Is the condemnation of Russian (and Belarusian) tennis players such as Victoria Azarenka justified? CC-licensed photo by Su–MaySu–May on Flickr.
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There was another post last Friday at the Social Warming Substack: it was about Threads.
A selection of 9 links for you. Tiring. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Instagram’s Threads: everything you need to know about the new Twitter competitor • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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As Twitter continues to flail about under Elon Musk, all eyes are on the newly launched Instagram Threads as a potential replacement. Meta launched Threads on iOS, Android, and the web on July 5th — a little bit ahead of schedule.
Two days in, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads has registered over 70 million accounts, and it’s still growing.
In an interview about Threads with The Verge, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri explains why the platform wants to take on Twitter. “Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” Mosseri says. “And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”
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Oh, there’s a lot more, but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you think Threads is going to slowly strangle Twitter (🙋♂️) or just Zuckerberg noodling around.
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Earth shatters heat records, faces uncharted extreme weather • The Washington Post
Scott Dance:
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A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers — and an increasing likelihood that this year will be Earth’s warmest on record.
New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.
And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter.
“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. He said any number of charts and graphs on Earth’s climate are showing, quite literally, that “we are in uncharted territory.”
Monday was Earth’s warmest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Service. Another data set showed Tuesday was even hotter.
It is no shock that global warming is accelerating — scientists were anticipating that would come with the onset of El Niño, the infamous climate pattern that reemerged last month. It is known for unleashing surges of heat and moisture that trigger extreme floods and storms in some places, and droughts and fires in others.
But the hot conditions are developing too quickly, and across more of the planet, to be explained solely by El Niño. Records are falling around the globe many months ahead of El Niño’s peak impact, which typically hits in December and sends global temperatures soaring for months to follow.
“We have been seeing unprecedented extremes in the recent past even without being in this phase,” said Claudia Tebaldi, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. With El Niño’s influence, “the likelihood of seeing something unprecedented is even higher,” she said.
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One day we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t take more notice of the warnings. The question is, what state will we be in when we’re looking back?
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G/O Media’s AI ‘innovation’ is off to a rocky start • The Verge
Mia Sato:
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Last week, G/O Media leadership had news for staffers at the many publications the company owns: AI-generated articles were just around the corner.
“We are both a leading technology company and an editorial organization that covers technology in world class fashion across multiple sites,” editorial director Merrill Brown wrote in an email. “So it is utterly appropriate — and in fact our responsibility — to do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology.”
G/O’s early experiments with AI tools began on Wednesday through a couple of articles appearing on Gizmodo and The A.V. Club credited to the publications’ respective bots. And almost immediately, there were embarrassing mistakes.
The Gizmodo bot’s first story, “A Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows,” contained factual errors about the in-universe chronology of the franchise, something fans were quick to point out. James Whitbrook, a deputy editor of io9, where the story appeared, tweeted that he was unaware the article would be published until shortly before. Whitbrook also said that “no one at io9 played a part in its editing or publication.” As of this writing, the original link to the story is returning an error message.
Over on The A.V. Club, a list called “The Biggest Summer Blockbusters of 2003: 10 Can’t-Miss Movies” is credited to the outlet’s bot. The article contains almost no writing or analysis, but its construction suggests that the piece is an attempt to attract cheap search traffic. The piece was also syndicated to Yahoo Entertainment.
It is unclear how the articles were assigned, generated, and if they were edited at any point by a human before going live.
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And yes, it is the biggest blockbusters of 2003, not 2023 – I thought it must be a misprint, but it isn’t. Which Yahoo syndicates even so? Bizarre.
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The working-from-home illusion fades • The Economist
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Didn’t a spate of studies during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that remote work was often more productive than toiling in the office?
Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential. A good starting point is a working paper that received much attention when it was published in 2020 by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, then both doctoral students at Harvard University. They found an 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes. Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline.
The researchers had not made a mistake. Rather, they received more precise data, including detailed work schedules. Not only did employees answer fewer calls when remote, the quality of their interactions suffered. They put customers on hold for longer. More also phoned back, an indication of unresolved problems.
The revision comes hot on the tails of other studies that have reached similar conclusions. David Atkin and Antoinette Schoar, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sumit Shinde of the University of California, Los Angeles, randomly assigned data-entry workers in India to labour either from home or the office. Those working at home were 18% less productive than their peers in the office.
Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and Friederike Mengel and Christoph Siemroth, both of the University of Essex, found a productivity shortfall, relative to prior in-office performance, of as much as 19% for the remote employees of a large Asian it firm. Another study determined that even chess professionals play less well in online matches than face-to-face tilts.
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Who’s behind all those weird product ads on Twitter? • Financial Times
Bryce Elder:
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Something big just happened in the world of Twitter advertising.
For quite some time, the internet’s town square has been clogged with adverts for pet products, household doodahs, gadgets and garden ornaments, as if the Betterware Catalogue had been reinvented by Wish. The ads all use the same template: a promoted tweet from a blue-tick account, a speeded-up video, and a link to an identikit shopfront badged something like Zotu, Dulo or Loza.
The frequency with which these ads appeared has caused Twitter users quite a lot of irritation, with the community’s “added context” feature being used to raise concerns about the quality and legal status of some products:
As it happens, Alphaville was tracking several dozen of these ad accounts. And in the past few hours, every single one was suspended.
To be clear, there are a lot of dropshipper ads on social media. The specific accounts we’re referring to were promoting a fleet of commerce sites — Tace, Vore, Toba — that are aesthetically and functionally identical. They all use the same build of WordPress and they all rely on Woocommerce, an open-source plugin for small merchants.
Another repeated theme among these ecommerce sites is unlikely-sounding operating addresses. The head office of Sene, for example, is the site of what was once The Square restaurant in Mayfair…
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Plenty more to this story, none of it giving you much confidence in Twitter’s ability to vet people looking to advertise. And the rabbit hole is quite deep on this.
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Volkswagen Group China CEO says EV market is “overheating” • Inside EVs
Dan Mihalascu:
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Volkswagen Group China CEO Ralf Brandstaetter, who previously served as CEO of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand, has warned that the electric car market is “overheating.”
Speaking at the 2023 China Automobile Forum hosted by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers in Shanghai, Brandstaetter said that high capital investment and discounting “will ultimately harm the interests of consumers,” according to Autocar.
“Currently, there are more than 120 car makers within the [electric vehicle] market, and about 150 new models will be launched in 2023. Intense market competition and high battery prices make them face severe economic pressure. Short-term sales success requires extremely high capital investment.”
He also noted that many EV startups face a financial squeeze and are exiting or about to exit the market, or are in urgent need of new capital investment.“We are facing a situation where the market is overheating. Consolidation of the playing field is in full swing,” the executive added. He was especially critical of the discounting of EVs in China. “The fierce competition has led to deep price discounts in recent months. This will ultimately harm the interests of consumers. They will no longer be able to get services from retired brands, or they will see a significant price cut on the models they buy.”
The comments are clearly a reference to Tesla, which has started an EV price war in China in late 2022 – and not only in China. Brandstaetter stressed the Volkswagen Group would not chase sales and growth in China’s EV market at all costs as “the profitability of the business is the most important.”
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Price war? Sounds good to me. The exiting companies are basically burning VC money.
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Technology never changes geometry • Human Transit
Jarrett Walker:
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Like many fashionable tech folks, Elon Musk wants to replace city buses with little vehicles that protect you from having to share space with strangers.
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With the advent of autonomy [of car driving], it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager. … [This technology] would also take people all the way to their destination.
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Musk assumes that transit is an engineering problem, about vehicle design and technology. In fact, providing cost-effective and liberating transportation in cities requires solving a geometry problem. This confusion is very common in transport technology circles.
In dense cities, where big transit vehicles (including buses) are carrying significant ridership, any “small vehicles replacing big vehicles” solution increases the total number of vehicles on the road at any time. The technical measure of this is Vehicle Miles (or Km) Travelled (VMT).
Today, increasing VMT would mean increased emissions and increased road carnage, but let’s say technology has solved those problems, with electric vehicles and automation. Those are engineering problems. Inventors can work on those.
But there is still, and aways, the problem of space. Increasing VMT means that you are taking more space to move the same number of people. This may be fine in low-density and rural areas, where there’s lots of space per person. But a city, by definition, has little space per person, so the efficient use of space is the core problem of urban transportation.
When we are talking about space, we are talking about geometry, not engineering, and technology never changes geometry. You must solve a problem spatially before you have really solved it.
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Tennis has a Russia problem • POLITICO
Daria Meshcheriakova:
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Ukrainian players have a message for world tennis: You cannot be serious.
Just as the world’s top stars are battling their way through the first week of Wimbledon, tennis is grappling with how to handle all the Russian players near the top of the game. Ukraine’s players, for their part, reckon the sport is failing them.
There is staunch locker room support among some Russian players for President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine, as well as links between a top Russian star and a company which finances the Kremlin’s aggression — and even a family connection between a Russian Olympic tennis gold medalist and a tournament in honor of a Wagner Group mercenary fighter.
The war has triggered fervent, heated discussion between Russian players behind closed doors in the men’s locker room.
At a tournament in Belgrade in April 2022, Russian player Karen Khachanov — currently the men’s world No. 11 — rounded on compatriot Andrey Rublev, who had professed some desire to see peace between his country and Ukraine, and had written “No War Please” on a TV camera lens in February, just as Putin sent his forces toward Kyiv.
Khachanov, according to one locker room figure familiar with the row, argued that talks should not be conducted from a position of strength with the weaker side. Russia, he yelled, should demonstrate its power through the conflict on Ukraine and show its greatness to the world.
When asked about the confrontation by this journalist, Khachanov took the tried and tested line beloved of sportspeople who’ve found themselves in an awkward political spot. “It was our private conversation. I am an athlete, not a politician,” he said.
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The problem with expecting Russian players to condemn Putin is they might find their families chowing down on Novichok sandwiches. It’s unreasonable, honestly, to expect them to take a strong position beyond “we want the war to end”. And Ukrainian players now reap the benefits of audience backing, whoever they play – especially if it’s a Russian or Belarusian: I was at Wimbledon on Sunday and saw the Ukrainian Elina Svitolina beat – just – the Belarusian Victoria Azarenka. At the end, they didn’t shake hands; but that was because Svitolina has refused to shake hands with Belarusians, not that Azarenka was refusing to shake her hand. However the crowd booed Azarenka.
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Googling isn’t grad school • The Atlantic
Arthur C. Brooks:
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The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, when a person’s confidence is highest though their actual knowledge is low, they become very believable to others—despite not being reliable. And the more inaccurate people are—or perhaps the more they want to believe the validity of their perception—the more they tend to be swayed by their own underinformed overconfidence.
This explains the problem of internet experts and those who rely on them: Practically everywhere you look on the web, you can find technical information of dubious accuracy. This is not necessarily because we are being deliberately lied to—although plenty of that is going on there too—but because the internet is a free, democratic platform. This very freedom and accessibility causes many people to succumb to the illusion of explanatory depth, confidently sharing their newly acquired expertise in some technical information gleaned from reading a single article or watching a couple of videos.
The two ways we fall prey to the illusion are as consumers and as producers. The plight of the consumer of misinformation is the hardest to address, because it isn’t always easy to know when someone is a true expert or just flush with false confidence. The key question to ask is, Does the source of this technical assertion have a genuine technical background? If the answer is no, proceed with caution.
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Words of advice and caution for everyone. Though isn’t there an implication that we’re overconfident in how good we are at spotting people who are peddling misinformation?
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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