentives for people to sign up for its payments service, then it could add additional financial services like debit cards and money market accounts. And that would be part of a “superapp” with many different services on top of social media and payments.

If that sounds ambitious, it is; it’s also the pitch for X.com. Here are some of the similarities:

• After the merger of Confinity and X.com, David Sacks became the head of the product group, working closely with Elon Musk. When Musk took over Twitter, Sacks was among the small group of advisers he brought in to reshape it
• One of the combined team’s actions was to create a “verified” tier for PayPal users that linked their bank accounts to prove they were trustworthy, similar to Twitter’s paid verification
• Both Confinity and X.com offered a signup bonus of $5 to $20 to attract new users
• X.com offered a suite of financial services, and after the merger, tried to use the popularity of PayPal to direct its users to sign up for X.com’s financial products. (It didn’t work very well.)

Musk is trying to rerun the playbook for his old finance company by grafting it onto a completely unrelated business. Not to mention that the industry today is very different than in the late 1990s. PayPal and Square are dominant players, there are plenty of other money-transfer apps and online banks, and traditional banks have continually improved their online services. Why would anyone use Twitter — not traditionally the most reliable company — when they can just keep using what works?

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Elon Musk finally stops sending poop emojis from Twitter’s press email • Daily Beast

Justin Baragona:

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Edgelord billionaire Elon Musk has finally put an end to his months-long troll of the media, announcing Thursday night that Twitter’s press email will no longer auto-respond to inquiries with a poop emoji. “We are changing the auto-reply from 💩 to a ‘We will get back to you soon’ infinite loop,” the “Chief Twit” tweeted. (The Daily Beast confirmed the automatic response from the email account.)

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Worth it for “edgelord billionaire”. Musk is 52 years old.
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Hollywood’s existential threat is attention • David By Design

David Armano:

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Having recently returned from a trip to visit my parents, both in their eighties, allowed me to witness how most of their screen time is spent.

Spoiler alert that won’t surprise anyone; the number one screen is their phones. But it’s not just the screens; it’s the content. Like many other generations with mobile phones, my parents aren’t watching movies or shows on their phones; they are watching an endless stream of short-form videos and clips powered by AI algorithms.

This is not the content Hollywood produces and profits from. The TikTokification of content that is getting the lion’s share of our time and attention means there is less of it left over for Hollywood products. This includes streaming, BTW.

So however the strikes play out, Hollywood will emerge with a supply and demand problem in the works for years. That supply and demand issue translates to a shortage of attention for Hollywood-produced content and a surplus of products.

Hollywood’s monopoly on content has been over for some time, but it has reached an industry existential inflection point. As much as I personally don’t love what the Kardashians pump into the culture, they have been well ahead of the curve in divesting their massive income streams from Hollywood dependence. They don’t need Hollywood and, unlike it, have built a moat around their influencer/creator-architected revenue models.

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In that sense, Quibi (remember?) was a sensible response to what was happening. But it had the worst possible luck in its launch time (pandemic! Everyone’s at home all day!) and lacked the algorithms of TikTok. Maybe try again?
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How the creator economy is incentivizing propaganda • Noema

Renee DiResta:

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One of the more remarkable artifacts of late-stage social media is the indelible presence of a particular character: the persecution profiteer. They are nearly unavoidable on Twitter: massive accounts with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, beloved by the recommendation engine and often heavily monetized across multiple platforms, where they rail against the corporate media, Big Tech and elites. Sometimes, the elites have supposedly silenced them; sometimes, they’ve supposedly oppressed you — perhaps both. But either way, manipulation is supposedly everywhere, and they are supposedly getting to the bottom of it.

Many of these polemicists rely on a thinly veiled subtext: They are scrappy truth-tellers, citizen-journalist Davids, exposing the propaganda machine of the Goliaths. That subtext may have been true in last century’s media landscape, when independent media fought for audience scraps left by hardy media behemoths with unassailable gatekeeping power. But that all changed with the collapse of mass media’s revenue model and the rise of a new elite: the media-of-one.

The transition was enabled by tech but realized by entrepreneurs. Platforms like Substack, Patreon and OnlyFans offered infrastructure and monetization services to a galaxy of independent creators — writers, podcasters and artists — while taking a cut of their revenue. Many of these creators adopted the mantle of media through self-declaration and branding, redefining the term and the industry. Many were very talented. More importantly, however, they understood that creating content for a niche — connecting with a very specific online audience segment — offered a path to attention, revenue and clout. In the context of political content in particular, the media-of-one creators offered their readers an editorial page, staffed with one voice and absent the rest of the newspaper.

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A long time ago, analysts forecast that the internet would atomise newspapers. They didn’t realise it would enable the spontaneous generation of particles of propaganda, quantum theory-style.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The unexpected death of Kevin Mitnick, the first big-name computer hacker, has put his accomplishments back in the spotlight. CC-licensed photo by Campus Party Mexico on Flickr.

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

Famed social engineer and hacker Kevin Mitnick dies at 59 • The Register

Liam Proven:

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Kevin Mitnick, probably the world’s most-famous computer hacker – and subsequently writer, public speaker, and security consultant – has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was 59.

Tributes have poured in from around the world following the announcement of his death this week.

“We’ve lost a true pioneer of the digital world, Kevin Mitnick,” said Chris Wysopal, a former member of the L0pht team and today an infosec CTO. “His ingenuity challenged systems, incited dialogues, and pushed boundaries in cybersecurity. He will remain a testament to the uncharted power of curiosity.”

Kevin’s wife Kimberley, who is pregnant with their son, said: “Till we see each other again, I know you are here with me. I hear your voice. Our son will know you and I am convinced he will be a mini you. I am grateful we have so many friends all over the world who will teach our son how to hack and more importantly who the real Kevin Mitnick was.”

Mitnick was sometimes known as the Ghost in the Wires after his book of the same name, and was an early celebrity in the area of computer security, as well as a sometime Register contributor. We could hardly introduce him better than he could himself: twenty years ago, we recommended his book the Art of Deception and he generously permitted us to publish its unused autobiographical first chapter.

As a teenager, Mitnick worked out how to obtain free travel on the bus system of the greater Los Angeles area in his native California, and later progressed to breaking into the computer systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Pacific Bell. He served a number of jail sentences even before he made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He was apprehended in 1998, and served about three years in prison, which he later referred to as a “vacation.” On his release, he was banned from using any form of computer for three years, and even lost his ham radio license, although after a legal battle he won that back.

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Mitnick was the first properly famous hacker; the fact he was indicated how we had moved properly into the computer age in the mid-90s, when the machines were both pervasive, and controlled so much of what we did, but were also accessible to and controllable by the ordinary person – even a teenager. Every hacker whose name ever appeared in a paper owes a minor debt to Mitnick.

I found him charming (as I suppose was his aim) when I spoke to him about his first book, The Art Of Deception – about hacking. He’s a great loss.
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The European heatwave of July 2023 in a longer-term context • Copernicus

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Temperatures for Europe as a whole show long-term warming trends for both annual and seasonal averages. The annual temperature for 2022 was the second warmest on record for Europe, and was 0.3°C cooler than 2020, the warmest year on record. The ten warmest years on record for Europe have all occurred since 2000, and the five warmest years have all occurred since 2014. Summer 2022 was the warmest on record, by a large margin, at 1.4°C above average.

The average temperature over European land was only a little warmer in the early 1980s than it had been a hundred years earlier but has risen sharply over the past forty or so years. The average value for the last five years is around 2.2°C higher than typical values for the latter half of the 19th century. This temperature increase for Europe is about 1°C larger than the corresponding increase for the globe as a whole. Europe has also warmed faster overall than any other continent in recent decades.

European air temperature over land – anomalies for summer (JJA) 1950–2022, relative to the average for the 1991–2020 reference period. Data source: ERA5, E-OBS. Credit: C3S/ECMWF/KNMI.

While the current heatwave is expected to last until around 26 July, another period of extreme temperatures may follow if the heat dome persists. C3S seasonal forecasts also predict that well-above-average temperatures are likely to continue across Europe until the end of summer, with the exception of southeastern parts of the continent where large uncertainty leaves the probability for extreme conditions close to average.

“C3S is monitoring the evolution of the season. June was the warmest on record for the globe as a whole, and the first 15 days of July have been the warmest 15 days on record. This means that the chance of having a record-breaking summer for the globe is not remote,” said Carlo Buontempo. “Without a dedicated study we can’t say how much more likely the current heatwave has become as a consequence of climate change, but it could be seen as part of a global pattern.”

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Crypto investors are being robbed in their own homes, Canadian police say • The Block

Yogita Khatri:

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Canadian police have issued a public warning following what appears to be an emerging trend of home invasion-style robberies in the country targeting large crypto investors.

“The suspects appear to know the victims are heavily invested in cryptocurrency, know where they live and are robbing them in their own homes,” Jill Long, staff sergeant of Delta Police Investigative Services, said in a release published Wednesday by Delta Police and Richmond Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Over the past year, several incidents have been reported in Delta and Richmond, where victims were holding “large amounts” of crypto, the police agencies said, without disclosing specific details.

In one case, an arrest has been made, and charges are being recommended. As for suspects’ modus operandi, in each case, they gain entry into victims’ homes by posing as delivery persons or people of authority. Once inside the homes, they seize crucial information that grants access to the victims’ crypto accounts, the police said.

They have asked crypto investors to remain vigilant and take necessary precautions to safeguard themselves and their assets.

Canada is one of the popular nations for growing crypto adoption. The country ranked 22nd in the Global Crypto Adoption Index by Chainalysis in 2022, up from 26th position in 2021 and 24th in 2020.

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Of course, this is the sort of thing that could happen if you owned a large amount of any sort of currency – except that if you were forced to make a bank transfer, you could afterwards call and get the bank to reverse it. (Assuming you’re still alive afterwards.) With crypto, when it’s transferred, it never comes back in any normal circumstance. Maybe being rich isn’t so attractive after all?
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Costly invite? Scientists hit with massive bills after speaking at COVID-19 ‘webinars’ • Science

Michele Catanzaro:

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When Björn Johansson received an email in July 2020 inviting him to speak at an online debate on COVID-19 modeling, he didn’t think twice. “I was interested in the topic and I agreed to participate,” says Johansson, a medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “I thought it was going to be an ordinary academic seminar. It was an easy decision for me.”

Three years later, Johansson has come to regret that decision. The Polish company behind the conference, Villa Europa, claims he still owes them fees for taking part, and is seeking payment through a Swedish court. After adding legal costs and interest to the bill, the company is demanding a whopping €80,000.

Johansson isn’t alone. Dozens of researchers participated in the same series of online conferences on COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 and many have received demands for payment from Villa Europa. At least five are being pursued through courts in their own countries for fees of tens of thousands of euros, although several researchers are fighting back.

But the case is peppered with puzzling circumstances. In court filings and interviews, the researchers say the demands are illegitimate and based on deceptive license agreements. Little is known about the individuals who organized the conferences. And many of the demands hinge on the ruling of a Polish arbitration court whose very existence has been questioned by experts in the country.

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Faked names, unpublished videos, scammy contracts: all the signs of opportunistic grifting are there.
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Revealed: media blitz against heat pumps funded by gas lobby group • DeSmog

Phoebe Cooke:

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Over the past two years, the Energy and Utilities Association (EUA) has paid a public affairs firm to generate hundreds of articles and interviews to lobby the UK government on energy policy.

The PR campaign subjects heat pumps to intense criticism. Powered by electricity, heat pumps are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85% of Britain’s homes and account for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.

Negative stories about electric heat pumps have featured in outlets such as The Sun, Telegraph and The Express, in which damning headlines dub the technology “Soviet-style”, “financially irrational” as well as “costly and noisy”. Broadcast media has amplified similar messages on BBC 2’s Newsnight, LBC, TalkTV and GB News.

The company driving this coverage is the Birmingham-based WPR Agency, which was hired by the EUA to deliver an “integrated PR and social media campaign” to “help change the direction of government policy”.

On its website WPR said it aimed to “spark outrage” around heat pumps. This wording, along with other phrases, has since been altered to read “spark conversations” following a request for comment on this article from DeSmog.

The group has since lobbied to delay government plans to ramp up heat pump installation targets in a consultation that closed in June.

WPR’s campaign also explicitly promotes hydrogen as a viable fuel for domestic heating. While favoured by the gas and installers industry as it can flow along existing infrastructure, neither the UN’s leading climate body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or 32 recently reviewed independent studies see a major role for hydrogen in decarbonizing homes.

Much of the media coverage about heat pumps features Mike Foster, a former Labour MP and the chief executive of the Energy and Utilities Association trade body. According to the group, its members  carry out around 98% of the UK’s heating installations. The vast majority of these are for gas boilers, though some of its members have also branched out into heat pumps.

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Great journalism. A hydrogen trial was abandoned earlier this week: it just doesn’t work.
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‘Major wake up call’: Vattenfall halts 1.4GW offshore wind farm project over cost fears • BusinessGreen News

Stuart Stone:

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Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has today announced it is halting the development of its 1.4GW Norfolk Boreas offshore wind project and reviewing further projects planned for its Norfolk Zone that were expected to power up to four million homes.

In its interim report for January to June 2023, Vattenfall revealed that project costs have risen by up to 40% on the back of soaring materials and labour costs. As such, it stated that it would “not take an investment decision now” on the project and confirmed its decision will trigger an impairment cost of 5.5 billion Swedish crowns, or roughly £415m.

The Norfolk Boreas project is expected to provide power for up to 1.5 million homes and would be the first of three east coast wind farms planned by the company. The project was last year awarded a Contract for Difference (CfD) guaranteeing a £37.35/MWh fixed price for its electricity over its first 15 years – equating to around £45/MWh today.

However, subsequent inflation and rising interest rates have led to concerns across the industry that a number of planned offshore wind projects may no longer prove profitable at the contract prices that were previously agreed through the CfD auction process.

Anna Borg, chief executive at Vattenfall, this morning confirmed that current “market conditions” left the company with little choice but to pause the project.

“Offshore wind is essential for affordable, secure and clean electricity, and it is a key element of Vattenfall’s strategy for fossil-free living,” she said. “But conditions are extremely challenging across the whole industry right now, with a supply chain squeeze, increasing prices and cost of capital, and fiscal frameworks not reflecting current market realities.”

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This comes just as the government is giving an estimated £500m in various subsidies to (foreign-owned, a subsidiary of India’s Tata Motors) Jaguar Landrover to build a battery factory in the UK rather than Spain. Very much about priorities, isn’t it.
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Of Course Apple Has an LLM AI Chatbot in the Works, and of Course the Bloomberg Report Revealing Its Code Name Mentions How the Story Moved the Company’s Stock Price • Daring Fireball

John Gruber, on the Bloomberg story about the Apple chatbot:

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Next paragraph [in the Bloomberg story]:

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Apple shares gained as much as 2.3% to a record high of $198.23 after Bloomberg reported on the AI effort Wednesday, rebounding from earlier losses. Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s partner and main backer, slipped about 1% on the news.

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If you ever notice, Bloomberg news stories always contain updates like this. It’s an obsession unique to Bloomberg. My understanding is that this decade-old Business Insider story remains true: Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to reporting market-moving news. They’re incentivized financially to make mountains out of molehills, and craters out of divots, to maximize the immediate effect of their reporting on stock prices. And Bloomberg appends these stock price movements right there in their reports, to drive home the notion that Bloomberg publishes market-moving news, so maybe you too should spend over $2,000 per month on a Bloomberg Terminal so that you can receive news reports from Bloomberg minutes before the general public, and buy, sell, and short stocks based on that news. No other news organization I’m aware of has an incentive system like this for reporters — but no other news organization has a business like the Bloomberg Terminal.

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That’s absolutely astonishing. I hadn’t heard about this incentive scheme, but as the linked BI story points out, it worries traders because it creates an obvious incentive for reporters to stretch a story in order to move the stock. Talk about misaligned incentives. Incredible that American journalists, normally the most po-faced of all, would tolerate it.

By the way, my hurried calculation yesterday about the effect of the announcement on Apple’s value was wrong by a factor of 100: as Jonathan B pointed out, “If Apple is worth $3trn and jumps 2%, that’s $60bn, not $600m. A billion here, a billion there etc…” Imagine if the reporters got a bonus proportionate to the unsigned value change..
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Google tests AI tool that can write news articles • New York Times

Benjamin Mullin and Nico Grant:

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Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.

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What a strange phrase – “it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories”. I take it that refers to Google, rather than the tool itself, but I’m not even sure what is meant. If you’re offering a tool that writes news stories, surely you’re implying that the effort by human of writing news stories is in fact largely wasted.
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Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988. But we have no idea what • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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GPM J1839–10 was discovered in a search of the galactic plane for transient objects—something that’s not there when you first look, but appears the next time you check. The typical explanation for a transient object is something like a supernova, where a major event gives something an immense boost in brightness. They’re found at the radio end of the spectrum—fast radio bursts—but are also very brief, and so fairly difficult to spot.

In any case, GPM J1839–10 showed up in the search in a rather unusual way: it appeared as a transient item twice in the same night of observation. Rather than delivering a short burst of immense energy, such as a fast radio burst, GPM J1839–10 was much lower energy and spread out over a 30-second-long burst.

Follow-on observations showed that the object repeated pretty regularly, with a periodicity of about 1,320 seconds (more commonly known as 22 minutes). There’s a window of about 400 seconds centered on that periodicity, and a burst can appear anywhere within the window and will last anywhere from 30 to 300 seconds. While active, the intensity of GPM J1839–10 can vary, with lots of sub-bursts within the main signal. Occasionally, a window will also go by without any bursts.

A search through archival data showed that signals had been detected at the site as far back as 1988. So, whatever is producing this signal is not really a transient, in the sense that the phenomenon that’s producing these bursts isn’t a one-time-only event.

The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items.

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Pulsar? Nah. Neutron star? Nah. Something else? Clearly, but nobody knows quite what. Though there may be many more of these mystery things out there, as Timmer explains.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A surprising number of scientific papers contain faked images using editors to rotate or flip pictures of results and make them seem more convincing. But they’re being caught. CC-licensed photo by Maximilian Paradiz 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. It’s about tennis, sort of. Free signup.

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

Science has a nasty Photoshopping problem • The New York Times

Elisabeth Bik is a microbiologist:

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One evening in January 2014, I sat at my computer at home, sifting through scientific papers. Being a microbiologist, this wasn’t unusual, although I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did that night.

These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.

There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments.

What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks. Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be.

…Since childhood, I’ve been “blessed” with what I’m told is a better-than-average ability to spot repeating patterns. It’s a questionable blessing when you’re focused more on the floor tiles than on the person you’re supposed to talk to. However, this ability, combined with my — what some might call obsessive — personality, helped me when hunting duplications in scientific images by eye.

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Bik has made a tremendous difference by spotting and hunting down these frauds: she’s been doing it full-time since 2019. (Not clear who funds her.) Unrelated: Stanford University’s president is resigning his post and retracting “at least” three papers after the student newspaper exposed data manipulation in multiple papers.
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Netflix says password-sharing crackdowns caused more signups than cancellations • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Netflix says its password-sharing crackdown is working. In its second quarter earnings report posted on Wednesday, the streamer says it saw the addition of 5.9 million subscribers globally, with the US and Canada making up 1.17 million new members from April to June.

Now, Netflix will start to address password sharing in all its remaining countries. The company’s password-sharing policy only went into effect in the US in late May after the streamer started alerting users of the extra $7.99 per month charge. Data from the analytics company Antenna suggests that the company saw a dramatic spike in subscribers in the days following the crackdown. In addition to the US, Netflix also rolled out paid sharing in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain.

Netflix says revenue is now “higher in each region is now higher than pre-launch,” adding that signups are already outnumbering cancellations. Additionally, the streamer adds that it’s “seeing healthy conversion of borrower households into full paying Netflix memberships” as well as more users adding extra members to their accounts.

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Once again I’ll say: told you so. At the margin, people were far more likely to want to continue watching than to cancel: the reason you’re using a “borrowed” password is because you like the content. OK, not everyone will sign up when the password is blocked. But enough will. QED.
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Tom the Dancing Bug: What we imagined climate change deniers would say… • Boing Boing

Ruben Bolling’s strips – called “Tom the Dancing Bug” for reasons that aren’t easily pinned down – capture the essential madness of America very neatly. This one is particularly true. Think: what do you think those climate change deniers in the hot seat are actually saying right now?
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Stability AI CEO: most outsourced coders in India will go in two years • CNBC

Ryan Browne:

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Most outsourced programmers in India will see their jobs wiped out in the next year or two, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque said.

Mostaque, on a call with UBS analysts, said that most of the country’s outsourced coders will lose their jobs as the effects of AI mean that it is now possible for software to be developed with far fewer people. “I think that it affects different types of jobs in different ways,” Mostaque said on a call with analysts at the Swiss investment bank last week.

“If you’re doing a job in front of a computer, and no one ever sees you, then it’s massively impactful, because these models are like really talented grads.”

According to Mostaque, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. That is due in no small part to differing rules and regulations around the world. Countries with stronger labor laws, like France, will be less likely to see such an impact, for example.

In India, Mostaque said, “outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you’ll never fire a developer.”

“So it affects different models in different countries in different ways in different sectors.”

India is home to more than five million software programmers, who are most under threat from the impacts of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT, according to a report from Bloomberg.

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That’s a lot of people who will fairly rapidly be looking for new jobs. Wouldn’t have expected AI to be the vanguard of onshoring, but it makes sense.
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G/O media will make more AI-generated stories despite critics • Vox

Peter Kafka:

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In early July, managers at G/O media, the digital publisher that owns sites like Gizmodo, the Onion, and Jezebel, published four stories that had been almost entirely generated by AI engines. The stories — which included multiple errors and which ran without input from G/O’s editors or writers — infuriated G/O staff and generated scorn in media circles.

They should get used to it.

G/O executives, who say that AI-produced stories are part of a larger experiment with the technology, plan on creating more of them soon, according to an internal memo. And G/O managers told me they — and everyone else in media — should be learning how to make machine-generated content.

“It is absolutely a thing we want to do more of,” says Merrill Brown, G/O’s editorial director.

G/O’s continued embrace of AI-written stories puts the company at odds with most conventional publishers, who generally say they’re interested in using AI to help them produce content but aren’t — for now — interested in making stuff that is almost 100% machine-made.

…Brown and G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller both argue that AI will be transformative for the media industry — like the internet was in the last couple decades, or maybe more so — and that ignoring it would be a terrible mistake.

“I think it would be irresponsible to not be testing it,” Spanfeller told me.

Spanfeller and Brown say their AI-written stories aren’t the only way they want to use the tech. Like many publishers, they bring up the idea that reporters could use AI to do research for a story; Spanfeller also says he wants to use AI to automate some tasks humans currently perform on the business side of his company, like preparing basic marketing plans for advertisers.

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Gotham’s Ben McKenzie on crypto, fraud, and Celsius’ Alex Mashinsky • Rolling Stone

Ben McKenzie (who has written a book about the crypto hype) went to a crypto conference, was taken out to dinner by the CIA, and next day bumped into Mashinsky and asked for an interview:

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For reasons that can only be attributed to ego, Alex Mashinsky said yes. So we talked: about an industry rife with speculation, about Celsius’s relationship with Tether (he downplayed it), about risk, about the supposed promise of crypto. As the conversation went on, several Celsius staffers, all of them young women, circled the couches, alternating between punching away at their phones and staring at their free-talking CEO with growing concern. At one point, Mashinsky’s wife Krissy, decked out in a pink Juicy Couture velour jumpsuit, stood directly across from him, giving him a death stare. The point was clear: End the fucking interview! But Mashinsky brushed her off with a wave of his hand. We got it on camera. There were moments that astonished me. Talking about scams, he took the usual tack and said people needed to educate them- selves. Alas, there are a lot of scammers out there, but always DYOR. I asked him, didn’t that really mean it’s the customer’s fault? Most crypto CEOs duck that question, or pretend to be offended. Instead, Mashinsky leaned back and said, with a “Who me?” kind of mock innocence, “If you left money on the street, you[’d] expect it to be there in the morning?”

Toward the end of our conversation, when the video was off but with audio still rolling, Mashinsky told me something that made my blood run cold. I asked him how much “real money” he thought was in the crypto system. I didn’t think he would actually answer the question, but he did.

“Ten to fifteen percent,” Mashinsky said. That’s real money — genuine government-backed currency — that’s entered the system. “Everything else is just bubble.”

The number seemed straightforward and eminently believable. But it was still shocking to hear it from a high-level crypto executive, who seemed totally unconcerned about it all. Mashinsky acknowledged that a huge speculative bubble had formed. If the overall crypto market cap was about $1.8 trillion at the time we spoke, that meant that one and a half trillion or more of that supposed value didn’t exist.

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Mashinsky has since been charged with fraud and market manipulation. Wonder if his defence will include “well, most of it wasn’t real”?
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OpenAI strikes $5 million-plus local news deal • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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OpenAI will commit $5m in funding for local news initiatives through the AJP [American Journalism Project], which supports non-profit, local news outlets through grants and other support efforts.

AJP will distribute the funding via grants to ten of its 41 portfolio organizations. Those organizations will experiment with best practices for ways local news outlets can leverage AI responsibly in their newsrooms, products and revenue teams.

The funding will also support the creation of a new product studio within AJP that will support local news outlets as they experiment with OpenAI’s technology, said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of AJP.

The studio, which for now is slated to include three full-time AJP staffers, will also serve as a central hub to share feedback and best practices with external partners like OpenAI on what’s working and what’s not.

“We see this as an opportunity to create a feedback loop between OpenAI and the local journalism industry,” Berman said.

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A whole $5m? With local journalism in its current parlous state in the US, that’s getting on for a few thousand each. But what is it going to do? “Support local news outlets as they experiment with OpenAI’s technology” sounds a bit like “circulate the money back into an OpenAI subscription so you can write the boring articles more quickly”. Not that I’m cynical or anything.
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Startup failures have doubled over the last 12 months. There are ways to ensure yours won’t suffer the same fate • Inc.com

Sam Blum:

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The failure rate of companies in Kruze Consulting’s portfolio, which includes clients that have accrued a cumulative $12bn in venture funding, has doubled over the last twelve months, according to Healy Jones, Kruze’s vice president of financial strategy. Kruze, also based in San Francisco, specializes in financial and HR matters for startups.

The upswing in failure is attributable to the funding climate of 2021, when money going to new startups soared, hitting $329bn in the U.S., alone, Pitchbook data shows. Startups that prospered during the boom are now burning through their final cash reserves, as VCs started to pick winners — and losers — amid the crowded field of that year, Jones tells Inc.

From “Q3 of last year onward,” he says, “you could tell that VCs had really upped the game in terms of what they were willing to invest in. And so that made it way more difficult for [startups] to raise funding. And that’s why the churn popped up so dramatically.”

The environment may now be reverting back to the more difficult, pre-pandemic period of 2018-2019, and so are entrepreneurs’ options.

Startup founders worried about their companies biting the dust, amid what Jones describes as a looming correction in the funding landscape, still have options. Two among them stand to increase the survival potential for businesses: raising money at a lower valuation, and bridge funding.

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More evidence pointing towards a big clearout in Silicon Valley.
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Apple is testing an AI chatbot but has no idea what to do with it • The Verge

Emma Roth and Emilia David:

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Apple is creating its own AI-powered chatbot that some engineers are calling “Apple GPT,” according to a report from Bloomberg. The company reportedly doesn’t have any solid plans to release the technology to the public yet.

As noted by Bloomberg, the chatbot uses its own large language model (LLM) framework called “Ajax,” running on Google Cloud and built with Google JAX, a framework created to accelerate machine learning research. Sources close to the situation tell the outlet that Apple has multiple teams working on the project, which includes addressing potential privacy implications.

As other tech giants, including Meta, Microsoft, and Google, have moved quickly releasing generative AI products of their own to businesses and the general public, Apple has been conspicuous in its absence. While Apple banned its workers from using ChatGPT, Bloomberg reports that engineers have been using the Ajax-powered chatbot internally. Ajax was created to “unify machine learning development,” Bloomberg says.

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Apple’s stock jumped 2% in 6 minutes when the Bloomberg story hit the wires. That’s more than $600m; the company is presently valued at over $3 trillion. It fell back a little when people read through and decided there wasn’t going to be a fruity chatbot in front of people any time soon. But it shows how sensitive the market is to this sort of news.
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The death of Infosec Twitter • Cyentia Institute

Jay Jacobs:

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“Infosec twitter” has been used to describe the vibrant, active and often enthusiastic community of security practitioners working in and around the industry. It’s been a source of insight, inspiration and entertainment for many and for years. Therefore, it is with a bit of sadness that I must announce that the death of infosec twitter is upon us.

Two years ago, on July 12th, 2021, we saved our first bit of data from twitter recording tweets with discussions of CVEs on twitter. I had been researching and studying vulnerabilities for several years and our work on EPSS was in full swing. We started collecting vulnerability discussions to see what kind of benefit that data could add to the EPSS approach. Plus, CVE identifiers are relatively easy to search on and pick out from conversation, so we could be relatively confident we were collecting every tweet.

On July 12th, 2021, we recorded 1,161 original and unique tweets (no retweets) that were discussing CVEs, and we tracked tweets with CVEs every day from that point on.

…Over the last 3 weeks of our data (June 21 to July 12, 2023), we saw a weekday daily tweet count drop from the 1,272 pre-Elon average to just 333 tweets a day, which is about a 74% drop in weekday tweets. The 2-week rolling average (including weekends) dropped down to 272 tweets over the final 2 weeks. When I attempt to remove automated CVE announcements (bots), the drop is even more significant, dropping from over 500 a day down to 66 over the last two weeks, an 87% decrease in CVE-related tweets.

Unfortunately this is where the story will stop too. The free tier we were using to collect this data was cut off last week. Between the headlines and the trend we are seeing in this data, it just doesn’t make sense to pay for access to this data. The last day we were able to save twitter data was July 12th, 2023, exactly two years from the start of our experiment. And with that, we say “so long” to Infosec Twitter.

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The tweets are going out all over Europe. And other bits of the world.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The humble-seeming telephone number has a deep ability to connect absolutely everyone. CC-licensed photo by Hades2kHades2k 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. Voicemail? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘We used to check every day, now it’s every minute’: how we got addicted to weather apps • The Guardian

Hannah Marriott:

»

The temperature in Austin has been in the 110s Fahrenheit (40s Celsius) for weeks; [Matt Rickett] will keep checking the apps, even when he knows no change is likely. Or else he looks at the weather in other places, where it is less hot, and he has family, and will think: “Oh, maybe I can just go there for a little bit.”

It’s behavior that Jess Green, who lives in Liverpool, England, might relate to. During last summer’s unprecedented heatwave in the UK, she says, “there was a lot of talk of: ‘will we make it to 40C?’ I kept checking in the hope that we wouldn’t.” She would watch the numbers rise on her app, with trepidation, and would then feel relieved to see them peak, thinking: “We’re on our way down; and things haven’t burst into flames.” She would check different locations. “I would think: so it’s not a record temperature in Liverpool today. That’s great. But what about London?”

She has three weather apps on her smartphone, but recently a widget has started popping up, unbidden, on Microsoft Edge on her computer. “It asks: ‘do you want to know about record temperatures today?’” Then a quiz appears, asking whether the day’s temperature is above or below average, historically. “That has made my obsession quite a lot worse,” she says. In many ways, she points out, it would be odd not to feel anxious, given the climate emergency. “But it’s a bit like the pandemic. It’s unprecedented, so it’s hard to tell if your anxiety is proportional to the threat you’re feeling.”

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The weather! Everyone talks about it, nobody does anything about it.
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Microsoft puts a steep price on Copilot, its AI-powered future of Office documents • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft is putting a price on the AI-powered future of Office documents, and it’s a steep one for businesses looking to adopt Microsoft’s latest technology. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.

That’s a big premium over the cost of the existing Microsoft 365 plans right now. Microsoft charges businesses $36 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, which includes access to Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and many other productivity features. A $30 premium for access to Microsoft 365 Copilot will nearly double the cost for businesses subscribed to E3 that want these AI-powered features. For Microsoft 365 Business Standard, that’s almost three times the cost, given that it’s $12.50 per user per month.

…Around 600 enterprise customers have been testing Microsoft 365 Copilot during a paid early access program over the past several months. Companies like KPMG, Lumen, and Emirates NBD have all had access. “We’re learning that the more customers use Copilot, the more their enthusiasm for Copilot grows,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, in a blog post today. “Soon, no one will want to work without it.”

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Is that really a lot? I think a lot of companies would feel happy if they think they’ll get $30 (or more) of extra productivity from their staff. At lunch yesterday I heard from a business consultant who used ChatGPT for the first time in his professional capacity in order to save a little time, and was both delighted and horrified by how succinctly it did his work for him. The chatbots are coming, folks.
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Phone numbers are a perfect technology • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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even the 10-digit system—one of the technological constants of my life—has an expiration date. At some point, the numbers will run out, a realization that caused me to wonder who, if anyone, is keeping tabs on our numbers. Thankfully, the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, the delightfully bureaucratic organization that manages and assigns phone numbers and area codes in 20 countries, is on the case. Say a whole bunch of people move to Montana or Maine and request new numbers—NANPA’s team works with carriers and state commissions to roll out a new area code, a process that takes at least three years, Florence Weber, NANPA’s senior director, told me.

“We continue to see an uptick in terms of requests for numbers—that’s not going away,” Weber said. But nothing lasts forever. NANPA has been closely monitoring and preparing for the day that we run out of three-digit area codes or have to move beyond the 10-digit number. Weber told me that, according to NANPA’s proprietary prediction system, which takes into account forecasted demands and assignment rates, the “projected exhaustion date” is sometime in 2051.

I shudder to think what will happen on that day. The dawn of longer phone numbers is one possibility; surrendering to online services is another. The phone number feels a bit like a relic in the age of Zoom meetings, one-tap FaceTiming, WhatsApp, Signal, Viber, DMs, Discord—you name it. Phone numbers were originally conceived as a way to route connections via location, and technically speaking, the internet now does this just as well either via IP addresses or by using the Voice over Internet Protocol. The nerds suggest that we could ditch the numbering system and use a decentralized calling system that works a bit like web addresses do—you get a unique address and purchase a domain, so people can contact you without having to punch in a long string of numbers.

Still, it’s worth considering what we lose if our area codes, prefixes, and line numbers are slowly washed away by the sands of time.

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With the 10-digit system, you do actually have enough numbers for everyone on earth to have one; in theory there are 10 billion. But, as with so much, we haven’t managed to distribute them equally.
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Threadzilla • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway on Twitter’s demise:

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We’re not only witnessing the unraveling of a firm, but a person. I have written about mens’ need for guardrails. These can take several forms — an office, a girlfriend, regulation, a board. The erosion of Musk’s guardrails as money and sycophants melt whatever better judgment or grace he had has resulted in a reputation experiencing the same trajectory as Twitter’s revenue. If Elon had never downloaded the micro-blogging app he’d be much wealthier and universally revered for his formidable accomplishments. Instead, he’s set a land speed record for hero to villain.

To be clear, Twitter will not go away. Elon remains the wealthiest man in the world and can fund Twitter’s operations, and the interest on its debt, for years if not decades. There’s ample Elon stans and a sizable cohort who don’t care about any of this and have communities or identities on Twitter that work for them. Meanwhile, Threads faces many of the same challenges as Twitter: How do you balance openness and diversity of views with standards of decency while generating sustainable cash flow? It’s a riddle few, if any, firms have solved. LinkedIn? Reddit?

History says the nose of this jet will be difficult to pull up. In 2008, MySpace was one of the most trafficked websites in the U.S., with 115 million active users, generating $800 million in revenue in a year. Then Facebook surpassed its user count and the business was sold for $35 million to Justin Timberlake. Friendster also had 115 million users at its peak in 2008. There’s a learning here: Social media apps do well until Mark Zuckerberg kills them.

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As Galloway points out, consider if we’d never heard from Musk; if, like the extremely rich people of the recent past, he’d had no easy way to transmit his laziest thoughts to billions of people. Or, as a contrast, what if Andrew Carnegie had had Twitter – would he have been the same incredible philanthropist? (It has worked for Bill Gates, so not all hope is lost.)
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The case of the 500-mile email • iBiblio

Trey Harris, in a (true) story that he first wrote up in 2002, but happened some time between 1994 and 1997:

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I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?”

“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.” Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–”

“Geostatisticians…”

“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”

“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands. “When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?”

“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”

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See if you can figure out why. (The precise distance was 558 miles.)
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Bay Area startups face ‘mass extinction event,’ experts predict • SF Chronicle

Carolyn Said:

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A Darwinian day of reckoning is on the horizon for startups. Soaring interest rates and economic jitters have created an inhospitable climate for raising capital. Venture-backed companies are now belt-tightening to conserve their cash, but experts say, ultimately, many will not survive.

“PREDICTION: There’s a mass extinction event coming for early & mid-stage companies. Late ’23 & ’24 will make the ’08 financial crisis look quaint for startups,” tweeted venture capitalist Tom Loverro early this year, in a thread that continues to get big traction.

The reason, as he and others explain it: In 2021 and early 2022, the market was flush with cash and startups easily raised money at high valuations. Typically, each VC round lasts 18 to 24 months, so many will need to return to the market for cash infusions starting in the second half of this year.

But times have changed.

“Venture capital has become a lot harder to come by, especially compared to 2021 and beginning of 2022 where there was a wave of capital exuberance,” said Kaidi Gao, associate analyst for venture capital at PitchBook, a research firm and financial data provider. “A lot of companies took advantage of that time and really loaded up their balance sheets.”

With interest rate hikes, tumbling values on Wall Street and fears of a recession, those same companies now are confronting a stark reality.

“Capital is a lot harder to come by,” Gao said. “Companies are cutting back and really trying to stretch out their runway. But you can only stretch it so far, there comes a time when you run out of capital and have to return to the market.”

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“Down rounds” which value companies lower than their previous funding round are becoming common. Unlike 2008, it’s going to be rising interest rates that kill these ones.
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This millionaire is selling his private jet — out of concern for the environment • CNN

Jacopo Prisco:

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The global private jet fleet has more than doubled in the last two decades and the market is on fire, with new industry records set for transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022, according to a new report by the US Institute for Policy Studies.

Private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger, disproportionately contributing to the aviation sector’s climate impact, according to the report, which was published in May 2023.

What’s more, while approximately one out of every six flights handled by the Federal Aviation Administration is private, the sector only contributes 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the agency.

Amid these concerns, one private jet owner has decided to scale back. Stephen Prince, vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires – a group of wealthy Americans pushing for higher taxes which also contributed to the report – is giving up his Cessna 650 Citation III.

He decided to ditch the plane – a mid-size, long range corporate jet with room for up to nine passengers – after he learned how much more carbon-intensive flying private is compared to commercial.

“I was gobsmacked by the fact that by being so in love with private air travel, I was willing to ignore what a horrible travesty I was perpetrating on the environment and on future generations,” he tells CNN. “I’ve got to change. I just can’t continue to do this.”

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Which means he’s going to save about $300k per year, and slum it in first class. Except.. if you read on, you’ll discover he hasn’t entirely given up private plane travel.

Deep sigh.
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Making EVs work in Britain • Notes On Growth

Sam Dumitriu on the many, many challenges to EV charging:

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If you happen to have somewhere to park your car off-street, acquiring planning permission to install a chargepoint is relatively straightforward. There’s a Permitted Development (PD) right for installing one, so as long as you meet certain standards (i.e. it’s not too tall, too chunky, or too close to a public highway) you do not need to apply for planning permission.

This is not the case for public chargepoints. If a business wants to install new chargepoints so people can charge while they park on the street, then they need explicit permission from the council.

In theory, this shouldn’t be a big issue. New housing generates opposition because existing residents typically lose out in some way (e.g. more congestion, lower house prices, loss of light), but chargepoints are literally a new benefit for local residents.

Yet, there have been a number of recent objections against chargepoints being installed on public roads. In Norwich, where plans to install 46 chargers on city streets were under consultation, a local branch of the pedestrian campaign group called Living Street described the proposal as “a new threat to our public space with more clutter on the pavements.” Living Streets, along with charities representing the blind or partially sighted, have lodged similar objections to a Scottish consultation which suggested creating a PD right for on-street charging.

Living Streets want on-street charging points to be placed in the road to ensure no pavement is lost (Cambridge already does this). Yet, a compromise clearly could be struck. On narrow streets, more clutter is undesirable, but on wider streets where ample space for pedestrians remains – permissions should be streamlined and become permitted development where possible.

Another way to avoid pavement clutter would be to create a permitted development right to install special gutters for EV charging cables. Companies like Kerbo Charge will install small removable gutters running from your house to a parking spot. That’s handy if you have a regular on-street parking spot in front of your house. At the moment, this scheme is only being trialled in Milton Keynes, but there’s no obvious reason why it couldn’t be rolled out nationwide.

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Charging! It’s complicated! (You’re welcome, John. Happy belated birthday.)
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Chart: going round in circles? The countries that prefer roundabouts • Statista

Katharina Buchholz:

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Roundabouts make waiting at traffic lights obsolete, yet for some drivers who are unfamiliar with them, they might mean an additional stress factor. Depending on their design, they can be harder for cyclists and pedestrians to cross. For the driver, however, roundabouts have been proven to be a faster and safer way to pass through an intersection. Additional benefits of going round in circles include saving space (because there is no need for multiple lanes leading up to a stop light) and lower costs (because of easier maintenance).

Some countries in Europe have made the roundabout their go-to intersection – notably France and Spain. France has 967 traffic circles per million inhabitants, according to an evaluation by the blog erdavis.com. In Spain the number is somewhat lower at 591 per one million people, but still high compared to elsewhere. Other countries, like the U.S. and Germany, still shy away from using the infrastructure, often citing fears that drivers who are not used to roundabouts might have trouble with the concept of yielding upon entering the circle.

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“Might have trouble with the concept of yielding upon entering the circle”? What nonsense is this? You look on the roundabout before you enter and give way to traffic already on it. Like joining any road ever anywhere, except you don’t have to look in the other direction because there won’t (pray) be anything coming from there.

I’d like to see this chart (which puts France, Spain and the UK at the top) redone per mile of road. I suspect the US would be even further down. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Driving along the Hutchinson River Parkway means your car numberplate will be analysed by AI to see if it has been on a suspicious journey. Good or bad? CC-licensed photo by Doug Kerr 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The spam bots have now found Threads, as company announces its own ‘rate limits’ • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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It looks like Twitter isn’t the only one having to turn to rate limits — or limits on how many posts users can view. In an amusing turn of events, Twitter’s latest rival, Instagram Threads, announced this afternoon that it, too, has to tighten up on rate limits due to spam attacks. Laughed Twitter owner Elon Musk in a reply to a screenshot of the announcement posted on Twitter, “Lmaooo Copy 🐈 [cat].”

As you may recall, Twitter earlier this month had to enforce new limits on how many tweets users could read as the service suffered an extended outage. Explained Musk at the time, Twitter was facing “extreme levels of data scraping” from hundreds of organizations and other “system manipulation.” As a result, Twitter chose to curb the problem by initially allowing Verified users (paying subscribers) to peruse a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users could only view 600. After some backlash from users, Musk later increased the limits to 10,000 for Verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for new, unverified accounts.

Over the weekend, Musk said he would increase the rate limit again for Verified users by 50%, which implies they would now be able to see 15,000 posts.

Twitter had been criticized for its unorthodox solution to the spam and bot problem, which some suggested wouldn’t have been an issue if Twitter hadn’t laid off such a large swath of its engineering staff. After all, not being able to scroll the Twitter timeline for long periods of time had never been an issue in the pre-Elon days (except, of course, in the earliest years when the fail whale was a regular occurrence).

Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained the problem in a post on the Threads app this afternoon, noting that “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.”

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Spam isn’t failure. Getting spam attacks means you’re successful: big enough to matter. The question then is how well you deal with it.
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Alzheimer’s drug donanemab helps most when taken at earliest disease stage, study finds • Nature

Sara Reardon:

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An experimental drug can slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease in those who start it when the disease is still in its early stages. The drug, a monoclonal antibody called donanemab, does not improve symptoms. But among people who started taking it at the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, 47% had no disease progression on some measures after one year, compared to 29% who took placebo.

The drug does not provide as much benefit to people at later stages of the disease or those with a common genetic mutation that raises the risk of Alzheimer’s.

“This decade is already proving to be the decade of Alzheimer’s,” said Alzheimer’s Association chief science officer Maria Carrillo at a press conference at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Amsterdam. “It’s important to now double down and not slow down.”

Donanemab’s manufacturer Eli Lilly, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, presented the results of the 1,736-person trial today at AAIC and published them1 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The company released partial results in May, but those results left researchers with questions about the drug’s safety and efficacy in certain patient populations.

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No doubt Eli Lilly would be happy if people start taking it prophylactically, years ahead of any possibility of developing the disease. And it certainly creates an incentive for gene testing to see if you’re vulnerable. Also worth reading this article from the Alzheimer’s Society from last year about the “amyloid controversy”.
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SEC is worried chatbots could fuel a market panic • The Verge

Emilia David:

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expressed concern about generative AI’s impact on financial markets.

In a speech given to the National Press Club on Monday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said recent advances in generative AI increase the possibility of institutions relying on the same subset of information to make decisions.

Gensler said the large demand for data and computing power could mean only a few tech platforms may dominate the field, narrowing the field of AI models companies can use. If a model provides inaccurate or irrelevant information, financial institutions may end up using the same flawed data and making the same bad decisions — creating the risk of something like the 2008 financial crisis, where banks played “follow the leader” based on information from credit raters, or the Twitter-fueled run on Silicon Valley Bank. Gensler compared the potential fallout to something like the 2008 crisis, which he said demonstrated the risks of a “centralized dataset or model” in finance.

»

“AI may heighten financial fragility as it could promote herding with individual actors making similar decisions because they are getting the same signal from a base model or data aggregator,” Gensler said. He added that the rise of generative AI and other deep-learning models “could exacerbate the inherent network interconnectedness of the global financial system.”

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Or, put another way, the whole thing is so teeteringly unstable that it’s a Jenga tower with many of the blocks pulled out and put on the top.
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This AI watches millions of cars and tells cops if you’re driving like a criminal • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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In March of 2022, David Zayas was driving down the Hutchinson River Parkway in Scarsdale. His car, a gray Chevrolet, was entirely unremarkable, as was its speed. But to the Westchester County Police Department, the car was cause for concern and Zayas a possible criminal; its powerful new AI tool had identified the vehicle’s behavior as suspicious.

Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas’ car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Department of Justice prosecutor filing, it made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York between October 2020 and August 2021 following routes known to be used by narcotics pushers and for conspicuously short stays. So on March 10 last year, Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car, finding 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semiautomatic pistol and $34,000 in cash inside, according to court documents. A year later, Zayas pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking charge.

The previously unreported case is a window into the evolution of AI-powered policing, and a harbinger of the constitutional issues that will inevitably accompany it. Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this case it was used to examine the driving patterns of anyone passing one of Westchester County’s 480 cameras over a two-year period. Zayas’ lawyer Ben Gold contested the AI-gathered evidence against his client, decrying it as “dragnet surveillance.

…To Gold, the system’s analysis of every car caught by a camera amounted to an “unprecedented search.” “This is the specter of modern surveillance that the Fourth Amendment must guard against,” he wrote, in his motion to suppress the evidence.”

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Er, OK, but Zayas was driving like a criminal because.. he was a criminal? The story doesn’t say how many cars were pulled over on suspicion, out of the 16m licence plates being scanned per week.
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Behind Twitter’s poop emoji PR • Semafor

Max Tani:

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as Yaccarino began angling for the CEO job at Twitter earlier this year, [her personal PR guy Joe Bennarroch] wasn’t afraid to cross some company lines. When NBC News reporter Ben Collins tweeted about a Semafor story documenting advertisers’ concerns about Musk, Benarroch called to reprimand him, a rare instance of a business-side employee expressing criticism of a journalist’s editorial views.

Benarroch declined to comment on his time at NBCU or his new role.

Benarroch and Yaccarino succeeded in elevating Yaccarino’s profile at NBC, and her iconic stature in the ad industry helped her get the top job at Twitter.

But their attempts to use the same tactics at Twitter so far have not worked, as she’s been unable to establish herself as the company’s true chief executive. She’s delivered the official message in a series of clunky tweets on a platform dominated by her boss’s politicized and profane stream-of-consciousness.

Benarroch has quietly attempted to implement a traditional press strategy: Since joining last month, he’s done outreach to reporters, spinning negative stories, and attempting to influence the narrative around the new CEO in the background. He confidentially shared her day one internal memo with tech reporters last month, and has flagged some of her noteworthy tweets.

But even Benarroch’s title is a reflection of attempting to placate Musk’s whims. Despite spending much of his time working the phone with reporters, he maintains a business operations title, the result of Musk’s dismissiveness of standard comms work.

Benarroch has pleaded with staff to keep conversations internal, sending around a memo last month telling employees to report leakers. The note promptly leaked.

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It’s hardly unheard of for PR folk to call journalists to complain about a story they don’t like. (Well, maybe to pearl-clutching American journalists.) Though Tani’s method of expressing a view about Benarroch (read the headline again) is quite neat.

Also, “[has] been unable to establish herself as the company’s true chief executive” is quite a clause.
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Why social media is hardly social any more • Financial Times

Elaine Moore:

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Threads, Meta’s new social network, had 100mn sign ups in its first five days. Not bad for a watered-down version of Twitter. According to Zuckerberg, the idea is to create a public conversations app for a billion people.

Listening to a billion people talk to one another sounds like a nightmare. But that’s not quite what Zuckerberg means. Threads is less public town square than stage. He doesn’t want us all to be part of the conversation, he wants us in the audience.

Social media networks are not very sociable these days. Feeds are algorithmic, which means you see whatever the apps want to show you. After I joined Threads, I saw a lot of brands and celebrities. I couldn’t tell you what my friends were posting but I could tell you that reality star Bethenny Frankel had thoughts on the new Barbie movie.

Once upon a time, people joined social media networks so they could connect with one another. I signed up to Facebook in 2007 to see what my friends were up to online. It’s hard to remember why it was so interesting to look at lots of blurry photos of a night out, but I spent a lot of time doing it.

That has now been superseded by content from strangers. I still have all my social media accounts but I rarely post anything. For many of us, the point of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter is not to upload our own posts or look at what our friends are doing but to watch a small number of popular creators. Instead of talking to one another, we have become mostly silent onlookers.

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There’s a misconception here. Social media has always been dominated by a few accounts which generated most of the content, with a huge remainder which were essentially passive, generating very little content viewed beyond their own narrow networks. We’ve always (mostly) been silent onlookers.
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Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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not all prominent right-wing Twitter contributors appeared to be part of the program. When asked if she was part of the program, Chaya Raichik, the creator of @libsoftiktok, offered a tongue-in-cheek response claiming that her relationship with Musk was thriving. She did not respond to a question about whether she was receiving payments under the program.

Anti-Trump influencers Ed Krassenstein and Brian Krassenstein, who were previously banned from Twitter in 2019, also announced that they were part of the program. Musk did not respond to a request for comment emailed to him at Twitter and at SpaceX, another company he owns.

“I think that there are some conservative content creators who are unhappy,” said Kris Ruby, a conservative influencer and president of Ruby Media Group. “It doesn’t seem even across the board. I don’t think the playing field is level.” She said some on the right who weren’t included in the program, despite meeting all the criteria, are venting in private. “Most conservatives don’t want to go up against the wrath of Elon and what happens when you criticize him,” she said. “We’ve seen that he’s not really applying the terms of service equally across the board.”

Twitter claimed in a blog post that creators’ share of advertising revenue would be based on a calculation of replies to their posts and monthly impressions. However, on Friday, Musk tweeted that payouts were not tied to public impressions but were calculated using a proprietary metric based on ads served to other verified users.

The program is available only in countries where Stripe, a payment platform, supports payouts, and recipients must pay for Twitter Blue, the platform’s monthly subscription service, to be eligible.

Not all creators who want to monetize will be able to. Creators who apply to the program will have to pass “human review,” and there is currently no open application for those interested in joining.

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In other words: it’s a complete con. It’s just those who interact with Musk a lot. However, they also repel Twitter’s largely non-far-right audience, who are suddenly finding Threads a lot more attractive.
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The best way to save American lives on the road • Time

Daniel Knowles is the author of Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It:

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Near my home in Wicker Park, on Chicago’s north-west side, is an intersection known by some in the neighborhood semi-affectionately as “the crotch.” In Chicago’s almost perfect grid, it is where North Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue and Damen Avenue all meet in one point, creating a six-way road intersection. Its nickname fits it, because this is the part of Wicker Park you want to look away from. Nobody likes the intersection. When you cross North Avenue on foot, you have to watch out, because when the walk signal turns white is exactly when drivers try to illegally turn left and run you over. If you are on a bike, as I usually am when I cross it, it is even scarier, as you pick your way between parked cars and stressed drivers. But it also sucks to drive through. Traffic is almost permanently backed up, and at busy times, it can take 10 minutes to get through the lights.

There have been 690 crashes at the Crotch over the past six years. At least 19 pedestrians and cyclists have suffered incapacitating injuries. And yet, there is, a simple way to make the intersection safer. It should be turned into a roundabout (also known as a traffic circle or rotary). Based on my crude highway engineering (staring at Google maps), it probably could not be a true roundabout (one where cars are free to enter at all times, giving priority to those already on the roundabout). I suspect traffic lights would still be needed for the pedestrian crossings to work. But if you put an island in the middle, instead of a giant expanse of empty asphalt, it would force drivers slow down as they travel through it. The illegal left turn would be impossible to make, because the spot drivers wait in blocking traffic would be occupied by the island. It would be far less dangerous.

Actually roundabouts should be installed almost everywhere in America. Why? Because they save lives.

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Intrigued, I took a look on Apple Maps at the intersection: see below. And yup, it’s an obvious candidate for a roundabout with traffic lights. (Bear in mind that the cars would go counter-clockwise around it.) Might be a bit of fun installing the roundabout, of course.

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This geothermal startup showed its wells can be used like a giant underground battery • MIT Technology Review

James Temple:

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In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen.

Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it resurfaces at a well head, where it’s hot enough to convert refrigerants or other fluids into vapor that cranks a turbine, generating electricity.

But Houston-based Fervo Energy is testing out a new spin on the standard approach—and on that day, its engineers and executives were simply interested in generating data.

The readings from gauges planted throughout the company’s twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours.

The results from the initial experiments—which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively—suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.

There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today’s grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems.

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You have to love sentences like that final one above which begin “But if…” It’s essentially saying “OK, everything’s against this. Ignore that though and…” I think I wrote a lot of science “breakthrough” stories which then stumbled over the “But if” hurdle.
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New lawsuit against Bing based on allegedly AI-hallucinated libellous statements • Reason

Eugene Volokh:

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When people search for Jeffery Battle in Bing, they get the following (at least sometimes; this is the output of a search that I ran Tuesday):

[image suggesting that someone who is the CEO of a company has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy]

But it turns out that this combines facts about two separate people with similar names: (1) Jeffery Battle, who is indeed apparently a veteran, businessman, and adjunct professor, and (2) Jeffrey Leon Battle, who was convicted of trying to join the Taliban shortly after 9/11. The two have nothing in common other than their similar names. The Aerospace Professor did not plead guilty to seditious conspiracy.

And this Bing output doesn’t just list the facts about each of the Battles separately, the way that search engine results have long listed separate pages separately. Rather, it expressly connects the two, with the “However, Battle was sentenced …” transition, which conveys the message that all the facts are about one person. And to my knowledge, this connection was entirely made up out of whole cloth by Bing’s summarization feature (which is apparently based on ChatGPT); I know of no other site that actually makes any such connection (which I stress again is an entirely factually unfounded connection).

Battle is now suing Microsoft for libel over this, in Battle v. Microsoft (D. Md.) (filed Friday). He’s representing himself, and the Complaint is flawed in various ways. But if the case is properly framed, he may well have a serious argument. That is especially so if he can substantiate his allegations that he had informed Microsoft of the problem and it didn’t promptly fix it.

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There it is again: “but if”. Very tricky for Battle to argue that this is directly Bing’s fault when Microsoft can argue that it’s essentially a random number generator which put a 1 against a 2; that doesn’t make it a serial number generator.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified